Page 4 of Omega’s Forward

My five minutes end and I’m back on the ice, watching Dorn closely. He behaves himself. Maybe he’s done for the game. Got the bloodshed he wanted and now he’s just playing.

We hold the lead through forty minutes and take it into the third.

There’s six minutes left on the clock when the night goes wrong. I’m bent over the circle, stick down, watching the linesman’s hand, when the sound of the building changes.

It isn’t a goal sound or a fight sound. When I look up, a whole section of the crowd is on its feet facing the wrong way. They’re not watching the ice. They’re looking up at the owner’s box.

I straighten and follow their eyes.

Up in the box, people are moving fast. A chair goes over. Somebody’s palms are flat against the glass, and between the bodies I can see Gordie’s gray suit. Then people close around him and I can’t see anything at all.

“Gordie.” I hear myself say it out loud, to nobody.

A long whistle sounds and the music cuts off mid-song. In the quiet that follows you can hear one voice up in the box shouting for someone to call 911.

The arena medics are already on the move. Two of them take the stairs at a run with their bags, a third wheels the equipment in from the tunnel. They’re fast.

Linus appears beside me, white as his jersey, muttering something in Swedish. JP has come the length of the ice with his mask shoved up on his head. Coach crosses himself twice.

The jumbotron goes dark. Eighteen thousand people fall so quiet I can hear the medics’ radios crackling two hundred feet up.

Through the glass of the box I can see them working. Somebody starts compressions. I’ve taken the first-aid course every summer since I was a junior. I know the rhythm when I see it.

They bring a stretcher in through the owner’s entrance. When they finally carry him along the concourse there’s an oxygen mask on his face and his suit jacket folded under his head. One arm has slipped loose of the blanket, and it swings with every step.

The whole building stands in the quiet, all of us watching the empty doorway.

My gloves are on the ice behind me. I don’t remember dropping them.

2. Everett

Sacco is waiting for me in the service entrance of the arena. He looks grayer than when I saw him last and thicker through the middle, but he’s wearing the same club windbreaker he was wearing when I was small enough to sit on the skate bench and watch practice. Head coach, my father’s best friend, thirty-odd years with the club between the ice and the bench, and he’s going to be here until the day he dies.

“I’m sorry about your dad, Ev.” He puts out his hand, then thinks better of it and just looks at me.

Nobody has called me Ev in twenty years.

It’s been almost two decades since I set foot in this building, and the first person in it makes me feel like a little kid again. I hate this place.

“Thanks, Coach,” I say. I don’t mention that no one calls me Ev anymore.

He looks me over once, head to shoe.

“You got tall, Ev,” he says, flat. Whatever he’s measuring me against, I don’t pass.

He takes me up the back stairs, past decades of framed team photographs, and unlocks my father’s office.

He straightens one frame with two fingers as we pass, without looking at it. Nineteen eighty-nine. He’s in that one.

The corridor smells like my childhood and makes my stomach twist. It’s cold. I can scent old coffee, sweaty gear and machine oil. I spent a lot of time here as a kid. I’ve never missed it.

Above us, faint through the concrete, a machine is circling the ice.

“Practice ended at noon,” he says. “Building’s empty so you shouldn’t be bothered by anyone.”

“Thanks. I appreciate that.”

“Nobody’s touched anything,” he says from the doorway. “Callahan’s coming up before you leave. Your captain. He wants to introduce himself.” A pause I can read with my eyes shut: and he’s worth more to this club than you are. “If you need me, I’m down by the coaches’ room. You remember where it is?”