On the Fly (30 page)

Now it was pretty damn clear. He’d
fucking benched me.

The rest of the period, Scotty didn’t
give me another second of ice time. When he wanted to send the
fourth line out, since Jonny was now playing up with Zee and Gags,
he started double-shifting Babs and left me at the end of the bench
to stew.

It was still a scoreless tie when the
horn sounded to signal intermission. As soon as we got back to the
locker room, I threw my helmet in my stall.

“
Oh, are you pissed off?”
Scotty shouted at me.

“
Yeah, I’m pissed. You
fucking benched me.”

“
Fucking right, I benched
you. You pull a fucking dipshit move like that and you think you’re
going to play?”

“
I screwed up. It won’t
happen again.”

“
Yeah, that’s right it
won’t.” Scotty’s face turned beet red. “If you get back on the ice
today, you’ll be playing on the fourth line. You’d better fucking
keep up with them, too. And if you get out there with them and pull
another stunt like that, you’ll be watching the next game from the
fucking press box. Jonny, you’re staying with Zee and Gags for
now.”

He kept talking to the team, going
over assignments and reminding everyone of the game plan, and I
pretty much tuned him out. I knew the game plan. When we headed
back to the rink for the third, I took my spot on the bench and
waited for him to tell me I could play, trying to keep myself
focused, keep my head in the game, even though I was still fuming.
Anger wasn’t going to help me right now. It wouldn’t get me back in
the game.

The boys scored a goal finally, almost
halfway through the period. Zee sent a seeing-eye pass through two
Canucks defenders’ legs. It hit Jonny’s stick right on the tape,
and he deflected it past Luongo. Now we had a lead to defend. The
Canucks only started hitting our guys harder and more often after
that, trying to physically dominate us into coughing up the puck
and making the same kinds of mistakes I had made.

About two minutes after we scored,
Jonny had had enough of the late hits and uncalled cross-checks. He
dropped his gloves with Tom Sestito, a goon playing for the
Canucks. He probably shouldn’t have done that; it gave their bench
some life when we had finally started taking control of the game.
Their guys picked two more fights in the next three minutes,
leaving three of our forwards in the penalty box serving
time.

“
Soupy!” Scotty
shouted.

My head whipped around.

“
Don’t fuck this up. Get
your ass out there.”

At first, I wasn’t sure if he was
sending me out to fight or if he actually wanted me to play. But
then I saw he’d sent us out against the Sedin twins. This wasn’t to
fight—he wanted me, JT, and Pepe to keep those fuckers in
check.

I lined up for the face-off. JT won
the draw, so I took off for the blue line to head into the Canucks
zone. Pepe beat me there, and JT passed the puck up to him. I made
for the net, determined to plant myself in front of Luongo and stay
there. You don’t score goals in the NHL unless you’re willing to go
to the dirty areas of the ice.

Once I got into position, Bieksa
started cross-checking me in the back, trying to force me out of
that spot. I slashed him with my stick, hoping the refs wouldn’t
catch me doing it. They always seemed to get the retaliation, not
the initial incident. Granted, today they didn’t seem to be calling
much of anything. They were just letting us play.

Instead of cross-checking me again,
Bieksa slashed me on the ankle with his stick. The ankle that was
already killing me. I dropped to the ice, one of the Sedins blocked
a shot and took off with the puck, and everyone headed to the other
end of the ice without me.

Fuck!
I got up, but I couldn’t put any weight on my ankle. It gave
out on me and I dropped back down to the ice just in time to see
the puck go in the net and the red light flash.

They’d tied the game with only a few
more minutes left.

Eddie Masters, the Storm’s head
athletic trainer, jogged across the ice to me. “What’s going on,
Soupy?”

“
My ankle. I think it’s
done.” Not to mention my NHL career. After this, it didn’t look so
hot.

“
Can you put any weight on
it?”

I couldn’t a minute ago, but Eddie
helped me up so I could try again. I tried to stand on it, but it
felt like it was going to completely twist underneath me.
“Fuck!”

“
All right, lean on me and
we’ll get you off for some X-rays.”

I put my arm over his shoulders, and
JT came over to help on the other side. I glided on my good foot
all the way over to the benches so they could take me through the
tunnel back to the locker room.

“
He’s done for the night,
Scotty,” Eddie said.

Scotty glared at me, his face as red
as it had been during intermission. “I could have fucking told you
that.”

Yeah. I was done for the night. Maybe
for good. Scotty would probably want Jim to bury me and my contract
in the minors again once I got over this ankle injury. Maybe he was
right to want that.

“Looks like it’s
just an ankle,” Laura said to me. “That shouldn’t
be too bad.”

Just an
ankle
. Like any injury he could have
wouldn’t be awful.

I had to look like an absolute mess.
When Brenden had fallen down and not been able to get back up
again, all the blood had drained from my head. Even though I had
been sitting down, I’d felt so dizzy that I’d worried I would fall
out of my seat. And now, watching him being helped off the ice
without being able to put any weight at all on that leg…

“
I don’t think I was
prepared for this part of it,” I said. “How do y’all keep from
being sick with worry all the time?”

Sure, I’d been watching all of the
Storm’s games lately. In that game when Nicky had been taken off
the ice on a stretcher, I’d been horrified. And I hadn’t even known
him then. It hadn’t been personal. He’d just been a faceless player
on the team I worked for—just a name with no emotional attachment.
This was different—definitely worse. This was watching a man who I
cared for—far more deeply than I had previously admitted to myself,
based on my current reaction—getting hurt. After everything with
Maddie yesterday, this was too much to swallow.

I was just glad that some of the other
kids we’d met yesterday were here. Tuck was off playing in a
corner, and Maddie had brought a coloring book with her because too
much activity made her head hurt, and she couldn’t handle reading
much either. They were completely oblivious to what was taking
place on the ice. They’d only watched for the first few minutes
before Tuck had succumbed to the urge to run off some energy and
Maddie said the ice was too bright to look at.

Neither of them had seen Brenden get
hurt so they weren’t worried about him. Not like I was.

“
I’d like to say it gets
easier,” Laura said, “but I’d be lying if I did. It’s never easy to
see someone you love get hurt. That’s part of why we stick together
up here during the games. Moral support.”

Dana came over and took the seat on my
other side. “They’ll take him back and do some X-rays, check him
over fully. One of the team doctors is always present during the
games, so he’s going to get immediate care. They’ll take good care
of him.”

“
He might have to sit out a
while for it to heal, stay home from this next road trip or two,
but hopefully not too long.” Laura sipped from her wineglass. She
leaned in closer to me, like she had been earlier when she’d been
filling me in on all the gossip. “They’re always miserable when
they have to stay home. That’s just the nature of being a
professional athlete. But it’ll mean you get more time with him
than you normally would during the season.”

Spending more time with him would be
great, but if it meant he had to be hurt, I’d rather pass. I
steeled my spine and swallowed, forcing myself to keep it together.
I’d been falling apart too much lately. Now wasn’t the time for
it.

“
Brenden’s had a lot of
injuries in his career,” Dana said.

I didn’t need her to tell me that.
Last night when he’d taken his shirt off, I’d been able to see for
myself all the scars he had—on his shoulder, his arms, his face,
his abdomen. They were all over him.

She kept talking, like it was supposed
to reassure me or something. “Some were a lot worse than this. He
always bounces back.”

How many times would he have to get
hurt before he said enough?

The game had started up again, and I
tried to pay attention to that instead of thinking about how badly
injured he was. It was all just a big blur on the huge sheet of
ice, though—lots of movements that didn’t make any sense. I didn’t
think I’d be able to concentrate on anything until I could see for
myself that Brenden was going to be all right.

Sara brought over a fruity cocktail
and took the last empty seat near us, her smile making her eyes
sparkle. She’d been gone from the owner’s box since sometime during
the first period. I’d thought maybe she had gone home.

“
You look giddy,” Laura
said. “Tell us why.”

I was starting to learn that Laura
Weber didn’t really ask for things; she just demanded them. No one
ever told her no, though—at least not that I’d witnessed—so clearly
it was working for her.

Sara took a sip of her drink and set
her glass down in front of her. “I’ve got a date, and I don’t even
have to lie to Daddy about it.”

Laura pouted. “Not someone from the
team, then.”

“
Nope. He’s a loan officer
for a bank that rented one of the corporate suites over there.” She
waved her hand randomly at the other boxes on the same level as
ours. “I ran into him outside the bathrooms. Very hot, but he
wasn’t really into the game. Hockey’s not his thing. He’s just here
to schmooze with clients. He took me to the bar and bought me
drinks and flirted with me until I agreed to go out with
him.”

“
If he doesn’t like hockey,
I don’t like him,” Laura said. “At least not for you.”

Sara rolled her eyes. “Please. You
just want to keep all your little duckies in a row.”

“
And I freely admit it. But
it’s only because I
like
all my little duckies. I want to keep you around,
and if you hook up with some banker who hates hockey…”

“
It’s different for you,”
Sara said. “You chose hockey when you chose to marry a hockey
player. I didn’t get a choice. It’s been my whole life whether I
wanted it or not. Daddy was already coaching when I was
born.”

“
You could have chosen
something else for yourself once you got out of high school,” Dana
said. “He hasn’t tried to force you to stick around.”

“
No,” Sara agreed. “But I’m
all he has—me and hockey.”

The horn sounded, blasting through the
Moda Center so loud I jumped. We all looked out to the ice to see
what we’d missed. The Storm had scored, and only thirty-two seconds
were left on the clock.

“
Good deal, girls,” Laura
said. “We should be able to go home with men in good spirits
today.”

Most of them might be in good spirits,
but I had a sneaking suspicion Brenden wouldn’t be.

“
Oh!” Dana bent over and
dug around in her purse for a second. She pulled out an envelope
and passed it over to Laura. “That’s for Katie. You two left
yesterday before I could give it to her.”

“
Instructions on how to
date a very specific teammate of her father’s without her father
killing said teammate?” Laura quipped. “Because that’s pretty much
the only thing she wants for Christmas, I can tell you
now.”

“
Contact information for
Derek Hatch. He’s an entertainment agent, and he’s looking for
young talent—especially kids like Katie who can sing and act and
maybe do more. Pretty much if they’d fit in with the cast of
Glee
, he wants to hear
from them. One of my teammates from Boston College is working for
him now, and she passed it on to me last week. Said to have Katie
put together a ten-minute video of what she can do and send it to
him.”