But the plain truth was that he had to confront her. Today, next week, it didn't really matter. When he'd first thought of it, the Santa getup had seemed. . . well, like a cute idea. He'd thought she might respond to it and at least let him have his say. And what a say it was going to be! When Will Chatam went for humiliation and rejection, he went all the way.
He glanced at the package in his hand, then back at Marti, who was walking into her boots.
"Do it," she said again. Then she kissed him on the cheek, whispered "Merry Christmas" in his ear, and stole out the door like a thief.
"Marti?" he heard Kelly call from upstairs. "Marti, who was it?"
Catching his breath, Will tiptoed into the living room and waited by the fireplace doors.
"Marti? Who—"
Kelly stopped dead in her tracks, her breath darting back into her like a small, startled animal. She'd changed into a nightie and a quilted robe, a ratty old thing her mother had given her ten years ago, and now she belted it around her.
Santa Claus was standing by the fireplace. He had Will's face, and a gift in his mittened hand.
"Merry Christmas," Will said, and shrugged. "Marti took off in a hurry—"
"Will?"
"No less." His body was filmed with sweat. "Hope you don't mind."
The tears started up again, and Kelly ran to him. "Oh, Will," she sobbed, hugging his padded suit. "I'm so glad to see you."
A knot broke in Will Chatam's chest with an almost audible twang. They stood that way awhile, Will stroking Kelly's hair as Marti had done only minutes before. Then Kelly stood back from him.
"For me?" she said, tapping the glittery package with a fingernail.
"Uh-huh," Will said. He handed her the package. His face was grimly set, the face of a man was has staked his life's savings on a single spin of the wheel.
"I didn't get anything for you," Kelly said.
"The hug was enough."
Kelly smiled. "Should I open it?"
Will nodded.
"You want to get out of that outfit first?"
"I'll wait." In case you throw me out once you see what's inside.
Still smiling, Kelly unwrapped the package.
There was a tiny ivory-inlaid jewelry box inside. When she opened it, it played a wistful little classical piece that Kelly didn't recognize, but thought might have been composed by Vivaldi. Inside, snugged in blue velvet, sat a single delicate diamond.
Kelly's eyes filled with tears again. She kissed Will tenderly on the mouth. "It's beautiful, Will, and I want to put it on. But can we call it a friendship ring for now? Until I'm sure?"
Will plucked the fur-rimmed cap off his head. His face was alive with a mighty smile. "More than anything, Kelly, that's what I want to be. Your friend."
Kelly slipped the shiny gold hoop onto the ring finger of her right hand. It was a perfect fit.
"C'mon," she said, her voice filled with erotic promise. "Let's get you out of that suit."
Peter awoke refreshed on Christmas morning, though he'd slept only a couple of hours. He refused the breakfast they brought him and told the attending nurse that he wished to be left alone. It was Christmas Day, he told her, and he wanted to enjoy it in peace. A dull ache in his chest reminded him of the night before, but the memory awakened only a delirious sense of anticipation.
The adventure was just beginning.
When the room was quiet, he closed his eyes and rose from his crippled body. It was like being lifted out of a vat of bland syrup in which you could somehow breathe, but only barely.
He slipped through the glass into the sunny glare of Christmas morning.
In his indecision of the night before, Will had parked his truck at the top of the hill. As a result, Peter saw only Kelly's snow-heaped Subaru in the turnaround. When he entered the house—this time through the bedroom window, hoping to catch her sleeping late—the furthest thing from his mind was that she might not be alone. His trespasses of the past few weeks had instilled in him a deep sense of ownership, and he'd all but dismissed the possibility of the stranger's return.
The discovery was like salt in an open wound.
He found them seated at the kitchen table, giggling over the big floppy Santa hat her boyfriend had cocked on his head. The sight was even more infuriating than the first time he'd caught them together, and Peter simply hung there, paralyzed anew. As he watched them, the scene seemed to grow in brightness until it glared.
Kelly wore only a nightie, a ghost of a thing you could see through. Her tits winked out at him like fog-bound stoplights—and now the fucker she was with reached out and cupped one of them!
That broke the spell.
The power was suddenly huge, uncontainable, and Peter aimed it like a sputtering flamethrower; he aimed it at the jackass in the Santa hat—and when he let it go, the exhilaration was tremendous.
But nothing happened.
They went on giggling, and Peter found himself stuck in the wall like a misflung spear. Unbelieving, he pulled himself free and tried again, this time targeting Kelly.
Again, nothing.
A swarming maroon filled Peter's vision—and when he blinked he was back in his bed. Back in the drowning pool of his body.
A nurse at the desk down the hall heard his agonized howl, but decided, wisely, to ignore it.
TWENTY-NINE
Gardner," Coach Tessaro called from the doorway of his cubbyhole office.
Sam, who was gearing up with his teammates, did not appear to have heard him. He was sitting hunched over his knees, lacing his skates, but close enough so that Tessaro's big voice should have reached him.
"Hey Gardner!" the coach called again, and this time Rolly Sawchuck, the Sudbury goaltender, nudged Sam's shoulder with his glove. Sam looked around, stood, then started toward the office with a listless nod.
The kid was in a daze, Tessaro knew, what with his mother so recently dead (not to mention the way she died, Tessaro thought grimly), and the coach was having serious second thoughts about playing him. There wasn't much question that without him the team would suffer—at the tender age of twenty, Gardner was their key playmaker—but maybe the kid would suffer more. He was not at his best, not even close, and tonight they were in for a grudge match. The last time Sudbury had met the Ottawa U. Raiders, just before Christmas on Ottawa's home ice, the Ottawa team had been badly humiliated—mostly due to Gardner's scoring ability—and tonight tempers would be hot. Their goons would be laying for Gardner.
"Yeah, Coach?"
"Come in here a minute, would you?"
Sam angled past Tessaro's big belly, his skate blades thudding on the rubberized carpet, and stood before the littered aluminum table that served as the coach's desk. Tessaro closed the door and shot the bolt, then squeezed in behind his desk.
"Listen, kid," he said, looking squarely at Sam. "We all feel shitty about what happened to your mom."
Right, Sam thought. That's why so many of you showed up at the funeral.
"It was a hell of a thing. A hell of a thing." His gaze fell from Sam's. "I think it shows a lotta guts that you're out here tonight—and believe me, kid, we'd probably get our butts kicked without you." He shrugged. "But do you think you should be back in it so soon? I mean, it's only been a couple of weeks, and we're in for a real barn-burner tonight, I can promise you that. That yard ape Kiley's gonna be gunnin' for you. You really smoked him last time out, and clean check or not, Kiley's gonna be on your ass like a rash." He met Sam's eyes again. "What I'm trying to say, kid, is that maybe you should sit this one out. You can stay geared up, watch from the bench, but—"
"No," Sam said, breaking a written-in-stone rule by interrupting the coach. "Kiley doesn't scare me." Bobby Kiley was Rhett Kiley's brother. And Rhett Kiley, full-time drunk and part-time mechanic, had once been a "friend" of Peter's. "I want to play."
A familiar flush rose from beneath Tessaro's collar, then gradually receded. "Okay, kid. You can go on. But I'll be straight with you. If I see you fucking up out there, you're off the ice. Fair enough?"
"Fair enough," Sam said. "That it?"
At the coach's nod, Sam turned and clunked his way back to the locker room.
By 6:45 p.m. the arena was packed with fans, many of them already sipping spiked Cokes or swilling from forty-ouncers stuffed into brown paper bags. To their credit, the Ottawa team had managed a respectable turnout. Behind the Ottawa bench a mob of chanting fans hoisted a huge purple banner aloft while the team mascot, a guy in a brown bear costume, bounded up and down through the stands. On the Sudbury side similar festivities were in progress, all of it challenged for volume by the arena's organist, who keyed out something drab and repetitive.
In the Sudbury locker room, Sam lagged behind his teammates, who had filed out for the pre-game warm-up. Though heartsick at the death of his mother, ascendant over all of his emotions was guilt. The guilt was huge. It had begun Christmas morning, when he left the morgue to go tell his brother the tragic news, and it had plagued him unremittingly ever since. Peter had been up in his wheelchair that snowy morning, gazing trancelike through his ninth-story window. Sam had shuffled into the room swearing he'd be brave, that he would not allow the tears that were already falling—but before he'd gotten a word out, before his brother had even swiveled around to face him, Peter had said, "She's better off, Sam. We both know that."
"How did. . . ?" But surely one of the nurses had told him or someone from Pastoral Care? Or maybe he'd heard it on the news.
Peter's wheelchair hummed through a hundred-eighty degrees. His expression was chiseled in ice. "She was a drunk, Sam. A whore. A liability."
For the first time in his life Sam felt as though he should be furious with his brother, utterly outraged. His inbred instincts of decency and respect cried out for that rage. . . but it wouldn't come. It just wasn't there. Peter was right. Their mother had been all of those things and more.
And in the cold light of Peter's words, Sam realized that he was glad. Mother or not, the tormenting witch was gone, out of his life forever. And he was glad.
"Change your mind?"
Sam looked up into Tessaro's dark eyes. "No."
"Then get out there and skate."
Sam got to his feet. He plucked his stick from the rack, whacked its heel against the toe of one skate, and started down the damp cement corridor to the rink. In the pit of his stomach, all his emotions were focusing into a single hot flashpoint, like sunlight funneled through a magnifying glass. Even the guilt. Especially the guilt. Like frenzied insects they orgied together. . .
And their single hybrid offspring was rage.
The players for both teams had been on the ice for five minutes, skating brisk warm-up patterns and flicking wrist shots at their goalies, deliberately bumping shoulders with their opponents. As in almost no other sport, hockey was a game of intimidation. On the ice, with two-hundred-pound slabs of muscle and padding hurtling at you at speeds of up to thirty miles an hour, fear was your ally. But only if you inspired it.
Sam stepped onto the ice and joined the carousel, slipping automatically into a practiced routine of limbering and stretching, flooding cold muscles with blood. After all was said and done, he was glad he'd accepted the spot on the Cambrian U. team. Though it used up a lot of prime study time—second year was even stiffer than first year had been—it also kept him sane. On the ice was perhaps the only place in the world where Sam felt totally alive, totally in control. The frosty wind in his face, the good heat of all-out exertion, the grace the skate blade afforded the human body. He would have been incomplete without it.
But tonight Sam felt none of these things. He felt alone, angry, confused—
Pain roared up Sam's left leg from his ankle, spinning him around and almost dropping him to the ice. Out of the corner of his eye he saw a puck deflect away from him, and an instant later Bobby Kiley was barreling toward him from the opposite blue line. The burly center scraped to a sidelong halt at the red line, inches from where Sam was standing.
"Ay, cocklips," Kiley squawked, grinning his greasy grin, his troll's face and shaved head gleaming with an unclean sweat. "It's you an' me tonight, rump ranger. Tooth and fuckin' nail."
Sam ground his teeth against the knot of pain in his ankle. Kiley was not only known for his brawling; he had one of the meanest slap shots in the league and the accuracy of a laser-scope rifle.
"Stay out of my way," Sam warned flatly.
"Ooooh," Kiley baited, doing an effeminate little jig. "I'm shakin' all over."
In the sway of Sam's unflinching gaze, Kiley's grin faltered, and for a moment Sam thought the crazy mother was going to throw down his gloves right there. Then he was skating away, snorting laughter, snaring a puck and driving it at the open net.
The first period passed without altercation. A Sudbury defenseman drew a two-minute penalty for hooking. Gilles Peltier, the Sudbury right-winger, scored an unassisted goal at five minutes of play, and Bobby Kiley matched it less than a minute later. To the delight of the fans, Kiley snapped his stick in half over the ball-peen curve of his head as he skated back across the red line. It was Kiley's trademark, and even the Sudbury devotees roared their approval. Later in the period, Sam cross-checked Kiley in a clean play, knocking him sprawling, and everyone expected an immediate punch-up. But the big brawler only grinned and skated away. In a way, Sam was disappointed.
But the shit hit the fan during the first two minutes of the second period.
Closing full bore on the Ottawa net, Sam picked up the puck at the blue line, faked a slap shot, and then lobbed it over the goalie's shoulder. The puck wobbled into the right top corner of the net, making the score two to one.
The crowd roared.
Bobby Kiley came out of nowhere, a snarling locomotive moving at top speed. Two feet from his target he spiked up an elbow and slammed it into Sam's right ear, sending Sam's helmet flying and dropping him to the ice like a flung sac of seeds. Twelve hundred perfect Os punctuated the astonished faces of the fans, creating a chorused boo that thundered through the cavernous arena. Sam landed hard on his left shoulder, numbness bolting down his arm like a shot of novocaine. A whistle blew and one of Sam's teammates gave Kiley a shove, but Kiley decked this new adversary with a single punishing jab. He swung his stick at another attacker, shattering the visor of his mask, then threw off his gloves. Ignoring the referee and the fast-approaching linesmen, Kiley skated a mocking circle around Sam, spraying him with chill mists of ice.