Comeback (7 page)

Bergy was already upset enough that we’d given up a two-goal lead in the third, capitulating to their style of play instead of sticking to our speed-and-transition game. They wanted to bang bodies, and we’d let them. We tried to do some of that ourselves, but playing a hard-nosed, physical sort of hockey wasn’t where our team excelled. We were built to fly, not to bruise.

I finally made it to an armchair and collapsed into it, and Nils climbed on my lap. His brother joined Elin on the sofa. She’d been there, right by Emma’s side, since I’d walked through the door. I was beginning to notice that Elin stayed with Emma almost constantly, and I didn’t think it was because she was trying to make the most of the time they had left. I got the sense that she was taking care of her mother, almost as much as Henrik was. She looked after her little brothers a lot, too, always being sure they cleaned up after themselves and ate their vegetables. She was a little mama, far too grown up for her age. I wanted to take some of that responsibility off her shoulders, but I didn’t know how. I didn’t know if she’d let me.

“Are you going to play tomorrow?” Nils asked, oblivious to the direction my thoughts had gone.

“Maybe.” Bergy hadn’t definitively said which of the two of us would start the game. With it being a back-to-back, my chances of getting in were pretty decent, especially with the way Hunter had struggled in the third period tonight. But it was just as likely that Bergy would want to test Hunter early in the season to see what he could handle. I likely wouldn’t know whether I was going to play or not until we went in for morning skate tomorrow.

“I hope you get to play,” Nils said. “You’re the best.”

I scrubbed a hand affectionately over his hair in response. I doubted there were many people who would agree with his assessment right now, but he was allowed to be biased. I was his uncle.

“Vladdie said a bad word,” Hugo put in.

“And you better not repeat it!” Elin said. “Mama doesn’t like you using those words.”

“That’s right,” I said. “None of us can use those words.” I always had to think a lot harder when I was around the kids to be sure I wasn’t cursing in front of them. I had to pretend there was a microphone in front of me and a camera recording everything I said or else I would slip up more often than not.

“I won’t say it,” Nils said, big eyes serious as he looked at me.

Emma moved her head slightly in response. She’d been typing into her computer since I’d come in. She used a text-to-speech program to communicate since the muscles of her mouth and tongue didn’t always cooperate anymore. It was difficult to understand her, and trying to talk left her physically exhausted. In the days since they’d arrived, I still hadn’t gotten used to hearing the computer’s voice instead of hers. It was only after they’d shown up at my door that I realized I hadn’t actually spoken to Emma on the phone in close to a year. It had always been the kids who’d gotten on the other end of the line to talk to me, keeping her secret until she was ready to fill me in.

She pushed the button to have the computer read her words to me now.

“I found an apartment today. We’ll move in next week. That will give us Oregon residency. And I saw a doctor today who agreed to write the prescription once I have residency and get a second opinion.” Her eyes had been on me the whole time the computer was relaying her message.

I swallowed hard and forced myself not to take hold of Nils’s shoulder and squeeze. I’d likely hurt him, and he had more than enough hurts already. I didn’t need to add to that list.

“So you’re still going through with it, then?” I’d hoped that I would have been able to convince her to change her mind, not that it would have done any good. She was still dying. We might have gotten a little more time with her, but how much quality time would it have been? Very little.

As much as I hated to admit it, as much as I hated to give in, Emma was right. This was the right choice, at least in terms of preventing the kids from being forced to watch her deteriorate before their eyes. I still wasn’t sold on my being the best choice of guardian for the munchkins once she was gone. Gabe’s parents were still alive. They were in Sweden. They were old, yes, and not in the best health themselves, but at least they had a stable home.

Emma didn’t type anything into her computer. She nodded, her eyes never leaving mine.

“How soon?” I asked, choking on the words to keep myself from crying.

Nils put his little hand in mine, and that nearly did me in.

Emma started typing. “Not sure yet. We’ll all know when it’s time.”

“It’ll be all right, Uncle Nicky,” Elin said.

That was just perfect. Now my niece and nephews were trying to comfort me. How fucked up was that? I should be the one comforting them, taking care of them, making everything all right in their world at least as far as I was able to. They were children.

I was going to have to figure out how to be the grownup in this relationship…and fast.

OVER THE NEXT
few weeks, Jessica became my lifeline, one of the few things on earth keeping me grounded in reality. I’d confided in Jim Sutter as she’d suggested I do, and he’d insisted that we tell Bergy and the rest of the coaches what was going on. In particular, he felt very strongly that we needed to talk to Trevor Jackson, the Storm’s recently hired goalie coach.

In the few months since he’d come on board, Jacks had been the only guy involved with the team I’d opened up to about how my father had died. Over the last few months he’d been instrumental in helping me to take everything I’d learned in rehab and tie it in to my game, so I’d just blurted it out one day without really meaning to tell him. He tended to have that effect on the goaltenders he worked with based on what I’d seen. I knew Hunter had a similar relationship with him. It really played in to the way Jacks liked to work with us, too. It wasn’t just about our skillset and technique with him. Jacks looked at everything as a whole—physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual. He helped me focus. He helped me see the big picture and not dwell on the things I couldn’t control like letting in a soft goal, misplaying the puck behind the net, and the fact that I was still trying to earn back the trust of my teammates and the rest of the coaches. All I could control was my focus within the moment, nothing more and nothing less. He’d been helping me take the game a moment at a time, to consider each setback I faced a learning experience. He took a Zen approach to the game, which suited my approach to life, so we meshed well.

But even with all the coaches and other team executives trying to help me figure things out, it was Jessica I’d begun leaning on. Every time there was a new development with Emma, it was Jessica I called to talk things through. Every time I struggled to find a way to manage becoming a single father when I could hardly keep my own shit together, she was the person I sought out. Being around her or even just hearing her voice calmed me, helping me take a step back and see everything as it was laid out before me instead of flailing within the riptide my life had become. She treated everything I came to her with as a problem that had a solution if we just looked for it hard enough, and she had a demeanor that made me think she’d been there before and come through it, which gave me hope that I could come through my issues, too.

What had me down at the moment was the fact that Bergy had passed over putting me into a game for almost two weeks, so the logical person I ought to go to with my frustrations was Jacks. Jessica was the person I knew I needed today, though. I had a little over an hour between the lengthy film session we’d just finished up and when I needed to pick the kids up from school, so I drove over to the Light the Lamp offices.

As I’d come to expect when I showed up unannounced, she had the phone shoved between her ear and her shoulder while she typed and talked. She had to get the worst cricks in her neck from holding the phone like that so often. Out of reflex, I stretched, turning my head from side to side.

She glanced up when I came in, giving me a brief smile and holding up a finger. “Absolutely, Carter,” she said into the phone. “I have an email ready to go out so I can coordinate a team on my end. I really can’t wait to get started on this with you.” She fell silent for a minute, still typing, and then, “Got it. I’ll call you once I know how many I can bring on board. All right. Talk to you soon.”

“Bring on board for what?” I asked as she settled the phone on its cradle.

“A home-building project,” she said offhandedly.

“For Light the Lamp?” She hadn’t mentioned anything about it before now. At least not to me. Building houses didn’t seem like something that would line up with the foundation’s mission, either. It came out of left field. I tended to be very aware of what projects she had going, mainly because I wanted to be involved in any way I could. It sounded like she had all sorts of plans already in place, though, so she must have been working on it for a while. As much as we’d talked over the last few weeks—at least once a day, and sometimes as often as three or four times a day—I would have expected to hear
something
about it.

But now that I thought about it, I realized I hadn’t heard much of anything going on with Jessica in these weeks. Every time we got together or talked, it was all about me, Emma, the kids, my struggles with the team. It had been an insanely one-sided relationship. I suddenly felt like an ass.

She stopped typing and glanced up at me with a sheepish expression before going back to her work. “I didn’t want to bother you with it,” she said. “You’ve already got so much on your plate.”

“Not so much that I can’t help you out.”

“You mean help Light the Lamp.”

“I mean you. And Light the Lamp, too.” I took the seat across from her, the desk between us, and I reached a hand out to still her fingers so she’d look at me. “Having something else to do, to focus on…it helps more than it hurts.”

She pulled her hands away, drawing them to her lap where they were out of my reach. “Nicky,” she said on a sigh. “I don’t want to give you any more burdens.”

“Helping you isn’t a burden.”

She stared at me for a long time before sighing again. “All right.” She pulled out a stack of papers and flipped through them before taking a sheet out and passing it over to me. “So there’s a family whose house burned to the ground because of a meth lab exploding next door…”

AFTER I FINISHED
my pre-game nap, I took Emma to the pharmacy to fill the prescription that would end her life, my heart turning my feet to concrete. Elin insisted on coming with us even though nothing was going to happen other than paying the pharmacist and getting the bottle. Emma wasn’t going to take it today. She’d promised me and the kids that it would be a family decision, that we would all know and have an opportunity to say our last good-byes. But now, Emma would have that option. She would be able to choose when to end her suffering.

No doubt, Elin wanted to spend every possible moment she could with her mother. I couldn’t blame her for that. I was doing the same, passing up dinners out with the guys in favor of being with my sister every opportunity I had.

Getting the prescription took us all of five minutes. We spent longer getting Emma’s wheelchair in and out of the minivan than we did inside the pharmacy, and the guy who checked us out had looked at me like I was an idiot and asked why I hadn’t used the drive-through. The fact was, I didn’t even know drive-through pharmacies existed, but I made a mental note to use it next time if I had to ever come back with Emma before…well,
before
.

I’d bought the minivan on a day off last week. I was the only guy on the team with one. The others who had kids tended to drive SUVs, but the minivan was easier for transporting Emma and her wheelchair. Maybe I’d trade it in for an SUV after she was gone. Or maybe I wouldn’t. In the present, I couldn’t decide if the memories associated with it would bring more pain or comfort. I parked it now in the handicapped spot closest to Emma’s apartment. Before I’d shut off the engine, Elin had undone her seat belt and climbed over to lower her mother’s chair down to street level. They had it all sorted out by the time I came around to help.