Finnie Walsh (19 page)

From where I was standing, I couldn’t see exactly what happened. Finnie could, though. He immediately clamped his hand over her throat. By the time Louise and I got to them, a thin line of red was oozing through his fingers. Sarah’s eyelids fluttered and she passed out.

“We have to go for help,” Finnie said, preternaturally calm. “Her throat’s cut. I don’t know how deep it is.”

“Can we move her?” Louise asked. Her voice cracked a little.

“I don’t think we should,” I said.

“We have no choice. If we stay here, she’ll either bleed to death or drown in her own blood.”

Louise and I cringed.

Finnie took control of the situation. “Paul, go get our shoes. Louise, help me get her life jacket off.”

When I got back, Sarah’s life jacket was off and so were Finnie’s skates. There was more blood coming through his fingers and Sarah’s breathing made a sickening, gurgling sound. I helped Louise with Finnie’s shoes and then we put our own shoes on.

With one hand firmly clamped over the gash in her throat, Finnie scooped Sarah up with his free arm and raised himself to his feet. He adjusted her dead weight and began to jog toward the path that led to the sawmill. Louise and I followed.

Slowly, like a train going down a hill, Finnie began to pick up speed. His jog turned into a run that turned into a long-distance, full-speed gallop. It was all I could do to keep up with him and I wasn’t the one carrying Sarah. I thought Louise wouldn’t be able to keep pace, but she did, just barely. By the time we reached the sawmill, we had covered ground that normally took at least 15 minutes to negotiate in less than 5 minutes.

My hands fumbled in my pockets for the car keys, but my hands were shaking so badly that I couldn’t get the key into the lock. Louise took them and with steady hands she opened the doors. I got into the front seat with Louise and Finnie got into the back with Sarah.

We spoke little on the way to the hospital. Louise concentrated on driving, Finnie tried to keep his hand in place and I think I must have gone into some sort of shock. It wasn’t until the next day that I even noticed that I’d sprained both my ankles on the way to the car.

When we reached the hospital, we were engulfed. Doctors swarmed around Finnie and Sarah, shouting at him not to move his hand. They were ushered through doors, but Louise and I were prohibited from following.

My parents were called, I assume, by Louise. My memory of
those hours, during which there was no clear indication that Sarah would live, is a blur. Her lungs had filled with blood, restricting her breathing, and she had lost too much to be sure she’d live.

My father, fearing the worst, said, “Sarah was from another place. She was a sentinel. She was a catalyst.”

I believe that my father was right. She was a catalyst. She prompted us all to do things that we probably wouldn’t have otherwise done and to think about things that without her would have gone unpondered.

“She was right, you know,” Finnie said, weeks after the accident.

“No, she wasn’t. She said she’d drown. That’s not what happened.”

“You’re wrong, Paul. She did drown, sort of. It was the blood in her lungs.”

Right before the accident, before anyone could have possibly known what would transpire, she had screamed, as though she knew exactly what was going to happen. But this foreknowledge might even have contributed to the accident; if she hadn’t screamed, Finnie wouldn’t have skated toward her. Maybe he wouldn’t have fallen. Maybe.

Sarah pulled through, barely, flatlining twice on the operating table. There was a scar on her throat to mark the slice of Finnie’s skate, a scar that would fade as she grew older but would never completely disappear. Her jugular had been nicked but not severed, which, according to the doctors, was the reason she hadn’t died. That and Finnie having had the wherewithal to keep his hand locked on the wound.

There is one more thing. As Sarah recovered we realized that
her pale yellow complexion, which no one had ever been able to adequately explain, had changed. She looked like a normal little girl.

Near the end of January, Finnie and I returned to the minor leagues. He bought a new pair of skates, refusing to ever wear the ones he’d worn that day, but his face drained of colour every time he looked at the blades. We were shaky our first few games, making a lot of mistakes, but by the middle of February we were playing much better.

On Valentine’s Day, Finnie was called up to the NHL team to back up its number-one goalie. The second-stringer had injured his shoulder in practice and would be out for two weeks. Finnie didn’t get any ice time, but he practised with the team and dressed for the games. Each night there was a possibility that he might play, everyone back home tuned in, hoping to see him on the ice. I watched on nights I didn’t have a game of my own and whenever the camera panned the bench there was Finnie, looking calm and collected to the untrained observer, but anyone who knew him could see that he was nervous as hell.

When the regular backup goaltender returned to the line-up and Finnie was sent back down to the minors, he played like he’d never played before. He was electric, allowing fewer goals per game than any other goalie in our league. I asked him what had changed.

“It’s the big league, Paul. It’s incredible.”

“Why?”

Finnie hadn’t talked much about his experience in the NHL since his return. “I don’t know. There’s something in the arenas, an excitement, almost a fever. Even when you lose a game, it’s amazing. I want more. I want to play.”

Finnie got his chance soon enough. He was called up again
a few weeks later and halfway through the game the coach pulled the starting goalie. The team was playing against the New Jersey Devils and Finnie let in only one goal.

“I didn’t even mind,” he said to me when he returned to the minors. “I mean, it’s almost an
honour
to be scored on by Peter Stastny.”

Finnie’s performance had attracted attention from the press and was even mentioned by sportscasters on the evening news. Until then a lawyer who worked for Finnie’s father had been handling Finnie’s contractual affairs. Ironically enough, it was the same lawyer whom Roger Walsh had retained when the Hawthornes had sued Finnie over Frank’s eye. As yet there hadn’t been much work for him; both Finnie and I had the standard contract for rookies who would likely play out the balance of their contracts in the minor leagues. After his game in the NHL, however, Finnie was approached by several big-name agents. Finnie rejected their advances without hesitation. He believed that agents were a big part of what was wrong with hockey and he preferred to manage his own interests, using his lawyer to check contracts for legal snags.

Finnie was called up regularly that March, playing several more games and putting in solid performances. It seemed as though it was only a matter of time before he secured himself a regular spot on an NHL roster and, although I would miss him in the minor league, where I would certainly be spending the rest of the season, if not the rest of my career, I was happy for him. No one deserved this more than Finnie, after all he’d been through.

Things were going well with Louise as well. She visited him on the road whenever he was in a city reasonably close to Portsmouth and they talked on the phone almost every night. Finnie was determined to prevent their relationship from deteriorating the way it had with Joyce.

Louise was good for Finnie. With his popularity as a hockey player on the rise, there were many temptations open to him, temptations that might have led to trouble if he hadn’t had Louise to keep him grounded.

Of course, the whole situation with Joyce Sweeney had changed since Louise appeared on the scene. I thought about it a lot and decided that if an opportunity ever presented itself I would pursue Joyce, which for me was no small resolution. Yet I didn’t see her at all that spring and it wasn’t long before she was pushed into the back of my mind by more pressing events.

The news came suddenly. Without any warning, Finnie was traded as part of a three-way, seven-player deal. It placed him on an NHL team that already had two top-notch young goalies, which in effect meant that the odds of him seeing any ice time almost nonexistent. He’d be sent back to the minors immediately.

This was why he’d been getting called up, to increase his marketability, a move that had been calculated by our team’s management. They had been getting Finnie good press and letting him play so that he would be worth more on the trading block. It had little or nothing to do with their confidence in him or his skill as a goaltender.

“I’m meat,” he said as he packed up his equipment for the last time. His flight left later that day.

“Come on, it’s not so bad. Players get traded all the time.”

“Yeah, I know, but I never thought it would feel like this.”

“What did you think it would feel like?”

“I don’t know.” He paused, looking at his catching glove. “Remember when hockey was fun?”

“It’s not so bad.” It had been a long time since hockey had been about fun for me. I still enjoyed playing, but it was a job now; the game was not what it was when we were kids. We were being paid to play hockey. It’s hard to complain about that. Besides, I
wasn’t very good at anything else. But I didn’t love the game the way I used to.

With one month left in the season, Finnie left. With the exception of that one horrible season with Tom Kazakoff in net, after Coach Hunter had benched Finnie, and the times when he had been called up to the NHL, I had never played with another goalie. It felt unnatural for there to be someone else in his spot.

Back in Portsmouth, my parents were still adjusting to the change in Sarah. One of the first things my father did was take the lamp from her room and smash it into as many pieces as he could. It was the right thing to do; my mother and Louise agreed. There was no way that the lamp could stay.

Sarah appeared to be indifferent to the lamp’s destruction; she had bigger fish to fry. Before the accident she was socially outcast by other children because she was yellow and wore a life jacket and, well, was a little strange, to say the least. But now there was a whole world she wanted to see and touch and experience. Where she had asked questions before, she now answered them on her own. The only thing that bothered me was that neither hell nor high water could get her to go anywhere near a hockey rink. She wouldn’t even listen to my games on the radio.