The Tao of Hockey (Vancouver Vice #1) (16 page)

“Bitch.”

The word sprang instinctively from me.

She laughed. That sound I’d always treasured was now mocking me. “Took you long enough to figure that out.”

O
perating on automatic
, I packed a bag and hit the road. It was late in the day to start the long drive home, but I couldn’t stay in Vancouver any longer. All the trust that Josie and I had was shattered. Had she been laughing at me behind my back the whole time? Everything spiritual that I had shared was meaningless to her.

I didn’t belong here. I needed to get home. I was drawn there like a salmon returning to spawn.

Nelson had a history of sheltering people who didn’t quite fit in elsewhere or were looking for someplace special. Like back in the Vietnam War days, a whole bunch of draft-dodgers had settled here. Even today, on our main street, there were more holistic businesses than chain stores. It was a healing place. And right now, I needed healing. My mind kept coming back to Josie—I loved her, I trusted her, and to have her turn on me like that hurt so much; the physical pain was worse than anything from hockey.

If I thought I had hit bottom before, now was the lowest of the low. I had worked so hard for the past two years. Arizona, Switzerland, training with Tony—everything I had done to get this one last shot. Getting cut from the Vice meant I had no realistic shot at the NHL. I had only the slimmest of chances anyway, but now there was none.

The last time I’d felt this low was when I got cut by my last AHL team in San Antonio. I thought I’d hit rock bottom that night.

I had gone back to the team hotel and booked one extra night. I threw my hockey gear in the closet, went out and got completely wasted. Even to this day, that whole night was a blank. I woke up in my hotel room, and there was this strange girl sleeping beside me. That wasn’t a huge surprise, in those days waking up alone after a party night would have been a bigger shock.

A beam of sunlight was coming through a gap in the curtains and shining on her face. Her makeup had worn away in the night, and she looked young—way too young to be out all night and sleeping with a total stranger. But I had been too drunk to see that and do the right thing.

I stared up at the popcorn texture of hotel ceiling and thought about how much I hated being inside my head. But it was a cycle; I hated myself, so I did stupid shit like getting drunk or blunted or laid, which made me hate myself more.

Then the girl had woken up.

“Good mornin’, baby,” she drawled. And I could tell from the tone of her voice that she had already worked up this whole fantasy where we were in love. I always had a ton of intuition, but in those days I never used it to stay out of trouble.

But I smiled at her anyway. I didn’t say a word because I couldn’t even remember her name. She kissed me and then she got up to go the bathroom. When she turned, there was a tattoo of a butterfly on her shoulder. It was a tiny pink cartoon drawing. That tattoo looked more like a sticker. It was exactly what a young girl would get. And there was something so sad about that tattoo that tears welled up in my eyes. That sadness was for her, but also for me—that my life was so completely in the shitter that I had ended up here. No job. No future in hockey. Hungover and sleeping with teenagers. I was only 21, and everything was over.

Later my shaman would say that was the first sign. That the butterfly had come to me to lead me out of that life and into my new one. And he was right. I had no big plan, but I decided to follow my intuition and do something different. Something better. I packed up all my gear and shipped it home. Then I took my knapsack and hopped on a bus and headed to Arizona. The first step on a long journey.

A long journey that led here? To bumper-to-bumper traffic as I fled yet another city after being cut by yet another team. If that night in San Antonio was worse than now, why did I feel so completely destroyed? Maybe because when everything was my own fault, at least I could change and fix things. I could stop drinking. I could straighten out my game. I could stop humping kids.

The traffic finally cleared out, and I drove mindlessly for hours. I stopped at a McDonald’s drive-through just because it was open. Nutrition didn’t matter if I wasn’t playing. I could hardly taste anything anyway. Then I looked down at the half-eaten burger and remembered Josie’s teasing promise that I could take her out to McDonald’s. Only two nights ago, we were laughing and joking around. I had made the team, I had lost my interlock, and I had the woman of my dreams.

I drove on until the familiar landscape of my hometown appeared—the mountains loomed even in the darkness and the highway wound along the water. As I crossed the bridge, Kootenay Lake was a shimmering darkness beneath me.

I parked in front of my mom’s place, and I could see that my dad’s car was in the driveway. I had texted her that I was coming home, and she had probably told him. News travelled fast around here anyway, especially bad news.

I walked in the front door. Downy ran up to greet me with yips and jumps, but he was the only one happy that I was home. Everyone else was sitting in the living room. My mom looked worried, my dad looked pissed, and Dino looked—well, he always looked a little stoned. My mom got up and hugged me.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

“Yeah, I’m fine.” I had soreness in my chest, but right now I wasn’t sure if that was from the airbag or heartache.

“We were just celebrating you making the team, and now this. What did you do this time?” my dad demanded.

“Chuck,” my mother laid a warning hand on his arm. “Don’t assume anything.”

“I wasn’t drinking and driving if that’s what you think. It was an accident, and not my fault.”

“Then why did you get cut from the team?” he asked.

“Because I brought bad publicity to the Vice. My, uh, passenger was the daughter of a prominent Vancouver lawyer. I might get sued or something.” I wasn’t exactly sure what would happen next. I still trusted that Josie didn’t want to do anything legal, but who knew what her father or brother would do.

“Goddamn it, Eric!” My dad jumped out of the chair and got in my face. “How many times have I told you that women are a distraction? Can you not keep it in your pants for one night?”

“It wasn’t like that. She’s my girlfriend. I mean, she
was
my girlfriend.”

“The stakes were so high, and now you’ve screwed up again. This was your big opportunity.” He shook his head like he couldn’t believe my stupidity.

Why did my dad always assume it was my fault? It was like no matter how much I tried to turn my life around, I was never going to get a goddamn break. “How the fuck do you think I feel? I did all the work—I’m in the best shape ever. I was the best player in camp. The coach hated me, but I was so good that he
had
to put me on the team. I told you—it was an accident. I did nothing wrong. Nothing.”

My mom inserted herself between the two of us. “Both of you need to calm down and get into a more peaceful space, so we can really communicate. Let’s sit down and have some tea first.”

She gently pushed both of us into separate chairs, and Dino disappeared into the kitchen. We quietly steamed in our corners until he brought in a tray with Japanese tea cups, a pot of green tea, and seed cookies.

“Look, Eric—” my dad began, but my mom held up a hand.

“Chuck, I think it’s important that we listen to our son first, and let him explain what happened.”

I took a deep inhale and felt the soreness in my chest. But it only reminded me that Josie had a tube draining her lung. Whatever I felt was nothing compared to her pain.

“Okay, you don’t have to lecture me. I know exactly how badly I’ve screwed up.” I held my head in my hands and stared at the floor. “Every day, it’s the first thing I remember in the morning, or when I go to start my truck, or when I get to whatever crappy rink I’m playing at—all I can think about is how I messed up. So you don’t have to tell me.”

I looked up, my mom had already started crying but my dad still looked angry… and disappointed. That was how he always saw me: a failure.

“If I could go back and do things differently—don’t you think I would? Then Gary would be in the NHL... and I would too. You and mom would still be... together. And now, this time—Josie would be okay too. I keep trying, but—” I could feel a lump in my throat, but I was determined not to cry.

“I try… I try to do the right thing, but I fuck up. But this time, it wasn’t my fault. I wasn’t driving drunk or speeding or anything. All I was doing was being… happy.”

That sounded so pathetic, but it was true. For the first time in years, I had pure joy and hope inside me. All I’d wanted was for that evening with Josie to last forever.

I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was my dad. He perched beside me and awkwardly slipped his arm around me. “Don’t worry, son.” His voice was choked. “You’re okay… and that’s what really matters.”

“Thanks, Dad.”

“I’m sorry if I put too much pressure on you. I know how much you love hockey, so I wanted you to be able to play—at the highest level.”

He squeezed me with one muscular arm. When I was a kid I thought my dad was the strongest man in the world. When I looked up at him, he smiled. He wasn’t the type to make big emotional declarations, but I got him.

“It’s what I wanted too.” As much as his nagging bothered me, deep down I knew he was right.

He sat back down on the couch. My mom was still crying, but now she was smiling too. Dino had placed a box of tissues in the middle of the coffee table.

My dad was already making new plans. “Eric, let’s get Lance on the case here. He can find you a new team. You liked Switzerland, right?”

“Wait,” my mom interrupted. “What did you mean when you said your dad and I would still be together?”

That was something I had never dared to ask, but we were letting everything hang out tonight. “Well, you guys decided to split up right after the draft. Was it because you were disappointed that I didn’t go higher?”

My mom stared at me. It was like what I said didn’t compute at all.

“Of course not. Baby boy, is that what you’ve been thinking all these years?”

“I don’t know. I just didn’t get it. It was so weird that we were all happy when we went to the draft, and then two weeks later you guys split up. I couldn’t help thinking that the two events were related.” It seemed stupid once I said it out loud, but I had worried about that for years.

She leaned forward and took both my hands in hers.

“When you moved away to play junior hockey in Kelowna, it became very clear that your father and I were no longer in the same headspace. Having you as our focus helped to mask our issues for years.” She squeezed my hands tighter, “Now, don’t start feeling guilty about that. We were young when we got married and we changed. Your dad is a wonderful man, but we have very different souls.”

She smiled at my dad, and he managed not to roll his eyes.

“Your father insisted that was important for your hockey career that we present a strong family image when the scouts interviewed us. So I agreed—reluctantly—that we should remain together until you were drafted. I felt honesty was the best policy, but….” She didn’t finish the sentence, and my dad looked a little sheepish.

I nodded. They’d always fought, but that was what marriage was like. My mom was certainly happier now. My dad seemed the same as ever. But it was a relief not to feel guilty about it.

Now my mom moved onto a happier topic. “Tell me more about your new girlfriend. Josie?”

“Yeah, Josie. She’s still in the hospital. She has broken ribs and a punctured lung.”

“Eric, what are you doing here if she’s in the hospital?”

“I told you. She broke up with me.” I hated saying the words. It was like saying them made things more real. I couldn’t deal with the pain yet.

“At the hospital?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh my goodness, pharmaceuticals can have a huge effect on anyone’s personality. Don’t believe anything she might have said under the influence of drugs.”

I began to laugh. It was funny to hear my pot-smoking mother lecture me about the evils of drugs—legal ones. My dad snorted and chuckled, and even Dino was smiling. Eventually my mom saw the humour and joined in the laughter.

“Isn’t it nice when we’ve all got this mellow vibe on?” Mom declared. She hugged each one of us in turn and then passed out cookies while Dino refilled our teacups.

I
t was after eleven
, but I wasn’t tired. I felt more peaceful inside after talking to my parents, but I was still restless. I put on my shoes and jacket and went for a walk. It was cool out. The leaves were changing, and it was fall. For the last seven years, I’d only come home in the off-season, so Nelson was in perma-summer in my mind.

I wasn’t even aware of where I was going, but I found myself in front of Gary’s house. His landscaping truck was in the driveway and a sliver of light showed in his basement bedroom.

I hesitated for a moment, then walked across the lawn and tapped on his window. He yanked open the curtain and looked at me in surprise. Then he opened the window.

“Goldie. What the hell are you doing here, man? I thought you were in Vancouver.”

“I got cut again. Can I come in?”

“Uh, sure.” He slid the window all the way open, and I began to slide in—like we did during high school when his parents were asleep. But halfway in, my jacket caught on something and I was stuck halfway.

“Shit.” I couldn’t even fit my arm in to reach back.

Gary instantly saw the problem, slipped his hand in, and released me. I propelled myself all the way in.

“Nice entrance, superstar,” he said. We both laughed, and it broke all the tension. Why had I even worried about Gary being angry with me? He was never the type to hold a grudge about anything.

“The window’s a tighter fit now,” I confessed.

He nodded. “No duh. You’re pretty jacked.”

I pushed aside his clothes and sat in his desk chair. He sat down on his bed. Gary was wearing a t-shirt and boxers. I could see the long scar on his thigh.

“So, how’s it going?” I asked him.

He nodded. “It’s good. The usual stuff, y’know. Work, sleep, repeat.”

I chuckled. Even though it had been a couple of years since I’d really talked to Gary, he seemed totally down with it.

“You wanna smoke up or anything?” Gary asked, motioning towards his desk drawer.

I shook my head. “No, thanks.” Suddenly, I realized that throughout this entire crisis, I had never once craved alcohol or weed. Maybe I was finally learning to deal in other ways.

Gary nodded. He was easygoing. He always went along with whatever I wanted to do. We talked a little about a couple of buddies from high school. People always filled me in on the latest gossip when I got back to Nelson. But lately, I didn’t even know all the names anymore. New people were moving in and others were moving on.

After another long silence, Gary spoke up. “So, what happened? I heard you made the Vice, for real.”

“Yeah, I did. But this thing happened the other night—” Was Gary the right person to be telling this to? “I was in a car accident.”

His face froze. “Shit.”

“No, it’s not like that. I wasn’t drinking or anything. My truck got T-boned in an intersection. Not my fault.”

“So, why’d you get cut?”

“There’s this girl. She’s, well, she used to be my girlfriend—” I blew out a noisy breath. “Anyway, she got hurt in the accident and her dad’s a big deal in Vancouver. The coach found out and said I wasn’t a good model for the team. To be honest, he never really liked me.” I realized that Coach Panner was probably happy to have any excuse to cut me.

Gary was looking down at his hands and didn’t say anything. Unlike my parents, he didn’t question the rightness of my getting cut. Maybe he was used to life being unfair.

“Sorry, Gar. You’re probably the last person I should be dumping this shit on. But when the accident happened—it took me right back.”

He nodded. We were the only two people in the world who shared that memory. Being in that flipped car at night with not a soul around. But his memories were far worse than mine, because of the pain and the finality of what happened.

“I was hoping you were going to make it this time, Goldie.”

I knew that. That had been the huge fucking weight that was always on my shoulders every time I skated on the ice. When Gary got out of the hospital, I used to visit him. Mrs. Lysenko had recovered enough to forgive me, and before I left for camp, she told me, “Now you must make it for you and Gary both.”

He continued, “I feel kinda, I don’t know, guilty.”

I stared at him. “Are you kidding me? Why would you feel guilty?”

“Because what happened to me screwed up your head.”

“My head? What about your leg? We were both supposed to go—the dream, remember?”

Gary looked down at his hands again. They were rough and calloused and darkly tanned from being outside all day. There was a black rim of dirt under each fingernail. They looked like the hands of a much older man.

His voice was quiet. Almost like he was talking to himself. “I was never going to make it.”

“What are you talking about? You got drafted too.”

Gary stretched his neck and looked off in the distance. “I was picked in the last round. I didn’t even go to the draft because Lance Bertrand told me it might not happen. Fuck, I wouldn’t even have had him for an agent without your dad arranging it.

“You know, Goldie, my numbers were good because I played with you. You fed me the puck a hundred times a game.”

“No way. We were good together.”

“We were good because we had played together for so long. But you were legit.”

“My numbers in Kelowna tanked the year you were gone. I needed you too.”

Gary looked up at me, and his eyes looked a little watery. “You tanked because you were messed up. I know what happened when you broke Buchanan’s ankle.”

I shut my eyes. I hated thinking about that night. It was the first round of the playoffs. I had had a shit season, but my game seemed to be picking up a little. During game five, I had missed on a breakaway. This big stupid winger skated by me and said, “Too bad for Kelowna, the wrong fucking guy got crippled.” All I could see was red, and I went after him. He wouldn’t fight though, and he kept taunting me all game long. Finally I took my stick and two-handed him—right in that spot where there are no pads or protection. He went down like a tree. I got suspended for the rest of the playoffs.

“How did you know?”

“Alex Trunch told me. He played for Tri-Cities, and Buchanan was bragging on the bench that he had gotten to you.”

That was something else I felt terrible about. It wasn’t enough that I shattered Gar’s leg. I had deliberately injured another player. And then I had to sit and watch my team lose that round. Those days were like a blur now. I had so much rage and anger that I couldn’t control. My coaches always wanted me to be more emotional and angry on the ice—but not like that.

Gary scolded me. “You used to float above all that crap.”

“I know.”

He nodded, and we sat in silence a while. Maybe that was one reason I liked being with Josie, it reminded me of the old days with Gary. If it rained hard and we couldn’t play road hockey or soccer, we’d stay inside and listen to music. Sometimes we talked, but mostly we just sat around.

“It was an accident,” he said.

He sounded like Josie. But he was wrong. “No. I shouldn’t have been driving.”

Gary yanked at his hair. “Fuck that. You and I both know that we drove in way worse shape. It could have been me driving. I don’t blame you, man. I never did. I tried sometimes, because it would have been easier on me.”

“How?”

“I dunno. Sometimes I’d think, like what if? If I called my dad for a ride. If you wanted to stay with that chick, so I got a ride home with someone else. If I walked home.” He laughed, but it was a sad laugh. Then he concluded, “But none of that would have happened. It was us—doing what we always did. It’s a waste of time to think about what ifs.”

That was something Josie had said to me just before the accident:
You spend too much time in the speculative past.
It was funny that Gary and Josie were so different, yet they were both practical. I was the one with too much imagination and too many romantic illusions.

“Did you know you can get PTSD from a car accident?” Gary asked.

“Of course I know. I researched all this stuff while I was trying to get better.” In between escaping my anxieties by drinking and smoking up.

“I thought I was being a wuss. It’s not like we went to Afghanistan or anything. But it’s a real thing.”

“Yeah.” I realized that I never knew if Gary went for counselling afterwards. We had still been good friends, but we hadn’t talked about that night much. First it had been too raw, and then it had been too late. “I’m sorry I haven’t been around much.”

He shrugged. “No big deal. I get it.”

“It’s not that I didn’t want to see you.”

“Forget it. We’re good.”

That was what your real friends were like. No matter where I went in the world, I could come back here and some things would be the same.

“What’s she like?” Gary asked.

“Josie?”

He nodded.

“She’s amazing. She’s so different from other people. I have no clue what she’ll say next. And she’s brave and confident.” I didn’t say the best part though, the fact that she never put any demands on me. Well, she made sexual demands, but that was nothing to complain about.

“But what’s she look like?”

I grinned. “She’s hot. Beautiful and hot.”

“Do you have a photo of her?”

I frowned and pulled out my phone. Josie wasn’t exactly the selfie type. Then I found the photo that Margie had sent me. “Okay, this is her at work, she works in movies. She doesn’t always look like this, of course.”

Gar whistled. “Wow. She’s gorgeous. Not the kind of girl I would have thought you’d go for though.”

“She’s not like Sunny, if that’s what you mean.”

He stood up. “Look, is this Josie chick your new girlfriend or not?”

“It’s a mess right now. She’s complicated.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Josie doesn’t think I should let the team cut me. That this accident and our accident were two different things, and I should confront them.”

“They weren’t different things, Goldie. Neither one was your fault. Maybe you drank some, but you could drive okay. It wasn’t like we were weaving all over the road and hit a tree.”

I didn’t totally agree with what he was saying, but maybe it was his way of dealing. So he didn’t have to wonder about whether he made the wrong choice by getting into my car. There were many different realities. “If it’s not my fault, then they can’t cut me. An accident can happen to anyone. I never drink and drive anymore.”

Gary nodded. “So you’re going to go back and tell the coach that?”

“Yeah, sure. I’m going to claim the beautiful woman, get my spot back on the team, and then ride off into the fucking sunset.”

He smiled. “You better hurry, asshole. The season starts on Monday.”

“Fuck me. I drove eight straight hours, and now I have to drive back.” I’d crash at home and head back to Vancouver tomorrow.

“Next time, just call.”

I laughed, but then I realized Gary had been pacing. That slight hitch in his walk always bothered me before, but now it was only a part of what made him unique.

“What’s wrong?”

“Since you’ve got Josie now, I wanted to tell you—I asked Sunny out.”

“You did?”

“Yeah. I like her, well, everyone does. But I’ve liked her for a long time. Not while you guys were going out, but we’ve hung out and stuff. Then at a party two weeks ago, we kinda hooked up.”

“Wow.” It was hard to imagine the two of them together.

“I wanted to tell you in person.”

“Go for it. Sunny’s great.”

“And so beautiful,” Gary added.

They would be a good couple. Gary worked hard, but he didn’t have a ton of imagination. Sunny had enough drive and ambition for both of them. And yeah, she was beautiful—in that conventional way. Not like Josie, of course. Nobody was like Josie.

I started nodding. “I can see it, man. I can see it.”