Page 21 of Canadian Boyfriend

Rory

P.S. Thank you for the charm bracelet! I should have opened with that! It’s a little lightness in all this junk—I look down at it and it gives me a little lift. Emma asked me, in a snotty way, about it, implying that a Snoopy charm was immature. How much did I love telling her it symbolized my first kiss with my Canadian Boyfriend at the Camp Snoopy amusement park at the Mall of America?!

5—FAILED BALLERINA

MIKE

I’d been thinking about the concept of panic attacks since Aurora and I spoke about them. I had my share of demons, but I’d never had a panic attack. But a couple weeks later, I came as close as I ever have on the flight to San Jose for our first away game. I was sitting by Ivan, as per usual, and Badger was acting like an idiot in the row ahead of us, telling off-color jokes to his seatmate, also as per usual.

Everything was the same, yet nothing was the same.

Sarah was dead, her parents were on my ass, and I’d been “invited” to a meeting next week with Olivia’s teacher to discuss “behavioral barriers to her academic progress.”

Also, I really missed my mom.

Sometimes, when I was teetering at the edge of the abyss, I did this thing where I concentrated on a bad feeling in order to distract myself from another, worse feeling. Missing my mom was an entirely different thing from missing Sarah. This trick was my own little invention. I hadn’t told Dr. Mursal about it. I didn’t want her to pronounce it junk science and make me stop.

My mom ran a home day care, had since I was a kid. Shewas sixty-one and hadn’t planned on retiring anytime soon. She and my dad had stubbornly refused my attempts to help them out, beyond the Tim Hortons franchise my brother and I bought that my dad ran. That had been a huge, uncharacteristic coup, and we’d only succeeded because we’d framed it as an investment. But when Sarah died, Mom spent two weeks closing down her day care, flew to Minnesota, and settled in to stay with Liv and me. She cooked. She helped me get the homeschooling stuff organized. She made me lift in the garage and go running with Ivan, insisting that I couldn’t get so out of shape that I had trouble going back to hockey in the fall—like Dr. Mursal, she seemed to think quitting was out of the question.

In short, she, with her signature mixture of tenderness and tough love, was an enormous help. Until, according to her, she wasn’t. “I’m not helping anymore; I’ve become a crutch.” She gave me two weeks’ notice as if quitting a job, told me it was time for me to start getting ready for school and hockey and for her to reopen her day care for the coming school year.

She was right. I barely knew how to cook. I didn’t know there was a dress code at Miss Miller’s—and once I got that figured out, it turned out the outfits weren’t the same for tap and ballet.

But damn, I missed Mom. And not only, or even primarily, because she was so helpful. I, a grown-ass thirty-four-year-old man, missed my mom so much it sometimes became a physical ache.

But here’s the key: being in that place, aching there, was a lot less bad than what happened when I swapped out “missing Mom” for “missing Sarah.” There were still moments, after all these months, when the combined forces of loss and betrayalknocked the wind out of me, emptied my body out, made me aware of those little holes inside me that needed filling with… something. Air, I supposed, to begin with, so I concentrated on taking deep breaths.

I felt a hand grab mine.

Ivan. There he was, same as ever, with his shaggy eyebrows and almost-black eyes. I looked at his hand on mine—he had probably noticed I was freaking out—and he let go. We didn’t do stuff like this. I wasn’t on social media; I kept my shit locked down. But when Ivan first came to Minnesota, there had been articles about our so-called bromance. That’s what the public called it when men on the same sports team were friends and expressed affection or admiration for each other. I was fine with the label. The funny part, though, was that Ivan and I had never had a particularly deep relationship. We’d just clicked, from the moment the surly Russian and I had been assigned to room together on our first away game when we were playing in Chicago. After he came to the Lumberjacks and I lured him to my corner of the Twin Cities, we went running together almost every morning we were home. I taught him to fish, and more days than not in the offseason, we’d be out on the lake.

Ivan and I were a quantity-time duo rather than a quality-time duo, is the point. We hadn’t really talked about Sarah’s death and its fallout. Hell, Lauren knew more, directly from my mouth, about how I felt than Ivan did.Shewas the one who had rushed up and wrapped me in her arms when the news of the accident had reached us at that hotel in Montreal.

But Ivan was a smart guy. He was observant. That’s why he was such a good defenseman—he could read plays and justknowwhere a puck was going. His grabbing my hand as we sat on the tarmac waiting to push back from the gate was a lifeline.It made me think of Aurora and her tapping therapy, a physical sensation being used to interrupt a panic spiral. It startled me enough to turn my attention away from the abyss.

Then good old Badger finished the job.

When Badger joined the team, he’d explained that his nickname referenced his time at the University of Wisconsin, but I quickly discovered it was an apt moniker for the dude in other ways, namely that he did not hesitate to badger the shit out of everyone both on and off the ice. He was always bugging you to switch seats, or rooms, or dinners with him. “Order envy,” he’d declare, and he’d try to make me take his risotto inflected with truffle whatever in exchange for my steak salad.

“Hey, Martin.” He popped up over the back of the seat in front of me. I wondered if he’d seen the hand-holding thing. That wasn’t the kind of thing Badger would let slide.

But I went with it. Badger was a distraction that would pull me even further back from the edge. “Yeah, what?”

“Now that you’re free of the old ball and chain, you gotta come out with us. Get yourself some puck bunny action.”

I unbuckled my seat belt and retracted my arm in a flash, fully intending to punch him, but Ivan, with his defensive Spidey-sense, intercepted me. Ivan and I were never paired these days, but it was almost like wewereon the ice together, our bodies working together for the desired outcome. “Yeah, OK, OK,” I said once I realized what an idiot I was being.

“Sorry, man,” Badger muttered. “That was, uh, not cool of me.” The thing was, hewassorry. He was young and stupid, but his heart was in the right place. Badger and the rest of the team never made the fake-sorry face, which was something I appreciated the hell out of. That was a big part of why I was back.

Badger was still looking at me, stricken. There was no precedentfor me reacting like this. I hated that people felt like they had to walk on eggshells around me, but I also wasn’t sure what choice they had, given that I was, objectively, highly breakable.

“I’msorry,” I said to Badger as I buckled myself back in. “That was way out of line.”

Badger looked like he was going to say something more, but my phone dinged with a text from Aurora that I fumbled to open. I could already tell I was going to treat texts from Aurora—and Lauren—like personal summons letters from the league commissioner.

“We good?” Badger asked.

“Yeah.” I waved him off.

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