Comeback (13 page)

“Why the hell did you get back up on it, then?” Archie demanded. Any normal guy would have just stayed down and hoped the ref would blow the play dead.

Soupy shrugged. “Heard it snap, but they don’t usually stop play for something like this. Figured I could block a shot if I got up, at least.”

“If you could hobble over there in time,” Babs said, laughing. “Next time try not blocking it straight past Nicky, okay? Rach is going to think you did this on purpose to get out of diaper duty or something. You know she will.”

That brought a wry smile out of Soupy. “A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do. Dirty diapers are some nasty business.”

By then, the officials were skating over to us to hurry us along, whatever was decided. Burnzie and I helped skate Soupy over to the tunnel, where the Canadiens’ doctor was waiting to help Archie evaluate him. We transferred him over to them.

“Sorry, Nicky,” he said over his shoulder as they pretty much carried him toward the locker room.

“Crazy bastard,” Burnzie muttered. “Never can say enough. He’d probably try to come back out here in a cast and skate on one leg if they’d let him.”

“Good thing they won’t, then,” I said. Especially since now we were down by one with only a few minutes left to tie the game.

Burnzie chuckled and skated for the bench. We had a game to finish.

I settled back into my crease, washed everything that had just happened from my mind, and focused on the ice in front of me. That goal wasn’t my fault. It didn’t matter. The only thing that mattered was the next shot coming my way. One moment at a time. I could do this.

SOUPY HAD HIS
immobilized left leg up, stretched out over the bench in front of my stall, when I got back to the locker room after my shower. The boys had tied the game late in the third when Bergy had pulled me for an extra attacker, and we’d won the game in overtime when Burnzie snuck in on Carey Price’s back door and beat him glove side, so the guys were all feeling pretty carefree, apart from being worried about Soupy’s leg.

His arm was draped around a pair of crutches. He had my cell in his hand and a furrow in his brow, and I had sincere doubts that his concerned expression had anything to do with his leg.

“What?” I demanded.

“Your phone kept ringing in your stall. I thought it might be Emm—”

I cut him off. “You answered it? And?” I snatched the phone away from him. Four missed calls before the one Soupy had answered.

“It was Jessica Lynch. She said— Hell. It’s bad. Just call her.”

All those missed calls had been from Jessica in short succession. I had already punched her speed dial number in before he finished talking.

“Nicky?”

“Tell me.” My voice shook.

“Emma’s not… God. I don’t even know how to tell you.”

All the blood drained out of my body. I felt lightheaded. Tried to sit on the bench but missed and landed on the floor. “She didn’t already take the pills?”

“Not yet. It’s time, though. You need to come home. She needs you now.”

Emma needed me. The kids needed me. I needed— Hell, I didn’t know what I needed other than for all of this to be a bad dream. But it wasn’t. It was as real as it could be.

It was time. Which meant I was out of time.

“Nicky?” Jessica said on the other end of the line. “Are you all right?”

“Fine.”
Not even close to fine
. “I’ll— I’ll call you once I’ve…once I know—”

“It’s all right. It’s going to be all right.”

Nothing was going to be all right.

“I’m with them now,” Jessica said. Her voice was strong. She sounded so calm and together, the complete opposite of what I felt at the moment. “I’ll stay with them. With you. It’s going to be all right,” she said again.

EVERYTHING AFTER THAT
was a whirlwind. I had vague recollections of Bergy and Jim sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of me in the locker room. The boys floated in and out of my mind—Zee putting his arm around my shoulders and saying something, Babs and 501 helping me to my feet, Hunter packing up my gear for me, Jonny handing me my clothes a piece at a time since I was too dazed to figure out how to get dressed on my own—but nothing really sunk in. I was too far gone. Lost in the dark, painful mess of my mind. Desperate to escape.

There was no escape, though.

Somehow I ended up on a plane heading back to Portland along with Soupy and Jim, with no true understanding of how I’d gotten there. They didn’t try to make me talk. At least I didn’t think they did. I was too caught up in my thoughts to know what they were really saying or doing. I doubted I would have been able to carry on a conversation if I’d wanted to. Even the simple task of telling the flight attendant that no, I didn’t need anything, was more than I could handle. I’d barely gotten, “No, thanks,” out before I was choking on my tongue and dissolving in tears.

She walked away and came back a minute later with a packet of tissues. The tissues didn’t exactly prove to be helpful because I couldn’t seem to make the tears stop. Not until long past the point where my eyes were scratchy and my throat was raw and I didn’t have any more tears left inside me, at least.

I had no idea what time it was when we landed. I don’t know how Jim got me into his car. Lord knew I was no help, and with Soupy on crutches, he couldn’t have been much help, either. I didn’t recall giving Jim Emma’s address, but somehow he parked in front of her apartment building and walked with me to the door.

Henrik opened it and moved aside to let me in. Thank God my feet knew the way because there was nothing left within me to function. The door to Emma’s room was open. All three kids were in the bed with her. Holding her. Even asleep, they were holding on to her so fiercely, almost as though keeping a grip on her would make it possible to keep her in this world.

Apparently I did still have tears left in me. They’d just been waiting for this moment to fall.

Jessica was sitting in the chair by the window. She got up when I came in, crossing over to me. She didn’t say a word; there were no words for a time like this. Instead, she pulled me into her arms as she’d done once before, and she let me cry on her shoulder until I was too mentally and physically exhausted to cry anymore. I held her tight to my chest. Too tight. Belatedly, I loosened my grip, but I might have already left bruises on her arms.

She didn’t pull away as if I’d hurt her, though. Instead, she stretched up on her tiptoes and placed a soft kiss on my cheek, so gentle it might not have actually happened if not for the tingling of my skin where her lips had touched me. Then she pulled my coat from my shoulders, tugged the shoes from my feet, and nudged me down onto the bed.

“Try to rest, Nicky,” she said, settling the blankets over me and tucking me in as though I were one of the kids.

“Stay,” I croaked out, reaching for her hand. The ground was shifting beneath me, and I was sinking like a rock. I needed something to hold on to, someone who could help me keep us all from being swallowed up in quicksand. There wasn’t room for her on the bed, but I wanted to make room. I needed her with me for this.

“I’ll be in the other room,” she said quietly. “Your family needs you now.”

We needed her, too, though.

I didn’t hear her slip out of the bedroom, but a few minutes later, I heard her voice, light and warm, joining the conversation with Jim and Henrik. And then there was nothing.

EMMA HAD ARRANGED
for everything so that Nicky wouldn’t have to. She’d worked out all the details with a funeral home in advance, her will had been laid out in perfect order, and she’d had a lawyer draw up every sort of document Nicky might need for gaining custody of the kids. She’d brought over all their medical records, school files, everything to do with each of them, right down to the artwork they’d made for her to display on the fridge.

The only things left for him to do were hold her hand while she died and then hold her kids while they grieved.

I’d come over to her apartment as soon as I’d gotten the call from Henrik during the game. The urgent tone of his voice had only hastened me along. I’d seen Emma earlier in the day, too; I had seen her rapid decline for myself. He’d told me he still had the prescription shut away in a cabinet, so she hadn’t taken it yet, but he didn’t think she would make it until Nicky was due to return from the team’s road trip since there was almost a full week left.

When I’d arrived, all three kids had been in the bed with her, holding her and crying so much that it had been almost impossible for Emma and I to have a conversation. She kept speaking to the children in Swedish, comforting them as best she could. I didn’t understand a word of it and thought I should leave, that it should be a private time with them.

It was an occasion that Nicky should be there for, not me. I couldn’t even speak their native language.

She’d insisted she didn’t want to bring Nicky home, though, that he needed to stay with the team. She’d begged me to stay and tried to convince me she could hold out, but she hadn’t been able to bear having Henrik help her out of the bed the whole day. Stubbornness was a trait I could admire, but all of us who had a bit of a backbone had to recognize when we were doing ourselves and the people we loved more harm than good. Eventually, I’d ignored her protests and made the decision to call Nicky against her wishes.

It seemed that had been what Emma needed from me all along. She needed someone else to ease the way for her to make the decision. Taking your own life, even in a situation such as this, couldn’t be an easy choice to make. It wasn’t something to be taken lightly. I admired her desire to spend as much time with her children as she could. I admired her decision to choose to die with dignity so her children would not have to watch her suffer more than was necessary even more.

She hadn’t been angry with me after I’d called. It was more a sense of resignation at first, and then relief. Sitting up in her bed as much as she could, she’d typed into her laptop for hours, talking with me even long after her kids had finally fallen asleep around her. That was when I had finally given her an answer to the favor she’d asked of me weeks ago.

“Yes,” I’d said. “I’ll help him.”

I had essentially said the same thing to him on the phone, although I wasn’t certain he understood what I’d meant when I’d told him I would stay with him. I doubted anything was really getting through, sinking in. But Emma understood, and I understood.

She’d chosen me to replace her as a mother figure for her children, and I had accepted that monumental task, along with everything else that would come along with it. I wasn’t sure I understood all it would entail, but understanding it wasn’t important at the moment. All that mattered was that I had agreed to step into her shoes.

Now I had to figure out how to do that. Not an easy thing, considering I still didn’t feel as though I
belonged
with them. I really liked the kids, and I was coming to care for Nicky more than I was comfortable with, but I still felt like a foreigner among them.

That night, I’d slept on the couch. Jim had stayed, too, eventually falling asleep on the recliner. We didn’t want Nicky to be alone…after.

At the moment, Henrik was up and tooling around in the kitchen, making coffee and putting together breakfast for the kids. It was a Thursday in mid-December. On a normal day, they would be on their way to school by now, I would have already been at the office for an hour or more, and Jim would still be with his team on the road. But today was not going to be a normal day.

I stretched my arms overhead, debating my next step. I’d promised Emma I would be here for Nicky and the children, but I didn’t want to intrude. Instead, I made my way into the kitchen and wordlessly helped Henrik with the food preparation. Jim joined us after a bit. The three of us made an odd team, particularly since none of us seemed inclined to break the hush that had fallen over the apartment by speaking.

A little bit later, Elin came out with her two brothers in tow, pulling one of them along with each hand. They all still had sleep in their eyes, not to mention red streaks and bags beneath them were dark as bruises.

“Mama asked for a few minutes with Uncle Nicky,” she explained. “She said we should eat breakfast.”

I wanted to wrap them all up in my arms and hold them until all their hurts were gone, but I didn’t know how they would react to that. Instead, I ushered them to the table and set food in front of them—more food than they could possibly ever eat, but that was the only way any of us knew to comfort them at the moment.

They mainly just picked at their food. I couldn’t blame them. I was doing the same, nibbling on a bite of toast and chewing a strip of bacon without really tasting it.

It felt as if a long time passed before Nicky finally came out. He looked bleary-eyed and so pained that simply touching him with the tip of my finger might cause him to shatter, but he seemed resigned.

“It’s time?” Jim asked quietly.

Nicky nodded, dragging a hand through his hair and then down his face. “She wants… She wants to go to the beach.”