Comeback (2 page)

I had been walking along the path for a couple of minutes when I saw the perfect spot below. Most of the gardens here had a theme, I’d noticed. This one wasn’t filled with plant life, though. It was a big, rectangular area, with white-gray rocks covering the surface and a few larger, moss-covered boulders placed strategically throughout. A stone wall surrounded it, with a few benches along one side. Someone had traced lines through the rocks, it seemed, making patterns within the uniformity.

There wasn’t a doubt in my mind; this was where I needed to be.

I bounded down the stairs built into the landscape, moving away from the hubbub of voices filling the rest of the gardens and into the privacy of this rock garden. The bench was slightly damp from the morning rain, but I didn’t mind it. I took a seat and stared, studying everything about the view before me.

Trees lined the other side of the stone wall. There was another cherry blossom, its leaves as orange as the others had been, but it was solitary. Like me. A single tree wasn’t enough to overwhelm me with the same morbid thoughts as earlier. It was just enough to help ease me into meditation.

Before long, I’d forgotten why I was here and how many other people were in the gardens today. No one had come down to pull me from my pensive tranquility, so I had been able to shut everything out and just be.

God, grant me the serenity…
Somehow, I fell into reciting the Serenity Prayer silently in my mind. I’d never been a religious person. I believed there was something bigger than me out there, but I didn’t know who or what that “something” was, and I wasn’t inclined to figure it out. Still, saying the prayer had refocused my mind enough to get me through some rough times, particularly in the months after Dad’s death.

I’d learned to use the prayer during one of my numerous visits to rehab. I repeated it now as a reminder that I was not in control of everything, and that it was all right to let go. In fact, recent years had taught me that most of the time it was better that I wasn’t the one in control. Things seemed to fall apart when I was in charge.

A cool breeze blew over me, not enough to make me cold despite the fact that a shiver raced up my spine. I closed my eyes, breathing in the fresh, slightly damp scent on the air, and started the Serenity Prayer again.

“Oh! I’m so sorry.”

The interruption startled me, and I jumped. It was a female voice. I popped my eyes open and swiveled my head toward the sound coming from slightly behind me.

Jessica Lynch stood just at the base of the stone steps, alternating between staring at me and turning her gaze up to where she’d just come from. She tucked a strand of her brown hair behind her ear and shoved her hands in the pockets of her jacket. “I didn’t realize anyone was down here until I heard your voice,” she said. “I don’t meant to interrupt—”

“You’re not interrupting anything,” I assured her. I might not want to be surrounded by bodies on every side, but having a single companion wouldn’t be the end of the world. Besides, I had always liked Jessica in the years that I’d known her.

She was the Portland director of the Light the Lamp Foundation, a charity started by Liam Kallen before he’d become one of my teammates a few years ago. It was an organization that I’d spent a lot of time working with in recent years, primarily because I had a keen interest in their mission. Due to my involvement, I had seen Jessica fairly regularly over the years.

Kally was retired now, but he still spent half the year with his wife, Noelle, here in Portland working in the Storm’s front office. The rest of the year, they lived in Sweden. He did some scouting for the team in Europe while he was there. Kally put a lot of his energy into Light the Lamp, though. When a drunk driver had killed his first wife, he’d decided it was best to channel his grief so something good could come out of the bad. Light the Lamp’s mission was to help addicts make something positive from their lives.

That was something I strove to do every day in my own life. Some days were harder than others, but I couldn’t worry about tomorrow until I’d dealt with today. I was trying to put that into my goaltending, too, taking on a more Zen approach to the game than I had before.

I smiled and scooted over on the bench, patting my hand beside me in invitation. “Really,” I said. “I don’t mind.”

She hesitated for a moment, but then she came over and sat next to me. “Trying to eke out a bit of quiet?”

“Something like that.”

She nodded, not looking at me. Her gaze was focused on the rocks, much as mine had been before she’d arrived. “I could use a little quiet, too,” she said. “The season ticket holder event later is bound to be insane.” A small smile curled her lips, and she pressed her palms flat on the bench on either side of her, curving her fingers down around the edge of it.

“I thought you lived for those moments, getting them to fork over money for your cause,” I teased.

“Hardly. It’s just a necessary part of the business.”

The business being helping people like me. I knew that, and I shouldn’t have made light of it. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I shouldn’t joke about what you do.”

“You don’t need to apologize, Nicky.”

But I did need to. Maybe not for her sake, but for my own. I went back to staring at the lines drawn in the rocks, focusing on the patterns and details. It was a combination of straight lines and perfect circles, hard edges and rounded curves. Juxtaposition in everything. Yin and yang, or something like that.

Jessica fell silent, too. That was one of many things I appreciated about her. It couldn’t be easy, working with addicts as much as she did. Being an addict myself, I understood all too well how fucked up we could be, how easily we could hurt the people in our lives, especially the ones who were trying to help us, whether we intended to or not. But somehow she didn’t seem to let it get to her. She understood the needs we had—for contemplation, for self-awareness, for so many things that the general population often took for granted.

“Did you have a good summer?” she asked after a few minutes.

There wasn’t really any need for her to ask. I’d stayed here, in Portland, instead of going home to Sweden. My support group was here, and the rehab facility that had finally helped me to get clean and stay clean was here, too. I’d stuck around and had been right by her side for a few of the community service events the foundation had hosted. She knew exactly what my summer had been like.

Asking questions she knew the answers to meant one thing: no matter how much time we might have spent around each other, she saw me as one of the addicts she helped every day and nothing more. This was all business.

“Pretty good,” I said evenly, taking her cue. “And yours?”

“Busy. Really busy.” She shifted her feet beneath her. “You’re still clean? No issues heading into the new season?”

“One year, four months, and seventeen days.” And counting. I’d spent all last season playing for the Storm’s minor-league affiliate, the Seattle Storm, because of how badly I’d screwed things up in the playoffs the previous season, for myself and for my teammates. I had been so dependent on sleeping pills and pain pills and alcohol it was a wonder that I’d made it out of bed to go in the net, but I had played like shit and let everyone down. I hadn’t been able to focus on the puck or the play around me. I kept letting in goals that I would have been able to stop when I was twelve.

I had been an absolute wreck. When our season had come to an end, the coach and the general manager had pulled me aside.

I can’t put you in the net next year, Nicky
, the head coach, Mattias Bergstrom, had told me.
I can’t trust you to be what the team needs you to be. Too many times, you’ve promised you had your shit together, and too many times you’ve failed to keep it together.

Then it had been Jim Sutter’s turn. He was the GM.
You’ve got two choices. You can go back to rehab this summer and then play next season in the AHL to prove that you’re willing to make the changes you need to make in your life, or we will have to begin the proceedings to void your contract on the basis that you aren’t fulfilling your obligations. It’s your call.

I’d already been to rehab three times at that point, typically going to a center in Stockholm so I would be close to my family in case my father’s health deteriorated rapidly. Not once in any of those rehab stints had I talked about Dad. Not once had I admitted I was an addict, not to the counselors or to the people involved with the Storm. I’d skirted around all of it, avoiding telling anyone that my father had ALS and never saying anything more than,
It’s tough
, when one of the guys on the team asked me how things were going. So after we’d fallen out of the playoffs, I’d told Jim that I’d think it over. Then I’d headed back to Sweden and watched my father die in one of the most horrifying ways imaginable.

It had taken losing my spot on the team and then losing my father in the span of less than a month to convince me I had to change, to show me that maybe I was less in control of things than I told myself I was.

After my sister, Emma, and I had buried my father, I had returned to Portland and asked Jim for help. He’d gotten me set up with the Players’ Association and their substance abuse program, and I’d gone into rehab to set about the tedious and seemingly impossible task of putting my life back on the right course.

I hadn’t been back to Sweden since. Hadn’t seen my sister and her kids in all that time. I emailed Emma and talked on the phone with the munchkins as often as we could manage, but they all understood I had to turn things around. They knew I had to make myself into the man I should have been all along. Especially now that we didn’t have Dad to fill that role.

And now was my opportunity to win my job back. It wasn’t going to be easy. I had no delusions about that. Jim told me he believed in me, that he was sure I was ready. The coaches and my teammates were another story, though. And then there were the fans. Not to mention the media and their never-ending questions:
What was going on? Why were you demoted to Seattle? Aren’t you washed-up? Maybe you should think about retirement, huh?

After I got through all the questions and expectations, I was still going to have a fight on my hands to try to win my starting spot back from Hunter Fielding. Of course, I shouldn’t even be able to fight. Not now. I was supposed to spend this season in Seattle again because the people who could make these decisions still didn’t believe that I had my shit together.

I’d lost the coaches’ trust. I’d lost my teammates’ trust. I’d lost the fans’ trust.

But this was my opportunity to do something about it. Jim had come to me when Hunter’s backup from last season, Sean “Bobby” Roberts, had suffered a torn ligament in the last game of the preseason. He’d told me it could be my comeback. God only knew why he still believed in me, especially when no one else did. I wasn’t sure I believed in myself much, these days, but I was trying to earn back what trust I could.

Hunter wasn’t going to just step aside and give me the net, though. Not a chance in hell that would happen. This season was going to be all I could handle and then some. But I was determined. I was clean. I was focused. I was as ready as I could be. And Jessica’s question, her curiosity about my sobriety, was to be expected, I supposed. She was far from the last person I would have to convince.

She reached over and put one hand on top of mine, patting it like she would a child’s. “Good to hear, Nicky. I’m proud of you.”

Proud of me.
Her response seemed rote, the sort she would give any of the dozens of addicts who came in and out of her office every day. It was the type of reaction that made me believe I might never prove to her that I could keep it up, that she might never think my issues were in the past.

But then again, there was no cure for addiction. Once an addict, always an addict. There would always be the lure, always the desire to reach for a bottle and let its contents ease the ache while creating new and more potent pains in its place.

Maybe she was right to doubt me.

IN MY EXPERIENCE
, there are few things in life more agonizing than loving an addict. Pills, alcohol, hard drugs—it doesn’t really matter what the specific addiction is because it always wins in the end.

If there was anyone in the world who understood that, it was me. My dad had been an alcoholic since before I was born. My brother got into drugs in middle school. I lost a best friend and a husband to their addictions—my best friend died as a direct result of hers, and my husband had become a different person when he started using, wanting nothing to do with me anymore because I encouraged him to get help. And so what had I chosen as my profession? I worked for a charity that put me in close contact with countless addicts daily.

I might not be an addict myself, but I intimately knew the beast better known as Addiction on an entirely too personal level.

Because of the pain involved in loving addicts, I’d tried to put some distance between me and the men and women I worked with through Light the Lamp. It wasn’t always easy, particularly when it came to men like Nicklas Ericsson. He was a player for the Storm, and since Liam had started the foundation, the players had all been involved in various fundraisers over the years. Nicky hadn’t taken part in as many last year as before because he’d been in Seattle instead of Portland, but he’d still made an effort to show up to help when he could. But it went further than that with Nicky. He didn’t just try to raise money and awareness for Light the Lamp—he was dealing with his own addictions and was involved in nearly everything we did, attempting to turn his own life around through the programs we offered.