Comeback (31 page)

The Storm had a game that night, and Rachel had invited us over to watch it at her house. I supposed that would have to be good enough in terms of finding something for the kids to do with themselves, at least for now.

In the middle of the afternoon, while she was helping me stuff envelopes, Elin got a call on her cell from a number she didn’t recognize. It turned out to be
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tienne, who had gotten the number from Nicky, using his father as a go-between. She turned bright red and dashed off to her bedroom with the phone pressed to her ear, slamming the door behind her. I chuckled to myself and kept working.

The game was early that night since they were playing in St. Louis. I threw my laptop in a bag and took it with me when we left for Rachel’s house, figuring I could get some work done while we watched. She’d told me that she had to pick her kids up from the sitter on her way home from work, and she was just pulling in when we arrived. Tuck grabbed the boys and dragged them in front of the TV, Maddie and Elin scurried off to whisper to each other about
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tienne, and I helped Rachel unload the twins and all their baby gear.

“Brenden spent the day doing media spots,” she said when we got through the front door and put the girls down on the floor to explore. Pumpkin, Rachel’s cat, took off down the hall as soon as the girls started crawling around, probably to find someplace safe to hide from probing one-year-old hands.

Rachel brushed her hair back from her face, surveying the situation. “Jim thought it would be a good way to keep him at least somewhat busy while he’s recovering and the guys are gone. Brenden tends to drive me batty when he can’t do anything, and Jim knows it.” She laughed. “He needs me on my game, so he’s trying to come up with six-to-eight weeks’ worth of tasks to occupy my husband. No clue when he’s coming home. Y’all okay with pizza tonight? I can’t bear the thought of cooking.”

“I’m completely on board.” One full day of watching those kids and trying to get my work done at the same time, with no one to give me a break and help out, had worn me out in a way I had never expected. All I wanted to do was crawl into bed, but there were still hours to go before I could do that.

Rachel pulled out her phone and placed an order, and I headed into the living room with my laptop so I could oversee the kids and at least hear what was going on in the game.

Darryl Carlson’s voice came on the TV, as grating as ever, and I opened my email program to catch up on everything that had come in over the last week or so.

“So it’s going to be Nicklas Ericsson in goal again tonight,” Darryl said, “with Coach Bergstrom deciding to go with the hot glove. Hunter Fielding will be warming the bench.”

My head popped up at that. Sure enough, there was Nicky in the goaltender’s crease, scuffing the ice with his skates as he did at the beginning of every period.

“Uncle Nicky’s playing tonight?” Nils squealed, spinning his head around to look at me. “Why didn’t you tell us?”

“I would have told you if I’d known,” I said, closing my laptop without having even looked at my email beyond glancing at the massive number of unread messages waiting for my attention: 426 of them to be exact. But they were just going to have to keep waiting. I wouldn’t be able to focus on work if Nicky was in the net.

Rachel sat next to me once she’d finished placing the order.

“Did you know?” I asked her.

“Nope. That’s Bergy’s decision. I don’t even know if Jim knew, but whether he did or not, it isn’t something that trickles down to me.” She toed off her shoes and put her feet up beneath her. “I have to wonder how well that’s sitting with Hunter,” she murmured.

I didn’t imagine he liked it much, but I was far more concerned with Nicky.

The two teams traded chances early in the game, with the Blues putting a ton of pressure on Nicky at every opportunity they got. It was still scoreless when the doorbell rang, signaling our pizza had arrived.

Rachel got up to collect the food and pay the driver. She set the boxes down on the coffee table, not even attempting to get the kids to sit in the dining room while the game was on. “Plates and napkins!” she demanded as Tuck grabbed two huge slices, promptly dropping one of them face-down on the floor. He picked it up, tossed it on a plate, and took it to sit cross-legged in front of the TV.

Nils and Hugo were a little more careful, but that wasn’t saying a whole lot. Kids were messy. I’d always known that, of course, but there’s a big difference between knowing something and actually experiencing it firsthand. Living with them had been an eye-opening experience for me.

As if to prove the point about kids being messy, Sydney—or maybe it was Peyton—pulled herself up to the couch between us and rubbed her hands on my pants. I wasn’t sure what she smeared on me, but it was sticky.

Rachel grabbed for a packet of wipes on the table next to her, pulled one out, and tossed me the rest. “Sorry,” she said, taking her daughter’s hands and cleaning them. “They’re constantly into stuff at this age. I thought it was bad with one, but having two going through this stage at the same time? Eesh.”

“It’s all right. Kids will be kids,” I said, rubbing the wipe over my pants. Whatever that little girl had rubbed on me was even sticker than I’d realized. It pulled bits of the white wipe off and they stuck to my pants. I set the wipe aside, figuring it would be better to just let whatever it was dry and soak the pants when we got home.

“What are you planning to do with these guys on New Year’s Eve?” Rachel asked between bites during a commercial break, waving her hand to indicate the entire living room full of kids.

I honestly didn’t know what I was going to do. I had to oversee the big party and all my celebrity drivers, but even though there wouldn’t be any drinking, it wasn’t really something I could take the kids to.

“Try to find a sitter?” I said. “Not that I know how to do that. But I don’t really know what else I can do.”

“Bring them over here before you go. They can watch the game and play ‘Jump on Mr. Soupy’ all night. We’ll have a slumber party. You can come get them in the morning.”

Her suggestion was definitely tempting, but that would leave her and Brenden with seven kids—two of them still in diapers. Not only that, but Brenden was on crutches and could only help out so much. “I don’t know if that’s really fair to you.”

“Brie’s already agreed to come over and help out,” she said, winking. “She’s trying to get a sense of what being a mom is like before she and Keith start a family. I say we should give her a really good trial run.”

I snorted in laughter. “Most of us don’t get one.”

The game started up again, and straight off the face-off, Nicky had to make three point-blank saves in a row. Once the Storm players got control of the puck and moved it out to the neutral zone, I released the breath I’d been holding.

“No,” Rachel said, eyeing me astutely. “We don’t.”

BY THE THIRD
day of Nicky’s road trip, I was slowly going insane. Mainly because the kids were going insane from being cooped up in the house without enough to keep them occupied.

Nils was bouncing around and trying to get his older siblings to roughhouse with him, even though they didn’t want to. When they didn’t give in, he would either attempt to force the issue—ending with either Hugo or Elin coming to me to make him stop—or he would whine that no one would play with him.

Hugo was getting cranky about everything.
When is Uncle Nicky coming home? I don’t want to eat that. I miss Mama. Make Elin do it. Nils took my controller.
He was an unending stream of complaints.

Elin was spending increasingly more time holed up in her bedroom, and I couldn’t decide whether I should allow it to continue or not. She was essentially a teenager, and that was a fairly common teenaged behavior. Most likely, she was spending the entire time texting or talking with some combination of Maddie and
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tienne, and it wasn’t that she was isolating because of grief. Regardless, I thought it must be better for her to spend more time out in the open with her brothers, wouldn’t it?

With all of that, I was beginning to resign myself to the fact that I was going to have to give up on the idea of working until Nicky came home or the kids went back to school, if for no other reason than I needed to get these kids out of the house for a bit.

I’d gotten my inbox down to about 120 emails—a miracle, considering how frequently I was being interrupted—when my phone rang. Desperate for any sort of distraction from the madhouse surrounding me, I answered it without bothering to see who it was.

“Jessica? It’s Julianne d’Aragon.”

I shut down my laptop, racking my brain as to why she would be calling me. Probably to complain that
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tienne was holed up in his bedroom talking to Elin. That would be just my luck. A few days into allowing Elin to have a boyfriend and I was already getting complaints from the boy’s mother.

I pressed my fingers to my temples and gritted my teeth, determined to figure out a way to get through this. “Hi, Julianne. How are you?”

“To be honest, I’m going a little stir-crazy with the kids out of school for the break. They’re all driving me berserk, but
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tienne is the worst of them all. He won’t stop begging me to let him get together with Elin. I can’t listen to another minute of it without potentially strangling a pillow so I won’t strangle one of them instead, so I thought I’d call you to see what we could do about it.”

“Oh.” Well, that was a lot better than everything I’d assumed. “These kids are driving me a little crazy, too. I can’t get any work done. I figure I’d better get them out of the house before one of them physically hurts another. What did you have in mind?” I slid the laptop across the empty table. I wasn’t going to work anymore today, anyway.

“What about the Saturday Market?” she suggested. “It’s nice enough out today, and there’s something fun for kids of all ages. I can let Patrice and Adrienne go off to do their own things, for the most part. That would leave one of us to keep an eye on the younger boys.”

“And the other to keep an eye on the lovebirds,” I finished for her. “Sounds good to me.” If nothing else, there was a lot of open air for the boys to run around. It might not wear Nils out like JJ Jump had but anything was better than nothing.

“We can maybe find somewhere to take them for dinner after,” Julianne said. “Somewhere that’s got the game playing.”

“I can have these guys ready to leave in half an hour.” Actually, once I told them we were going to go out, I bet they would be ready in half a minute.

“We’ll meet you there.”

“Don’t let me forget to tell you that you’re a lifesaver,” I said before we hung up. Not just her, either. Julianne. Rachel. All the players’ wives were making it so much easier on me than I’d expected. I didn’t know how I would have gotten through this without them.

We disconnected the call, and I walked into the living room to get the kids’ attention. “Guess what?” I said once they quieted down enough that they could hear me over the racket they were making. “We’re going out.”

They raced to get ready and piled into the car, and we headed out for the Saturday Market a lot sooner than I thought we would. We were going to be very early. Oh well. At least we were out of the house.

NICKY GOT THE
start in the game that night against the Nashville Predators, since he’d posted another shutout against the Blues and Bergy said he didn’t want to mess with what had been working for them lately. We watched the game with the d’Aragon family at Kells Pub, since it wasn’t too far from the Saturday Market and we knew they’d have the game on.

After each goal the Predators scored, the fans chanted at Nicky as they always tended to do in Nashville.
Ericsson! Ericsson! Ericsson! You suck. It’s all your fault. You suck.
The camera was still focused on Nicky after the second goal he let in, early in the third period. He had his mask off and was making an adjustment to the straps. But what drew my attention was the fact that he seemed to be chanting right along with them. It looked like he was saying the same words they were, but I couldn’t be sure. Lip-reading was much easier to do when the person in question was cursing than when they were singing along to a fan chant.

Even though he’d given up two goals, the Storm had already scored three. He could still come out of this game with another win as long as the team held up in front of him and he didn’t lose his focus.

The third period interview was with Hunter, since Nicky was busy in the net. He glowered at the camera as he adjusted the headset.

“Nice to have you with us tonight, Hunter,” Darryl said, getting the interview started. “So Ericsson has been doing a pretty good job in the net over the last few games. Has Coach Bergstrom given you any indication what you’ll have to do to get your next shot at it?”

“Oh yeah,” Hunter said, sounding as cranky as Hugo had been earlier. “Wait on Nicky to blow it, or wait for the next back-to-back situation. One of the two, whichever comes first.”

On the ice, the Predators forced a turnover, and Cody Williams lost an edge in his effort to race back to defend. It was a two on none. Nicky came out of his crease to challenge the shooter. Instead, the guy passed it to his partner, who should have had a wide-open net and an easy goal with Nicky caught out of position. But somehow, Nicky slid over on his back, both legs windmilling through the air. He got the toe of his skate on the puck and made the save.

“Probably the second one,” Hunter said dryly after watching the play.

Later in the third period, the Predators pulled their goalie in an effort to tie the game with an extra attacker. Sometimes, it works; that night, it didn’t. Riley Jezek put the puck into the empty net with about twenty seconds left in the game, ensuring Nicky the win.

By the time it was over, Nils was yawning, and Hugo was back to complaining about everything. On top of that, I doubted I’d ever see Elin again without her cheeks being stained pink because
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tienne had held her hand under the table almost the whole time we’d been at the restaurant. To a chorus of protests, Julianne and I got the kids gathered up to head home for the night.