Comeback (5 page)

My office door opened, and I glanced up briefly to see Nicky coming in. He looked as ragged as I’d ever seen him—never a good sign when you were dealing with an addict. That meant he was either on something or he was fighting it really, really hard. His blond hair, already longer than he usually wore it, was a mess. Nicky wasn’t a messy sort of guy. He was clean-cut, fashionable, and always tidy. But not today, and there was a wildness in his eyes now that set me on edge. I held up a finger, silently begging for a moment to finish my call, and opened my calendar program. I had a conference call tomorrow morning, but my afternoon was free and clear, other than the thousand envelopes that needed stuffing and the accounting work that was two weeks behind. Such was life when you were the only employee in a nonprofit office.

“Two o’clock,” I confirmed. “That’ll work. Your office or mine?”

“I’ll be out on a job site that morning, so why don’t I come to you?” Carter suggested.

“Done. I’ll see you then.” I started keying in the appointment and hung up the phone. “Hey, Nicky,” I said, still typing. I put on a smile. I didn’t know if he was looking or not, but it should at least come through in my voice. “Guess you got back from the team-building retreat unscathed.”
Or not
. “What’s going on?”

“I need help.”

Those three words made a thousand different things race through me all at once. Uncertainty over what was going on. Pride that he recognized he needed help and was willing to ask for it. Dread over what help he required and whether I’d be able to give it to him or not. What if I couldn’t even direct him to the right person or place? Those were the times when I hated my job. It was always easier when there was an obvious solution, but so often that wasn’t how life worked.

I spun in my chair, giving him my full attention. “What kind of help? Did you reach out to your sponsor?”

“I don’t need my sponsor. It’s not about pills or whatever. I’m handling that, at least. I need—” He dragged a hand through his hair, leaving it looking even more unkempt than before. “I don’t know what I need. Someone to talk to. Ideas. I need someone to convince her not to do it. She won’t…she won’t listen to me. None of them are listening to me. She’s already decided and I get no say in it.” Somewhere along the line, he’d started pacing through my office, making his words feel more erratic and urgent.

“All right, slow down,” I said, trying to sift through the things he’d said to make sense of what he
hadn’t
said. “Should you go talk to Jim?” I wasn’t sure what he was talking about or who
she
was, but Jim Sutter had always had his finger on Nicky’s pulse, the way I saw it. He was a good person to talk to, and whatever this was might affect Nicky’s ability to perform in games.

“I can’t. I can’t tell the team. Not yet. I need to—” He turned those wild eyes on me, his palms up in a question.

So that wasn’t going to happen right now, then. Apparently, Nicky thought I was the one he needed to talk to. I opened my desk drawer, took out a hair clip, and resigned myself to helping him figure out a solution to whatever his problem might be. “All right. Why don’t you take a seat and we can work together and sort this out?”

I got up and crossed to the Keurig, putting my hair in a messy knot and securing it with the clip. I had never been able to think well with my hair in my face. I put a cup under the drip and hit the button to brew a cup. He might not need coffee—he seemed pretty wired already—but I had a feeling I would.

“Want anything to drink before we get started?” I asked anyway. “Coffee? Water? Soda?” I clarified, just to be safe. The machine finished brewing, and I picked up my cup and held it to my lips for the first sip.

“My sister’s dying.”

I nearly dropped my mug. I forced a calm expression to my face, forced my body to respond without revealing the tension I was feeling. His sister was dying? No wonder he looked like such a wreck. This definitely sounded like one of those impossible-to-solve problems I had been dreading. I grabbed a bottle of water from the mini-fridge and carried it over to him. He took it without looking at me.

I sat down at my desk, placing my cup next to me but far enough away that I wouldn’t accidentally knock it over if he dropped another bomb on me, and rested my elbows on the hard surface. Then I waited. Pretty much the only thing I would be able to do for him was listen, which didn’t feel like much.

He unscrewed the lid of his bottle and then put it back on, repeating the process a few times. “She’s got ALS.” He paused then added, “Lou Gehrig’s disease.”

I didn’t know a ton about the disease. I’d mainly only heard about it because of the Ice Bucket Challenge that had gone viral awhile back—but I did know it didn’t kill someone immediately. It was an illness that ravaged a body over the course of several years. Still, if his sister had been diagnosed with it, there was little doubt that she would die from it in time. That couldn’t be an easy thing for anyone to learn about someone they loved. At least with addiction, you had some control. You could choose to fight it. You could make smart decisions from moment to moment. With a disease like ALS, all control was taken away from you.

I was still groping for something comforting to say when he kept going, relieving the need for me to fill the silence.

“We knew she had the gene, that she might get it. We both got tested after Dad got diagnosed.”

“Your father died of ALS?” I blurted out, instantly wishing I’d kept my mouth shut. I knew his father had passed away a couple of years ago, but Nicky had never said anything about how it had happened. I’d assumed something far more common had been to blame, something along the lines of a heart attack or cancer. Not that either of those things would have been better. The man would still be dead any way you looked at it.

Nicky’s eyes shot up to meet mine, and he rolled the water bottle between his hands. “I haven’t ever talked about it with anyone outside of rehab.”

“I’m so sorry. I…”

Whatever I’d been attempting to say floated off with the dust particles shimmering in the line of sunlight that was streaming in through the windows.

“He was diagnosed about six years before he died—not long after I came to Portland, actually. Emma and I both got tested once we knew he had the genetic variety. She has the gene. I don’t. I might still get it, but if I do, it won’t be because of anything in my DNA.” He laughed at that, and I marveled that he could find any humor in the situation.

“Six years,” I said, trying to calculate how much time he might have with his sister. “Is that normal?”

“Three or four years is more common. He held on a long time, but it was—” Nicky cut himself off and took a moment to compose himself. “Let’s just say it wasn’t pretty. The end is the most awful thing you can imagine times a million.”

I nodded. I had a pretty active imagination, and everything I was picturing was bad enough. “And Emma just got diagnosed?”

Tears sprung to his already-red eyes, and he shook his head. “That’s just it. She’s known for years. Since before Dad died. She never told me.”

“Until now…” Now that it was too late for him to come to terms with it, to accept the inevitability. But it was also too late for him to have to see much of that
most awful thing you can imagine times a million
. Perhaps she’d been trying to do him a favor by keeping it a secret, but I doubted he saw it that way. He would only see the lost time.

He nodded and swallowed hard, and my hand itched to reach over and touch him, to comfort him. A hard lump filled my gut, a heavy sensation that wouldn’t go away. But I’d kept the desk between us for a reason. I couldn’t let myself get too close. Instead, I took another sip of my coffee. “Do you need to go back to Sweden? To be with her? Is that what you’re worried about telling Jim? Because I’m sure he’ll—”

“No, that’s just it. She’s not in Sweden! She’s here.”

“Here?” In Portland? Why would she be here if she was dying? Traveling halfway around the world was the last thing I would do if I were on my deathbed, no matter how much I wanted to spend time with friends or family.

He turned haunted eyes on me, clenching his hand around the water bottle. “Physician-assisted suicide is illegal in Sweden.”

Once more, I nearly dropped my cup. It might not be legal in Sweden but it
was
legal in Oregon. This was a right-to-die state, the first in the country, thanks to the Death with Dignity Act. The weight of what Nicky was saying hit me like a ton of bricks, and I didn’t even know his sister.

“Can she… If she’s not a citizen, will they still allow it?” They must. Surely she would have done her research before coming.

“She’s setting up residency. She brought the kids and her caregiver.” He was back to undoing and redoing the lid. I’d seen a lot of lost people over the years—more than I cared to see—but I’d never seen anyone look half as lost as Nicky did right now. “She wants me to take care of the kids. After, I mean. The caregiver has been looking after them because she couldn’t, but…”

“But you’re family and he’s not,” I murmured, racking my brain for something—anything—I could say to help. I had nothing, though.

I didn’t know how a single man playing in the NHL would be able to take care of kids by himself. Nicky had to travel with the team and he couldn’t exactly take them with him. That wasn’t how it worked. Even when they were in Portland, he would have practices, film sessions, community events, media sessions, games… The list of his responsibilities and the things the team expected of him went on and on. Most of the guys in the league who had kids had either their wives or girlfriends to take care of the kids when they weren’t available, or an ex who had at least custody. I had no idea what Nicky would do with these kids, but it didn’t sound like there was another option.

All of this on top of the fact that he was an addict still in the early stages of recovery.

None of this would help his sobriety. It would only add more stress onto a pile that was already more than most recovering addicts could bear without relapsing. Although, maybe it wasn’t fair of me to lump them all together. Everyone was different. The load one person could carry was different from what another could handle. I shouldn’t make assumptions about Nicky based on my past experiences with other people. He’d already proven himself to be a rare sort of man simply by becoming an elite goaltender in the best hockey league in the world. Maybe this could be another way he could be unique.

“What do I do?” he asked, his voice quiet and cracking and utterly destroyed.

That was all it took to break me. I got up and moved around my desk, and before I could think better of it, I was pulling him into my arms and holding him. Because it was the natural thing to do. Because he needed comfort and this was all I could give. Because I needed to do something, even if I couldn’t make things any easier for him.

He remained seated, and I stood between his legs, stroking his hair with one hand. His arms came around my waist, and he pulled me closer, burying his head against my shoulder.

I combed my fingers through his hair over and over again. “You take it one day at a time,” I finally said, falling back on the old cliché that was a lifeline to anyone trying to fight addiction. “That’s what you do. It’s all you can do. One moment at a time, if you have to. You just have to take things as they come.”

“This is too much. I don’t think I can do it.”

There was part of me that thought he was probably right, but I didn’t want to believe that. I wanted to believe he would overcome everything life threw at him, that he would rise above it all and come out stronger.

But my life experience had proven that to be unlikely. Chances were he would fail. Chances were he would fall apart and he would start using again, and then those kids were going to have lost both parents and might as well have lost their uncle, too.

I really, really wanted us both to be wrong.

AFTER ACCEPTING THIS
position with the Light the Lamp Foundation a few years ago, I’d started watching hockey on a fairly regular basis. I went to about half of the Storm’s home games, and I tended to watch most of the rest of the team’s games on TV. I found that it helped me understand both the players and the fans better, and somewhere along the line I’d gotten to where I truly enjoyed watching, not just for my job.