Delay of Game (34 page)

Usually it was a prescription, something they started taking to deal with pain from injuries or maybe to help them sleep because of the odd schedule professional hockey players had to put up with. But in my experience, it had always seemed more likely to be a guy like Cam who ended up with those problems—a fighter—or maybe a guy like Soupy who’d had so many injuries and setbacks. Not a starting goalie.

“Are
you
okay?” I asked after a moment. Finding out a friend and teammate was dealing with something as serious as this couldn’t be easy for anyone.

“Yeah. I’ll be fine.”

I didn’t miss the fact that he’d said he
would
be, not that he
was
.

Well, this made my worries about meeting Cam’s family all seem incredibly inconsequential and silly.

“I wish I could be with you tonight, though,” he said.

“So do I.”

“When we get back to Portland tomorrow night, do you want me to go to my house, or should I come to yours?” There was a hopeful tone in his voice. No, it was more than just that. Hopeful, but also a little wounded.

I wanted to wrap my arms around him and hold him until that wounded part disappeared. “Come here,” I replied. “If you don’t think your mom and sisters will mind, at least.”

“They won’t mind.”

“Okay. Then come here when you get back.”

“I will. Sara?”

The way he said my name caused my breath to lodge in my throat. There was so much more to what he was saying in that one word, things that I wasn’t ready to give a name to, things I wasn’t ready to acknowledge.

“Yeah?” I replied when I found my voice again, even though I was 99.9 percent positive I didn’t want to hear whatever he was about to say.

“I love you. I’m not just falling in love with you, and it’s not something that I think is happening but I just can’t be sure of it yet. I love you.”

I’d never heard such loud silence as what fell between us after he said it. That was exactly what I hadn’t wanted him to say. I felt as though all of his weight was crushing me beneath him, as though he was standing upon my cracked ribs and making it impossible for me to breathe or form a coherent thought or do anything but wish I could go back in time and hang up before he had a chance to say those words.

“I know you’re not ready to hear that yet,” he said. “I’m not sorry I said it, though, because you need to know. You need to know that what I feel for you and what I want for us is big. That’s why they’re coming.”

“Your family?” I was still wrapping my mind around the first part of it and he was already moving on to something else, and I didn’t know if I could keep up. It was as though we’d switched personalities or something. He was usually quiet and hardly said three words, and I was the one you often couldn’t shut up. But right now, I was struggling to make sense of all the words coming out of his mouth. “Your family is coming because you told them you love me?”

“Not exactly. I didn’t tell them. They just knew.”

He waited a beat, but it wasn’t long enough for me to prepare myself for the bomb he was about to drop on me next.

“They want to love you, too.”

That wasn’t going to happen, though, because I wasn’t the girl you took home to meet your parents. I was the one who got knocked up by some random guy and now their son, their brother, was taking the fall for it.

They weren’t going to love me. They were going to crucify me.

FOR ONCE, I
decided to actually pay attention to the game on Friday night because it would be easier to sit with Daddy and do that than to be in the dining room with all the girls. And yes, I did mean
all
the girls. Dana and Mrs. Campbell were still staying with us until the guys got back, but since it was a Friday night and the kids didn’t have to go to school the next day, Laura had brought Katie and her whole brood with her, Rachel had brought her two younger kids, and even Noelle had come, along with her puppy to play with Buster.

Luke and Dani claimed spots on the floor in the living room with video game handsets keeping them busy, and Tuck made himself at home on Daddy’s lap again. Maddie curled up at the opposite end of the couch from me and kept her nose buried in a book, only looking up at the TV screen whenever my father and the kids would make noise, good or bad, about whatever was going on in the game.

The rest of the girls stayed in the dining room where they could all go over wedding details together, discussing the various items that Dana and her mother had decided upon during the week and debating the things that were still up in the air. They’d tried to get me to sit with them so I could weigh in, but I’d claimed my ribs were hurting too much to handle sitting upright tonight.

No, they really weren’t hurting that badly. Yes, it was a chickenshit move on my part.

I just didn’t know if I could handle an interrogation from the lot of them when it came to Cam, and Laura had always been able to see right through me. She would surely see everything on my face and try to wheedle it all out of me, and then I would be crying and blubbering all over the place. Which
would
hurt my ribs, damn it. And it would upset Daddy. And I didn’t want to go there.

I hadn’t even told Dana about what Cam had said to me last night. I didn’t know how to talk about it since I was still in shock and hadn’t settled on how I felt about it. He’d said he loved me, for God’s sake. How does a reasonable person react to something like that when it had been taking all of my spare energy to avoid falling in love with him?

So I stayed in the living room watching the game as a means of avoidance.

Sure enough, the backup goaltender Hunter Fielding was the guy in the net tonight, and they’d brought Sean Roberts in from the Seattle team to back him up. No sign of Nicky. Hunter had done a completely respectable job for the team throughout the season, but this was his first real test in a high-pressure situation as a pro. I was on edge to see how he would handle it.

I wasn’t nearly as on edge as Daddy was, though. He’d been cursing a blue streak all day, after I’d told him what had happened with Nicky, and he’d only forced himself to stop when Rachel and Laura showed up with their kids.

Whether he’d manage to keep himself from cursing in front of them if things went sour was anyone’s guess. He’d never even attempted it when I was a little girl, which was probably why I had a mouth like a sailor. I was even worse than half the guys sometimes, but it was what I’d always known. Still, I usually kept a lid on it around kids—a lesson I’d learned as a kid, myself, when Daddy had coached the Bruins years ago. The players’ wives weren’t exactly thrilled with me and my potty mouth being around their children.

Daddy, though? I supposed we would have to wait and see…and we might not have to wait very long, either. That would all depend on whether the guys came out and played like they had in Game Four, or if they decided to go back to playing the way that had gotten them into the playoffs in the first place. Hunter would be a determining factor, too. If he rose to the occasion, Daddy’s blood pressure would likely be kept at a much more reasonable level than if he let the big stage intimidate him.

Only a few minutes into the game, it was easy to see what Daddy and Cam had been talking about as far as Babs was concerned. He was a man on a mission, running over anyone standing in his way. In his first three shifts, it was impossible to take my eyes away from him to watch anyone else out there. He was stealing pucks, creating turnovers, laying out big hits. Pretty much the only thing he didn’t do was score, and it wasn’t for lack of trying. He’d gotten a couple of nice shots off, and he nearly scored on a deflection from a big, booming slap shot Burnzie sent in from the point.

But eventually, all of Babs’s hard work paid off. The Canucks were paying so much attention to him, often double-teaming him in their coverage, that both Zee and Soupy were often left uncovered. Neither of those guys is someone a team should ever forget about, and Soupy made them pay. He’d been hanging out behind the goal while Babs fought to get the puck free along the boards with two of the Canucks’ defenders going against him. Jens pinched in to help him out, and somehow Babs squirted the puck out from the mess and straight to Jens’s stick. He one-timed it but angled his shot so it was more of a pass to Soupy. Soupy didn’t mess around; he backhanded it so it would hit the back of the goaltender’s pads. It rebounded into the net before he had a chance to get his glove on it. Soupy was the one who got the goal, but no one would doubt it was Babs that made it happen.

At the first intermission, the Storm were up one to nothing. Hunter hadn’t been tested too much so far in the game. The guys had done a great job of maintaining possession and keeping the play in the Canucks’ zone for the most part, and Daddy hadn’t let any curses fly.

The girls had stopped talking and looked up at a few points, keeping themselves up to speed on the game, but for the most part they were so absorbed in their wedding plans that they were oblivious to everything going on in the living room, which suited me just fine.

Right around the first intermission, I’d started having some mild cramps in my abdomen. Probably just gas, but I didn’t want Laura to see anything weird in my face and flip out.

I got up carefully, easing myself off the couch as well as I could, and went upstairs to my bathroom. It was only when I was in there, all alone, that I had a small freak-out moment. There was a tiny pink spot on my panties. My OB-GYN had told me that a small amount of spotting was normal and not anything to worry about in most cases, so I tried not to let it bother me. But I couldn’t get the thought out of my head that I wasn’t just spotting—I had that discomfort in my abdomen. What if it wasn’t gas?

My paranoia made me wish Cam were here. He was always able to calm me down. Usually the fact that he could do that pissed me off, but at the moment it seemed necessary.

I spent several minutes upstairs trying to slow my pulse and refocus my thoughts before returning to the living room. Once I thought I’d finally reined in my panic, I headed down the stairs.

“You almost missed the start of the second,” Daddy said when he saw me walking gingerly back to my spot on the sofa. “I was getting worried.”

He
looked
worried, too. His brows were drawn together, his lips pinched.

I smiled and shook my head, trying to brush him off. “Just a bit of nausea. Morning sickness at night. No big deal.”

He grunted, but then he turned his attention back to the television since the commercial break had ended and the official was about to drop the puck at center ice.

Maddie set her book down and climbed down from the couch. A minute later, she came back with a bottle of ginger ale that she handed to me. “It always helps me when I have an upset tummy,” she said. She got back into her spot and picked up her book just as one of the Sedins scored off the rush up ice for Vancouver.

“Well, that’s just f—” Daddy cut himself off just in time.

Tuck looked up at him with big eyes. “Mommy says I can’t say that word, Mr. Coach.”

“That’s right,” Rachel called out from the dining room. “You can’t. But he didn’t actually say it. Even if he does, though, you still can’t.”

“This time he didn’t,” I mumbled, and Daddy shot a look in my direction.

After that, we all went back to doing what we’d been doing. The action in this period was back and forth, up-tempo hockey. This sort of game was definitely better suited to the Storm than the Canucks, but it didn’t matter. Neither team managed to get another goal in the rest of the second, but it wasn’t for lack of opportunities. Hunter held up really well under a barrage that lasted nearly two full minutes near the end of the period, where our guys weren’t able to get off for a change but the Canucks kept the shots coming. He made a highlight-reel-worthy save with only two seconds left before the buzzer, sending the boys into the locker room with the game tied and one more period remaining in regulation.

By that point, the cramping sensation in my abdomen had stopped, so I was able to convince myself that I’d been right in the beginning: it was only gas. Nothing to worry about. Before the end of the second intermission, the girls finished up all of their planning in the dining room, and they came out to join us in the living room for the third period. Katie, Dana, and Noelle all joined the teenagers on the floor. Rachel picked Maddie up and settled her on her lap, and Mrs. Campbell sat between us on the sofa. Laura took the other recliner.

When the action on the ice resumed, I don’t think any of us could take regular breaths. The whole series—hell, the Storm’s playoff lives—were really hinging on the outcome of this game. Yeah, it was still best of seven, and tied at two games each. But they couldn’t afford to go down a game at this point in the series. We could all feel that, I suppose.

The fast-paced, north-south game from the second period carried over into the third. You could see it was starting to wear down the Canucks, especially because their coach had shortened their bench and was really only playing three forward lines and two defensive pairings. I supposed he didn’t trust his bottom-end players enough in a track meet like this, but the rest of his team was gasping for air like it was going out of style every time they climbed over the boards and sat on the bench.

Halfway through the period, the Canucks’ fourth line finally got a chance to play—the first time since about eight minutes into the second period—and they took advantage of it. Zack Kassian, of all people—a guy who might score one goal a year if he was lucky—somehow knocked the puck off Monty’s stick and turned up ice with it. Monty tried to get back, and he made a diving play for the puck but missed and tripped Kassian up just as the Canucks’ forward got off his shot. He scored what had to have been the flukiest goal of his career, putting them up by one.

Hunter visibly deflated after letting that one in, but Monty and the other guys on the ice went over to him, patting him on top of his mask and tapping his pads with their sticks. When they skated away, he shook his head as if he was shaking it off, tapped his goal stick on each of the posts, and got set for play to resume.