The Year We Fell Down (27 page)

Dana looked genuinely torn, which is how I knew that she was hot for Daniel. There was no other reason she would even hesitate before saying no. “I just can’t,” she said after a pause. “I’d duck every time the ball comes near.”

“That’s not against the rules,” I pointed out.

My phone chimed with a text from Damien.
Where R U? Beaumt Dining Hall?
Then my phone buzzed again, and I picked up the call. “Hi? Damien?”

“Please tell me you’re at brunch,” my brother said. “Because I’m climbing the stairs.”

“What — really? Why?”

“What do you mean,
why?
I came to see you. Are you up here?”

Startled, my eyes went straight to the door. A few seconds later, my brother stood there in the archway, peering out from underneath his Harkness baseball cap. I let the phone fall to the table as he met my eyes and then smiled. Then he was standing over me, leaning in for a hug. “Hey! I found you.” He grabbed a chair from the empty table next to ours and swung it around. That put him on the end, between Hartley and I.

Hell and damn.

“Um, Dana? I said. “This is my big brother, Damien.”

Damien didn’t seem to pick up on my discomfort. “So
you’re
Dana! Nice to finally meet you, girl.”

She beamed at him, shaking hands.

“And maybe you also know Daniel? And of course, Hartley.” I could feel my face reddening as I said his name.

“How’s it hanging, Hartley? I see you got your cast off. You must be feeling frisky again.”

Frisky? I was going to die of embarrassment in the next ten minutes if I couldn’t figure out how to extract myself from this situation. I snuck a look across at Hartley. He had the good sense not to look too amused.

Damien looked around the room. “Typical scene for a Sunday. I’m just going to grab a cup of coffee. Feels like I never left this place.” He rose again and loped towards the mugs.

“Oh, crap,” I whispered.

“Your face is the color of a tomato,” Dana whispered.

Hartley reached across the table and gave my hand a quick squeeze. “Be cool, beautiful. We’re just having brunch here. Did you know he was coming?”

“No!” I hissed. “He never mentioned visiting.”

My brother sat back down, sipping his coffee. “So, how are you holding up?” he asked me.

“Just fine,” I said quickly.

His blue eyes were studying me so carefully that it was unnerving. “Well that’s good,” he said slowly. “Mom and Dad asked me to check in with you.”

“That’s…nice,” I said, feeling as though I’d missed something. “You took the train up?”

“Sure,” he said, still eyeing me. Was there some way he could tell that I’d just done the one thing he’d ever told me not to? It wasn’t that I cared what he thought about Hartley and me. But my life was evolving at warp speed, and I could have used a day to get used to the idea. I didn’t need any push-back from Damien.

Stacia picked that moment to walk by, passing us between the conveyor where trays are deposited and the door. “Hey, Callahan,” she said suddenly. I turned my head as a reflex, about a millisecond before realizing that she was speaking to my brother.

My hockey-playing brother. Of course she was.

“Hey, Stacia. Looking good, as always,” he winked. “Do you know my sister Corey?”

As her gaze slid from Damien to me, the temperature of it dropped from steamy to subzero immediately. “Oh,” she said, frowning. “We’ve met.” And then she stomped out of the room.

“Well, she’s still the same,” Damien chuckled. Then he glanced at Hartley. “Oh, shit. Weren’t you two…?”

Now even Hartley looked rattled. “Yeah…uh…not anymore.”

“Sorry, dude.” My brother went back to his cup of coffee. My nerves fried, I was just about to declare brunch finished when Bridger trotted up, pausing behind my brother and me.

“What’s up, Bridge?” Hartley asked before draining his juice.

Bridger smirked down at him. “I was going to ask you the same thing. Please tell me that somebody had to do the Crutch of Shame this morning. Or do I have to restock the bourbon?”

“Bridger,” I gasped.

“Come on, Callahan,” he said as he passed behind me, giving my ponytail a flip. “I’ve been saving up that joke all weekend.” He rounded our table toward the door, aiming a lopsided grin at Hartley. And then he did a hard double-take as he recognized my brother. “Whoa, Callahan,” he said, pulling up short. “I didn’t see you there.”

In the silence which followed, Damien looked from Bridger to me, and then slowly to Hartley. “What the fuck?”

Interesting choice of words.

My new boyfriend rubbed his jaw with his hand. If there was a suitable thing to say into the silence that followed, neither Hartley nor I could figure out what it was.

Bridger was still standing frozen over Dana and Daniel, practically in the doorway. “I just, uh…” he said. “Sorry.”

Hartley dismissed him with a wave, and then turned back to face my brother’s glare.

“My little sister?” Damien bit out. “Out of five thousand undergrads, she’s your latest conquest?”

I could see Hartley trying to decide if defending himself was the right strategy or not. “Conquest?” he said, frowning. “It’s not like that.”

Damien shook his head. “You don’t have to sit here and be an asshole about it now. Can’t you just get lost now?”

“Actually, Callahan,” Hartley said quietly, “
that
would be the asshole thing to do.”

Damien turned to me, his face red. “I don’t know why I even made the trip up here.”

“I don’t know why either,” I snapped.

My brother’s face actually slackened with surprise. “You don’t, do you?”

“No, Damien. So why don’t you just tell me?”

“Wow.” He gave a dark chuckle. “Don’t worry. I won’t tell Mom and Dad why you forgot what day it was.”

“What day is it?” Dana asked. At least I wasn’t the only one who was confused.

“It’s January fifteenth. I came here to make sure Corey was doing okay.”

“Oh,” I said, stupidly.

Oh.

My stomach swerved, and memories of last January fifteenth rushed toward me, unbidden. I didn’t want to remember. But suddenly it seemed that I had no choice. Lowering my eyes to the table, I was transported back one year.

Last January fifteenth was a Saturday.

I slept through breakfast, and then made myself an egg and bacon sandwich for lunch. My mother had been out jogging, even though it was only ten degrees outside. And by the time she came home, I was tearing the house apart, looking for my hockey shorts. “I washed them,” she’d said. “Look on the drying rack.”

I ran past her. I
ran
. On two legs. I was full of irritation, worried that I’d be late for my game. I’d had no idea that things were about to change so dramatically — that running into the laundry room was something I’d never do again.

“Um, Corey?”

My head snapped up. Dana had been trying to get my attention, but I’d been lost — staring with unseeing eyes at my plate. “Yeah?”

She frowned at me. “What’s January fifteenth?”

“It’s…” I swallowed. She and Daniel were looking at me with confusion in their eyes. Hartley and my brother only looked sad. “Today…” Now I understood why I’d had two text messages from my parents already — messages I hadn’t returned.
Call us
, they’d written.
We’re thinking about you
.

I didn’t feel like explaining. I didn’t want to
be
that damaged person, but it seemed that today I had no choice.

Leaning over, I picked up my crutches from the floor. “I was supposed to call my parents this morning, and I just remembered,” I stammered. I heaved myself out of the chair and began crutching for the door. Damien got up to follow me.

“The game is at one-thirty!” Daniel called over his shoulder.

Chapter Twenty Two:
January the Fifteenth

—
Corey

“The game is at one-thirty,” my father had said through clenched teeth.

He was behind the wheel of our car, and I was hurrying to throw my gear into the back. The coach was not supposed to arrive so close to face-off, yet again. As usual, my dad’s tardiness would be my fault.

“Sorry,” I had said, running around to the passenger seat.

I don’t remember the drive. There wouldn’t have been any traffic, not in our sleepy little town. What had I been thinking about on the ride to the rink? A homework assignment? The boy I’d just started dating — the one whose face I could barely remember now?

Before my accident, it had been so easy to stare out the car window at the frozen landscape, thinking of nothing at all. I hadn’t known that I should love every moment, that every minute of feeling complete and capable was worshipful. I hadn’t known.

Back at McHerrin, I retreated into my bedroom.

“Nice room,” Damien murmured.

I crawled onto my bed and removed my braces. Scooting up onto the pillow, I set my back against the wall.

A glance at the clock told me that it was almost twelve. I wondered what my parents were doing now, but I was too chicken to call them. Depending on the schedule, my father might have a game. For his sake, I hoped it was an away game. I hoped that one-thirty would not find him standing in exactly the same spot he’d stood last year.

For every one of my games, he had always been right there, in the box with a whistle and a clipboard. It was hard to picture him without those two things. My teammate once asked me in jest if my father wore his whistle to bed at night. Maybe I’d played so hard at hockey because he was always there watching. He was such a good coach, and such a fair man, that I’d never felt hemmed in by being both his kid and his athlete. It was all good, until the day that it wasn’t.

My poor father. He had to watch it all go down.

I was skating hard, backwards and fast. The puck shot across the ice in my direction. I leaned in for the pass, but another skater — an opponent — leaned in harder. She flailed her stick in the direction of the speeding puck, but caught my skate blade instead.

My memory of this part is really just a collage of the things people told me later.

Somehow, she tripped me so badly that I went flying backwards. I flew over the other skater in a neat airborne arc. And then I landed on my back. And then I blacked out for a few seconds.

My father was over me when I opened my eyes. “Corey, are you okay?” he asked me.

“Yeah,” I said. And I believed it. In fact, I eventually got up and skated off the ice.

“So what else is going on with you?” Damien asked me. “Do you have your new semester sorted out?”

I cleared my throat. “I think so. I’m taking a Shakespeare class with Dana. And that psych class everyone raves about. With Professor Davies.”

“That’s a fun one,” my brother agreed, fingering the bill of his cap. “Want to play some RealStix?”

I shook my head. Today I wanted nothing to do with hockey. Not even pretend hockey.

“What was that guy Daniel saying about a game?”

I met my brother’s eyes, which were warm and clear. I tried to tamp down my irritation, because he was only trying to help. “I joined the coed intramural water polo team. Did you ever play?”

Damien shook his head. “Sounds fun, though.”

“It’s okay,” I said. “It’s actually a better workout than I thought it would be. There aren’t any extra players. So at the end of an hour, we’re all puffing like grannies.”

Damien looked at his watch. “I’ll come to your game.”

I shook my head again. “I’m going to sit this one out.”

After my awful crash, I sat the rest of the hockey game out. On the bench, leaning against the wall, my back hurt. But so did my head, and my shoulders. My father wondered if I had a mild concussion. Aside from my intense backache, there weren’t any scary symptoms. So we went home. I took a dose of an ordinary pain killer, and went to bed surprisingly early.

That night, I woke up to crushing pain in my lower back. Terrified, I got out of bed and stumbled into my parents’ room. I barely made it, sinking down on my mom’s side of the mattress. “Corey?” she said, but her voice sounded far away. “What’s wrong?”

That’s when I passed out.

I woke up in the hospital two days later. I’d had major surgery for a blood clot pressing against my spinal cord. There were beeping machines and tubes and worried faces everywhere. Doctors muttered phrases like “unusual presentation” and “wait and see.”

It took everyone a while to realize that the midnight trip I’d made into my parents’ room had been the last time I would ever walk unassisted.

At one o’clock, Hartley appeared in the doorway to my room. “Hi there,” he said.

“Hi.” My voice sounded small and underused.

“It’s almost time to go to the pool.”

I didn’t want to have a big teary talk, or explain. I just looked away.