Twenty Miles (17 page)

‘Um, I guess we just want you guys to know that we love you both and we’re totally happy for you, and – ’

‘Sorry, Reverend Bozzo, but I feel compelled to interject.’ Toad stepped into the circle. ‘You aren’t marrying them, champ. No offence. Look, this is what it’s all about.’ She sighed and pulled her hoodie over her head. A pink T-shirt underneath read
Lez-apalooza.
She did a sloppy figure-skater twirl, and sprayed to a stop with her back to us, legs spread, hands on her hips. On the back of the T-shirt:
Scarlet Gay Pride Day, 1998. 1 on 1 at the Crease.
Quiet as we all read it and then Tillsy clapped her hands and laughed delightedly.

‘I want one of those, man!’

Boz’s mouth dropped.

‘For fuck’s sake,’ Hal said.

Then Duffy began to laugh. She bent over, hands on her knees, shoulders shaking.

‘Oh my God,’ she said and stood up, wiping away a tear beside her nose, still laughing. ‘Oh my God, Toad. Holy shit.’

Pelly threw some more confetti, and I blew on my noisemaker with everyone else.

Duff and Hugo glided toward us, Hugo ducking her head, a grudging smile. Toad stuck a hat on Duff’s head, snapped the elastic under her chin. It must have been the confetti – Hugo must have skated over the confetti. Her skates just flew out beside her, as though she was running across the ice in socks, and she went down, hard. Falling backwards, hands thrown out behind her to brace her fall. Breath hooked in my lungs, I watched her curl forward, clutching a wrist, rocking back and forth in the fetal position, orange hair brushing her knees.

‘Shit,’ Boz breathed, and it sounded strange to hear her swear. Duff crouched beside her, frantic, Hugo breathing deep in a disciplined pattern, gliding through the pain. In through her nostrils, out through her mouth, a rapid meditation. Rocking. We bunched in around them. Duff had her face down next to Hugo’s and was whispering something. When she turned to look up at us, her eyes were wild.

‘Someone do something! Please! Get someone!’

She held Hugo’s limp wrist carefully on her palm, just balanced it there in front of her, as though it had been given to her, while Hugo rocked, head down. Tears slid fast down Duff’s face.

‘Get someone!’ she shrieked again, but Boz had already gone. She tucked Hugo’s hair behind her ear, and stroked her back with clumsy jabs.

‘It’s okay, baby. It’s okay,’ she whispered. How quickly it all had broken. Toad shivered in her T-shirt. She crossed her arms over the words and watched them, off to the side, with tired eyes.

H
ugo had fractured a bone in her wrist, but she returned to ice the following week with a blue playing cast. It matched Segal, who’d been wearing one since the beginning of the season, hers now ratty, trailing tattered pieces of cotton around the fingers like an old security blanket, giving off a smell of sour milk and rotten socks. But the point was, they could still play, Hugo and Segal, the casts fitting perfectly into their gloves. Segal came in with a new one, red this time, and she told me that while the plaster was setting the doctor got her to hold a stick in the palm of the cast, so the cast dried in that position, her broken hand frozen around a hockey stick for weeks. I pictured this, Segal clutching the stick in the doctor’s office, those long, meditative moments while the plaster dried. Like some misguided act of worship.

The team boasted an impressive roster of broken bones, pulled ligaments, strains, sprains, aching backs and knees. Our athletic therapist, tiny Greek Tamara, came in after games hauling a cooler full of ice packs. She stood in the middle of the room and threw them around the stalls like she was delivering newspapers. She laid players out on towels in the middle of the dressing room and pummelled muscle cramps into submission with sadistic nonchalance, her small hands finding the pain. There, there. Moans like a torture chamber, a brothel. Players were drawn to her, dragged themselves to her office whining like kids, seeking out her motherly aptitude, that calming ability to draw circles around the pain and then plaster over it.

In a scrum around the puck during practice, someone’s blade nicked my calf, just above the heel of my skate boot, right where the shin pads leave the well-being of your legs to fate. On the bench, Tamara snapped on latex gloves from her kit and wiped away the garish blood with impatient strokes of gauze, looking for the real story. In her sprawling kit, she located the perfect size of bandage.
It was the same colour as my skin and, when she smoothed it over a reddening wad of cotton – a soothing undulation of fingertips – it disappeared into my leg.

I couldn’t believe Hugo came back so quickly. But they always came back, as quickly as they could, sooner than they should have. As though playing with pain might somehow make the team stronger, this act of limping back with the hurt parts displayed, proving their messy love for the game, for each other. The team shifting its shape around them, over the torn muscles, the fractured bones. Healing the hurt parts.

I tested myself: What would I do if I broke my arm? Would I make a comeback with the playing cast? I didn’t know. I’d probably go home.

H
ad I known that dressing-room geography would make my destiny for the rest of the year, I would have sat elsewhere, in the far corner with Duff, Hugo and Roxy, maybe, in the area Toad called Mime Village – it wasn’t that they didn’t speak there but that they spoke in normal volumes rather than the megaphone-for-mouths brand of communication favoured in our end, the vocal-cord workout demanded by the
CD
player that sat at Heezer’s feet. The Mime Village horizon seemed to shimmer like an oasis through the shower steam after practice. A haven, mellow and neat, their movements saturated with casual lethargy, or so it seemed from the North End, our tilt-a-whirl side. Our end remained loyal to each other, in restaurants, cars, buses. Hal and Toad could probably take or leave me, I thought; it was Pelly who had cemented me in.

‘Iz! Here!’ Pelly’s voice pierced through the thick morning air on the bus. Near the back, she waved a magazine in the air. I pushed through the aisle, stalling as my teammates in baseball caps and toques shoved their backpacks above the seats, everyone moving in slow motion, falling in next to their stall partners. They mumbled sleepy greetings as I passed.

Hal and Boz spoke quietly in the row Toad called Prime Real Estate, the only row of three seats, very back, next to the bathroom.
Someone had transferred the No Kicking It sign – like a No Smoking sign, but with a boot instead of a cigarette – from the dressing-room toilet stall to the bus toilet door. I’d thought that
kicking it
meant dancing when I first started, and could easily imagine the reasoning behind the sign – Heezer getting carried away and dancing on the toilet one day after practice, slipping and getting a booter. This scenario grew edges, became logic, the boot entered my swelling dressing-room lexicon. Heezer dancing on the toilet could have happened; it was getting harder and harder to weed my own memories from team legend.

‘Shitting,’ Pelly had said to me out of the blue one day. ‘Kicking it is to shit, you know?’ I’d nodded like I knew. When Pelly offered me these morsels out of the blue –
Shitting
– I felt strange gratitude, a small seizure in my stomach.

Hal and Boz didn’t look up as I slid in ahead of them, next to Pelly, who was acting out a drama involving a bottle of Aspirin, her Scarlet water bottle and head pain. She moaned as pills spilled over her hand, into her lap, and rubbed her temple while she scooped up the excess.

‘What’s wrong?’ I asked as she whiplashed the pills back. Toothpaste spit chalked one corner of her mouth.

‘Got my braces tighten yesterday,’ she grimaced. ‘They’re a bitch. But I’ll look this way when I’m done.’ She pointed to Julia Roberts’s horse teeth on the cover of
Cosmopolitan.

‘Yeah, I can see it,’ I said.

Moon’s whistle scissored open the team’s morning drone. She was small at the front, her track jacket wrinkled like she’d slept in it the night before.

‘I had the worst dream ever last night,’ Toad had said a few days before. ‘I broke into Moon’s cromulent lair, and I was all excited, like, right on, let’s have a lookie here, let’s break some shit, whatever. But I get to her bedroom ... and I look in the closet ... and hundreds – thousands! – of track jackets fly out at me, like – like bats! And I go through her drawers, and there are these, like, self-renewing reserves of track pants, layer upon layer, no end. An infinity of track suits.’ She’d shuddered.

Moon’s eyes drooped. Stan handed her a Styrofoam coffee cup from the front seat and she took a hard swig.

‘Who’re we missing?’ she called. Pelly raised her eyebrows at me and formed a T with her hands, raising it high above her head. Moon’s cheeks dropped and she scanned the back, then heaved a disgusted sigh, flicking out her wrist to look at her watch.

Toad jogged in, holding a partially eaten doughnut out like a baton. The bus lurched away from the rink as she staggered oblivious down the aisle in flannel Barney pyjamas.

‘Prime Real Estate!’ she enthused, eyeing the empty seat at the back.

Hal snorted. Pelly and I angled ourselves around casually.

Toad struggled to fit her backpack overhead. She offered the doughnut to Boz, who shook her head, smiling.

‘Oh, I almost forgot,’ Toad clapped her hands. ‘Happy birthday, champ.’

‘It’s tomorrow,’ Hal said.

‘But the presents can’t wait!’ Toad pulled the backpack down again.

‘Oh Jesus,’ Hal breathed.

‘Why don’t you save it for tomorrow, Toady?’ Boz said.

Toad looked down at Pelly and me and waggled her eyebrows as she rummaged through.

‘Morning, youngsters. What’s wrong, Pelter? You look constipated.’

Pelly glared at her. ‘I got my braces tighten – I’m getting a migraine.’

‘That sucks – oh, here.’ She pulled a newspaper from the bag and flipped through, folding it back with a grin. ‘Hal’s first modelling spread. Happy birthday, totsi.’

Hal studied the paper for a long while, the crease above the bridge of her nose deepening, shadows thrown down over her eyes. Boz rested her chin on Hal’s shoulder to look, an unsure smile wavering on her mouth.

‘You’re kidding me. Where did you get this?’ Hal glared at Toad.

‘It’s next week’s
Press,
I just got it at U. Centre. What’s your problem?’

‘You’re kidding me,’ Hal repeated.

‘What is it?’ Pelly said urgently. ‘Let me see.’ She snatched the paper from Hal’s hands and I read over her shoulder. The headline,
Scarlet Hockey Makes Its Mark,
was bookended with an action shot of Ben Hardy, captain of the men’s team, a small triangle of tongue poised at the corner of his mouth, body leaning nearly parallel to the ice as he cut a sharp corner. In the neighbouring picture, Hal wore a black, low-plunging dress with jewel-studded spaghetti straps, her face and chest flushed red, eyes lidded down with dark eyeshadow, lips shining a hard gloss. Her hair was pinned up in dark snarls of curl, and a strand had escaped along her cheek, lending her a look of unravelling as she stared, smiling absently, away from the camera.

‘Is this from the athletic banquet?’ Pelly asked. Hal shook her head at Boz, speechless.

‘It’s a gorgeous picture, babe,’ Boz offered.

Hal was slipping into a mood, you could feel it coming off her. ‘It would have been
so hard
for them to get a shot of me on the ice,’ she said quietly.

‘At least it’s not a picture of you at morning practice or something – all zitty and pale. You know?’ Toad offered.

‘You’re a hottie.’ Boz rubbed Hal’s back.

‘Hardy will love this.’ Hal gazed out the window, chewing her bottom lip.

‘Fucking rights Hardy will love it,’ Toad said. ‘He totally wants you, Scotty said – ’

‘Stop telling me that,’ Hal spat. ‘I don’t care.’

Toad blinked rapidly, silent for a moment. ‘I just want – ’

‘For my birthday, Corinne, I would like you to
not talk.
’ Hal shook her head, staring out the window.

I elbowed Pelly. ‘Did you get the card?’ I whispered. I’d wanted to get Hal a birthday card but didn’t want the responsibility of choosing it. Pelly rummaged around in the backpack at her feet, then shot back up, grinning. She threw the card onto my lap.

‘Sign it,’ she said.

The front said
To a Special Grandma
in flowing letters. A lengthy poem inside mentioned babies, butterflies, sunshine, cookies and God. Pelly’s signature already scrawled at the bottom.

‘I’m not signing this,’ I said.

Pelly shrugged. ‘Best card ever.’

I signed it. Hal was turning twenty-three.

‘Heezer!’ Toad hollered across the aisle after she’d attempted a few seconds of silence. ‘You got that present?’

Heezer popped up like a gopher, a few rows up. ‘Oh yeah, happy birthday, Hally!’

‘It’s tomorrow,’ Hal said.

‘It’s all week! Gestation period!’ Heezer shouted.

‘Vile,’ Toad said. ‘Who says
gestation
at seven in the morning?’

Heezer came down to Prime Real Estate and handed Toad a folded sheet. Pelly and I angled ourselves over the backs of our seats, dangling like moons above the heads of Toad, Hal and Boz.

Hal opened the paper, a certificate that read
Welcome
(
Chrissy
written into the blank in confused-looking scrawls, like Toad had written it with her left hand)
to the Silver Salmons Water Club!
and had a picture of an apple-shaped, white-haired woman cannonballing off a diving board, a group of grannies laughing and frolicking – in that stiff-necked, vaguely panicked way older, permed women have – in the pool below her.

Hal smirked. ‘Yeah. Fuck you very much,’ she said.

‘They’ll be expecting you at the New Horizons Senior Centre on Tuesday,’ Heezer drawled. ‘Just so you know.’

Toad took the certificate from Hal. ‘I’ll take care of that. Wouldn’t want it to accidentally get thrown in the garbage in some fit of dementia. This is Wall of Hein material.’

The Wall of Hein was getting out of control, growing across the wall beside the bulletin board – the board already overcapacity with unflattering drunk photos of players, magazine cut-outs of men’s underwear ads, and sketches of Peter Mansbridge, also in underwear, that Heezer drew as presents for Toad during her Women’s Studies class. Spreading like a rash toward Mime Village. I hadn’t made it up there yet.