Light the Lamp

by Catherine Gayle

  She may not think she was my lucky charm, but she was wrong.

  Bobby’s flight arrived in San Jose just in time for him to board the team charter to Anaheim, meaning we could thank Nate for his efforts and leave him to lick his wounds in private. I reminded him to think about the positives. There are a lot more hockey players who’ve never skated a single shift in an NHL game than there are who have. He got to live the dream for a little while even if it was more of a nightmare.

  By the time we were heading out of town, Nicky had been released from the hospital, and so he got to fly with us. He still didn’t have any idea who had drugged him or why, he’d said, but he would likely get cleared to play again before our game against the Ducks in two nights.

  X-rays on Hunter came back negative for any sort of break. It was just a high-ankle sprain, but that would still keep him out through the end of the regular season probably, and maybe a little bit into the playoffs. We would be heading home again after the Anaheim game, and since Hunter didn’t need surgery, he stayed with us instead of getting sent back to Portland.

  This injury to Hunter, though, meant Nicky absolutely had to be on top of his game, and it also meant that we needed Bobby with us and ready for whatever may come. We didn’t need to face any more games where some untried guy like Nate Smith was between the pipes. We still hadn’t clinched our playoff spot. We were in a good position to do so, but I’d been around this league long enough to know that a few injuries piling up was all it would take for an epic collapse.

  This was just the time of year when injuries tended to start plaguing teams and fluke things like Bobby’s flight delays tended to happen. I knew to expect it, but the Portland Storm was a pretty young team, in general. There were quite a few guys who were a lot closer to Babs’s age than there were to my age—and we had a lot of guys without much playoff experience.

  Even some of the older guys on the team—the leaders like Zee and Soupy—hadn’t spent much, if any, time in the playoffs. Zee had in his first couple of years. Soupy was just getting to be a regular in the NHL instead of playing in the AHL. Monty had quite a bit of playoff experience, but he was out with a broken arm.

  Hell, even RJ, Eller, and I hadn’t seen a ton of playoff action. RJ and I missed the postseason as often as we got in with the Islanders. Eller had played for the Jets, who had rabid fans but rarely made it beyond the regular season to thank those fans. Now that I thought about it, Webs was probably the only guy on the team who’d seen much playoff action in his career. He might have played as many playoff games as the rest of the guys on this team combined.

  All of that meant that we might get into the show this year, but that didn’t mean we were ready to do much damage once we got there. But it also reinforced that this was exactly where my focus needed to be. I still had two years left on my current contract. As long as I could get myself back on track, whether Noelle was part of my life or not, I was going to be here for a while. With these guys. I needed to step up and play the role that Jim Sutter brought me here to play.

  I made up my mind on the flight that since I was one of the older, veteran guys on this team, one of the ones who knew what a grind the playoffs could be, I needed to spend as much time as I could making sure that the younger, less-experienced guys kept their heads on straight and stayed calm. That seemed like a better use of my time and energy for the next few weeks than obsessing over what was going on with Noelle.

  That didn’t stop me from calling and leaving her messages at least a few times a day and sending her a text message here and there, just in case she eventually turned on her phone or went back to the condo. In case she decided to give me another chance to sort out how to give her what she needed.

  I just couldn’t let her be my only focus. Or even my primary focus.

  There was a point in the middle of the second period when the game was tied at two that Ducks forward Corey Perry was getting under the skin of a bunch of our guys. After Perry steamrollered into Nicky on a breakaway, Razor lost his cool and tried to draw Perry into a fight. That didn’t exactly work out. Razor got sent to the box for roughing and Perry didn’t get a penalty on the play, and then Razor went nuts—throwing his stick against the glass and screaming all sorts of obscenities at the refs. A couple of seconds into the penalty kill, our guys got distracted and we took another minor for having too many men on the ice.

  Scotty took a look down the bench and settled on me to serve the penalty. “Kally, go calm him the fuck down.”

  I wasn’t usually part of the PK group anyway, so it wasn’t all that surprising that he would send me. I made the eighty-foot skate across from the team bench to the penalty box and sat down next to Razor, who was still going berserk.

  “Yeah, let that fucking pansy-ass douche canoe run all over our fucking guy and don’t do a fucking thing about that and then you call me, ref! He’s been diving all fucking game and you keep letting him off.”

  The penalty box attendant shut the door and looked at me before taking his seat.

  “You’ve got to let it go, Razor,” I said.

  “The fuck I do.”

  “You do. We need you to play with your head the rest of the game.” Not just Razor, but all of us. Perry was getting in the heads of a lot of our boys, and it had to stop or our game was going to completely come off the tracks.

  “But the fucking refs—”

  “Don’t worry about the refs. Worry about yourself. You let Perry get past you, and then he ran into Nicky. If you’d done your fucking job better, then none of this would have happened and it wouldn’t matter what the refs did or didn’t do.”

  “Fuck you,” he shot back. “I don’t see you scoring out there.”

  “Never said I was perfect. We all need to play better. Including me, and including you.”

  Razor glared at me, but he shut up after that.

  We sat and watched our PK team successfully kill off the Ducks five-on-three advantage, and with each second that ticked by, I could feel Razor’s mood shifting and his focus returning.

  By the time the attendant opened the door to let Razor out, I had the sense that his head was back where it needed to be, even if he was pissed at me for calling him out. That was okay. I’d done it one-on-one, not in front of anyone else. And he knew it was the truth.

  I got to leave the box a few seconds later, and the team as a whole settled in for a hard-fought game. But now we were more worried about ourselves and what we were doing than about Perry and his antics. I didn’t get a point in the game, and we lost—but we hung on until overtime to do it, getting the extra point in the standings by doing so.

  It could have been a lot worse. Bergy pulled me aside in the locker room after the game and gave me both a literal and a metaphorical pat on the back. “I don’t know what you said to Razor in the box, but whatever it was, you said the right thing.”

  “I just told him what I would have needed to hear when I was his age.” There wasn’t any reason I needed to tell Bergy or anyone else that I’d handed Razor his ass on a platter in there. That was between me and him.

  Bergy nodded. “Well, nice work. We need more of that from you, you know.”

  “I know. You’ll get it.” It was a hell of a lot easier for me to promise something like that than to promise I’d keep scoring like I had while Noelle was around.

  We flew back to PDX after the game because we had to play at home against the Stars the next night. They were already in Portland and waiting for us. It was after one in the morning by the time Babs and I walked through the door to the condo, and I’d been filled with a mixed sense of dread and anticipation ever since the game ended and I didn’t have that to distract me.

  She was gone. I’d known, deep in my gut, that she had left, but now there was no more room for doubt. Her cell phone was sitting on the bar in the kitchen with the charger and life-proof case right next to it, the credit card beneath it all.

  “I’m sorry, Kally,” Babs said. He shuffled insi
de the apartment with his suitcase, shutting the door behind us.

  I nodded, but that was all I could do for a moment other than stand where I was and try not to break down.

  She’d left most of the clothes I’d bought for her behind, but at least she had had the sense to take the waterproof gear I’d brought her right before she left. She might be in a shelter somewhere, or maybe she’d gone to stay with a friend, but if not something like that then she was bound to be out on the streets.

  The thought of it made me sick. I’d seen plenty of homeless people around Portland since I arrived here. They stretched out on park benches to sleep or in the covered entryway to businesses downtown after hours or anywhere they could find that they could catch a few hours in relative peace. They went around panhandling, begging for anything you could give them. Some used it for drugs, sure, but others just wanted to put a decent meal in their bellies. She’d already been too skinny from not eating enough when I’d met her. It wouldn’t take long for the little bit of weight she’d put on since then to waste away.

  I wanted to go out looking for her, but I didn’t have a clue where to start. And what would I say when I found her? How would I convince her to come back to me?

  Babs had already unpacked his bag and changed for the night, and I was still standing there staring at her cell phone and the credit card. Part of me had hoped she would have taken the card even if she’d left the phone, but that was about as unlikely as unicorns showing up to the next Storm game. Noelle didn’t want anything I knew how to give her. Babs came back out, his hair sticking up wildly after washing his face. “Get some rest, Kally. We can’t come up with a plan without sleep.”

  “We?” My voice was a frog croak.

  “Yeah. We.” He went to the fridge and took out a bottle of water. “You don’t know the city very well yet, so you’re going to need some help finding her. But there’s nothing we can do right now.”

  He was right, and I knew it, but it still took me a while to get myself moving.

  That night, I took an Ambien and slept in Noelle’s bed. Her scent was still on the pillows, which might have aided me in falling asleep more than the pill did. There was something about her presence that had always brought a sense of peace to me, and I experienced at least a small reflection of that just because her sheets smelled like her.

  I went to the optional morning skate the next day, mainly because I needed something to do to distract me. I forced myself to go through my usual game-day routine. There was no more point in calling to leave Noelle messages or in sending her texts, since her phone was in my condo and not with her, so I somehow refrained from doing that all day long. It had been the one thing I’d been able to do on the road to convince myself I was doing everything I could for her. Now there was nothing I could do.

  We had a hard-fought game against Dallas that night. They were making a late-season push for the playoffs, too, hoping they could get one of the wild card slots in the Western Conference. They definitely didn’t just roll over for us, but we somehow came out with a two-to-one win in regulation. I didn’t score, but I wasn’t a liability out there, either.

  Every time Bergy caught my eye lately, he gave me a little nod. And Scotty wasn’t screaming at me too much. I figured I was starting to find my way with this team, even if I couldn’t be the scoring forward they hoped I would be. I didn’t know how to score without Noelle in my life. She’d been this ray of sunlight, making everything around me brighter, but without her everything was going dark again.

  Since Noelle wasn’t there for me to go home to, I went out for a meal and a beer with the boys after the game. Burnzie pushed to go to Voicebox, a karaoke bar that had sake on the menu, and somehow he won out. Probably because most of the team was so young and their idea of a good time lined up more with his than with mine. The few older guys on the team went home with their wives and girlfriends after the game, so it was me and a bunch of young, mostly single guys.

  I would have preferred something quieter than a karaoke bar, and I wasn’t completely alone in that. Jonny and I stuck together at the back and listened to the other guys make utter idiots of themselves, and Babs kept close to us. He was still underage, but a lot of the local bars looked past that at least in terms of letting him in. He didn’t try to drink, but I got the impression they would have served him despite his age. Mainly, he just watched wide-eyed and blushed when the waitresses flirted with him.

  Even though it wasn’t what I would have picked, it was a fun night, especially when Burnzie put on a show by singing “I’m Sexy and I Know It” while doing a bit of a striptease to the screaming adoration of a group of drunk women. He didn’t really strip—he just took off his jacket and tie, undid a few buttons of his shirt—but they went crazy for him. Babs blushed some more watching it, but I got the feeling he was glad the women were fawning over someone other than him for once. Every time one of the women screamed, Babs sat back further into the shadows of our booth.

  Hanging out with the guys helped to ease the hollow ache of knowing I had to go home and Noelle wouldn’t be there. After Babs, Jonny, and I made sure the rest of the guys were going to be able to get home safely, Babs and I went back to the condo. It was just as empty as it had been when we’d left before the game, and Noelle’s cell phone and the credit card were still right where she’d left them.

  “Get some sleep, Kally,” Babs told me again, just like he’d done the night before. “We’ve got a day off tomorrow. We’ll get some of the boys together and come up with a plan. We’ll find her. We’ll make sure she’s okay.”

  “Yeah,” I said, and I knew that was the best I could hope for—that Noelle was all right. Not that she would come back to me. I still didn’t know how to give her what she needed. Nothing had changed in that regard, and it didn’t seem as though it would anytime soon. “Yeah, good night, Babs.”

  I headed off into Noelle’s room again, hoping that I could wrap myself up in her scent and have it ease the disquiet taking over me.

  That open, aching, hollow spot in my gut clenched and churned, and I felt like I would be sick. But it didn’t feel like the sort of nausea that would ease once I’d puked. This felt like it was going to stay with me for a very long time—months, years—just like it had when Liv had died. Noelle was still very much alive, at least to my knowledge, and yet I felt like I was grieving for her.

  “As long as you’re back by eight o’clock tonight, this bed is still yours,” Bonnie Carter said. She pulled her mass of long, brown hair behind her head and twisted it into a knot before securing it with a big hair clip. A chunk fell out right away, and she huffed but didn’t attempt to sort it out again. “At 8:01, if another woman is here and needs a bed for the night, you know I have to give it to her.”

  Bonnie was the manager on duty tonight at the women’s shelter where I’d been staying since I left Liam’s apartment. I’d gone out several days now, applying for jobs and volunteering at Helping Hands and doing other things of that nature, but I’d never had any concern about making it back before the cutoff. Not until today.

  “You can’t make an exception if you know I’m coming back?” I asked.

  I’d been offered some part-time work for a company that hosted events, Willamette Events and Party Planning. I’d be helping the caterers, clearing tables, taking out trash—you name it. If it needed to be done, I would be doing it. The best part about this job was that many of the events they ran were fundraisers for charities. What I would be doing gave the work meaning beyond simply making money. I couldn’t really ask for anything better than that. I mean, the company paid pretty decently, but the work was going to be sporadic. I couldn’t count on it being a full-time gig, but at least the work I would be doing was going to have value.

  This afternoon, they’d asked me to work a celebrity golf tournament that was raising money for the March of Dimes. The event itself was supposed to finish up by around five, but they’d told me to expect to stay behind for another two ho
urs or so afterward in order to clean everything up and put it all back to how it had been before we arrived. Between that and having to count on public transportation, I might not make it back by eight.

  “You know the rules, Noelle,” Bonnie said, her usually warm eyes taking on a sad look. I dropped off the laundry we’d stripped from my bed, and she picked up a stack of clean sheets. Then, together, we headed back into the bedroom. “I can’t make exceptions for one person or I’ll have to start making them for everyone.”

  “I know. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have even asked.” We’d always had rules about who could foster one of our dogs at Helping Hands, too. There was a good reason for most of the rules in places like this women’s shelter.

  “I hope you get back in time.” Bonnie helped me make the bed I’d been sleeping in as well as the three others in this room. “You’ve been a real joy to have around here. I can’t tell you how many more smiles there’ve been since you showed up, and that’s a blessing in a place like this.”

  Smiling while I talked to the other women who were staying here had been easy. Most of them were good women who had hit a rough patch, just like I had. I enjoyed spending time with them and helping to lighten the mood. It made it easier for me to accept the charity of being allowed to stay here, being able to talk and laugh with the women. It was only when I got into my bed at the end of the night and the lights were out that I let myself cry.

  It wasn’t self-pity that made me cry or anything like that. I just missed Liam. I missed the sensation of being wrapped up in his arms. I missed the way his whiskers tickled my cheek when he hugged me. I missed the way he called me älskling, his deep voice turning gravelly as it rumbled over me. I missed twirling my fingers in his chest hair until he let out an exasperated sigh and put his hand over mine to stop me. I missed his sturdy, steady presence that kept me on the ground instead of floating off in the clouds.