Her pupils opened. “I do not tell you shit so you can throw it back in my face.” She dropped her hands, and her jaw made a clicking noise. “They’re at my house, Derek, the whole lot of them. The house where I lived for fifteen years. Where Sebastian was a baby. I just stole a goddamn bottle of wine from my own house.” She tugged at her cuffs and collar. “My goddamn sister-in-law is probably washing the dishes right now.”
Derek backed up and folded his arms, trying to appear unmoved.
“Okay,” he said.
In the hallway, she turned and touched his face again, lifting the chin with two fingertips.
“Look,” she said. “Next weekend I’m stripping wallpaper. Next Saturday. I could use a hand.”
“What about your man from the bakery? Isn’t this a job for him?”
She was on the step, holding out a palm to test the rain.
“Do you need me to make a total fool of myself? I’ll be working on the house. Sebastian’s with his aunt and uncle.”
“Sure.” Without trying, Derek rifled through a series of memories. Kelly snored. She had a silly sense of humour that tried his patience. There were those hard, unblinking eyes when she made love. And she was generous. He couldn’t be sure how much of this remained. The generosity was still there, but she was judicious in how she parcelled it out.
“It’s a week away,” she said, shrugging and avoiding his eye. “If you don’t show, I’ll understand.”
Through the window he watched her walk up the middle of the street, tossing her head and swinging her arms with drunken bravado.
It was too late to cook pork. He had to get to Twin Rinks. Gathering a towel and underwear from the bedroom, he stopped to sit at the computer, and found an address for Curtis from one of the emails he’d been copied on.
Hi curtis;
Lookingforward to your trip.
I have a DVD of a hockey game in Detroit in 1965. Detroit vs Chicago. You and Mom and Lou were there/
Something must have happened at that game, because they paged your father.
Was he there? Curious.
Thought it was worth asking. See you soon
Derek.
The trick was to get the car going and avoid red lights. But Derek couldn’t avoid the lights, and stalled out twice en route to Twin Rinks. The bright-blue-sky song was turning in his mind, in his guts. Sunshine is breaking through, Oh baby…
The rink was not of this earth. It hovered in the dark above Blackler Avenue.
He was late, alone in the room, and had his skates laced before he realized his pants were still in the bag. He couldn’t face the laces again. He worked each skate through the nylon shell of the pants, and cut a long gash down the inside of one leg.
Outside the room, that was better. The air was chilly, aching cold in his chest. Reassuring noises came from the ice, cracking sticks and the razor slice of skates. The endless whisper of the place—the drone of compressors or whatever it was—that was good too. Derek chewed his sandpaper tongue, and waited for the play to shift to the far end so he could open the gate. Kelly’s wine was a sickly sweet glue in his mouth.
Davey Byrne spit through his teeth and Shawn Gover leaned over to suck wind. Nels Pittman had the puck. Starting wide at the boards, he turned a shoulder to the net and drove straight for it. That’s what he always did, regardless of opponent or situation, and never mind the passing of years. Lenny tried to force him, but lost the angle. Nels was almost on top of Brian when he shoved the puck through with one hand on his stick.
How long had he been playing hockey with Nels? Twenty years?
He was through the gate, slamming it behind him to close the seal and preserve the perfect oval world. Long, easy strides—one, two, three, four, five—took him to the dark team bench. The ice surrounded him, a curving, centreless space. He arrived and reached to open the gate, but it shifted and drew away. The blue paint marking the top of the boards quivered. His padded hand grasped at nothing, his left toe wiggled and slithered inside. That wasn’t a problem, really. But now his other arm was lifting, swinging his hockey stick skyward, brandished like a sword. The slithering skate nicked the steady one, his legs collapsed, and the corner of the wooden gate rushed towards him.
Instinctively, he turned his face and felt something like a rubber mallet bounce off his plastic head.
“Jesus.”
“Hold on, boys!”
The white lights were beautiful.
Faces loomed over him. Derek raised an arm to his eyes.
“You okay?”
He rolled over, chin cold against the frost. White lights, white ice. His right eye took in a long ridge of snow, the cut of a single blade.
Kent’s Pond, in the heart of winter.
“Fuck me,” said Heneghan. “You drive here tonight?”
Derek had been terrified of the ice, unmoved by his father’s coaxing or his mother’s assurances. He would cross the threshold, he said, only if Curtis held his hand. So together they walked out on Kent’s Pond, the two of them in their snow boots. The milky sky merged with the snowbanks and down into the glassy, alien world cracking and groaning around them.
“You okay?” It was Nels Pittman, laying a protective glove on his back.
Derek released his brother’s grip and dropped to his knees. He placed his palms flat, as if making handprints in cement. Up close, the pond wasn’t white at all. More the colour of ash, with bruises suggesting turmoil below. He leaned over and laid a cheek against the cold, felt the snow on his eyelash. He stayed there until his brother made him get up.
“Someone drive his car home after.”
Nels was next to him, gripping his arm. Derek lifted his face from the hard cold and spat a strip of rosy phlegm. His head throbbed against the helmet, which felt several sizes too small. Nels taught poetry at the university, even wrote poetry himself. That’s what Derek had heard. But he knew nothing of the man, nothing of his poems or family or happiness or disappointments.
“Nels,” he said, but couldn’t finish. The thought stabbed at him. We are alone.
Someone grabbed the other arm. He climbed to his feet, one wobbly blade at a time.
“Just take it easy, now. Sit back and watch for a couple of shifts.”
“Yeah.”
“You want to go relax in the room? Boys, someone go in with him.”
“No!” said Derek. He wasn’t going back there.
On the bench, Shawn Gover put an arm around his shoulder and laughed and laughed.
“Quite the smack!”
Kent’s Pond. How old was he, two or three? It was Curtis who told the story. But Derek had fashioned a private version of it, seen through his eyes. Almost a real memory.
Back before it was safe. Back before he even had a word for it.
Ice.
It could have been anything.
TEN
Nicole had dark, full eyebrows that hooked up and around the sockets. Her black hair flipped at the shoulders, making her look like a woman full of questions. Her throat was high, so her neck ran long and even, as did the nose above.
These details returned to him now, with Kelly at close range. Her brows were slivers, not at all like Nikki’s dog legs. Her bloodless face was improved by age, by its deep lines and the folds around her mouth. Bristling red hair fell in great bundles, and the body stretched across the futon was round and abundant, more so than he remembered. Here was a breeder, an adult, carrying life in her bones. Nicole was callow and girlish by comparison.
Derek’s day had begun with pre-emptory masturbation and too much coffee. After showering he applied Nicole’s old moisturizer to his forehead and elbows, dusted his left foot with a powder to prevent the peeling and cracking between his toes, and decided against the medicated patches for the corns caused by his skates. Finally, as always, he applied an antifungal ointmen
t to suppress the rectal itch that had troubled him these past several years. Now Kelly had him by both hands, a middle finger perilously close to discovering this condition.
He started to ease his hips away, and she promptly took the advantage, rolling and pinning him on his back. He was enclosed by her thighs. She leaned full against him.
“Mmmmm,” she said, like she was settling into a nice hot bath. The distant past flitted in and out of view, allowing them a measure of fluency. There was no wide-eyed wonder, no giddiness of the first encounter.
Rising on her arms, she shimmied a little, made another approving noise, and pushed. A good start, but the alignment wasn’t quite right. Derek was wedged against something bony and unyielding. If she flattened her hips, he could change his trajectory and they’d be on their way.
He pressed the small of her back.
“Okay,” he whispered. “Can we just—”
“Mmmm-HMM!” she replied, drawing away (Mmmm) and pushing hard against him (HMM!), jamming his erection back on its foundation.
Derek gasped. Taking this for pleasure, Kelly fixed him with a delirious smile and pushed again. The spasm shot up his thigh and through the pelvis.
“Ahggg-unhhh!” he screamed, and there was no mistaking him this time. Kelly pulled up and lifted a leg. Derek flipped to the floor and instinctively brought his chest to his knees.
Oh Jesus. Oh Jesus.
His hand reached down, frantically searching.
Oh God, no.
It was gone.
Gone, gone. He was maimed, ruined. The flaw, the fault line in his abdomen had finally given way. His precious egg, thinking only of self-preservation, had retreated, had run for cover.
“Oh fuck, no.” He said it out loud this time, and rolled again, facing the ceiling.
“Derek, no! You need gravity.”
Kelly guided him back to his knees.
He took deep, sobbing breaths and thought stupidly of the children’s rhyme:
Hitler, has only got one ball.
Goering, has two but they are small…
Inexplicably, Nicole appeared before him in her flannel pyjamas, propped against a pillow, lost in her book.
“Go away!”
“Do you want me to massage it?” said Kelly.
“Oh fuck. Oh fuck.”
“Just rub above your penis a little.”
He tentatively kneaded two fingers into his pubic hair, but already the knot was easing. He froze for a pivotal, agonizing moment, then perceived his fullness returning.
“Ahhh,” he said, almost sobbing. He lightly touched both testicles for verification.
“You okay?”
“I think so.” His eyes were watery and his stomach was in his chest.
He fell to his side. Kelly waited a few seconds, then carefully pushed at his knees to ease the fetal tuck.
“Just relax,” she said. He tensed against her fingers, which pressed along his lower abdominal. “That okay?”
He nodded.
“Open your legs a bit.”
He did as he was told, holding his breath. She rubbed the inside of his leg, touched behind his scrotum as if testing a freshly baked cake.
“Fat and healthy as ever.”
She was still on the futon, her thighs flushed red, the covers kicked away. She propped her head on an elbow.
“How did you know?” he asked.
“It’s not unheard of. I sort of guessed it might be, you know, a withdrawal. Especially the way you reacted.”
The hand moved up and gave his shrivelled penis a light, diagnostic squeeze. The Kelly he remembered had been skittish in bed, almost at odds with her body.
“You’ve changed with the times,” he said half jokingly. Her hand dropped and she fell back to face the ceiling.
Derek crawled from the floor and back into bed, cupping himself as he did so. Kelly turned her back, reached for a leather bag on the bedside table, and pulled out her cellphone. She poked at its keys, then let it drop to the bedroom carpet. Derek wrapped a hand around her waist, one finger trailing into the wiry red hair, and she settled against him. They lay like this for a long time.
Outside, the thaw continued with such vigour that it might have been raining, huge drops clattering from trees and eaves. People would be out in jackets and gumboots, driving shovels into crusty snowbanks, urging spring on. She had asked him over to strip wallpaper, and they had. Three hours of scoring, soaking, and peeling, enough to fill six or seven garbage bags. They smelled like glue and old wet paper.
“I had this notion,” she said now. “Back in my shit wife stage, when I was home with Sebastian. I had this fucked-up notion.”
Derek tightened his hold and pushed one knee between hers, further cushioning his damaged core.
“Billy and me talked about having another baby, and that was good, a good idea. Great idea, in fact. Except I had this notion that I, that I…”
She tossed a hand in the air.
“That I wanted someone else to be the father. That’s how insane I was.”
Another confession, crashing down like the icicles and clumps of snow releasing from rooftops outside.
“And I had this weird idea that I would go to your place and we’d go to bed, just go to bed once. I knew I could time it so it would work. And it wasn’t just pie in the sky, either. Jesus, I think I had my coat on a couple of times.”
She turned and rested her forehead against his.
“Pretty fucked up, hey?”
“Everyone has weird fantasies,” said Derek, though it did sound pretty fucked up. He thought of the weird chicks in high school, girls who wrote poems about suicide and dead flowers. Among the boys, all this peculiar behaviour had been taken for displaced sexual appetite.
Derek retrieved the comforter and pulled it over them.
“How long will I last in this dump?” said Kelly. “Six months?” She shrugged. “Bill thinks he can wait me out. Give me time and I’ll come back. He’s probably right.”
She kissed him so he wouldn’t have to answer. She moved deliberately now, with the long, descending sighs of a woman exhausted by battle, open to whatever truce might be laid on the table.
The door creaked. Derek opened his eyes to the gloom. The bath towel shading the window had lost its glow.
Another creak, and a thin shaft of light split the dark of the wall. Derek froze, his chest tight with terror.
“Mom?”
Derek’s arm was asleep, dead meat hanging outside the covers, exposed.
“Okay,” said Kelly. She swept from the bed, into her robe and to the door. “Did you get your dinner?”
The boy mumbled and his mother made motherly sounds. Derek didn’t move, tried to be invisible until he heard footsteps descending the stairs. He rolled to his back and shut his eyes, let himself breathe.
“Sorry about that.” She was leaning over him now.
“We shouldn’t have passed out,” said Derek.
“It’s okay. He’s a terrific kid. Sounds like he’s had a good day.”
Foolishly possessive, Derek parted the robe and slipped a hand inside. She studied him, eyes narrow, and let the hand rest on her for a few seconds before pulling away.
“Grilled cheese sandwiches,” she said.
Derek shivered at the touch of his jeans to his thighs. The place had a penetrating chill, from the floorboards up. The air warmed as he reached the foot of the stairs, where the boy sat on the floor holding a large glass of milk with both hands. It was a little house with no divide between kitchen and living room. Kelly stood at the counter, regal in her floor-length green robe. Her toes flexed rhythmically. She buttered bread and watched the skillet.
“Wanna watch the playoffs?” asked Sebastian.
“Already? Is it that late?”
&nbs
p; The boy shrugged, laughed at a Tim Hortons ad on the television.
“How late is it?”
“About eight-thirty,” said Kelly.
Derek walked to the stove. The boy was oblivious, or so it appeared.
“We slept a long time,” said Kelly, watching cheese blister in the bread holes.
“I better go,” he said.
She leaned her hips into his as a farewell gesture, scooped the sandwich from the skillet, halved it with a knife, and slipped both triangles into a brown lunch bag.
“Your reward, wallpaper man.” Her face was flushed, the eyes moist and clear. There was a great flourish of music from the television, and Sebastian started singing.
“Doot do-do-do doooooo!” He bounced on his heels, milk spilling from the glass. “Doot do-do-do doodle-ooooo!”
Daylight had hung on longer than expected, and the wind along Military Road had little strength. Derek ate the sandwich, grateful for it, enjoying the walk.
He should have seen it coming, the way a flare went off at the front of his leg with every sudden shift in weight. Today’s pain was different, more like the long, awful push of the dentist’s needle. He could no longer deny that his underpinnings were fucked up. Derek shoved a hand down his pants and held himself for a moment. With those marvellous, life-giving hips she had nearly unmanned him.
He descended Prescott Street, walking down the middle where the pavement was dry. The air was heavier when he arrived on Water Street, level with the harbour.
Three young women spilled from Jo-Jo’s and onto the sidewalk. They crouched to maintain their balance on high heels, and their knees bent inward under short skirts. Fussing with cigarettes, they broke into fits of giggles as a book of matches slipped through their fingers and onto the wet sidewalk. Derek had to squeeze past one of them, doubled over with laughter in the doorway. She didn’t seem to notice.
He sat at the bar. Quiet again tonight.
“Can you hand me some of those papers from this week?” Jo-Jo kept newspapers piled next to the cash register. Months old, some of them.
With a nod, Jo-Jo indicated that Derek could come around and sort through the stack himself.
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