Twenty Miles

by Cara Hedley

  I turned, and a miniature woman five rows up snarled, straining against her husband’s forearm grasp. The husband grimaced with embarrassment, eyes sliding side to side.

  ‘Wheelchair!’ she shrieked again, her voice cracking. Toad cranked my helmet back to the ice.

  ‘Don’t look. Never look,’ she said, laughing. She watched the play, darting glances at the clock, and snorted. ‘That’s awesome – wheelchair, wheelchair! Worst fucking heckle in the history of hockey. I love it.’ The ref whistled Hugo offside and Toad hit the side of her helmet with her glove, dumbfounded. ‘Eleanor!’ This was the ref ’s name and Toad used it throughout the game like they were chummy.

  She watched the clock shuck off the last seconds of her penalty and lifted the door handle.

  ‘Keep the Sin Bin warm for me – and don’t forget to say your Hail Marys – ’ And she leapt out of the box as though skydiving, plummeting toward a snarl of players biting at the puck along the boards.

  I half-turned and looked for the heckler out of the corner of my eye. She’d forgotten her promises of my imminent handicapping and was now engrossed in the play, little claws buried into the husband’s bicep. I tried to think of the last time I was heckled, but couldn’t. Parents of the boys floated threats over the rink, but never at me.

  Sleeping Beauty Syndrome, Sig called it. No matter what I did on the ice, no one would touch me. Not the boys, not their parents. ‘Princess force field,’ Sig would say, drawing an invisible line around my body with her finger. I hated it. To hear those words directed at me – this seemed an impossible decadence.

  ‘Black belt!’ the heckler barked behind me, freed from her trance by a whistle.

  I sighed and watched the penalty’s epileptic countdown on the clock, my gaze seeming to slow it. The box hyperventilated around me, and I imagined the ancient breath of my sinning teammates growing inside me like mould.

  ‘Iz!’ Moon bellowed from the bench, on her toes, chin up. I nodded.

  ‘Go right on!’ she yelled, pointing to the net where Hal was wrestling the puck around a defenceman.

  Seventeen. Sixteen. Fifteen. Fourteen. Thirteen. Hal shot the puck at the goalie’s pads, a wicked wrist shot, and the Alberta D scrambled for it.

  I threw open the gate and jumped out, the air flooding my mouth like water, ice drenching the bloodied inside of my cheeks – I chewed them while I played, iron tasted later with the vague amazement of a sleepwalker.

  ‘Get her, Shauna! You get her, now!’ the heckler shrieked as I sprinted to their net.

  We lost. To the Pandas.

  ‘Mmm, sewage,’ Jacob said. We were walking along the river path – the Red River, thrown around one side of campus like a protective arm. The water looked hard and glossed when we’d first eyed it from the fifth-floor dining hall, trying to decide what to do. A colour that might be gathered like paint in your hands, but up close it swirled and churned, thick tongues of mud lashed in with green and orange.

  He was watching me. My muscles shifted in resistance. I knew that if I looked over, he wouldn’t flinch. His eyes would still be on me. He’d been watching me like this since the bookstore. In the dining hall at breakfast. At the rink. Like he was trying to figure me out.

  A huge squirrel, grizzled black, ran across our path carrying a ragged flag of lifejacket material in its mouth. The wildlife I’d seen around campus all appeared pumped-up, larger than life: the deer lounging aloof around the greenhouse behind Rez, all muscled ribs and supermodel legs, the squirrels like bear cubs. This wasn’t what I’d expected from the city.

  ‘Those squirrels,’ Jacob said.

  I wondered if he was thinking about home.

  ‘My grandfather – Shoomis – when he was really old and had gone a little ... squirrelly, so to speak – sorry, that was bad – he was convinced that all squirrels were communists.’ Straight-faced, Jacob squinted out at the river. ‘He’d get all worked up whenever he saw one. “You commies,”’ Jacob mimicked in a husky voice, face crumpled up, ‘“you stay away from my tomatoes!” – he had this garden he was always protecting from communist takeover. Didn’t worry about us, but made sure his cucumbers were safe. He died in his sleep one night, midsummer. Just went, you know. Kookum swore she knew exactly when it happened, even though he didn’t make a sound. Said it was like how the end of a thunderstorm can wake you – not the noise, but the quiet, she said. This sudden stillness. So she went out to the kitchen to call my dad, and – middle of the night, remember – a squirrel was sitting on the window ledge, looking into the kitchen. Tiny, this squirrel was, and kind of bird-like, kind of downy, like it just hatched out of an egg. And it just stared at Kookum, not moving. Watched Kookum make all her phone calls. And no one could understand what she was talking about because she was telling everyone she called, not that Shoomis had died, but that he’d come back as a communist. Proud. He’d come back as a communist.’

  Jacob kept staring out at that melted edge where the colour turned solid again. I watched his face, the unmoving creases around his mouth, laugh lines even when he was serious. He snapped his head toward me suddenly and caught me staring, his eyes a trap. He winked. I shook my head, laughed a little as another squirrel pranced by with a swatch of lifejacket, mud crusted around its mouth.

  ‘They’re digging a lifejacket graveyard,’ Jacob said. ‘How’s that for a goodbye to summer?’

  The way he said summer, the stinging S held for a moment on his tongue. I missed summer when it was gone the same way I missed Buck, and I wanted to tell Jacob this, with his S still buzzing between us, his own grandfather offered toward me like an outstretched hand – I could talk about Buck if I wanted to. I wondered at how calmly he was able to skate the edge of sentimentality. I didn’t know how to even start.

  Jacob’s arm brushed mine. I moved away from him. The sun spun and then lost its pivot, clattering instant shadows, as though the campus buildings were falling down over top of us. A woman with dreadlocks walked a fat Rottweiler along the path toward us. The dog wore a tie-dyed collar and stopped every few trees to lift its leg, standing stork-footed for a few fruitless moments, its bladder run dry.

  ‘Poor guy got no game,’ Jacob said quietly. The owner looked vaguely sheepish as she sung a low greeting, and the dog ignored us.

  It was as though he’d set a goal for himself. Once the dog had passed. The huge white pine with boughs hanging weary over the path. As soon as we reached that tree he’d try it. Like trying out a head fake on a D – which wasn’t fair because I had no warning, just his eyes that forecasted the movement of his lips right before his head swung like a wrecking ball toward my face.

  ‘Oh Jesus,’ I breathed and turned my back on him, quick, hands over my mouth like I was about to sneeze. But I hadn’t expected this at all. I should have expected this. My hands were still on my mouth so I faked a cough.

  ‘I have to go work out,’ I mumbled and scurried down the path, Jacob’s laughter at my back.

  ‘Isabel, you’re hilarious,’ he said.

  I saw him next in the rink as we practised. He sprinted down the stairs, hair damp after his own ice time, three others on his heels. Their cheeks all moved, steam coming off their heads. Moon explained the next drill and I looked over at Jacob. On his way up. He wore the blue underwear shirt they all wore under their equipment, with the navy rim around the neck and cuffs. A darker blue square clung to his back, long hoops of sweat under his arms. I imagined the salty smell passed between them. Hair pasted across his forehead as though he hadn’t touched it after he removed his helmet. His calves flexed in rhythm with the passing stairs, hamstrings glinting above, a fin of muscle, his mouth open. He had a nice mouth, I decided.

  Hal leaned over, helmet lightly knocking mine. Her breath a scratch over my cheek.

  ‘Don’t do it,’ she said. ‘Those guys are all pigs.’

  Centre ice, a Pronghorn winger threw a pass a couple of feet in front of me at a high-pitched screamer somewhere just beyond my left sho
ulder – ’Yeah, yeah, yeah!,’ a backup singer gone horribly wrong – and I threw myself at it, feet hungry with a win so close, tied 2-all, and we were winning the third period, coming back from the throbbing red zero below HOME of the first two periods. But you could feel it rising during the second intermission, communicable anger, Hal expelling low, fervent words around the dressing room, a desperation stirred in my legs, a need to show her I’d listened, I’d heard her, all of us turning to each other on the benches when she was done, repeating her words, mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, and then thrown back to the ice and gasping into life.

  Moon was juggling lines, searching for the formula that would create the boom, and so I’d been sent on one of her blind dates with Hal, right wing to her centre and I knew her shadow there along the boards as I lunged for the lazy Pronghorn pass – if I could just steal this pass, I’d give her the puck, her shape along the boards I could see in my hands’ eye, she could have it. And I sucked the puck off its track, inhaled it with my stick, spinning back toward their net and forgetting Hal in the dazzle of all that empty ice, the Pronghorns having pulled up their defencemen already, too presumptuous, and so I was speeding into the emptiness of their end, the rush and pulse of wind and breath and the rising chords of my teammates and the crowd and the laboured beating sound of a D killing herself to get back in position, the one like an oversized doll draped in a Pronghorn jersey, and their goalie puffing herself bigger like a spooked cat, spreading her arms, bending and widening and shrugging herself into place, my hands reading the net’s blank spaces, the holes around her body, the heated grunts of the D just behind me, and Hal shouting, ‘Go, Iz, yeah, you got time!,’ Scarlet voices carving into my back, my hands and feet flashing a hundred different lives, weighing their choices against the shifting crouch of the goalie, then my eyes saying there, pinning the upper left corner of the net, hands sending the puck into flight, up, but something catching, hands tripping, the puck wobbling in the air and then plummeting like a doomed plane, dull thunk into the goalie’s pads. The goalie dropped on it.

  Whistle.

  I stood there on the cusp of the goal crease. Gloves pounded my back, echoes through my chest. Nice try, Iz. Almost had it. Next time, buddy. I didn’t move. Hal sprayed to a stop in front of me, took off her glove, the wormed push of her fingertips through my cage, yanking my helmet in close to hers, breath hard and hot all over my face, a smell faintly curdled.

  ‘The right was wide open,’ she huffed. ‘What the fuck happened?’ Eyes wide.

  Breath delivered breech from my lungs. I gulped and gulped.

  ‘Eh?’ Hal demanded, but then she let go. Shook her head.

  ‘I shit the bed,’ I breathed. ‘I totally shit the bed.’

  She backed up a bit, eyebrows raised but I moved toward her.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘Hal, I – ’

  She turned her back and skated away, her strides like snapping rope.

  Ed ambled toward his office holding a Styrofoam coffee cup from the machine in the lobby. He smiled absently at me and looked away and then his eyes crashed back to my face.

  ‘Hey, nice game there, Norse,’ he said. My brain still revving replays of the fanned shot, all the different ways I might have not shit the bed.

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘a tie’s not a win, right?’

  He tilted his head at me, sipped at the coffee with distraction. Leaned in.

  ‘Hey, she would’ve gotten it either way,’ he said quietly, as though telling me a secret. ‘She was all over it. It’s math, you know. Kristjan always – ’

  ‘Okay,’ I grunted, Ed’s sad nostalgia cuffing me with weariness. ‘Gotta go eat. See ya, Ed.’

  I didn’t care about The Game or math or Kristjan. What made me feel sick was the birth defect in that shot and how this made me weak and the red push of Hal’s fingertips through my cage. I stalked off to the door and flung myself into the parking lot, the night, the headlights of Pelly’s car pinning me against Sam Hall. Waiting to transport me to the shinier, carb-bloated horizons of Theresa’s Pizza and More, where we were to replace the lost potential in our muscles with spaghetti and meatballs.

  Ed left to erase the mistakes of our blades.

  ‘I really want to make this happen,’ Toad said, peeking under the tail of her lobster. ‘I do.’

  ‘You put the ass in class, sport,’ Heezer said, leaning over from the next table.

  Toad snorted and nodded her head in amazement, jiggling one of the huge mottled claws. ‘Totally.’

  Pelly reached over without a word and dismantled Toad’s lobster in seconds flat, then gargled her wine and worked at a piece of food snared in her braces with her tongue.

  ‘You’re a star, child,’ Toad said, bowing her head over the opened lobster. Pelly shrugged and tugged on the tip of a napkin folded into a shell shape. The napkin collapsed, and Pelly smoothed it over her lap in one quick motion, simultaneously pulling down the hem of her dress. She crossed her ankles beneath her chair. I tugged on my own napkin and eyed the lobster in front of me. Sig usually cooked a few crayfish in the summer, and I’d learned to leave the house when she put them in the boiling water, still alive. The first time, I watched the crayfish perform a sluggish dance at the bottom of the pot as their shells turned Christmas light red, and I knew they were being lit up on the inside because they screamed, quietly, almost privately. Sig took a hammer to them at the dinner table. She kept it beside her plate and, without warning, swung like she was trying to kill them for the second time. Buck smiled while he watched her, baffled and amused.

  Everyone was eating theirs. I glanced around Pelly’s parents’ restaurant at the spangled constellation of tables the shape of kidney beans, of deformed hearts. Four or five to each table, and my teammates’ faces flickered eerily in candlelight as they laughed at each other and ventured with knives and glinting shell-crackers, classical music tinkling faintly in the background. They were strangers in makeup and dresses. Like real girls, I thought.

  At the table next to us, Woo was making her lobster perform an energetic dance to a song she only knew some of the words to, hummed loudly and off-tune. She’d drunk more beer than any of the other rookies at the warm-up party Boz had hosted in her apartment, shotgunning beers over the bathtub while Hal and Toad teased and hair-sprayed her black bob into a frizzy, off-kilter pompadour. She’d fallen on the ground laughing when they brought out the dress she was to wear, a pink and purple eighties prom gown with a silk-screened profile of Madonna on the back. She’d expressed jealousy at the two-foot-high inflatable beer-mug hat that was given to Roxy as part of her rookie uniform, while I’d thanked God that I’d managed to escape it. I’d tried to look at the situation like Woo did, tried to come at the humiliation in a different way. I’d attempted a few forced laughs when Toad unveiled my dress, a massive, hot-pink number with shoulder pads and a yellow bow drooping from the waist. Pink Sorel boots to match. I’d managed an additional weak laugh when Toad had turned the dress around to reveal Hockey Barbie written in huge black letters across the back. But Woo was drunk, and I could barely swallow sips of my own beer (slapped into my palm by Toad as soon as I walked through the door – ‘You’ll be needing this, Rooks,’) as Hal and Toad improvised the rest of the costume, any small ability to laugh dissolving there in Boz’s room while I sat on her bed, listening helplessly. They riffed off each other, grew my horror in sentences.

  ‘You know what we should do? Rip off one of the sleeves so it looks like she was in a fight or something. You know, Hockey Barbie duking it out with that totsi, Skipper, in the corners. You dirty bitch – drop your gloves like a man, or I’ll drop them for you – ’ Toad said.

  Hal jumped in. ‘Ooh – we could give her a black eye. Where’s that purple eyeshadow I saw over – ’

  ‘Holy shit – you know what I just thought of ? I think I might still have some of that tooth black-out from that Halloween, like, the football-player Halloween. Oh my God, that would be per – ’

>   ‘Yeah, and then rainbow eyeshadow on the other eye, and – stitches on her chin.’

  They’d followed through.

  I looked back down at the lobster. Pelly was disengaging the shell for me, deftly and delicately, as though diffusing a bomb.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said.

  ‘No prob.’ Her eyes dropped to the Jill strap resting on my lap, worn as a belt, the through-the-legs strap they’d severed swinging taillike between my knees. On it, Toad had scrawled, DON’T EVEN THINK ABOUT IT, PERV.

  ‘Hockey Barbie’s very own two-in-one Jill strap and chastity belt!’ she’d said brightly. ‘Watch her fend off hockey crotch shots by day and horn dogs by night! Hockey Barbie, defending her reproductive organs and her virginity all at once!’

  ‘Why do they call it Jill strap?’ Pelly asked the table.

  ‘Oh, Pelter-Skelter,’ Toad sighed, head down to the lobster, elbows pointing right angles over her plate. The candle splashed kaleidoscope spots across her face.

  ‘You know the nursery rhyme “Jack and Jill”?’ Boz said. Pelly shook her head. ‘You know, Jack and Jill went up the hill – ’

  ‘Oh yeah. Yeah.’ Pelly nodded rapidly. ‘Oh, okay. Yeah.’

  Toad abandoned the lobster, clattering her knife onto her plate, and filled her wineglass as she leaned back in her chair. She threw her hand up like a cheerleader as she chugged the wine, then dabbed daintily at the corners of her mouth with her napkin. I examined the cartoon on the Jill strap. I wondered if I could turn it backwards without them noticing. A bit later, I decided. I could already feel the wine in my legs, a slow tingle working its way up.

  ‘Whatever happened to Jill?’ Boz asked. She wore a purple scarf woven with gold flecks that trilled across her chest in the candlelight.

  ‘Jill who?’ Pelly said.

  ‘As in Jack and Jill. Jack fell down and broke his crown and Jill came tumbling after. Then what, you know?’