Page 134 of The Fall

I should have thought of a bow.

Blair flips the lid open, and inside, a DVD gleams, marked by my handwriting:Calgary Wranglers: Full Season

It took me days to track down the right person who could help me. After my first eleven phone calls, I’d nearly given up. No one knew how I could get copies of every single game played almost a decade ago. Who wanted to rewatch old juniors’ games? Once the scouts saw the players for that year’s draft, that was it, wasn’t it?

But I’d done it. I’d found every game the Wranglers played the year that Blair and Cody were together on the team.

“I, uh—” I have no idea how to tell him what’s on that disc. “These are the games from the year you stayed down, with Cody. I found them all.”

Blair’s whole body goes still. A breath punches through him like he’s been shot. His Adam’s apple rises and holds, quivering, caught between speech and silence. His fingers brush across the surface of the disc, and his other hand rises, covers his mouth. His shoulders don’t flex. His eyes don’t move.

“They said they only keep the scout cuts.” His voice folds up and disintegrates. A muscle in his cheek jumps. The case creaks between his trembling hands.

Erin guides Lily into the kitchen, where they start to clean up.

He finally raises his eyes. I’ve never seen him this stripped of every defense. Across from him, Hayes hasn’t moved, hasn’t breathed.

I’m suddenly aware that I have crossed a line into his grief that he has never, not once, invited me to approach.

Jesus, maybe he doesn’t want to see these games. I want to reach across the table and take it back. I didn’t think?—

Blair moves to the living room without a word. Hayes rises next, and I follow them both, hanging back a few steps and watching as Blair drops to his knees in front of the entertainment center. He opens the case, removes the disc, and presses a button on the PlayStation.

Hayes takes a seat on the couch, perched on the edge like he might need to leap up and catch Blair.

I hover near the doorway, uncertain if I should stay.

Then it loads. The broadcast title card—WRNG-TV Calgary—flickers on screen. There’s no intro music, no highlight reel, only a local camera trained on warm-up skate in a small barn. It’s blurry, with that specific junior-league roughness: cameras long past the budget they were bought with, rink sounds too close to the mic, a loop of early 2010s pop-rock bleeding off the playback. The team skates their first lap in red and black. Most of the names on the backs of the jerseys are from players who never made it higher than major juniors.

A teenage Blair enters the frame, his shoulders narrower, his hair longer than it is now. His stride then already carried the power and fluidity that defines him today.

And then—center-right, number nineteen—there he is: Cody.

I know it’s him, even before the Callahan on the back of his sweater comes into view. He’s an echo of Blair, clearly his brother. Slighter, shorter, with that same dark hair and a hint of those same stormy eyes.

Blair sits back so slowly. No air leaves his body, and he doesn’t blink when the camera zooms in on his brother’s face beneath his helmet. He is impossibly young and vibrant, and I want to believe all of that goodness stayed vibrant in him past this game.

Every minute that passes makes the room smaller. The screen shifts to the opening proceedings. Cody and Blair are side by side, identical in their confidence. The announcers call their names into the arena air.

Cody misses glove-side on his first shift. He makes up for it two possessions later with a feed so smooth I feel it in my own hands. A minute later, the video jumps forward and resets at the bench. Cody wipes his mouth with one gloved hand andthen punches his brother’s thigh. Blair-on-screen leans into his brother’s shoulder, and the Blair in front of me, on his knees on Hayes’s carpet, shudders. His eyes remain fixed on the screen where his brother skates, alive and young and whole. He was so much more than what took him out of this world.

Cody scores in the first period with a lateral snap from the dots. The camera shakes with the crowd’s movement, but it captures the board-side celly between Blair and Cody.

Blair unravels. The glow of the screen catches the first tremor in his shoulders, but he doesn’t make a sound as the tears run down his cheek. His spine tilts forward. His elbows land on his knees. He hides his face in his palms, and?—

Crying isn’t the word for it.

There’s nothing clean about this pain. His body rebels against itself, muscles knotting and unknotting beneath his shirt. A tearing sound in his throat stops and starts. His hands are white-knuckled over his face as he tries to breathe. The inhale sticks in his chest. His exhale breaks apart. Another wave hits him and his spine curls tighter.

My soul turns inside out. My gift is grief; that’s what I’ve given him. This is a vivisection, and I’ve caused it.

Hayes moves toward Blair but freezes mid-step. Neither of us knows what to do. The room fills with static, with hurt, with the tinny echo of a hockey game from years ago where two brothers play on perfect ice, unaware of everything to come.

I desperately want to fix it. I want the air in the room back. I want time to rewind and for me to never, ever have had this stupid fucking idea. I thought maybe the footage would give Blair something to cherish, not something that would drown him. Maybe it would let him remember Cody at his best, when they shared a perfect year. Jesus, why did I think?—

The footage rolls on for fourteen agonizing minutes until the first period ends. The screen fades to black before transitioningto the second period, but I reach for the remote and pause the game.

Blair’s breathing comes in ragged pulls. I take a half-step toward him, then stop. “I’m sorry,” I whisper.