Page 31 of The Fall

Sixteen

It’s been seven days since the hit.

Seven days since the world slammed into me and I twisted in the dark, and now I’m stuck trying to make sense of the impossible.

Every time I close my eyes, the time I spent in Tampa slithers farther away.

I woke up in the hospital, anguished, and then I was sedated.

I woke up again, shattered, and everything I’d been certain of wavered like reflections sinking underwater.

It’s all slipping through my fingers, and the more I chase it, the faster it vanishes.

This is worse than fading away. It’s complete erosion, and I’m scrambling to hold on to the pieces of what I knew, what I lived.

Sometimes, my memories come in flashes. They’re not even images.

They’re textures, feelings, impressions: the heat of Blair’s skin, the drift of cotton sheets, the clatter of Nerf darts underfoot.

It’s been days since I bothered with the lights in my apartment. Shadows pool in the corners like spilled ink. In the dark, I can pretend that this is all a nightmare and that soon I’ll wake up in Blair’s arms, in our bed, in our life.

But I don’t wake up.

Tonight, I’m bathed in the glow of my phone, watching the Tampa Bay Mutineers skate across a screen too small to capture all of Blair’s brilliance.

The game’s halfway gone, and so are Tampa’s chances.

Blair’s prowling the ice and the guys are frustrated.

It bleeds from their movements, each pass missing, each hit harder than necessary.

Hollow shouts from the bench, his hands tight on the stick.

I’m watching a disaster in slow-motion, every misstep magnified.

I know these plays; I know how to help.

Or do I only think I do?

Blair glides across the ice while I drown in static silence. I know his body. I have felt the heat of his post-game muscles bleeding into me as we sat close together on our charter plane.

Haven’t I?

Here I am in the dark, clutching him through the static of my phone screen. Blair in pixels, me in fragments.

This apartment is a half-baked reflection of my mind.

For a week, I’ve watched every game Tampa Bay has played and studied every post-game video posted to the Mutineers’ website.

I’ve analyzed each slant of Blair’s lips and every tilt of his chin.

I don’t know what I was expecting to find: definitive proof of another world?

Confirmation from my own reality? There are ninety-nine logical explanations for what I’ve been through since the moment Zolotarev knocked me into oblivion.

Maybe my memories were an elaborate dream concocted by my traumatized brain as it battered around my skull. Maybe I blacked out and Blair was the last thing I saw before I lost hold of reality, and I built up a new one out of the blue of his eyes.

Or maybe the explanation is much simpler: I’m crazy.

I’ve tried over and over to verify what I can remember, but it’s all so thin.

The names of our trainers and coaches—gone.

Our team doctor—what was her name? My notebook lies beside me, the pages bruised with ink, all my failed attempts at fact-finding.

My memories taunt me, fingertips brushing the edges before whispering away.

A dream. All of it a dream.

Sleep, I need sleep, but every time I close my eyes he’s there. I dig my palms against my eyelids, willing something to surface.

I flip through the pages of my delirium. I’m clutching at nothing, aren’t I?

But at least, in these messy pages, Blair is here, close to me again. I’ve sketched him so many times.

His eyes stare back at me dozens and dozens of times. Some are quick sketches: the curve of his arms, the set of his shoulders. Others are painstakingly detailed: the exact pattern of freckles across his nose, the way his eyes crinkle when he smiles.

God, the details. The way his hair lies after it’s dried.

A ghost of a tan at the line of his sunglasses.

It’s these details that make this whole thing so fucked.

The curve of his jaw, the angle of his cheekbones, the intensity of his eyes: I know these more than I know myself.

The scent of Blair’s skin after a game. The feel of his hand in mine. His laughter, low and warm, all for me.

I study my work. It’s good, too good. How can I draw someone if I don’t know him? When I try to grasp at my memories and pull them out, they dribble away, but every detail of him stays sharp. Still, it’s not enough.

My phone chimes: a text from the Orcas’ trainer. I swipe it away without reading. My real world feels paper-thin. I’m supposed to return to practice tomorrow. I’m supposed to have been using this week to recover. Screen-free. Taking care of my brain. Working out. Getting myself back in gear.

I turn back to my notebook. Blair’s eyes stare back at me.

This sketching is becoming an obsession. It’s evidence, I tell myself, and turn to a fresh page to begin again. Is this what insanity looks like? This single-minded fixation?

Tampa’s game plays on. Blair is there, the camera lingering on his face during an icing call. I watch him, drinking in every detail.

His eyes. I begin and end there every time.

Blair’s on the ice, doing everything right, and it’s all coming out all wrong.

I should be out there with him. I could help him, be there where he needs me to for that pass.

Now he’s heading to the corner, pressuring Nashville’s defenseman and coming up with nothing.

Tension runs through his turn, the sea drawing back before a hard swell.

If I pick up this fucking pencil and nail down the angles where his cheekbones slide into his jawline, maybe I can catch a piece of him to hold on to. Maybe I can preserve the whole ocean that stays trapped behind his eyes.

Who is he that I’m drawing? Is he the Blair on the screen or the one in my head? Are they two different men?

Christ. I’m cracking.

I need him here with me, but the more detailed the lines I draw, the more agonizing his absence is. He’s here, but he’s not.

Nashville scores again; Blair’s stick cracks against the ice. He skates to the bench, head-down, jaw set and grim. The shot lands on his face and my heart stalls; it’s as if he’s staring through the lens at me, asking why the hell I’m here while he’s out there.

I want to scream, to tell him that I’m trying, that none of this makes sense, that it doesn’t add up.

Tell him that I’m sorry, that I’m so fucking sorry, but I don’t even know what for.

He’s a million miles away, and I can’t get to him.

I can’t remember what I’m supposed to. Everything’s falling apart, and all I have left are these sketches of a man who doesn’t know me, who I love more than the sun loves the sky.

Tampa’s losing to Nashville and I’m losing my mind.

If I can remember one thing, one goddamn detail that lines up with reality, then maybe the rest of it…

“I love you,” I whisper. “God, I love you.”

My words hang. For the space of a breath, I let myself believe that maybe, maybe?—

But reality slams back: I’m alone in the dark, whispering to a drawing of a man I’ve never met.

You can draw him, but you can’t reach him.

He’s not yours.

He never was.

No. He exists in the graphite beneath my nails, in the hammering beat of my heart.

He has to.

Remember.

Remember.

This is home, I remind myself. This is your home.

Bullshit.

The light in Vancouver sucks the life out of everything, brittle and ready to snap. Tampa’s sun and sky, with everything drenched in sultry joy and booming, brilliant colors, is a universe away. Even inside Tampa’s arena, there was something extra, something that felt like?—

Home.

No, I tell myself. Light’s just light.

The door to the Orcas’ locker room is too close, too huge.

I hesitate, one sneaker scuffing against the polished concrete, my breath faltering.

For a moment—one ridiculous, treacherous moment—I hope that when I push through those doors, I’ll find Blair inside, the eye of the hurricane that was our team.

He’ll see me, and he’ll shoot me that half-smile that unravels me every single time?—

When I walk into the room, my Orcas teammates turn toward me like a jury facing the damned.

Conversations die mid-sentence. Tooks and Pugh stop laughing.

Becky moves past me like I’m not worth the effort to sidestep.

Wilhelm’s leaning over, tying up his skates.

He doesn’t look up; he jabs his chin toward my stall, a lonely cubicle where my equipment sits, untouched and dusty.

Eyes slide off me like water on glass. I catch a flicker in Pugh’s gaze, a crawl of something across his expression. He turns back to his own laces.

Chandy, at least, breaks his silence enough to speak at me. “I don’t know if you’re up for this, Kicks. I mean, are you really up for coming back?”

“Dude, don’t.”

“You’re wasting your time, man.”

I don’t look to see who’s saying what.

Well, it’s the welcome wagon I expected, isn’t it? Big and boisterous, full of love and cheer for their favorite teammate—not. I should be thrilled they didn’t change the locks on me.

I don’t belong here. They know it, and so do I, and now we’re done pretending, I guess. It’s not that they hate me; they’ve just moved on. I’m a has-been, a yesterday who’s forgotten to go away.

I shudder into my gear. It’s rote, muscle memory, ingrained in a place I used to trust. But muscle memory’s a joke.

What good is memory when all it digs up for you is a (complete, total, all-absorbing, fascinating, perfect, alluring, wondrous, belonging) nightmare of your deepest desire brought to life, only to be yanked away?

Blair, laughing. His eyes dancing as he passes me a puck in practice. You’ve got this, Kicks.

Over the past eighteen months, three episodes in the arsenal of podcasts I listen to have featured Tampa Bay Mutineers’ players—Hawks, Mikko, and Hayes.

ESPN feeds me a steady diet of news from around the league right to my phone, twenty-four seven.

How many articles on the Mutineers did I read without realizing?

Did Corsi stats and play breakdowns lead to wild dreams?

Did my memory take those scraps from inside me, seize Blair’s shadow on their blue line that night, and spit out a life I’d never have admitted I craved?

If we’d been playing Edmonton that night, would I be dreaming of oilfields and Albertan plains and endless snow? Would I be staring north instead of south?

Fuck memory.

It was real to me , more real than anything, but now I have to keep living in this world, the one without him.

I don’t know how. I don’t know if I can.

On the ice, it’s worse. This air, this cold—it’s like the arena resents me. Vancouver feels hostile down to my atoms. This place doesn’t care if I’m here to play or die.

“Kendrick!” Coach’s voice shatters through me. “Get your ass in gear!”

The first drill begins before my hands can find the right grip on my stick. Becky waits a half-second, then asks, too loud, “Ready, Kicks?”

Catch the pass, deliver it clean, skate tight patterns. It should be rhythm, pure rhythm, easy as blinking. Instead, it’s chaos. Nothing sticks. My stick scrapes like it’s got Velcro stuck to it. My edges slip. I waver, and?—

I’m in Tampa. Hayes’s voice cuts through my fog: That’s it, Kicks, you got this!

Blair and I are poised on the blue line, ready to take off.

His eyes pierce right into me, and I see him inhale, exhale.

Watch a bead of sweat travel down his temple beneath his visor.

Catch the flicker of his lips, a there-and-gone smile, for me.

The whistle blows. We’re in it together, sweeping down the ice, two parts of a whole.

We dance around the defense, our other teammates set against us.

He finds me in the seams. I bury the puck like we always do?—

“Wake up, Kendrick!” Coach’s bellow snaps me back, and the puck slides past the end of my stick.

I need to breathe, but I’ve forgotten how. I’ve got feet for hands, and didn’t we joke about that? At breakfast, right? What would you rather have— Imagine how big your skates would need to be! Well, not yours, of course ? —

Tampa was my dream, but this is a shitshow. It’s the fifth, maybe seventh time I trip over my own uselessness that I know my disconnect goes deeper than frayed nerve endings and exhausted limbs.

A perfect pass, me and Blair in sync, the puck sailing from his stick to mine ? —

The memory sucker-punches me; I catch a rut in the ice. The fall is fast and I hit the ice hard. I’m down, the wind knocked from me, the puck nowhere near.

My mind can’t pull out of itself. Tampa’s still inside me in flickers and flashes, ghosts that move on the ice in between here and there.

The ice doesn’t care about my grief, or my shattered dreams, or about the gaping hole ripped through my soul.

Fuck, fuck. I’m spiraling. When I went down, I didn’t come back whole. I didn’t come back right. I remember. I forget. My heart isn’t here.

“Fuck’s sake, Kendrick!”

Our final drill is a breakaway. I charge down the ice, alone. I see the lanes, the openings, and if I get the goalie to bite?—

The stick’s wrong. Or the puck is. No, it’s you , Torey, fucking loser. The rink widens, deepens, narrows. My edges give, the puck snakes away, the net rears up, and?—

I fall.

My crash into the boards cracks around the rink, ripping open a rotten, wounded place inside of me. I have a year of worthless memories festering inside me, a collection of meaningless moments, and still, still, I want?—

But I’m nothing . I’m not someone’s future or their forever, and I’m not the light that fills their eyes. I’m not someone’s best friend, or a team’s reliable goal scorer, a clutch player who took a team into the playoffs.

I am nothing.