Page 8 of The Fall

Four

Shadows chase across the dashboard as Hayes drives me out of the garage.

Blair had to stay for a meeting and they must have planned for Hayes to drive me home, and home is, apparently, Blair’s house.

Whether he and I live together officially and openly is a mystery, but Hayes at least knows exactly where to take me.

What happened to my truck from Vancouver? That’s apparently another loose end in the tangled mess of my memory.

Slashes of tropical light flicker between the trees.

It is so much brighter here than in Vancouver.

Even with sunglasses, my eyes ache. Hayes is a comfort and a challenge.

The easy banter, the trash talk, the listening as he rambles—yeah, I can do all that.

But when he gets specific and asks me my thoughts on practice or our plays or our penalty kill, I’m over my head.

Which he proves when he asks, “You sure you’re all right, Kicks?”

My heart is revving past the redline. “Yeah, I’m good.”

Hayes nods, his gaze steady on the road. “Last night was rough, huh?”

“It wasn’t awesome.”

He shakes his head. “Fucking Zolotarev.”

I hmm like I agree, like I have any clue what he’s talking about.

We turn, and twist, and navigate into a neighborhood of stately homes. It’s a nice neighborhood, more than a mile above my old Vancouver apartment complex. Blair lives—or we live?—in a canal-front home in the quietest corner of Punta Gorda.

“Home, sweet home,” Hayes says, pulling into Blair’s driveway.

It’s a sprawling house, low-slung beneath the Florida sun, sitting on an entire corner lot.

Here, people value their personal space.

The yards are immense, and neighbors are more of a concept than a reality.

A canal borders the yard on two sides. It’s a magazine cutout.

It screams success, serenity. It also screams way, way out of my league.

“Thanks, man.” I slide out of Hayes’s Escalade like I belong here.

“No problem. I’m always happy to be the friendly neighborhood Uber.” He smiles, big and bright, and I see myself in the reflection of his shades. No wonder everyone keeps asking me if I’m all right; I am doing a shit job of hiding how fucking terrified I am.

I hold out my fist for a bump and grab my bag. “Catch you later.”

He bumps back, explodes his hand, goes into a rocker face, and shifts immediately back to his full-wattage grin. “See you bros later!”

His tires squeal as he backs out in a J-turn and swings his Escalade around the cul-de-sac.

This isn’t the kind of neighborhood for drifting, but Hayes isn’t the kind of guy that cares about that.

He beeps his horn once and waves out the driver’s-side window.

I wait on the driveway until he makes the turn off the street and disappears around the corner.

This is going to be hard enough without an audience.

It takes me four tries to find the right key for the front door.

When I get it right, I push open the front door and step into a palatial space, a living room, kitchen, and lanai, all seamlessly blended together.

One wall is made up entirely of glass sliders.

And, yep, there it is, the backdrop for all those photos of me that I found on my phone.

The pool, the chaise lounges, the perfect blue sky. Our backyard.

Kitchen to the left. Stainless steel, white marble. An island big enough for an entire hockey team. Our bench at the rink is smaller than that. A hallway to the right. Doors and bedrooms. Our bedroom.

I don’t recognize any of this.

I didn’t get a good look this morning. The yard and the house had been shrouded in darkness, and with Blair awake, I couldn’t go poking around and investigating my own life. I’d eaten a banana because it was on the counter, and I didn’t need to hunt for a mug, a bowl, or a spoon.

So, I’m home, in a home that doesn’t feel like it.

Remember.

Or at least get better at faking it.

I need to learn my own life, inside and out.

I tiptoe around, my footsteps echoing in the space. Blair’s style is minimalist but lived-in. We ditch our ball caps and our gear bags in the corner of the kitchen, drop the mail on the counter. Coffee mugs wait to be washed in the sink. Empty bottles of Vitaminwater and Gatorade huddle together.

There are photos on the fridge, stuck beside the team’s monthly practice and travel schedule and the trash pickup calendar. They’re mostly him and me: a selfie from the pool, the two of us on the ice during game warm-ups. A few others full of faces I don’t recognize.

He cooks, at least a little. The knowledge appears from nowhere, something I know out of the blue.

He cooks. I sit there, on the stool opposite the range, and sometimes he’ll give me something to do—chop this, peel that—but mostly he cooks and we talk.

We share a bottle of Gatorade. One time, I tried to pour it into his mouth because his hands were covered in batter—batter from what?

—but I missed, and I spilled it down his chin and chest. He squawked; I laughed, and then I spilled more.

He cooked the rest of dinner shirtless, and I said?—

What did I say? Damn it, what did I say? Was that a memory? It has to be, has to be. Where does it lead, though? What happened next?

There’s a bowl of fruit on the counter, the same bowl I snagged my banana out of. Oranges, mangoes, apples. We eat mangoes together. The sweet, sticky juice of mangoes on our fingers, his arm around my waist, pulling me close, our bare chests brushing?—

These memories are like faded home movies, the colors washed out, the details dropping into static. Half-formed, unfinished. Never out of post-production.

A soft ping from my phone breaks the silence. A text from Blair.

This meeting won’t end. How’s the head?

I smile. It’s automatic, a reflex, and so is the tender excitement curling through me.

Not bad. I’m doing better.

Fingers crossed, that becomes true.

Stretching helped.

And it had. Whatever that was, some combination of stretching or centering or balance work, those twenty minutes in the dark felt like twelve hours of sleep and a dose of good painkillers.

Good.

Hayes had said Blair was worried about me, enough to be noticeable. I barely know Blair, but it’s clear he’s not an effusive open book like Hayes. If you can read his emotions, they must be overpowering him, and if Blair is this worried today, now, after a bad night and a hit…

I stare at the screen, my thumb hovering over the keyboard.

How are you?

As replies go, it’s pretty weak, but I need to start reciprocating here.

Grinding through.

He sends a melting smile.

Be home soon.

And then a heart emoji appears.

Everything inside me stops. I close my eyes, drop my phone on the counter, and sink my face into my hands. How do I respond to that? What do I say to the man who loves me when I can’t remember holding his hand?

The sound of Blair’s laugh floats through my mind, clear as day, washing through me.

How is this my life? How did I get this?

Breathe in, breathe out.

Remember.

And focus. I’m on a mission here: find myself. Follow the breadcrumbs of my life. Follow them so well I can climb inside this life, even though I’m a stranger. A cuckoo.

The living room is comfortably chaotic. There’s a massive sectional parked in front of an equally massive flat-screen TV.

Water bottles and game controllers clutter the coffee table.

Slides and sneakers lie kicked off at the edge of the shag throw rug.

Throw pillows seem piled to support two couch-chilling options: two guys sprawled out with toes together, or two guys glued together in the corner, entangled.

I curl up on one side like I can divine memories out of cotton and stuffing.

Of course it doesn’t work like that. Amnesia isn’t healed by osmosis of furniture.

Still, I settle in and dig out my phone again. If I’m following breadcrumbs, there’s at least one trail that will lead me somewhere definitive. I pull up YouTube.

Before, there were dozens of videos devoted to Torey Kendrick, that washout loser, that bust of a draft pick, a has-been nobody marking time until he’s sent packing from the league. I never made the highlight reels, but I sure made it on a lot of videos of the ‘Biggest Busts.’

Now?

I don’t recognize the guy on the screen.

I’m flying down the ice, a blur of blue and white, puck dancing at the end of my stick.

My dad used to tell me I had magic in my hands when I was a kid, and now it looks like I do.

On my phone, I smile after burying the puck in the back of the net.

This Torey, the one in the videos, is fearless.

He’s a gamer, fully in control, fucking magical on the ice.

He’s exactly who I dreamed I could be when I was a kid, and he’s everything I believed was dead and gone about myself.

I’m watching a shattered dream that’s been glued back together.

I’m not that Torey.

That Torey, that beautiful, confident phantom on the screen, exists only in the flickering light of this life I can’t reach. He’s a ghost haunting what I can’t touch. What hurts worse—your dream come true and losing it, or realizing it came true for someone else?

I’d rather stay on the couch and disappear than keep going after that. I should have saved the YouTube videos for never.

It takes me a while to enter our bedroom.

My clothes are mostly in the hamper, some piled beside it.

In the closet, I recognize suits and button-downs and clothes in my size.

The drawers have my shorts, my T-shirts, my lucky pair of boxers.

In the bathroom, the second vanity has my shaving cream, the brand of razor I like, the hair pomade that works best with my mess of hair.

There are traces of me everywhere. That’s my side of the bed. That’s my phone charger on the nightstand.