Page 8 of 50 First Skates

“I haven’t met Noah Barrett.”

“You’ll meet him on the ice when we play against the Puckups. Or if you hang out at The Penalty Box. She’s off-limits. AndC—she has amnesia. ButDthroughinfinity, she’s Papa Bear’s daughter. So don’t fuck with her.”

“Wait, what? Back up. Amnesia? Is that what you said?”

“Yeah. She had an accident a month ago. Fell on the ice and hit her head. Now she has amnesia. It really sucks.”

“But she knew you guys.”

“It’s aphrodisiac amnesia,” Corey says.

Dave smacks him up the side of the head. “Anterograde. Anterograde amnesia. She has no short-term memory. She can remember everyone she knew and everything that happened upuntil the night of the accident, which was the night of February sixteenth. But every night that she goes to sleep, it’s like her memory of the day she just experienced is wiped clean. She thinks it’s February seventeenth, the day after the accident. Every day.”

I scrub my face with the palm of my hand. That can’t be right. “What?”

“You know Dory, the happy blue fish inFinding Nemo?” Dave asks, because he has a five-year-old and he relates everything to situations involving animated characters. “Even if she wasn’t your boss’s daughter, it would be like dating Dory. If Dory was a hot woman who could remember things for an entire day instead of just a few minutes. Also, Dory is aware that she has short-term-memory loss and Soleil isn’t. So that’s maybe not the best analogy.”

“Ya think? Are you telling me this is a permanent condition?”

“That’s what the doctors told Coach B.”

“Are you fucking with me? Is this some kind of messed-up hazing ritual you put the new guys in town through? Convince them that the coach’s beautiful daughter has amnesia?”

“That would be great,” Corey muses. “That would mean Soleil didn’t fall and hit her head and Coach Barrett wouldn’t have been distracted, the Comets wouldn’t have been so anxious for a month, and we’d have a fucking team to root for in the junior playoffs! But no. Nope. It’s real. This is life and it sucks.”

“Really fucking touching that you rank the Comets not being in the playoffs as a bigger tragedy than Soleil Barrett getting a brain injury that caused a permanent memory disorder.” Both Dave and Winslow smack him on both arms at the same time. “Idiot.”

I have to say—though I’m not an idiot, so I’ll never say this out loud—this is information that the assistant coach in me needed to hear. Would I have done anything differently with theteam if I’d known the situation I was walking into a week and a half ago? Not necessarily. Is some of the weight lifted now that I know the Comets and Coach Barrett were distracted for personal reasons for a month before I even got here? Honestly—yes. But that’s the coach side of me. The guy side of me is still really fucking confused and pissed off because I like this girl and I don’t want to believe what they’re telling me.

“Wait, so if this is true then why is it the first I’m hearing of it? I’ve been here a week and a half working with Coach Barrett. I know people in Calgary who know him. Why didn’t anyone mention it before I came over here? And by anyone, I mean why the fuck didn’tyousay anything, Dave?”

“Because he asked us not to.”

“Barrett? You’re telling me three thousand people in town besides me knew about the accident and the brain injury, but he asked everyone not to talk about it?”

“He doesn’t want her to know. He doesn’t want tourists to hear about it and mention anything to her.”

“So…you’re telling me that Soleil has no idea she has no short-term memory? Does she know she hit her head? Andhowdid she get injured? None of this makes sense.”

Dave shakes his head. “Here’s the deal. This is what Noah told me a couple of weeks ago at the bar after our game. They’d just brought her home from the hospital,” he says, settling further into his seat as he begins his explanation. “So, first of all, Coach Barrett hasalwaysbeen protective of his daughter, all right? Supposedly when she was, like, five years old he took her out on the ice to skate for the first time. She fell and hurt her hands, and he was like,Nope. No skating for you.He’s seen a lot of hockey players get hurt on the ice, and he forbade her from skating. Apparently, on the night of February sixteenth, she told her dad she wanted to go skating with her friend Jessie. Jessiewas upset because the guy she went out with on Valentine’s Day ghosted her.”

“I’ll kill him,” Winslow mumbles.

“Papa Bear didn’t want her to. They had a big fight. She went to bed early. All she remembers of that day ends there. But it turns out Jessie knocked on her window—because it was their Digital Detox Week, so she couldn’t text her—and Soleil snuck out with her. They drank at the park and then snuck onto the rink when it was closed. Jessie let her use her skates, which were a size too big, and Soleil twisted her ankle and fell.” Dave pauses for a moment, scrubbing his face. “Jessie called an ambulance, and they got there fast. But Soleil just happened to hit her head on the ice a certain way. When she woke up in the hospital the next morning—onactualFebruary seventeenth—Coach and the doctors explained what happened, and then a few hours later they had to explain it to her again. The first couple of days her memory window was pretty short. By the second week she was in the hospital, when they explained to her the accident happened over a week ago and she didn’t remember any of it, she got really, really upset. Coach and Noah found it so hard to watch they decided once they brought her home they’d just let her believe it’s February seventeenth for as long as they can.”

“How? How do they do it?” I ask. She’s such a bright, sharp woman, it’s nearly impossible for me to believe that anyone can fool her.

Dave looks at his phone to check the time, takes a swig of ice water, and gives me a look, like,Get comfortable.

I don’t. I can’t. This is the most uncomfortable I’ve felt in years. Not one thing about this morning has made me feel comfortable aside from those first few seconds when I saw Soleil before I started talking to her. I feel like I got punched in the head. My ears are ringing. I watch Dave’s mouth move, butI’m barely here. It’s like I’m having the shittiest out-of-body experience ever.

He tells me that Soleil lives with her dad and that she has always written in a journal her whole life. Every night for the past two weeks since they brought her home from the hospital, when she’s fast asleep, one of them will sneak into her room and switch out the journal she wrote in for a new one. Then they keep the journal she wrote in inside a locked safe, along with her cell phone, iPad, laptop, their Apple TV box, and the Wi-Fi router.

Every night, they put out a new wall calendar in the kitchen, with every day up to February sixteenth crossed out. Soleil has crossed out February seventeenth at the end of the day for fifteen days by now. She got a dozen red roses from her bestie Jessie on Valentine’s Day, so every few days, Jessie gets them fresh ones to switch out. They don’t subscribe to a newspaper or any magazines and they only watch DVDs and play records and board games during their monthly Digital Detox Week.

And since Coach Barrett happened to writeHave the best day ever, Baby Bearon the calendar on February sixteenth and she wroteYou too, Papa Bearwith a little heart, he’s copied that out onto twenty-five calendars. He’s already ordered more, just in case.

“That’s it,” Dave says. “It was a stroke of luck that her accident happened during Digital Detox Week, so they don’t have to deal with the phone-and-internet piece of it.”