Page 224 of Slashed Bonds

Two dates with three years between the second one and today.

I set the flowers down. White ones. She liked white, said color was for signs and white was for everything else, and I’ve never understood that and I’ve never bought her anything but white.

Then I sit.

On the ground, in front of the stone, on grass that’s gone stiff with the first frost of the season, and I look at the flowers I’ve placed and I let the thing come that comes every year.

Anniversaries come fast.

That’s the first lie of them. Faster when they’re death anniversaries, which makes no sense, because when a light goes out the world slows to nothing. I remember that. The week after, time went thick, like wading through something, and every hour was a room you had to cross, and I believed, with the whole of my seventeen-year-old body, that I’d never get to the other side of it.

That’s how you learn what the light was worth. Not while it’s on. After. When you’re standing in the dark where it used to be, understanding for the first time how much of the room it had been lighting, how many things you’d been seeing by it without knowing they were lit at all.

Her orbit mattered. That’s the plainest way I can put it. There were people who moved differently because she was in the room, and I was one of them, and when she went out of the room they all kept moving and I didn’t.

And then the days go.

That’s the second lie. The world spins. Clocks tick. People wake up and make coffee and argue about parking, and your world is in pieces on the floor and nobody steps around them, because nobody can see them, because the pieces are yours. Everyone else moves on. Not out of cruelty. Out of the plain mechanics of being alive, which don’t stop for anyone.

The circle of life. They call it that like it’s a comfort.

It isn’t. It’s a sentence. You have no choice but to move on too, because nobody is waiting for you to finish mourning. There’s no bench you can sit on until you’re done. The game restarts whether you’re on the ice or not.

Life goes on.

And it’ll go on past me the same way. I know that, sitting here. Doesn’t matter that I wear a C. Doesn’t matter who I put through glass or who I pulled off a hill at five in the morning or how many kids on a roster called me Cap and meant it. When my clock stops, the ones I helped will keep going, because that’s what I’d want them to do, and then one day the last person who remembers my face will stop too, and I’ll be a name on a stone that somebody with a brush takes the lichen off.

Except for the ones who carry you. That’s the only afterlife there is. A few people who keep you in their chests until theirs stop.

Her kid would’ve been three.

I do the math every year and every year it surprises me. Three. Walking. Talking in sentences. Old enough to hold up a sign at a rink if somebody lifted them onto a seat. I don’t know if it would’ve been a boy or a girl. Nobody ever told me, or nobody knew, or I was seventeen and didn’t ask the right question in the right room, and it’s one of the things I’ll never get to find out.

I smirk. At the stone. Because she’d have made the kid a sign too. She’d have had them at the glass with a piece of poster board before they could spell their own name.

Then I close my eyes and put the headphones on.

Rock. Loud. The kind with a guitar that saws, that doesn’t leave room for a thought to form sideways. I like it here. Not for the music. For what the music does, which is take the whole world and compress it down to a point inside my skull where nothing else fits, and in that point, for a while, I can be still.

Meditate. That’s what Nikolai calls it. I don’t argue with him. I don’t know what else to call sitting on a grave with your eyes shut trying to cross over to wherever she went so you can see her one more time.

Fifty-four percent.

It comes in under the guitar, because the dot is the one place I can’t lie to myself. Fourteen draws lost on Saturday to a Carrow center who shouldn’t have taken six off me. Not because my hands were wrong. Because I wasn’t there. You win a faceoff with a quarter second of attention so total the rest of the building doesn’t exist, and for a week the rest of the building has been all I’ve had. I’d bend over the dot and the linesman’s hand would be a sign over the glass, and the puck would be on the ice before I’d come back.

Semis in two weeks. The bracket posted this morning. The box at the end of Killian’s line on the kitchen wall has a name in it now, and the name is Hellsing Ross.

I knew it would be. We all did. The teams they paid lost on schedule and the one they didn’t pay kept winning, and the geometry of a bracket only has one place for two undefeated lines to meet. The night after the gala. On a neutral sheet with cameras on every dot.

Every draw against Ross. That’s the first tier of the thing I promised her on a hill. And I can’t win a draw this week against a boy from Carrow because I’m sitting on a grave.

Get it back. Whatever’s in the hole with you, climb out with it, because in two weeks there are four men on a dot who put a drug in her neck, and they’re going to be looking at my hands.

One more time. That’s all I’ve ever asked for, here. Not forever. One more look at the girl with the poster board.

She had one for every game. That’s the thing people who didn’t know her don’t believe. Poster board from the pharmacy, markers in a pencil case she’d had since she was nine, and a new sign every time I dressed, from peewee to the last game she saw. GO CASH. CASH IS KING. Once, after a broadcaster called me a disappointment, a sign that said THE DISAPPOINTMENT’S SISTER in letters a foot high, held up over the glass behind the bench for sixty minutes with her arms shaking. I scored twice that night. I didn’t look at her either time. I’ve looked at that sign in my head every day for three years.

The last one said SEMIS OR BUST. She didn’t make it to semis. Neither did we, that year.