The Light That Wraps You

Now more than ever my thoughts turned to you.

I remember it all so well. We all have those little moments, those memories of a time long since past. Like e-mails, they had attachments, sights and smells we encountered that day that would ensure we never forgot.

Like you and I. Maintenance had just cut the grass outside my apartment building, and that new, fresh scent hung thick in the air. It was May and the city had warmed into the low seventies, with the sun peeking out behind clouds. The weather was perfect, symbolizing the promise of things to come, like summer and what we hoped would also be the Stanley Cup. We were several days into the Finals against the Red Wings, and I had been proud and exhilarated, making what the analysts called my “playoff debut”. Good things were everywhere, even if we’d only won one game so far.

We had a day off between game three and four. I had just come home from practice to find my refrigerator was alarmingly empty. I was three feet out of my front door and on my way to the grocery store, inhaling that freshly-cut grass scent deep into my pre-summer lungs, when my cell phone rang.

This was before I bought a house. It was a small apartment, a temporary fix to my living arrangement. I hadn’t been in the city for long, having barely spent some of the season away from Wilkes-Barre/Scranton, and it was not so much a home as a place for me to crash at night. You and I had talked about houses in one of our last phone calls, and I still remember you told me, “Make sure it is big enough for parties”. Hoping that I could cement myself on the roster, I was going to purchase one over the summer, with you as my advisor.

We had just spoken the day before. I remembered it so vividly, how you were out of breath because you had run to the phone. “Kris?” you answered, like I was the only one who ever called you. “Sorry, I was out on the bike!”

The bike, of course, was your motorcycle. You had just purchased it several weeks before. The Canucks hadn’t made it to the playoffs that year, and so you suddenly had a very long summer stretching before you as you patiently waited for me, jokingly saying that I had better show up in Montreal with the Cup or not at all.

We had both talked about getting bikes, about riding around Montreal during the summer when you came to visit and train. I was so excited for you, and I couldn’t wait to have one of my own. Even if we lost the Cup, I could still look forward to spending all that time with you. It had been such a long time since we’d been able to, and it was going to be fun.

I answered my cell phone on the second ring. It was our agent, Kent Hughes. I wasn’t afraid of him, per se, but getting a call in the middle of the afternoon was never a good sign, and I picked up with a ripple of anxiety starting in my stomach and spreading outwards. “Hi, Kent.”

“Kris.” Such multitudes in my name. He sounded weak and tired, like he had just run uphill on jelly legs.

I froze. “What? What’s wrong?”

He sighed heavily. “It’s Luc.”

“What about him?” Panic battered my system, making my heart rate leap through my skin. Had you switched agents? Had you been traded?

“He was in an accident this morning.”

All the breath seemed to vanish from me, like smoke taken by the wind. My hand shook so badly I nearly dropped the phone. I spoke, but the words weren’t mine; they seemed to come through a haze, through an underwater tunnel. “What happened? Is he all right? What hospital is he at?”

“He was on his motorcycle, and he lost control. He--” Kent cleared his throat, and it was then that I knew he was crying. “I’m so sorry, Kris, but Luc has passed away.”

Passed away. Euphemism for died. I knew what the words meant. I knew what he was telling me, and somewhere inside of me, they clicked. A light bulb switched, the power going out, as a piece of me flickered off and died. I slowly lowered my cell phone from my ear, and snapped it shut. I clenched it tightly in my palm, my nails scraping against the plastic. My soul was anchored to that phone; it made me feel calm. A fog descended over my mind, allowing me to walk back up the stairs and into my apartment. As soon as I closed the door behind me, my cell phone was flying through the air, smashing against the opposite wall. Pieces of plastic rained down on the carpet.

I walked into my bedroom next. A calm fury seized me in its icy talons. I made no noise, gave no indication that I was about to cause utter destruction. There was only this feeling, this cold air seeping from my lungs into my body, through my blood and into my very bones. A rushing, like waves breaking on vicious sharp rocks, echoed through my ears like a seashell and I couldn’t hear anything, couldn’t feel anything, with numb fingers and nails digging into my palms.

On a shelf were trophies, awards I had been given, pictures, medals. I swept my arm across it, knocking everything to the floor. I smashed the shelf with my fist and it fell from the wall. I moved then to my dresser. I pulled out the top drawer, upended it, and then threw it viciously across the room. It shattered the sliding glass door that led to the balcony, bouncing against the railing before falling over. Seconds later, I heard the crunch of broken wood as it collided with the sidewalk. I pushed the entire dresser over and it crashed to the floor, spilling clothes.

Next came the bed. I ripped the blankets and sheets off, throwing them on the floor. I hauled up the mattress and threw that through the broken glass door too. It landed with a whump on the balcony. I smashed the bed frame to pieces, shredded my pillows, and knocked every single picture I owned off the walls. I kicked a hole in the door and punched the walls until my fists were bloody. The noises I made in my fog were my own, were secret, were animal sounds, something you would find in the depths of the forest, or on the Discovery channel. I wasn’t myself. Somewhere in that moment, I was gone, and some primal being took over.

When I came back to myself, who knows how many hours later, I saw what I had done. I saw my bruised knuckles, my bleeding hands. I saw the splinters and the cuts, and I tasted bile in the back of my throat. I fell to my knees and dropped my head into my hands, pulling my hair until my eyes watered from the pain. And then I cried. Giant, avalanche sobs tore out of me, almost as painful as vomit. I heaved, trying to catch a breath in between the wracking screams and blinding tears, but I felt like I was drowning in myself, in what I was feeling.

This was not real. This could not be real.

I screamed myself into an exhausted sleep, right there on the floor of my wrecked room. I entered what Saint John of the Cross called “the dark night of the soul”. The world behind my closed eyes had lost all its light and color. I was alone, in every echoing, empty sense of the word. Just thinking it made me feel as if I was standing in the middle of the pews of the Basilique Notre-Dame de Montréal screaming out your name and having it echo back to me in the derelict air.

The very next day, I called Dan. He was still “Coach” to me then, still just a man I needed to impress rather than someone I could confide in. He knew, of course. The entire hockey world knew, especially after the painful, dazed press conference I was forced to give. I wanted nothing more to leave. Dan recognized that.

“Go,” was all he told me. So I went.

I missed game four, and instead flew to New Brunswick. Those few days that I was there are still hard for me to remember. I was not in the waking world with everyone else. I was with you in the land of the dead, wherever that was, across the rainbow bridge that spanned our worlds. A piece of me had cracked and left; it was wandering, searching for you, desperate to bring you back, even if I had to claw my way through hell and ash only to find just bones on the other side.

Before I had known you, I hadn’t really had many friends, and none of them were people that lasted with me. When I met you as a young teenager, there was something about you that told me you would be different. You were my first real best friend, and I was so certain that we had forever waiting for us. You were the only other person besides my mother to see me cry. If you ever plucked up the courage to ask Charlene to marry you, I was going to be your best man. That was how it was. Before you, I had known emptiness, but now, after you had gone from my life, I knew a new sort of emptiness. It was despair and loneliness squared, personified, amplified. It took over everything.

Before your funeral, I stopped by your mother’s house. She used to have me over, and the two of us would drive her crazy, running around and yelling at the top of our lungs about who got to be Richard or Lemieux in our street hockey games. She used to throw up her hands in exasperation when we raced about, stealing cookies and jumping on furniture, asking God how she was so unlucky to have hooligans such as us in her home. Still, I’d like to think she saw me as a second son, a brother to you. That was how I often felt.

When I saw her for the first time in years, she looked sad and tired, but more composed than me. I didn’t even know how I was moving, when I felt so dead.

“I have missed you,” She said as she pulled me into a hug. “We have all missed you.”

I almost started crying right then and there, but I held on. I spent some time with her talking about what had happened, though it pained me to do so. She gave me the details: the motorcycle, the winds, the missing helmet. It all seemed so statistical, like we were discussing the possibility of rain or the latest politics rather than the death of a son/best friend.

We went to the funeral together. I was stopped outside by a news crew. I don’t even remember what I said. Something about missing game four, but who cared? Hockey was my life, was important, but not as important as you had been. As far as I was concerned, the Cup and my team’s fate meant nothing because you were gone.

I had never glimpsed death before but looking around at the hundreds of people gathered there in Shippagan, I saw it everywhere on everyone’s face. Up until that point, I had never thought about it. The idea of losing you never once crossed my mind because we were young. Twenty-one-year-olds didn’t die. Things just didn’t work like that, not in this world. You were supposed to die when you were old, not when you still had so much to give. I realized then, sitting there and listening to Charlene read your poem, her voice thick with tears, that there were only two choices when it came to death: you spent your life ignoring it, or it surprised you and you fell into it like a hole.

Up until then, I had ignored it, blindly believing that you and I were invincible. But now, I had fallen, tripping over this tragedy, and it consumed me.

I didn’t know where to go. I didn’t know how to move on from that point. Going back to Pittsburgh was like traveling back in time, and I entertained the daydream of me going back only to find that it had all been a terrible, unconscious nightmare like in The Wizard of Oz. I would be shaken awake by Flower, his grin filling my sight as he cheerfully remarked that I was late for practice. I would have a voicemail from you, telling me to call you back when I was a Stanley Cup champion.

But there was no smile on Flower’s face when I showed up for practice on the morning of June second, and there were no voicemails, though I kept checking.

At one point, I called you. It went to voicemail and your smiling voice filled my ears. “This is Luc. I’m out having fun without you, so leave me a message.” I didn’t. Instead, I hung up and redialed, listening as the message tone played again. I just didn’t understand; my brain couldn’t process what my ears were hearing and the emotions that went with it. If you were dead, if you were gone from this world, then why were there still traces of you? Why could I still hear your voice across the wavelengths?

We lost the Cup three days later. I called your voicemail all summer, listening to your half-grinned words, your breathless snicker at the beginning, and the decisive playful tone at the end. I memorized all that I had left of you until one afternoon, the operator informed me that the number I had dialed was no longer in service.



We were decimated by the Wild that night, and everyone in the league began asking the question, are they finished without the Kid? We certainly felt that way. We had no energy, no heart. We felt as if we were done, though it was only January. We felt dead. It was the very first shutout that an opposing team had achieved in Consol.

I hadn’t seen Lux since the game against the Lightning. I had seen her, of course, but we hadn’t spoken. Even on the flight to Montreal, she chose to sit beside Max instead of me. I wasn’t sure what I had done wrong, but it was eroding my insides and starting to infect all the good places left in me. She didn’t seem to understand how much I needed her, and I felt as if I was losing everything one slow minute at a time.

After the harrowing game that night, I plucked up all the courage that I possessed and stopped by her exam room. She was on the phone, talking quietly in French, her back to me. I waited in the doorway, ashamed of myself for listening, but unable to turn away.

“Maman, je vais bien. Non, non, je n’ai été. Ce sont les derniers d’entre eux.”

She paused to listen, and I frowned. What was it that she had been doing? And the last of what? What were they talking about? I edged closer.

“Non, je n’ai pas le leur dire. Parce qui’ls n’ont pas besoin de savoir!”

My heartbeat thudded painfully in my chest. Us, she had said. Did she mean the team? I wanted to burst into the room and scream at her. What secrets was she keeping from us, and more importantly, what secrets was she keeping from me?

She sighed, rubbing her temple. “Maman, je dois y aller. Je vais vous rappeler plus tard. Au revoir!” She hung up, and I watched as she slammed the receiver down repeatedly. I had never seen her lose control like that, and I stood there, stunned.

Something was wrong. Perhaps it was not me, but something else entirely. I bit my lip, waiting in the shadows for her to cease her mumbling. She shuffled some papers on her desk, and I watched. She looked so very tired. She was carrying something, some burden that she dared not share. She reminded me very much of myself and how I had refused to talk about your death for such a long time. Perhaps all she needed was someone to open up to her, to show her that she could do the same.

I tried to be quiet, but my soft knock on the doorframe scared her nonetheless. She jumped, spinning around. Several papers caught in the wake of her movement and they fluttered to the floor. Her hand flew to her throat, her stormy eyes wide.

“Mon dieu, Kris! You frightened me.”

“Sorry.”

She stooped to pick up the papers, settling them back in a pile on her desk. “So what can I help you with tonight? Shouldn’t you be on your way home?”

I shrugged. She was playing it very professional, and I suddenly didn’t know what to say. “I just came by to see you.”

Lux blushed. She folded her arms and bit her lip, looking away. I took that time to step into the room and shut the door behind me. When I turned back to her, she was staring helplessly at the floor.

“I’m sorry,” She said, wringing her hands.

“For what?”

“For the last few days. I have been trying very hard to stay away from you, Kris.”

“But why?”

“I did something very stupid on New Year’s Eve and caused a lot of problems. I didn’t want word of that kiss to get back to Boston. I could lose my job over it, and I--”

“--need this,” I finished hollowly, hurtful emotions cascading through me. “Yes, I remember.”

She finally looked me in the eyes. “You are angry.” It wasn’t a question, so I didn’t answer it. “Kris, I feel as though I have been unfair to you.”

You have. You have made me believe there is something between us when I can feel you slipping away. “And?”

“I just… You have to understand. I feel as though there are two worlds here in Pittsburgh. I feel like in one world, I am your physician, and I work here with everyone else. And then there are the times when I am alone with you, just the two of us, and it feels like there’s no one else. I do silly, irrational things. I am never irrational. It is all very new to me, and I don’t quite know what I’m doing.”

I walked over to her, laying a hand on her arm. “I don’t know what I’m doing, either. I cannot stop thinking about you. You’re everywhere. I can’t remember what my life felt like before I met you, and I desperately want things to work out.”

She looked up at me, smiling slightly. “Then they will.”

I wanted to shake her. She didn’t seem to understand my desperation. She was so serene, so certain that things would work out, that everything would be okay between us. But after everything that had been going on, I needed a bona fide insurance policy. I needed to be absolutely sure, because after what had happened with you, I could not stand to lose someone else.

“But I have to know, Lux. I cannot go blindly on faith; I have never been able to. I have to know what will become of us when February arrives.”

She closed her eyes. “February. That word has never seemed so bitter until now.”

She had no idea. February was the month of your birthday, and every year that it came, I was reminded of how you weren’t there to experience it. We should’ve been the same age, you and I, but you were stuck in a photograph almost three years past, forever caught on the cusp of youth and maturity, forever young. Now, I heard you say in the back of my mind. Tell her now.

“Lux, I wanted to talk to you.”

“But we are talking.”

Her eyes were open again, and there was a world of pain inside of them. This was so hard, not just for me, but for her too. The truth was there and I saw it clear for the first time: she didn’t know what would happen come February. We were at an impasse.

How does one escape a canyon where the walls are growing ever higher and closing in around you? Instantly, I knew: she was the one stuck, and I was the canyon. I had never meant to be, but that was the form she had given me, and now I was the villain. So I did what needed to be done.

I’ll break down a wall and offer you a way out.

“Yes, but I have something, a story, that needs to be told.” I took a deep breath. I had never felt so vulnerable in my life. “Two years ago, something happened to me. It changed my life in ways I would never imagine. My best friend, Luc Bourdon, died. You may already know--you did say something several days ago--about what happened to him. He--”

“It was an accident.” Her voice was eerily toneless. “Wasn’t it?”

“Yes. After what happened to him, I…I became a different person. I am still learning what it means for him to be gone. To the world of hockey, it has been two years, but to them, those are merely minutes. They have not noticed his absence in the way that I have. To me, it has been two lifetimes. I cannot believe that this much time has passed, and I have lived without him.” Something in my chest clenched, and then let go. It felt good to talk about you. It was a bittersweet feeling.

She clenched her fists, and I knew that whatever secret she was holding tight to was particularly weighing her down at that moment. Tell me, I wanted to beg. Tell me everything in. Let me in. She didn’t. She just waited for me to finish.

“And this is what Max tells me is ‘baggage’. So I know that I am not perfect. I know that I carry scars, some deeper than others. But I would be willing to shed all the pain for you, if you would have me.”

There, I thought. It’s mostly out there. Now she can run if she wants. But I hope she’ll stay, and I hope she’ll share with me all I’ve shared with her.

She let out a weary sigh, her eyes glimmering. They were wet, like the smooth stones at the bottom of a river. She reached for me, and stared at her hand in wonder, as if she hadn’t even realized she was doing it. Her fingers brushed my chest and without any hesitation, I pulled her in.

Her breath was warm against my chest, her fingers moving over me softly, the ghosts of actual touches. “Kris,” She whispered. It didn’t sound like my name. It sounded like a goodbye.

“I need time.”

“Time,” I repeated numbly.

“Yes. I don’t truly think you know what you’re asking. There are so many things you don’t know about me, so many things that would kill you if you knew.” My hands clenched at the small of her back and she bit her lip. “There are riddles in my life that need solving. Until then, I cannot promise you anything. All I know is…” She let her words trail off, her fingers making shapes through my suit. “All I know is that I want this, more than anything.”

I thought of what I had said about desperately wanting this. “So it will happen?”

“Can love span lifetimes, Kris? Remember that question? I asked you on Christmas Eve.” She shook her head. “These are the things that cannot be answered for sure. There is no test, no logic to prove them to be certain. But I can tell you one thing.”

Tell me anything. Everything. “What?”

She looked up at me, and I saw past the quiet science of Dr. Girard, I saw past the bright demeanor of Lux, and instead, I saw into the inner layers of Lucinda, the woman, the girl, the one who secretly believed in light and love, even though she had chosen to walk the path of statistics and facts. I saw the lifetime of struggle hidden deep below the well of the surface. The yearning, the loss inside of me reached out, calling to her spirit. It was answered in that very second by another voice, another echo of a similar ordeal. Hers.

You, my heart said, resonating in my chest. It’s always been you, Lux. And if I have to, I will wait for you forever.

“No matter what February brings, you will know everything there is to know about me.” She shook her head, pulling herself out of my arms. “And I have a feeling that I will return to Boston, alone.”