The Light That Wraps You

You would have liked her.

Everyone else did.

The moment she fell asleep, they were surrounding me like a whirlwind. Max leered over the back of my seat, staring down at her. Sid and Flower nearly fell into the aisle, they were leaning so far over, and Geno got up and moved so he could sit in front of me, close enough to Dan and Tony to be within earshot. If Gronk were there, I’m almost certain he’d be towering over the two of us right now.

“Is she asleep?” Sid mouthed, pointing at her.

Max rolled his eyes for me. “Of course she’s asleep. She’s practically drooling on Tanger’s shoulder.”

I immediately looked down. She wasn’t, but her head was tilted, and strands of her golden hair had fallen over my shoulder. I could faintly hear the music she was listening to, but nothing distinguishable came to me.

I glared at Max, twisting my head as best as I could without disturbing her. “Sit down. You’re acting creepy.”

Max ignored me. “I’m teaching her everyone’s nicknames. She’s so cute, she blushes when she gets them wrong, or calls them by their full name. She thinks that she’s too formal.”

“She did that with me!” Flower murmured, keeping his voice low so she didn’t wake. His usual sunny smile lit up their portion of the aisle. “I only get called Marc-André if I’m in trouble, so after I ate one of the brownies that Vero made her to welcome her to Pittsburgh, she used it." Sid laughed at him.

“She very nice,” Geno threw in, sitting with his back against the closed window, his long legs taking up both seats. “While she look at my knee, she talk. She say she want to go to Russia. I tell her I take her over summer.” He grinned like he had just won the jackpot.

“No way! She told me she would come to Halifax with me!” Sid pouted for all of one second, before his face lit up again. “She’s from New Brunswick, you know. That’s only a couple of hours away.”

That made me think of you, and my attention sharpened like a blade. “Where?”

“Saint John. She was telling me about what it was like growing up there the other day when I brought her lunch.” Sid got a faraway look in his eyes. “She's really funny. And smart. And she smells nice..."

I listened intently, trying not to be appear interested, though secretly I felt eclipsed. Max was teaching her everyone's nicknames in their downtime. Sid was bringing her lunch while she sat in the office doing paperwork. Geno was talking to her about going home with him over the summer. Flower had used the perfect ace in the hole with his long-time girlfriend, Vero, and now she had a female anchor. I was certain, listening to them talk about her like she wasn't there, that even Jordan was charming her during their sessions with his hand, probably talking about his homespun childhood on a farm and making her giggle with funny brother stories.

I was the only one who had done nothing of import, nothing to gain her favor. Nothing but talk about a book that I would probably never finish. I was suddenly very annoyed at myself, that I hadn't tried harder to be friends with her. A girl like Lux deserved all of the clamor, and I was falling short.

“Okay,” I said suddenly, cutting them all off. “That’s enough. She’s trying to sleep. We should probably do the same. We have practice very early tomorrow, right Sid?”

Crosby nodded with a small sigh. He and Fleury sat back in their seats, talking quietly amongst themselves. Rather than move back to where he had been by Cookie, Geno stayed where he was, talking to Dan about how he had played, and if he could play again the next night. Max was the only one who refused to let it go.

“You like her, don’t you?” Max asked quietly.

I flushed. “Of course I do. Just like everyone else does.”

I couldn’t explain it. None of us could. She was fascinating. There was just something about her. The moment she stepped into a room, we all gravitated towards her, desperate moths seeking her light. She had only been around a week at best, and yet everyone affiliated with the team went out of their way to make her feel welcome, to make her a part of us. In a way, more than for her medical expertise, we needed her. She was our coveted treasure, and as I had known, we were all falling in love with her.

But what would happen when she left? She was only staying until February and we knew it. What would we do after she was gone? These were things that normally people don’t think about. We never ask ourselves what we’ll do when a person vanishes from our life, because we don’t think that will ever happen.

Like you. You and I had plans. We were going to spend almost the entire summer together, with you training in Montreal. We were both going to get our motorcycles, and spend our days outside, in the summer sun with lake water speckling our skin. I never imagined that I would have to ask myself, what do I do now, now that you’re gone?

You didn’t wait, and my summer got shorter and shorter with the Penguins going to the Finals with the Red Wings, and our plans kept changing, warping until they were so different from the original scheme that I wondered if we were actually going to do the things we had said we would.

The plans broke when you died. Then I started asking myself the questions. That had been a lesson, and now I asked them early. When she left, what would we do? If she could enter and change our lives so quickly in this short amount of time, what could she do in two months? What would we do without her?

Move on. Adapt. Grow. Experiences make a person, they say, but I would rather not have to say goodbye. I would rather be trapped in a gruesome life with the people I love, than have to watch them leave me. Maybe that’s foolish, but after losing you, that was how my perspective shifted.

I looked down at her, still sleeping peacefully beside me. For a split-second, I envied her that peace. I could never sleep on planes. It was impossible for me to close my eyes and drift off while others were awake around me, still talking, still reliving the game. I always looked out the window instead, watching those multitudes of lights beneath us, spread out arbitrarily through the blanket of darkness. I would imagine who held those lights. Homes, where someone has stayed up too late, a new book in their hand? Businesses still operating, though the streets were quiet? Parking lots, where the empty spaces resembled a chess board from our height; cities where the lights were all so close together that they were just one glare from so far below, just one golden glow filling up the window; towns where a single light blinked in all the darkness, just one anchor to keep the monsters at bay; all of that stretched on and on, and I got to see it all, even the dark spaces where there was no light, where there were only trees with leaves shifting in the wind, and animals to stalk through moonless clearings.

All of this happened while I sat there, while I watched her breathe evenly. I was exhausted but for all the money in the world, I couldn’t have--wouldn’t have--slept. I couldn’t tear my eyes away from her.

I wondered what she was dreaming of. Her family back in New Brunswick, the very same place you had lived? Her home in Boston, her friends, her career, her team? That thought made me jealous. I wanted us to be her team. But I had learned that we don’t always get what we want. Sometimes what we want gets taken from us, instead.

I sighed. Whatever it was that she was seeing behind her closed eyes, she seemed happy, the corners of her lips curling up in the smallest of smiles. I hoped it was something happy. If anyone deserved joy, it was her, just for being who she was.

“I’m going to try and sleep,” Max said, breaking me out of my thoughts. I wondered if he had been talking the entire time. I hadn’t listened at all. “Are you?”

I shook my head. “No. I think I’ll read.”

Max looked surprised. “Read? Read what?”

I picked up the book that she had left between us, probably because she knew I was interested. The Gargoyle. So maybe I would never finish it, but if this was the only thing that she and I would have, versus Russia and brownies and funny stories, I would accept that. One is better than none.

“This.”

“Mm. Okay. Try and at least get some sleep. We don’t want you to crash on your way home, right?”

Right. I opened the book, smoothing the pages back. First chapter. First sentence.

Accidents ambush the unsuspecting, often violently, like love.

I reread that sentence over a hundred times, feeling incredibly profound. Max’s words, her suggesting it to me, what had happened to you. It all collided in my mind, feeling too coincidental to be real. Sitting on a plane thousands of feet above light and darkness, millions of light years below stars and the cosmos, my life wavered for the first time, and I felt the first stirrings of something like faith.

I kept reading. Slowly, because reading English was still tough for me. Eventually, the story began to unfold, and all the while, I thought of you. This lovely, quiet girl reminded me all too much of you.

I said you would've liked her, but I was wrong. Liked was a word that just didn't quite cover Lux, similar to the word interesting, which is used when a person doesn't know how to fill that gap in a sentence. Lux was not a filler word. She was an adjective, an explosion of impossible descriptions because she was too complex to be anything else.

No, you wouldn't have liked her.

You would have loved her.