Chapter 20

Good news is Tanger is back on the ice at practice. Bad news is Sid is seeing his head doctor again. Come back soon Sid!

A four game road trip should have taken his mind off of her but coming home to an empty house re-opens the wound and as he stand alone in the dark staring at her empty bedroom with the only sound that of his own breathing, he thinks that it feels like the wound is fresh and bleeding. He walks into the room, past the gaping empty closet and sits down on the edge of the bed. Picking up a pillow he catches a faint trace of her perfume. Looking around, as if he might be caught doing something embarrassing he presses his face into the pillow and drags in a lungful of her light, fruity scent. 

It is the only reminder he has left of her, aside from her robin’s egg blue diner’s uniform, the only thing left in her closet. When he’d got home that night it had been on the floor, as if she had accidentally left it behind. A trip to the diner soon threw cold water on any hopes he’d had of bringing her home. She’d already called in her notice. 

True to his father’s words, Fern is gone. 

Sid’s lips curls up into a contemptuous smile at the memory of his father’s last test message, congratulating him on his ‘feisty’ play on the road. The truth is, over the last few days, it has taken an enormous amount of will power not to physically rip someone’s, anyone’s, head from their shoulders. It’s lucky that the media has chosen to think that he’s back with a vengeance though the truth is that his mind is not on the ice though he allows his father and most of his teammates to think that he is pouring himself into his daily routine and leaving it all out on the ice.  Only Marc and Pascal know different.

He cannot hide his restlessness from Dupers with whom he shares a room on the road. As for Flower, Sid is almost certain he is withholding something but if he is, the quiet goalie is admitting to nothing which of course means that he is aiming the blame for all of this mess directly at Sid. 

Unfortunately Sid himself is not finding assigning blame as straight forward. It is easy to direct the blame all onto his father’s wide shoulders. He, after all, is the one who levelled the threats and wrote the cheque; the enormous cheque with far bigger numbers on it than any she had been offered before. 

But then again, she is the one who took it.

Troy is quick to point out that everyone has a price and he has merely been the one successful in finding hers where everyone else failed and there is a little part of Sidney that is forced to admit to himself that this must be the case. He has also begun to wonder if he would have ever authorized an offer so large because he knew, in his heart, that he didn’t really want to find her number. 

That there was a number and she has taken the cheque feels like a betrayal.  

He lies back on the bed and stares up at the ceiling. He had already come to understand that he’d grown attached to her but it has taken her absence to teach him that what he has been feeling is more than a protective kind of friendship. There was a girl in New York, an encounter endured at the insistence of his teammates. If she had a name he doesn’t remember asking for it and as he stares up at the blank white ceiling now he cannot even recall the features of her face. What he does recall, vividly, is what he felt the entire time he was with this stranger. He’d felt like he was committing an infidelity, that he was cheating on Fern. He feels disgusted with himself now as he lies in her bed, her scent lingering in his nostrils, her features crystal clear in his imagination.

“I’m sorry,” he whispers to the ghost of her, the sense of her that lingers in the big empty house. They are the words he knows he would say if he had been just two minutes sooner, if he could have caught her before she’d gone. They are not enough, he has come to realize; not enough to reverse the damage he inflicted on an innocent girl that night last spring. They are not nearly enough to encompass all the new feelings he’s been discovering as the realization dawns on him that not only is there a chance that he will not see his son born, which in and of itself twists like a rusty knife in his guts, but that he might never see her again. “I got so used to your face,” he whispers to the ghost, thinking of the way her dark eyes would look out at him from the dark frames of her glasses, one minute making him feel like he was wearing a crown and the next like his halo had slipped down past his knees. “More than okay,” he adds hoarsely, one hand curling into a fist that he drums against the mattress, “you’re more than okay to me.” 

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“You sure hun? You’re welcome to join us,” her mother entreats as her father slides her coat over her shoulders. He does not look at his daughter who sits curled at the end of the couch with its frayed cushions and faded arms. 

“No, that’s okay mom. There’s one of those Jane Austen movies I like on. You two go,” she insists, pulling an afghan around her shoulders and wincing, just a little, when one of their cats jumps onto her. 

“Well don’t stay up too late,” her mother sighs, giving her one of those looks that’s half apology, half parental concern. Fern returns her mother’s look with a genuine smile. 

“I won’t, I promise. Have fun you two,” she adds, knowing the moment they are out the door her dour father will begin yet another tirade about his wayward daughter that her mother will have to listen to, nod in the right places and even agree with him even though her own excitement at becoming a grandmother trumps all of his predictions that Fern will now never find a suitable man and they will end up supporting her and the child out of his income. 

They are hardly made of money, not that they have ever denied her anything she’s needed. They’ve always been able to stretch to the essentials and once in a very long while something just a little bit more. Not that she feels deprived. She’s always thought she’d gotten lucky with her parents. After a couple of foster homes, not being slapped or yelled at was as good as getting taken out for an ice cream. 

They did; however, do disappointed rather well she thinks as her father glowers at her from behind his glasses. 

She wouldn’t call him a miser but her father is a careful man, a man who knows the value of everything and will not pay a penny more for anything than he thinks that it is worth. That will not, she knows, stop him from spoiling his grandson when the time comes. He will, she knows, be pleased not to have to compete with the likes of Troy Crosby when it comes to buying toys. That kind of competition, she thinks with a smile, would drive her father to distraction.

She thinks about the cheque with all of its’ zeroes in her jewellery box. After her son is born she will take it to the bank and deposit it and then transfer nearly half of it to her parents. Maybe then her father’s permanent frown will finally turn upside down and he will take her mother on that trip to Italy she’s always pined for. The other half she’ll keep but most of it will go into a savings account, one her son won’t be able to access until he’s at least 18. What’s left, she has already decided, will go to Mario Lemieux’s charity in his name. Maybe Sidney will know, maybe not but either way it will salve her conscious somewhat. Accepting the cheque has been the lowest point since that notorious evening that seems so long ago now. It wasn’t just taking the payment in return for her absence that is not sitting well with her, it is the giving in, the admission of defeat that weighs heavy on her soul. 

Picking up the remote she turns up the sound on the beginning of the movie. The vistas of the grassy hillocks of England would normally pull her in and she would get lost in the familiar dialogue, the empire waist dresses and the frock coats but tonight her mind roams. Those few magical moments when she almost believed that he cared about her make her feel like Marianne betrayed by Willoughby; not that he didn’t care for her, just that he could never lower himself as far as to permanently attach himself to someone his father and manager didn’t think was going to damage his squeaky clean reputation. 

“You’ll call if you need anything.” Fern looks up, blinks as she focuses on her mother’s face, and shakes her head.

“What could I need mom?” she asks, holding up a box of cracker jacks and nudging the very large glass of ice tea on the coffee table in front of her. 

“Well I’ll have my phone on vibrate, just in case,” her mother assures her, giving her that look as if she’s begging for Fern to give a reason, any reason, to stay. Imagine wanting out of a night of sitting with her father listening to political pundits spewing hot air and blowing smoke up each other asses. As much as she would like to help her mother out, a few hours of having her not fussing is something Fern is sure that she needs. 

“I’ll let you know if I do,” she promises, much to her mother’s chagrin. She listens to them leave, as she rips open the box of caramel corn and settles back into the couch for a few hours of almost peace, the shy awkwardness of a young Hugh Grant and the gallantry of Alan Rickman.

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“Come out.” It’s not really a request but he ignores their tone and instead of stepping out of his door Sid leaves it open behind him and retreats into his house forcing his two teammates who are standing on the front step to follow him inside. 

“You can’t sit in the dark all by yourself. It’s not natural,” TK insists, dogging him as he makes his way back to the kitchen. He is neither hungry nor thirsty but he knows it’s the first place they will go. 

“Maybe I have a headache,” he suggests nonchalantly. 

“Do you?” Jordan asks, his blonde head popping up above the door of the fridge.

“No,” he replies in a tone dripping in sarcasm, “but I could. You don’t know.” 

“So you’ve got no reason to stay in,” TK grins hopefully, like it’s a done deal. 

“Other than I don’t want to go out you mean?”Sid counters, leaning against the counter and crossing his arms in front of his chest. 

“Oh c’mon. It’ll be fun, you know you want to,” Jordy grins, popping open one beer and handing another to Kennedy. He offers one to Sid who shakes his head. 

“Not really. Remember that’s how I ended up in this mess,” he reminds his friends who then stare back at him quizzically. 

“I thought your dad bought you out of the mess?” Kennedy says looking honestly confused. 

“Yeah,” Jordy chimes in, “I thought it was like, good riddance? I mean, you didn’t really want to be a dad already when there’s so many fish in the sea to catch.” Sometimes he honestly wonders if his friends know him at all as he stares back at them, stunned. 

“She was living here,” he points out, waiting for dumb and dumber to catch up. It’s not that he doesn’t appreciate their support but at this moment they are more like Troy’s cheering section than his own. 

“Yeah but that wasn’t, y’know, serious, right?” TK asks using a tone that makes it plain he wants his captain to tell him he hasn’t gone over to the dark side. 

“I want to find her and bring her back. I just don’t know where to start. Is that serious enough for you?” He looks from one wide pair of blue eyes to an equally shocked pair of dark eyes staring back at him and shrugs. 

“Well hell, why didn’t you just fuckin’ say so?” Kennedy grins and slams his beer down on the table and rubs his hands together. “Which way did the little bitch go when she left? I’m like a fucking hound dog when it comes to huntin’ bitches down!”

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The pain starts as a dull pressure in the small of her back. She rolls over onto her other side and curls around her body pillow. She slips back into the dream she’d been having, a picnic on the side of a hill complete with red check table cloth and good white wine in plastic wine glasses. It is another dream of him, as hard as she tries to make it be about Alan Rickman, he is reading her sonnets and she is lying with her head in his lap, listening to Rickman’s voice but it is Sidney’s pale complexion and complex gold green eyes that she looks up into. He strokes her hair with his free hand and she relaxes against his massive thighs and watches his full pink lips move as he speaks. When the pain comes again it is like the twisting of a knife in her ribs and she wakes with a gasp, her hand clutched to her side.

“You little bastard,” she hisses through her teeth, rubbing her hand over the spot where she assumes her son has tried to kick his way out. Taking slow breaths she waits for the sharp pain to ease before she lies back down. Her eyes are just beginning to droop when the ache in her back makes her readjust her position again. That only last a few minutes before she is sitting up on the edge of the bed, cursing quietly as she slides her feet into a pair of warm fuzzy slippers and reaches for her robe. 

Rubbing the small of her back as best she can, Fern pads across her room and heads for the bathroom. She is half way down the hall when she hears the creak and groan of the garage door beginning to move and the familiar rumble of her father’s Volvo station wagon in the drive. 

While she runs water into the sink, waiting for it to get cold, she listens to the garage door roll up and back down again and then the scrape and click of a key in the lock followed by her parents hushed voices. She smiles at her reflection when realizes that they are arguing in whispers and wonders how two people with such opposing political views could ever have stayed married this long. 

She lifts a cup to her lips and closes her eyes in bliss as the cool water slides down her throat. Her parents have reached the top of the stairs and she hears her mother shushing her father and she smiles as she puts the cup down on the counter. 

The next sound is that of breaking glass as the cup shatters on the floor of the bathroom. She clutches her stomach with one hand and the edge of the counter with her other. The pain makes her see stars and almost forces her to her knees. This, she knows immediately is not just a kick. Something is wrong, very wrong. 

“Mommy!” she calls out, trying to catch her breath. 

“Fernie what are you doing up dear you should be in bed and…,” her mother rounds the corner and her reflection appears in the mirror just as a warm gush of warm water runs down the insides of her thighs and onto the floor. “Oh god Jamie, call nine one one.”