The Centerman's Vow

Declan Voss is seventeen years old and playing the biggest game of his life when he looks up at section C, row 12, seat 4, and sees his father standing, one hand pressed to his chest, his face the colour of old snow. He climbs the stairs in skates, thirty pounds of equipment turning every step into a fight, and by the time he gets there a woman is on her knees with her hands on his father's sternum, counting compressions. Three days later his father dies anyway, and Declan sits in his mother's kitchen the night of the funeral and makes a private vow: never let anyone close enough to lose. Twelve years later he is in a visiting locker room with his left knee packed in ice, reading a contract extension. Three million dollars if he plays sixty games. He has played fifty-eight. He has four games left before the trade deadline and a Grade 2 MCL sprain that the team doctor wants rested for a week. He does not have a week. That bonus is what pays for his brother Tristan's treatment. Maggie Chen is the new trainer, blue-tipped fingers from the cold packs, always carrying a clipboard or a bag of ice or a suture kit. Nobody has told her what Declan is protecting, and she has worked it out anyway. Her offer is three days, maybe four, if he does exactly what she says. Working against both of them is Jesse Nilsson, the assistant coach with half a pinky missing, who once spent twenty minutes behind a closed door arguing that Declan's groin was a liability the team could not afford, who wants Len Holloway's job, and who walks out of the supply cabinet with a controlled substance in his pocket and an explanation about the head coach's back. And in Declan's hip pocket through all of it is his father's Zippo. Cold brass, initials scratched into the base with a pocket knife, the letters worn soft from a thousand thumb-rubs. He holds it close and never lights it. A hockey romance about a man who has confused endurance with love, a trainer who will not sign off on a lie to keep a job, and a season that ends somewhere other than where he was aiming, with a whistle around his neck and a kid in a too-big jersey hanging off his arm; closed-door.