The Winger's Weakness

Cormac O'Shea is fourteen years old, and he knows he has lost them the game before the goalie has even scooped the puck into his chest. Then, up in section C, row 12, his father stands with both hands braced on the railing, and goes down sideways. Cormac climbs over the boards still in skates and gloves, takes the stairs three at a time, shoves past a security guard. By the time he gets there his father's eyes are open and fixed on the ceiling, and a paramedic is counting compressions. Mick O'Shea's fingers curl, reaching, and the last two words he ever says do not leave his mouth so much as fall out of it. *I expected more.* Ten years on, Cormac is number seventeen, right wing, standing in the tunnel of the Lakeport Civic Arena with ten thousand people stomping overhead, trying to remember how to breathe. His heart is doing something it should not. It has done it since he was fourteen, and the doctors have called it anxiety, called it panic attacks, called it a lot of things that did not fix it. The night it puts him on the dressing room floor, a woman with red hair, freckles and round glasses kneels in front of him and breathes with him until the tunnel widens and the air comes back. Then she holds out a card. *Call me if you want to stop pretending.* He crumples it in his fist. *I don't need a shrink.* *No. You need a teammate.* Saskia Renault has thirty days to prove her program works before the funding goes and she is back in her walkup. The captain wants to know why the club should pay her to teach grown men how to breathe. What she tells nobody is that she carries a flash drive labelled in faded blue ink: twelve recorded sessions with a patient she should never have taken on, because he was her brother. And in a Chicago hospital bed, Cormac's sister Roisin is twenty-three, pale and thin in a faded blue cardigan, waiting for a lung transplant that might never come. A hockey romance about panic attacks, a dressing room that treats them as a character flaw, and two people who are each carrying somebody they could not save; closed-door.