The Captain's Sin

She keeps a brother upright. She keeps a family's story straight for the people who ask about it. She keeps a press pass she is not sure she deserves. And she keeps walking into an arena where the man who ended her brother's season is wearing a letter on his chest. The puck is still wet with Zamboni mist when Gabriel O'Reilly taps his stick twice and watches it slide past the goalie's blocker. Red light. Horn. Gloves slapping his shoulders, helmets knocking against his. He does not feel any of it. They won. That is what everyone will remember. What Gabriel remembers is a different night and a different building: his shoulder into the numbers on the back of a red jersey, the air leaving a boy's lungs before the sound of the hit reached the stands, a stick spinning away across the ice, and a leg bent the wrong way. He caught the name off the jersey as the paramedics wheeled him past the bench. Number eleven. Fast hands, quick release, scored the game-winner in November. In the locker room afterwards there was the hum of the ice plant through the walls, the muffled roar of a crowd, and everybody watching him. Coach. His teammates. A lawyer. Police. And underneath all of it, the trailer park, and his mother working doubles at a hospital cafeteria, and the way she looked at him the day he told her he had been scouted. What follows: a ghost that will not be buried, the mask he puts on for cameras, somebody digging for bones, threats delivered in black ink, a bitter witness, one glimpse behind the armour, and the walls the two of them turn out to be hunching behind from opposite sides. *I can't walk away from you. But I love you. And I want to figure out what that means.* She sat in this arena and interviewed him while he smiled for the cameras and lied to her face. The puck is still wet with Zamboni mist. He taps his stick twice. And this time he does feel it, all of it, which is the entire difference between the man in the first chapter and the one in the last.