Pucking Around

The janitor lets her into the training room before six in the morning, and the count is wrong. Fifty-six elastic wraps. Twenty-seven rolls of athletic tape. Twelve boxes of pre-wrap. Then the bin of oral rehydration packets, which held twenty-four yesterday and holds eighteen now. The supply room lock is electronic. The logbook says nobody signed in between her leaving and her arriving. So Sloane Montgomery takes scissors to the freezer stock — thirty-two ice packs she sealed and labeled by hand — and cuts open every single one. Seven of them have a faint, sweet smell under the gel. There is a season opener tonight, and twenty-three professional hockey players to keep from destroying their bodies on the first night of the year. There is also an MRI at 3:15 at the University of Minnesota Medical Center for her brother Owen, who has a brain tumor, who is fourteen, and who cannot drive himself home afterward. Then the door opens without a knock. Garrett Caldwell is six-three, wears number four, and is old enough that his teammates have started using the word veteran where he can hear it. His shoulder is held together by tape and stubbornness and three inches of scar tissue he does not talk about. He looks at her initialed ice packs, and he understands exactly what they mean — which makes him the first person in the building who does. What Sloane has instead of allies is an assistant trainer who has spent a year making it clear she wants the job, a coach who changes rules overnight without telling her, and a front office that would rather have a quiet season than an honest one. What she has instead of time is Owen's chart, his next MRI, and a treatment schedule that costs eight thousand dollars every few weeks. When a photo taken in an alley reaches the general manager's desk, Sloane is handed a choice dressed up as a promotion: sign the resignation letter, or take a transfer to Des Moines — five hours from the hospital where her brother is attached to monitors and IV lines. Garrett is offered a version of the same choice, and he makes it without telling her what it cost. A contemporary hockey romance about a head athletic trainer who has been keeping her brother alive since she was twenty-two, and a defenseman with nothing left to trade but himself. The romance is closed-door.