Where are we going tonight?
You’ll find out later, he replied. Dress is VERY casual. Take your sticks, not your chair. We’re riding the van. Meet me @8 at Beaumont gate.
I spent the day with an entire flock of butterflies in my stomach.
“What do you think it could be?” Dana asked for the tenth time. She was painting my toenails pink.
“I don’t KNOW!” I yelped. And that wasn’t even the biggest question in my heart.
What did it mean?
Dana read my mind, which probably wasn’t difficult. “He dumped her for you. It’s true, Corey. He grew a pair of balls and did it.”
My stomach lurched again. I wanted so badly for it to be true. But when was the last time I got exactly what I wanted?
“Why won’t you tell me where we’re going?” I asked as we waited for the gimpmobile. I was feeling positively giddy, standing next to Hartley, ready to embark on his strange little adventure.
But all he would give me was a maddening grin. And when the van turned up, he asked the driver to take us to the intersection of Sachem and Dixwell. But I didn’t know the city map all that well, and couldn’t guess what was there.
To my enduring surprise, the van stopped in front of the hockey arena.
“Really?” I asked as I levered myself off the one low step, onto the sidewalk. “I don’t go in there,” I said, hearing the sound of dismay in my own voice.
The van pulled away, and I realized how quiet it was. There was no hockey game tonight. There was nobody around except for Hartley and I.
“I know you don’t,” he said, stepping close to me. “But I want you to come in with me, just this once.”
“But why?”
He only shook his head. “If you hate it, I’ll never ask you to come back.” He leaned down. And in the orange glow of the street lamps, he gave me a single soft kiss.
My heart contracted in my chest. There was plenty I would do to get a few more of those kisses. But Hartley didn’t know that I hadn’t been into a rink since my accident. I wasn’t afraid to go in — I just didn’t want to. Too many happy hours of my life had been lived at rinks. And now that entire part of my life was gone.
“Please?” he asked. He put his arms around me and kissed the top of my head. “Please.”
Who could say no to that?
Hartley walked me downhill, around to the side of the building. Taking a set of keys from his pocket, he opened the ice level door.
Inside, the familiar sensations overwhelmed me immediately. Every rink I’d ever visited had the same smell — the crisp scent of ice, mixed with body odor and salty pretzels. I breathed it in, and my stomach did a little twist.
“Just a little further,” Hartley said. He walked me right down the chute, where the players step onto the ice before the game.
Ice gleamed a few feet ahead of me, its surface a recently Zambonied sheen. I stared down at the threshold between the rubber matting and the clean edge of the rink. The memory of how it felt to put one skate over the lip, push off, and fly was so vivid. The lump in my throat swelled.
“Have you seen one of these before?”
I looked down. Hartley knelt in front of two…sleds? Each one had a molded plastic scoop-shaped seat. When Hartley tipped the thing to the side, I could see two blades underneath. A wooden strut stretched forward from the seat, toward a footrest with a metal ball under it.
I shook my head, clearing my throat. “What is that?” I asked, my voice hoarse. “Some kind of adaptive bullshit.”
He looked up at me, his expression worried. “They’re…it’s fun, Callahan. I tested it out first. You can go pretty fast.” He positioned one of them next to my feet. “Let’s just give it a little spin. If you hate it, we’ll go home.”
Still, I hesitated. How many times had I stood a few feet from the ice, ready to step out onto it, without ever a clue that it was a privilege? A thousand? More? I’d never known that I had so much to lose, that a few bad minutes could end it forever.
Hartley stood up and came around to stand behind me. He put his hands under my arms. “Just bend at the waist, and I can set you down on it.”
With a sigh, I gave in. I bent.
It took the usual eternity to remove my braces, strap me in and set me up. Then Hartley handed me not one, but two, short little hockey sticks. “Be careful of the ends,” he prompted. When I studied them, I noticed that each stick had three little metal spikes sticking straight out of the top. “That’s how you push yourself,” he said. “You’ll see.”
Then he wrestled my sled over the lip and shoved me out onto the rink. I skidded about thirty feet, then came to a stop. Raising my chin, I looked up at the stadium lights several stories above. Harkness had a gorgeous arena. I’d watched my brother play here. And after my Harkness acceptance letter arrived, I thought I’d play hockey here, too.