The air smells like wax, frozen grass, and the sharp metallic cut of news truck generators.
There’s a bank of cameras at the curb, lenses aimed and ready, searching for the first person to crack.
They want us to be tragic, or noble, or at least interesting.
I show up late on purpose, drift through the crowd unnoticed until I’m a safe distance from the scrum at the main entrance.
I find a spot under the overhang, just outside the yellow police tape, and watch the spectacle as if it’s a documentary about someone else’s life.
The fans have built a memorial along the glass, jerseys, flowers, hand-scrawled posters. Someone’s lashed a row of battered hockey sticks together, blades up, a fence of tribute.
There’s a pile of pucks, each one marked with a number and a name. Cap’s number is everywhere, 4 on hats, 4 on faces, 4 on the backs of toddlers too young to remember the man they’re mourning.
The team is here, too, gathered in a knot of black jackets and bowed heads, the usual social order disintegrated by trauma.
O’Doul is crying, big ugly sobs that make his whole body jerk. Raz stands next to him, staring at his shoes.
The rest of the roster fills in around them, a single organism, holding itself together out of pure stubbornness.
I don’t join them. I hover at the periphery, hands buried in my pockets, posture loose but alert.
I’m scanning for threats, even now, even though the odds are microscopic. Once you’ve been hunted, you never really stop.
A woman with a Steelhawks beanie and a face like a paper cut is the first to recognize me.
Her eyes go wide and wet, and she makes a beeline through the crowd, her candle trailing hot wax down her wrist.
“Oh, Darius,” she says, and before I can react she’s crushing me in a hug, her arms wiry and insistent. “I’m so, so sorry.” She smells like cinnamon and baby powder.
I pat her back, gentle, awkward. “Thanks for coming,” I say, because it’s the right thing to say.
She lets go, wipes her nose on the back of her glove. “You were so brave. You all were. My son, he’s in peewee, he worships you guys.”
I nod, not trusting my voice.
She retreats, and instantly her place is filled by more, a ripple of mourners who want a piece of the story.
Some just touch my shoulder, some recite lines from the news coverage.
A few ask for a photo, as if tragedy is a collectible now.
I move sideways, using my height and the shadows to fade out.
I end up by the makeshift memorial, fingers absently counting the sticks lashed together, the warped tape and chipped paint, each one evidence of years spent in the game.
Cap’s old stick is there, I recognize it by the frayed knob at the end, the joke he always made about “maximum surface area for whacking idiots.”
I remember the first time he called me “rookie,” remember the sting of it, and how proud I was when he finally dropped the qualifier.
I feel the burn in my throat, but nothing gets through. I focus on the sound of candles hissing in the wind, on the collective shuffle of feet as the crowd grows restless.
Someone steps up to the little podium by the doors, taps the mic. It’s Coach Vasquez, face harder than I’ve ever seen it, every line etched deep by grief and fury.
She doesn’t waste time on platitudes. “They tried to take this from us,” she says, voice steady. “But they don’t get to decide how we remember. That’s ours.”
A murmur runs through the crowd, an agreement made out of noise.
Coach goes on, talks about brotherhood, about legacy, about “family that bleeds together.” She calls each of the lost by name, and the crowd echoes them back, a litany of absence.
