“He’s going to blame Zach. He’s going to say Zach’s head wasn’t in it. He’s going to make this about the game.”
“WAS Zach’s head in it?”
The front door opens downstairs and I hear lighter footsteps before my mom’s voice calls out “Mackie?” the way you call into a house when you already know something’s wrong. She must have left the arena right after the final buzzer.
I don’t answer. I can’t. Kara is still on the line and I’m pressing the phone against my ear so hard it hurts.
“Mackie, I know you’re here, your car is in the driveway.”
“I’m on the phone,” I call down.
I hear her footsteps on the stairs, stopping halfway up. “Are you okay?”
“No.”
An hour later, the front door opens again.
“He’s home,” I whisper to Kara. “I have to go.”
“Call me after. I don’t care what time.”
“Okay.”
“Mackie. I love you. You’re going to get through this.”
I hang up and lie on the floor and listen. I hear my mom’s voice, low and careful. The tone she uses when she’s managing him, the hockey wife one that saysI’m hereandI see youandtell me what happened. I hear my dad’s voice. I can’t hear the words, but I hear the volume rising and falling before I hear my name.
Not Mackie. Mackinnon. My full name, the way he says itwhen I’m in trouble. The last time he used it like that I was sixteen. I’d taken his car without asking and broken off the side mirror when I hit a mailbox.
I get up, open my door and walk to the top of the stairs.
My parents are in the kitchen. Dad is standing by the island with both hands flat on the counter and his head down. Mom is on the other side with her hands around a mug she’s not drinking from. When I come down the stairs they both look at me.
“Sit down,” Dad says.
I sit at the island and put my hands in my lap, afraid that if I put them on the counter he’ll see them shaking.
“How long did you think you could keep this going.” It’s definitely not a question.
“I wasn’t trying to keep it going forever. We were going to tell you?—”
“WHEN.” The word hits the kitchen like a slap. “When, Mackie? After the Cup? After the season? After he gets a contract somewhere else and you follow him and I find out from a TEAMMATE that my daughter’s been?—”
“After the playoff run ended. That was the plan. Win or lose, we were going to tell you.”
“The plan.” He laughs that same ugly laugh from the corridor. “You had a PLAN. You and your—you and him, you sat around and PLANNED how to keep lying to me.”
“We planned how to TELL you. That’s different.”
“It’s NOT different. Every day you didn’t tell me was a day you chose to lie. Do you understand that? Every morning you came downstairs and had breakfast at this table and said ‘good morning, Dad’ and you had a secret and you chose not to tell me. That’s not postponing. That’s lying.”
“And the PWHL.” He says it suddenly and the pivot catches me off guard. “The rinkside thing. You turned down the NHL opportunity and I thought you were being idealistic,I thought you were just stubborn about the women’s league, but this whole time you were pulling away from MY world because of HIM. Because you couldn’t do NHL rinkside and date my goalie at the same time without getting caught.”
“That’s not why I?—”
“It IS. It has to be. Because the Mackie I know, the one who grew up in this world, who loves this game, who I raised to recognize an opportunity—that Mackie doesn’t turn down NHL rinkside for a three-year-old league. Not unless there’s something pulling her away. And now I know what it was.”
“You’re wrong.” I’m trying not to yell, and failing. “The PWHL has nothing to do with Zach. NOTHING. I want to cover women’s hockey because I care about women’s hockey and I’m sorry that you can’t see the value in that without assuming a MAN had to be the reason I chose it.”
