Icebound Hearts

The ice at the Pine Ridge Icehouse always smelled like the inside of a freezer that somebody had tried to make holy. Jake Thompson stood at the blue line with his gloves tucked under one arm, breathing it in that cold, clean, faintly metallic smell that had the same smell since he was six years old and too small for his own pads. Above him, the rafters were strung with faded blue and gold bunting left over from some championship a decade before he was born. Below him, three hundred people were finding their seats, stomping snow off their boots, calling out to each other over the tops of the boards like the bleachers were just an extension of Main Street. Somewhere in the fourth row, his dad was already sitting where he always sat dead center, home side, close enough to see everything. "You gonna stand there admiring the architecture, Thompson, or are we playing tonight?" Cooper skated up beside him, grinning through his mouth guard, six-foot-two of Danny Cooper crammed into pads that always looked a size too small no matter how many times equipment ordered him new ones. "Just getting a feel for the ice," Jake said. "You've been getting a feel for this ice since before you could walk." "Some ice needs more feelings than others." Cooper laughed, clapped him on the shoulder with a glove the size of a dinner plate, and skated off toward the bench, hollering something at Nate Kowalski that Jake didn't catch. He didn't need to. It was opening night. Everybody was loud tonight. Jake took one more lap along the blue line, alone, the way he liked to before every home opener. It was a habit his dad had taught him get to know the ice before it gets to know you back when Jake was young enough to think that meant something mystical instead of just a way to check for soft spots and bad patches near the boards. He didn't think it was mystical anymore. He still did it anyway. Up in the stands, someone's phone flash went off. Then another. He didn't look. He'd learned a long time ago that if you looked for the cameras in Pine Ridge, you'd never stop finding them. -------------------- Maya Carter was not one of the people with a phone flash going off, because Maya Carter did not believe in phones for real photography. She had her father's old Nikon slung around her neck, the strap worn soft from twenty years of use before it was ever hers, and she was crouched in the photographers' well at center ice with her elbow braced against the boards, waiting. "You're going to lose a finger doing that," said the man next to her — Frank Delgado, who shot for the Pine Ridge Gazette and had been telling Maya she was going to lose a finger, an eye, or her hearing at every single game since she was fourteen and her father first let her down here with a camera instead of a coloring book. "I have ten to spare," Maya said, not looking up. "That's not how fingers work." "That's exactly how fingers work, Frank." He laughed, the specific wheeze-laugh of a sixty-one-year-old man who'd covered high school hockey in Pine Ridge for three decades, and went back to fiddling with his own lens. Maya kept her eye where it was on the ice, on the guy doing slow laps along the blue line by himself while the rest of the team horses around near the bench. She didn't need to check who it was. She knew Jake Thompson's stride the way she knew the sound of her father's truck pulling into the driveway. It was less of a hockey player's stride than a specific fact of Pine Ridge, something as fixed and familiar as the water tower or the flagpole outside the elementary school. Jake Thompson skates the blue line alone before every home game. Everybody knew it. Nobody talked about it, the way nobody talked about most of the things everybody knew here. She lifted the camera and took the shot anyway. Him alone on the ice, dad in the fourth row, three hundred people waiting for the puck to drop and not one of them looking at what she was looking at which was just a kid, eighteen years old, all by himself on a sheet of ice too big for one person, like he was trying to memorize something before it was too late. She lowered the camera. That one was for her, not the yearbook. "Your dad's looking for you," Frank said. "Ten minutes till the puck drops." "He's not looking for me. He's looking for his lineup card." "Sixty percent looking for the lineup card." Maya rolled her eyes and stood, brushing ice dust off her knees, and made her way along the boards toward the home bench, where Coach Dean Carter, six-foot-one, Carhartt jacket zipped to the chin even indoors, a whistle he never blew hanging unused around his neck — was in fact looking for his lineup card, and also, when he glanced up and caught her eye, looking for her. "There you are," he said. "Thought you bailed on me." "I have been standing in this building for forty-five minutes, Dad." "Forty-five minutes of not saying hi to your father." "I was working." He looked at the camera around her neck the way he always did, a little proud, a little wary, like he still hadn't fully decided whether her wanting to be behind a lens instead of on the bench beside him was a betrayal or an inheritance. Maya had stopped trying to figure out which one he meant it as. Some days she thought it might be both. "Get me something good tonight," he said. "Boosters want stuff for the banner." "I always get you something good." "You do," he admitted, and for just a second, under the fluorescent lights and the pregame noise, he looked at her like she was eight years old again, sitting cross-legged on a folding chair with a disposable camera, and not nineteen, home from her second year of college with opinions about aperture and a mentor at school who kept using the word *promising* in a way that made her chest go tight and hopeful at the same time. "Go," he said, softer. "Get your spot before Delgado hogs the good angle again." -------------------- The horn sounded. The lights dimmed for introductions, that specific hush-then-roar that Pine Ridge did better than anywhere Maya had ever been, three hundred people going quiet all at once and then loud all at once, like the whole town breathed on the same count. "Starting at center, and your captain — number nineteen — JAKE THOMPSON." The Icehouse came apart at the seams. Cowbells. A kid two rows up screaming Jake's name like it was the only word he knew. Somewhere behind Maya, Ben Thompson was on his feet, clapping in that careful, contained way he had the way of a man who had learned a long time ago not to let anyone see exactly how much something mattered to him. Maya had the camera up before she'd even decided to lift it. Through the viewfinder, Jake skated out from the tunnel of his teammates' raised sticks into the wash of the rink lights, and for one half-second, right as the flash caught him, he wasn't looking at the crowd or his dad or the ice. He was looking at her. It lasted exactly as long as a shutter click. Then he was past her, taking his position at center, tapping his stick against the linesman's skate for luck the way he did every single game, and the moment was gone, folded back into the noise and the cold and the three hundred people who thought they knew exactly what they were watching. Maya lowered the camera and looked at the little preview screen. There he was. Caught mid-stride, looking straight at her, an expression on his face she didn't have a word for yet. She filed it away for herself, not the yearbook and got back to work.