“What are you guys doing?” Sid asked when I answered the call, he had that kind of longing tone that tended to rear its head when he spent more than a week away.

“Pippy, Taylor, and I are watching Josie and the Pussycats and Lachlan is picking up dinner with Serena.” I looked over at Taylor, gesturing for her to take Piper, who was half asleep, then snuck out of the room so they could enjoy the movie without hearing one side of a conversation. “How are you?” I continued after slipping into the office and settling onto the chair behind his desk.

“Good, just landed in Vancouver,” he said unenthusiastically. “How are things there?”

“Alright, Taylor’s got the day off and an afternoon game tomorrow so I was thinking about taking the kids.

“Spud will like that,” he replied with a little more emotion, but he still sounded distant. Taylor had been playing in the National Women’s Hockey League for the past year in Connecticut. I had secretly hoped she’d be drafted to Pittsburgh’s expansion team but Connecticut wasn’t so bad, and their mother could finally say both of her children played hockey for a living which was a dream come true.

“I think so,” I answered him softly, instinctually trying to be calm for him. “What are your plans for tonight?”

“Probably just hang out in the room,” his words felt heavy and I could feel his depleted energy from 2600 plus miles away. I should have been used to this. It was far from the first time he’d called me from the road with that aching feeling. It wasn’t the same longing as years past, not that desperate desire to be with me. Instead this was a pining for things to be different. I could feel his confusion with every sentence he tried to string together. He was tired, we all were.

We’d miscarried the spring before Piper’s first birthday. During the second round of playoffs I woke up in the early hours of the morning to find myself laying in a small pool of my own blood. We hadn’t known that we were potentially going to become a family of five. I’d had a hunch but brushed off my irregularity as a side effect of breastfeeding. In a strange way losing the pregnancy was serendipitous. Piper hadn’t even reached a year old and lay sleeping peacefully in the same bassinet attached to our bed that Lachlan had. I considered letting Sidney sleep, dealing with it all when the sun came up, but the deep red stain on our white sheets was nothing if not disturbing.

I think he expected me to be upset, but instead I just felt tired and sore, like my stomach was being squeezed.
“It’s okay to be sad,” he leaned against the doorframe to the laundry room, wearing only boxer briefs and crossing his arms. I didn’t look up, instead continued to spray the stain with peroxide based stain remover. It was three in the morning and I didn’t have the energy to engage him in an emotional conversation. I didn’t want to think about what was happening, I wanted to crawl back into bed and forget I’d ever been awoken so rudely.

“Do you want me to do that so you can go back to bed?” he took a step towards me and held out his hands. He’d offered so genuinely that it warmed my heart and for a beat I wanted to pass the job over to him.

“No,” I finally responded, giving him a weak smile. “I’m almost done. You should go back to bed, I’ll be up in a few minutes.”

He kissed my temple and rubbed his hand up and down my back a few times before leaving me alone, holding the evidence of my body’s failure.

I didn’t join him until half past four, by then the sun was already peaking through the previously black sky and I could hear the obnoxious song birds outside our window. Piper woke up at 6:45am, right on schedule, and Lachlan came barrelling into our room and 7:00am, just as Sidney was getting out of bed. Sid caught Lachlan’s wiggly body and tossed him playful lying onto the bed. Piper clapped her hands, sitting in the middle of the action surrounded by the downy white duvet and wearing her pink polka-dotted pyjamas. I could see more of myself in her than I had in Lachlan at that age. She had Sidney’s eyes and a mixture of his dark hair and my loose curls. She had my nose and Sidney’s famous lips, and I could already tell her nose would be dotted with my freckles in the coming years. For all their difference in colouring, she looked like Lachlan, there was no doubt they were siblings. But unlike Lachlan she was serious, organized even, she did not take well to changes in her schedule. I’d once tried to feed her dinner half an hour later than usual and all hell broke loose. In that way she was far more like Sidney that I could ever have imagined.

“Do you want me to take them so you can get some more sleep?” He spoke softly as if to protect the little ears near us from the harsh reality that we were facing.

“No,” I pulled my well worn pyjama bottoms— that had once been his— on and twisted my hair into a bun on the top of my head, preparing myself for the morning.
“Are you sure?” he shot me that worried look I’d seen regularly for the past nearly six years. “I don’t have to be at the rink until this afternoon,” he said pulling a t-shirt over his head and muffling his words.

“I’m fine, Sidney.” I tried to sound reassuring but instead it came out exasperated and cold. “Really, I am.” I tried again, this time getting a little closer to my intention. “Besides, you can’t feed Pippy breakfast, you know she won’t take a bottle in the morning.” I held my arms out to her and she mimicked my gesture, grinning up at me. She was exceptionally smily that morning, almost as if she knew that I needed her to distract me from myself.

We didn’t talk about it after that day. It was just something that had happened that neither of us wanted to bring up. Me because I didn’t want to think about it too much and allow it affect me, and him because I think he worried it would cause some delayed breakdown. Despite the closed lines of communication on the topic, something shifted between us. We spent the off-season inseparable, not even taking our parents up on the offer to take the kids for a few days. We didn’t want a break from them, instead we wanted to wrap them up and keep them as close as possible. But the off-season doesn’t last forever, and in the blink of an eye it was time to leave our safe haven by the water and return to our lives in Pittsburgh. Leaving was never easy, the night before our plane took flight I sat on the dock with Simon and cried. I wasn’t ready to share Sidney for another nine or so months, and the thought of leaving the safety of our extended family was overwhelming. Simon was still struggling to gain mobility, and I knew Big Bea was getting older. I felt guilty leaving them when I should have been there to help.

“I think I need to talk to Mario when we get back in town.” He released the statement as if he’d been holding it, along with his breath for months. Almost like it was a secret. It wasn’t though, at least not a secret being kept from me. I didn’t need to ask what he meant, because I’d seen this coming.

“Do you feel like you’re ready?” I would have given anything to be beside him in that moment.

“I don’t know. I don’t think I’ll ever feel ready. But something feels different and that scares me.”

“I know what you mean,” I mumbled and closed my eyes, letting my head fall back against the chair.

He paused, and I was preparing myself for him to tell me he’d call later. After all this time he still tried to hide a certain part of him from me. But I wasn’t naive, I knew it was a mixture of ego and he’s constant need to protect us from his world.

“I’m just so tired, Beatrice.” he finally spoke. His voice was tight and I knew his eyes were starting to water. “I didn’t think this could happen. How do you get tired of doing the thing you love the most? There are people who would give their lives to be in my shoes. Am I selfish for wanting out?”

“Oh baby, no. You’re not selfish at all. This is your job, and people become disenchanted with their jobs, you’re just as entitled to that as anyone else is. You’ve been doing this for thirteen years. That’s a long time to be doing one thing.”

“Would you be disappointed if I retired?” That was the question that stung the most. Because on one hand I loved watching him play, because I knew he loved playing. But the idea he could even consider that I would be anything but supportive took me off guard and left me feeling uneasy.

“Hockey isn’t your master status, Sidney. Maybe it’s what you are associated with publicly, but it’s not your defining characteristic. Whether you play or not will have absolutely no impact on how much we love you.”

“Thank you,” he sighed. “I love you, Bea. I’ll call at bedtime so I can say good night to Lachlan.”

“I love you too, Dis. And I always will.”

I didn’t mention our conversation to anyone. Part of me wanted to confide in Taylor as soon as I hung up the phone, but it felt wrong to share his sorrow, even with his sister. Instead I waited for him to come home to us, and I hugged him a little tighter than usual when he walked in the door. I spoke a little softer when we were alone. And I did everything I could to remind him how much we loved him.

The question hung in the air between us for months. I woke up every morning expecting him to tell me they’d scheduled a press conference. Every road trip included a call or two from the darkness of his hotel room, his voice hoarse, and no closer to an answer than before. He met with Mario every few weeks, sometimes with me by his side, and other times by himself, sneaking out of the house only to tell me when he’d arrived at his destination. I kept a strong appearance for him, reminding him that no matter what he decided I’d support him, but the truth was it all terrified me. I couldn’t do anything to make him feel better, nothing I said gave him the answers he needed. I was in limbo while he tried to make the biggest decision of our lives. I couldn’t tell him, but the waiting killed me. While it might have been his career in question, it was also the status of my life. Some days if felt like I was the keeper of everything, like I held the responsibility of making everything function in the palm of my hand. Sidney was going to do what he had to, but I would always be the one tying loose ends and fitting the pieces of our life he created together. It would be a lie to say I hadn’t lay alone at night resenting him, or tried to wrangle to kids while spitting his name in vain under my breath. But I wasn’t about self pity, I gave myself to permission to be frustrated, but never to forget that I had chosen this life for myself. We didn’t really believe in destiny. Some things happened serendipitously and I hoped that there was some universal energy keeping an eye on things, but other than that our lives were a result of sociological factors rather than fate. We were lucky, we’d been born in the right places at the right time, with the right complexion, and in Sidney’s case the right sex. We’d been fortunate to have our choices so far lead us to an extraordinary life. I found it oddly comforting to remind myself when it felt too overwhelming that I had made these decisions for myself. It was that notorious sense of control that Sidney and I both lived for.

They didn’t make playoffs that year. Watching him in the weeks following the end of the season was terrifying. Something in him had broken and I couldn’t figure out how to fix it. I had never seen him so defeated and distant. When we boarded the plan to Halifax that April I hoped with everything in me that being home for the months of the off-season would revitalize him. I didn’t expect him to be miraculously changed by the ocean air but I had faith that it could bring parts of my husband back to me.

The sun came through the windows making everything shimmer one July morning as I stood in the kitchen making breakfast. It was already fifteen degrees outside and the hour hand clock hadn’t even hit eight. Lachlan and Piper were sitting at the table eagerly awaiting their eggs and toast, their colourful plastic cutlery keeping them occupied. We’d been up for over half an hour and I hadn’t heard any signs that Sidney was awake. I’d gotten into the habit of waking up earlier the kids to catch them before they could get to our room and disturb him. It was almost like I was hoping he could sleep off the foul mood he’d been in for months.

The eggs had been served and toast had been buttered when I heard the front door open then close.

“Daddy?” Lachlan called, jumping up from the table and running to the window, just in time to see Sidney’s truck pull out of the driveway. Sadly this wasn’t the first time he’d left without saying goodbye nor was it the first time Lachlan had returned to the table disappointed and irritable.

“What should we do today?” I asked, hoping to distract him and shift his mood back to its usual cheery state.

“I don’t know,” he sighed. His little body hunched over his plate, elbows on the table with his face in his hands.

“We could practice riding your bike,” I suggested even though that was something Sidney had promised to do when they’d bought the blue two-wheeler bicycle a few weeks prior. “Or we could go see Grammy. I think she said she was making popsicles today.”

He didn’t reply, instead gave me the same vacant look Sidney did, his bottom lip pushed out.

“Grammy!” Piper chimed in, her face covered in bits of egg and crumbs of toast. Her curls were wild with tufts of hair sticking up from the back of her head.

“Pippy wants to go see Grammy, Spud.” I reached over and tickled his neck hoping to at least pull a smile out of him, but instead he smacked my hand away and scowled. “We could see if Grammy wants to go to the beach,” I tried one last time, instinctively smoothing the stray hairs on the top of his head without thinking. He pushed me away again, this time getting up from his seat.

“I don’t care,” he pouted before running out of the kitchen and in the direction of his room.

“Lachlan, you weren’t excused from the table,” I called after him. It was more of a reminder that I was still his parent than any kind of disciplinary threat. I couldn’t really blame him for being in a sour mood and although that didn’t excuse his behaviour I didn’t have the heart to chase after him. If he wanted to be alone then I could give him that.

I cleaned up the remainder of our breakfast and wiped the residue from Piper’s face before attempting to talk to Lachlan. When I asked if I could come in I was met with a loud and hostile no that stung me to the core. I told myself not to take it personally, but the rejection hurt and I was overcome with a longing for the days when he’d cry if I left the room. I knew it was better to back away and lick my wounds than to try to push it. He had a right to some privacy and this was him exercising that.

His mood, not unlike his father’s, was contagious and before the hour was over I had two temper tantrums on my hands. I made the executive decision to deal with Piper’s melt down before attempting to smooth things over with Lachlan again. She sat on the floor of her room screaming and slamming her hands against the floor while I tried to coax her into getting dressed.

“Pippy, we can’t go see Grammy and Grampy when we’re nakey!” I tried to get her attention, holding a navy blue romper in one hand and her favourite floral print seersucker dress in the other. “They have a strict no naked babies rule.” I offered her the dress with a smile, but she screamed even louder and yanked it out of my hands sending it flying to the other side of the room.

“Piper, please let Mummy help you get dressed,” I begged and tried to pick her up but was met with flailing arms and kicking feet. I could feel myself losing my patience. I had a five year old who wouldn’t talk to me and a two year old who was kicking me, the only productive thing I could think to do was leave. I put Piper back on the floor, lay both outfit options on the bed and walked out of the room, leaving her screams behind me.

I sat on the back deck forcing myself to take deep, even breaths, all the while hoping Sidney would come home and relieve me of my parental duties. Any other day I probably would have given up, let Lachlan sulk in his room until he was ready to talk to me and let Piper spend the day in her diaper. But I was desperate to get out of the house, and with Sidney off in his own world I had not choice but to take Lachlan and Piper with me. I hadn’t suggested going to see their grandparents on a whim though. That I had planned to do regardless, because I only knew a handful of people in the area, an only one of them could offer me the guidance I had blindly been searching for for months.

“Mum! Make her stop singing!” Lachlan cried from the back seat moments after we’d pulled out of the driveway. It had taken everything in me to get them dressed and into the car, beach gear and all.

“Buddy, she’s not hurting anyone just let her be,” I looked at him in the rearview mirror. Piper was in her carseat beside him singing her own version of the pop song playing on the radio, most of the words were mismatched and mumbled but she was enjoying herself and more importantly, she’d stopped screaming.

“No! Make her quit. I don’t like it!”

“We’re almost there, just ignore it. She’s having fun,” I told him calmly, not taking my eyes off the road. I wanted to listen to my own advice and annoy his irritable complaints but I hated the idea of him feeling unheard.

“You always take her side,” he kicked the back of my seat and folded his arms in a huff.

“Lachlan,” I raised my voice slightly, grabbing his attention “I have already told you how dangerous it is when you kick the back of my seat. I know you’re angry but that is not an outlet for your anger. And I have warned you about the word always. I do not always take her side. She’s little. She’s not trying to bother you.” I had to use all the control left in me to keep my voice stern without yelling. I hated yelling at him. It was so easy to cross the line between authoritative and angry, everyday I had to remind myself that yelling at him only made things worse. But that was easy enough to say when he was five, I made no guarantees that my anti-yelling stance wouldn’t change as he got older.

I released them into the backyard as soon as we reached our destination, leaving them to play with their grandfather and the dog while I made a beeline for the air-conditioned house. I found her in the kitchen. Before I’d even sat down I felt a sense of relief. The prospect that I may find clarity or better yet, an answer, that could save my marriage was the most hope I’d encountered since the end of the season. After exchanging pleasantries and giving both kids the popsicles I’d used as bribery to get them out of the house, I sat down at the kitchen table and told her everything. I started with the miscarriage and didn’t stop talking until my mouth was dry and my eyes were damp. I told her about the late night calls from the road, the uncertainty surrounding his career, and how soul-crushingly painful it was to see him pulling away from me. Only a year ago I had thought our marriage was indestructible. In light of everything we’d endured together it felt like we were finding our rhythm and I thought of our future so optimistically. Despite my best efforts I couldn’t pin point where it had all gone wrong. There seemed to be no pattern leading to the shift in our relationship, it just seemed that one minute he wanted to be with me every waking moment, and the next he’d disappeared emotionally. I was alone, left in the dark while a plague of discontent and melancholy ripped him apart. I knew logically that his distance wasn’t really about me or the kids, we’d just been caught in the crossfire. Casualties in the sick and twisted battle going on inside of him. But knowing that did little to quell my own gloomy cloud of anguish that threaten to destroy everything I’d worked so hard to create.

“I don’t know how to fix this,” I told her, my fingers knotted in my hair and my elbow resting on the table. “Have you ever seen him like this?”

“Not to this extent,” she gave me a sympathetic smile. “I’ve seen him go off into his mind before and forget that there’s a world outside of hockey. But not like this.”

“It scares me. This has been going on for months now, I don’t know how to explain it to Lachlan. I don’t think Sid realizes how much it effects the kids. His moods are directly impacting them. It’s like I’m getting it from two sides and I can’t handle either of them.”

“Have you told him that?”

“No,” I sighed. “I don’t want to make him feel bad, or make it worse.”

“I know he can be difficult, but he needs to know what you just told me. I think he’s just as afraid as you are right now, he’s never been good at talking about how he feels,” she reached out and took my hand in hers.

“I don’t want to give up on him, but he’s making it hard to stay.”

She didn’t have a chance to reply before the front door opened and he was standing a few feet away from us. His wet hair was a tell tale sign that he’d just showered, but the heat had beads of sweat trickling down his forehead. I could tell his shirt was sticking to him but he looked as aloof as ever. He looked from his mother to me without greeting either of us then walked past us to the fridge.

“I’m going to go see how Dad is doing with the kids,” she excused herself, leaving Sidney and I alone in the house.

The silence hung heavy in the air like, not unlike the humidity outside. It was suffocating, incapable, and left me feeling uncomfortably warm. We were in a stand off, both waiting for the other to speak first and slice through the distance we’d put between us. There was a voice inside of me urging me to open the communication, but when I tried to speak there was no sound, as if my brain and mouth had been disconnected. Every second felt like a lifetime. The room seemed to be getting warmer and warmer, the oxygen level falling and my body struggling for air. He needed to break the spell but instead just stood at the counter with his hands on either side of the sink and his head hung. I tried not to drift off into memories of wrapping my arms around his waist and pressing my face against his back. But my masochistic mind brought me back to the days after Piper was born when I’d find him in the kitchen making breakfast, or washing my favourite mug by hand so I’d have it for the day. It reminded me of bathing Lachlan for the first time in the kitchen sink, water soaking both of us and his tiny wails filling the house. Sidney had looked so strong holding his squirmy little body in the water. He didn’t look so strong and stable standing in his parents’ kitchen though. He looked empty.

“Sidney,” I finally spoke. It sounded forced and foreign to me, in a pitch too high to be my own voice.

I watched his shoulders tense before he croaked out a “what” without turning to face me.

“I…” the words left me, all of my thoughts halted at the base of my throat, crashing into each other, rendering me frozen and shaking.

“What, Beatrice?” He finally turned, fists and jaw tight. He was doing everything he could to avoid looking at me.

“Please,” I sputtered out.

“I don’t know what to say,” his tone was so bleak I could almost taste his discontent. “I don’t know what you want to hear from me.”

“Just tell me how I can fix this,” it came out as a plea more than anything and I quickly pushed the tears off of my cheeks. “I know something is wrong and I want to fix it. “

“You can’t fix it,” he half-snorted, shaking his head. “I’m the only one who can fix it.”

“Okay,” I stood up and took a step towards him, but stopped when he flinched. “Then what can I do to help, because I don’t know how much longer I can live like this. No, I don’t know how much longer the kids can live like this. This time last year all you seemed to want was to be around us, and now I can’t even get you to look me in the eyes.”

He tried to shrug me off but still wouldn’t look at me. “I’m just worried about next season.”

I took yet another deep breath and tried to calm myself. I knew it was an excuse, and worse of all it was a bad one, a cop out so he wouldn’t have to keep talking. “I understand that. But I don’t understand why that has to impact our entire family.”

“Don’t you get it?” he spoke so loud he was almost screaming. “I don’t want to retire, because if I do that I’m just another washed up athlete who couldn’t cut it past his 20s. But there’s no use playing if I can’t win. So I either quit and become nobody or I do everything I possibly can to be better. And that’s what I’m doing.”

“At the expense of your family,” I added.

“You don’t get it do you?” he cried. “There is no way you could possibly understand this feeling.”

I stared at him while rage washed over me. Glaring at him while tears dripped down my sunburnt cheeks. He’d crossed the one line I wasn’t sure I could forgive. “I don’t understand?” I bellowed. “You’re telling me I don’t understand what it’s like to feel like the world is caving in? What it’s like to feel like you have no control over a situation?” My voice was louder than his had been and I was sure the decorative plates on the wall were going to start crashing down from the noise coming from me. “Never did I think you could be so selfish! But if you really think I don’t understand then you need to find someone who does.”

He looked at me in horror, eyes wide and jaw slack.

“If you really think that I can’t possibly help, or worse that your career is more important than our family then maybe you need to go back to Pittsburgh on your own. Because it’s not about us anymore, it’s about your children. And while I can ignore your petulance, they can’t and I refuse to force them to.”

“What are you going to do? Take them away? Lachlan starts school in a few weeks, you can’t just take them away from me. Where are you going to live? Your parents’ basement?”

“You might have the city behind you, Sidney, but don’t forget that I’m related to most of an Island and if I want to enrol Lachlan in school in Canada I can make it happen. I could have a place to live, a job, and a lawyer in less than a week.”

“Is that what you want?”

I had to let myself thing about his question, in part to scare him but mostly because I wasn’t sure what I wanted. I knew I didn’t want to leave him or live without him, but I also knew that he wasn’t the same person I’d married.
“No,” I finally answered. “But it’s not about what I want. It’s about them. So either you talk to someone and figure this out, or we have to make other living arrangements. We can’t be around you until something changes.”

With that I left him standing dumbfounded in his parents’ kitchen and went outside to corral the kids into the car. Lachlan cried when he saw his dad’s truck and accused me of being mean, his angry words scared Piper and soon enough they were both screaming and crying in the back seat while I tried desperately to keep it together.

I wasn’t surprised when he didn’t come home that night, or the one after that, but by day three I was sick with worry and had spent most of my waking hours pacing with the phone in my hand. I was starting to fear the worst and our house had become a gloomy place despite my best efforts to keep the kids distracted. I started to regret the ultimatum I’d presented him, trying to convince myself that I could live with his mood if it meant he was safe beside me, I could live with anything if it meant him coming home. I’d tried to call him but could only reach his voicemail, my texts went unanswered and his mother hadn’t heard from him. I promised myself one more night and I’d start calling people. Telling myself that as much as it hurt I couldn’t be surprised that he was taking time after I’d threatened to leave. If I wanted to save what we had it was imperative that I give him a chance to improve.

After a long evening of fighting to get both Piper and Lachlan to sleep I spent the night staring at the ceiling wondering how things could have possibly gone so wrong and hating myself for pushing him away. The bed felt empty and my stomach seized at the idea that I may have spent my last night with him.

I saw the headlights through the window before I heard him come in and pulled the blankets tighter around me. There was no way I could know why he was coming home, but I refused to get my homes up, telling myself that he was probably just getting his stuff. I closed my eyes when the bedroom door opened, and held my breath as I felt the bed dip under his weight.

“Beatrice?” he whispered and I slowly rolled to face him. “I talked to someone, I’m going to fix this.”

Notes

This isn't a very good Happy December 25th, I know. But I have a feeling everyone would have stopped reading years ago if everything was always sunshine and roses.

I hope you're all having a wonderful holiday season and I'd really appreciate comments. The more comments I receive the easier it is to update (not that I'm black mailing you, it's just encouraging to know people are still reading.)

xx-T