The Futures(3)

Not that people didn’t attempt to leave. They’d go for a few years of community college or university, but a small town like ours possesses a strange gravity, and they always came back. A few of my teammates were going to escape by leaving school early to play hockey in the Major Juniors, a path that would lead some of them to the NHL. I might have done the same. But I’d heard about someone from town, a decade ago, who’d played for an American college instead. He was rich and successful and living in New York by that time. He came back occasionally to visit, and I glimpsed him once at the gas station, filling the tank of a shiny high-end rental car. Even in that split second, I saw that he carried himself in a different way, and something within me latched on. I’d known that the world was bigger than Carlton, British Columbia, but I’d never really thought about just how big it was. I was fourteen years old, and I made up my mind. I played in Junior A and kept my college eligibility. Despite my reputation, I was smart, or at least I wanted to be smart, and I studied hard in school. In spare hours I shot tennis balls into the street hockey net, did squats and flipped tires and jogged the dirt roads around our house. On a Saturday morning, I drove two hours to take the SATs at a town on the border. In the fall of senior year, I finally got the call. The one I’d been hoping for. A new door, swinging wide open.

On the afternoon before my flight east, I stood with my parents in the driveway as the sun slipped behind the mountains, casting an early twilight over the yard. My parents owned the town’s grocery store, and they couldn’t afford the vacation time or the cost of the plane tickets. My mom would drive me to Vancouver, where we’d spend the night in an airport motel before my flight the following morning. My dad was staying at home to work. I’d said good-bye to my friends at a party the night before, truck headlights illuminating the clearing in the woods where we always gathered, squat kegs and foamy cups of beer clutched in the semidarkness.

It was quiet during the car ride out of town. “Music?” my mom asked, and I shook my head. The trees along the highway blurred together.

“Evan,” she said after a long silence. “It’s okay to be nervous.” She looked over at me, her face tanned from the summer. A long salt-and-pepper braid fell down her back. Her bare arms were lean from years of carrying boxes from delivery trucks to the loading dock. It was her hands on the steering wheel, their familiar age spots and creases, her thin gold wedding band, that made me understand that I was really leaving.

But I shook my head again. “I’m fine.”

“Well,” she said. “I guess you’re probably pretty excited about it.”

I was. I still was. But the anticipation had been building up for so long, and now that it was actually here, the moment felt disappointingly ordinary. We could have been driving anywhere, on a family trip, or en route to some hockey tournament. I had the feeling that eventually we’d turn back in the other direction, toward home. It seemed impossible that this was how life transformed itself: a drive down a road you’d driven so many times before.

“Only a hundred more kilometers,” she said an hour later, as we whizzed past another road marker. I felt like I should make conversation—it was the last time I’d see her for months—but I couldn’t think of anything to say.

“Checking in?” the clerk at the motel asked.

“The reservation is under Peck. Two rooms,” my mom said, digging through her wallet. I raised my eyebrows at her, my eternally frugal mother. Only when we were wheeling our bags down the hallway, away from the lobby, did she lean over and whisper: “You’re a grown-up now, honey. I think you deserve your own room, don’t you?”

I was on campus early. Every year a rich alum from the hockey team paid for the team to have use of the rink for one week in late August. The captains would run the practice, skirting the NCAA rules that prevented us from officially beginning practice until October. Most of the players lived off campus and could move in early. After my flight—the longest I’d ever taken, the first one out of the country—I caught a shuttle bus to New Haven. I was going to crash at the hockey house for the week, along with the other freshmen. The door was unlocked when I arrived.

“Hello?” I called into the empty living room. I followed the sound of voices to the back of the house, where I found two guys sitting in the kitchen, eating dinner.

“Hey. I’m Evan Peck. I just got here.” I held out my hand.

“Hey, man. I’m Sebi. And this is Paul. We’re new, too.”

“Where are you guys from?”

“Medicine Hat,” Sebi said.

“Kelowna,” Paul said.

Our team was mostly composed of guys like that, guys like me—Canadians from the prairies and the western provinces, some New Englanders, a few boys from Minnesota. It made settling in easy. The routine was familiar, the intensity turned up: twice-a-day practices, runs and lifts, team dinners. I was exhausted, not so much falling asleep every night as passing out, too tired to feel homesick. On the second-to-last day of that week, toward the end of afternoon practice, I noticed a man sitting in the stands, watching us scrimmage. He wore a crisp suit and tie, which seemed incongruous with both the August heat outside and the manufactured cold inside the rink.

“Did anyone else notice that guy?” I asked in the locker room.

“The guy in the stands?” one of the seniors replied. “That’s Reynolds. He’s paying for all this.”