"The life of the dead is placed in the memory of the living."—Cicero
Requiem
Pav was quiet today. Most people, who didn't know and appreciate Mark Pavelich the way Jim Craig did, would have pointed out that Pav was always quiet, but Jim realized that wasn't true. Pav was far from silent on the ice or in the locker room, even though he seldom used words to communicate, and when he did, never strung two together where one would serve.
Displaying a sense of humor as untamable as the woods he loved hunting in, Pav delighted in playing practical jokes on his line mates in the locker room—tying the laces of Bah's skates together or snapping Buzz's stick and taping it up again just to see the astonishment on Buzz's face when it snapped after the simplest of hits.
On the ice, he was always making stir with his assists, because he lived to set people up for goals the way Jim lived to block shots, or, if he couldn't avoid sliding into the spotlight, scoring goals himself. Anyone who thought Pav was quiet because he didn't speak was probably stupid enough to believe that Helen Keller hadn't been able to see or hear just because she was blind and deaf. There were more ways to hear than with ears, more ways to see than with eyes, and more ways to speak than with words.
That was why Pav didn't have to speak a single word for Jim to recognize he was distracted and upset today. He played no jokes on Bah or Buzz, and his chemistry with his line was not igniting with assists and goals, but instead fizzling out with dropped passes and bungled positioning. Pav's difficult practice came to an awful climax during the last five minutes when he did not notice a chance to go in for a breakaway goal during a scrimmage.
Jim was irritated that both his defensemen, Baker and Rammer, were tangled in the knot of forwards—Mac, Mark Johnson, Eric Strobel, and Bah—that had been fighting for possession of the puck and from whence Buzz had whacked the puck in Pav's direction a second ago on the far side of the blue line. The existence of a breakaway opportunity indicated a serious defensive lapse. More than that, he was annoyed that he wouldn't be undergoing the challenge of preventing a breakaway goal, but, even more than that, he was worried about Pav, who looked like he had either seen a zombie or just become one.
When it became clear that Pav wasn't about to take advantage of the breakaway opportunity and the scrimmage was only going to plummet from bad to worse, Herb blew his whistle and snapped at the decibel level of a low-flying aircraft, "Rammer!"
"Yes, Coach?" Rammer's resigned tone suggested that he was aware he was going to receive the brunt of the blame for the poor defensive positioning that had created the chance for a breakaway goal.
As a rather offensive defenseman, Bill Baker basically had a blank check from Herb to skate on the far side of the blue line if he believed he could score a goal as a result. Bill was the defensive counterpart to forwards like Mark Johnson, Rob McClanahan, and the Coneheads who essentially had free reign to position themselves wherever the rules did not prohibit, because Herb trusted them to be conscientious enough not to make gigantic mistakes and fast enough to skate in a blink to wherever they needed to go next if the situation shifted abruptly.
Technically, Rammer was not supposed to have the same degree of liberty, but that often did not stop him from playing as though he did. As a defenseman, Rammer's overarching strategy seemed to be to follow the excitement, even if that translated into getting into scuffles along the boards when he should have been patrolling near the net. Herb seemed to fluctuate on a daily basis between admiring Rammer's passion and raging at the enthusiastic nineteen-year-old's penchant for forgetting simple laws of positioning in the heat of an exhilarating moment. Right now, he was firmly planted on the latter end of the spectrum, and Rammer, flushed, knew it.
"Where the hell were you when Buzz gave Pav that perfect opportunity for a breakaway?" demanded Herb, glaring at Rammer with enough firepower to disarm a battleship.
"Over here." Rammer raised a hand like a lackluster student volunteering an answer less out of the conviction that it was correct and more on the supposition that class participation was their only hope of passing the course. "I haven't really moved since, because, you know, you blew your whistle."
"And where were you supposed to be during that play?" pressed Herb, increasing the intensity of his glower.
"Between the opposing forward closest to the goal—Pav—and the net," Rammer recited dutifully.
"If you knew where you were supposed to be, why weren't you there?" snarled Herb.
Before Rammer could reply, Jim's eyes were caught briefly by the sight of Bob Suter, who had been playing defense near Janny's net at the opposite side of the ice, leaning over to massage his ankle. Last week, he had injured it, necessitating Herb to turn Dave Christian into another defenseman, although Christian had not played that position since high school. So far, Christian's quick wit compensated for any mistakes he did make and prevented him from repeating errors.
Perhaps sensing Suter's distress through some Wisconsin boy bond and not wanting Herb to detect it, Mark scooted closer to Rob. Their shoulders almost touching, they created a screen that blocked Suter from view, and Herb, his attention still focused on the disgraced Rammer, probably wouldn't register anything suspicious. Like most line mates, Mark and Rob had very flexible definitions of personal space when it came to one another. If Herb even spotted Mark's movement now, he would probably assume that the two forwards were telepathically communicating their plot for dominating the next face-off.
Mark, Jim thought, might pretend that he had no fears of Suter being kicked off the team owing to his recent injury, but his actions proved otherwise. No matter how many times he told the story about Suter having his toe partially severed in a warm-up skate only to get stitches and come charging out of the locker room to play for the Badgers in the first period, he was obviously still afraid that Herb would doubt Suter's ability to tough this injury out in the Olympics.
"I just wanted to be where the excitement was," said Rammer after a pause, and Jim rolled his eyes, thinking: Don't worry, Rammer. Just blow wherever the winds of excitement carry you, and I'll keep your plus-minus stats up all by myself, shall I?
"Well, we can only hope that seeing Pav get a breakaway would quench your craving for excitement," Herb remarked coldly before fixing his iron stare on Pav and rapping out, "What about you, Pav? What have you got to say for yourself? Did you not see that chance for a breakaway goal?"
That question, like so many posed by Herb, could be the definition of being trapped between a rock and a hard place. There was no right or even preferable answer. Say no, and you seemed oblivious to game-changing opportunities. Say yes, and you appeared unable to seize any important chances you spotted. Neither was a particularly desirable attribute in an Olympic athlete.
Pav, however, managed to give without speaking a word the response best able to raise Herb's hackles when he offered a non-committal shrug that could have meant everything or nothing.
"I expect a verbal answer, Pavelich," Herb growled. "You have a tongue. Use it."
"Oh," muttered Pav, offering his typical mildly put-out reply to being forced to employ actual words in a conversation. Oh, in Pav's opinion, seemed to constitute a complete answer to any question.
"Oh," Herb repeated disdainfully, nearly spitting with fury. "Is that all you can say?"
"No." Pav shook his head, and Jim winced. One of the worst things about Pav's stubborn refusal to engage in regular human contact was the fact that he had no comprehension of how some of his straightforward, short responses could be interpreted as utter insolence.
Exhaling gustily to ease the tension coiled in his muscles and mind, Jim prayed briefly that Herb would realize that while an answer like that from O.C. or Mac would have been pure sarcasm, in the case of Pav, it was plain honesty.
"Humph." Herb's gaze narrowed as if that could help him read the mind that Pav resolutely refused to reveal. "And will I see you take the breakaway next time you have a chance?"
"Dunno." Pav shrugged as if to say that he could not make any promises about his future performances when he only played in the moment, and his game changed from second to second.
A vein on the verge of explosion twitched in Herb's neck. While a person like Mac could declare that his technique would improve and record that as just another objective to be crossed off in his daily planner, Pav thrived off the spontaneous maneuver. His style was more innovation and inspiration than hard work and determination. On a good day, you could watch Mac and say that was how a forward should play; on a magical day, you could watch Pav and say you never knew a forward could be played like that.
Jim had to have faith that Herb appreciated that artistic genius part of Pav, even if Herb couldn't stand the fact that Pav appeared immune to Herb's mental manipulation. When it came down to it, Jim sometimes thought that Herb's favorite thing about coaching was the constant challenge of staying at least three steps ahead of fiercely intelligent players like O.C., Verchota, Baker, and Mac. However much those players rolled their eyes and grumbled over Herb's mind games, Jim suspected they enjoyed the intellectual exercise of trying to outsmart Herb, not to mention the triumph of believing they had shown Herb something when they probably had just reacted precisely as Herb wished.
With Pav, it would always be different, because Pav couldn't be wound up like a clock work by just a few well-chosen words from Herb. He was insulated from mind tricks by the memory of a hunting accident that had killed his best friend. To Pav, life was a woods where you never knew what would happen because you couldn't know. Having survived with scars the mind games of the woods, Pav wasn't about to fall for any devised by a mere mortal, even one as clever as Herb Brooks. It was that causal defiance to be governed by Herb's psychology that appealed to Jim the most.
The second he glanced at the stupid psychology test Herb expected them to take with its ridiculous questions about if they were an animal would they prefer to be an elephant or a baboon (a baboon, because elephants lived too long and remembered everything) and if they were a color would they be yellow or green (green because Jim was Irish), he had felt his brain close down like a clam ducking into its shell. He was tempted to scrawl in all capitals at the top: "The day we buried my mom, I lost my mind. Psychoanalyze that and tell me if you can be a lunatic if you know you are insane." Deciding that was too rude and risky, he had settled for turning the exam in blank.
Jim still felt that it had been presumptuous of Herb to think he had the right to pick his players' brains like that. It was against human nature to allow easy access to the brain. Other vital organs were well-shielded, of course: the lungs and heart inside the ribcage; the liver and spleen tucked securely under the edge of the ribs; and the kidneys packed in fat and safe against the thick muscles of the lower back. Solid protection, but nothing compared to the brain, which was encased entirely by the hard bone of the skull, and inside this bone, there were sac-like membranes filled with cerebrospinal fluid so that the brain sat in the middle of a pressurized liquid system that afforded it superb protection. Not that this wasn't ironic in a way: that the brain should be so shielded from pain when it lacked its own pain sensors. After all, it was one of the freaks of anatomy that the organ which sensed pain throughout the body could feel nothing itself.
"You guys are playing worse every day, and right now you're playing like the middle of next month," Herb finally barked, drawing Jim out of his reflection with a default Brooks expression. "I can't stomach watching you shame the game anymore today. Come into practice an hour earlier tomorrow."
Collecting his water bottle from the top of the net with a sigh, Jim thought that only Herb would believe it was fair to make them come in an hour early because he had irritably dismissed them about two minutes early the previous day.
As he followed Mac and Mark in the stream of boys heading back to the locker room to shower and change, he heard Mac grumble to Mark, "It's not fair that we had about five minutes less of scrimmage than the other guys."
Amused by Mac's endless capacity to take offense and morph everything imaginable into a competition, Jim contented himself with an internal snort. To Rob McClanahan, getting five minutes less playing time was a very big, very serious deal. In his world, it was probably like Herb had said, "McClanahan, you and your line are the worst—that's why I can't have you play as long as everyone else." Then again, Jim was fiercely protective of his space in net, so those who lived in glass houses probably shouldn't throw stones unless they had exceptionally good home insurance.
"No stressing," Mark told Mac as they stepped into the locker room. "Save your energy for tomorrow's extra long practice."
As he walked over to his cubby, Jim observed inwardly that Mark's life philosophy probably boiled down to "don't stress; just be brilliant."
The word brilliant made him think of Pav, who was usually so vivid a presence on ice, and he resolved to ask Pav if he wanted to get a drink and just talk or say nothing at all.
Fifteen minutes later, as everyone was drifting out of the locker room, Jim clasped Pav's arm, asking softly, "Do you want to get a beer together?"
Pav hesitated for a moment, as if debating inwardly whether he had the energy for that much time with even a friend, and then nodded.
Smiling slightly, Jim guided Pav out of the arena and down the salted sidewalk glowing yellow in the streetlights to a corner grocery store. Familiar with the organization of this particular establishment, they strode to the rear refrigerators where the beer cans were kept cool.
After paying the clerk behind the counter for their selections, they walked further down the boulevard to one of the city's many parks. Always more comfortable on the ground than on a bench or concrete, Pav sprawled out on a mattress of snow near the icy little pond, looking more like an innocent child making a snow angel than somebody who wrestled with the tragedy of his friend's bloody death in the woods.
"Is there anything you want to talk about, Pav?" Jim murmured, sinking into his own bed of snow, popping open the top on his beer can, taking a sip, and then putting the can in a snug hole of snow to keep chill.
"I used to talk." Pav clenched a snowball between his gloves and hurled it at the nearest lamppost, startling a pair of joggers who were racing along the cobblestone path at that second. "To him."
No need to ask who he was. He was the friend who had been killed so suddenly and senselessly. The friend whose death Pav didn't want to begin to understand. The friend who, refusing to say dead, haunted Pav, who could only be grateful for whatever heartache those scraps of memory and contact could bring, because the only thing more painful than remembering the dead was forgetting them.
He and Pav, Jim often reflected, were the only ones on the whole team who understood what it was like to really suffer a loss. That was why when someone like Rob McClanahan began his biweekly rant about the washing machine eating another one of his socks as if it were a devastating personal loss (presumably because Rob was now at a greater risk of walking around with uncoordinated accessories that might be noticed and gossiped about by people with creepy foot fetishes) it took all of Jim's discipline not to observe rather condescendingly that he hoped the fear of unmatched socks would always be Mac's biggest problem.
Saying that would do no good, he knew. Rob would just retort that, given Jim's stunning sympathy skills, it was a shocker he didn't have more friends than he could count on one hand. Robbie was no idiot—in fact, he was one of the most cultured people Jim had ever met—but the point would go flying over his head with a whoosh. To him, tragedy was what happened to characters in the contrived Greek and Shakespearean plays he read for fun; it wasn't something that happened to him or anyone he loved in real life, and it definitely wasn't a classic definition of hubris that he felt that way. Not at all.
Jim forced himself to control his bitterness, reminding himself that he wouldn't wish suffering such as he had endured on his worst enemy, and nobody—annoying personality quirks aside—on this team was that. Nobody should have to struggle to keep their attenion focused on their textbook as they took a jolting T ride through Boston's dark subway tunnels after hockey practice to visit their mother who was dying of cancer. No one should ever have to tack up loving get well cards on their mother's hospital wall, fearing all the while that their mother would never get well. Nobody should have to see needles pumping medicine that only seemed to make their mother sicker into her veins. No one should ever have to talk to their dying mother about classes and hockey games as if everything were normal when nothing would ever be right in the universe again.
Freshman year at BU had been awful for Jim because he could never decide which was worse: seeing his mother suffering and trying valiantly to act as if she were experiencing no pain, or going about his life as if trivial things still mattered and as if she weren't fighting cancer without him by her side. Jim was too proud to tell any of his professors or Coach Parker how he felt like his life was spiraling out of control no matter how hard he tried to balance everything, because that might lead to the shame of asking for help. Help that, ultimately, even the doctors and nurses with their advanced medical degrees, couldn't give, unless you counted giving Jim's mother a ton of painkillers so that her death was a little less agonizing than it could have been.
When Coach Parker had heard through the university grapevine (because even at a school as massive as BU, there could be no secrets) that Jim's mother was sick with cancer, he had been a cross between offended and sympathetic. He had demanded whether Jim really thought that he was such an unfeeling bastard that he wouldn't care that Jim's mother was sick with cancer. Figuring that there was only one safe answer to that question, Jim had stammered out that of course he hadn't. Coach Parker had snorted as though he doubted this claim very much, clapped Jim on the shoulder, and told him that he would be there if Jim needed him.
Resting his head on a pillow of snow, Jim realized not for the first time how amazing it was that Coach Parker had placed no time limit on that offer.
"I guess you don't have much to say any more," observed Jim, watching Pav sip his beer once he felt he had given Pav a suitable chance to continue if he wished to say more than he had in the past seven weeks combined.
"Nothing to say," Pav agreed, nodding.
Jim bit his lip, wondering if Pav had lost his tongue the day his friend died in the hunting accident.
"Oh," Jim commented, thinking that one of the oddities about talking to Pav was that you started using his expressions and abbreviating your own sentences to match the brevity of his. "I'm sorry."
After his mother's death, well-meaning friends—sometimes the worst kind-had handed Jim all the usual clichés about losing a loved one, so he had learned the hard way that a simple "I'm sorry" was the best thing to say. Don't talk about how it would get better, or how the dead person was in a better place. Don't yammer on about how it was all part of some divine plan. Don't presume to tell the mourner they were lucky to know such a wonderful person. Don't mention closure as if losing someone you loved was something routine to get over like losing a sock in the wash. Every one of those platitudes had driven Jim crazy in the weeks following his mother's death. They had made him stare at the idiot and wonder why he or she still breathed while his mom's body rotted.
Those platitudes were the reason Jim stopped talking to most people about his mother. Some might have perceived it as him being macho or brave—trying to spare his friends or shunning people's pity or some such nonsense. That wasn't it. Talking about his mother hurt. A lot. It brought back his last moments with her. It brought back the unanswered questions. It brought back all the might-have-beens, and few things could devastate like the might-have-beens. It brought back the guilt: the feelings, however irrational, that a stronger son—a better son—would have found a way to save her. It brought back the regret that there had been selfish moments he wasted doing something other than making her and the rest of his family happy.
"Dreamed about him last night." Pav pulled a twig through the snow, making lines and zigzags around his legs. "Feels like I didn't sleep."
"You never forget. Even if you do during the day, you'll get a dream, and it won't be a nightmare. The nightmare is what you find in the morning, waking up to a world without them." Jim swallowed, thinking that anyone who believed that grief got less crushing with time didn't understand that love, being eternal, existed out of time. When you loved somebody, there would always be a million little things in your day that reminded you of that person, and each remembrance sliced open the gaping wound where your heart should have been. You would hear their voice in your head, turn around to see or say something to them, and then remember that you could travel across the whole globe and still not speak to them face-to-face. There were moments when the pain was less when you would hope that you were beginning to find peace, and then a laugh as happy as theirs or a smile as shiny as theirs awakened the dead, and you knew you would only find peace a world away, if at all. "Even if your awake mind will let you forget, your sleeping one won't."
"He screamed." Pav shook his head, staring down at his illustration in the snow. "But I couldn't hear his voice. Couldn't remember."
Jim swallowed, knowing that trying to hold onto all the little details about a person you would never see again in this lifetime was as futile as attempting to clutch water in your fist: everything slipped from your grasp even faster the more you tried to cling on. Photographs could help you remember the exact shade of the person's eyes gleaming in sunlight, or the precise, gentle curve of their jaw as it softened into a grin. No picture could capture the music of a mother singing as she cooked dinner, or the tenor of a friend's chuckle at a witty joke. Terribly and cruelly, those seemed to be the memories the mind drained itself of first.
"Sometimes I'm afraid I'll forget all the little details that made my mom so incredible." Jim's fingers beat a tattoo against his can. "But I think that, even if my mind forgets the exact way she laughed or sang, my heart won't. She shaped me so much, becoming such a part of who I am, that she'll be in my heart forever."
Pav nodded, as if to say that his friend would live in his heart forever, too, and then raised his can in a toast. "To remembered friends."
"I'll drink to that." Jim clinked his mostly empty can against Pav's.
Then, as he ducked his head to take a sip, he found himself with a mouthful of snow instead of beer. As he wiped the snow from his lips, he knew from Pav's snicker that the snowball thrown at the lamppost earlier had merely been target practice so Pav could hammer Jim's face with a snowball.
"If it's a Cold War you want, it's a Cold War you'll get!" exclaimed Jim, the blood pounding through his veins as it did before he made a pivotal save, and he launched a snowball of his own at Pav's ear. When Pav squawked in protest, Jim burst out laughing, and, in the wind blowing off the pond, he could hear the echo of his mother's laughter in heaven.