"We know that hockey is where we live, where we can best meet and overcome pain and wrong and death. Life is just a place where we spend time between games."—Fred Shero
Epilogue: Time Between Games
Mark stared out the window of the Oslo hotel room he shared with Ken, who had gone out to the corner grocery store to purchase a six pack of Carlsberg-Ringes beer and raisin bolle with brown cheese because Mark had said that the best cure for the hairline fracture his ankle had suffered during the afternoon's training run with Coach Patrick was alcohol and hangover food.
Gazing out at the luminous pinpricks of the stars, Mark tried not to see, as if from light-years away, his own foot step into a hole—more like a crater you would expect to find on the leering face of the moon than in a thriving Norwegian city—and twist. He had known when he felt more than heard that sickening snap in his ankle that his Olympic dream might have been shattered, so when Doc diagnosed after an X-Ray a hairline fracture in his ankle that would take anywhere from six to eight weeks to heal, he hadn't listened to Coach Patrick's bracing assurances that injuries happened to everyone—even the greatest players in the NHL weren't immune to them.
No matter what soothing words Coach Patrick had spewed, Mark had recognized that his injury made his spot on the roster even more tenuous than it already was and gave opportunities to other players who would take his ice time to surpass him on Herb Brooks' list of Olympic hopefuls. As long as he was injured, Mark understood that he was vulnerable in more places than just his fractured ankle. His body had failed him in a freak accident during his push for the Olympics, he might never forgive it for betraying him as if it like Herb didn't want him on te team, and now he felt as if the sun had flickered out.
A knock sounded on the ajar door, and Mark called dully, "Come in!"
Rob slid into the room and settled on the bed beside Mark. Not ready to hear whatever awkward sympathy Rob planned to offer, Mark commented, still studying the dark sky outside the window, "Everything ends, you know. Even stars burn out, and, because the universe is expanding, it keeps getting colder. The stars we see shining so brightly right now could already have been dead for a century, and nobody would realize until a hundred years from now."
"Particles from dead stars make new stars and planets," Rob answered, fingers tugging on a loose thread in Mark's blanket. "When the universe expands far enough, it will contract again, and then there will be another Big Bang. Every ending has a beginning wrapped into it like crème in the middle of an Oreo."
Somehow they didn't seem to be talking about astronomy anymore, but, reluctant to surrender the façade, Mark muttered, "Do you ever think about how lucky we are to even be here—any of us? I mean, for us to even exist, everything from our planet's magnetic field to its distance from the sun had to be perfectly aligned to support life. Hell, if we didn't have a moon as big as ours—a moon that a little planet like ours isn't even supposed to have—to stabilize our axis and slow our rotation with its massive gravitational pull, our planet would be subject to the same sort of temperature fluctuations that make Mars a barren wasteland. That we're even here is a matter of chance and luck."
"Yeah, and it took Earth colliding with a planet the size of Mars to give us our moon," observed Rob in a hushed tone. "The moon is just coalesced debris from Earth and that ancient planet that were thrown into the atmosphere from the crash. You need a cataclysm to create and sustain life."
Mark bit his lip hard enough to taste the coppery tang of blood, wondering if his fractured ankle would truly be the death knell of his hopes of going to Lake Placid or if it was only the beginning of a comeback story of survival against the odds. Either way, he supposed that at least he had memories of friendships he hadn't though he would be able to develop to carry with him to the grave like pictures, a melancholy idea that prompted him to ask, "Do you think when a guy dies, if he sincerely repents of whatever crap he did wrong, he gets to go back and live forever in all the times that were happiest for him?"
Rob paused, contemplating this question, and then answered, "My dad insists the definition of insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different result. My preacher says hell is basically a state of reliving all the horrible shit you did and being unable to fix any of it. By that logic, heaven, as the opposite of hell, should be a divine, timeless place where you could experience everything pleasant that you ever did and not have any of it change. Everything is about repetition and constancy, so Herbies might be the key to unlocking the mysteries of the universe, after all."
"Herb will be thrilled." Mark chuckled, and then remembering how it had felt to swim through the lake with water so cool and pure that his mouth seemed to be cut open every time a drop touched his tongue and how it had felt to joke, laugh, and compete with Rob, he added softly, "If I get a chance to relive my life, swimming to that cliff and back with you is one of the moments I'd choose to revisit."
"Me too." Rob grinned wryly. "Since I know I actually make it back, I can classify it as a good memory."
"I don't know whether I'll be able to make it back from my injury in time for the Olympics." Rubbing an earlobe between his fingers, Mark discovered that he was ready to discuss his fractured ankle at last.
"September to February is a long time to rehabilitate from an injury." Rob reached out to clap Mark on the shoulder. "You'll be fine, Wellsy. Just don't—"
"Don't what?" pressed Mark, his forehead knitting, when Rob trailed off in the middle of dispensing advice.
"Just don't let Herb bully you into coming back too soon—give it the full eight weeks to recover if you have to," Rob finished fiercely as if the question was all he needed to burst out with this vehement declaration. "Don't risk aggravating the injury. That's stupid, and any coach who tries to coerce you into playing when you could worsen an injury is scum, okay?"
"Yep." Mark nodded, and proceeded to point out with a distinct note of fatalism that would not have been out of place in the voice of a death row inmate, "It's just that my fractured ankle doesn't exactly increase my thin odds of making the final cut for the roster. That's the truth. In Chippewa myths and the books teachers force-fed us in English class, the truth makes everything all right in the end. The heroes prevail, while the villains are punished, and, in a nutshell, there is happiness and justice, but in real life, it isn't like that, is it? In real life, you don't always know who the heroes are, and even if you could identify them all, you couldn't guarantee a good ending for them all, could you?"
"No." Rob exhaled gustily. "In real life, I figure the truth only makes everything known, and we only bother with it at all because nobody has enough deception skills to maintain an illusion forever."
For a long while after that, they just sat and said nothing. Neither of them attempted to share a joke or talk about what had happened or what was yet to come. They simply sat with their backs to the pillows and their shoulder grazing one another. It was the lightest of touches, but it was enough to remind Mark that he had friends on a lonely, rough journey that he hoped led to Lake Placid, and that sometimes his place wasn't somewhere he found but instead was somewhere that found him when he needed it most.