Page 94 of Don't Cross the Blue Line
He was there.
He cared.
He acted.
I swallow hard, lips parting, unsure what words are coming next. “Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you come after me?”
My father sighs, head shaking just slightly. “I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know how to talk to you. You were thirteen. You were already pulling away. And you were…so angry.” He pauses. “And I don’t blame you. I’d earned it. But it didn’t make it easier to know how to reach you.”
He walks to the window.
“Your mother was right about me. I spent too much time with hockey. Too many missed dinners and school plays and the thousand small things that add up to a childhood I wasn’t fully present for.”
“Dad—”
“Let me say this,” he says without turning. “She was right to leave. But my failure wasn’t choosing hockey over you. It was not knowing how to love you in a language you could understand. Hockey was the only language I spoke. My father was the same. He coached until he was seventy. And my mother waited for him. For years, she waited. It killed me. And I swore I’d be different. I guess I was exactly the same.”
He turns. Not the coach. But Duncan Hart, my father. I feel like I’m seeing him for the first time in my life. He was a stranger, and we’ve just been introduced.
“When your mother said she needed to leave, I had a choice. I could fight. Hire lawyers. Force a custody war that would have torn you apart. Or I could let you go. Peacefully. And let her build what she needed to make you feel safe.”
“No,” I say, eyes closing, head shaking. That’s—that’s not right. “No, you chose hockey.” Seventeen years of pressure finding the cracks.
“I stayed with the job that paid your mother’s rent. That paid child support every month. Paid for your college tuition. Your health insurance. The car she drove.” He pauses, the lines of his eyes red, a grimacing, watery smile. “Everly, I didn’t choose hockey over you. I didn’t—” His voice breaks, cracking under the weight of a lifetime of words unsaid. “I used hockey to take care of you. The only way I could. From a distance. Because I thought the distance was the kindest thing.”
Silence.
“But I failed you,” he says, voice stripped to the studs. “Not by choosing hockey. By not learning your language. By hiding behind provision and boundaries, telling myself I was doing what was right by staying away, when what you needed was for me to show up at your door and tell you the truth. That I read your books and they’re brilliant and I love you and I’m sorry.” He pauses, a shuddering stop as the words catch in his throat. “I never stopped choosing you,” he whispers as though it’s all he can manage. “I just chose you in a language you couldn’t hear.”
My eyes fall shut, sniffling as a tear breaks down my cheek. “Because you spoke provision,” I say. “And I spoke presence.”
Finally, I understand.
“Yes.” Seventeen years in one word. “And I’m sorry I didn’t learn your language sooner.”
He crosses the room, pulling me into his arms, and I bury my head in his chest. I’m suffocating on tears, trying to hold myself together—one breath, two—and then something inside me lets go, surrenders to the safety of my father’s arms. Suddenly, I’m eleven years old, crying behind that Zamboni?—
And my dad finds me there.
We stay like that for a long time. Until I can’t cry anymore. Until my breath finds its pattern again, slow and steady, sleepy. Until I step back, exhausted, but just a little healed.
He smiles at me, a little healed too. “Would you stay for dinner? I’d like a little more time with you.”
I smile, soggy. “I’ve been given specific instructions to eat anything other than ice cream. So yeah…I could eat.”
He nods to the door. “Come on.”
I go to follow him and pause, my gaze catching on the framed lyrics. “‘All the vain things that charm me most…’” I say.
He stops, follows my gaze. “After all these years, it still stops me. It’s a good reminder.”
“Where did you get that?”
“Oh, that’s from Beckett’s dad. My best friend. When he died…well, I made him a promise. It had to do with Beckett.”
I knew that already, didn’t I?
He looks at the song. “Michael Benson was one of the best men I ever knew. He could have been big—really big. Got offers from Winnipeg and Chicago and New York, but he chose to stay here, playing for our little team, because his wife loved it here and he’d started this hockey team for kids at Sutton Arena and…well, he said he didn’t need his name in lights. Just light in his name. A man who called himself a Christian.”
