Loved Twice by the Hockey Star novel · Chapter 3 of 32

Chapter 3: The Ditch

Nils calls her a drunk in front of the whole floor and she answers that she was pregnant; she tells Erik she remembers nothing of the road; her friend Jodie arrives, and Dag walks in with a lawyer and an offer.

Nils came down the hall slowly so everyone could hear the click of his leg.

Two nurses at the station looked up.

A father in pajama pants stopped in the door of 610 with a cup of coffee.

"Nils," Erik said. "Not here."

"Why not here? This is where she likes it. Hospitals." Nils tipped his head at me. "Last time she walked out of one."

He stopped close enough that I could smell the cold on his coat.

He'd been nineteen.

Now he had a beard and a voice half the state woke up to every morning.

"You look good, Britta. Darker hair. New name, I hear."

"Keep your voice down. My daughter's asleep."

"Your daughter." He raised his voice. "Hey, everybody. This is the drunk who put my brother's truck into a tree and left me in the ditch with my leg under the dash."

The father in pajama pants set his coffee down.

One of the nurses reached for her phone, then didn't.

"She walked out of the ER before the deputies could talk to her," Nils said. "I was in surgery. She was on a bus."

I could feel all of them looking at me.

Seven years ago I'd have cried.

I'd have run.

I'd done enough of both.

"I wasn't drunk," I said. "I was pregnant."

The hall went silent.

Nils's smile slipped for half a second.

"Then you were pregnant behind the wheel."

"Maybe I was. I don't remember the road. But I hadn't had a drink in six weeks, and you know it, because you spent the whole party trying to hand me one."

"Enough," Erik said.

He put himself between us.

He didn't touch his brother.

He just stood there, six foot three, until Nils had to look up at him.

"Go home, Nils."

"You're taking her side."

"There's a six-year-old asleep behind that glass. She has cancer. She has my tooth. Go home."

Nils looked past him at room 614.

His expression tightened for a second.

Then he turned around and clicked back to the elevator.

The doors closed.

The father in pajama pants picked up his coffee and went back into 610.

Nobody said anything to me.

Erik walked me into the family lounge and shut the door and sat down hard on the couch under the fish tank.

"I don't remember it either," he said. "That night. Any of it. The doctors said the concussion took the whole evening. I remember the bar. Then I remember waking up two days later and Dad telling me you were gone."

"I remember the parking lot," I said.

He looked up.

"You were all drunk. You and Nils and half the team. I said, 'I'll drive, I'm the only one who's sober.' I remember saying it."

"And then?"

"Then I remember the ER. Your dad. The stitches."

I touched the scar through my eyebrow.

Erik frowned at it.

"You drove my truck?"

"That's what they said."

"You hated my truck," he said slowly. "You couldn't work the clutch. You stalled it in the Kwik Trip parking lot three times and made me swear never to make you drive it again."

"I was the only one sober."

"Yeah." He rubbed his face. "Yeah. I guess you were."

The door of the lounge banged open at seven the next morning.

I was asleep on the couch.

"Where's my goddaughter? Where's the hockey man? Are those free muffins?"

Jodie Rasmussen came in.

She had a bleached pixie cut, a parka covered in dog hair, Ingrid's blanket under one arm and a duffel of my clothes over her shoulder.

She'd driven four hours from Fargo in the dark.

"You said 'it's fine' on the phone," she told me. "Your 'it's fine' voice means somebody died."

"Nobody died."

"Did you find him?"

"He found Ingrid."

"Oh, no." She dropped the duffel. "Oh, honey. Did she do the Daddy thing?"

"On live TV."

Jodie sat on the arm of the couch and laughed so hard she had to hold on to me.

Then she cried a little.

Then she ate two muffins.

Erik came in from the hall with three coffees.

He'd slept in the chair outside 614.

Jodie looked him up and down, slowly, from his wrecked hair to his sneakers.

"So you're the sperm."

"I'm Erik."

"I know who you are. I've watched you play for six years. I hate your power play."

"Everybody hates our power play."

"She cried every time you scored."

"Jodie," I said.

"Well, she did."

He handed her a coffee.

She took it and narrowed her eyes.

"Fine. You can stay."

"It's my city."

"It's her floor," Jodie said. "You can stay."

Ingrid's voice came through the wall, loud and outraged, asking where everybody was.

Jodie went to her.

Erik followed with the third coffee, which turned out to be hot chocolate.

I watched them through the glass.

Ingrid was making him show Jodie his tooth.

For one minute I let myself sit there and be happy.

Then I saw Dag coming down the hall in his sheepskin coat.

There was a man beside him in a gray suit with a leather folder under his arm.

Dag didn't knock.

He opened the lounge door and stood aside so the man in the suit could walk in first.

The man set the folder on the coffee table in front of me and opened it.

There was a check paper-clipped to the top.

Dag smiled at me.

"Two hundred thousand dollars and the best care in the country," he said. "Sign her over to my son and disappear again."

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