Loved Twice by the Hockey Star novel · Chapter 9 of 32
Chapter 9: Christmas Eve
"Remember what?" I said.
Nils opened his mouth.
Then the side door banged and Erik came back in, stamping snow off his boots.
Nils pushed off the wall and walked out the front doors without another word.
His leg clicked on the stone steps.
I watched him all the way to his car.
"What did he say?" Erik asked.
"Nothing," I said, and I didn't know yet that it was a lie.
We stopped at the gas station on the way out of town.
I bought a stuffed moose with a red scarf.
Ingrid named him Sheriff.
Christmas Eve on the sixth floor smelled like cinnamon and hand sanitizer.
The nurses had strung paper chains down the whole hallway.
Somebody's grandpa was playing "Silent Night" on a keyboard by the elevator, slowly, with a lot of wrong notes.
Ingrid wore a red velvet dress over her hospital pants and her number 19 hat.
She'd insisted.
"It's a party," she said. "You don't wear pajamas to a party."
"You're wearing pajama pants."
"Only on the bottom. Nobody looks at the bottom."
Jodie had brought a tiny fake tree from Fargo and stuck it on the windowsill.
She'd decorated it with medical tape and the caps from Ingrid's syringes.
The nurses said it was a health violation.
They also took pictures of it.
At six, the elevator opened, and the goalie and the young winger came down the hall in Santa hats.
They had a sack.
They also had the worst voices I've ever heard.
They sang "Jingle Bells" outside every door on the floor, wrong words and all, and the kids came to their glass in hats and bandages and laughed until the nurses made them lie down.
The goalie stopped at 614 and bowed.
"For the princess," he said, and pulled a jersey out of the sack.
It was a Voyageurs jersey, a kid's size, with HAUGLAND across the back.
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