FORBIDDEN ON ICE

Okay, first of all, the boot is not as bad as it looks.

I want to get that out of the way, because I'm standing at Pearson Airport at 11:48 on a Thursday night, in Arrivals, in a walking boot the size of a bread box, holding a piece of cardboard I made at the kitchen table out of a Nanaimo bar box, and I can feel about forty people deciding what they think of me.

The sign says, in Sharpie, in my best handwriting: HELLO. I AM YOUR RIDE. NOT A KIDNAPPER. (JONESY, #14.)

Look, I workshopped it. The first draft said OWEN'S BEST FRIEND AND ALSO A BEAUTY, and I scrapped that because it felt like I was trying too hard.

Here's the situation, and I'll go fast, because it's a lot.

Thursday, against Ottawa, in the second period, I blocked a slapshot with my foot. Not on purpose. My foot was just there, and so was the puck, and it turns out a puck going a hundred miles an hour and a size-eleven skate boot have a very short, very honest conversation. Trainer says "lower-body, day-to-day." Miller says "rest." Dax says "this is the funniest thing that's ever happened," which is a direct quote and I've saved the text.

So the Leafs flew out to Vancouver for a back-to-back, and I didn't.

And Owen, who is the best center in the Atlantic Division and a person who has never once in his life asked anyone for anything, texted me from the team bus at six this evening. Just: Can you get my sibling from Pearson tonight. My place is locked, the key is with the building guy, he's gone home. Please. I owe you.

He sent a second one, thirty seconds later, because Owen is Owen: Don't be weird.

I want to point out that I have not once been weird.

That's a lie. I have been weird approximately four hundred times. But I've been weird quietly, which is different. I've been weird in a way no one could prove in a court.

Anyway. So now I'm here. With a sign.

A little kid in a Connor McDavid jersey, about eight years old, tugs on his mom's coat and points at me, and the mom looks at the sign, looks at me, looks at the boot, and says, very slowly, "Honey, don't make eye contact."

"I'm Jonesy!" I tell the kid, with a big wave. "I play for the Leafs! I'm just doing a favor!"

"That's what a kidnapper would say," the mom says.

"That's... fair," I say. "That's actually a really good point, ma'am."

My phone buzzes in my jacket. I know without looking. It's the group chat, which is called BEAUTIES ONLY, and which I did not name, and which has been buzzing for ten minutes because somebody on hockey Twitter has already posted a blurry photo of me and my sign, with the caption JONESY AT PEARSON?? WHO IS HE PICKING UP?? and four hundred replies. Dax has texted, in all caps: BRO WHY ARE YOU AT THE AIRPORT WITH A SIGN. Brody has texted: Is it for a girl? Or a boy? Or the friend? Sorry. I don't know why I asked. Sully has sent a single thumbs-up emoji, which is the most Sully thing possible. And Fitz has texted, at the very bottom, one minute ago, in his usual style, which is zero punctuation and total menace: you look nervous.

I don't answer Fitz. I haven't been able to answer Fitz since the Christmas party, when he looked at me across the room for about ten seconds and then went back to his drink, and I swear I felt the back of my neck get checked for a pulse.

I'm not nervous.

I am a very calm person. I've got a 6'0" frame, good hands, and an even temperament, and I'm standing here in a walking boot, and I've checked my hair in my phone camera three times, and I've changed my shirt twice, once in the truck, once in the parking garage, and I've sprayed cologne on my wrists like a guy at a prom, and none of that means anything.

The sliding doors hiss open.

And there you are.

I don't mean you come out in slow motion, or anything, with wind in your hair. It's Pearson. There's no wind. You come out the way anybody comes out of customs at midnight, tired, wearing a coat that's a little too heavy for indoors, dragging a carry-on with one bad wheel, scanning the signs. You look at every one of them. Some guy in a suit. A lady with a balloon.

Then you get to mine.

I see it land. I see you read it twice. I see something happen at the corner of your mouth that I have personally spent four years trying to cause on purpose, and the whole airport goes quiet inside my head, and the boot, the foot, the sign, and the forty strangers all disappear.

I drop the sign.

It hits the floor, face up, so you can see it. I just stand there in my boot with my arms hanging at my sides like a guy who's been pulled over.

"Hey," I say. It's more of a croak. "Hi. You're, uh. Yeah. You're here."

I clear my throat. I try again, with my regular voice, the loud one, the one that works on refs and rookies.

"Welcome to Toronto! Your ride is here. Your ride is a beauty. Your ride is also, as you can see, injured, so I'll be carrying nothing, but I'm taking the bag, because I have manners."

I take the bag. It weighs about eleven pounds. I carry it like a Stanley Cup.

You're looking at my foot, and I can tell what you're going to say.

"It's a bruise," I say. "With ambition."

Okay. I should tell you about the truck.

The truck is a 2014 Chevy Silverado named Gordie, after Gordie Howe, because I believe in honoring the greats. It has a hundred and ninety thousand kilometers on it, a dent in the passenger door from a snowbank in Kingston, a bumper sticker from my minor hockey team in Kelowna that says HONK IF YOU LOVE A GOOD BREAKAWAY, and a heater that has two settings, which are "surface of the sun" and "off."

There's a puck on the dash. There's a tub of my mom's Nanaimo bars on the back seat, that she shipped me in a care package, with a note that says EAT SOMETHING GREEN. LOVE MOM. There's a pair of rented skates in the footwell I've been meaning to return since October. And there's a photo of my dog, Biscuit, a golden retriever who lives with my parents in Kelowna and who has never once understood why I left, taped over the radio.

I open the passenger door for you with a little bow, which is hard to do in a boot.

"Music is your call," I say. "It's a hostage situation, but a nice one. I've got Shania Twain, I've got the Tragically Hip, I've got a playlist called Pregame Bangers that is not for civilians. Pick any of them."

I walk around the truck to the driver's side, limping a little, and I get in, and Gordie starts on the third try, with the noise of a bear waking up.

"Okay," I say, as the heater roars to life and blasts both of us in the face like a hairdryer. "That's the surface of the sun. That's normal. Give it about four minutes."

I look over. I try not to look at your face for too long. It's very hard.

"Quick question," I say. "Have you eaten? Because I've got a plan, and it's a good plan, and it involves a drive-thru."

We hit the Tim Hortons on Dixon Road at 12:17 a.m.

I order for both of us, because I have a system. Two large double-doubles, a dozen Timbits, one chocolate dip, and, for me, a maple-glazed that I will defend with my life. I roll down the window. It's thirty-one degrees and sleeting. The girl at the window, about nineteen, with a headset and a tired smile, looks at me, and then at my boot, and her whole face lights up.

"Oh my God," she says. "You're Jonesy."

"Guilty," I say.

"My dad is, like, obsessed with you. He has your jersey. He says you're the only one on the team who actually talks to the fans." She hands me the bag, then the tray, then, with a conspiratorial look, an extra box. "Free Timbits. Don't tell my manager. Get better soon!"

"You're a legend," I tell her. "A saint. Tell your dad I said he has excellent taste in jerseys."

I roll the window up. I turn to you, grinning like a golden retriever, and for one second the truck feels so warm and so small and so exactly like the best night of my entire year that my chest actually hurts.

"See?" I say. "Twelve minutes in town, and you've already got free Timbits. I'm basically a tour guide."

Here's what I haven't told you.

Four years ago, on a Thanksgiving weekend, a month into my rookie year, Owen Strand, who had said maybe ten words to me since training camp, turned around in the dressing room and asked if I wanted to come home with him to Sudbury, because his mother had heard I'd be alone.

I said sure. I said it like it was nothing. I hadn't seen a family dinner in two years.

The door at the Strands' house opened, and it was you.

You looked at me, at my hair, which was frosted at the time, and for which I will apologize to anyone who asks, and you told me, with a completely straight face, that Owen hadn't mentioned he was bringing a boy band.

I'd like to say I came back with something smooth. I laughed so hard I had to put my hand against the doorframe.

That was it. That was the whole thing. Four Thanksgivings, four Christmases, a cottage on Lake Ramsey every July, one catastrophic game of family Scrabble, and a lot of nights lying on a pull-out couch under moose-print sheets staring at the ceiling, doing math on how many floors up you were sleeping.

And I've never said a word. Not once.

Because of Owen.

I need you to understand that Owen is the best guy I know. He drove me to the hospital when I broke my wrist in my second year, and he sat with me in the waiting room for six hours and didn't say anything, and every so often he'd hand me a cracker. There's a rule, in every dressing room in the country, written on no wall and known by everyone. You don't go after your buddy's sibling.

So I don't.

I just notice things. A lot of things. All the time. That you hum when you're reading. That you steal the corner pieces of the cinnamon buns. That you've got a laugh with two parts, a little breath first, then the real one, like it needs a second to get going. I've got a whole filing system.

It's very healthy.

My apartment is on the seventh floor of a building in Liberty Village with a view of a parking lot, a Shoppers Drug Mart, and, if you stand on the balcony and lean, a sliver of the CN Tower.

I cleaned it for forty minutes before I left. I want credit for that.

"Okay," I say, unlocking the door, "so, I did a thing. A deep clean. A light deep clean. Everything is a hundred percent tidy. Please do not open the oven."

I push the door open.

It's clean. It really is. Mostly. The couch has a blanket on it, folded into a rectangle, which is the most effort I've ever put into a blanket. There are throw pillows. I don't own throw pillows. I borrowed them from the neighbor, Mrs. Okonkwo, who is eighty-one and thinks I'm in a band. There's a plant on the counter, a small, sad, bright green plant I bought at the corner store at nine p.m. so the place would look lived in. It's called Kevin.

"Welcome home," I say. "Welcome to my humble abode. Bedroom's on the left. I put clean sheets on, the good ones, the ones with no holes. I'm on the couch. It's a pull-out. It's fine. It pulls out. Mostly."

I bring your bag in and set it down by the bedroom door with great care.

"Bathroom's through there. One towel. A clean one. I did laundry. There's also a T-shirt on the bed, in case your stuff is wet. It's from the Okanagan Cherry Festival, 2016. It's very soft. It's so old it's basically a cloud."

I stand there in the hall, in my boot, looking at the carpet.

I'm talking too fast. I know I'm talking too fast. It's the thing I do. Around anyone else, it's a gift. Around you, it's a leak.

"I'm gonna make wings," I announce. "Spicy garlic. At one in the morning. It's a tradition. I just made it a tradition."

I go into the kitchen, and I put on a playlist, nothing too loud, and I start the oven, which I'd forgotten has all my laundry in it, and I have to take out four hockey socks and a towel while telling myself, very calmly, in my head, that I am a professional.

The shower starts running down the hall.

Okay. Cool. That's fine. That's a normal sound. Water. People shower.

I start naming the Leafs' lineup out loud, in order, by position, to keep my brain occupied. Haas, Strand, Gauthier. Lindgren, Sully. Fitz in net. I get through it twice. I start on the Bruins' lineup. I get to the third line and I realize I'm holding a wing in one hand and an oven mitt in the other, and I've been staring at the wall for two full minutes.

The water shuts off.

I have a rule. The rule is: I do not think about the fact that there's a person I'm in love with, in my bathroom, in my T-shirt, two feet from my bed.

I think about the fact.

By the time you come out, the wings are done. They're good. They're really good. I've plated them with a stick of celery and a dish of ranch and two napkins, and I've put the Timbits in the middle like a centerpiece. I've turned the music down. I've changed my shirt again, a third time, into one without a hole in it, and I've washed my hands twice.

You walk into my kitchen in my old Cherry Festival T-shirt, with your hair wet and a towel around your neck, and I forget the whole English language.

I mean it. I've been interviewed by every sportscaster in Canada. I've talked my way out of a fine, two parking tickets, and a five-minute major. And I stand there, in front of my own stove, holding a plate of wings, with nothing in my head at all except one very quiet, very clear sentence.

Oh, no. It's worse in the light.

"Hi," I say. "Wings."

I set the plate on the counter between us. Our hands almost touch on the edge of it, and my fingers, which have caught a hundred-mile-an-hour pass without flinching, are shaking a little.

We eat. We don't talk much. It's almost two in the morning, and the building is silent, and the city is humming far away, and the only light in the kitchen is the one over the stove, warm and low. You've got a drop of hot sauce on the corner of your mouth. I see it. I see it with my entire body.

I don't say anything. I'm very, very proud of myself.

You lick your thumb.

Something in my brain goes to static.

It's an old habit, what happens next. I've done it since I was eight years old, in the front yard of our house in Kelowna, with a stick, a tennis ball, and a very large audience of imaginary people. When it gets really loud in my head, when I can't think, when everything's too much, I narrate. I do the play-by-play. It's the only thing that's ever kept me steady.

So I do it now, in my head, in my best broadcaster voice, quiet and fast.

And we're into the third period here at Liberty Village. Jones with the puck at his own blue line. It's been a long night. He's got speed, folks. He's got the wheels. There's a bruised foot, there's a plate of wings, there's a lot going on, but he's moving, and he's got nobody back.

Nobody back. Oh, he's looking at the net.

And the net is looking at him. And Owen, to the best of anyone's knowledge, is in Vancouver. There's no defender. There's no goalie. There is, and I want to be very clear about this, nobody on the ice.

He crosses the red line. He's through the neutral zone.

He's closing in. The crowd's on its feet. He's got the whole open side, and he's thinking about it, he's definitely thinking about it, he's in on the...