IN THE FEW years I’d been playing in Tulsa, the overwhelmingly intense summer heat tended to start dissipating by late September when our preseason games got underway.
Not this year.
September had already come and gone, but we still had temperatures well into the nineties most days, and one day last week, the thermostat had threatened to breach triple digits.
The cooler weather that tended to arrive with fall also usually brought with it some intense thunderstorms, which would mean much-needed rain to soften the parched, cracked earth. Instead, we were still smack-dab in the midst of a months-long drought and heatwave. According to the local meteorologists, there was no end in sight due to a strange weather phenomenon that had occurred in the Gulf of Mexico over the summer.
The high temperatures were holding on far longer than was normal for the area. Air conditioner repair businesses had rarely been in such high demand so late in the year. Most of my teammates and I had only been around for the tail end of the drought, but the locals had been feeling the effects of it since mid-June. My neighbors couldn’t recall a drought of this magnitude in recent memory, and they told me heat waves lasting this deep into autumn only occurred every few decades in this part of the country.
I dripped with sweat during each practice, and even more so in games we played at our home arena. The trainers and equipment staff were constantly refilling our water bottles and reminding us to stay hydrated, but cramping and dehydration were still a major concern for almost every guy on our roster.
The BOK Center’s air conditioners had to work overtime in order for the ice crews to keep the building cool enough to maintain the ice. It was even more difficult for the guys who had to keep our practice ice frozen since we used it during the heat of the day. That the building maintenance crews managed it was nothing short of a miracle.
Every lawn in my neighborhood looked more brown and brittle than vibrant and green, due to water restrictions that’d been in place throughout the entire state of Oklahoma, as well as almost every part of the southwestern United States, since the early summer months.
The only thing that kept Carter from complaining about the heat when he came down for his weekend visits was taking trips to my teammates’ houses—particularly the guys who had swimming pools in their back yards. He and Snoopy swam for hours, wearing themselves out.
Natalie seemed to enjoy those days, even though she still had to stay out of the water due to her cast. She laughed almost as much as Carter did, especially when Snoopy would leap into the pool and send up a huge splash all over my kid.
Because of that, I encouraged Snoopy to do it some more.
Frankly, I’d do anything to see Natalie smile, to hear the sound of her laughter. There hadn’t been much of either in recent weeks.
I kept thinking it would soon be too cool for us to go swimming or to have afternoon barbecues in someone’s backyard, but the punishingly dry heat persisted.
A few news crews kept bringing up the Dust Bowl, pondering whether we should expect to experience something of that nature in the coming months or years, which led me to Googling it. After a bit of Internet research, I was reasonably certain they were just fearmongering and that a return of those conditions wasn’t something we should expect due to advances in farming techniques, but plenty of locals had already latched onto the idea and were trying to come up with ways to prepare for it. Something told me they were preppers, anyway, so I decided not to give them much credence.
The land around us might be so parched and brittle that it was cracking, but Natalie was not only healing—she was coming to life. Every time I came home from a practice or a game, I picked up on dramatic improvements in her that she seemed to miss.
Her bruises had all healed, now existing only in my memory and in the photographs the hospital workers and police officers had taken as evidence. She was sleeping less and active more, learning to get around without assistance.
But the biggest change was in the way she looked at me when I came home.
In the early days of our new living arrangement, every time I walked in through the front door, there was unmistakable apprehension in her eyes until something in her brain clicked and she realized it was me. Then she visibly relaxed, the anxiety melting away as she sank back against the couch cushions.
No matter how accustomed we got to one another, though, there was always something floating just beneath the surface of all her interactions with me. She was calm in my presence, but a layer of unease and wariness kept her distant.
I understood her wariness all too well—but I didn’t know how to explain my understanding without trivializing what either of us had been through. Because of that, I kept it to myself, biding my time for the right moment.
And then one night, a thunderstorm rolled in. The air was filled with the crackling of electricity, and you could smell rain, even though nothing had fallen yet.
Carter was with Kinsey, so it was just me, Natalie, and Snoopy at the house when the first crack rumbled overhead. Snoopy whimpered and tried to burrow into Natalie’s side on the couch.
“You think we’re actually going to get any rain this time?” she asked me.
“If we’re lucky.” But I kind of doubted it. Lately, we’d been getting storms that were more show than rain. Lots of flashing and banging, but nothing to soak the earth.
Natalie smiled, one of those rare smiles that actually made it all the way to her eyes. It lit up her whole face, even from across the room. “Wanna go outside and watch? We can sit on the porch.”
“You like thunderstorms?”
“Love them. At least the ones we get down here. We didn’t get anything like an Oklahoma thunderstorm back home when I was a kid.”
She wasn’t joking about the storms here. Every spring and fall, I was amazed by the intensity of the fronts that sometimes blew through Tulsa. No Hollywood magic needed here. This was the real deal—thunder, lightning, rain that came down in sheets, high winds and hail, and sometimes even more.
“Yeah, let’s go.” I grabbed a leash for Snoopy, because I didn’t want him to get scared by a crack of thunder and run off, and then I held the door open for Natalie.
She headed out before me and took a seat on the front steps of my porch, leaning her crutches against the railing. I sat next to her, loosely holding Snoopy’s leash so he could run off and explore several feet of the yard, his sniffer working overtime because of the crackling energy in the air.
The sun had almost fully set, but the sky was still more purple than black. Dark storm clouds were rolling in from the west, though, ominous and foreboding but somehow promising at the same time.
We desperately needed the rain. I hoped we’d get some.
“Where was home?” I asked, glad to be talking with Natalie about something other than doctors and hospitals and therapy.
Based on her soft sigh of relief, she was glad to be focused on different subject matter, too. She seemed more relaxed than I could ever recall seeing her before. “Ann Arbor.”
“Seriously? Ann Arbor? I grew up in Livonia, so we were practically neighbors. My mom’s still up there,” I added, almost as an afterthought.
And my father was, too. He was one of the main reasons I never went back if I could help it.
“My family’s still there, too. I think.”
My brain latched onto the last bit—I think. “You don’t talk to them?” I asked.
Natalie shook her head, staring off into the distance, where another flash of lightning lit up the night sky. “Not since…” Then she shook her head again.
But I didn’t need her to finish that thought. I could fill in the blanks well enough on my own.
“How long did it go on?” I asked.
Natalie blinked a few times, but I could see the flood of tears filling her eyes. She didn’t let them spill over, though, somehow holding them inside. I got the sense she had a lot of things locked up tight, keeping them under wraps.
She took a deep breath, refusing to look at me, her gaze never wavering from the electrical show in the heavens. “The first time he hit me, we were seniors in high school. It was right after our prom, actually, so not long before graduation. I had a nasty shiner when I walked across the stage to get my diploma. I tried to cover it up with makeup, but makeup can only do so much.”
Another crack of lightning split the sky, followed a few seconds later by a massive, rolling boom that shook the earth, but still no rain fell. Natalie shivered, despite the sweltering heat, but she didn’t shift to go back inside.
As long as I could keep her talking, I had no intention of moving a muscle.
“Why did he hit you that time?” I asked. Because if she was anything like me, she would remember every detail. They were all stored in my memory, in a place I kept them tightly under wraps. I could access them when I needed to, but I usually kept them locked away. I’d never forget, but I didn’t like to think about any of it too much.
Natalie looked down at her lap for a moment, and I thought I might have pushed too hard, asked for too much. But then she lifted her head and stared out at the rolling clouds again. “Because one of the guys from the basketball team asked me to dance with him, but I was Hayes’s date, so I wasn’t supposed to dance with anyone but him.”
“He hit you because some guy asked to dance with you? Not because you danced with him, even?”
“He didn’t really need a reason to hit me,” Natalie said. “He always gave me one, but he didn’t need one. He hit me because he got off on it. That night was also the first night he—”
But then she cut herself off, shaking her head, her lips forming a thin line.
Too soon to go there, apparently. That was all right. At least I had her talking now.
“My father didn’t need a reason to hit me, either,” I said, not ready to give up on this conversation.
Natalie’s head shot around to face me, her brows drawn together, forming a question in her expression.
“My dad beat the shit out of me for years. The first time I remember him hitting me, I was four years old, and I’d come in last place in a race across the pond with a bunch of kids who were older and bigger than me. They’d all been skating for longer than me. He told me that if I ever wanted to play hockey, if I wanted to be someone someday, I had to be faster than all the other kids, and that he’d beat me until I understood.”
A fat tear filled one of Natalie’s pale-blue eyes, growing to an impossible size before finally spilling over. I couldn’t stop myself from reaching up to brush it away with the pad of my thumb. For just a moment, she almost leaned in to my touch, but then she turned away to stare at the light show taking place in the sky, instead.
“Why do you think some men feel the need to hit people?” she asked. Her voice had gone soft and shaky, similar to how it had been after they’d taken the tube out of her throat. “Women and kids, other men? What do they get out of it?”
“I wish I knew. Power?” I suggested. “Maybe they feel like everything’s out of their control, and that’s how they try to reclaim it?”
“Hayes didn’t need to hit me to have control over me,” she said, but her voice was almost a whisper.
“He doesn’t have control of you anymore.”
She blinked a few times, as if trying to stop more tears from falling. “You’re wrong,” she whispered. “He’ll always be there. Always controlling me. He could be in another state or behind bars or even dead, but he’ll still be in control.”
“Only if you let him,” I pointed out.
“He’s still out there, though.”
“But he’s not here.” Once the team had suspended him, he’d packed up his shit and left. I didn’t know if he’d gone back to Michigan or if he was trying to get a hockey gig in Europe. And frankly, I didn’t care, as long as he wasn’t here.
“You don’t think your dad is still controlling you?” she asked, just as the night lit up like a Christmas tree, with a flash of lightning so bright and intense that it made me jump. The crack of thunder that followed it had Snoopy whimpering and racing back to jump into my arms, burrowing his face in my elbow.
“Not in the ways he wants to be,” I said. “He made me who I am today.”
Her brow furrowed in confusion, and she shook her head.
“Whether I liked his methods or not, I wouldn’t be in the NHL today if he hadn’t pushed me the way he did. And it’s because of all the shit he put me through that I’ve made it a point to never, not ever, lift a hand against a woman or a child. My kid’s not going to grow up being scared of me. This dog might be scared of thunder, but he’s not scared of me. My ex and I couldn’t make our marriage work out, but it wasn’t because I was abusing her. I wouldn’t be half the man I am today if it wasn’t for him.”
“I don’t believe that,” Natalie said, and she sounded so sincere it made my chest ache. “You’re a good man because of you, not because he beat it into you. You’re a good man in spite of him.”
“But still, he made me want to be better,” I insisted. “The way I saw it, I had two choices: I could end up just like him, beating the shit out of my wife and kids, or I could decide to go a different way. ‘Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,’” I quoted.
Natalie looked away again, watching the lightshow in the sky. “Did your mother know?” she asked.
“How could she not? He beat her, too. For all I know, he still does. Maybe more than ever since he can’t hit me anymore.”
“She’s still with him?”
I nodded slowly, even though she couldn’t see it other than maybe out of the corner of her eye. “I tried to get her to come with me when I got my first NHL contract.”
“But she wouldn’t come,” Natalie said, as if she’d somehow known the answer without me needing to put words to it.
“No, she wouldn’t come.”
“The same as I wouldn’t come with you that first night.”
I didn’t know how to respond to that. Maybe it didn’t need a response.
“Why do we do that?” Natalie asked. “Why don’t we try to escape, even when it’s that bad? Why do we hope everyone will look away, and why are we thankful when they do?”
There wasn’t a good answer for any of those questions. “Fear of the unknown? It’s safer to stick with what we know rather than face what we don’t know. At least that was what I used to think.”
“But you fought back,” she said. “You got out.”
“You got out, too.”
“Only because you saved me.”
“Only because you called me for help,” I pointed out.
Natalie blinked back some more tears, staring out into the night. It was fully dark now, despite the early hour. The clouds had completely blocked the moonrise. Thunder persisted, sprinkled with flashes of lightning, but there was still no rain.
“Kinsey knew all about how my father beat the snot out of me,” I said. “Carter’s mom. She knew it well before we got married and had Carter. She witnessed some of it for herself.”
“But she was never scared you’d be like him?” Natalie asked.
“Never. You’re not scared of me, are you?”
Natalie shook her head.
“Kinsey wasn’t, either. She knew me, really knew me. We grew up together. She was the girl across the street. I’d had a crush on her since before I understood what it was to have a crush. I sometimes escaped to her place when the beatings got too bad but before I was big enough to fight back. Her mom would put a steak on my black eyes and other bruises, or sometimes she’d give me a bag of frozen peas to slow the swelling. She cleaned and dressed my cuts. She showed me the kind of love and care I’d never known before. I told her they were hockey injuries. I don’t think she ever believed me, but she didn’t say anything.”
“I told my parents that I fell down the stairs at school the first time I came home with a black eye,” Natalie said. “Said my face hit the bannister and that’s why I had a shiner.”
“Did they believe you?”
She shook her head. “I don’t think so. But they never intervened to get me out of that situation. I wanted them to help me. To see through the lies I had to tell them, but no one helped. Not until you.”
“People can be really blind to things that are right in front of their eyes.”
“But your ex’s family saw?”
“They saw, and they knew, but they still didn’t step in to stop him. I think they were afraid of what he’d do to me if they tried to get involved.”
Natalie nodded, slow and steady, as if soaking it all in and realizing she wasn’t alone. Maybe for the first time since her prom, she didn’t feel alone.
I wanted that for her. I wanted her to know she had someone she could count on. I needed her to believe she could count on me, that I had some idea of what she’d been through and I’d never allow her to end up in a situation like that again.
“At first,” I said, “Kinsey just watched her mother tend my cuts and bruises and shit without saying anything. But then one day, while her mother was dressing a particularly nasty cut on my cheek, Kinsey took my hand and held it in her lap, crying silent tears for me because I refused to let any of my own fall.”
Tears much like the ones currently falling down Natalie’s cheeks.
“How old were you?” she asked. “When it stopped, I mean.”
“I was fifteen the first time I fought back.”
“Why then?”
“Because I was finally big enough. He’d pushed me my entire life to be bigger, faster, stronger, better than all the other kids I was playing hockey with. But he never expected me to use it against him.” I stretched out my legs just as another crack of thunder had Snoopy diving back onto my lap, shaking in fear. I scratched his ears and tried to soothe him. “One day, I’d taken a bad penalty in a hockey game. On the way home, he got so mad that he pulled off the road and dragged me out of the car, whipping off his belt to beat me with it. But I wrestled the belt out of his hands and used it on him, instead.”
“That couldn’t have gone over well.”
I laughed, a dry, hollow sort of laugh. “That’s putting it mildly. He lost his shit. Got back in the car and left me on the side of the road. I was just a kid in nothing but jeans and a sweatshirt on the side of the road in the middle of January in Michigan with no way to get home. I walked a couple of miles to a gas station. Some strangers gave me a few quarters, and I managed to call my coach for a ride. But instead of going back to my place, I moved in with Kinsey’s family. And as soon as I got the chance to play in juniors in Canada, I was out of there and never looked back.”
“Do you ever wonder?” Natalie asked. “About your mother,” she clarified.
“All the time. When I got my first pro contract, I called her and asked her to come live with me and Kinsey.”
“But she wouldn’t come?” she repeated.
Sometimes, a person needed to hear the same thing over and over and over again before they’d believe it. Before it could sink in. So I said, “No, she wouldn’t come. You ever think about your parents?” Maybe understanding that she wasn’t alone, that other women in the same position she’d been in, would help Natalie to heal.
“All the time,” she said, echoing my earlier response. “But so much has changed now. He cut me off completely. Wouldn’t let me have any contact with them, and they refused to have anything to do with him, anyway.”
“Maybe you should think about calling them soon.”
“Yeah. Maybe.” But there wasn’t anything in her demeanor that said she intended to do it, nothing that led me to believe she would go through with it.
It killed me that they’d cut her off when she’d needed them more than anything.
Another streak of lightning lit up the sky, and Snoopy trembled in my arms, but the clouds still refused to release any rain. I scratched him behind his ears, hoping to calm him down.
“Seriously, though, why do you think that is?” Natalie asked. “Why do we stay?”
That was a question she’d have to answer for herself, in the end. I’d already taken one stab at it.
But maybe she just needed to hear it again.
I turned my head until I could meet her eyes. A fresh ache welled up inside me, from wanting to heal her heart but knowing no one could do that but her. “Because we’re scared that what we’re running to might be even worse than what we’re running from,” I finally said, not knowing any other answer. “Better the monster we know than the monster we don’t know. At least then we know what to expect.”
She nodded and stared up at the light show going on in the sky, lost in her own mind.
But I was lost just from staring at her.