The Lake Provides

The town reminds Mike of Kenora, even if it’s on the wrong side of the US-Canada border. It’s a sleepy place, especially this deep into winter. Everything is a little bit farther apart than it needs to be. It’s probably really nice in the summer during tourist season, but this time of year, it feels empty, buried underneath the snow. Anything off the main street is only half-plowed. Mike’s glad he rented a SUV so that he can get around.

The inn he’s staying at is all rustic and wood paneled, old-fashioned and creaky in a way that feels like it’s about to fall apart. He’s one of two guests. The other one is a cousin twice-removed from one of the families in town. She’s pretty in a wholesome, Midwestern sort of way.

She’s also chatty. “So what are you doing in town?” she asks Mike when she catches him in the hallway.

“Fishing,” Mike says.

She nods. “Sturgeon season,” she says with a nod. “The best time of year, in my opinion. We used to get all sorts coming into town for it, but it’s been quiet the past few years. We hit a rough patch, you understand.”

Mike isn’t sure what to say to that, and it doesn’t seem like she needs or wants his input anyway, so he just says, “Yeah.” When he drove in, he saw a water tower with a fish painted on the side with the title “Sturgeon Center of the World” proudly written underneath it.

“Well, good luck today!” she continues. “Maybe I’ll see you out on the lake.”

“Maybe,” Mike says.

It’s a gray, cloudy day. Chilly. The air is still. Not as windy as it could be. Mike drives out to the lake, where the surface has frozen over. There’s already a crowd gathered on the ice. Mike joins them and does his best not to seem too much like an outsider. He grew up ice fishing on the Lake of the Woods, but nothing as big as this. That’s why he’s here: to do something new, different. When he get close to the hole in the ice, he sees that someone has already managed to spear a sturgeon, the giant fish skewered on the end of a pitchfork. “It’ll be a good year,” he hears murmured. “Just gotta make sure the lake stays happy.”

“Hey, stranger,” a red-faced man in a bright blue toque says. He smiles at Mike. “You interested in sturgeon, too?”

Mike nods, and the man’s smile gets wider.

“Well, you’ve come to the right place.”

The sturgeon fishing lasts for most of the day. Mike gets the distinct feeling he’s the only person who’s genuinely new to the proceedings. Even the other first timers have been brought here by friends or cousins or someone else they know. Everyone else is friendly to him, asking him questions about where he’s from, what other sorts of fishing he’s done, how he heard about sturgeon fishing out here in the first place.

Mike answers all of them as best he can. After a few years away from the bright lights of the NHL, his interview skills are rusty from disuse. He’s not prepared for a full on interrogation. Still, he tries to make himself useful. He helps a few other guys drag a speared sturgeon out of the water. It thrashes against their holds, bleeding red onto the pale ice. It’s a huge fish, one of the largest Mike has ever seen, and Mike has seen plenty of fish in his lifetime.

“Nice work,” he says to Brian, the man holding the spearing trident. Brian’s tall and heavy-set, his face crinkled with laugh-lines. He’s clearly the leader of this operation. Mike’s watched half a dozen people come up to him with questions and comments over the last few hours. Brian answers them all with an easy, comfortable smile and friendly pats on the back.

“Thanks for the help, stranger,” Brian says. Mike has told him his name at least once, but he doesn’t think Brian remembers it.

“Happy just to be here,” Mike says. He gazes over the frozen expanse of the lake, towards the blurry, distant horizon. He’s far away from home, yes, but he’s also far away from– everything else, too. That’s the beauty of fishing. The chance to push yourself away from shore, to leave all the messy, ugly realities of life behind on dry land.

“You visiting from Canada?” Brian asks. “I can tell by the accent.”

Mike nods. “Yeah. Kenora.”

“Never heard of it,” Brian says.

“It’s small,” Mike says.

Brian accepts that with a shrug of his burly shoulders. “You’ve got some good lakes up there, don’t you?”

Mike thinks of the way the Lake of the Woods looks during a summer sunset, when the surface of the water glows in purples and pinks and blues. “Yes,” he says. “We do.”

“Must be something big that brought you here, then.” He smiles, and there’s something odd about the expression in his eyes, but Mike doesn’t understand it at all. “Hope you find it.” He launches into a practiced spiel about the noble sturgeon, how they’ve been around since the time of the dinosaurs, how they can live to be over a hundred years old, how they’ve almost been hunted to extinction, how it’s important to support conservation efforts.

Someone has brought out a small charcoal grill while some of the more seasoned hands have skinned and gutted the giant fish. It doesn’t take long before the thin, cold air has taken on the smell of cooked food. It makes Mike’s stomach rumble right up until someone hands him a paper plate, a lightly charred slice of fish sitting right in the middle of it. He has to fumble his heavy winter gloves off to use the plastic fork to eat it, but it’s worth it. The flesh melts right on his tongue, warms his throat and stomach. He savors the taste.

“Good, huh?” a passing local asks.

“Yeah,” Mike says, and it’s only after years of practice that he manages not to talk with his mouth full.

He wakes up in the middle of the night to roiling nausea. His head spins as he makes his way to his room’s toilet. Mike has dealt with a lot of drugs before, but none of them have ever made him feel like this, even at his worst. This is like– it’s like something is trying to crawl out of him. He finds the toilet bowl with two hands and vomits into the center of it. When he’s expelled as much of his stomach as his body can handle, he presses his forehead against the cold, white porcelain and thinks that maybe he should go home.

He closes his eyes, still feeling lightheaded, and struggles to his feet.

No, that’s ridiculous. He still has more to do here. He can’t leave until– until he’s done what he needs to do here.

And what would that be? a quiet voice whispers in the back of his mind. But at that point, he’s already stumbled back to bed, and after that, he falls into a deep, dreamless sleep.

When Mike wakes up the next time, the sun is out, peeking through the curtains. He gets out of bed to pull them open the rest of the way, letting the light in. There isn’t much to look at: just the passing road, a few barren trees, bone-white snow drifts.

His body feels good, surprisingly. The best he’s felt since he was nineteen, young and stupid and starting out, when he could bounce back from anything. Even the low-level headache he’s had for years seems to have faded. It’s probably just the vacation, the chance to get away from everyone and everything, the weight of their concern, their judgment. Away from the ever-present specter of hockey.

Cheryl, the proprietor, greets him as he comes downstairs for breakfast from behind the front desk. “Heard the fishing went well yesterday.”

Mike remembers the sturgeon thrashing on the tines of a trident. He remembers the taste of it on his tongue afterwards. He shrugs. “Yeah, it was pretty good.”

Her smile only gets bigger. “That’s good. It’s good to get some fresh blood around here. Keeps things from going stagnant, you know?”

“Sure,” Mike says. Yeah, he grew up in a small town that lived off the tourist trade, but it wasn’t like they kept track of who came from where.

“All the kids have been leaving, going off to the big cities. They don’t really understand how important tradition is. The lake will provide.” She changes tack. “Are you going back out today?”

Mike doesn’t know why she’s asking. Is this just some sort of American thing of sticking your nose into other people’s business? “Uh, probably,” is all he says. He does feel the tug, the urge to be back out on the ice again, to be fishing. But then again, if Mike had his way, he’d always be fishing.

“I hope you have a great time!” she chirps in response.

Mike gives her an awkward smile back. It’s always uncomfortable when it feels like someone is being overly solicitous. He never knows how he’s expected to act.

After breakfast, he considers his options. He could stay in, take a lazy day off where he does nothing but nap and watch whatever cable TV channels his room gets. But he knows he’s not going to do that. He’s going to go back to the lake, back to the ice, to the strange, ancient fish that lurk underneath the surface. That’s where he wants to be. That’s where he needs to be.

Six Months Later

The summer sun is bright and blinding though the windshield of Jeff’s car. He pulled down his sun shade earlier, but he’s still squinting through his sunglasses. As a general rule, Jeff isn’t prone to fidgeting, but he still finds himself tapping out an uneven rhythm on the steering wheel, shot through with a nervous energy.

He hadn’t told anyone that he had decided to do this after the Kings had been unceremoniously bounced from the post-season: not the coaches, not his teammates, not anyone from the front office. He hasn’t even told Mike’s family.

The only reason Jeff is even here is because he had reached out to them after Mike had ghosted him for months, and they were the ones who told Jeff about how Mike had gone missing mid-season in some backwoods Idaho town during an otherwise boring fishing trip. There had been some investigation from the local police, but it hadn’t turned up anything – no sign of foul play – and without any sort of closure, it had just left the Richards clan sad and frustrated and grieving.

Jeff’s not like, a fucking detective or anything, but he’s just – he wanted to see it for himself. Things had been so fucked up between him and Mike for so long before Mike’s disappearance. The last time Jeff had seen him had been right before Mike had left for his fateful trip back over the American-Canadian border, and Mike had been quiet and surly, and Jeff hadn’t said anything either because he was pissed that Mike was being such a fucking bitch about everything. They weren’t fighting or anything like that, but they weren’t exactly buddy-buddy at the time either. And then news of Mike’s arrest had come out, and Jeff had been left to stew in a confusing mixture of anger and annoyance. Jeff’s emotions have had time – a few seasons – to cool off since then, and now he just wants to know what the fuck happened to his friend. All of this sucks, and it’s left behind a nagging sense of unease, a feeling that’s taken up space in Jeff’s chest, and maybe by coming out here he can make it suck a little less. He knows that he’s not, like, responsible or at fault for any of what happened with Mike, but there’s still some hockey superstition nestled into the back of his brain that is certain that this is some sort of karmic payback from not fixing things with Mike when he still had a chance.

He pulls into the parking lot of the inn that Mike had been staying at– before, before Mike and all his stuff and his goddamn rental car all went missing. Jeff had thought that maybe the place would look a little more ominous somehow, like something that you would see in a horror movie and think that the characters are stupid for not running away from it immediately, but it just looks like a house. Not particularly large. A sign out front. Jeff tries to imagine Mike making this same trip, pulling into this same parking lot, walking up the same front steps. Easy enough to do. It’s everything that happened afterwards that he’s struggling to wrap his mind around. What was Mike thinking when he disappeared?

There was a time when Jeff felt like he knew Mike better than anyone else in the entire fucking world, but towards the end, when things were getting messy with the Kings, it had been like Mike was a complete fucking stranger. Who the fuck was he when he went missing? (The other possibility, that Mike is– that someone had– and then covered their tracks– Jeff can’t let himself think about that.)

When Jeff pushes through the front door, the woman behind the front desk looks up from the book she’s been reading and stands up straight. She’s on the older side, graying hair and creases at the corner of her mouth, and something about her nose and eyebrows remind Jeff of his middle school librarian, the one who was always snacking on pistachios when Jeff would visit during study hall. She smiles at him. “Hi, how can I help you today?”

“Uh, I’ve got a reservation. Jeff Carter.”

She chatters amiably about the weather and the influx of tourists and the one decent Chinese restaurant in town as they both make their way through the necessary paperwork. “We had a good winter, a productive one, and now we’ve gotten a beautiful summer in return,” she says, and even though Jeff has no idea what she means, he doesn’t want to accidentally kick off an extended explanation.

When he finally gets hold of his room key, he has worked up the nerve to ask, “Hey, there was a guy who was staying here that disappeared a few months back, wasn’t there? A hockey player?” It’s not exactly a subtle opening, but Jeff hasn’t exactly had a lot of opportunities to practice.

The smile freezes on the woman’s face. “Why do you ask?”

Jeff tries to cover up his awkwardness by shrugging. He’s not sure it works. “Newspaper article.” There hadn’t really been any larger hockey news coverage of Mike’s disappearance, because at that point, he was just another retired hockey player fading into quiet obscurity, but Mike’s mom had mentioned that they had talked to a local Kenora paper.

“Well, I don’t know what to tell you,” the woman says with a sigh. “He left that morning and didn’t come back. That’s all I know.” Her voice has gotten noticeably colder, but Jeff doesn’t think he’d do any better if a random person showed up out of nowhere and started accusing him of things. In fact, Jeff has never reacted well when a random person has showed up out of nowhere and started accusing him of things.

“Uh, thanks,” he says. “Sorry.”

The next day, Jeff goes out to the nearby lake. It’s the on-season right now, and the weather is beautiful and warm, so the place is busy, full of people enjoying the outdoors. Kids splashing in the roped off designated swimming area. Jet skis whizzing to and fro. Families gathered on the beach for picnics. Nowhere near as busy as the LA beaches Jeff is used to. Not even as busy as the Lake of the Woods, those few times Jeff went up to visit Mike in Kenora. But it’s still a happy scene, filled with light and laughter.

Maybe that’s why Mike came here, all those months ago. It’s not like there was any shortage of fishing back home in Canada, no shortage of friends or family or hangers on who would be willing to go with Mike if he wanted to go on a trip somewhere, anywhere. But no, Mike decided to hare off to bumfuck Idaho and then go missing. Shit, it’s not even like Jeff doesn’t know what it’s like to want to disappear for a bit, to just go away and not be bothered by anyone for a while. But that’s for a day or two, maybe a week, not six fucking months.

There’s not really anything here for Jeff. It’s not like he brought a swim suit or anything. But there’s a trail that circles around the lake,so Jeff follows it. This is stupid, he thinks to himself, not for the first time. This whole fucking plan is stupid. Jeff is just going to follow in Mike’s footsteps and at the end of the yellow brick road, Mike is, what, going to pop out of a bush and say, Hey, good job, man. You found me, like they’re in the most fucked game show in existence?

At least it’s a nice day for a walk.

The trees are a vibrant green, and their leaves cast dappled shadows onto the ground, shielding Jeff from the heat and glare of the sun. The air smells woodsy and natural, like growing and decaying things. A few birds let out calls, their songs accompanied by the rustle of wind through the leaves.

Jeff loses himself in it, the quiet presence of the moment. He’s always enjoyed moving his body, even before he was on track to do it professionally, and out here, by himself in the woods, he doesn’t have to worry about his stats or what his coaches will say. Out here, he can just enjoy it.

Right up until he spots a familiar plaid cap, partially covered in brown leaves, just off the main path. It’s just a standard baseball cap, like so many other ones out there, but the logo over the brim isn’t something reasonably common and popular, like the Dodgers or Under Armor. The logo over the brim is for that brand that Mike’s friend started up. Mike was constantly trying to shill for it. Jeff is certain he’s even seen Mike wear this exact same hat before.

Jeff pushes into the brush to get to it, lifting the cap up off the ground. It’s dusty and worn, and it looks like it’s been warped and flattened by the elements. It probably has been sitting out here for months. But it’s also definitely Mike’s hat. Same one he’d wear after practices and before they went out for a night. Jeff resists the urge to hold it up to his face, to see if it smells anything other than dirt and dead leaves. (Maybe a little bit like something that would remind him of that night of the Stanley Cup win, the first one, of hugging Mike close, of smelling of sweat and ice and locker room, of hearing the roar of the crowd all around him.)

This doesn’t tell Jeff anything that he didn’t already know. Mike was here to visit the lake. He could have lost his hat for any number of reasons. He was always leaving shit behind in hotels or locker rooms and then having to go back for them and bitching to Jeff about it all the while. But it still feels weighty and real to have proof of Mike’s presence here. It feels like maybe Jeff is getting somewhere.

Still a little high on finding a little bit of tangible proof of Mike’s fucking existence, Jeff decides to go to the police station next.

He’d heard that they’d closed Mike’s case based on lack of evidence, and this is new evidence. Jeff doesn’t know how police investigations work beyond the few times he’s caught Law & Order reruns and what the team management tells them about not talking to officers without a lawyer present. But he figures it can’t hurt. Not if it can get him any closer to an answer.

This particular station looks kinda small, kinda shabby. Just a squat, ugly building that looks like it was built in the 70’s. A small station for a small town.

There’s not much going on when Jeff enters, so the bored-looking guy at the desk manages to get Jeff in to see the detective in charge of Mike’s case after only a few minutes of waiting. Detective Reynolds is a big guy, sturdy-looking, has a kind face. “I heard you wanted to ask about the Michael Richards case?” he asks.

Jeff shifts uncomfortably in his chair. “Uh, yeah, I was on the trail around the lake and I found Mike’s hat.” He places the baseball cap on the detective’s desk. “He used to wear this one all the time.” Maybe a little bit of an exaggeration, but only a little bit.

Reynolds looks at him with a pitying expression that Jeff hates immediately. “And what do you expect me to do with this, son?”

Jeff doesn’t know what to say to that. He shrugs. “Just figured that you would want it for your case. Maybe you could get fingerprints or something.” He licks his lips. “Mike was a good friend of mine. We played together for a lot of years. I just want to know what happened to him.” It’s not like he can really put it into words, why he ended up here. Just that there was a time when Mike was important to him, and still, despite everything, Mike is still important to him.

“I did meet your friend Mike when he was passing through,” Reynolds says. “I have met a lot of people in my life, kid, and I know when someone wants to get away from everything for a while. I told his family this a few months back, and I’m going to tell you this now: that guy did not want to be found. Not by you. Not by anyone.”

“So you’re not going to do anything with this, then?” Jeff asks. He’s pretty sure that’s what Reynolds is getting at here. Telling Jeff that he’s going to go back to sitting on his ass, doing jack shit.

Reynolds sighs. “I’ll file it with the rest of the evidence we’ve got from the case and get the lab to run prints, but we can’t promise it will lead anywhere.”

“Alright,” Jeff says. His stomach twists. Maybe he had just gotten his hopes up too high. “I’m planning on sticking around for a few more days. Let me know if you find anything.” He scribbles his number down on a piece of paper.

“Of course,” Reynolds says. He smiles, friendly and polite and apologetic, and Jeff knows he’s not going to get a call. “Thanks for coming by.”

That night, Jeff wakes to the creak of the door to his room opening, the heavy tread of footfalls on the wooden floors. He only has a moment to blink at the ceiling before he’s being yanked out of the bed and tossed onto the floor. He resists the best he can can – he’s a fucking six-foot-four hockey player and not inclined to make it easy on anyone – but there’s too many other bodies, and he’s still shaking off sleep.

But he is awake enough to connect the obvious dots. “What the fuck did you do to him?” Jeff snarls into the floorboards.

No one answers. Rough hands pull his arms behind his back and strap zip-ties around his wrists. Jeff wonders if this was what Mike went through, if he’d felt that same mix of rage and terror as they took him away. Jeff doesn’t know what these fuckers want from him, doesn’t know what they wanted from Mike, but he supposes it’s not going to be anything good. One of the men ties a gag around his mouth. Another ties a blindfold around his eyes.

Then he’s being dragged outside, and there’s a truck, smelling of oil and metal and plastic, the engine rumbling as they shove Jeff into the backseat. No one says a word as they drive off. Jeff’s first thought, now that he’s stuck in here with his thoughts, is that these guys must be experts at this shit by now. There’s something almost practiced about how good they are at it. His second thought is that the front office will be pissed if he gets himself murdered out here.

At some point, they pull to a stop. The engine cuts out, and Jeff is pushed out the back seat into the night air. He can hear the scuffle of boots on gravel, the hum and chirp of crickets. He wonders how they’re going to do this – if they’ll make it quick and easy or if they’ll try to drag it out. He wonders what they’ll do with his body afterwards.

Jeff steels himself for it like it’s an incoming hit, but nothing happens, at least not at first.

At first someone rips the blindfold from Jeff’s eyes. He blinks once, twice, but his eyes don’t take long to adjust. The night is dark all around them. A faint light glows in the gloom, somewhere further away, through a thicket of trees. The man closes to Jeff is the detective Jeff met at the station, dressed down in jeans and a t-shirt. Jeff would like to say he’s surprised to see him, but he’s not. The other two men with him are unfamiliar.

“The usual?” one of the unfamiliar men asks.

“No,” Detective Reynolds says. “The new guy wants to see him before…” He doesn’t finish the sentence, but he does make a gesture with his hands that feels ominous.

The other man doesn’t look perturbed by any of this, just blankly bored, so maybe it’s fine. Jeff isn’t sure why “the new guy” would have anything to say to him, but he doesn’t know why any of them are doing any of this (or why they did– whatever they did to Mike).

Jeff gets shoved along the path, and Jeff focuses on not tripping over anything – a rock, a tree root, his own feet. It keeps him from letting his mind wander. It doesn’t take them long to break through the tree cover and onto a small beach and dock at the edge of the lake. Silver moonlight reflects off the water. There’s a few small boats tethered to the dock. A cluster of people are gathered on the dirt banks, and Jeff has a moment of relief, the thought that maybe they can’t do anything too horrible to him, but that moment is cut short when he realizes no one is trying to help him. Whatever the hell is going on, they’re all in on this.

The crowd turns to stare at him, a mixed group of men and women, and Jeff stares back, uncertain and confused. One figure steps out of the crowd. It’s dark enough outside that Jeff can’t make out their face until they’re only a few feet away, but then–

“What the fuck are you doing here?” Mike asks. He doesn’t look much different from the last time Jeff saw him. He’s still bearded and frowning, broad and sturdy and grumpy. Not any worse, but not any better either.

Jeff just glares at him until he wrestles the gag out of Jeff’s mouth. “I was just about to ask you the same fucking thing,” Jeff says.

Mike frowns. “No one asked you to come looking for me.” His eyes narrow in a familiar version of his patented Mike Richards judgment.

“How the fuck would you even know?” Jeff snarls. He’s way past shocked at this point and is back to being really fucking pissed. “You’ve been here with your new buddies, too busy to even fucking call your parents and tell them you’re not dead in a ditch somewhere.”

“You don’t know shit,” Mike hisses back, eyes narrowing.

“Well, it’s not like you bothered to explain yourself to any of us,” Jeff says. “What the fuck were we supposed to think?”

Mike shakes his head. “It’s not that fucking simple. There’s something going on here–” He looks off to the side, towards the other group members. Jeff had been so angry that he’d forgotten that they had an audience.

Reynolds gives Mike a stiff nod, like maybe Mike was asking him a question. “Say what you have to say,” Reynolds tells Mike. “It’ll be better for you to get it off your chest.”

“What the fuck?” Jeff says. “Since when do you take orders from this douchebag?” This whole thing had already been incredibly fucked up, but now it’s getting increasingly more fucked up by the minute.

Mike ignores him. “I told you we should have just let him go,” he says to Reynolds.

“Maybe,” Reynolds says with a shrug and an unfazed expression on his face, “but I’m pretty sure he wasn’t going to let you go.” He doesn’t so much as glance in Jeff’s direction, but there’s something knowing in his voice, like he knows– Jeff feels his neck go cold and then hot all at once.

That just gets a snort and a shake of Mike’s head. “He doesn’t know shit, and he’s still playing hockey. Pro hockey. If he goes missing, it’s going to be a big deal, and the Kings are going to be looking for him, and that’s going to bring down a ton of shit onto all of us.”

Reynolds just smiles. It’s not quite a creepy smile but it’s not not a creepy smile either. “The lake knows what it wants.”

Jeff, already not in the best of moods, can feel his blood pressure rising the longer they keep pretending that he’s not standing right there.”It’s already brought down shit onto all of you. Did you really think no one noticed that you went AWOL?”

“Don’t even pretend like they’re the same thing,” Mike says. “I’m not–” He clenches his teeth. His jaw works. “– I’m just a washed up has-been now. Fuck, I’m sure the Kings would be thrilled to know find out that they won’t have to deal with me anymore.”

Jeff had ignored most of the details of the legal battle at the time, mostly because the feelings had been too sharp and too new. Betrayal. Anger. Disappointment. Not entirely unlike what he’s feeling now. So much so that he can’t get any words out.

“I’m sure most people are more than ready to forget I ever existed,” Mike says.

Jeff wants to strangle him, wants to punch him in the face, wants to find a way to shove it into Mike’s thick fucking skull that none of that is fucking true. The words eventually spill out of him in a torrent. “I could be doing anything else this summer. I could be sunbathing in fucking Cancun. I could be partying my way through Sea Isle. I could be at home asleep in my bed. But no, the only reason I’m at this fucking lake in fucking Idaho in the fucking middle of the night because I wanted to remember you. Because I didn’t want to let you go, you selfish piece of shit. Maybe if you pulled your fucking head out of your fucking ass for one goddamn second, you would fucking see that.”

Mike looks away, like he’s unable to meet Jeff’s eyes, and Jeff really wishes he could reach out and physically knock some sense into him. “Yeah, well,” Mike says, half-mumbled, “you’re right. I’m not worth any of that.” He gives a short little nod to someone off to the side, and then there are hands grabbing for Jeff’s arms and shoulders, and then they drag him away.

Mike watches as Jeff struggles against his captors. He keeps twisting his head to look back in Mike’s direction, trying to use his height and his weight and his strength to his advantage, but he was never much of a fighter on the ice. Isn’t much of a fighter on the ice. Likes to keep his head down and score goals. All the hockey cliches. Skate hard and get pucks in deep.

Jeff shouldn’t be here right now. He should be back in California or at his beach house on Sea Isle. Knocking back a few beers with whoever his buddies are these days. Somewhere far away from Mike. Maybe once, back before Mike had become the dead weight in the relationship, Mike would have been excited to see Jeff again, would have pulled him into a big hug and given him a friendly chirp along with a slap on the back.

But this is after all of that, and now Mike has a different purpose, something to do with himself now that he doesn’t have a job winning hockey games anymore.

Jeff is still cursing out Kurt and Big Jimmy as they wrestle him down to the boat. Fuck, Mike had really hoped that it wouldn’t come to this. He’d hoped that Jeff would flit in and out of town, doing whatever it is that he needed to do without making a fuss, and then go back home, leaving Mike’s new life untouched. But no, Jeff had stuck his nose in it. Jeff had asked too many inconvenient questions from the wrong people, and now– well, the lake and its masters would have their pound of flesh. Brian had warned Mike that this would be difficult, that the first ritual would test his faith, but Mike hadn’t realized how it would feel when it actually happened, how his emotions would get all messy and tangled and conflicted.

He runs a hand through his hair and lets out a sigh. He had worked so hard to put all of this shit behind him. He had found a community, a place where he could just be himself, live the quiet life, and not feel messed up by how slow he was getting on his skates or how everything fucking hurt all the fucking time. He could just be another set of hands helping out, and no one expected him to compete night after night, to run himself ragged for the love of the game.

The crowd starts to move, drifting towards the docks and the boats there. Mike hangs back, even though he knows he should be in the thick of it as the new guy still settling into his place. It would be a good way to prove himself to the group. A good way to prove himself to the lake. It’s the first sacrifice of the summer, when the shortest night means the sturgeon are restless and hungry, when the town makes an offering to them to win their blessing for the coming year and the promise of a gentle winter.

Cheryl checks in on him. They’ve all done that from time to time: getting Mike a place to stay, making sure he doesn’t need anything. From a lot of people, he would find that kind of attention stifling, but they’ve all got it down to some sort of Mid-western American art. Friendly without being intrusive. Gentle. “The past always catches up with you, doesn’t it?” she says. “When I was younger, I left town for a few years. Just wanted to see what it was like on the outside. I don’t regret it. I learned a lot. But it’s a hard, cruel world out there– you know how it is. In the end, I came back, but it was– I had built myself a life out there. It wasn’t easy to leave it behind.”

“Did it come looking for you?” Mike asks, watching as they push Jeff up the gangplank. Even from this far away, he can tell Jeff apart from everyone else, because he has a couple of inches on the next tallest person. Mike has a sneaking suspicion that he already knows the moral of this particular story, but he feels compelled to hear it all the way through to the end anyway.

Cheryl’s smile is faint in the moonlight, just the barest shadow of an expression. “In a way,” she says, “I was asked to reaffirm my choice.” She pats Mike’s shoulder. “I had to be sure about who I wanted to be and where my loyalties were going to lie.”

Mike says, “And they were here?”

“The lake provides,” she says with that same comfortable intonation of someone who has repeated it over and over again her entire life. “But only to those who pay it the proper respect. The choice was easy.”

Mike is sure it was for her. Cheryl’s one of the more zealous members of the group. Her faith has always seemed unshakable. He gives her an acknowledging nod and then makes sure to follow the crowd onto the small dock. His stomach turns.

He’s glad Cheryl seems at peace with her own decisions, but Mike is nowhere near as cavalier about it himself. At least not when it comes to Jeff. For a while, when they were younger, Mike had seen the way Jeff had looked at him, and he couldn’t help but look back. Because Jeff was kinda cute when he smiled, and he was a killer goal scorer, and Mike just wanted to be around him all the goddamn time, and it seemed like Jeff wanted the same thing. But there had always been an understanding between that two of them that anything would have to wait, that nothing could happen until after. After hockey. After retirement. Back then, it hadn’t even crossed Mike’s mind that they would retire at different times, that Mike’s career would flame out so quickly and so miserably. When it happened, so many of Mike’s dreams had gone up in smoke. A future with Jeff had been just another one. It wasn’t like Jeff had avoided Mike after the whole incident, but it wasn’t like Jeff had reached out either, and Mike had gotten the message loud and clear. So Mike had moved on, tried not too feel too bitter about lost opportunities, got on with trying to find himself or some equivalent woo-woo bullshit.

Of course, Jeff showing up had fucked up that plan.

Mike still doesn’t know why Jeff came after him, why he decided to waste some of his big shot NHL player time looking for Mike’s useless sorry ass when Mike clearly didn’t want to be found. He still doesn’t understand the look on Jeff’s face when he saw him again or the betrayal in his voice when Mike ripped the gag out of his mouth. He still doesn’t know how Jeff managed to get pulled into this in the worst way possible.

Mike still doesn’t know why he can’t fucking let it go either.

No one seems surprised when Mike rushes to catch up with the others and climbs onto the same boat as Jeff. Brian even gives him another knowing nod as he does so. They’ve gagged Jeff again, probably because Jeff ran out of interesting or creative curses to yell at them. Jeff shoots him a look as he passes by. Mike doesn’t know what to make of it. Jeff’s taciturn demeanor is often mistaken for subtlety, but to Mike, he’s usually as transparent as glass.

“I’m sorry,” Mike says to him, low, under his breath, because the words aren’t meant for anyone else. The others on the boat are distracted anyway, preparing for cast off and gathering things for the subsequent ritual: incense and herbs, a crown woven from sticks and decorated with algae, thick rope threaded through heavy stones.

Jeff’s expression doesn’t get angrier, the way Mike would have expected. He just looks kinda sad and kinda pitying, like he feels bad for Mike in this situation. Even through all of it, after all of Mike’s many and varied fuckups over the years, Jeff still– he still thinks Mike is worth giving a shit about.

And that, more than anything else, is what pushes Mike over the edge.

He can’t– Jeff told him he fucking missed him.

Mike steps closer, reaching into his jacket’s pockets for the utility knife he keeps there. Jeff tenses up, his eyes narrowing, but he relaxes a little when Mike touches his bicep, his forearm, his wrist. The plastic zip ties fall apart without much effort as Mike slices through them.

Jeff meets Mike’s eyes, and something wordless and familiar passes between them. Some sort of understanding, developed from knowing each other for over half their lives, from all their shared apartments and teams and terrible bars. Jeff knows what Mike is doing, and Mike knows that Jeff knows what he’s doing.

“You all good over there, Mike?” Brian calls out from the small wheelhouse of the boat.

“Yup,” Mike yells back, “All good over here.”

“Good, good. We’re all counting on you,” Brian says. He’s not even looking in Mike’s direction now that they’ve cast off and are headed towards the deepest part of the lake. Even without the full weight of Brian’s attention, Mike feels keenly aware that this is a betrayal, that he’s turning his back on this new family of his, this community that welcomed him in with open arms when he was at his lowest. Mike owes them in a very real, very tangible way.

But then he catches sight of Jeff’s face out of the corner of his eye, and something about the image it – the dull blond of his hair, the shaggy mess of his still-unshaven playoff beard, the clarity of his eyes – cuts through the uncertainty and the doubt. Jeff doesn’t deserve this. He doesn’t deserve to get his entire life fucked over just because he made the mistake of knowing Mike.

He waits for the right moment, when everyone else is distracted, to give Jeff’s hand a squeeze. He can only hope that Jeff knows what that means.

Jeff does. He’s not perfectly in sync with Mike, but he’s only half a step behind as Mike runs and takes a diving leap over the side of the boat and into the lake.

The water isn’t cold, seeing as it is summer, but it’s not exactly as warm as the Pacific Ocean either. Some of it goes up Mike’s nose, fills Mike’s mouth, stings at Mike’s eyes. Mike has a moment as his body sinks below the surface where he wonders if this is going to be it, if they will still be the sacrifice that the sturgeon demand every year, if they will be swallowed by the lake and Mike will never get to go home or see his parents or his brothers ever again. Mike won’t ever know if Jeff would be a jerk about it if Mike ever tried to kiss him.

For a while there, without a contract, Mike had been adrift, living his life on autopilot. When he’d landed here, it had given him something he didn’t even know he’d been missing. But now he’s realizing– Mike’s life had always been worth living.

Maybe back then, the thought of dying out here would haven’t seemed to bad. It could have even been peaceful in its own way. Not so bad in the scheme of things.

But now, Mike can’t imagine anything worse.

He kicks his legs as hard as he can, drawing on all his summers spent splashing in Lake of the Woods, on every bit of skill and strength he can muster. His head breaks the surface, and his lungs gasp for breaths of the fresh night air. He can see the silvery edge of the shoreline in the distance, and while it might not be true safety, it’s close enough. Behind him, he can hear the yells of the guys on the boat behind him, the confusion and chaos they’ve left in their wake.

Mike swims towards shore, keeping to a breast stroke to minimize splashing. His cardio isn’t what it used to be, but it’s not complete shit either, and he’s got a system pumped full of adrenaline. He ducks under the water every once in a while when the lights sweep over the surrounding areas, looking for them.

He swims and swims and swims. He doesn’t know for how long, but his lungs burn and his muscles ache, but he can’t stop. He can’t let himself stop.

Eventually, he reaches shore. Mike manages to clamber up onto the embankment. It’s not a particularly graceful clamber, but he’s so far beyond caring what he looks like right now. His clothes, now soaked through, are heavy and cold, and he lets himself collapse onto his back, still breathing heavily. The town’s boats are far enough away that they’re nothing more than distant lights on the surface of the water, and they don’t seem to be coming any closer.

Jeff emerges from the lake a few hundred meters away, nothing more than a dark shadow at first, but he stumbles over to Mike, and then Mike can pick out the details of his appearance. Jeff is also breathing hard, and his stupid hair is plastered to his forehead, like it used to during so many terrible late nights on Sea Isle. Jeff says, “I’m still mad at you, you dickhead.” He collapses next to Mike, two grown men sprawled out and gazing up at the stars like children.

“Yeah,” Mike says, because he definitely deserves it, “Sure.” He turns onto his side so he can see Jeff’s face.

It’s half shadowed in moonlight, and a frown creases his lips. Mike knows the expression from bad games, ugly losses, and the sight of it stirs up a feeling from deep inside Mike’s chest, something that– “I can’t believe you came looking for me,” he says instead of thinking about it.

Jeff looks back at him, and he shifts closer. He rests one hand on Mike’s hip and leans in, pressing his forehead against Mike’s. This close, Mike doesn’t have to worry about what his face is doing, which is a relief. Jeff says, “I can’t believe you decided to join a cult instead of going to therapy to deal with your feelings. Didn’t all those years in LA teach you anything?”

“Fuck off,” Mike says. There are things they’ll have to worry about – how to get away from here, how to get home, what the rest of the town might try to do to stop them – but all of that seems so very distant, now that Jeff is here, now that they’ve been reunited again. So Mike just closes his eyes, and he doesn’t pull away.

FIN.