Chapter 27

“So am I going to meet your family while we’re here?” Sidney asked as reached for her hand. Mya wiped her clammy hand down the side of her pants before sliding her hand into his as she eyed the approaching figures of his parents with trepidation.

“We’ll see,” she replied quietly, trying to decide if the smile she was forcing would make her look pleasant or maniacal. She heard Sidney’s deep sigh but was thankful that he didn’t have time to belabor the point as his bear of a father had pulled him into a handshake that looked like it would crush the metacarpals of a smaller human being. His son seemed to handle it like a seasoned pro. Mya watched nervously as Sidney greeted his father, whom he’d warned her was apparently either going to pretend she didn’t exist or was going to be openly hateful. His mother, on the other hand, who looked like a church mouse in comparison to the barrel-chested Troy, beamed at her son and at his girlfriend and pulled them both into a warm hug.

“I’m so glad to see him settling down. I worry for him around some of those boys,” Trina admitted in a whisper before she let Mya go. Mya felt her own smile grow warmer as she pulled back from the woman who was still glowing in her son’s presence. She felt a pang of jealousy that threatened to close up her throat but she managed to keep smiling all the same.

“So, son, are we gonna kick some US ass today or what?” Troy asked, doing exactly as his son predicted he would, ignoring Mya’s presence altogether, but just as she was about to allow herself to fade into the background, for his sake she told herself, she felt Sidney’s arm slide around her waist and felt herself pulled protectively and proprietarily against his side.

“Mom, Dad, this is my girlfriend, Mya.”

Mya felt herself stiffen though she couldn’t stop herself from grinning like an idiot. Girlfriend. It sounded so official. She’d never heard him call her that before and even though she was wearing his promise ring and he’d told her he loved her, somehow this made everything so much more real.

Troy glowered at her but Mya just kept grinning and almost broke into out and out giggling when she felt Sid’s arm tighten around her waist. As hard as it was to have Troy’s piggy little eyes glaring at her, she imagined it was much worse for Sid to have his father behaving like a petulant child. Parents could be so embarrassing; Mya thought to herself. That was something with which she could entirely sympathize.

“Nice to meet you,” Troy grumbled finally, pushing his meaty paw towards her. Mya looked down at his thick, oversized hand and wondered how many seconds it would take to crush her fingers. She put her hand in his anyway and gave him her biggest, brightest stage smile. For his part, Troy made a noise in his throat that the rest of his family obviously recognized as some kind of ascent, as they all turned to head out of the Airport Terminal.

“Lunch?” Sid asked, looking over at his mother with a satisfied Mona Lisa smile on his face.

“Do they have good food in the athlete’s village?” his mother asked, the same sort of secretive half smile gracing her face as she tucked her arm into her son’s.

“No, well...yeah it’s okay but Mya knows this some great places around here. We thought you might like to try some Indian?” Sidney turned to look at her and Mya felt her knees go weak. He had his family around him and he’d won some kind of battle with his father and now he was looking at her like he was so glad she was here and all she could think was...fuck I love this man.

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“I just ate too much and it was spicy and your dad was staring at me like he was trying to make my head pop off with the power of his mind,” Mya insisted as she took the tissue Sid offered and wiped the blow back off from around her mouth before leaning back against him. He was still holding her hair back and now reached with his free hand to feel her forehead for a fever. “And you can cut that out too,” she insisted, brushing his hand away. “I wouldn’t come anywhere near you if I was sick.”

“First the headaches, now you can’t keep anything down...My, I’m worried,” Sidney began but she only shook her head and then winced at the movement.

“It’s stress. Not all of us can be calm and cool and collected all the time,” she sighed, turning to bury her face in his chest. Sidney wrapped his arms around her and held her there, on the floor of the bathroom in his room in the athlete’s village. She wasn’t supposed to be here. If Yzerman found out....

Well it was a good thing that Nash was down in the village looking to hook up with some figure skater or something Sid thought as he ran his fingers through Mya’s long dark hair. Not that he thought Nash would say anything. He didn’t seem to be the kind of guy that would snitch on a teammate. Besides, Sidney was pretty sure he was going to have to bunk with one of his teammates at some point if Rick actually managed to score.

“You can stay, if you want,” he offered but Mya just shook her head.

“Have you seen the size of the kiddie beds you have? No thanks. I think I’ll go back to my king size bed at the bed and breakfast thanks,” Mya replied with a chuckle as she struggled to get up onto her feet.

“Speaking of which,” Sidney began, helping her up and turning her to face him. “Why, if your parents live here, are you staying at a b & b?” Mya made a face and then shrugged, turning away and reaching for his shaving kit. He watched her pull out his tooth brush and toothpaste and made a mental note to stop at the store they’d provided for the athletes in the village and get another toothbrush.

“You’re not going to leave that alone are you?” she asked quietly as she squeezed the toothpaste onto the brush, glancing back at him in the mirror.

“Well now you have me worried, like maybe you’re hiding some kind of weird mutation in your family tree or something,” Sidney replied, trying to keep things light so that she wouldn’t shut down, like she did every other time he tried to bring up her past. Mya had begun to brush her teeth and now looked back at him in the mirror with narrowed eyes. “Like someone with an extra toe or...something like that?” he muttered, wondering if he’d come a little closer to the mark than he’d intended.

Mya finished brushing her teeth and even added some mouthwash before she spat and rinsed out the bowl, taking her time, like she was thinking about her response. Sidney waited, silent, wondering just what had her so concerned. Could she really think that he was that shallow, that ego centric, that he’d really care if some kind of physical deformity actually did run in her family? Did she really think that little of him?

“Okay,” she said finally, putting his toothbrush down and shutting off the water before turning to face him, her expression carefully veiled. “Tomorrow, after your practice, I’ll meet you outside the rink. I was going to do my dutiful daughter act anyway. You may as well tag along.” Sidney tried to read the guarded expression on Mya’s face but she wouldn’t meet his gaze, not quite. Finally he reached out and tipped her face upwards, his grip just strong enough to make her look at him through narrowed eyes.

“If there’s something you’d really rather I not see...,” he began but Mya only shook her head and with an acerbic laugh shook her head.

“No...no you should see. You should know what you’re buying into,” she replied with a heavy sigh, pressing her lips briefly against his before inching around him and heading for the door. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Sidney watched her go, watched the door close behind her leaving him with his imagination swimming with images of circus side show freaks.

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It looked like a nice apartment from the outside. Mya always thought that as she walked up the street towards it. It looked like a nice neighbourhood with tree lined streets and cheerfully painted terraced apartments and it was, for the most part. It was only as you got to the alarmed doors at the front and saw the wheelchairs lined up outside in the sun that you would begin to realize there was more to this place than just a place to live.

If you could call it living, she thought uncharitably as she felt Sidney go very still as they waited for the doors to slide open and admit them, the antiseptic tang of bleach mixed with the underlying stench of sickness and death. It made her skin crawl. It always did.

She could feel Sidney’s eyes on her but she could barely make herself look ahead. She could barely make herself walk through the doors of this place. She couldn’t worry about him now or what he was thinking. This was hard enough for her as it was.
She felt his hand curl around hers’ and just for a split second she felt better, like she had back up, like she had a wing man, but then she heard the whoosh of the automated doors closing behind her and that brief respite was replaced the same overwhelming nausea that she always felt as she walked past the security station and the nurse’s station, past the visiting area where the more mobile patients sat listening to someone play on a piano.

Of course most of the inmates, she didn’t think of them as patients, not these ones who still could get up out of their beds and interact with their limited world, were older, gray haired and wizened. That was one of the reasons she’d fought against putting her here. What would her mother have in common with these old people?

It didn’t matter though, as it turned out, she thought as they turned the corner and walked down a dimly lit corridor, past rooms filled with patients who no longer left their beds hooked up to monitors that told the nurses by beeps and alarms if their comatose patients were alive or dead. Sometimes that was the only way you could tell.

“Hi mom,” she called out, forcing a smile onto her face as she walked through the last door, dropping Sidney’s hand as she crossed the floor to place a soft kiss on the top of the head of the emaciated woman in the rocking chair by the window. She was up today. That meant she was having a good day. She waited the long, agonizing moment it took for her mother to drag herself out of her dark little dream world she was in and turn her grey blue eyes toward her.

“Oh!” her mother smiled and Mya felt her heart leap in her chest. It must be a good day. “Myrna, is school out already?”

“Yeah...yeah for today,” Mya nodded and brushed her mother’s sunken cheek with her hand. Maybe it wasn’t such a good day after all. She thought she was her Aunt...her Aunt who was dead. “How are you? Did you watch any of the Olympics on the TV today?” Mya turned away from her mother to hide the tears that sprang to her eyes. She doesn’t recognize me anymore, she thought as she busied her hands making the bed, folding the afghan that lay at the end of the crisp white hospital bed, fluffing the crunchy hospital pillows. She’d known this time would come and she had been away for a longer this time.

“Oh...oh Frank...Myrna you didn’t tell me Frank was here.” Mya turned to follow her mother’s gaze, and saw Sidney standing in the doorway, watching the two of them with wary eyes. Frank was her father. She wondered when he’d last bothered to visit. She opened her mouth to correct her but it always confused her more when anyone did that. It was easier to play along, to keep her happy in her imaginary world. The last time she was happy, when she’d been a teenager.

“That’s right. Frank’s here to see you,” Mya beckoned Sidney in and watched his brow furrow as he crossed the room, holding the bouquet of flowers they’d stopped to buy on their way here before him like a shield. She watched her mother take the flowers and bury her face in them, a huge happy grin on her face and couldn’t help but wonder if her father had ever bought her mother flowers. She couldn’t remember ever seeing any in the house, none that hadn’t been grown lovingly by her mother in their yard. She always brought her mother flowers. They never failed to make her smile.

“Oh Frank, these are lovely. Did you bring over any new records to listen to?” her mother asked, beaming up at Sidney who looked helplessly towards Mya.

“Not today, did you Frank. But he brought a book to read to you, didn’t you...Frank?” she said pointedly, glancing over at a chair and then back at her mother with a raised eyebrow. He’d wanted to come, the least he could do was play along.

“Ummm that’s right. Mya...Myrna said you like Maeve Binchy?” he asked quietly, dragging the chair next to her mother and holding the book out he’d had under his arm. Her mother beamed and it tore at Mya’s heart to see the adoration in her mother’s eyes when she looked at Sidney. She couldn’t imagine her mother ever loving her father that much. She must have though, at one time, she thought as she watched Sidney settle into the chair and open up the book and begin, patiently, to read to her mother.

Mya glanced at the picture of her father on her mother’s bedside table. It was a picture of him taken when they’d just begun dating, leaning against his black Trans Am with the golden screaming eagle on the hood. His dark hair was slicked back and he was wearing a black leather jacket and dark jeans. A real hood. A greaser. Mr Cool.

Mya picked up the photo an looked down at the boy looking back at her from the inside the frame. He’d been hard on them all, strict and unforgiving. As far as she knew, the last time he visited her mother was the day they’d brought her here after...after she’d wandered away from the house in the middle of the night in her nightgown.

Putting the picture back in its’ place, Mya fought to keep the bile down that crept up her throat. They’d fought then. A wild, screaming fight full of accusations and horrible things they couldn’t take back. That’s when Myrna, her Aunt, had told her it was time to leave, time to stop putting her life on hold to take care of her parents. She was too young to be doing that.

Maybe she had been but still....

Mya turned back to watch her mother’s hand close gently, but possessively around Sidney’s. She watched him go still, heard his voice falter mid sentence. But then he smiled and gave her mother’s hand a squeeze and tears rolled down Mya’s face. She couldn’t remember the last time she saw her mother so exquisitely happy.
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“That was what you were so worried about?” Sidney asked quietly as they walked out of the building. Mya turned her tear stained face up to his and they stopped in the middle of the parking lot as she tried to speak through her tears.

“That? You say it like that was nothing and that....That is my mother and she doesn’t even know who I am...do you have any fucking idea what that fucking feels like?” she asked, tears streaming down her face.

“No,” he replied quietly, cupping her face in his hands and pressing a soft kiss to her furrowed brow. “But I think what you did...are doing...is all you can do for her My. It’s not your fault.”

“I know that, don’t you think I know that?” she sniffed, stiffening as he tried to wrap his arms protectively around her.

“No I don’t,” he whispered into her hair, feeling her gradually relaxing against him until her arms wound around his middle and her cheek rested against his shoulder “I think you probably think you should be looking after her but you couldn’t...not all the time and...well she doesn’t know you’re not there so...I know you probably feel bad but it’s not like she can miss you.” He held her close, tightening his grasp on her as she struggled against him. He knew that she probably didn’t want to hear what he was trying to say but he knew he was right when he said it.

“I’m hundreds of miles away from her. I miss her...I miss her all the time,” Mya sobbed, slamming her hand against his chest. “You don’t know...you have two fucking moms with Nathalie...I don’t even have the one I have.” Sidney tried to think of something motivating to say but he came up empty and decided that the best thing he could probably do for her was exactly what he was already doing, and that was just to hold her. “I can’t even call her, you know?” she sniffed finally, wiping her nose with the back of her hand before looking up at him, her green eyes red rimmed. She looked exhausted. He nodded, realizing this was probably the most vulnerable she’d ever been around him. Even when she’d been in that holding cell, she’d been tough and resilient. Not now. Now she was shaken to the core, and this was the first time he felt like maybe she really needed him.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered, brushing a tear away from her cheek before lowering his mouth to capture hers’. His chest swelled as she clung to him, her lips moving eagerly under his. “And if you thought this was going to scare me away My...it’s just not going to happen.” She gave him the ghost of a smile and then dropped her gaze from his.

“That could be me...will probably be me...,” she began but stopped when his fingers cupped her chin and forced her gaze to meet with his.

“If that ever happens, I promise you that you will never end up in a place like this and I promise you...I will never leave you My...never.”