I did not have the processing power for this.
The lanyard was gone. He'd already reported himself. He was taking me to an ambulance he'd called before the game ended and holding my hand in a team corridor and his face had the quality of a man who had made several decisions tonight and had stopped managing the fallout of them individually.
Nathan Cross, who checked corridors before kissing me. Who saidthere's no oneinto a phone with me three feet away. Who had maintained professional distance in every team context for two years with a precision that I had spent months cataloguing, that Nathan Cross was walking down a facility corridor in Toronto holding my hand where anyone could see it.
This felt right, but also felt wrong.
Not wrong like bad. Wrong like, the rules had changed and nobody had told me which rules and my head was an eight and I couldn't find the thread that connected the lanyard to the ambulance to the hand to whatever was on Nathan's face right now, which was tired and certain and something I didn't have a category for yet.
Coach turned around.
His jaw did something. He looked at our hands. He looked at Nathan. He made the decision of a man who had managedhuman beings for years and knew when a conversation belonged in a corridor and when it didn't.
"Morrison," he said.
"Coach," I said.
Nathan didn't let go.
He looked at Nathan. Something passed between them, brief and weighted.
Nathan looked at his hands.
Outside the facility doors there was an ambulance.
Not parked urgently, lights going—just there, quiet, waiting. Which meant someone had called it before the final buzzer. Which meant someone had known before the game ended that it was going to be needed.
I looked at Nathan.
He was still looking at his hands.
The ambulance had been called before the game ended. Before the assessment. Before he'd even come into the locker room.
He'd known.
"You already told them," I said. "Before you even came into the locker room. You already—"
"Get in the ambulance, Wesley," he said.
Not unkind. Not the wall exactly. Something more tired than either, something that had the weight of a decision already made and already reported and already on the record, and Nathan Cross standing in a Toronto facility corridor without his lanyard because the decision about the lanyard had apparently also already been made.
"Nathan," I said.
"The ambulance," he said. "Please."
Coach put his hand briefly on my shoulder. Once. The way you touched someone when there wasn't anything to say.
I looked at Nathan one more time.
He looked back at me. Those blue eyes, the real version, and underneath everything—underneath the tiredness and the wall and the thing that had already been reported and recorded—something that was still there, still present, still the hotel room and the hand andone shiftsaid in a tunnel in Toronto because I'd saidit's Dylanand he'd understood.
Still there.
I got in the ambulance.
26
"Grade-three concussion," she said. "Significant enough that I want to be clear with you about what that means. This isn't something you push through. This isn't something you manage. Your brain needs rest. Actual rest, not hockey player rest. If you don't give it that, you're looking at symptoms that compound in ways that will follow you for a long time."
