Dad looked at the foot of the bed for a moment. Then: "Your brother's a good player."
"Yeah," I said. "He is."
Dad nodded. Once. Like he had said what he came to say and was done with the part that required words.
Dylan, from the door, said nothing. But something shifted in his face—just slightly, just for a second—and then it was gone and he was looking at the wall again.
Mom, who had been quiet for approximately as long as she was capable of being quiet, put both hands on my arm.
"You scared us," she said. "You scared us very much, Wesley."
"I'm okay," I said.
"You are not okay," she said. "You have a grade-three concussion and you need to rest and you are going to rest and you are not going to argue with me about it."
"I wasn't going to argue."
"You were absolutely going to argue."
She wasn't wrong.
"The team doctor brought us here," she said. "Dr. Cross. Before he—" She paused. "He came to find us himself. In the arena. He explained what had happened, he brought us to the hospital. He stayed until he knew you were being seen." She seemed to have arrived at a conclusion and was deciding how much of it to share. "He was very good. Very thorough."
"He's a good doctor," I said.
"He was also," Mom said, in a different tone, the one she used when she was about to say something she'd been holding, "extremely handsome."
Dylan made a sound.
"Linda," Dad said.
"I'm just observing." She shrugged. "I'm allowed to observe. He had very nice eyes." She looked at me. "Blue. Very blue."
"I hadn't noticed," I said.
Dylan made the sound again, louder.
"Are you getting sick?" Dad asked him.
"No," Dylan said.
"You keep making a noise."
"I'm fine," Dylan said, to the wall.
Mom patted my arm and looked satisfied with how the conversation had gone, and I lay in a Toronto hospital bed with a grade-three concussion thinking about very blue eyes and the space where a lanyard should have been.
"Where is he?" I said. "Nath—I mean, Dr. Cross. Where did he go?"
The room did a thing.
Not dramatically. Nobody flinched. Nobody said anything. Nobody moved.
Dad looked at Mom. Mom looked at Dylan.
Dylan looked at me.
"He had some things to deal with," Dylan said. "With the team."
