Page 11 of Puck My Pain Away

I keep it locked always and the key off my ring, in my wallet, behind a card, because what’s in the drawer is the one thing in my life I’ve never trusted to a building. A single file folder, unmarked, that I carried out of my last hospital in a box of personal effects rather than leave for anyone to find. I take it out. I set it on the desk and open it, and the name at the top is the one I won’t think in the dark.

Sam Aldridge.

Twenty-three years old. An addiction-and-pain patient I was given to manage and chose instead to keep, the same slow architecture I can feel myself laying down again now with my own steady hands, brick by careful brick. He had nobody too. They always have nobody; that’s not coincidence, that’s selection. I don’t choose the ones with a wide net under them. I choose the ones who’ve already fallen through every other net in their lives, because a man with somewhere else to turn doesn’t turn his whole weight onto you, and the whole weight is the thing I’m after. Sam had a mother who’d stopped answering and a body full of pain and me. Roman has a father who loves a scoreboard and a body full of pain and me. I tell people I treat the difficult cases. The truth is I select for a specific difficulty, the kind that has no one else in the room, and then I make very sure it stays that way. I read two lines. I always only read two lines; I don’t need the rest. I lived the rest. The intake summary, in my own old handwriting. I read those two lines and I close it before the room I’m in starts to smell like that other room.

I tell myself I take it out as a warning. A discipline. Look what this is, look where it goes, you have a file in a drawer because you did this exact thing and a boy died of it. And there’s a man who could read those two lines, reassign Roman in the morning, and never be alone in a locked room with him again.

But that’s not why I keep it. I’ve started to understand that, kneeling here over the proof of my worst self. I don’t keep the file to frighten myself out of it. I keep it like you keep a thing you’re proud of and ashamed of at once, the only complete record of the one time I was loved that totally, needed that absolutely. I take it out on the nights the wanting gets bad, and I read two lines, and what I feel is not only horror. That’s the truth I lock back in the drawer with it. Some of what I feel is missing him. Missing being that necessary. And Roman Vane is going to be that necessary. I am building it so that he will. The file goes back in the drawer, the key goes back behind the card, and I lock my own evidence away and turn off the light.

—

I pour a drink at home I don’t finish.

Good scotch, one I don’t taste, set on the counter while I stand at the window of an apartment as controlled and empty as I am, nothing out of place because nothing’s ever lived here hard enough to disturb anything. There’s one chair by this window, and in three years I have never once had a second person sit in it. My phone lights. The GM, of course, at eleven at night, because Sloane manages by leaving no hour unclaimed: Vane on track?

I look at the question. I think of the man face-down on the practice ice just days ago, the snapped stick, the dosing chart climbing, the file warm from my hands an hour ago. I think no. I think I am the thing he’s not on track around, and I am not going to stop.

I type: On track. Ahead of schedule on the joint. Managing the psychological side closely. Every word true in the only way my words are ever true, which is true enough to hide the thing under it.

Good man, she sends back. Knew you were the call.

And I think, distantly, looking at those two words, that she has no idea how completely she’s wrong, and that the not-knowing is the whole product I sell. Sloane doesn’t want to know how I get the wins any more than the franchise wanted to know why a clinician of my caliber was available mid-career, willing to relocate, asking no questions about the gaps in his references. Nobody digs into the man who fixes things. That’s the genius of choosing this disease over the obvious ones. A drunk gets caught. A man who needs to be needed gets promoted, gets the difficult cases handed to him gift-wrapped, gets a general manager texting him good man at eleven at night while the actual harm accrues quietly behind a locked door and a documented rationale. I have built a life in the one blind spot society keeps permanently unwatched, and I did it on purpose. The only person who has ever looked at me and felt the wrongness before she had the evidence is a twenty-nine-year-old athletic therapist with a dosing chart. And I have already started planning how to manage her.

I set the phone down next to the scotch I’m not drinking. I stand in my immaculate empty apartment, the most trusted clinician in the organization, a file locked in a drawer at the office and a boy two miles away finally sleeping because I told him to. And I am not, in this moment, lying to myself about a single part of it. That’s the worst hour, always. Not the lying. The clarity. The few minutes at the end of the night when I see exactly what I am, exactly what I’m doing, exactly where it ends. I rinse the untouched glass. I go to bed anyway. I do not stop. I never have.

Tomorrow there’s a session. The joint is nearly ready. I’ll find a reason it isn’t.

7

ROMAN

The knee goes on a drill I could’ve done in my sleep at nineteen.

It’s late, past nine, the facility emptied out an hour ago and I stayed because staying is better than the apartment. Elias kept the lights on in the small rink for me, the practice sheet, and he’s got me doing edges, nothing real, just controlled pushes along the blue line to teach the joint it can trust itself again. Push, glide, stop. Push, glide, stop. I’ve done forty of them and the fortieth is the one that ends me.

I load the outside edge and the leg isn’t there. Same as the test, the same vanishing, except this time there’s no clipboard, no audience, no Niko in the corner of my eye, just me and the empty boards and the joint folding like wet cardboard. I go down hard on my hip and my palms. The cold comes up through my gloves, and I’m on the ice again, flat, a thing that fell.

“Goddammit.” It comes out of me ragged and I hit the boards. Fist, full force, the dasher rattling in its frame, and the impact rings up my arm and I do it again because the first one didn’t fix anything. “Goddammit, goddammit—” My voice cracks on the third and I hate the sound of it bouncing back at me off all that empty seating, eighteen thousand seats with nobody in them, the loudest quiet there is. My knee is screaming now, the fire flooding back into the place where the leg disappeared. I stay down on all fours with my head hanging, and I breathe, and the breath shakes coming out. I am so far past the edge of what I can carry that I don’t even have the rage anymore. The rage was the last thing holding me up. Now there’s just the cold and the wet seeping through my track pants and the fact that I can’t get a hockey stop out of a leg I’ve owned for twenty-five years.

I hear the gate.

I don’t look up. I know the sound of him by now, the steady unhurried steps on the rubber matting, no rush in them, no alarm. And I want to scream at him not to come over here and see me like this, and I want him to come over here more than I’ve wanted anything in weeks.

He doesn’t say it’s okay. He doesn’t tell me to get up. He crosses the ice in his street shoes, careful on the surface, and he crouches down in front of me, down to where I am, so I’m not a man on the floor being looked at from above, and he puts himself in my eyeline.

“Roman. Look at me.”

I don’t. I’m staring at the ice, at the scrape marks, at the small dark spots where something off my face has dripped and frozen.

“Look at me.” Not louder. Lower. A floor under the words, flat and certain, the same voice he used the first night with his hands on my knee, and something in me that’s been thrashing for an hour goes toward it like it’s heat in a cold room.

I look at him.

His eyes are right there, pale and steady, and they don’t have any pity in them, that’s the thing, that’s the thing that lets me breathe. Everybody else looks at me now like I’m a funeral they have to attend. He just looks at me like I’m a problem he already knows how to solve.

“Breathe,” he says. “Look only at me and breathe. In through your nose. Out slow. Nothing else exists in this building right now except that. Do it.”

And I do it. I’m a grown man on my hands and knees on the ice doing breathing exercises because a guy told me to. And somewhere under the wreck a small voice says this is humiliating; you used to be somebody. I cannot make myself care, because for the length of one slow breath with his eyes holding mine, the screaming in my head drops to a hum. He counts me through three of them. In through the nose. Out slow. The shaking backs off a notch. My heart stops trying to climb out of my throat.