Page 2 of Puck My Pain Away

The recovery room is the wrong kind of quiet after.

Tile, a humming light, that hospital smell of cold antiseptic that gets into the back of your throat. They’ve cut my sock off. The knee under the ice wrap has swelled into something that doesn’t look like it belongs to a body, a hot tight balloon of a thing, the skin gone shiny and stretched, purple feathering up underneath. I can’t stop looking at it, because if I look at it I don’t have to look at the surgeon’s face while she talks.

Her name’s Dr. Okafor and she’s good, they flew her in once for Theo’s shoulder, and she’s got the scan up on a screen she’s turned toward me like that’s a kindness. She uses the words. ACL. MCL. The meniscus, which she says is the part she’s most concerned about, which is doctor-speak for this is the bad one. She says reconstruction. She says grafts, plural. She says the thing I’ve been keeping behind my teeth since the ice came up to meet me, she says it out loud into the cold room with her hands folded:

“Roman, I want to be straight with you. You’re done for this season. And a return to your prior level? I won’t promise you that. I’d be lying if I promised you that.”

There’s a tray beside the bed. Paper cup of water on it, a little pleated thing, and a second cup with two pills she hasn’t given me yet.

I knock it off the tray.

I don’t decide to. My hand just goes, swipes the whole tray. The water cup hits the tile. The pills skitter under the bed. The metal tray rings against the floor like a cymbal, and I hear myself saying no in a voice that’s coming apart, no, you run it again, you run the scan again, you don’t know, you don’t know me, I heal fast, ask anybody, ask my trainer, I heal fast⁠—

A nurse is there. She doesn’t flinch from the noise. She picks the tray up off the floor without a word. She’s got a syringe. She finds the line in the back of my hand that I forgot they put there, and she says, very calm, very even, “This’ll take the edge off, Mr. Vane. Just breathe for me.”

I want to tell her I don’t want it. I’m shaking and furious. There’s water soaking cold through the sheet by my hip, and I open my mouth to tell her I don’t need it.

Then it hits.

I have never felt anything like it, and I will spend the next year of my life trying to feel exactly like it again. It comes up the arm slow and gold. It gets to my chest and the white roar in the knee just steps back. Doesn’t leave. Steps back, the way a dog backs off a fence. And behind it, where all night there’s been nothing but the pop, the silence, the crowd already gone, something warm folds over the whole wreck of me and tells me, without words, in a voice I’d follow anywhere: none of this has to be felt right now.

My fists come open. I didn’t know they were closed until they aren’t. The fight goes out of my hands first, then my arms, then the back of my neck where I’ve been holding my own skull up since the tunnel.

“There,” the nurse says softly. “There you go.”

I lie back. The ceiling’s very interesting. I think, distantly, from a long way up, oh. Just that. Oh. So that’s available.

I should be afraid of how good it is. I’m not. That’s the thing right there, that’s the whole next year. I’m twenty-five, flat on my back in a paper gown, and I don’t see it coming any more than I saw Kovac.

—

That night they keep me for observation and I don’t sleep.

Course I don’t. The gold’s worn thin by two a.m., and the knee’s woken back up under the brace, throbbing in time with my pulse. They’ve left me a button I’m not supposed to push more than every however-many minutes, and I’ve already learned exactly how many minutes. The room’s dark except the strip of hall light under the door and the glow of my phone, which I should put down, which I cannot put down.

The notifications stack up the side of the screen and I don’t open one. Theo, four times, the last just a string of nothing, just bro and a row of dots, which from Theo means more than a paragraph would. Dara, my agent, three calls and a text I can read the top line of without unlocking it: Roman call me the second you’re able, we manage this, do not post anything. Already running numbers on me, already turning the worst night of my life into a thing to be managed. I can’t be mad at her for it. It’s her job, and she’s not wrong. The rookie, Niko, who I’ve said maybe nine words to all year, has sent me a wall of text I can see is long and earnest, and I don’t open that one either, because a twenty-year-old’s hope is the last thing my chest can hold right now.

And there at the bottom, the one I knew would be there. My father. One missed call, no message. He wouldn’t leave a message. Leaving a message would be admitting the call was about feelings and not about the leg, and Vic Vane has never once in my life made a call about feelings. He’ll have watched it live. He’ll have seen the replay loop, the score and the silence, same cut I keep watching. He’ll have sat there in his recliner doing in his head exactly what Dara’s doing on her phone, running the timeline, the comeback, the math on what’s left of his investment. He didn’t call to ask if I’m scared. I know that like I know my own knee’s gone. He called to find out when I’m skating again, and I let it ring out, because I don’t have a number to give him. A son with no number to give Vic Vane isn’t worth the long distance.

I put none of them out of their misery. I open the one thing I shouldn’t instead.

I’m watching myself.

That’s the sick joke of it. I’ve got my own highlights open, the team’s posted a montage already, thinking of you 91, and I’m lying here in the dark watching the version of me from four hours ago and four years ago split defenders, roof backhands, get buried under teammates, watching eighteen thousand people scream a name that, in the clips, belongs to a person who can stand up. There’s one from a playoff run two springs back, me and Theo mobbed at center ice, both of us howling into each other’s cages like the building might come down. I watch the goal from tonight. Somebody’s already cut it with the injury right after, the score and then the silence. I watch it twice, three times, my thumb going back to the start, back, back, like if I run it enough times the tape might catch and play it the way it was supposed to go.

The me on the screen points his stick at the kids behind the glass.

I scrub back and make him do it again.

The phone dies somewhere around the fourth or fortieth time, just blacks out mid-celebration with the battery I never charged, and the dark that’s left is enormous. No crowd. No gold in the arm. Just the ceiling I can’t see, the knee keeping time, the realization sitting on my chest with its full weight now that there is nothing under it. Take the hockey away and I genuinely do not know what’s left standing in this bed. I’ve never had to know. I built the whole thing tall and load-bearing on one joint. The joint is in pieces under a brace, and I’m lying here in the dark at twenty-five finding out, for the first time, how little of me there is that isn’t the player.

I don’t cry. I get close. I lie very still and ride it out like a hit I see coming, bracing. After a while the night nurse comes in to check the line and finds me staring up at nothing.

She’s kind about it. She doesn’t ask if I’m okay, which I’m grateful for, because I’d have hated her for it. She checks the bag and the brace. She tucks the blanket back over my hip, and on her way out, like it’s nothing, like it’s good news, she says:

“Get some rest if you can. They’ve got you set up with the best for the rehab, you know. Doctor Mercer’s taking your case himself. He doesn’t do that for everybody.”

“Who?”