Page 21 of Puck My Pain Away

“Can I come in?”

“It’s not a good time. I was about to ice the knee and crash. Early night.”

“Roman.” His voice cracks a little. He’s not looking at me, he’s looking past me at the bottles. When his eyes come back to mine, they’re wet and scared, and I have to look away. “Man, what is going on with you? Talk to me. This isn’t—you’re not okay, anybody can see you’re not okay, and I’m not leaving until⁠—”

“I’m fine.” It comes out hard, harder than I mean, the cornered-animal hard. “Theo, I love you, but I’m fine, and I need you to go, okay? I’ll call you. We’ll get the boys together. I just need a couple weeks to get the knee right and I’ll be back to normal, I swear.”

And I get him out. I actually do it. I stand in my own doorway and I shoulder my best friend of fifteen years back out into the hall with a smile and a lie, the man who’d take me into his home tonight if I asked, who has a plate of birthday dinner in his freezer with my name on it. I shut the door on his worried face. I lean my back against it, slide down to the floor, and I can’t breathe for a second.

Because I had to get him out before he saw the rest of it. Before he saw the part of me that was already, even then, even sliding down the door shaking, thinking about the only place I wanted to be, which was not here and not with Theo and not getting better.

Through the door I can hear him not leaving. Just standing out there in the hall, breathing, his weight settling against the wall across from my door. I picture his face on the other side of two inches of wood, the big easy face that’s never once been anything but glad to see me. I know if I open the door right now and just say his name, just say Theo, with nothing else, he’d have me out of here in five minutes. He’d carry me to his truck if he had to. He’d sit up with me all night and never once make me feel like a thing that broke. The whole rescue is sitting in my hallway leaning on the wall. All I have to do is open a door I just closed. And I sit on my side of it with my knees up and my hands over my mouth so he won’t hear, and I wait him out. That’s what I do. I outlast my own best friend’s love, sitting on the floor in the dark, until I hear him finally push off the wall. His footsteps go heavy down the hall, the stairwell door bangs, and he’s gone. The relief I feel that he’s gone is the sickest thing I’ve felt yet, because it means the part of me that wants the locked room has started winning even against Theo, even against Sammy’s empty chair, even against the last good thing I’ve got.

—

I last about twenty minutes alone before I text him.

I sit on the floor against the door with the bottles looking at me, Theo’s truck pulling out of the lot below, the silence coming down, that specific four-walls silence that’s worse than any pain. I make it about twenty minutes. Then I pick up my phone and I text Elias.

coming over

I don’t ask. I’ve learned not to ask, asking gets me the coat. I just tell him, and I sit there on the floor holding the phone. The three dots come. Then his answer comes. It’s one word, and it’s all I needed and all he ever has to give.

come

That’s it. One word, lowercase, no punctuation, the least a person can say, and it goes through me warmer than anything Theo said tonight, warmer than I’m worried about you, warmer than just talk to me. Theo wants me to be okay. Elias wants me to come over, and right now the second one is the only language I can still hear. I’m up off the floor before I’ve thought about it. I’m grabbing my keys. I’ve got one shoe on and I’m carrying the other, hopping toward the door of my wrecked apartment past the bottles, the shrink-wrapped gear, the dead man on the wall, out into the night toward the locked room. And the awful thing, the thing I’ll have to answer for someday, is that for the first time all day I feel okay. Not good. Okay. Pointed at the one thing that quiets me, finally moving. The metal railing bites cold into my palm as I take the stairs two at a time. I don’t tie the second shoe until I’m already in the truck. Somewhere behind me Sammy’s plate is in a freezer, Theo’s concern is still unanswered, and Blake’s offer still stands, day or night. I drive away from all of it toward the one door in my life that locks from the inside, and I tell myself, like I tell myself everything now, that I’ll fix it tomorrow.

14

ELIAS

Sloane gives me a date and a warning in the same breath, which is how I know the warning is the real message.

“March first,” she says. She doesn’t sit and she doesn’t offer me a chair; this is a standing meeting, the kind she does when she wants it short and remembered. “He’s on the ice in a real capacity by March first, or we have a different conversation. And Elias—” She lets my name sit there. “The board’s started asking. A first-line forward, eighteen months left on a very large contract, out longer than anyone projected, and the medical explanation is coming from one clinician they didn’t hire and don’t know. I’ve been covering that with my own credibility. I can’t do it past March.”

So now there’s a clock I didn’t set, ticking against the clock I did. I hold her eyes and I give her the only thing that works on Sloane, which is calm. “March first,” I agree, as if it costs me nothing, as if I’m not at this moment scheduling the exact protocol delays that will make March first impossible. “He’ll be ready. And I understand about the board. Send anyone with questions to me directly. I’d rather they hear it from the person managing the case than play telephone through the front office.” Generous. Transparent. The offer of a man with nothing to hide, which is the single most effective thing a man with everything to hide can say. She nods, mollified. I walk out having promised a date I will spend the next six weeks quietly ensuring we miss. I do the arithmetic in the elevator, and the arithmetic tells me I’m running out of the one thing I’ve always had more of than anyone, which is time.

That’s the variable I’ve never had to solve for before. In the other cities, with the other ones, time was infinite, or near enough; no one was waiting on a slight young man with no contract and no audience to perform for on a Tuesday in March. Sam had nowhere to be. That was half of why I chose him. But I chose Roman because he was the opposite—public, valuable—and I let the wanting override the obvious operational truth, which is that you cannot quietly disappear into the slow ruin of a man the whole city is waiting to see skate. The thing that makes him intoxicating, that an entire organization needs his body back, is the thing that will end me, because the world keeps the receipts on a man like Roman in a way it never bothered to for Sam. I knew that going in. I did it anyway, which is new, which frightens the part of me that has stayed free for all these years by never once choosing appetite over cover. This time I chose appetite. I file the fear where I file all the threats, in the cold drawer that’s never full, and I start planning, because planning is the only prayer I have.

—

The first thing I plan around is a reporter.

It comes to me secondhand, which is itself useful, a forwarded email from the PR office with a tired note attached, Can you advise on a response? The reporter is Erin Vasquez. Local sports desk, but good, better than local usually runs, the kind who files a story and then keeps pulling the thread after everyone else has moved on. Her email is three polite sentences asking for comment on Roman Vane’s unusually extended recovery timeline, whether there are complications the public should know about, whether the organization stands by the original prognosis. Nothing accusatory. Just a smart person noticing the same gap Sloane noticed, from the outside, with a byline.

I draft PR’s response for them, because of course I do, that’s why it came to me. I make it warm and boring and final. Roman’s recovery is progressing well; the club is prioritizing his long-term health over an artificial timeline; we won’t be commenting on specifics of an athlete’s medical care, as is our policy. Unimpeachable. Caring, even. It says nothing. It closes the door politely. It gives her no thread to pull. I send it back to PR with a note suggesting they keep all Vane medical inquiries routed through me so the messaging stays consistent. They’re grateful. One less thing on their desk. And just like that, every question about Roman Vane’s body now runs across the desk of the man hiding what’s being done to it, and I’ve made that look like media discipline. Erin Vasquez will get her boring answer and move on, probably. People usually do.

Probably. I write her name down, though, the same as I wrote Blake’s. The ones who keep pulling threads are the ones who end me, if anyone does, and I’ve learned to mark them early.

What I can’t do is make her go away like I’ll make Blake go away, and I sit with that limitation, because it’s instructive. The reporter is a different kind of problem entirely, and a new kind of problem is the closest thing to excitement I own. Blake is inside the building; I can move the pieces she watches, reroute the supply, drown her in a plausible taper, use the institution’s own deference to me against her. Erin Vasquez is outside it, and you can’t reroute a journalist’s curiosity, you can only starve it, give it nothing, make the story boring enough to die of neglect. The danger of the outside ones is that they have no career inside my walls for me to threaten, no protocol for me to falsify. They answer to an editor, a deadline, their own appetite for the thread, none of which I control. So I do the only thing that works on the outside ones, which is to make the inside so seamless that there’s nothing for the outside to catch on. A perfect official record. A caring boilerplate quote. A franchise that closes ranks because closing ranks is what franchises do. If I keep the inside clean enough, Erin Vasquez writes one tepid follow-up and her editor reassigns her to something with a pulse, and the thread goes slack for lack of anything to pull. That’s the plan. It’s a good plan. It has one flaw, which is that it depends on Roman staying alive, and that is the one part of all this I’ve stopped being able to guarantee.

—

Blake doesn’t email. Blake brings paper.

She finds me in my office at the end of the day and shuts the door behind her without asking, which tells me before she’s said a word that this isn’t the hallway conversation anymore. She puts a printout on my desk. Pharmacy logs. Roman’s refills, dates and quantities, weeks of them, and she’s highlighted the pattern in yellow, the climb, the intervals shrinking, the totals that don’t reconcile with any protocol a healing knee should need.

“I’m not doing the gentle version again,” she says. Her voice is steady but there’s something underneath it, fear maybe, the fear of a junior person who’s decided to do the right thing against a senior one. “These numbers are wrong, Elias. This isn’t pain management for a recovering ACL. This is a dependency being fed, and either you can’t see it, which I don’t believe, or you’re the one feeding it. So here’s what’s going to happen. You’re going to explain this to me in a way that makes medical sense, right now, or I’m taking it to the physicians’ board. I’ve already scanned the pages. I will do it. I like you, or I did, but I’m not going down with you and I’m not letting a patient die so you can keep your secret, whatever it is.”