Page 22 of Puck My Pain Away

It’s the bravest thing anyone in this building has done, and I feel the cold thing in me recognize her fully, the recognition you give a worthy opponent across a board. She has me. On paper, she has me. And I sit back and I do the only thing that’s ever saved me, which is to become, instantly, the reasonable man hearing a serious concern.

“You’re right to bring this,” I tell her, and I watch it knock her half a step off balance, the agreement she braced against an argument for. “The numbers look exactly like you say. I should have flagged it to you myself.” I let regret into my face, dosed to the gram. “Here’s what you don’t have, because it’s not in the pharmacy system: he’s been on a tapering schedule for nine days. The high refills are the old protocol; the taper started after his last imaging. I’ve been managing it closely because of the very risk profile you’re describing, family history, the psychology, all of it. You’ve caught the peak of a curve that’s already coming down.” I meet her eyes, open, grateful. “Give me three weeks. If the numbers aren’t down by then, you take the whole file to the board and I’ll walk in with you. But don’t blow up a man’s career and mine on the upslope of a taper I’m already running.”

It’s a good lie. It’s a good lie because most of it is structure she can’t check against anything except my word, and I’ve spent a career making my word the most trusted instrument in any room. I watch her want to believe it, because believing it means she doesn’t have to detonate her own career on a hunch, and I watch the wanting do half my work for me. She doesn’t fully buy it. But she takes the three weeks, because three weeks is reasonable and she’s a reasonable person and that’s the lever I pulled. “Three weeks,” she says. “I’m keeping the logs. And I’m watching.” She leaves the highlighted printout on my desk, on purpose, a copy she doesn’t need back, so I know she has others.

I sit with it after she’s gone. Three weeks. She’s bought me less time than Sloane and she’s far more dangerous, because Sloane wants to be reassured and Blake wants to be right.

—

So that night I do the thing that takes Blake out of the equation, and it’s the worst single step I take, and I take it without my hand shaking.

I move him off the team pharmacy. I write him a private script, my own pad, a pharmacy across the county line that doesn’t talk to the club’s system, and from this week forward, Roman Vane’s medications leave no trace anywhere Blake Fox can subpoena. The logs she’s guarding will show a taper, a real one, declining numbers, beautiful and exonerating, because the real supply, the climbing one, will run through a channel that doesn’t exist on any sheet she can reach. I’ve solved her. I’ve turned her own diligence into my cover; the cleaner those official logs get, the more they’ll vouch for me. And the cost, the only cost, is that I’ve just removed the last institutional eye on how much I’m giving him. No pharmacist cross-checking. No system flagging an interaction. Nothing between the dose I decide and the man who takes it but my judgment. My judgment is not a thing anyone should trust with another person’s life. I know that better than anyone alive. And I do it anyway, that night, in clean blue ink.

That’s the step that kills people. I know it is. I have a file in a drawer that is the record of the last time I removed the last safeguard. Sam died on a private script too, the same maneuver, the same county-line pharmacy logic, the same beautiful clean official record that showed a responsible doctor while the real supply ran through a channel no one watched, and when they finally went looking the official record was so clean it nearly cleared me, would have, if a nurse with Blake’s kind of stubbornness hadn’t kept her own notes. I learned from that. Not the lesson a person should learn. I learned to be better at it. To choose the pharmacy more carefully, to keep the official taper more convincing, to mark the Blakes earlier. I’m not repeating a mistake tonight; I’m executing a refined version of a thing I’ve done before and gotten away with, and the refinement is the most damning fact about me, more than the wanting, more than the harm. A man who did this once in a fog of need is sick. A man who does it twice, better, with notes, is something the language doesn’t have a soft word for. I move his scripts off the audited system with full knowledge of where the road goes. The knowledge sits in me, cold and quiet, and changes nothing, because it has never once been the part of me that’s driving.

—

I stop by his apartment that night uninvited, because I find I want to see him, and the wanting is a thing I no longer pretend not to act on.

He buzzes me up confused, glad, off balance, and I walk into a scene I’ve walked into before, in another life, with another boy. The bottles on the counter, more than I’d estimated. The smell. The physio gear still shrink-wrapped against the wall, the road back he hasn’t touched. A grown man, a captain, living in four hundred square feet of slow ruin, and the ruin has my fingerprints all over it, the scripts, the silence, the delay, the nights. I take it in like a man surveying his own work.

I should do something. There is a version of this where the doctor in me, who is real, who trained for years to keep people alive, looks at this room and acts. Calls someone. Admits him somewhere. Stops. The room is a chart and the chart is screaming, and I can read it better than anyone.

The doctor is real. That’s the thing people get wrong when they imagine men like me; they think the healer is a mask over the predator, a costume. It isn’t. I genuinely know how to keep a person alive. I’ve done it, hundreds of times, hands steady in actual emergencies, and meant it. The two of us live in the same body and neither is the disguise. That’s what makes this room unbearable to stand in and impossible to leave, that I can see exactly what’s killing him with the same eyes that want to keep killing him, that the diagnosis and the appetite arrive in the same glance. I stood in a room like this once before. I watched the chart scream and chose the appetite. The boy in that room is two lines of my own handwriting in a drawer now. I am standing in the second room. I know it’s the second room. There is no version of me that doesn’t know. And the knowing arranges itself, as it always does, not into rescue but into a kind of tenderness for the ruin, a proprietary ache. The wreck on the counter and the wreck of the man are mine, the only things in my cold life that are warm. A man does not call an ambulance on the only warm thing he has, not if he’s me, not if he’s already done the arithmetic and decided.

I set a fresh script on the counter instead. The private one, the new channel, the bottle that won’t show up anywhere. I move aside an empty to make room for it, a small domestic courtesy. I tell him to drink water with it, to sleep. I look at the wreck of him a moment longer, this beautiful ruined man who looks at me like I’m the only solid thing in a falling world, and I feel the enormous fullness, the hole closing, the thing I would burn anyone for. And I do not stay, and I do not help, and I do not stop. I leave the drugs. I leave him in the ruin and go home to my clean apartment. Somewhere two miles back, a man I am killing picks up the bottle I set down and feels, looking at it, that he’s been cared for.

That’s the masterpiece. Not the harm. The fact that the harm arrives wearing the face of care, and that he’ll thank me for it, and that I built it so he would. The board will never find it. Erin Vasquez will never print it. Blake will guard a clean taper that proves my innocence. And the only honest record of what I am is two lines in a drawer with another boy’s name on it, and I am, tonight, quietly opening a second file.

15

ROMAN

Ifail the test in the first ninety seconds, and the worst part is that the knee isn’t even the reason.

It’s a basic battery. Single-leg landings, a lateral bound, a stop-and-cut at three-quarter speed with Gus running the clipboard and a kid from the analytics group filming it on a tablet for the file. I’ve done these landings ten thousand times in my life. I did them at fourteen on a pond with no one watching. I did them at twenty-three in front of eighteen thousand people, my body knowing how before my brain ever got a vote. And I plant on the cut. The leg holds, the knee holds, the rebuilt ligament does exactly what it was rebuilt to do. The rest of me just isn’t there. I’m slow. I’m a half-second behind my own feet. My hands are sandbags. My lungs are tin, the floor keeps coming up wrong, and I bail out of the second bound before I even land it because some animal part of me knows I’ll go down if I commit.

Gus doesn’t yell. Gus used to yell at me when I was a rookie jumping the boards too early, and I’d kill for the yelling now. Instead, he just lowers the clipboard and looks at me like he’d look at a truck that won’t turn over anymore, and he says, “Take five, Vane,” in a voice with nothing in it.

And then he turns to the analytics kid, and he thinks I’m out of earshot because I’m bent over with my hands on my knees pretending to catch a breath I can’t catch, and he says it low. “Off the record. Knee’s fine. Scans are clean. But that—” a tip of his head at me, at the wreck of me sucking wind on his nice clean floor, “—I’ve seen that before. That’s not a knee. Maybe the kid’s just done.”

Done.

The word lands somewhere deeper than the knee ever could. Because here’s the thing nobody tells you about being the name on the back of eighteen thousand jerseys: you stop being a guy and start being a number on a board, and you let it happen, you’re glad to let it happen, because the number is cleaner than the guy. Roman Vane the man missed a six-year-old’s birthday. Roman Vane the number won a building three trophies. You do the math the city does. You learn to be the number. And then one Tuesday a guy with a clipboard says maybe the kid’s just done. What he’s really saying is the number’s coming off the board. If the number comes off the board, I genuinely do not know what’s left standing here in these gym shoes. That not-knowing is a drop with no bottom, and I have found exactly one thing in this world that stops me falling down it.

He doesn’t say it cruel. That’s what guts me, same as Theo not being mad, same as Blake picking a kinder word. Gus says it like he’d say it about a horse, a sad practical fact, and he’s not even wrong. I straighten up with my face arranged into nothing. I walk off the floor, into the hall, and I do not go to Gus and ask him what he meant. I do not go to Theo, who is fifteen minutes away and would drop everything. I do not go to Blake, who has been trying to hand me a rope for a month. I get in my truck with my hands shaking on the keys. I drive the one direction my body always drives now, the only place the word done can’t reach me. I’m halfway there before I’ve decided anything, and I wasn’t ever really going to decide anything else.

—

I don’t knock. I have a keycard that still works and a man who stopped pretending he doesn’t expect me. I let myself into his office at the end of the day. He looks up from his desk and reads the whole thing off my face in about two seconds, because reading me is what he does better than anyone alive.

“Gus ran me,” I say. My voice comes out wrong. “I failed it. Knee’s fine. It’s me. He said maybe I’m just done.”

Elias sets down his pen. He doesn’t tell me it isn’t true. He doesn’t tell me I’m not done, doesn’t reassure me, doesn’t do a single one of the things Theo would do, and that’s exactly why I came here instead of to Theo, because I can’t stand to be lied to kindly right now and Elias never bothers. He just looks at me, that flat assessing quiet, and lets the word done sit in the room without arguing it, and somehow that’s the only thing that’s loosened my chest all day.

“Come here,” he says.

We end up at his apartment because that’s where we go now. I stand in the middle of his clean living room while he takes my coat off me like I’m something he’s bringing in out of the weather, and I let him. The whole time there’s a thing building in my chest that I don’t have a name for until it’s almost out of my mouth.