Page 28 of Puck My Pain Away

She nods, unbothered, like people say this kind of thing in here all the time, which I guess they do. And I make myself turn my head. I turn my face to the window, the real window, the one with the gray sky, the parking structure, not his face in it. I keep it there. I don’t look back at the glass even though every nerve I own is screaming at me to. Somewhere behind me, I feel rather than see him stand there a moment longer, then go, the pull stretching thin and thinner as he walks away down the hall until it finally, barely, snaps. I’m wrung out and sweating when it’s over like I actually fought him. And I did, except the him I fought was the one living in my own blood. I won this one round by about a single heartbeat, and I know there’ll be a thousand more rounds and I won’t win all of them. But I won this one. I turned my face to the window. It’s the bravest thing I’ve done in a year and nobody saw it but a nurse.

—

Theo comes back up with two coffees and finds me crying and doesn’t make it a thing, just sits.

When I can talk, I tell him what I want to do before I can lose the nerve. “There’s a program,” I say. “The counselor, Maren. She runs a place. Residential. Weeks, she said, maybe longer.” I’m already scared of it, the length of it, the away-ness of it, but I’m more scared of the thing that happens if I go home to that apartment with the bottles and the shrink-wrapped gear and his number still in my phone. “I want to go. Before I talk myself out of it.”

Theo just says, “Okay. Then we’ll get you there.” We. Like it was never a question he’d be in it.

It turns out the team’s already done part of it. Sloane, or somebody, has cleared the way, there’s a bed held for me in Maren’s program starting as soon as they discharge me, the paperwork half-moving before I even asked, and bitterly I know the franchise wants me fixed because a fixed Roman is worth more than a dead one, the same math as always. But I’m too tired to be proud about the reason. A held bed is a held bed. Maren brings the intake forms herself, a clipboard thick with pages. She hands it to me, and I notice she hands it to me, not to Theo, not to a publicist, to me, and waits.

I sign it myself. My hand’s still shaking, the signature comes out jagged the same as it did on those jerseys, but it’s my name and I’m the one putting it down, and that matters, that I’m the one. There’s a line for emergency contacts, for the people they call, the people who’re allowed in, and I fill it in fast before the part of me that’s still loyal to the locked room can get a vote. Theo. His number from memory. And Dara, because she’s pulled me out of more than she’ll ever bill for. I look at the space under them and I think about Vic, who’s called twice since I woke up, both times about how this hurts my career, and I leave him off. And I think about the name I’m not writing, the one my hand actually wants to write, the doctor, my north. I leave him off too. It costs me, and I do it anyway. Two names. Theo and Dara. People who want me alive more than they want me useful.

And that’s the line, I think, looking at the two names in my own jagged writing. That’s the thing I couldn’t see for months, the difference I traded away without knowing I was trading it. Elias wanted me useful to him, useful as a wreck, useful as the warm thing he got to run. Vic wants me useful as a name. The franchise wants me useful as a return on a contract. For a long time, the only people who got close to me were people who wanted me for what I could do or be, and I let it happen, because being useful was the one currency I trusted, the one I’d built a whole life out of. These two on the clipboard are the only ones who’d want me if I never skated again, if the name went dark forever, if I was just a guy. I almost died learning to tell those two kinds of love apart. I’m not going to forget it now.

I hand the clipboard back fast, like you let go of something hot, before I can read it over and start bargaining with it. “Okay,” I tell Maren, and my voice barely holds. “Okay. I’m in.”

She takes the clipboard and tells me the first thing I’ll do at her place is hand over my phone, all of it, every number in it. I feel the panic spike and then, right behind it, something that’s nearly relief, because his number’s in that phone, my north is in that phone, and I’m not strong enough yet to be the one who keeps it. So I nod. Give it to her now, I almost say. Take it before I change my mind. I don’t have the strength to lock the door myself, but I’ve got just enough, today, to let somebody else hold it shut for me.

20

ELIAS

Sloane does it in the morning, in her office, and she does it correctly, which I can respect even as it ends me.

There’s a second person in the room, a woman from the league’s legal side I’ve never met, there to make it official and to make sure I don’t say anything that turns a clean process messy. Sloane stays standing. She doesn’t turn a monitor toward me this time; there’s nothing left to show me that I don’t already know is coming. “Elias,” she says, and her voice is flat and final, none of the warmth I farmed off her all winter, because she’s read enough now to know the warmth was a thing I was doing to her. “Effective immediately, you’re suspended pending an internal and league review of your conduct and prescribing practices regarding Roman Vane. You’ll surrender your credentials, your building access, and your team devices. You’ll have no contact with the player. Legal will be in touch about the rest.”

I say the only correct thing, which is “I understand,” and I mean it more completely than she knows. I understand exactly. I built my whole life on understanding the architecture of rooms like this. I can see the entire structure of what’s about to happen to me laid out clean: the review, the findings, the referral to the medical board, the part where Bellwood stops being a sealed thing and becomes a pattern. I sit in the chair and watch my own demolition with the same flat attention I’d give a chart. There’s no move here. I keep checking for one out of years of reflex, the reasonable sentence, the lever, the need in the other person I can press. There isn’t one. Sloane needs nothing from me now except my absence, and absence is the one thing I’ve never had to give before.

They’ve packed a box. That’s the detail that almost reaches me. While I sat through the meeting that unmade me, somebody had already gone through my office and put my few personal things in a banker’s box: the framed credentials, the good pen, the spare reading glasses, the things a man accumulates. A security officer I’ve nodded to in the parking garage for four months carries it for me, because they don’t let you carry it yourself, and walks me down through the building. Past the trainers’ room. Past the rink, dark and vast through the glass. Past people who look and then make a point of not looking. The walk of a man being removed. The officer is kind about it, which is worse. At the lobby he hands me the box and says, low, not unkindly, “Take care of yourself, Doc,” and I take my own life in cardboard out through the doors I’m not allowed back through.

Doc. He’s called me that for four months, the same as everyone calls me that, and I’ve worn it like a second skin because it was never just a job title. It was the whole load-bearing structure of me. I have been, in three cities now, the one they call, the steady hand, the man whose word is the most trusted instrument in any room. I built that not for the medicine, though the medicine is real, but because being the one who is needed is the only architecture in which a man like me gets to stand at the center of anything. Take the white coat off me and you take the only thing that ever made the appetite invisible, the only frame in which my hunger for other people’s dependence read as service instead of predation. Roman lost his name in front of cameras and it nearly killed him; I’m losing mine in a banker’s box carried by a security guard. I feel the symmetry of it from a cold distance, the two of us unmade the same way, our whole selves poured into a thing the institution can simply revoke. The difference is that Roman is in a bed learning he was a person under the name. I’m in a parking structure discovering there may be nothing under mine at all.

—

Erin Vasquez calls as I reach my car, and she doesn’t waste the call on preamble.

I’ve set the box on the passenger seat. I’m standing at the open driver’s door in the cold of the parking structure, and my phone rings, her name now saved in it because I saved it the night she said Bellwood, and I answer it, which I shouldn’t, which is the first undisciplined thing I’ve done in years. She doesn’t ask about Roman. She doesn’t ask about the suspension she somehow already knows about. She asks one question, gently, almost kindly, the practiced gentleness of someone who has learned that the soft question gets the true reaction.

“Doctor Mercer,” she says. “Tell me about Sam Aldridge.”

And I say nothing. I stand there with the phone against my ear in the concrete cold. I don’t give her the denial, don’t give her the no comment, don’t give her the smooth boring deflection I drafted for her once and routed through the PR office, because all of those are moves. I’ve finally reached the place where I can see that any move I make is a thread she pulls. The only thing that isn’t a thread is silence. So I give her silence, a long stretch of it, her breathing and mine on an open line. Then I take the phone from my ear, end the call without a word, and get in the car.

And I don’t drive. I sit there. That’s the thing I can’t account for, the second time in two days my body has done something I didn’t instruct it to. The engine off, the box of my life on the seat beside me, a reporter who has the whole shape of it now somewhere across the city writing it down. I sit in the parking structure of the building I just got walked out of and I don’t turn the key. The concrete pillar in front of the windshield has a faded yellow stripe and a number stenciled on it. I read the number three times. She said his name out loud. Sam Aldridge. His name in another person’s mouth, in the daylight, attached to mine, where for years it had been a file in a drawer and two lines in my own hand. Something happens in my chest that has no name in any textbook, the furnace-feeling from the corridor, closer now. I sit with my hands in my lap and let it do whatever it’s going to do, because I’ve run out of drawers to put it in.

—

I go to the hospital anyway. I know I’m not allowed. I go.

It isn’t a decision so much as the absence of one. I’m not allowed contact with the player; I’ve been told this clearly by a woman from the league’s legal department not ninety minutes ago. I drive to County, park, ride the elevator up, walk the corridor toward Roman’s room as if none of that were said, because the thing that drove me toward him all winter doesn’t take instructions from Sloane any more than it takes them from me. I just want to see him. I want to stand at the glass like I stood at it before, have him turn his face toward me instead of away, have the one warm thing in my life look at me like I’m the solid point in a falling world, one more time, before the world finishes falling.

Theo is in the chair outside the door.

Not asleep this time. Awake, upright, planted, a big man in a folding chair he’s positioned squarely between the corridor and the door to Roman’s room. He sees me come around the corner. He doesn’t stand up, doesn’t shout, doesn’t reach for his phone to call security. He just looks at me. Then he settles, somehow, gets heavier in the chair, makes himself into a thing that isn’t going to move, and the message is complete and wordless. Not past me. Not ever again past me. He has the whole story now. The door behind him has Roman behind it, and he has made himself the door’s second lock. There is nothing I can do about a man like Theo, because Theo cannot be charmed or leveraged or made to need anything I have. He loves the person in that room more than he fears me, more than he wants anything, and that kind of love is the one wall I’ve never found the door in.

I stop in the corridor. The linoleum smells of bleach. A cart rattles somewhere behind me. We look at each other for a moment, the man who breaks down doors for Roman and the man who walked through every one of them to get to him. I understand that he is the better man, that he won. I turn around, and I leave. No fight. No scene. There’s nothing to fight for that fighting would win. I ride the elevator back down past the families and out to my car. I drive home for the first time in a year with no one waiting for me to come, nothing to go to, quiet.

—