Page 29 of Puck My Pain Away

At home I try to write the letter, because some part of me that’s still a doctor thinks that’s what a man does now.

I open the laptop at the kitchen table and I start a letter to the state medical board. The screen throws a cold blue square onto the wood. My reading glasses sit folded beside the keyboard where I set them down. I’ve read enough of these to know the form, the self-report, the clinician who comes forward, who names his own conduct before the review names it for him, who throws himself on the mechanism in the hope that honesty counts for something at sentencing. To the Board, I type. I am writing to disclose serious deviations in my prescribing and professional conduct. Two lines. True lines. The truest opening I could write.

And I stop.

I sit there with the cursor blinking after the second line and I cannot type the third. It isn’t fear of the consequences; the consequences are already in motion, and I know it. It’s that the next line is the line where I’d have to write what I am, plainly, in my own words, for a stranger to read, and I find I cannot make my hands do it. Not won’t. Cannot. I have looked at the file. I have heard her say his name. But to set it down myself, to be the one who authors the true sentence, is a threshold the whole architecture of me is built to prevent, because a man who can write that sentence is a man who has stopped protecting himself. I have never in my life stopped protecting myself, not for Caleb, not for Sam, not even now. I close the laptop without saving. The two true lines blink out. And I sit at the table in the failing afternoon light and understand that I have just learned the exact shape of my own cowardice, that I could be unmade by everyone else and still not manage to unmake myself. I file that, except it won’t file either. It sits on the table with me like a third thing in the room.

I think about Caleb, which I never do on purpose. I think about the night with Caleb, the one that built the vow, and I understand for the first time that the vow was never really never helpless again. That was the noble version, the one I could live inside. The real vow, the one my body actually swore over my brother, was never the one at fault again. Never the one whose hands were on it. And I have kept that second vow flawlessly for twenty years, kept it through Sam, kept it right up to this kitchen table, arranging every disaster so the official record would show a careful man beside the wreckage instead of the cause of it. The letter on the closed laptop is just the latest proof that I will protect that vow past the point where every other thing I had is already gone. Roman, sick as he was, looked a counselor in the eye and said the true sentence about himself. I have more education than anyone he’ll meet in that program and I cannot type one line. That’s the whole difference between us, finally, laid bare on a dark table: he can bear to be at fault and live, and I would rather lose everything, including him, than write down that I am.

—

It’s dark by the time the first report goes up.

I haven’t turned on the lights. I’m at the table still, the closed laptop in front of me. On the wood beside it is the Aldridge file, the thin physical thing I never put back in the drawer, and my phone. I pick the phone up once, near midnight, the team device gone now but my own still mine, and I look at it. There’s a thread on it I haven’t let myself open. The last message in it from Roman. need you, two words, the night everything was still going, the night I closed the file and left it open. I typed come and went to him. That’s where it stops. No reply will come after it. He’s somewhere with his phone in a basket and a counselor reading him his own blood, unreachable, gone, getting better two miles and a whole world away. The last thing he ever said to me is still glowing on my screen, frozen, the final word from the only warm thing I had. I look at it until it hurts in the place that has no name.

Then I set the phone face-down on top of the file, his dead text against Sam’s dead name, the two of them stacked in the dark, and I sit there. And while I sit, somewhere out in the lit world, the story breaks. I feel it more than see it, the buzz of the face-down phone going off against the cardboard of the file, once, then again, then steadily, the notifications stacking up as the first report of my suspension goes online and the people who write these things start to write. I don’t turn it over. I leave it face-down on the file and I sit in the dark of the apartment with my whole life unmaking itself one buzz at a time, alone, finally, completely. Nothing left to manage, no one left to manage, the furnace in my chest burning on with no name and nowhere to put it. For the first time in twenty years I don’t try to put it anywhere. I just sit in the dark and let it burn.

And somewhere in the burning I start, slowly, to suspect what it is. I’ve spent two days running the diagnostic and getting no result because I was checking it against the catalog of feelings I’d decided I didn’t have, looking for grief in its recognizable clothes, for remorse with the standard edges. I found nothing because it didn’t match the pictures. But it isn’t shaped like the textbook entries. It’s shaped like Roman’s face turning away from the glass. It’s shaped like Theo getting heavier in a folding chair. It’s shaped like a two-word message that will never get a third word. It gets worse, not better, when I think about him getting well. That’s the part no predator is supposed to feel, the part that ruins the whole clean story I’ve told about myself, because a man who only fed on Roman would feel relief at being free of the wreckage. And what I feel instead, sitting here in the dark with my career going up in notifications, is that I would trade every piece of what I’m losing tonight, the license, the name, the freedom, all of it, to be the man allowed to sit in that chair in Theo’s place. I don’t have a word for that either. But it isn’t appetite. Appetite never once cost me anything I wasn’t getting back with interest. This only costs. And I sit in the dark and let the thing that only costs go on burning. I don’t look away from it. That, the not-looking-away, is the first honest thing I have done in twenty years.

21

ROMAN

The first thing they take is the phone, and I hand it over like it’s a live thing that might bite me on the way out of my hand.

Intake is a folding table, a kind woman with a clipboard, a plastic bin. Into the bin goes my phone, my watch, the lighter I don’t even use, a strip of pills they find in my bag that I’d forgotten was there, which tells you everything. The phone is the one that matters. I put it in the bin face-down so I don’t have to see the screen light up. The second it leaves my fingers I feel the panic, then, right behind it, the same ugly relief I felt in the hospital, because his number lives in that phone and I am not yet a man who can be trusted to own the door to that number. They tag the bin. They tell me I’ll get it back at the end. I watch it go into a cabinet and think, good, and I sign another form.

Detox is its own country and I spend the first stretch of it as its only citizen. They’ve got a medical wing, real staff, Maren’s people. They manage the worst of it with a taper, a banana bag, somebody checking my vitals every few hours. But managed isn’t the same as gone. The skin-doesn’t-fit feeling comes back worse than the hospital. I sweat through the sheets. My legs do the crawling thing all night so I pace the little room until my feet hurt and then I lie down and they start again. I throw up twice. There’s a low gray stretch in the middle of it where I can’t remember why I agreed to any of this. I’d sell the building to make it stop. A nurse named DeShawn sits with me through the worst hour of that one and doesn’t say much, just stays, and somehow stays is enough.

And then, slowly, on the far side of it, I come up into a morning where my hands are steady for the first time in months. Just steady. Holding a paper cup of bad coffee without it shaking. The surface sits flat. No ripple, no tremor climbing up the wax rim. I look at my own steady hand and I almost cry over it, this thing I used to take for granted, a hand that does what I tell it.

They give me a narrow room, a bed, a window, a wall. The counselor hands me a printed daily schedule, and I tape it to the wall above the desk. Wake, meds, breakfast, group, lunch, work assignment, group, dinner, meeting, lights out. Every hour spoken for. A year ago, a schedule like that would have made me claustrophobic. Now I stand and look at it taped to the wall. I feel something I can only call gratitude, because for the first time in longer than I can remember I know exactly what I’m supposed to do next, and not one line of it is find the locked room.

—

I meet Russ Delgado in the common room on day four, and he’s the first person here I don’t have to explain my body to.

He’s huge. Older, sixties maybe, but built like what he was, and what he was is written all over him, the shoulders, the nose that’s been broken more than once, how careful and slow he lowers himself into a chair with both hands on the arms because his knees are gone, just gone, bone on bone, two surgeries he tells me later that didn’t take. He comes over with two coffees, hands me one, and sits down across from me with a grunt.

“Russ,” he says. “They asked me to be your sponsor, if you want one. Fourteen years in. Played eleven of pro before the wheels came off, D-man, nobody you’d remember.” He takes a sip. “Here’s how I work. I’ll call you, you’ll call me, we’ll do the steps in order and not skip the ones that hurt, which is all of them. And I’m gonna tell you the one thing I tell everybody on day four, which is that the worst is not behind you, the worst is a Tuesday about four months from now when everything’s fine and you decide you’ve got this handled. That’s the one that kills guys like us. Not the bottom. The plateau.”

I wait for it. The thing everybody does. The I’m such a fan, the what was it like?, the careful circling around the comeback, the knee, the date, all of it. Russ doesn’t do any of it. He doesn’t ask me about hockey once. He played a decade of it. He sits there with two ruined knees that match my one rebuilt one, and he does not ask me a single thing about the game, my team, whether I’ll skate again. I realize, sitting there, that it’s the first conversation I’ve had in a year where I’m not a number on a board or a name on a contract or a body somebody’s measuring for a return. I’m just a guy on day four with a coffee. He sees the athlete in me, I can tell he does, he reads my walk like only another wrecked athlete can. He just doesn’t think it’s the most interesting thing about why I’m here. Neither, I’m starting to understand, do I.

But here’s what I can’t stop looking at, those first days around Russ: he’s me in twenty years if I’m lucky. That’s the thing. I’ve spent my whole life terrified of exactly what he is, the broken-down former athlete, the body that gave out, the guy whose knees are bone on bone, and whose playing days are a sentence in a stranger’s memory—nobody you’d remember. That future has been the monster under my bed since I was a kid, the reason I pushed through injuries I shouldn’t have, the reason a word like done could put me on a bathroom floor. And here it is, sitting across from me with two coffees, and it isn’t a monster. Russ is the most solid man I’ve met in a year. He lost the game, the knees, and, he tells me later, a marriage and most of a decade to the bottle on the way down. He came out the far side of all of it into something I don’t have a word for yet but want, badly, a way of being a person that doesn’t depend on a scoreboard agreeing that you exist. I built my whole self on the scoreboard. Russ is proof you can lose the scoreboard and still be here, still be solid, still have something to hand a scared younger guy across a table. Maybe that’s the work. Maybe the work isn’t getting back to the ice at all. Maybe it’s becoming a man who’d survive never getting back, so that if I do go back, I go back as a person instead of a number praying the number holds.

—

Group is where I find out I’m still a liar, I just got sober enough to watch myself do it.

It’s a circle of folding chairs, eight of us and Maren. When it’s my turn, I tell my story, and I tell it well. I’ve got it polished by now; I’ve told versions of it to Theo and to myself for months. The injury. The pain. The pressure of the comeback, the whole city waiting, the meds that got away from me, the slow slide. I tell it clean, sad, shaped, a story where things happen to a guy. A couple of the others nod along because they’ve got the same story with different details. I feel the old smoothness come over me, the new face I built, the one that says true-sounding things. I land my ending and sit back. It’s a good performance, and Maren lets me have all of it.

Then, when I’m done, in the quiet, she says, mild as anything, “Who wrote the prescriptions, Roman?”

And the whole polished thing comes apart in my chest. Because in my story the meds got away from me, passive, weatherlike, a thing that happened. There’s no hand in my story. And her question puts a hand in it. Somebody wrote them. Somebody I haven’t named, in this room or to myself, not really, not as a person with a pen, because naming him means naming the rest of it, the nights, the locked door, what I went there for, what I did to get it, the fact that I drove drunk to his office and let myself in with a key and asked—every time I asked. My face goes hot. My pulse roars up like it used to when the monitor tattled. I can’t. I’m not ready to put him in the room, him or the rest of it, and I do the only thing my body knows how to do when the real thing gets close, which is leave. I stand up. I mumble something. And I walk out of the circle with eight people watching and Maren not stopping me, just watching me go with no surprise on her face at all, like she’s seen exactly this a hundred times, which she has.

—

Three nights in, after lights-out, I break and I call him.