Page 3 of Puck My Pain Away

“Elias Mercer.” She’s already at the door, a shape against the hall light. “Team’s recovery man. Bit of a cold fish, between us.” Something close to a laugh. “But I’ve never seen him lose. If anybody’s getting you back on that ice, hon, it’s him.”

Then she’s gone, and the door sighs shut, and the name just hangs there in the dark over the bed where she left it.

Mercer.

I don’t know yet. That’s the thing I’d tell myself if I could reach back into that room. You don’t know anything yet, lying there grabbing at that name like a rope somebody threw. You think the worst thing that happened tonight is your knee.

I close my eyes. The knee beats. Six minutes, I keep thinking, they restarted it in six minutes, the puck was already dropped before they got me off the ice.

I find the button with my thumb in the dark. I wait out the minutes I’m not supposed to. When it lets me, I push it, and I lie there in the quiet of a building that’s already forgotten the goal, waiting for the gold to come back up the arm and tell me none of this has to be felt right now.

2

ELIAS

Sloane Whitaker keeps her office cold. I’ve always respected that about her. Most people heat a room to put a visitor at ease; she chills hers a few degrees past comfortable so that whoever sits across the desk stays sharp and a little eager to leave. It works on everyone. It has never once worked on me, which is part of why she trusts me, and part of why she doesn’t.

She slides the file across the glass without preamble. A team folder, navy, the franchise crest embossed in the corner, and inside it a man worth more than the building we’re sitting in.

“Roman Vane,” she says. “You saw it.”

“Everyone saw it.” Forty million people saw it. The clip has its own life now, the goal and then the silence, the stretcher, the towel he threw off. I watched it four times before I came in here. I told myself that was due diligence.

“Then you know what I need.” She takes off her reading glasses and folds them, which is the closest Sloane comes to showing her hand. “I need my franchise back on the ice. Not a press conference about him. Not a feel-good piece about his courage. Him, in a sweater, taking a draw. The medical people are giving me numbers I don’t like. The agent is already on me about a timeline. The coach wants to know if he should be planning a season without his best forward. I want one person who owns this. Top to bottom. So it’s clean and it’s quiet and it’s mine.”

“Then give it to me whole,” I say. “All of it. No assistant trainers freelancing his program. No second opinions I haven’t signed off on. No one in that room I didn’t put there. If I’m accountable for the outcome, I control every input that reaches him.”

She studies me. Sloane reads a cap sheet and a room with the same speed, and for a second I let her look, because there’s nothing on my face to find. There never is. I learned young how to keep the inside of a house from showing on the outside of a boy, and I have only gotten better at it since.

She taps the folder once with a manicured nail, not opening it. “His agent’s already called me twice. Dara Kessler. She wants a comeback narrative she can sell before he’s out of the brace, and she’ll be in your hair the entire way, her and the father both, everybody with a stake in this kid wanting a date on a calendar. They’ll push you. They’ll push him harder.” A thin smile. “I assume that doesn’t move you either.”

“Nothing they want changes what the knee can do. I’ll give them a date when the joint earns one and not a day before.” I don’t tell her the rest, which is that pressure from outside a recovery is the easiest thing in the world to turn to my advantage. A frightened patient with a father and an agent both leaning on him for a miracle is a patient who learns very fast to trust the one person in the building not asking him for anything. I’ve watched it happen. I’ve made it happen, and never once had to lift a finger to.

“You always want them sealed off,” she says. It isn’t quite a question.

“I want them to get better. That requires removing variables. A recovery is a controlled environment or it’s a guess.” I let the silence sit. “You came to me because the last three players I took on came back ahead of schedule. That doesn’t happen in a committee.”

“No,” she agrees. “It doesn’t.” She slides the folder the last inch toward me. All in. “He’s yours. Don’t make me regret how completely.”

I take it. The folder’s cold from the desk. “You won’t.”

—

I read him at my own desk, after, with the door shut and the building gone quiet around me.

There’s a quiet pleasure in a thorough file, and I don’t apologize for it. Other men have hobbies. I have this: the slow assembly of a person out of paper until I understand them better than the people who love them do. Roman Vane is twenty-five. The imaging is ugly, as Okafor’s note already warned, the meniscus the real problem, the ligaments a long road but a known one. He’ll need two grafts, the better part of a year, and a degree of pain management that another clinician would hand off to a pharmacist and forget about.

I don’t forget about pain management. Pain is the lever. It’s the one thing in an athlete’s life he cannot grit his way past, cannot out-train, cannot charm into leaving him alone, and the man who controls the relief controls the patient in a way nothing else does. I have known this a long time. I have never said it out loud to anyone, because said out loud it sounds like exactly what it is.

Then I reach the history, and I slow down.

The intake flags are there if you know to read them. Father a junior washout, which tells me where the boy learned that he was a performance and not a person. A line about “social drinking, self-reported,” which in a twenty-five-year-old elite athlete with a destroyed knee and no offseason discipline left means more than it says. A prior scrip for a sprained wrist two seasons back that he finished early enough to request a refill he didn’t medically need, and someone, to their credit, noted it, and someone, to their discredit, refilled it anyway.

I uncap my pen.

I circle the drinking note. I circle the early-refill note. Two small ovals in red, the only marks on an otherwise immaculate file, and I sit with them.

A better man closes this folder and picks up the phone. A better man flags the addiction risk to the team’s behavioral staff, builds a monitored protocol, loops in a second set of eyes because he knows his own weakness for a patient who needs him too much. I know all of this. I have the whole map of the right thing laid out in front of me, every road on it marked.