Page 31 of Puck My Pain Away

I think about Caleb while I tape the box, which I never used to allow and now can’t seem to stop. My brother, who I monitored and managed and loved through a system of controls so total that the controls became the relationship, until there wasn’t a brother under them anymore, only a patient I was failing in slow motion. I told myself for twenty years that I lost Caleb because I wasn’t vigilant enough, and built a life out of being more vigilant, and the life ate two more people. The truth I couldn’t see is that the vigilance was never protection. It was appetite wearing the one coat nobody questions. I needed Caleb dependent the same as I needed Sam dependent the same as I needed Roman on his knees. I dressed all three needs in the white coat and called it medicine. The only reason it stayed invisible is that the world pays a man to be the one everyone leans on and never once asks what the leaning is feeding. The box by the door is the first time in my life I’ve handed the controls to someone else instead of taking more.

—

On Tuesday night I find a meeting that isn’t for me.

There’s a category of meeting for the people standing next to the addict, the families, the ones who loved someone through it or are loving someone through it now. I find one in the basement of a church across town from anywhere I’m known, and I go. I don’t entirely know why I’m going, except that the man who would have known exactly why and arranged exactly the right reason is the man I’m trying to stop being. I sit in the back. Folding chairs, bad coffee in a steel urn, a circle of people who have the specific exhaustion I recognize from hospital waiting rooms, the worn-down look of those who keep loving someone whose disease keeps spending that love. I’m not one of them, exactly. I’m the other thing, the one who did the harm, sitting in the room built for the ones who suffered it. I’m aware of the wrongness of that, and I stay anyway. The only meeting that would have me as what I am doesn’t exist, and this is the nearest honest room, the room full of the people my whole life produced.

They go around. I hadn’t planned to say anything. But the leader, a tired kind woman with reading glasses on a chain, comes to me near the end. She doesn’t ask my story. She just asks my name, only the first name, only that, and I feel the entire weight of decades lean on the answer. My name has always come attached to the title, Doctor Mercer, the load-bearing structure, the frame that made the appetite read as service. She hasn’t asked for the title. She’s asked for the man under it, the one I told Roman I was afraid didn’t exist. The room waits. It would be so easy to give them the title. It would be so easy to give them nothing and slip out at the close.

“Elias,” I say. “My name’s Elias.”

And that’s all I give them, because it’s a room for the families and I haven’t earned a turn at the wheel of it. But I give them that, my first name with nothing standing behind it to make me safe. The woman nods like it’s enough—thank you, Elias—and moves on. I sit in the folding chair in the church basement and I stay. Through the rest of the circle. Through the closing. Through the part where the chairs scrape and people gather their coats, where nobody knows me, nobody needs me, there is no one here whose dependence I can feed. Which means there is no reason for me to be here that the old self would recognize, which is exactly why I came. I stay to the end. I help stack the chairs because that’s what the others do. A man hands me the urn to empty and I empty it.

For one ordinary minute, I’m just a pair of hands in a basement doing a small thing no one will thank me for, and it’s the closest I’ve come in twenty years to being a person instead of an instrument. It isn’t forgiveness. Nobody in that room forgave me; nobody in that room knows what I am. But I sent the letter. I named the dead. I gave a stranger my bare first name. I stayed past the point the old me would have left. I drive home the speed limit, alone, to no one. I don’t reach for anything to make it stop. I let the night be exactly as quiet, as empty, as earned as it is.

23

ROMAN

The thirty-day chip is a cheap aluminum coin, lighter than a puck, worth more than anything I’ve held in a year. They hand it to me in the Tuesday meeting without ceremony, just my name, the number of days, a small round of clapping that doesn’t mean good job, star, it means we see you, stay. I close my hand around it. Thirty days. A month ago, I was on a bathroom floor not breathing. Now I’ve got a coin in my fist that says I’ve gone thirty days without the off-switch, and I sit there in the folding chair turning it over with my thumb, trying to let it be what it is instead of what the old me would’ve made it, which is a stat, a milestone, a thing to measure and then need to beat. Russ told me the chips aren’t trophies. They’re just the program’s way of marking that you were here for it, that you showed up and didn’t die. I’m starting to understand the difference between a number that proves you’re winning and a number that just says you’re still here.

I call Russ every night at nine from the hall payphone. The receiver’s cold, the cord kinked tight from a hundred nervous hands. That’s the deal we made, and I keep it like it’s the only thing holding the building up, because some nights it is. Some nights, the call lasts twenty minutes and he walks me down off something. But some nights it only lasts forty seconds, I’m good, Russ, just checking in, and he says good, that’s the point, talk tomorrow, then hangs up. I stand there with the dead receiver thinking how a year ago I’d have called a thing like that pointless, a forty-second call about nothing. It isn’t about nothing. It’s about the fact that at 8:58 every night, whatever the day did to me, I have somewhere to put my hand that isn’t a bottle or a phone with a dead number in it. The number’s still dead. I checked it twice more, early on, the same recording, and then I stopped checking, because Russ said checking is just the want in a clean shirt, and he’s right. So now at nine I dial the only number I’m allowed to want, and an old man with two ruined knees picks up every single time, and that, it turns out, is what a lifeline actually is. Not a grand thing. A man who answers.

And I want to be honest about the chip, because the old me would already be spinning it into a recovery I can sell, thirty days clean, comeback of a different kind, and that’s a lie the disease would love me to tell. Thirty days doesn’t feel like winning. It feels like the want is still in the room, just sitting quieter, in the corner, patient. Some afternoons it gets up and walks the floor, and I have to call Russ at four instead of nine. The seminars were right about this part too: it doesn’t leave, you just get better company than it. I still wake some nights with my hand already reaching for a phone that isn’t there, dialing a number that’s dead, and the coin in my pocket doesn’t stop that, it just reminds me I’ve got thirty mornings of proof that the reaching doesn’t have to become the taking. That’s all the chip is. Not a trophy. A receipt.

—

Family day is the one I’ve been dreading since the counselor circled it on the calendar, and the reason I’ve been dreading it is that Theo’s coming, and Theo is the person I’ve wronged the most who’d still drive four hours to sit in a circle for me.

He comes in his flannel with his big hands, his easy face that isn’t easy today. We get a corner of the common room and two chairs that don’t match, and I do the thing they taught me, which is that amends isn’t an apology. An apology is for you; amends is for them. So I don’t lead with sorry. I lead with the list. “I missed Sammy’s birthday,” I say, and my voice does something I don’t let it do, and I push through it. “The party. The plate he set out. I was two miles away getting worse on purpose and I let your kid think his uncle just didn’t show. That’s the one I can’t—” I stop. I make myself keep the hand in it. “I lied to you for months. Every time you asked if I was okay I had an answer ready before you finished the question. And the night you broke my door down, I’d taken the pills knowing what they were, washed them down with whiskey knowing what that did. You put your shoulder through a door to find me. I have to live the rest of my life knowing what it would’ve done to you to find me the other way.”

Theo doesn’t say anything while I go. That’s the gift of him, that he lets me get all the way to the end of the ugly list without jumping in to make it easier on me, because he’s known me long enough to know that letting me off early would be doing me the old favor, the golden-boy favor, the one everybody always did. He lets me finish. He lets it sit. And then he leans forward and puts one of those big hands on the back of my neck like he used to in the tunnel before a game. He pulls me in. He says into the side of my head, rough, “You’re here. You showed up to a chair to say all that to my face. That’s the only thing I needed back.” And I break, finally, the thing in my chest I’ve been holding in a fist all month. I cry into my best friend’s flannel shoulder in a rehab common room, and he holds on and doesn’t tell me it’s okay, because it isn’t. It’s just forgiven, which is a different and bigger thing.

—

Vic comes on a Sunday, and I should’ve known better than to hope, but hoping about my father is the one habit thirty days can’t touch.

He’s smaller than Theo and somehow takes up more room, the team cap on inside, the jaw I’ll have in twenty years working at a piece of gum. He sits down across from me in the visiting area and looks around at the place like he’s pricing it. For about four minutes, it’s almost good. He asks how I’m sleeping. He says the food looks better than he expected. And I let myself feel it, the old warm stupid hope; the kid in me who still thinks this is the visit where my father shows up as a father. Then the clock in him runs out, like it always does. He leans in, drops his voice like we’re conspiring, and says, “So what’re they telling you about the knee? You doing the bands, keeping the leg under you? Berg’s having a year, you know. Spot’s not gonna sit empty forever. We get you back by camp, you ride the press, the comeback story writes itself.”

We. There it is. The knee was never the question and the knee isn’t the question now; the question my whole life has been—When do you produce again? I’m thirty days sober off a thing that nearly killed me, and the first real thing my father wants to know is the return date. And the thing is, I’m not even angry, which is how I know something’s actually changed in me, because a year ago that we would’ve put me right back on the spiral, scrambling to be the answer to it. Now I just feel tired and clear. I stand up. I don’t yell. I walk around the little table and I put my hand under his elbow like you’d steady an older guy. I walk my father to the door of the visiting room, and he’s saying what, what’d I say. At the door I tell him, level, “Come back when you’ve got a different question. Any other question. About me. Not the knee, not the spot, not the comeback. When you can drive up here and ask me how I am and actually want the answer, I’ll be glad to see you.” And I let him go. I watch him stand in the lot frowning at his phone, and it costs me, God, it costs me, but I stayed standing the whole time. I go find the payphone even though it’s not nine yet, because some calls can’t wait for the schedule.

What I’m only now able to say out loud, in group, with Maren waiting, is that Vic is where I learned the whole sick math in the first place. He doled out love by the goal, warm when I produced, gone the second I didn’t. My brother Danny got the version with no goals in it at all, got the cold, got watched as I climbed past him. I spent my childhood reading my father’s face for the exchange rate. Be the best and be loved. Stop being the best and disappear. I built an entire man on that equation and then I handed the equation to a doctor who’d already done the reading on guys like me, who saw a kid who’d trade anything for the love that only comes with the number and gave me a chemical that felt, for a few hours, like being enough without earning it. That’s the part I can finally name. The off-switch wasn’t only about the pain in the knee. It was about the pain of being a man who’s only worth the scoreboard, and the worst thing my father ever did wasn’t rationing it, it was teaching me so young that I never thought to ask whether the rationing was the lie.

—

Russ takes me on a day pass in week six, and the thing he picks, the reward, the big outing, is a public rink on a Saturday afternoon, and I almost laugh, because of course it is.

I haven’t had skates on since before the battery I failed. I lace them in the cold bleacher air with my hands steady. The leather’s stiff, the blades bite fresh into the rubber matting under the bench. I step out onto public ice on a Saturday, which is its own happy chaos, kids in helmets too big for them, a couple of beer-leaguers in mismatched jerseys, a dad towing a toddler in a milk-crate sled, a teenager practicing crossovers in the corner with earbuds in. No drills. No clock. No Gus on the bench with a stopwatch reading my failure off a screen. No analytics kid charting my first stride. Just ice, and a slow public swarm of people who are here because it’s fun, and me, gliding out into the middle of it on a rebuilt knee that holds. It holds. I don’t push it, I don’t test it, I’m not measuring anything. I just skate—big, lazy circles in the middle of the rec swarm. A kid of maybe seven cuts me off and falls. I stop, help him up, and he has no idea who I am, none. I’m just a tall guy who helped him up, and that, I realize as he skates off, is the whole medicine of the afternoon.

Because here’s the thing I’m learning standing in the middle of that happy mess. I built my entire self on being the best one on the ice, the name on the board, the reason people came, and the scoreboard giving out on me damn near ended me. And here I am on the same ice as a beer-leaguer with a gut, a kid who can’t do a crossover, and not one person in this building cares whether I’ll ever score again. The ice is still good. The cold air in my lungs is still good. The lean and pull of a clean stride is still good. The game I almost died over was never the thing I loved; I loved this, the gliding, the cold, and somewhere back there I let them convince me it only counted if a number agreed. And somewhere in those lazy circles it hits me what I’m actually feeling under the cold, which is that this is the same knee. This rebuilt joint holding me up clean on public ice is the exact body I spent all winter wrecking on Elias’s floor, the leg I was supposed to be rehabbing that I kept dropping to my knees on for him instead, trading the rebuild for the dark one night at a time. They told me in every seminar that the disease takes the thing you love and turns it against you, and I lived it without seeing it: the body that was my whole worth became the body I punished, the knees that were supposed to carry me back became the knees I knelt on to disappear. And now here it is, the same knee, doing the one honest thing a knee is for, holding me up while I glide in slow circles among strangers, and I’m not on it for anyone, I’m not earning anything off it, I’m just standing on my own two skates on good ice because the leg is mine again and so, maybe, for an hour, am I. Russ leans on the boards in his coat, can’t skate anymore, knees won’t have it. He watches me go around with this look, and when I finally come off, lungs burning, an hour gone, he says, “There he is,” and I don’t think he means the forward. I stay until they flick the lights for public skate’s end, the last one off the ice, and I don’t want it for the comeback. I want it because it’s mine and nobody’s scoring it.

—

In week eight, I sit down to write Elias a letter, and the first one runs six pages and I don’t send it.

I write it longhand on program paper, and it pours out, all of it, the rage first, the you knew, you wrote them stronger when anybody honest would’ve stopped, you took a key to a kid’s whole life. Then under the rage the other stuff, the harder stuff, the part where I admit I drove to him, I asked. I’d have found another way to hurt myself if it hadn’t been him—but it was him and he chose to be the one. And the part underneath even that, the part I can barely write, which is that some sick piece of me still reaches for him at two in the morning, that he’s still the direction my pain points even now, even sober, even knowing. Six pages. I read it back and I understand it’s a letter for me, not for him, the same as my first try at my own story was a story for me. Russ says you don’t send the bloodletting, you just bleed it, so I fold the six pages and put them in the back of my notebook where the want lives now instead of in a bottle.

Then I write the short one. Three lines. Not forgiveness, because I don’t have that and might never, and not an absolution, because he doesn’t get to be let off by the man he nearly buried. Just this: that there are things I need to ask him to his face before I can close the door all the way, and that I’ll be at the diner across from the old practice rink on a date I pick, eleven in the morning, public, daylight, my terms, and that he can come or not. I don’t put my number on it; I don’t have a phone yet, and even if I did, the number between us is dead and should stay dead. I seal it. I don’t trust myself to mail it, the part of me that wants to call instead of write, that wants the voice and not the table. So I walk it down to Maren’s office, put it in her hand, ask her to send it for me. I’ve learned the one thing this whole place is trying to teach, which is that when you can’t trust your own hand to do the safe thing, you give it to someone who can. She takes it. She doesn’t ask what’s in it. She just says, “You sure?” and I say, “No. Send it anyway,” and she nods like that’s the most sober thing I’ve said all week, and maybe it is.