Page 5 of Puck My Pain Away

I have wanted, my whole career, to be needed and never to need. I’m very good at the first half. Standing over Roman Vane’s bed with his ruined knee under my hands and that look on his face, I feel the thing I’ve never let myself feel for a patient, the small warm catch low in the chest, the wanting to be looked at like that again tomorrow, and I do the only safe thing with it. I set it down. I straighten.

“I’ll see you when they discharge you,” I say. “Eight a.m. Don’t be late and don’t be drunk.” I let that one land, watch it land, watch him understand that I read his file all the way down. “We start the day you get home.”

—

In the corridor, I stop at the window.

It’s nothing. A bank of glass over the parking structure, grey morning, my own reflection laid faint over the cars below, and I stand there a few seconds longer than a man with a full schedule should. My jaw’s tight. I make it loosen.

I think about Caleb without deciding to, which is how I always think about Caleb, the only person I was ever supposed to keep upright and the one I couldn’t. I think about the look on the boy’s face in there, the solid-ground look. And I tell myself the lie in its most flattering form: that this time I’m the one in control of it, that this time I’ll be careful enough, that needing me is the safest thing that could happen to a young man with a drinking note in his file and no one watching but me.

Below me a car pulls out of the structure and another takes its space. The glass throws my own face back at me thin and grey, a tall man in a good coat who fixes people for a living and has never let one of them fix anything in him. I’ve looked worse. I’ve looked better. I’ve never looked like a man about to make a mistake, and I won’t today either, because that’s not what this will feel like from the inside. It never is. From the inside it will feel like care, every step of it, right up until the end.

I straighten my coat. There’s a thread at the cuff and I don’t pull it, because you don’t pull the thread, you trim it later, cleanly, where it won’t show.

Then I go to my next patient, and my hands are steady, and no one I pass in the hall sees anything at all.

3

ROMAN

The first session, he makes me do a leg extension thirty times and I want to kill him by twelve.

It’s nothing. That’s the insult of it. Before, I’d squat three of him for reps and not feel it the next day. Now he’s got me sitting on a padded bench in a back room of the facility, lifting my own shin against a strap with maybe ten pounds on the pulley. By the tenth rep the knee’s lit up. By the fifteenth it’s shaking, this fine ugly tremor running through the whole leg that I can’t stop and can’t hide. He just stands there with his arms folded watching it shake, and he says, “Again.”

The room doesn’t help. It’s a back treatment room with no windows, fluorescent light flattening everything, a smell of rubbing alcohol and the rubber of the mats. A long mirror runs down one wall. I keep catching myself in it, wishing I wouldn’t. The guy in the mirror is wearing a knee brace over sweatpants. His arms have already started to go, two weeks off the ice, the definition softening at the edges. He’s got a week of beard and the dead eyes of somebody waiting in a hospital hallway. I played in front of eighteen thousand people sixteen days ago. The guy in the mirror couldn’t get a beer commercial.

“It’s shaking.” The strap bites into my heel. The tremor climbs up into the quad, the whole leg juddering on the pulley. I hate that he can stand there and watch it.

“I can see that. Again.”

“You want me to tear something? It’s done. The muscle’s done.”

“The muscle has more than you’re giving it. You’re stopping at discomfort, not failure. There’s a long way between those and I need you to live in it.” He doesn’t raise his voice. He never raises his voice, I’m learning that already, three days into meeting this man, the worse it gets the flatter he goes. “Again, Roman. Same count.”

I do four more and they’re garbage, the leg barely clearing the pad. The burn turns into something with teeth in it. On the last one the knee gives a wet little click that goes straight up my spine, and I lose it.

I rip the strap off my ankle and I throw the whole resistance band across the room. It’s a good throw, the only thing my body’s done right all week, the band snapping out in a long arc, the handle cracking off the cinderblock wall and skittering under a treadmill. I’m up off the bench on the bad leg before I think about it, shouting, “I’m not one of your fucking lab rats, you don’t get to just stand there and—” And my voice does the thing it’s been doing since the tunnel. It cracks down the middle, and I hate it, I hate it so much, how my own body keeps selling me out.

Elias doesn’t move while I yell. He waits until I run down, which doesn’t take long because there’s nothing to push against, no fight in him to meet mine, just those pale eyes taking it all in and giving nothing back.

Then he crosses the room. He bends, reaches under the treadmill, and picks up the band. He coils it neat around his hand, walks back, and holds it out to me across the small space.

“Sit down,” he says. “Strap on. Same count.”

And here’s the thing I can’t explain, the thing I’ll be turning over in the dark for months. I take it. I sit back down. My hands are still shaking with the leftover rage. I thread the strap around my ankle and start the count again, and somewhere around the third rep something in my chest just lets go. The yelling part of me, the part that’s been screaming since I woke up in that recovery room, the part that runs my mouth at Theo and ignores my father and pours the whiskey, it goes quiet. All of it. There’s just the count, his voice giving me the next number, the burn I’m allowed to disappear into because someone else is holding the map and all I have to do is the next rep.

I do thirty. Then he says ten more and I do those too. My head stays empty and clean the whole time, the first clean my head has been in a week. I don’t understand it, and I don’t want to look at it too hard in case it stops.

“Good,” he says, when I finish. One word, and nothing else after it. Flat as the rest of him.

It shouldn’t do anything to me. It lodges somewhere under my ribs and stays there and I have to look at the floor.

My whole life is people telling me I’m good. Crowds, broadcasters, my agent, my father loudest of all. Good off a marquee, off a stat line, off a check. I have never in twenty-five years heard that word mean a single thing until this man says it about ten ugly reps nobody will ever see, no camera, no contract, just me and a strap and him deciding I’m worth one syllable. It’s pathetic how much I want it again. I clock that even as I’m chasing it. I’m a grown man and a millionaire, and I just lit up like a kid because the cold doctor said one nice word. And the part of me that should be embarrassed about that is the same part that went quiet for an hour, so I can’t hear it over how good the quiet was.

—

My phone’s been buzzing in my bag the whole hour.