Page 6 of Puck My Pain Away

I dig it out in the parking lot, sweat going cold under my hoodie, and it’s my father. Of course it is. VIC across the screen, the third call today, and I stand there in the cold with my thumb over the green and I can’t make it press.

I know exactly how the call goes. I’ve been having it my whole life. He’ll ask about the timeline first, before he asks how I’m sleeping, before he asks anything, he’ll ask what the doctors are saying about a date, and I’ll hear it in his voice, the calculation, the part of him that’s been spending my career in his head since I was eight years old in a cold rink at five in the morning while he stood at the glass with a coffee and a stopwatch. He poured everything he didn’t get into me. Every washout dream. And he loves me, I think he loves me, but it comes to me down a wire that’s hooked to a scoreboard, and right now the scoreboard says zero and I do not have it in me to hear what that does to his voice.

I let it ring out. The buzzing stops. The screen goes dark. I feel like garbage, and also, underneath, relieved, which is its own small sickness.

He’ll have watched every game I ever played. That’s the thing about Vic that makes him impossible to hate clean. He drove me to the rinks at four in the morning. He sharpened my skates at the kitchen table at midnight. He never missed a game, not one, not in twenty years, and the whole time the love came across in a single dialect, which was performance, which was the number, which was did you win. My brother Danny couldn’t skate worth a damn, so Danny got the leftover light, which was none, and learned to resent me for being the sun. He wasn’t wrong to. I ate all the light in that house. And now the sun’s gone out. I already know that somewhere two time zones away my father is sitting with that fact and doesn’t have the first idea what to do with a son who isn’t producing, because there was never a version of me in his head that wasn’t, and there isn’t one in mine either. That’s the part I can’t say to anyone. Take away the thing he loved me for and I genuinely don’t know what either of us is supposed to do with the leftover man.

Dara next. She’s texted four times about a sponsor shoot the gear company still wants, a brave-comeback thing, me in their compression sleeve looking like a warrior. I text her back two words. Not yet. Then I think better of even that much. I don’t add anything, and I put the phone away.

There’s a text from Theo I read and don’t answer. Beers at mine whenever ur up for it. No pressure. Door’s open, brother. Theo, who’s known me since juniors, who never once wanted a piece of the brand, who’d sit with me in his minivan-smelling living room with his kids’ toys everywhere and not make me perform being okay. That’s exactly why I can’t go. He’s the one person who’d see straight through it, and I can’t be seen right now, not by him, not by anyone whose opinion I’d have to survive.

I leave him on read. I drive home one-footed, the bad leg propped useless, and the whole way there the only thing in my head that doesn’t hurt is good, said flat, in a voice that wanted nothing from me but the next rep.

—

Home is a glass box I bought at twenty-three because my agent said I should have an address that photographed well, and it’s never once felt like mine.

Three thousand square feet of someone else’s idea of success. I live in maybe four hundred of it, the couch, the kitchen, the bed. The rest just stands empty. There are dishes in the sink going on four days, crusted plates I keep meaning to deal with tomorrow, then the tomorrow after. A jersey framed on the wall that I can’t look at. The big windows that sold me the place show me the city lit up and not caring. Eighteen thousand of those lights belong to people who chanted my name a few weeks ago and have already moved on to whoever’s got the puck now. I close the blinds on all of it.

There’s a bottle of whiskey on the counter, good stuff, a distillery sent me a case years ago hoping I’d be seen drinking it, and I’ve made a lot better progress through the case than through anything else lately. I pour two fingers into last night’s glass without rinsing it and I drink it standing at the counter looking at the dark shapes of my own awards on a shelf I never dust. The burn’s familiar and almost friendly. It doesn’t do what the pills do, doesn’t fold the warm hand over my chest, but it sands the edges down enough to get me across the room, and across the room is where the rest of it lives.

I do the thing I do now. I line them up.

The orange bottle from the team pharmacy, the one Elias signed. I shake them out onto the nightstand and stand them in a row like little soldiers, the day’s allotment. I look at them. Marv used to say I had the best hands in the league. Surgeon’s hands, he’d say, soft hands. I line the pills up with those hands until the row is perfect and even, and I know exactly how many hours of quiet are sitting there on the wood.

The next one isn’t due for forty minutes. The bottle says every six hours and it’s been five and twenty. I know this. I’ve started knowing this like I used to know a goalie’s glove tendencies, by feel, without trying, the clock that lives in my body now counting down to the next time the world gets to step back and let go of my chest.

I take it twenty minutes early.

I tell myself it’s the knee, which woke up screaming on the drive and hasn’t stopped, and that’s even true. That’s the worst part—it’s always at least a little true. I dry-swallow it and lie back on the bed in my street clothes, waiting for the gold to come up like it did in the recovery room. It comes, smaller now, thinner, but it comes. The row of soldiers on the nightstand has one empty space in it, and I already don’t like looking at the empty space. I nudge the row down with one finger so the gap sits at the end, where it’s easier not to count.

Before the warmth takes me all the way under, I do the math I’ve started doing without meaning to. If I move the next one up the same amount, and the one after. I set an alarm on my phone for the one after that, so I won’t have to lie here watching the clock, so I can just be told when. Some flat voice telling me when. I set it, I put the phone face down, and I let the thin gold close over my head. The last thing I think, stupidly, is that I did thirty-plus-ten today without my head once, that it was the best hour I’ve had since the ice came up, that I want to go back tomorrow more than I want almost anything. I’m too far under by then to ask myself why.

—

Next session he runs me harder and I let him.

That’s the new thing, the thing I’d never admit out loud. I show up early. I do the count. When the knee shakes, I look at him instead of the leg. He says again, and I find the four more I swore weren’t there. My head goes to that clean empty place and stays there. For one hour a day I am not a wreck or a brand or a disappointment on a wire. I’m just a body doing what it’s told, and it’s the only peace I’ve got.

So at the end, I stall.

I don’t even decide to. He calls the session, says we’re done, good work, start the ice when you get home, and I should get up and go. Instead, I say, “One more set.” He looks at me. I say, “The, uh. The extension. I felt it slip a little on the last one; I want to make sure I’ve got the form.” Which is a lie, my form was clean, and we both know it’s a lie. I do the set anyway with him standing there, slow, dragging it out, asking a question about graft timelines I already know the answer to just to keep him in the room a minute longer.

Because when I go home there’s a glass box, a row of soldiers, a clock in my body. Here there’s a flat voice telling me what to do next. And I’ve started to need the second thing in a way I don’t have a name for, in a way I’m not ready to look at.

He lets me finish the set. He answers the question I didn’t need answered, short and exact. And then he reads me like he reads everything, those pale eyes going over my face one slow pass. Something moves behind them that’s gone before I can catch it. He says, not unkind, “Go home, Roman.”

So I do. I gather my stuff and I leave him standing in that bright back room.

In the parking lot, I sit in my car a second before I start it. The knee’s throbbing again, the session’s woken it all the way up, and I do the math on the next pill before I’ve even got the key turned. Two hours, maybe less if I move it up again. I think about the row of soldiers waiting on the nightstand, the alarm I’ll set, the gold coming up the arm. And then, right behind it, with no warning at all, I think about his hand coming under the treadmill for the band. The neat coil of it around his fingers. The flat good. And I notice, sitting there in the cold car, that the two thoughts have started living in the same place in my chest, the pill and the man, the relief and the relief, that I’m already counting the hours to both.

I drive home one-footed to the box, the blinds, the bottle. I count those hours till tomorrow, when I get to come back and have my head go quiet again. And I tell myself that’s just the rehab. That’s just wanting to get better. That’s all it is.

I almost believe it. That’s the part nobody warns you about. How much of you wants to believe it, right up until you can’t.

4

ELIAS