Chapter 9 Jamie
JAMIE
The kids are fearless. This is the first thing I notice.
They fall and they get up. They fall and they get up.
They fall and they get up. The cycle is so fast and so constant that it starts to look like a single motion: fall-get-up, fall-get-up, a continuous loop of failure and recovery that doesn't seem to bother any of them because they haven't yet learned that falling is something to be afraid of.
I'm at the Decatur rink. Ren Briggs runs a youth hockey program here on Saturday mornings, eight- and nine-year-olds in oversized gear and borrowed helmets, and the team requires twenty community service hours per season, and I signed up for this because it was the option that involved the least amount of public speaking.
The other options were hospital visits (talking), school assemblies (talking), and charity galas (talking plus formal wear).
The youth hockey program was labeled "on-ice instruction" and I thought: ice I can do.
Ice is the one place where my body knows what it's doing even when the rest of me doesn't.
Ren is quiet. Not the defended quiet of Mik or the analytical quiet of Mars or the loaded quiet that I carry like a bag of rocks through every room I enter.
Ren's quiet is settled. It's the quiet of a man who spent years being loud in the wrong rooms and eventually found the room where he fit.
He gives instructions clearly, moves among the kids with patience, and watches me with an expression I can't decode.
I'm helping a group of four kids work on crossovers.
The mechanics are simple at this level: weight on inside edge, push and glide, push and glide.
One of them, a girl named Sofia, gets it immediately.
She's small and fierce and her crossovers are, for a nine-year-old, excellent.
Two others are struggling but improving.
The fourth, a boy named Marcus, is wearing a Mars Santos jersey (number 31, too big for him, hanging past his knees) and is more interested in talking than skating.
Marcus talks the way Jonah talks: constantly, without apparent effort, as if silence is a condition he has never experienced and cannot imagine.
"Do you know Mars?" he asks me, attempting a crossover and completing it with more enthusiasm than technique.
"Yeah. He's on my team."
"Is he nice?"
"He's..." I think about how to describe Mars Santos to a nine-year-old. "He's quiet. But he's nice in a quiet way."
"Like you."
"I'm not that quiet."
"You're really quiet. My mom says quiet people are just listening harder. Are you listening harder?"
"Probably."
Marcus executes another crossover. This one is better. His weight transfer is improving, though his arms are doing something that resembles a windmill and his expression suggests he is solving a complex mathematical problem.
"Do you have a girlfriend?" he asks.
The question arrives with the casual inevitability of a child who has not yet learned that some questions have weight.
He asks it the way he asked about Mars, the way he would ask about my favorite color or my preferred breakfast cereal.
There is no subtext. There is no awareness that the question could be anything other than a simple inquiry about a straightforward fact.
"No," I say.
"My sister says all hockey players have girlfriends."
"Your sister is wrong about that."
The sentence comes out before the checkpoint catches it.
Before the internal process that evaluates every word for risk, for exposure, for the possibility that someone might hear the thing underneath the thing.
The sentence exits my mouth unfiltered and unedited and lands in the air between me and a nine-year-old boy in an oversized Mars Santos jersey, and the air does not shatter.
The rink does not collapse. The world continues to be a world.
Marcus shrugs. "I'll tell her," he says. He skates away to attempt another crossover, this one featuring an arm motion that can only be described as interpretive.
I stand at the boards. My hands are on the railing.
The railing is cold under my palms. The rink is full of children falling and getting up and I am standing very still because the sentence I just said, which was six words long and objectively unremarkable, has detonated something in my chest that I was not prepared for.
Your sister is wrong about that. Not: I don't have one right now.
Not: I'm focused on hockey. Not: it's complicated.
The sentence I said was not a deflection or a redirection or a careful non-answer designed to satisfy the question without revealing anything.
The sentence I said was, for the first time, true.
Not all hockey players have girlfriends.
I am proof. And the proof is not temporary. The proof is structural.
I am the proof.
The realization is quiet. It doesn't arrive with fanfare or lightning.
It arrives the way a season changes: one degree at a time, imperceptible in the moment, obvious in retrospect.
I have been building walls (Mik's word) around a feeling I wouldn't name, and a nine-year-old just walked through one of them without knowing it was there, and the wall he walked through was the wall labeled "pretend the question doesn't apply to you," and the wall is down, and behind it is a boy at the boards of a suburban rink in Decatur who has just admitted, to himself if not to anyone else, that the reason he doesn't have a girlfriend is not timing or circumstance or the demands of a hockey career.
The reason is the reason. And the reason has a shape now, even if it doesn't have a name.
The session continues. I work with the kids for another hour.
Sofia lands three crossovers in a row and pumps her fist. Marcus tells me a seventeen-part story about his dog, a labradoodle named Biscuit, who is apparently the world's worst swimmer and best cuddler.
Two of the kids fall during a stopping drill and immediately challenge each other to fall harder, which escalates into a competition involving deliberate falls of increasing theatricality.
Ren lets it go for thirty seconds before skating over and redirecting them with the calm authority of a man who understands that children learn through chaos and that the chaos only needs to be managed, not eliminated.
I watch the kids fall. I watch them get up.
The speed of the cycle, fall-get-up, fall-get-up, is the same as it was at the start of the session, but it looks different now.
It looks like something I want to learn.
Not the falling. I've done enough falling.
The getting up. The unselfconscious, fearless, full-body commitment to getting up without first analyzing whether the falling was justified and whether the getting up will be observed and whether the observation will lead to judgment and whether the judgment will confirm the thing you're afraid of.
The kids don't think about any of that. They just get up.
After the session, the parents arrive. Kids are unstrapped from gear and loaded into cars and the rink empties in the gradual, noisy way that events involving children always empty. Marcus waves at me from the lobby. "Bye, Jamie! Tell Mars I said hi!"
"I will."
"And tell him I scored a goal last week! It went off my shin but Ren says it still counts!"
"It counts."
Marcus leaves. The rink is quiet. Ren is collecting cones from the ice, stacking them with the methodical patience of a man who has done this a hundred times.
"You're good with them," he says.
The sentence is simple. Four words. But the way Ren says it, with a specific emphasis on the word "good" that implies something beyond instructional competence, makes me stop.
"Thanks."
Ren looks at me. The look is brief but it contains something I've seen before, in Mik's face during the film room conversation, in Gerald's eyes when he told me the hearing comes first. The look is recognition.
Not of the specific thing I'm hiding, but of the hiding itself.
The posture of concealment, which is apparently universal enough that people who have worn it can identify it on others the way veterans identify military bearing: instantly, without analysis, through pattern recognition born from shared experience.
"The kids don't care about anything except whether you're paying attention to them," Ren says. "That's their whole metric. Are you here, and are you seeing me. Everything else is noise."
He goes back to collecting cones. The observation sits in the air between us, simple and warm and carrying a weight that its words don't account for. Are you here. Are you seeing me.
I am here. I am not sure I'm being seen. But I'm beginning to understand that the walls I've built to prevent being seen are not protecting me from the thing I'm afraid of. They're protecting me from the thing I need.
I drive home. The furnished apartment is less anonymous now.
There's a reading lamp on the nightstand that I bought at Target last week because the overhead light was too harsh for evening and because I needed something warm in at least one room of this place.
The lamp cost seventeen dollars and it sits on the nightstand like a small, amber-toned act of habitation.
I sit on the bed. The lamp is on. The room is warm.
Your sister is wrong about that.
Six words. Said to a nine-year-old who has already forgotten them. Remembered by a nineteen-year-old who never will.