Chapter 5 Bohdan
Bohdan
I’ve lived a few different lives in my thirty years on earth, but the most important ones were the ones I lived at night.
On the ice and under all those lights in college, skating with Talon and Jay. Somehow the best on the entire planet at the thing I loved the most, but then loved second after I saw her through the glass one time.
Sneaking into Sloan’s dorm room after games, suit still on and half askew because I never bothered to put it back on properly—I was too focused on getting to her.
Other nights playing under other lights with a different jersey, that same girl still watching me from behind different glass, still the best according to everyone else, but the only thing I wanted to be best at was Sloan.
Coming home to her in that apartment with the floor-to-ceiling windows, the view of the Sound and the Olympics and all that Seattle had to offer.
But what that apartment really had to offer me was nights with that girl—usually on the couch, textbooks all around, music on low, her socked feet kicking in the air, chin propped up in one hand, dark hair fanning around her face, and blue eyes more beautiful than any body of water anywhere in the world.
Her face softening when she’d tilt her lips up to brush mine, smiling, loving me in this quiet way that somehow felt louder and more all-encompassing than anything I’d ever experienced, and ever would again.
Now I live this life, in an objectively nice apartment in Brooklyn, because I refuse to live near the studio headquarters in Secaucus, but nothing particularly important happens at night anymore.
Drinking ginseng or turmeric tea because my mom read somewhere it was good for brain health, and now I can’t go a month without new kinds showing up at my door.
Practicing mindfulness.
Taking my antidepressants, and sometimes a sedative if I’ve had a particularly rough day.
Trying all sorts of migraine-prevention techniques that probably don’t work.
But it is the one time a day I let myself open my wallet and pull out the picture of Sloan.
My therapist says I need to stop doing that. Can’t move on if I’m staring at the past each night before bed.
I think he’d probably sing a different tune if his past was Sloan Joseph.
It’s also the one time a day I let myself take an active stroll down memory lane. It’s pretty hard to avoid Sloan in all things because she is all things—at least all the things that matter.
Talon and Jay would tell me it’s pathetic. It is. I know it is.
But tonight, it doesn’t stop me from dropping my bag, yanking off my tie, grabbing a beer I shouldn’t have, and climbing the wrought-iron stairs to the rooftop so I can sit out there under all the stars and look at the brightest one that lives in my wallet.
A breeze lifts my hair from my face, cool against my skin, and it feels for a second like it might be a nice reprieve from the pounding starting along my hairline, but nothing’s ever hurt more than looking at all the things I used to have.
I take a swig of beer before dropping into the lounge chair in the middle of the rooftop. Stretching my legs out, I inhale before fishing out my wallet, finding the picture right behind my ID, where it always stays safe.
I could keep it anywhere, really. But there’s something about the fact that all I have left of her lives alongside this stupid piece of plastic that’s supposed to tell people who I am.
She forged me, after all.
The edges of the Polaroid are worn, starting to peel, not from lack of care on my part—this picture with her old number scrawled across the back is probably my most prized possession—but from time.
Funny thing, time.
It hurts the same way it always does, along the scar first—a pulsing pain every doctor and psychologist I’ve ever had has told me is firmly in my imagination, that there’s no physiological basis for a hurt like that to be caused by nothing more than memory, because that’s what Sloan is now, memory.
It moves along my scalp, the way her fingers used to.
It twirls in my hair before it slides down my face, almost lovingly.
Reverently. Before it scrapes down my neck and digs into my shoulders, finding its way down to the place I’m told my heart still beats because doctors can hear it, where it lives and makes a home.
Exhaling, I swallow another sip of beer, eyes roving over the picture, this deep, hard-to-explain pain pushing against my chest when I look at her.
Hair tumbling around her shoulders, eyes even more blue because they’re sparkling with unshed tears, and those painful arena lights shining down on her.
I flip it over, twirling it between my fingers, and there it is. Her name and her old number in that beautiful, loopy writing of hers.
Sloan Joseph
555-6718
A smile twitches the corners of my mouth, and I press the bottle to my lips.
It used to strike me as funny that she’d written her last name down, too. Like she wanted to make sure I knew who she was and give me some piece of truly identifying information so I’d never forget her.
There was never a risk of that.
I don’t know how long I’m staring, but my phone rings when I take the last swallow of beer.
A picture of my mom lights up the screen, and I’m not sure I feel like answering, but I don’t want her to get the wrong idea, thinking I’ve died of migraine-induced heart failure or something else she’s made up in her head, and call the police for a wellness check when it’s not needed, because I didn’t answer.
It wouldn’t be the first time.
Discarding the empty bottle beside me, I place Sloan back where she belongs, right beside me in my wallet, and my mother’s voice croons through the speaker.
“Brou?ku.” Little bug.
Her voice sounds the way it always does, warm and loving, before it turns serious with the edge of a reprimand. “It’s late.”
“You called me.”
“It’s early here.” She’s visiting my grandparents in Brno, but I can hear her smile all the way over here in Brooklyn.
I can imagine the whole thing pretty clearly, actually.
Where she’s sitting in the apartment, window thrown open and cool, spring air filtering in while she watches the square with her morning coffee. “How are you feeling?”
My eyes pinch closed and out of habit, I press my fingers to my temple. It might seem innocuous, but it’s a frustrating question.
The only one I ever get asked anymore.
Never how I am, just as me, the person—but how I’m feeling.
Like the entirety of my being disappeared the moment my head cracked against the ice.
Maybe it did.
“Fine. I just got home. I was at the studio, sorting some stuff out.” I stretch my legs out along the chair, wincing when my right quad cramps. I swallow, pressing my eyes closed again. “Went out on the ice for a bit this afternoon with a friend who still plays here.”
I toss the words out before I can regret it, because I know it’d only be worse if I kept it secret and she finds out.
It’s met with silence.
Heavy, all-encompassing, and somehow choking me from an entirely different continent.
“Were you careful?” she asks, just like her words.
Pounding my fist into my quad, I push against the muscle spasm and try to take my frustration out on the shitty, underused, probably equally-as-frustrated tissue instead of my mother.
My therapist says I need to be better about that sort of thing.
It already cost me the world. I don’t need it to cost me my mom, too.
“I can still skate, Mom.” I try to sound light, but the words slice through whatever the silence wrapped around us anyway.
It’s another question I get asked all the time with good intentions. Was I careful?
But it’s not just the ice, I rarely skate anymore. This was the first time in months.
It’s “Did I remember my prescription sunglasses?” because it was a sunny day.
It’s “Did I remember my meds?” It’s “Did I take extra care walking down the street to the subway, because you never know—someone might accidentally bump into me and send me careening to the ground where I’ll smash my head against the pavement? ”
She forgets I’m a grown man who lost more than his ability to get through a week without a pounding headache.
He lost his career. His dreams. His entire life.
Himself, probably.
The silence carries again, and for one stupid minute, I let myself hope that she’ll ask me the question I wish someone would.
How did it feel? Am I okay?
I’d tell her the truth—that it was the first time I’ve felt free in months. That it was just as incredible as I remember. That I’d do anything to be able to get it back. Would she please help me?
But she doesn’t.
She changes the subject.
“Of course you can, Bohdan.” I can practically see her forced smile from here—the way her eyes, just like mine, collapse a bit before she scrunches her nose and gives her head a tiny shake.
“Why don’t you come out here? Join me for a few weeks?
Playoffs are just about done; you won’t have many other commentating spots.
Your grandparents would love to see you. ”
She’s not wrong. Cup final is this week, and then I’m as free as someone like me could be.
I don’t know what I’m going to do next. Zane’s offer is still there, hanging over my head. My agent, Shay, thinks I should take it. Says it would be groundbreaking. The opportunity to make a difference.
My therapist says I should only do what I’m ready for.
The only thing I know for certain is that I’m booked on a flight next week for Talon’s stupid cruise.
Eyes cutting to the empty beer, I wish I’d thought to bring up another. “I’d love to. But I can’t. I’m actually heading to Barcelona next week to meet Talon and Jay. Talon’s retiring and he roped us into a cruise to celebrate. You know him, I’m sure he wants to—”
“Start his retirement in style?” My mother’s fond laughter spills through the phone, and I think I feel it in my chest, cracking the thing open and lightening it all, just a bit. “That sounds fun. Who’s going?”
That sends the whole thing crashing to the ground, and whatever modicum of happiness I felt before dissipates, and my chest seals itself shut again.
“Me, Talon, Jay, and Tia.” I tell her the whole guest list, minus the one name she wants to hear the most.
Silence again.
But heavier this time, because it’s weighed down by a woman with brilliant eyes and an even more brilliant brain.
“Oh,” my mom starts, and I can feel her debating her next words from here. “I thought maybe Sloan would go. Talon is one of her best friends, too.”
“Sloan doesn’t want anything to do with me,” I cut out, words harsh. “I wouldn’t want anything to do with me either. She didn’t even answer the fucking text.”
“Bohdan, if you’d just call her—”
“No,” I interrupt, a throb aching in my temple.
My mom thinks I’m being stubborn—a display of wounded male pride.
She doesn’t know I’d drop to my knees and beg for Sloan in the middle of Times Square and let everyone in the world record it if it meant a second chance with her.
I just won’t put her through it again.
She swallows, voice shaky with tears. “Are you sure? If you just explained, she’d understand. She loved—”
“Enough.”
I sound harsher than I mean to because it’s a plea, really.
I don’t want to be reminded of the fact I had the heart of this spectacular, wonderful, effervescent, brilliant person in my hands—this person who never really felt worthy of love because their brain was so cruel—took the edge of a dull skate blade, and systematically carved it up until there was nothing left of either of us.
That I’m the villain in her story, and I should be. I’m the villain in mine.
But every time I made Sloan bleed, I bled, too.