Puck My Pain Away (Puckboys Unleashed #5)

1. Roman

ROMAN

The puck’s on my tape and the whole barn knows what’s coming before the two guys in front of me do.

Eighteen thousand people on their feet. Third period, tie game.

I’ve got Hartley flat-footed at the line because he always cheats to his glove side and he’s done it again, the idiot, leaned a half-step the wrong way to open the door.

I take it. I always take it. That’s the thing nobody understands about me until they’ve tried to stop me and couldn’t: there’s no decision in it.

The lane opens and my body’s already gone.

I split them. Hartley and the kid they paired him with, both reaching, both a step late. One stick rakes my pants and gets nothing. Then it’s just me and Vesely in the crease, the slot wide open like the ice cracked down the middle just for me.

He drops. They all drop for me eventually. I wait the extra half-second that separates the guys who score forty from the guys who score eighteen, wait until his pad’s committed, and then I roof it backhand into the wedge of net over his shoulder where the puck has no business going.

The horn goes.

The sound that comes after isn’t sound. It’s pressure.

It’s the whole building inhaling and then coming down on me at once.

Somewhere under it the chant starts, same as it has in this rink since I was twenty-two.

Three syllables. My name, broken into a thing they can pound their feet to. Ro-man-Vane. Ro-man-Vane.

My boys hit me at the boards and I’m laughing, yelling something that isn’t words.

Theo’s glove cracks the back of my helmet hard enough to ring it.

This. This right here is the only church I’ve ever needed.

You score one like that and for about nine seconds you are not a person with a body, a father, a problem.

You are just the thing the crowd is screaming, clean and enormous and loved.

You would do anything, give anything, burn anything you owned to keep standing inside that noise.

I tap Theo’s cage. I point my stick at the kids behind the glass losing their minds in my sweater.

I never see Kovac.

—

They rule it clean. I’ll hear that word for months. Clean, because the refs had their eyes on the puck crossing the line, same as everyone else in the building, and not one of them was watching the guy coming across my blind side.

What it is, is this: I’ve already let the puck go, I’m gliding out of the play with my weight floating high on my edges, light, careless, a man taking a bow.

And Kovac comes across the grain from my blind side at a speed that doesn’t fit the moment, finishes a check the play doesn’t need anymore. His hip catches me low and turning.

My skate holds when the rest of me doesn’t.

There’s a sound. I want to be clear that I hear it before I feel anything, this wet structural pop from somewhere inside my own knee, loud as a branch going, loud enough that I think for one stupid spinning second it came from the boards.

Then the ice comes up and takes me. The pain arrives all at once like the building fell on the joint, white and total, a pain with no top to it.

I’m down grabbing my leg with both hands and I cannot make it let go.

I try to get up. That’s reflex, that’s twenty-five years of getting up. I plant the good skate and push. The bad leg won’t answer. It just hangs there sending up that white roar, and I go back down.

And the barn goes quiet.

You don’t know what eighteen thousand people sound like until they stop.

The chant dies in the middle of my name.

There’s a ring of held breath, and then this low traveling moan rolling section to section as the replay hits the board above me.

I don’t look up at it. I will never once look up at it.

But I feel it pass over me like cold water.

Somebody behind the glass is crying. A kid, maybe. In my sweater.

Theo’s on his knees beside me with his glove off, his bare hand on my chest, and he’s saying my name in a voice I’ve never heard him use, low and scared, the captain voice gone, just Theo. “Stay down. Hey. Hey, look at me, stay down.”

“It’s fine,” I tell him, and my voice cracks in half on two words. “It’s fine, it’s fine—”

It is not fine. I knew it the second I heard it pop.

Some animal part of me that has never once been wrong about my own body already knows it, is already screaming it while the rest of me bargains.

The season’s gone—maybe more than the season.

The thing I just felt give was not a ligament so much as the floor of my entire life.

They bring the stretcher.

I tell them I can skate off. I beg, actually, with the trainers crouched over me and the ref holding the crowd back with his arms out.

I say let me skate off, I can skate off, do not put me on that thing.

And the senior trainer, Marv, who’s taped my ankles for six years, looks at me with something terrible and gentle in his face. “Not this time, bud.”

So they strap me down. They strap my arms, they brace the leg, and the whole barn watches the boards do it, watches the cameras do it.

Eighteen thousand people, a national broadcast, my father somewhere in a recliner two time zones away, all of them watching them carry Roman Vane off on his back.

There’s a towel over my eyes I didn’t ask for.

I shove it off, because crying on the jumbotron is the one thing left tonight I get to refuse.

They roll me toward the tunnel.

And here’s the part that lives in me after.

As they wheel me into the dark of the tunnel mouth, behind me, the horn goes for the faceoff.

They’re restarting the game. Of course they are.

There’s six minutes left, a lead to protect, a building full of people who paid.

The trainers haven’t even got me to the room yet.

Out there the puck has already dropped, Theo’s already taken the draw, and the world I was the center of nine minutes ago has closed back over the hole where I was standing like water over a dropped stone.

I listen to the crowd come back up. Not for me. For the next thing. For whoever’s got the puck now.

That’s the sound I take with me down the tunnel. The crowd learning how fast it can love someone else.

—

The recovery room is the wrong kind of quiet after.

Tile, a humming light, that hospital smell of cold antiseptic that gets into the back of your throat.

They’ve cut my sock off. The knee under the ice wrap has swelled into something that doesn’t look like it belongs to a body, a hot tight balloon of a thing, the skin gone shiny and stretched, purple feathering up underneath.

I can’t stop looking at it, because if I look at it I don’t have to look at the surgeon’s face while she talks.

Her name’s Dr. Okafor and she’s good, they flew her in once for Theo’s shoulder, and she’s got the scan up on a screen she’s turned toward me like that’s a kindness.

She uses the words. ACL. MCL. The meniscus, which she says is the part she’s most concerned about, which is doctor-speak for this is the bad one.

She says reconstruction. She says grafts, plural.

She says the thing I’ve been keeping behind my teeth since the ice came up to meet me, she says it out loud into the cold room with her hands folded:

“Roman, I want to be straight with you. You’re done for this season. And a return to your prior level? I won’t promise you that. I’d be lying if I promised you that.”

There’s a tray beside the bed. Paper cup of water on it, a little pleated thing, and a second cup with two pills she hasn’t given me yet.

I knock it off the tray.

I don’t decide to. My hand just goes, swipes the whole tray.

The water cup hits the tile. The pills skitter under the bed.

The metal tray rings against the floor like a cymbal, and I hear myself saying no in a voice that’s coming apart, no, you run it again, you run the scan again, you don’t know, you don’t know me, I heal fast, ask anybody, ask my trainer, I heal fast—

A nurse is there. She doesn’t flinch from the noise. She picks the tray up off the floor without a word. She’s got a syringe. She finds the line in the back of my hand that I forgot they put there, and she says, very calm, very even, “This’ll take the edge off, Mr. Vane. Just breathe for me.”

I want to tell her I don’t want it. I’m shaking and furious. There’s water soaking cold through the sheet by my hip, and I open my mouth to tell her I don’t need it.

Then it hits.

I have never felt anything like it, and I will spend the next year of my life trying to feel exactly like it again.

It comes up the arm slow and gold. It gets to my chest and the white roar in the knee just steps back.

Doesn’t leave. Steps back, the way a dog backs off a fence.

And behind it, where all night there’s been nothing but the pop, the silence, the crowd already gone, something warm folds over the whole wreck of me and tells me, without words, in a voice I’d follow anywhere: none of this has to be felt right now.

My fists come open. I didn’t know they were closed until they aren’t. The fight goes out of my hands first, then my arms, then the back of my neck where I’ve been holding my own skull up since the tunnel.

“There,” the nurse says softly. “There you go.”

I lie back. The ceiling’s very interesting. I think, distantly, from a long way up, oh. Just that. Oh. So that’s available.

I should be afraid of how good it is. I’m not. That’s the thing right there, that’s the whole next year. I’m twenty-five, flat on my back in a paper gown, and I don’t see it coming any more than I saw Kovac.

—

That night they keep me for observation and I don’t sleep.