1. Roman #2
Course I don’t. The gold’s worn thin by two a.m., and the knee’s woken back up under the brace, throbbing in time with my pulse.
They’ve left me a button I’m not supposed to push more than every however-many minutes, and I’ve already learned exactly how many minutes.
The room’s dark except the strip of hall light under the door and the glow of my phone, which I should put down, which I cannot put down.
The notifications stack up the side of the screen and I don’t open one.
Theo, four times, the last just a string of nothing, just bro and a row of dots, which from Theo means more than a paragraph would.
Dara, my agent, three calls and a text I can read the top line of without unlocking it: Roman call me the second you’re able, we manage this, do not post anything.
Already running numbers on me, already turning the worst night of my life into a thing to be managed.
I can’t be mad at her for it. It’s her job, and she’s not wrong.
The rookie, Niko, who I’ve said maybe nine words to all year, has sent me a wall of text I can see is long and earnest, and I don’t open that one either, because a twenty-year-old’s hope is the last thing my chest can hold right now.
And there at the bottom, the one I knew would be there.
My father. One missed call, no message. He wouldn’t leave a message.
Leaving a message would be admitting the call was about feelings and not about the leg, and Vic Vane has never once in my life made a call about feelings.
He’ll have watched it live. He’ll have seen the replay loop, the score and the silence, same cut I keep watching.
He’ll have sat there in his recliner doing in his head exactly what Dara’s doing on her phone, running the timeline, the comeback, the math on what’s left of his investment.
He didn’t call to ask if I’m scared. I know that like I know my own knee’s gone.
He called to find out when I’m skating again, and I let it ring out, because I don’t have a number to give him.
A son with no number to give Vic Vane isn’t worth the long distance.
I put none of them out of their misery. I open the one thing I shouldn’t instead.
I’m watching myself.
That’s the sick joke of it. I’ve got my own highlights open, the team’s posted a montage already, thinking of you 91, and I’m lying here in the dark watching the version of me from four hours ago and four years ago split defenders, roof backhands, get buried under teammates, watching eighteen thousand people scream a name that, in the clips, belongs to a person who can stand up.
There’s one from a playoff run two springs back, me and Theo mobbed at center ice, both of us howling into each other’s cages like the building might come down.
I watch the goal from tonight. Somebody’s already cut it with the injury right after, the score and then the silence.
I watch it twice, three times, my thumb going back to the start, back, back, like if I run it enough times the tape might catch and play it the way it was supposed to go.
The me on the screen points his stick at the kids behind the glass.
I scrub back and make him do it again.
The phone dies somewhere around the fourth or fortieth time, just blacks out mid-celebration with the battery I never charged, and the dark that’s left is enormous.
No crowd. No gold in the arm. Just the ceiling I can’t see, the knee keeping time, the realization sitting on my chest with its full weight now that there is nothing under it.
Take the hockey away and I genuinely do not know what’s left standing in this bed.
I’ve never had to know. I built the whole thing tall and load-bearing on one joint.
The joint is in pieces under a brace, and I’m lying here in the dark at twenty-five finding out, for the first time, how little of me there is that isn’t the player.
I don’t cry. I get close. I lie very still and ride it out like a hit I see coming, bracing. After a while the night nurse comes in to check the line and finds me staring up at nothing.
She’s kind about it. She doesn’t ask if I’m okay, which I’m grateful for, because I’d have hated her for it. She checks the bag and the brace. She tucks the blanket back over my hip, and on her way out, like it’s nothing, like it’s good news, she says:
“Get some rest if you can. They’ve got you set up with the best for the rehab, you know. Doctor Mercer’s taking your case himself. He doesn’t do that for everybody.”
“Who?”
“Elias Mercer.” She’s already at the door, a shape against the hall light. “Team’s recovery man. Bit of a cold fish, between us.” Something close to a laugh. “But I’ve never seen him lose. If anybody’s getting you back on that ice, hon, it’s him.”
Then she’s gone, and the door sighs shut, and the name just hangs there in the dark over the bed where she left it.
Mercer.
I don’t know yet. That’s the thing I’d tell myself if I could reach back into that room. You don’t know anything yet, lying there grabbing at that name like a rope somebody threw. You think the worst thing that happened tonight is your knee.
I close my eyes. The knee beats. Six minutes, I keep thinking, they restarted it in six minutes, the puck was already dropped before they got me off the ice.
I find the button with my thumb in the dark. I wait out the minutes I’m not supposed to. When it lets me, I push it, and I lie there in the quiet of a building that’s already forgotten the goal, waiting for the gold to come back up the arm and tell me none of this has to be felt right now.