3. Roman
ROMAN
The first session, he makes me do a leg extension thirty times and I want to kill him by twelve.
It’s nothing. That’s the insult of it. Before, I’d squat three of him for reps and not feel it the next day.
Now he’s got me sitting on a padded bench in a back room of the facility, lifting my own shin against a strap with maybe ten pounds on the pulley.
By the tenth rep the knee’s lit up. By the fifteenth it’s shaking, this fine ugly tremor running through the whole leg that I can’t stop and can’t hide.
He just stands there with his arms folded watching it shake, and he says, “Again.”
The room doesn’t help. It’s a back treatment room with no windows, fluorescent light flattening everything, a smell of rubbing alcohol and the rubber of the mats.
A long mirror runs down one wall. I keep catching myself in it, wishing I wouldn’t.
The guy in the mirror is wearing a knee brace over sweatpants.
His arms have already started to go, two weeks off the ice, the definition softening at the edges.
He’s got a week of beard and the dead eyes of somebody waiting in a hospital hallway.
I played in front of eighteen thousand people sixteen days ago.
The guy in the mirror couldn’t get a beer commercial.
“It’s shaking.” The strap bites into my heel. The tremor climbs up into the quad, the whole leg juddering on the pulley. I hate that he can stand there and watch it.
“I can see that. Again.”
“You want me to tear something? It’s done. The muscle’s done.”
“The muscle has more than you’re giving it.
You’re stopping at discomfort, not failure.
There’s a long way between those and I need you to live in it.
” He doesn’t raise his voice. He never raises his voice, I’m learning that already, three days into meeting this man, the worse it gets the flatter he goes. “Again, Roman. Same count.”
I do four more and they’re garbage, the leg barely clearing the pad. The burn turns into something with teeth in it. On the last one the knee gives a wet little click that goes straight up my spine, and I lose it.
I rip the strap off my ankle and I throw the whole resistance band across the room.
It’s a good throw, the only thing my body’s done right all week, the band snapping out in a long arc, the handle cracking off the cinderblock wall and skittering under a treadmill.
I’m up off the bench on the bad leg before I think about it, shouting, “I’m not one of your fucking lab rats, you don’t get to just stand there and—” And my voice does the thing it’s been doing since the tunnel.
It cracks down the middle, and I hate it, I hate it so much, how my own body keeps selling me out.
Elias doesn’t move while I yell. He waits until I run down, which doesn’t take long because there’s nothing to push against, no fight in him to meet mine, just those pale eyes taking it all in and giving nothing back.
Then he crosses the room. He bends, reaches under the treadmill, and picks up the band. He coils it neat around his hand, walks back, and holds it out to me across the small space.
“Sit down,” he says. “Strap on. Same count.”
And here’s the thing I can’t explain, the thing I’ll be turning over in the dark for months.
I take it. I sit back down. My hands are still shaking with the leftover rage.
I thread the strap around my ankle and start the count again, and somewhere around the third rep something in my chest just lets go.
The yelling part of me, the part that’s been screaming since I woke up in that recovery room, the part that runs my mouth at Theo and ignores my father and pours the whiskey, it goes quiet.
All of it. There’s just the count, his voice giving me the next number, the burn I’m allowed to disappear into because someone else is holding the map and all I have to do is the next rep.
I do thirty. Then he says ten more and I do those too. My head stays empty and clean the whole time, the first clean my head has been in a week. I don’t understand it, and I don’t want to look at it too hard in case it stops.
“Good,” he says, when I finish. One word, and nothing else after it. Flat as the rest of him.
It shouldn’t do anything to me. It lodges somewhere under my ribs and stays there and I have to look at the floor.
My whole life is people telling me I’m good.
Crowds, broadcasters, my agent, my father loudest of all.
Good off a marquee, off a stat line, off a check.
I have never in twenty-five years heard that word mean a single thing until this man says it about ten ugly reps nobody will ever see, no camera, no contract, just me and a strap and him deciding I’m worth one syllable.
It’s pathetic how much I want it again. I clock that even as I’m chasing it.
I’m a grown man and a millionaire, and I just lit up like a kid because the cold doctor said one nice word.
And the part of me that should be embarrassed about that is the same part that went quiet for an hour, so I can’t hear it over how good the quiet was.
—
My phone’s been buzzing in my bag the whole hour.
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.