6. Elias #2
Twenty-three years old. An addiction-and-pain patient I was given to manage and chose instead to keep, the same slow architecture I can feel myself laying down again now with my own steady hands, brick by careful brick.
He had nobody too. They always have nobody; that’s not coincidence, that’s selection.
I don’t choose the ones with a wide net under them.
I choose the ones who’ve already fallen through every other net in their lives, because a man with somewhere else to turn doesn’t turn his whole weight onto you, and the whole weight is the thing I’m after.
Sam had a mother who’d stopped answering and a body full of pain and me.
Roman has a father who loves a scoreboard and a body full of pain and me.
I tell people I treat the difficult cases.
The truth is I select for a specific difficulty, the kind that has no one else in the room, and then I make very sure it stays that way.
I read two lines. I always only read two lines; I don’t need the rest. I lived the rest. The intake summary, in my own old handwriting.
I read those two lines and I close it before the room I’m in starts to smell like that other room.
I tell myself I take it out as a warning.
A discipline. Look what this is, look where it goes, you have a file in a drawer because you did this exact thing and a boy died of it.
And there’s a man who could read those two lines, reassign Roman in the morning, and never be alone in a locked room with him again.
But that’s not why I keep it. I’ve started to understand that, kneeling here over the proof of my worst self.
I don’t keep the file to frighten myself out of it.
I keep it like you keep a thing you’re proud of and ashamed of at once, the only complete record of the one time I was loved that totally, needed that absolutely.
I take it out on the nights the wanting gets bad, and I read two lines, and what I feel is not only horror.
That’s the truth I lock back in the drawer with it.
Some of what I feel is missing him. Missing being that necessary.
And Roman Vane is going to be that necessary.
I am building it so that he will. The file goes back in the drawer, the key goes back behind the card, and I lock my own evidence away and turn off the light.
—
I pour a drink at home I don’t finish.
Good scotch, one I don’t taste, set on the counter while I stand at the window of an apartment as controlled and empty as I am, nothing out of place because nothing’s ever lived here hard enough to disturb anything.
There’s one chair by this window, and in three years I have never once had a second person sit in it.
My phone lights. The GM, of course, at eleven at night, because Sloane manages by leaving no hour unclaimed: Vane on track?
I look at the question. I think of the man face-down on the practice ice just days ago, the snapped stick, the dosing chart climbing, the file warm from my hands an hour ago. I think no. I think I am the thing he’s not on track around, and I am not going to stop.
I type: On track. Ahead of schedule on the joint. Managing the psychological side closely. Every word true in the only way my words are ever true, which is true enough to hide the thing under it.
Good man, she sends back. Knew you were the call.
And I think, distantly, looking at those two words, that she has no idea how completely she’s wrong, and that the not-knowing is the whole product I sell.
Sloane doesn’t want to know how I get the wins any more than the franchise wanted to know why a clinician of my caliber was available mid-career, willing to relocate, asking no questions about the gaps in his references.
Nobody digs into the man who fixes things.
That’s the genius of choosing this disease over the obvious ones.
A drunk gets caught. A man who needs to be needed gets promoted, gets the difficult cases handed to him gift-wrapped, gets a general manager texting him good man at eleven at night while the actual harm accrues quietly behind a locked door and a documented rationale.
I have built a life in the one blind spot society keeps permanently unwatched, and I did it on purpose.
The only person who has ever looked at me and felt the wrongness before she had the evidence is a twenty-nine-year-old athletic therapist with a dosing chart.
And I have already started planning how to manage her.
I set the phone down next to the scotch I’m not drinking.
I stand in my immaculate empty apartment, the most trusted clinician in the organization, a file locked in a drawer at the office and a boy two miles away finally sleeping because I told him to.
And I am not, in this moment, lying to myself about a single part of it.
That’s the worst hour, always. Not the lying.
The clarity. The few minutes at the end of the night when I see exactly what I am, exactly what I’m doing, exactly where it ends.
I rinse the untouched glass. I go to bed anyway. I do not stop. I never have.
Tomorrow there’s a session. The joint is nearly ready. I’ll find a reason it isn’t.