19. Roman #2
The nurse is right there, checking my line.
“That’s my doctor,” I hear myself say, and my voice is shaking.
“From the team. I don’t—” The pull yanks at me, vicious.
I shut my eyes for a second and I think about Theo’s face this morning, you scared the hell out of me.
I think about Maren reading the numbers, Sammy’s empty chair with the party hat, the bottle that had his name on it doing what it did to me on the tile.
“No visitors,” I say. “Him especially. I don’t want to see him. Please don’t let him in.”
She nods, unbothered, like people say this kind of thing in here all the time, which I guess they do.
And I make myself turn my head. I turn my face to the window, the real window, the one with the gray sky, the parking structure, not his face in it.
I keep it there. I don’t look back at the glass even though every nerve I own is screaming at me to.
Somewhere behind me, I feel rather than see him stand there a moment longer, then go, the pull stretching thin and thinner as he walks away down the hall until it finally, barely, snaps.
I’m wrung out and sweating when it’s over like I actually fought him.
And I did, except the him I fought was the one living in my own blood.
I won this one round by about a single heartbeat, and I know there’ll be a thousand more rounds and I won’t win all of them.
But I won this one. I turned my face to the window.
It’s the bravest thing I’ve done in a year and nobody saw it but a nurse.
—
Theo comes back up with two coffees and finds me crying and doesn’t make it a thing, just sits.
When I can talk, I tell him what I want to do before I can lose the nerve.
“There’s a program,” I say. “The counselor, Maren. She runs a place. Residential. Weeks, she said, maybe longer.” I’m already scared of it, the length of it, the away-ness of it, but I’m more scared of the thing that happens if I go home to that apartment with the bottles and the shrink-wrapped gear and his number still in my phone.
“I want to go. Before I talk myself out of it.”
Theo just says, “Okay. Then we’ll get you there.” We. Like it was never a question he’d be in it.
It turns out the team’s already done part of it.
Sloane, or somebody, has cleared the way, there’s a bed held for me in Maren’s program starting as soon as they discharge me, the paperwork half-moving before I even asked, and bitterly I know the franchise wants me fixed because a fixed Roman is worth more than a dead one, the same math as always.
But I’m too tired to be proud about the reason.
A held bed is a held bed. Maren brings the intake forms herself, a clipboard thick with pages.
She hands it to me, and I notice she hands it to me, not to Theo, not to a publicist, to me, and waits.
I sign it myself. My hand’s still shaking, the signature comes out jagged the same as it did on those jerseys, but it’s my name and I’m the one putting it down, and that matters, that I’m the one.
There’s a line for emergency contacts, for the people they call, the people who’re allowed in, and I fill it in fast before the part of me that’s still loyal to the locked room can get a vote.
Theo. His number from memory. And Dara, because she’s pulled me out of more than she’ll ever bill for.
I look at the space under them and I think about Vic, who’s called twice since I woke up, both times about how this hurts my career, and I leave him off.
And I think about the name I’m not writing, the one my hand actually wants to write, the doctor, my north.
I leave him off too. It costs me, and I do it anyway.
Two names. Theo and Dara. People who want me alive more than they want me useful.
And that’s the line, I think, looking at the two names in my own jagged writing.
That’s the thing I couldn’t see for months, the difference I traded away without knowing I was trading it.
Elias wanted me useful to him, useful as a wreck, useful as the warm thing he got to run.
Vic wants me useful as a name. The franchise wants me useful as a return on a contract.
For a long time, the only people who got close to me were people who wanted me for what I could do or be, and I let it happen, because being useful was the one currency I trusted, the one I’d built a whole life out of.
These two on the clipboard are the only ones who’d want me if I never skated again, if the name went dark forever, if I was just a guy.
I almost died learning to tell those two kinds of love apart. I’m not going to forget it now.
I hand the clipboard back fast, like you let go of something hot, before I can read it over and start bargaining with it. “Okay,” I tell Maren, and my voice barely holds. “Okay. I’m in.”
She takes the clipboard and tells me the first thing I’ll do at her place is hand over my phone, all of it, every number in it.
I feel the panic spike and then, right behind it, something that’s nearly relief, because his number’s in that phone, my north is in that phone, and I’m not strong enough yet to be the one who keeps it.
So I nod. Give it to her now, I almost say.
Take it before I change my mind. I don’t have the strength to lock the door myself, but I’ve got just enough, today, to let somebody else hold it shut for me.