Chapter 12
Jamie — Past
I was eleven years old and for approximately two hours on a Saturday afternoon in March I forgot to be careful.
Danny Korek from next door knocked on the front door and asked if I wanted to come out. My mom answered before I could stop her, and I ended up in Danny's driveway with a basketball and nowhere to be until dinner.
Danny was the kind of kid who made things easy.
Loud in a way that filled the empty space so you didn't have to.
He moved through the world like he had never once considered that it might not want him in it.
The complete opposite of me. I always found this baffling.
I had also found it to be the best thing I'd ever seen up close — that kind of ease, the way it looked from the outside, like something you could catch if you stood close enough.
We played for a while. Basketball first, then something that stopped being basketball and started being its own game with rules we made up as we went.
He was funny. Not trying-to-be-funny. Just naturally funny, the way some people are, where things fall out of their mouths and land and you're laughing before you even understand it.
I scored on him and he lost his mind.
Jamie.
Like I'd done something incredible. Like it was the best thing he'd seen all week.
He grabbed my arm — both hands, shaking it — and I was laughing before I even realized I was laughing.
The kind that came up from somewhere I'd forgotten existed.
The kind that didn't check with you first. I couldn't remember the last time I'd laughed like that.
We ended up sitting on the driveway after, catching our breath, shoulders touching because the driveway was sloped and that was just where we ended up.
He was telling me something about his cousin and I was listening and at some point I wasn't thinking about anything except what he was saying.
I was so busy being happy that I didn't notice my dad at the window.
I found out later it didn't matter how long he'd been there.
The way I was looking at Danny was enough to be considered wrong within a second of him watching.
He didn't say anything when I came inside.
He was standing in the kitchen with his keys already in his hand and a look on his face I had spent years learning to read.
Flat. Contained. The stillness of a man who had already decided what was going to happen and was simply waiting for me to follow.
My mom was upstairs. I could hear the television through the ceiling. Could feel the distance of her.
"Get your gear."
I opened my mouth.
He looked at me.
I closed it immediately.
I went upstairs and got my gear and came back down and he hit me in the kitchen before we left, before I even registered it.
Open palmed. Fast. The side of my face into the counter, hard enough that the room tilted and I had to grab the edge of it to stay up.
My ear rang. The sound of it was very loud in the small kitchen. I didn’t make a single sound.
He didn't say anything after either. He picked up his keys from the counter and walked to the door and just waited for me to follow.
I followed.
My mom didn't come downstairs. The TV upstairs just got louder.
He drove me to the rink without speaking.
Twenty minutes in the car with my ear still ringing and the side of my face starting to swell and my dad's hands on the wheel at ten and two like he was driving somewhere ordinary.
The radio was off, all I could hear were the soft sounds of traffic outside.
I watched the streetlights and counted them and kept my breathing even and didn't touch my face.
Didn't cry. I knew he was listening to see if I would. I already knew better.
He paid for the ice time at the front desk. Nodded at a guy he knew. Acted like a man doing a normal thing with his son and dropped my bag at the boards.
"Edges. Go."
I went.
He sat in the bleachers with his arms folded and watched me for the first hour.
Edge work. Shooting sequences. Edge work again.
He didn't coach. Didn't correct. Didn't say a single word — just watched with that flat expression that I had learned was worse than anger.
Anger I could work with. Anger had edges, escalated, burned out at some point.
This was something else. Something crueler. Deeper. Endless. He never ran out.
I ran the drill again.
My ear stopped ringing around the forty minute mark.
My face kept swelling, but the cold was helping.
I kept my head angled away from the bleachers so he couldn't see it clearly.
Around the second hour he got up and went somewhere — coffee, the bathroom, I didn't know.
I kept going. It didn't occur to me not to. Like a trained dog, I just kept going because I wasn’t told I could stop yet.
I needed to use the bathroom around three hours in.
I knew because there was a clock above the penalty box and I spent a long time looking at it. Five more minutes. I could do five more. I ran the sequence. I did the edges. I looked at the clock. When he came back I skated to the boards and told him.
He looked at me like I was stupid for even asking.
"You stop when I tell you to stop, you know that."
I looked back at him.
I was eleven years old and my face was inflamed and he was sitting in the bleachers of a hockey rink and there was nothing in his expression that left any room for argument. Nothing that would have looked like anything to anyone who walked in right then except a father watching his son practice.
I went back to the ice.
I lasted another forty minutes.
I kept counting. Five more. Just five. Come on.
I ran the drill and I counted and I did the edges again and I ran the drill again and at some point the counting stopped working and I was skating a sequence along the boards and my body did what my body did and I kept moving because stopping without permission was the one thing that would make it worse.
The cold hid it for a while.
Eventually it didn't.
I had pissed myself on a hockey rink and I didn't stop skating. That was the part that stayed with me. Not the humiliation. The fact that I didn't stop, not once. I didn't look at the bleachers. I just kept moving.
I ran the drill again. And again. I got the edge sequence cleaner on the left side, which had always been weaker, and I ran it three more times until it stopped feeling like something I was doing and started feeling like something I knew.
My stick handling tightened up in the third hour in a way it hadn't before, the repetition doing what repetition does, my hands finding the rhythm even when my brain was somewhere else entirely.
I didn't look at the bleachers.
My dad let me skate another twenty minutes after.
Then he stood up.
"Let's go."
I got off the ice. I took my skates off at the boards. I put my shoes on. I picked up my bag. He signed something at the front desk. Nodded at the same guy. Acted like a man who had just done a normal thing.
We drove home without speaking.
My mom had dinner ready on the table.
She looked at my face when I sat down. Her eyes went to the swelling at my cheek, the way my ear was still slightly red. Something moved through her expression — fast, practiced, the way water moves around a stone it has learned is there. Gone in an instant.
She looked at her plate instead and began to talk.
"How was the ice, honey?"
"Fine."
She nodded. Passed the bread to my dad. The television was on in the other room and someone was laughing at something and the sound of it came through the wall like it was from somewhere very far away. Somewhere happy.
Maybe somewhere like Danny’s house.
Not this table.
I ate and I kept my eyes on my plate.
I thought about the drill sequences. The left edge, which was cleaner now.
The shooting sequence that kept breaking down in the middle because I was dropping my shoulder and I needed to stop dropping my shoulder.
I thought about these things because they were the right size for right now. They fit inside what I could hold.
I didn't think about Danny again.
I didn't think about his hands on my arm or the way he said my name like it was good news or how it felt to sit on that sloped driveway shoulder to shoulder with someone and not be bracing for something.
I didn't think about the laughing, the real kind, the kind that came up from somewhere I'd forgotten I had.
I put it somewhere I didn't have to look at it. I was getting very good at that. Putting things somewhere I didn't have to look at them. Building rooms inside myself for everything I wasn't allowed to have and closing the doors and not going back.
My dad reached for the bread while mom asked him something about work. He answered. The television laughed at something in the other room.
Something closed in me that night. Something that went all the way down, past the place where it was a choice, past the place where I was doing it on purpose. Something that had closed at that kitchen window the second I understood what my father saw through it.
Not a fight. Not a bad grade. Not a rule I broke or a chore I forgot or anything I could have fixed if I tried harder.
Just me. Being myself.
Standing too close to someone. Laughing too loud. Forgetting to check who was watching.
Just me, being something my father saw through a window and immediately recognized and knew what to do about it.
I didn't have a word for it yet.
But the message landed anyway. The thing he saw and the thing he decided about it and the specific methodical way he spent an entire afternoon making sure I understood.
I understood.
I twirled my fork and I didn't look up.
I learned the rule so completely that eventually it stopped feeling like a rule. It just felt like who I was.
I was eleven years old and I was learning the most important thing anyone would ever teach me.
Want nothing.
Show nothing.
Be nothing anyone can see.
Be still.
Be still.
Be still.