Chapter 4 — TEO
December
The song Brooks sent last night’s been stuck in my head since breakfast and I can’t tell if he sent it because he thought I’d like it or because he knew what it’d do to me.
It played through the lobby. It’s playing now as I walk the long hallway toward the treatment room with my bag over my right shoulder, which I still do even when I don’t need to.
The building’s quiet. Most of the guys are already on the ice.
Strings of Christmas lights have appeared over the equipment cage, hung by someone who doesn’t care about symmetry, and the lack of symmetry is a feature, now.
My love of this facility is irrational and total.
Three months in, I’ll defend this place to the death.
Christmas is in five days. My flight out is tomorrow. Nonna’s already texted me a list of things she’s going to make when I land, in a specific order, and I’ll eat all of it. When I’m done, she’ll make me eat more of it and I’ll let her and then have someone wheel me out of her house.
I’m still humming the chorus of that song without meaning to when I turn the corner, and that’s when I hear Brooks laugh.
Not the professional courtesy one. An actual laugh, full throat, the one he uses with the team and then kills the second I walk in.
The door’s open and I can see the edge of Brooks’s shoulder angled toward the table.
Thompson props himself up on his elbows, saying whatever he says, and Brooks laughs at it.
I stop in the hallway with my hand on the wall because I want to hear him do it again.
He doesn’t. But the echo of it’s still in the air when Thompson swings his legs off the table and I come around the corner like I haven’t been standing there listening like a creeper to Brooks’ laugh.
Thompson comes out, bag on his good side.
“Thommo.”
“Marchetti.”
“How’d it go in there?”
“Groin.” He doesn’t slow down. “Don’t die in Jersey while you’re home. Merry whatever.”
“Wait, wait. Where you flying?”
“Orlando. Bass tournament Saturday.”
“Thommo. You got a bass tournament with a groin strain?”
“I’m sitting in a boat.”
“My cousin Tony threw his back out landing a tuna off Long Branch. Hospital, Vicodin, the whole thing. He was in a chair.”
“I’m not fishing for tuna, man.”
“All fish are tuna to the muscles. It’s anatomy.”
Thompson almost smiles. He passes me on his way toward the locker room and knocks my shoulder. “He’s ready for you. Merry Christmas, Marchetti.”
“Merry Christmas, Thommo. Catch a big one.”
“Gonna catch five,” he calls back to me, still walking away.
The hallway goes quiet. In the treatment room, I can hear Brooks resetting the table, the rustle of paper, the click of a tablet being set back on the counter. I stand in the hallway for a second longer than I need to. The box in my bag presses against my hip through the fabric.
Brooks is wiping down the table when I walk in.
There’s a track running low from his phone on the counter, a bassline and no vocals, and when he looks up the smile that’d been on his face a second ago goes somewhere.
His mouth settles, his shoulders square.
He’s wearing the navy polo with the crest and dark jeans and the pen in his breast pocket’s the cheap facility-issue one with the logo printed crooked.
I know because I’ve been in this room three times a week for months now and notice everything. Not because I am paying extra attention to everything about him. That would be unprofessional.
“Marchetti.”
“Brooks.”
“On the table.”
I pull my shirt over my head and hop up. He runs the assessment the way he’s run every assessment for the last three months, top to bottom with no unnecessary words, which is also the problem.
“Arm out.”
I raise my arm. He watches it move, head tilted, the line between his eyebrows doing the thing it does when he’s concentrating.
“Hold there.” He presses two fingers along the one side, light, then firmer. His breath lands cool on my neck when he leans in. “Tell me when it’s restricted.”
Zay moves my arm back and I feel the pull. “When.”
He notes it. Switches to the other side. His hands are warm. They’re always warm. I have no idea where he keeps the warmth in those hands when the rest of him is this cold to me. It’s been fourteen weeks of sessions and the rest of him never gets the memo.
“Range is improved. Eight degrees since two weeks ago.”
“You hear that, shoulder? Good job.”
“Are you talking to your shoulder, Marchetti?”
“We have a relationship. It’s been a journey. I owe it some positive reinforcement.”
“You’ve been doing the accessory work.”
“I’ve been a model patient. I’ve been doing it at home.
I’ve been doing it in hotel rooms. I did it yesterday in the ice bath, which in retrospect maybe not the best choice to try to work my shoulder while my balls shrivel up.
” I see the twitch of his mouth. One corner, barely.
Gone before it starts. He kills it every time and every time I want to chase it.
But he moves on. “Great. Keep doing what you’re doing.”
He works my arm through positions I couldn’t hold in September. He’s pulling my arm back and I can’t help but move with him.
“Don’t help me.”
“I’m not helping you.”
“You’re helping me.”
“I am passively receiving your expertise.”
“Marchetti.” Flat. His thumb presses the joint and my shoulder opens further than it did three weeks ago and the only tell is the quarter-beat pause in his breathing.
“Brooks, come on. You’re allowed to be a little impressed.”
“We came up with a plan. These numbers match the plan. It’s expected.”
“Up from September!”
“Lie back, Marchetti.” He shakes his head, but I know he is trying not to laugh. With me, at me, I don’t care at this point.
I lie back. His hands work the anterior deltoid, the long head of the bicep, the insertion points.
I’ve had them on me enough times now that I know which stretch he’s about to do before he does it.
I know the pattern. I also know that when I was coming down the hallway five minutes ago he was laughing with Thompson.
Now he’s standing over me with his mouth set in that professional line, and I’m the only person in this building he does this around.
He finishes, snaps the towel off, and steps back grabbing his tablet. “Three sessions the week after the holiday break?”
“Second through fifth. Same slots.”
“Got it.” His head is down, marking the slots on his calendar.
I pull my bag up to my good shoulder. I could walk out now. I could walk out and not do the thing I came here to do. Instead I set my bag down and open the side pocket and take out the box.
It’s small. Matte black. It’s been in my bag for three days. Every morning I almost left it on my kitchen counter and every morning the bag won.
“Hey.” I set it on the counter next to his keyboard. “I got you a thing.”
He looks at the box. He doesn’t look at me.
“Marchetti. You didn’t need to do this.” He pauses, still staring at the box. “You shouldn’t have done this.”
“It’s not a thing. I mean, it’s a thing. But it’s not a thing. It’s just…Open it.”
He puts the charting tablet down. Careful, the way he’s careful with everything, setting it parallel to the edge of the counter. He picks up the box. He doesn’t look at me.
He opens it.
Two pens. One’s a fountain pen, matte black barrel, silver clip.
The other’s a rollerball. The Firebirds crest is engraved on the clip of each, small, not flashy, the firebird at the same angle on both.
I found a guy in Decatur who did the engraving by hand.
Brooks doesn’t need to know that part, because it would make this a thing, and this is not a thing.
He doesn’t say anything for a minute.
Then he picks up the fountain pen. Holds it. Clicks the cap off and looks at the nib. Clicks the cap back on. His thumb runs along the clip where the firebird is, once, back and forth. His thumb just stops on the engraving, pressed there, and his jaw does something I’ve never seen it do.
“Marchetti.”
“The cheap ones the facility gives you are bad. You know that. I’ve watched you write with the cheap one, I’ve seen your handwriting when the ink skips. It’s upsetting.”
“The ink skipping is upsetting?”
“Yes.” Simple answer, but not the whole answer.
He’s still looking at the pen. Not at me.
“The rollerball’s for your pocket. The guy I got it from told me where to get cartridges, they ship in threes. You can use it on charts, on the bus, wherever. They’re just pens.”
He sets the fountain pen back in the velvet. His hand stays on the box.
I take a half-step toward the counter and my hand moves before I decide it should. Toward his arm, the inside of his forearm where the sleeve of the polo ends. My fingers get close enough that I can feel the warmth coming off his skin before I pull them back to my side.
Brooks doesn’t see it. Or he sees it and pretends not to. His hand on the box doesn’t move. His breathing doesn’t change. But he doesn’t step back, either, and he could have.
“I’m gonna be late,” I say, but I don’t mention for what. Because there isn’t really anything other than a flight in five hours.
“Marchetti.” He puts the box down. “Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me. I was ordering stuff anyway.” This is a lie. I ordered them for him. “Merry Christmas. Or Happy holiday. Or whatever you celebrate.”
“Whatever I celebrate...”
“Uh, I don’t know what you might celebrate this time of year. I just...uh, wanted to get you something nice. You deserve something nice.”
He finally looks up.
There’s nothing in his face. The eyes are the eyes he shows me at work, not the ones that laughed with Thompson about a bass tournament five minutes ago.
He looks at me for maybe a second and a half, a blink longer than the last three months of sessions combined.
Then he nods once, small, and looks back to the pens.
I walk out.
Outside the treatment room the hallway’s too bright.
The strings of lights are still crooked.
I walk past them to the parking lot and I put my bag in the passenger seat and I sit for a minute with my hands on the wheel.
Then I start the car. The song he sent last night comes back on, the one I’d been humming without meaning to, and I let it play.