Chapter 23
Matt
"You look like shit."
Mason's assessment wasn't wrong. Five days of watching Frank sweat through sheets and vomit into buckets and shake so hard the bed frame rattled.
Five days of sleeping in thirty-minute stretches on the floor beside him because I was afraid of what would happen if I left the room.
My body was running on caffeine and muscle memory and whatever reserve a professional athlete keeps for the absolute bottom of the tank.
"I'm fine," I said.
"He's not fine," Mason told Coach George.
George was already looking at me with the expression that meant he'd made a decision before I'd walked in. Arms crossed. Jaw set. The stance of a man who'd benched a hundred players and knew how the conversation went.
"Maybe you should sit this one out, Baker."
We were in the locker room. Pre-game. The rest of the team was already geared up, going through the rituals.
Taping sticks. Checking edges. Bouncing tennis balls against the boards for hand-eye.
And here I was, being told to watch from the press box because I looked like a man who'd lost a fight with the week.
"I'm playing."
"Matt—"
"I said I'm playing, Coach."
He studied me. Really looked, reading me the way he read a play developing, scanning for the weakness in the system. I held his gaze. Didn't blink. My body might be running on fumes but my will was the one thing exhaustion couldn't touch.
"Your emotions under control?" he asked.
"Yes."
It was the biggest lie I'd told since "I don't care about anything" at a gas station in the rain.
My emotions were a disaster. Frank's withdrawal.
The bone-deep exhaustion that had turned my vision grainy at the edges.
And underneath everything, Carrie's silence after I'd told her I loved her.
The way she'd started talking about Nora Ephron like I hadn't just handed her the only honest thing I had left.
But I could compartmentalize. That was the deal. The body does its job and the head stays quiet.
George nodded. "If I see you slipping, you're coming off."
"Understood."
The puck dropped and my body answered like it always did.
First shift, and the exhaustion burned off the way morning fog burns off the ice.
Muscle memory took over, fifteen years of training running the program.
My edges were sharp. My reads were clean.
My hands remembered what they were built for even when the rest of me had forgotten.
First goal at three minutes. A turnover at their blue line, and the lane opened like a door someone had left ajar.
I took two strides, deked the defenseman to his backhand, and went high glove.
The puck hit the mesh and the building came apart.
Twenty thousand people chanting my name, and for three seconds the week didn't exist.
Second goal at eight minutes. Power play. I set up in my office at the top of the left circle, received Mason's feed, and one-timed it past their screened goalie. The ice shook with the crowd's response. Mason crashed into me, helmet to helmet, yelling something beautiful and profane.
Third goal at twelve. A hat trick before the first period even ended.
I stripped their defenseman at our blue line, broke out alone, and beat the goalie five-hole with a shot I could have made in my sleep.
Hats rained onto the ice. My name echoed off the rafters.
And I believed, in that moment, that the body could outrun anything. That the deal was still holding.
Then I missed the fourth.
Wide open net. Perfect pass from Dylan, a setup so clean it was practically pre-wrapped. All I had to do was redirect it. Touch it. Guide it the last three feet.
The puck sailed wide. Hit the boards and died.
The crowd groaned, that collective downshift in expectation, and something cold moved through my chest. One miss. No big deal. Everyone missed.
Except I missed the next one too. A wrist shot from the slot that caught the post when it should have been buried. My release was late. A fraction of a second, the kind of delay nobody notices in warmups but means everything at game speed.
And the one after that. A tap-in from the crease, the kind of goal I'd been making since peewees, and my stick was a full second behind the puck, swinging through empty air.
My body was done.
Not tired. Done. The fuel had run out and what was left was a machine operating on nothing, going through the motions while the system collapsed behind the dashboard.
My legs felt like they'd been filled with wet sand.
My hands, the hands I'd trusted my whole life, were moving half a beat behind where my brain told them to be.
Mason slid over during a stoppage. "You okay?"
"I'm fine."
"You're not fine, Matt."
"I said—"
The puck dropped. Play resumed. Our right wing sent a perfect pass across the crease, a sleek feed that landed on my tape with the net gaping in front of me. The easiest goal I'd get all season.
I missed again. My stick went through the spot where the puck had been half a second earlier, and the groan from the crowd traveled through the ice and into my skates.
I tried to get back into position. Tried to make my legs drive, my edges cut, my body do the one thing it had always done without asking. But the ice was tilting. Or I was tilting. The arena lights smeared into streaks. The noise went underwater.
"Baker!" Mason's voice. Far away. Getting farther.
The deal had broken. The one deal I'd built everything on, the only contract that had never let me down, body and ice and the certainty that if I trained hard enough my body would answer. It wasn't answering anymore. It was filing a grievance, and the terms were non-negotiable.
My knees hit the ice first. Then my shoulder. Then everything went quiet.
* * *
Fluorescent lights. White ceiling tiles. Antiseptic. The Bruins logo on the far wall.
"Welcome back."
Mason sat in the chair beside the bed. Coach George stood by the window with his arms crossed.
"What happened?" My voice came out scraped and raw.
"You passed out on the ice. In front of twenty thousand people." Mason managed a grim smile. "Dramatic as hell."
Memory filtered back in frames. The hat trick. The misses. The ice tilting. The fall.
"When's the last time you slept, Baker?" George asked.
I tried to sit up. My body objected. I overruled it.
"I slept."
"When?"
"Recently."
"Matt." Sharp now. "When?"
I couldn't lie anymore. The ice had stripped that option away along with everything else.
"Five days. Maybe six. I lost count. Frank's withdrawal has been—" I stopped. Tried a different word. Couldn't find one. "Hell. It's been hell."
"You played a professional hockey game on no sleep for almost a week," Mason said. "You understand how insane that sounds."
"He needed me."
"Frank needs professional help," George said. "Not his brother running himself into the ground."
"No rehab." The words came out sharper than I intended.
"He's been. Multiple times. It made things worse.
The structured environment, the group therapy, the constant monitoring.
It triggered him. Made him feel caged. He checked himself out of the last one and disappeared for three months, and when I found him he was worse than before. "
I could see it. Frank in that facility. The fluorescent lights, the linoleum, the counselors with their clipboards. The look on his face when I'd visited. Not a person getting better. A person being held in place while the disease ran laps around the treatment.
"Just mentioning rehab terrifies him," I said. "I can't do that again."
George and Mason exchanged the look. The one that said I was probably wrong but they didn't have the argument to prove it.
"Fine," George said. "No rehab. But you're benched. Effective immediately."
The word hit like a clean check I hadn't seen coming. "What?"
"Until you get this under control. Until you're sleeping, eating, functioning like a human being instead of a martyr with a death wish.
" His voice softened, barely. "Take all the time you need.
We'll be here when you're ready. But I won't put you back on the ice until I know you won't end up back on this table. "
There was no arguing. I'd collapsed on the ice on live television. The argument had been made for him.
"Go home, Baker."
I nodded. Couldn't trust my voice with anything more.
George left to handle the media. Mason stayed, helped me change out of the gear and into sweats.
My hands shook through the buttons. Same hands that had scored three goals an hour ago.
Same hands that had held Carrie's face when I told her I loved her.
Same hands that had been shaking on and off since a gas station in the rain, telling me something I'd been too stubborn to hear.
We walked out together. The facility was quiet. The game had finished without me. We'd won. 4-2. Good for them.
"By the way," Mason said at the parking lot. "Your girl's been calling me. Nonstop. Five times today asking if you're okay. Wanted to know if she should come by. If you needed anything."
I stopped walking.
"She's definitely crazy in love with you, man."
The words should have helped. Should have loosened something. Instead they just pressed on the bruise.
"If she loved me," I said, "she would have said it back."
Mason's grin faded. "Maybe she was scared."
"Or maybe she doesn't feel the same way." I unlocked my car. "Either way, it doesn't matter right now. I've got bigger problems than my girlfriend not being able to say three words."
The lie tasted worse than all the others combined. Because it did matter. It mattered in a way I didn't have the energy to examine, and the fact that I'd played a hockey game to collapse trying to outrun it was evidence enough.
I drove home.
Frank would be there. The withdrawal. The night sweats. The cycle that wouldn't break.
And Carrie's silence, living in my chest right next to the missed shots, taking up the same space, hurting in the same way, the specific pain of things you can't fix no matter how hard you try.