Chapter 26
"Grade-three concussion," she said. "Significant enough that I want to be clear with you about what that means.
This isn't something you push through. This isn't something you manage.
Your brain needs rest. Actual rest, not hockey player rest. If you don't give it that, you're looking at symptoms that compound in ways that will follow you for a long time. "
Dr. Reyes was maybe forty, dark hair pulled back.
I had a feeling that she had delivered this speech before and meant every word of it every time.
She had a clipboard and no patience for charm, which I could tell because I had tried the charm approximately thirty seconds in and she had looked at me over the clipboard with an expression that said she had seen better.
"How long am I going to be out?" I asked.
"Minimum two weeks before we reassess. Possibly more depending on how the symptoms progress."
"I have games—"
"You have a brain," she said. "Which is currently more relevant."
From somewhere to my left, Rob Morrison made a sound that was not quite a word but communicated full agreement with Dr. Reyes's position.
It was at that moment that I realized that my entire family was in the room.
I did the inventory. Dad, standing near the window with his arms crossed and his jaw doing the Dylan thing, which made sense because Dylan got it from somewhere.
Mom, sitting in the chair next to my bed with her hand on my arm.
Dylan, near the door, leaning against the wall with the focused stillness of someone who had been standing there long enough to look like part of the furniture.
"Two weeks, huh?" I said, because someone had to say something.
"Minimum," the doctor said. "No screens for the first seventy-two hours. No noise. No exertion. No flying for another twenty-four hours, which means you're staying in Toronto tonight." She looked around the room. "Questions?"
"When can I skate?"
"When a doctor clears you to skate," she said.
"He's always been like this," Mom said to Dr. Reyes. "Since he was a kid. You couldn't keep him off the ice."
"I'll need you to keep him off it now," Dr. Reyes said.
"We'll do our best," Mom replied, which was the Morrison family's honest assessment of their ability to make me do anything I'd decided not to do.
Dr. Reyes went through the rest of it—the protocol, the follow-up appointments, the list of symptoms that would require immediate attention—and I let it wash over me and nodded in the appropriate places and performed patient receiving information with the efficiency of someone who had been through this enough times to know the shape of it.
My head was a seven. Coming down, slowly, which was something.
Dr. Reyes left, after giving me a look that said she knew exactly what nodding in the appropriate places looked like and was not fooled.
Dad uncrossed his arms and came to stand at the foot of the bed.
He looked at Dylan in the doorway first.
"You should have pulled him back earlier," he said. Not unkind. Just regular Rob Morrison, stating what he saw, which was Dylan's job and the way Dylan had always been held to it. "You know how he gets."
Dylan's jaw did the thing.
"Yes," Dylan said. "I know."
Rob nodded. Filed it. Moved on.
"Decker," he said. To me.
"Dad, he’s—"
"I know," he said. "I know who Decker is. I know what he does." His jaw moved. "I also know what he said."
I looked at him.
"Section 112 has good acoustics," he said.
I didn't say anything.
Dad looked at the foot of the bed for a moment. Then: "Your brother's a good player."
"Yeah," I said. "He is."
Dad nodded. Once. Like he had said what he came to say and was done with the part that required words.
Dylan, from the door, said nothing. But something shifted in his face—just slightly, just for a second—and then it was gone and he was looking at the wall again.
Mom, who had been quiet for approximately as long as she was capable of being quiet, put both hands on my arm.
"You scared us," she said. "You scared us very much, Wesley."
"I'm okay," I said.
"You are not okay," she said. "You have a grade-three concussion and you need to rest and you are going to rest and you are not going to argue with me about it."
"I wasn't going to argue."
"You were absolutely going to argue."
She wasn't wrong.
"The team doctor brought us here," she said.
"Dr. Cross. Before he—" She paused. "He came to find us himself.
In the arena. He explained what had happened, he brought us to the hospital.
He stayed until he knew you were being seen.
" She seemed to have arrived at a conclusion and was deciding how much of it to share. "He was very good. Very thorough."
"He's a good doctor," I said.
"He was also," Mom said, in a different tone, the one she used when she was about to say something she'd been holding, "extremely handsome."
Dylan made a sound.
"Linda," Dad said.
"I'm just observing." She shrugged. "I'm allowed to observe. He had very nice eyes." She looked at me. "Blue. Very blue."
"I hadn't noticed," I said.
Dylan made the sound again, louder.
"Are you getting sick?" Dad asked him.
"No," Dylan said.
"You keep making a noise."
"I'm fine," Dylan said, to the wall.
Mom patted my arm and looked satisfied with how the conversation had gone, and I lay in a Toronto hospital bed with a grade-three concussion thinking about very blue eyes and the space where a lanyard should have been.
"Where is he?" I said. "Nath—I mean, Dr. Cross. Where did he go?"
The room did a thing.
Not dramatically. Nobody flinched. Nobody said anything. Nobody moved.
Dad looked at Mom. Mom looked at Dylan.
Dylan looked at me.
"He had some things to deal with," Dylan said. "With the team."
"What kind of thing?"
"Administrative things."
Administrative things. What the hell did that mean?
"He was kind," Mom said, into the silence. "Dr. Cross. When he came to find us. He was very calm and very clear and he—" She stopped. "He looked like he was sorry," she said. "In a real way."
I looked at the ceiling for a long time after that.
Nobody left.
That was the thing I kept coming back to, lying there in the Toronto hospital bed. Mom had her hand on my arm. Dylan was still at the wall, which was where Dylan was when there was nothing to fix and he was staying anyway.
Nobody left.
They were in a Toronto hospital room at midnight and nobody was leaving.
I looked at the ceiling.
He looked like he was sorry, Mom had said. In a real way.
Administrative things, Dylan had said.
The space where a lanyard should have been.
I closed my eyes.
Somewhere across the city, Nathan was doing something I didn't have the full picture of yet, and my head was a seven and coming down, and the Morrison family was in the room, and I fell asleep thinking about all of it.
They were still there when I woke up.
My apartment.
Mom had cleaned it.
Not obviously—she hadn't rearranged anything, hadn't moved the game controllers or reorganized the shelves—but the takeout containers were gone and the laundry had been done and there was actual food in the fridge, not just condiments and wax cheese, actual food, things that required preparation and intention.
This meant Mom had been to a grocery store and had opinions about what her son should be eating.
I was on the couch under a blanket that had also been washed, which I hadn't asked her to do, which was just Linda.
Dad was in the armchair watching a game with the volume at a level that was technically within my rest protocol parameters but that he kept threatening to lower every time I made a face.
The faces were involuntary. The lights were still doing something.
Not the Toronto something, not the eight, just—sensitive, the world slightly louder than usual at the edges.
"Stop making the face," Dad said. "I'll turn it down."
"I'm not making a face."
"You're making the face."
"I'm fine."
"You have a grade-three concussion."
"I know what I have."
"Then stop making the face," Dad said, and turned it down two units, which he'd been going to do anyway, and pretended he hadn't.
Dylan was in the kitchen with Mom, which was where Dylan always ended up when the family was together, helping with things that didn't need helping and listening to whatever she needed to say about whatever she needed to say it about. I could hear them in there. Low voices.
The Morrison family, in my apartment.
Rob in the armchair. Linda in the kitchen. Dylan helping.
It should have felt normal. It mostly did.
Except I kept thinking about a corridor and a lanyard and administrative things said in a tone that meant something else, and the game on the TV was hockey, which I couldn't watch, which Dad had been switching away from every time a game came on and pretending he wasn't doing that either.
My phone buzzed.
Foster: Are you dead?
I ignored that one. I had other texts.
Jenkins: how r u feeling bro
I typed back: fine
Jenkins: liar
Jenkins: also heard something weird
I sat up slightly, which my head noted with displeasure.
what
Jenkins: is cross ok?
I stared at the screen, a sinking feeling in my stomach.
what do you mean
Jenkins: like he's not at work. i asked around and someone said he's taking time off or something
Jenkins: which is weird right bc doc doesnt take time off
Jenkins: morr??
I put my phone down.
Picked it up.
Put it down.
From the armchair Rob said: "Rest protocol means no screens."
"I know," I said.
"Linda will confiscate it."
"I know, Dad.”
I put the phone on the cushion beside me face-down and looked at the ceiling and thought about not at work and taking some time and administrative things and the space where a lanyard should have been, and all of those things were pointing at the same place—and I didn't want to look at where they were pointing.
Dylan came out of the kitchen.
He looked at me. Then at the phone face-down on the cushion.
"Jenkins?" he said.
"Yeah," I said.
Dylan sat on the other end of the couch. Dad turned the game down another two units without being asked.
"Dylan," I said.
"Wes," he said.
"Have you heard anything? About Cross."
Dylan was quiet for a moment. Not the thinking quiet. The deciding quiet.
"Talk to you later," he said.
Not he's fine. Not don't worry. Just—talk to you later, which was Dylan's version of I have something to tell you and I'm not doing it in front of Rob and Linda with the game on.
I looked at him.
He looked back.
Then my phone buzzed again.
I picked it up. Not Jenkins this time.
Knox.
Knox didn't do preamble. Knox had never done preamble in his life.
Knox: Heard doc got fired. That true?
I stared at the text.
The word fired sitting there on the screen. No softening, no context, no Knox-style elaboration. Just the word and the question mark.
From the armchair, Dad said something about the power play.
From the kitchen, Mom said something back.
Dylan was watching me.
I put the phone down.
I got up off the couch, which I wasn't supposed to do, which Linda's voice in my head immediately noted.
I stood in my apartment in the clean-laundry-real-food version of it, the Morrison family version, Rob in the armchair and Linda in the kitchen and Dylan on the couch watching me, and I thought about the lanyard.
The space where it should have been.
Just his shirt.
Fired.
"Wes," Dylan said.
"Yeah," I said.
"Sit down."
I sat down.
Dylan looked at me for a long moment. Then he picked up the remote and handed it to Dad.
"Turn it up," Dylan said.
Dad looked at him. Turned it up.
Dylan looked at me.
"Later," he said. Quiet. Just for me.
I looked at the TV.
The game was on.
I didn't see any of it.