5. Roman
ROMAN
Iwake at noon with my face stuck to the couch cushion and no memory of moving from the bed.
The light’s all wrong, high and white and accusing, the light that means the morning happened without me.
My mouth tastes like the inside of the whiskey bottle and there’s a crust of something at the corner of my eye and my phone’s somewhere under me, digging into my hip, dead again.
I lie there a second taking inventory of the wreck.
Knee—throbbing, dull, the night’s pills worn off.
Head—splitting. A water glass tipped over on the floor by the couch that I don’t remember pouring, a dark stain spread into the rug beside it.
The framed jersey on the wall looking down at me like a thing in a museum about a guy who died.
The kitchen’s worse than I left it. The sink’s full, four days of it now, going on five, plates with food cemented to them and glasses ringed brown, and there’s a smell I’m choosing not to identify.
I stand in the middle of all of it in yesterday’s clothes, and I can’t make myself care enough to run the water.
That’s the part that should scare me—if I had the room left to be scared.
I used to be a guy who made his bed in a hotel before housekeeping came.
Now I’m a guy who lives in four hundred square feet of a house he’s letting rot around him.
I charge the phone enough to wake it and the notifications stack up the same as every day.
Theo, twice. You alive? Come to dinner, the kids ask about you.
And the rookie, Niko Berg, the twenty-year-old they called up when they put me on IR, who has decided for reasons I cannot fathom that we’re friends.
Hey Roman!! Was hoping I could pick ur brain about the forecheck sometime if ur up for it, no worries if not!
! Two exclamation points on everything, a kid wearing my number’s energy if not my number, his whole life still in front of him and his knees still his own, and I can’t look at it.
I can’t look at any of it. He’s what I was at twenty and doesn’t know yet that it ends with you stuck to a couch at noon.
I pour whiskey into last night’s glass without washing it.
I shake two pills into my palm and take them together, standing at the rotten sink, at noon, and I don’t even pretend to myself that the knee’s the reason this time.
The knee’s just the excuse I keep in my pocket.
I take them because the day is a thing I cannot do sober and there’s a skating test this afternoon that I already know how it will go.
The pills take hold and the warm hand comes over my chest and the kitchen stops being a thing I have to feel bad about.
That’s the trick of it, the thing nobody tells you.
It doesn’t make anything better. It just moves all of it one room over, behind a wall, where I can still see it but I don’t have to touch it, the dishes and the silence and the framed dead man on the wall, all of it filed away on the other side of the warmth.
Twenty minutes and I can almost stand myself.
I check the clock and I do the math on the next one before I’ve finished this one, which is a thing I’ve stopped pretending not to notice.
There are two clocks in me now. The comeback clock everyone keeps asking about, and this other one, the small private one counting down to relief, and only one of them is still running on schedule.
—
It goes how I know it goes.
They’ve got me out on the practice sheet for an assessment: me, a clipboard, Gus Renner’s assistant, Blake, a couple of the training staff standing along the boards with that careful nothing on their faces.
And Elias. Elias is there too, off to the side in his good coat with his arms folded, not writing anything down, just watching.
And I hate that he’s there. I skate worse because he is, and I can’t tell if I’m skating worse to punish him or to make him do something.
Niko’s out there too, at the far end, supposedly running his own drills but really just orbiting, sneaking looks, the kid who grew up with my poster on his wall watching his hero get tested like a lab animal and not knowing he should look away.
I told the staff I didn’t want an audience.
Nobody told the rookie, or the rookie didn’t have the sense, and every time I catch the flop of his pale hair in the corner of my eye it’s another set of teeth in me.
The thing is, on the ice, for about ninety seconds, I’m fine.
Straight lines, easy glide. My body remembers what it is, and my chest opens up for the first time in weeks, because this, this was the one place I was ever whole.
The cold air in my lungs, the hiss of steel on fresh sheet, the little sounds of a rink that I’ve heard since before I could read.
For ninety seconds I’m not a wreck on a couch, I’m Roman Vane, and I could weep with how good it is to be him again.
Then they have me cut hard on the edge. A real hockey stop, weight down into the knee, the thing I’ve done ten thousand times without a thought.
The knee doesn’t hold.
It’s not even pain, not at first, it’s absence, the joint just isn’t there when I ask for it, the leg folding under me like a tent pole pulled.
I go down on the fresh ice in front of all of them, sprawled, my stick clattering away.
And the sound the building doesn’t make is the worst sound in the world, because I’ve heard the other version of it, I’ve heard eighteen thousand people, and now it’s six people on a practice rink pretending they didn’t see.
I’m up fast. Too fast, wrong, the knee screaming now that the absence has filled back in with fire.
And I do the thing I do. I grab my stick off the ice and slam it across the top of the boards as hard as I’ve got, both hands.
It cracks. The blade end spins off into the bench, and I’m standing there with half a stick in my fists, breathing like I’ve run a mile.
Nobody says anything, and that’s worse than if they’d laughed.
Blake starts toward me with her hands a little out, that gentle approach you use on a spooked animal, and I can’t stand it.
“Don’t,” I tell her, and my voice is shaking.
“I’m fine. The edge was bad. Somebody sharpen my skates wrong, I’m—” and I don’t finish it because even I can hear it, the excuse with nothing under it, the same noise my father makes.
Across the rink, Elias hasn’t moved. Hasn’t come running, hasn’t softened, just stands there at the boards taking me in with those pale eyes, and somehow that’s the only thing in the building I can breathe near.
He’s the one person not performing sympathy at me.
I look at him for one second too long. Then I limp off the ice past all of them.
My phone buzzes in my bag in the tunnel, and it’s Dara, because of course it is.
The text says Great news! Gear company wants to lock the comeback shoot, can we give them a date? ?
A date. I just fell down on flat ice in front of six people. I turn the phone off without answering and I keep limping.
—
I go back that night to make him snap.
That’s the truth of it, the thing I won’t admit until much later.
I tell myself I’m going in to use the late slot, the second session he added, but I time it late, after everyone’s gone.
I go in already lit, two more pills and the last of the bottle in me.
I find him in the empty facility doing paperwork in that bright back room, and I get in his space and start swinging words.
I’m good at it. I’ve spent my life learning where people keep the soft parts. I go after the coat, the control, the cold. I tell him he’s a glorified massage therapist with a god complex. I tell him I’ve had surgeons, real ones, and he’s a guy who counts to ten while other men do the actual work.
“You get off on this,” I say, swaying a little, jabbing a finger at the empty bright room, the locked building, the two of us alone in it.
“Right? The little kingdom. Everybody scared of you, nobody allowed in. You picked the one job where you get to own grown men and call it medicine.” I’m close now, too close, in his space.
He hasn’t backed up an inch, and that just winds me tighter.
“I had a guy like you in juniors. Coach. Loved having broken kids who needed him. You’re the same, you just went to school for it. ”
I tell him he likes the late sessions because he’s got nothing to go home to, that I’ve seen it, that a man this buttoned-up is always rotting around something, and I get right up close when I say it, close enough to smell the clean nothing of him, daring him to shove me, to yell, to give me the fight my whole body is begging for because a fight I understand, a fight is the one currency I’ve still got.
Some part of me, way down, isn’t even doing it to hurt him.
I’m doing it to make him real. Everyone else in my life right now is a soft surface, my father’s disappointment, Dara’s optimism, Theo’s worry, Niko’s worship, and I’m a fist going through all of them and hitting nothing, no resistance anywhere, falling through the world.
I need one solid wall to hit. I need one person who won’t bend when I throw myself at them, because if everything gives then there’s nothing holding the room up and I’m just going to keep falling.
So I throw myself at the coldest, hardest thing in the building.
I think, underneath, I’m praying he holds.
He doesn’t give me one inch.