Skating Into Trouble

The email came in at 6:02 in the morning, and I read it three times before I let myself believe the number at the bottom.

Six weeks. Private recovery case. A per diem that made me sit down on the edge of my unmade bed with my coffee going cold in my hand.

“Priya,” I said into the phone, because Priya answers at six the way normal people answer at noon. “Read me the number again. I think I'm hallucinating.”

“You're not hallucinating,” Priya said. “You're the only person Marchetti trusts with a six week solo, and the client's a nightmare, so they're paying nightmare money.”

“How much of a nightmare?”

“You'll find out when you read the name.”

I scrolled. And there it was, in the assignment field, in the flat institutional font the league uses for everything.

Varga, Eamon. Defenseman. Ironbrook Wolves. Left shoulder, posterior labral repair, six week supervised rehabilitation, Lakeside Point.

“Oh,” I said.

“There it is.”

“He's supposed to be—” I stopped, because I was not going to say the word difficult out loud before I'd even met the man. “I've seen him give interviews.”

“Everybody's seen him give interviews. That's the problem. He gives one word answers and looks at the reporter like they owe him money.” A pause, and I could hear Priya doing the thing she does, softening. “Lior. You okay with this? Six weeks alone with a guy who once told a journalist that talking to the press was, and I quote, a waste of a functioning mouth?”

I looked around my apartment. At the stack of bills on the counter that I had sorted into a fan the night before, biggest on top, the way you're not supposed to. At the pill organizer by the sink that was not mine. At the photo of Tessa on the fridge, seventeen and grinning, from before.

“I'm okay with it,” I said.

“Liora.”

“It's four months of her medication, Priya. Maybe five if the pharmacy runs the coupon.” I stood up and poured the cold coffee down the sink. “For that I can survive one grumpy hockey player. I've survived worse men for free.”

Priya laughed, but it was the careful laugh, the one that knew exactly which worse men I meant.

Here is the thing nobody tells you about being cheerful. People think it's a personality. They think you're born with it, like curly hair or good teeth, and that it means nothing bad has ever happened to you. They see me walk into a room with a smile and they decide, in about a second and a half, that I'm soft.

I have made a career out of that second and a half.

Because while they're deciding I'm soft, I'm reading the room. I'm watching how a patient holds his injured side, whether he winces on the inhale or the exhale, whether he's the kind of man who'll do his exercises or the kind who'll lie about them and blame me when he doesn't heal. Cheerful is not the absence of hard things. Cheerful is a decision you make every single morning, with your feet on a cold floor and a stack of bills fanned out on the counter, that the hard things do not get your whole face.

Eamon Varga was going to decide I was soft. They all do.

I was already looking forward to being wrong at him.

“No,” I said.

“Eamon.”

“No.”

Coach Halloway put both hands flat on his desk, which is what he does when he's decided a thing and is pretending it's a conversation. I've watched him do it to referees, general managers, and once to a reporter who deserved worse.

“It's not a request,” he said.

“Then why'd you phrase it like one?”

“Because I was being polite.” He slid the folder across the desk. I didn't touch it. “Six weeks. Lakeside Point. Supervised rehab, private physio, no press, no phones from the front office, no me. You do the program, you get the shoulder back, and you come back to this team in one piece instead of the piece you're currently held together with.”

I looked at the folder and did not look at my shoulder, which was in a sling I hated, strapped down like the whole arm had committed a crime.

“I can rehab here,” I said.

“You can't, actually, and here's how I know.” Halloway sat down, which meant the standing part of the argument was over and the part where he tells me the truth was starting. “In eleven years I have never seen you take a day off. You played three rounds of playoffs on a shoulder that was already torn. You didn't tell the trainers because you knew they'd sit you. You went out there and you played through a labral tear because some broken part of you would rather destroy the joint than sit on a bench.”

“We were winning.”

“We lost, Eamon.”

And there it was, in the room with us, the thing neither of us had said in the four days since the buzzer. We lost. Game seven. My shoulder went in the second period and I said nothing and played the third, and on the play that ended our season I was a half second slow because my arm wouldn't do what I told it, and their winger walked around me like I was a cone, and that was the year. Gone. Because I decided I was tougher than a human shoulder.

“If I go to some lake,” I said, “for six weeks, with some—” I couldn't even find the word for it. “Some wellness person with a whistle. What does that fix.”

“It fixes your shoulder. And maybe, if we're very lucky and God is generous, it fixes about two percent of whatever this is.” He gestured at all of me. “Because I've got a locker room full of guys who'd run through a wall for you and won't sit next to you at breakfast, and that's not a shoulder problem, and it's not going to fix itself in a building full of people you scare.”

“I don't scare them.”

“Novak asked me last week if you were angry at him. You've never spoken to Novak. That's the point.” Halloway tapped the folder. “Sign the program. Go to the lake. Let somebody help you for six weeks. It's not a punishment.”

“It feels like a punishment.”

“Yeah,” he said, not unkindly. “Most good things do, to you. I've noticed that. It's the saddest thing about you and I've known you eleven years.”