Powerplay , Romance With My Proplayer

The hit doesn't hurt at first. Nobody warns you about that. What I get is a sound, a dull wet click from somewhere behind my collarbone, like someone stepping on a plastic cup in another room. Then the boards come up, the lights go white, and I'm flat on the ice tasting blood where my own tooth went through my lip. A face drops into view. Not a teammate's. Number 44 from Columbus, Marchetti, helmet shoved back half an inch, close enough that I can smell his mouthguard. "This one's from Eddie's friends," he says, almost kindly. "Interest is due Friday." Then a linesman hauls him off, hands raised like a choirboy, and I'm left on my back with my brother's name ringing louder than the horn. "Cap!" Now it's Danny Rourke, upside down, eyes huge, "Cole. Say something." "Marchetti's mother dresses him funny." He laughs like a guy who needed to. I let him pull me up. Getting up is the job. My left hand won't close. I tell the fingers to make a fist, and they do something closer to a shrug, buzzing like I slept on them wrong. I wedge the glove behind my stick and take the long way to the bench, looping the face off the circle so nobody sees what I'm favoring. Marty meets me at the gate with his bag. He's been our trainer since I was a rookie, same gray quarter-zip, same coffee stain on the sternum, and he looks at my arm and then my face with the patience of a man who's had this conversation four hundred times. "Let me see it." "Cramp." "Cole." "Hale's up in his glass box, Marty. I'm not leaving on a stretcher in front of the new owner." "Hale couldn't tell a cramp from a coupon." "Which is why I'm fine." Coach Dalton doesn't turn his head when I sit. Twenty years behind a bench and he has exactly one tell: he chews his gum slower when he knows you're lying. Right now he's practically meditating. "One shift," he tells the ice. "Then you sit." "Yes, sir." We both hear how that sounds. · · · It's tied two-two with four minutes left. Danny strips a defenseman at the blue line and feeds me in stride, and I take it with my right hand choked halfway up the shaft, left arm swinging off me like a coat on a hook. The kid covering me bites on a shoulder fake. Even that inch of lean sends a wire from my neck to my elbow, and for a second I'm seeing colors. I shoot anyway. The puck clips the post, caroms off the goalie's skate, and goes in. The horn blasts. Danny tackles me. "Franchise guy!" He's pounding my back, the bad side, and I clamp my jaw around whatever noise wants out. His wife is due in March. He's told me twice since warm-ups, and he's been floating ever since. I can't make myself shove him off. Then his mouth is next to my ear, and the floating is gone from his voice. "Whatever the new doctor tells you," he says, "check it twice." "Danny, what—" He's already pulling back, grinning for the cameras. But his eyes aren't on me. They're on the owner's box, high up behind the glass, where a man in a gray suit is standing perfectly still while everyone else in the building jumps. · · · By the tunnel my knees have opinions. It smells like rubber matting and scorched coffee, with a stripe of the rain that came in during the second period leaking through the loading dock, tar and wet pavement, the way this city smells when October can't decide what it wants to be. I lean my good shoulder on the cinder block and wait for my legs to agree to be legs. "You're holding that stick like it owes you money." A woman is standing under the exit sign with an iPad hugged to her chest. Navy blazer, dark hair pinned up with a pencil, a lanyard I don't recognize. She isn't looking at my face. She's looking at my shoulder like it said something rude about her mother. Check it twice, Danny said. I didn't think I'd need to do it this fast. "And you are ?" "Maya Reyes. Sports medicine. Mr. Hale hired me on Monday." "Hale hires a lot of people." "He hired me for you." She comes closer. Up close, she's shorter than I figured, which doesn't seem to bother her. "Left clavicle's sitting about a centimeter off. Grade three AC sprains, maybe worse. You've been choking up with one hand since the second period, and then you scored with it." She tilts her head. "It was beautiful. It was also stupid." "I'm fine." "Your lips are gray." "Arena lighting." "That's a shock." She holds out her hand. "Give me your fingers." I don't, so she takes them. Her hand is warm and dry and in no hurry. She presses each fingertip and watches the nail beds go white, then pink, then white again, and I stare at the exit sign and blame the heat in my neck on blood loss. "Forty-eight hours," she says. "You come to my office and tell the truth, or I walk this down to Coach Dalton myself." "You've known me six minutes." "I've known your file for three days." She thumbs the screen and turns the iPad around. A scanned page goes yellow at the corners. March 2019. Three diagnoses stacked like unpaid bills. "The previous team doctor swore this didn't exist. Three concussions, Mr. Brannigan. You played through every one." The hallway goes narrow. The crowd noise upstairs thins out until it's just a hum in the ceiling. Nobody knows about those. Not Marty, not Dalton. Not even my mother. "Where did you get that?" "That's what I can't sleep over." She says it lower, and for the first time she sounds less like a doctor. "Nobody gave it to me. It showed up at my office in a plain envelope. Your name on the front. No return address." My phone buzzes against my hip. I'd ignore it, but her eyes slide to the screen first, and so do mine. Unknown number. One line. Nice goal, Cole. Ask your brother what he owes. I looked up to ask if she saw it. She's already turned her own phone face down against the iPad, fast, the way you hide a card. She isn't surprised. That's what I noticed. Not scared, not curious. She isn't surprised at all.