Page 131 of Puck the Coach's Son
The house doesn't fall.
I still do. I fall hard, and I fall quiet, and I fall the whole way.
20
MADDOX
Two uniformed guys walk me to my truck.
They don't touch me after the first grab at the corridor. They don't have to. One in front, one behind, the geometry of men who have done this before. The one in front is maybe twenty-four, razor-burn down his neck, a wedding band that's new enough it still catches on his glove. The one behind is older. Bored. Doing overtime.
I walk in full gear because they didn't let me change. Skates traded for shower slides at the tunnel. Pads still on. Jersey still on. Blood still on the shoulder of the quarter-zip. The blood is cold now. It sticks the fabric to my collarbone and peels off a little with every step. Nobody in the service corridor looks at me. Everybody looks at me.
Callahan is behind us somewhere. Paul is behind us somewhere. Theo is behind us somewhere in a hallway I'm not allowed to walk back into.
Wait for me,I said.
I said it with my hands up. I said it with blood in my eye. I said it with security already on my arms. I said it like a guy who didn't know yet how small his world was about to get.
The kid in front opens the door to the players' lot. Cold hits my face. My breath goes white. My truck is where I parked it seven hours ago, back when the biggest problem in my life was a coach's pre-game speech I was going to play around. The wedding-band kid steps aside.
“Mr. Creed. You're gonna drive yourself home.”
“Yeah.”
The older one shifts his weight behind me.
“We'll follow you to the building. Mr. Callahan wants eyes on.”
“Fine.”
I get in the truck in full gear. The chest plate hits the wheel. I have to lean back to clear it. I start the engine and my hands are shaking, not from cold, from the adrenaline dump that's arriving ten minutes late, right on its usual schedule.
I pull out of the lot. Headlights in my rearview. A black SUV, not a cruiser, which tells me Callahan keeps his own guys on retainer, which tells me more about Callahan than I wanted to know tonight.
The drive is six minutes. It takes longer. I catch every light. At the third one, I put my forehead on the wheel and breathe through my nose because if I open my mouth I'm going to say something to the windshield I can't take back.
The SUV waits behind me at every light. Polite. Patient. A man doing his shift.
I park in my building's lot. The SUV pulls up behind me and stops but nobody gets out. They're going to sit there until I go inside. Fine. I let them.
I take the stairs because the elevator is slow and I can't be in a box right now. Four flights in skates-off gear. My thighs burn. I get to my door and stand in front of it with my key in my hand, and I can't make my hand do the thing with the lock for a second because the key is shaking.
I make it stop shaking. I unlock the door.
The hallway of my own apartment smells like the detergent the cleaning service uses on Fridays. Pine and bleach. I stand in the entry and I drip. Blood, sweat, melted ice off the back of the jersey. A small puddle forms on the hardwood the team owns. I stare at it.
I pull the quarter-zip off. It hits the floor.
I yank the jersey over my head. Number sixteen. I drop it on the quarter-zip. The blood on the shoulder has gone brown.
I unbuckle the chest plate and it drops onto the jersey.
I stand in the entry in compression gear and shower slides and look at the pile on the floor that is everything I am to the Frosthaven Huskies organization, and I breathe.
Then I go shower.
The shower is scalding. I put my forehead on the tile and let it run down the back of my neck and into the cut over my eye, which opens up again and bleeds a thin pink ribbon into the drain. I watch the ribbon. I watch it thin and thin and go clear.
