Page 97 of Crash Out
"Don't," he said. Still the tablet.
"I need to go back out."
"I know you think you do."
"My parents—" I started to say. The words were slightly harder than usual but they were there. Through the gap I could see the ice, the game still going, the clock running.
I thought about eleven placements and a Morrison house bedroom with hockey posters Rob had let me pick. I thought about the transaction, the system, the give them the moment and get the noise back that had been running since I was four years old in a house that wasn't mine yet.
Rob and Linda were in section 112.
"My parents are here," I said.
Nathan went still.
Not the professional still. The other kind, the kind that meant something had landed somewhere that had nothing to do with the medicine. The kind that belonged to a man who had been performing the correct version of himself for thirty-something years for people with expectations of who that version should be.
I could see that he understood.
"I owe them one more shift."
Nathan watched me closely.
I held his gaze. Not performing. Not the Morrison smile or the crowd face or any of the systems. Just me, brown eyes, the real version.
The tunnel was very quiet.
Nathan was doing the calculations, measuring the gap between what the numbers said and what the person in front of him was asking for.
He was also the man who had grabbed the front of my shirt and pulled me inside a hotel room three doors down. Who had saidokayin the dark. Who had held my hand when the city was quiet and his mother's voice was still in the room.
Both things were true at the same time.
I watched them fight it out on his face and I didn't say anything else because I'd said the thing and it was said and the rest was Nathan's.
"One shift," Nathan said.
Coach said something. Nathan looked at him.
"He can do one shift," Nathan said again, in the voice that meant the medical decision had been made. "And then he's done. He comes straight back."
He looked at me.
Something in his face. Under the wall, under the professional nothing, briefly and completely visible—the thing that wasn't a medical decision and he knew it and I knew it and we were both going to have to live in the world where he'd made it anyway.
"Come straight back," he said.
I went.
I played the shift.
It was bad. Not dramatically. I didn't fall, I didn't turn the puck over again— but wrong in the ways that only someone watching closely would catch. Edges slightly off. Timing a beat slow. The lights still doing the thing, the crowd noise still coming from slightly farther away than it should.
I was running on muscle memory and the thing that had been driving me since I was sixteen and nothing else.
Ninety seconds.
I thought about Rob Morrison driving four hours each way in February. I thought about Linda working extra shifts. I thought about Dylan on the ice thirty seconds ago, wrist shot from the circle, clean and fast and exactly right, and section 112 and the people in it.
