Centuria Books · Tape and Teeth
Tape and Teeth — Read the First Chapter
The one person who treats the team’s enforcer like a man instead of a weapon becomes the lever the front office reaches for.
Chapter 1
Two minutes left in the second period, and the Garden was already on its feet for a fight.
Lena watched it from the tunnel mouth with her arms crossed, the way you watch weather. Volkov had a fistful of the Tampa winger’s jersey and was working the body, short hooks under the ribs, the kind that don’t make the highlight reel but fold a man at the diaphragm. The crowd loved it. The crowd always loved it. There was a particular pitch to the noise, somewhere between a cheer and a scream, that meant a Vanguard player was hurting someone, and the building made that sound now, twenty thousand throats finding the same note.
The linesman peeled them apart. Volkov skated to the box with his jersey half off one shoulder, his right hand hanging in a way Lena cataloged before she could stop herself.
“He’s holding that wrong,” she said.
Renata, beside her, didn’t look up from her tablet. “Holding what wrong?”
“The hand. Index finger’s out of line with the rest. He dislocated it on the kid’s helmet.”
“He didn’t say anything.”
“He won’t.”
He sat in the box for his five and got up at the end of the period like nothing was wrong, which was the tell. A man with a healthy hand doesn’t keep it that still. He keeps it loose. He moves it because moving it is free. Volkov skated to the bench with the hand cradled against his thigh, fingers curled away from the world, and Lena was already moving down the tunnel because that was the job and the job did not wait for anyone to ask.
The room emptied around her as she came in. It did that. Twenty-three men in various states of undress and tape, and the volume dropped the second she crossed the threshold, conversations folding mid-word, somebody killing the speaker that had been thudding bass into the concrete. Eddie Park raised a towel like a flag. Cap nodded at her. The others found somewhere else to look. She’d stopped taking it personally years ago. A med tech in a locker room was a coroner at a wedding. Everybody got quiet and hoped it wasn’t for them.
It was for Volkov.
He sat at his stall with his elbows on his knees and the right hand turned palm-up on his thigh, studying it like a problem he was choosing not to solve. Up close the finger was worse than the tunnel had let her see. The proximal joint of the index, dorsal dislocation, the bone riding up over the knuckle and tenting the skin pale. His tape was still on his wrists, the over-under wrap he did himself, two layers, the second laid against the grain of the first so it locked. She’d watched him do it a hundred times without naming why she watched.
“That’s coming out tonight,” she said.
He lifted his head. He had a cut over the eyebrow that someone had butterfly-stripped between periods and a smear of blood drying brown on the white tape at his wrist, his own or the kid’s, no way to know.
“It’s fine,” Volkov said.
“It’s pointing at your thumb. Fingers don’t point at thumbs. That’s not a structure I’m willing to call fine.”
“I have eight minutes before third.”
“You have a dislocated proximal interphalangeal joint and you are not taking another shift until I put it back, so we can do this the easy way or you can sit there being brave at me and we’ll do it during intermission anyway. Your call.”
Something moved at the corner of his mouth. Not a smile. The acknowledgment of one, withheld. “The room is watching.”
“The room is leaving.” She didn’t raise her voice. “Renata, can you—”
“On it.” Behind her, Renata started herding bodies, that’s the tour, gentlemen, find a hallway, and the stalls cleared out in a low shuffle of socked feet and someone’s muttered Jesus and the door to the players’ lounge sucking shut. Cap stayed a beat longer, one shoulder against the wall, eyes on Volkov, the captain’s silent question — you good? — and Volkov’s silent answer, a flick of the chin, and then Cap was gone too and it was the two of them and the hum of the lights.
Lena dragged the rolling stool over and sat so her knees nearly touched his. She snapped on gloves. She cracked her own knuckles first, the left thumb, the index, one at a time, a small percussive line, and his eyes tracked the sound.
“Habit,” she said, before he could ask.
“I know.” Two words, flat, and underneath them something she didn’t have time to look at. “I’ve watched you.”
She let that go past her like ice spray. “Give me the hand.”
He gave her the hand. That surprised her, a little — that he just laid it across her gloved palm, heavy, the swollen knuckles like a row of marbles under skin, the new injury hot and wrong above them. The hand of a man who hit other men for a living, and he set it down in front of her like something he was handing over for inspection at a border.
“Tell me what I’m looking at before I touch it,” she said, because she always asked, because the body lies and the man on top of it lies worse, and the only truth you got was the one you took before they had time to compose it. “When did it go?”
“Second fight. His cage.”
“You hit a helmet with a bare hand.”
“I hit a face. The cage was after.”
“Of course it was.” She turned the hand toward the light. The skin over the joint had gone the gray-white of a thing losing blood supply, and under her thumb the displaced bone shifted, just slightly, just enough. “Okay. The good news is it’s clean. Dorsal, no rotation, the volar plate’s probably intact, which means I can reduce it right here and you keep your stupid finger. The bad news is it’s going to feel exactly as bad as you think.”
“I don’t think anything about it.”
“No,” she said. “I’m getting that.”
She found the base of the finger with her left hand, thumb and forefinger bracketing the joint, and took the tip with her right. He didn’t pull back. Most of them pulled back — a flinch, a tightening up the forearm, the body voting against you before the brain could override it. His forearm under her hand stayed slack. His pulse was the only thing that moved, a fast tap she could feel through the glove at the radial wrist, the body telling the truth the face wouldn’t.
“I’m going to hyperextend it first,” she said. “Then traction, then I push it back over the joint. It’s three seconds. Don’t help me. Don’t brace. If you brace you’ll fight the muscle and we’ll be here all night.”
“Do it.”
“Look somewhere else.”
“No.”
She glanced up. He was looking at her. Not at the hand, not past her shoulder at the door, not at the ceiling the way the tough ones did when they were busy not being tough. At her face. Steady, unblinking, the eye over the cut already darkening toward a bruise, and she had the brief unwelcome sense of being the thing under examination on the stool, not him.
“Suit yourself,” she said.
She extended the finger up and back, increasing the deformity, and his pulse jumped under her fingertips and his breath went out through his nose, slow, controlled, but the rest of him gave her nothing. She pulled — steady traction, lengthening the joint, feeling the bone unhook from the lip it had ridden up over — and then she pressed the base of the finger down and forward and the joint went home with a small wet thunk she felt more than anything else, the unmistakable seating of bone into the place bone belonged.
The man didn’t make a sound. His jaw worked once. That was all.
“There it is,” she said, and let go of the tip, and his finger lay along the others where it should, swelling already, but straight. She put her thumb to the joint and tested it gently through a small arc of flexion. “Move it for me. Slow. To pain, not through it.”
He curled the finger. Made a loose fist, opened it.
“Yeah,” she said. “That’s seated. You’ll buddy-tape it to the middle finger and you’ll ice it for twenty after the game whether you want to or not, and you’ll come see me tomorrow so I can splint it properly and check the volar plate didn’t tear when you decided a face was a reasonable thing to punch.”
“It’s a contact sport.”
“It’s an assault with witnesses and a referee.” She reached for the buddy-tape on her cart, peeled a strip. “Hold still.”
She taped the index to the middle finger, two anchor wraps and a figure-eight, snug but not strangling, and the whole time she was aware of him watching her hands. Not in the way men sometimes watched her hands, which she had a long and tedious filing system for. This was flatter than that. Closer to the way he’d studied the dislocation, like she was a problem he’d decided not to solve. The blood on his wrist tape had dried to rust and she could smell him, sweat and cold iron and the cedar of the room, and she breathed through her mouth and finished the wrap.
“Done.” She rolled back six inches on the stool, reclaiming the air. “You’re cleared, medically, which I will be telling Renata and the bench so don’t get creative about the timeline.”
“You’re the only one.”
She was peeling off her gloves and stopped. “The only what.”
“In the building.” He flexed the taped fingers, watching them, and then looked back up at her with that same level patience. “Who isn’t.”
“Isn’t what.”
He didn’t answer. He didn’t have to. She’d watched the room empty around her like a tide going out, the way it did, the way it had since her first week here when she’d walked into a celebration and killed it just by being the person who knew which men were lying about their heads. She knew exactly what he meant. They were afraid of him. The Tampa kid getting his ribs filed in was afraid of him. The linesman who’d peeled them apart had done it carefully, the way you handle something that bites. The room got quiet for her and quiet for him and those were two different quiets and the only person in this building who treated him like a hand and not a hazard was sitting on a rolling stool with rust-colored tape in her lap.
She wasn’t going to give him that. She made it a policy not to give them anything that wasn’t load-bearing.
“I’m not paid to be afraid of you,” she said. “I’m paid to keep you skating. Those are different jobs and I’m bad at the first one.”
“I know what you’re paid for.” He stood. He did it slowly, the way big men did when they’d been hit a lot, the body taking inventory on the way up. He stood and he was in front of her and then he stepped back, one full step, like he’d taught himself to, like he knew exactly how much room a person needed not to feel hunted and he gave it to them up front, every time, a tax he paid on his own size. He stood in the half-light at the edge of his stall and didn’t crowd her and didn’t leave. “Tomorrow. What time.”
“Renata’s got the schedule. Eight, probably. Eat first or you’ll go gray on me.”
“Eight.”
She gathered her cart. Snapped the gloves into the bin. Capped the tape. He watched her do it, and she let him, because telling a man to stop looking gave the looking weight it didn’t deserve. At the door she paused with her hand on the frame, because there was a thing she said to all of them, the same thing, the load-bearing thing.
“Hey. Volkov.”
“Sasha.”
“Volkov.” She didn’t look back. “Your hand. The chronic stuff, the knuckles, the swelling that never goes down — that’s going to cost you a finger you actually need someday if nobody manages it. You keep punching helmets and I keep gluing you back together and one of us is going to lose. Just so you know it’s not free. None of it’s free. They let you think it’s free.”
The room was quiet in the way of a room with one person breathing too quietly in it.
“I know it’s not free,” he said.
She left. The hallway swallowed the noise of the building back up, the bass returning, men filtering past her in the corridor and not meeting her eyes, and she walked toward the trainer’s room popping her knuckles one at a time, thumb, index, middle, the small line of sound she made before hard conversations and after them too, because the hand always wanted putting back in order somehow, and behind her, in the stall, Volkov sat down again and reached for the ice without thinking, the way he always did, pressing it to a hand that had stopped expecting anyone to ask whether it hurt.
Chapter 2
The ice goes soft in eight minutes. He counts.
The bag sweats through the towel against his knuckles, and the cold has stopped being cold — it’s just a dull pressure now, a thing pressing back at the thing that hurts. He keeps it there anyway. Forty-one seconds since her footsteps went quiet down the corridor. He counts those too. He has always counted the wrong things. Exits in a building. Steps between his stall and the tunnel. The number of times a man can put his weight on a leg before the leg quits — that one he learned at fourteen, in a barn outside Magnitogorsk, his father’s stopwatch clicking like a tooth.
She popped a knuckle before she told him the hand would cost him. He has watched her do it three times now. Index, middle, ring — she goes in order, like she’s loading something. He files it the way he files everything: which way a man drops his shoulder before he throws, which linesman blinks first. A tell. Everybody has one. Hers is that she counts too.
He shouldn’t know that.
The corridor outside the trainer’s room hums. Old fluorescent, the ballast going, a sound like a wasp trapped in a wall. Down past the players’ lounge somebody’s stick clatters into a rack and a janitor’s cart wheels squeak on the rubber matting, and under all of it the building exhales — the deep machine-breath of the refrigeration plant keeping the sheet frozen two floors below. He lives inside that sound. He has slept in it. Has put his back against the boards in an empty arena at one in the morning, the Zamboni doing its slow flat circles, and let the cold come up through his jacket until his teeth ached, because that is the only quiet a man like him is allowed. Out there nobody asks anything of him except the thing he is built to do.
In here, she asked if it hurt.
He didn’t answer. That was the right move. You don’t show a body where it bleeds.
The split in his lip has scabbed. He works it open again with his tongue, slow, and the copper floods up the back of his throat, familiar as spit. Tonight’s fight — Gendron, the Pittsburgh kid, six-three and dumb with want — went four punches before the kid covered up. Volkov keeps the tally: two to the temple that did nothing, one to the jaw that turned the kid’s eyes loose, one that caught crown of the skull instead of soft cheek and shoved his own finger out of its socket. That last one was greed. He knows it. He chased the highlight when the work was already done, and the joint paid for it.
She’d set it without asking him to count to three.
He drops the ice bag in the bin and stands.
He stands in the doorway of his stall. Not in it. Not out. The frame holds him up the way doorways always do — you can see the whole room from a doorway, and nobody can get behind you, and you can leave. He learned that from no one. He learned it from rooms that turned dangerous. The locker room is empty now except for the slow drip of a shower somebody left and Eddie Park’s gear hung wrong on the next hook, pads facing out like the goalie wants to scare the wall. Tape balls on the floor. The reek of liniment and rink-rot and the body spray the young guys drown themselves in. Home, if a man wanted to call it that. He doesn’t.
What he has instead is a schedule.
He knows hers. This is the part he keeps in the dark place behind the boiler, the file he doesn’t open in daylight. Her first week with the club, last September — Solis introduced the new physio at the start-of-camp meeting, Lena Moreau, soft tissue and rehab, you’ll be sick of her by Christmas, and the room half-listened the way it half-listens to anything that isn’t a roster move. Volkov listened all the way down.
He learned that she gets in before the strength staff, by the cones already out when he comes off the early ice. That she takes her coffee from the machine in the medical hall, not the players’ one, and lets it go cold while she works because she forgets it. That she wears the same two pairs of trainers and tapes a hot spot on her left heel the way he’d tape a wrist, over-under, neat. That she does not flinch. Guys come off the ice with their faces opened up and she puts gloved fingers in the mess and asks them to track her penlight and her hands don’t shake. He clocked that day one, the way you clock a fighter who isn’t scared of you and decide whether that’s a problem.
She was a problem.
He learned the worst thing on a Thursday. There’s a boy. Five, maybe. Black hair, a counting habit — Volkov saw him once in the family room during a charity skate, hauled up against the glass, calling out the number on every goalie’s pads as they cycled drills, one, two, three, four, like the pads owed him an accounting. The kid loves the Zamboni the way some kids love dinosaurs, total and loud. Volkov stood in that doorway too, half a hallway off, and watched her crouch to the boy’s level and answer every number like it mattered. He carried that out of the building. He doesn’t know why. He has carried worse and let it go.
So. He broke a rule.
The rule is old and it has kept him alive. Nothing on staff. Not trainers, not the equipment guys’ daughters, not the PR girls Coyle parades through for the cameras. Staff are levers. A man like Pryce — and there is always a Pryce — finds the soft thing near you and squeezes, and then you skate where you’re told and fight who you’re told and sign what you’re told. His father taught him the principle without the words: love the dog and they’ll break the dog to break you. So you don’t love the dog. You don’t love anything that can be reached.
He broke it the first week, watching a woman tape her own heel.
He didn’t touch the rule again until he had to.
The shower drips. He counts the drops — eleven, twelve — and stops, because counting drops is a thing a man does when he’s avoiding the other count.
One night. Months back, before the season, a charity thing in a hotel ballroom Coyle made them all wear suits to, and afterward a bar that wasn’t on the team’s approved list, dark booths and a bartender who didn’t know him. She was there. Civilian clothes, her hair down, no gloves, no clipboard, a woman and not a wall. He’d had two drinks, which is one past his number. She’d had more than that. Somebody she knew had done something to her — he could read it in how she held her shoulders, the careful way she set her glass down like the table might move. He didn’t ask. She didn’t tell. They talked about nothing. Linesmen. The terrible ballroom chicken. She did the thing with her knuckles, popped them one at a time under the table, and he caught it because he catches everything, and she caught him catching it and didn’t look away.
He doesn’t replay the rest. He tells himself he doesn’t.
He replays it constantly. The cab. Her hand flat on his chest in the elevator, not pushing, measuring — like she was reading him for damage. The way she said his name once, the Sasha, not the Volk, and the floor dropped out of him the way it does when the ice opens under a heavy guy and he goes down through it. Her room. Her hands, which do not shake on torn men, shaking once on him and then deciding not to. She had agency in every second of it; she ran it; she decided. That is the part he cannot get rid of. He has been decided about his whole life — by the father, by the league, by the men who fill out the lineup card with his name on the bottom because somebody has to be the thing the team breaks on purpose so the skilled boys stay clean. Nobody ever chose him. She did, for one night, and then they both agreed with their silence the next morning that it hadn’t happened.
It hadn’t happened. He’s told himself so for months. He told himself so tonight while she set his finger and called him forty-four and looked at his hand like it was the only part of him in the room.
Except.
His tape.
He sits down again because his legs have stopped being interested in holding him.
When she splinted the joint just now, she went over-under without him showing her. Index over, ring under, the spiral he does on his own wrists, the pattern his father never taught him because his father taped him like livestock, tight and cruel and meant to hurt before the hurt came from outside. Volkov reworked it himself at seventeen so the spiral pulled with the tendon instead of against it. Nobody learns that pattern by looking once. The equipment guys still tape him wrong half the time and he doesn’t correct them because correcting them means caring how he’s wrapped.
She did it right. First try. From memory.
His pulse goes up in his throat, a fighter’s pulse, the one that lives in the four seconds before the gloves come off, and there’s nothing in this room to throw it at.
She watched his hands. Long enough to learn the spiral. Long enough to keep it.
He turns his right hand over in the bad light. The swelling’s the permanent kind now, the knuckles gone wrong over years, the third metacarpal that never set straight, the skin that has been split and stitched and split so many times it knows the way. A hand that has stopped expecting to be asked anything. She held it like a thing with a history, and then she gave him back his own tape job, and the only way she knows it is if those weeks of him standing in doorways watching her — she was watching him back the whole time. Cataloguing. The way he catalogues. Storing the over-under against the day she’d need it.
They have been keeping files on each other.
The wasp in the wall buzzes. The plant hums under the floor. Somewhere two levels down the sheet lies frozen and flat and indifferent, the only thing in this building that has never wanted anything from him, and he wants to go down there now and put his back to the boards and let the cold climb in and turn this off, whatever this is, this thing rising in his chest that has no fight in it and so has nowhere to go.
He doesn’t go down to the ice.
He sits in the empty room with his ruined hand open on his knee and does the arithmetic he has refused to do since September. The bar. The months. The night neither of them survives by admitting. He has counted exits his whole life so he’d always know how to get out of a room.
He counts back now, and the count lands on a number, and the number is a door he can’t find the way out of.
She set his finger tonight and called him forty-four. She taped him in his own pattern from memory. And the boy in the family room, the one who counts goalie pads, one two three four — black hair, her crouched down beside him answering every number like it owed the kid the truth —
He stops.
He makes himself stop, because this is the kind of thought that gets a man killed, the kind that walks him out onto thin sheet at one in the morning, and he has no proof, only a tape spiral and a pulse he can’t dump and a face he memorized before he had any right to.
But he stands. Slow. He stands in the doorway of his own stall and looks down the empty corridor where her footsteps went, and the cold place behind the boiler comes open all the way, the file he doesn’t read in daylight, and the worst line in it surfaces and won’t go back down.
He has been telling himself that night didn’t happen so the league couldn’t use it.
If it didn’t happen, then the boy who counts pads isn’t a number he has to count.
He stands there a long time. Long enough for the ice in the bin to finish melting. Long enough for the shower drip to stop on its own. The building breathes around him, refrigeration and ballast and the squeak of the janitor’s cart turning the far corner, and Sasha Volkov, who has spent his life owning the only things he loved so no one could take them, runs the arithmetic one more time and gets the same answer, and the copper taste in his mouth goes cold.
Five.
The kid is five.
He puts his good hand flat against the door frame to keep himself standing, the way her hand went flat against his chest in that elevator — measuring, reading him for damage — and the menace drains out of him for once and leaves only the man, and the man stands in the doorway and does the thing he never does.
He hopes he’s wrong.
Chapter 3
The clock on the treatment room wall ran four minutes fast, a thing Lena had stopped correcting in October because the lie of it got her players moving, and at 6:52 by that lying clock she was on her second cup of coffee that tasted like aluminum and her own spit, both hands flat on the table she’d already wiped down twice, waiting for a man who was eleven minutes late by the real time and who never, in three months, had been late at all.
The phone in her scrub pocket buzzed. The daycare’s number. Her stomach went over like a glove flipped inside out.
“Ms. Moreau, it’s Donna — Theo’s fine, totally fine, he’s just— he didn’t want me to call but he asked four times if you were still picking him up tonight, and I told him yes, and he asked again, so.” A pause built around a child’s voice in the background, low and methodical, counting. “He’s been counting the cubbies. He’s at thirty-one. He does that when he’s worried, and I didn’t want you blindsided at pickup.”
Cubbies. There were thirty-six. He’d start over at thirty-six and count down to one and then climb back up, and he’d do it until somebody put a hand on the crown of his head, and the somebody had always been her, never the winger who’d left the week the boy outgrew the bassinet, and she’d built her whole spine around being the somebody.
“Six-fifteen tomorrow I can do drop-off late,” she said, “but tonight’s pickup is mine, I’m leaving by eight. Tell him— ” The corridor door swung. “Tell him the Zamboni runs at eight-thirty and I’m bringing him for it Saturday. He’ll do the math, it’ll hold him.” She thumbed the phone dark before Donna could thank her, because gratitude from the people minding your kid did something to the throat that she didn’t have time for.
Volkov filled the doorway.
He did that. Stood in the frame of a room like he was deciding whether it deserved him, all six-three of him hung off the shoulders the way enforcers carried it, weight high and ready, and ordinarily she’d have a dry word for the loitering, but the right hand was the thing under examination tonight and the right hand was wrong.
He held it against his sternum. Not iced. Cradled the way men cradle a hand they’ve already decided they’re going to lie about.
“You’re late,” she said, “and you’re hiding it, which means it’s the third metacarpal again or it’s worse, sit.”
“Is fine.”
“Sit, Sasha.”
He sat. The table took his weight with the particular complaint of a table that had absorbed a thousand of these men, and he laid the hand in his lap and didn’t offer it, and the smell came off him — Tiger Balm and the rink’s cold mineral nothing and underneath it the copper of split knuckles he hadn’t bothered to clean. The over-under tape on his left wrist was fresh, neat, ritual. The right wrist wasn’t taped at all. He’d skipped the part of his routine that touched the part that hurt, because to tape it would mean handling it, and handling it would mean admitting it.
“Hand,” she said.
He gave it to her the way he gave the league everything — slow, watching her face for the angle. She took the wrist in both her own, thumb to the radial pulse out of habit, the pulse hammering up at her like it had somewhere to be, and turned the hand to the lamp.
The fourth metacarpal had a step in it. A boxer’s break, the head of the bone sunk and the knuckle gone flat where the knuckle should ride proud, the back of the hand already swelling into one tight shining curve, and across the dorsum a bruise was coming up dark as wet slate.
She popped her left index knuckle against her thumb. Pop. The sound she made before she said the thing nobody wanted.
“When.”
“Tonight. Boston player, you saw.”
“I didn’t see, I was reading three other charts, tell me which exchange.” She palpated down the shaft, watching his face and not his hand because the face was where men kept the truth they wouldn’t give the mouth. His jaw set. No flinch where flinch should live. That was worse than a flinch — that was a man who’d trained the flinch out of himself in a barn somewhere a long way from here, and she knew enough not to admire it. “There’s a step deformity. You feel the bone move when you make a fist?”
“I don’t make a fist.”
“Make a fist.”
“No.”
The room’s compressor kicked over somewhere in the wall, that low building-breath, and for a second the two of them sat inside it like the only warm-blooded things in a structure built to stay cold. She set the hand down on the towel. Squared it. Took the cold pack out of the dorm fridge, cracked the chemical seal, shook it to slush.
“This goes on for twenty minutes,” she said, “then I splint it ulnar-gutter and you sit out tomorrow and we get films, and I am writing all of this down.”
He took the cold pack off the table and set it back on the steel counter beside him with a click that was almost gentle, almost worse for being gentle.
“No film,” he said. “No ice. No splint.”
“That’s not—”
“I play Thursday.”
She’d had this conversation in nine bodies and four languages and once with her own knee at twenty, on a different table, with a surgeon who’d told her the field hockey was over and she’d argued with him until she cried in the parking garage where nobody could put it in a file. She knew the shape of it. She knew it was never about the bone. The bone was the easy part.
“Thursday is Pryce’s broadcast night,” she said. “That’s what this is.”
His eyes came up. Pale, flat, the eyes of a man who’d learned not to let anything live in them, and for one second there was a flicker under the flat — gone before she could name it — and his hand twitched toward the discarded cold pack and stopped.
“You ice this,” she said, lower, “or I document refusal, and refusal of treatment on a structural fracture goes to Renata, and Renata’s signature is the thing that lets you skate at all. You understand the machinery you’re standing in? Medical clears the play. Not you. Not him.”
“You document,” he said, “I lose the cold pack. I keep the hand. The hand is the thing they pay for.” He turned the wrist so the swelling caught the lamp, an offering and an accusation both. “You think they pay me to be careful with it?”
It landed in her chest the way true things do, sideways, and she hated that it landed, because she could not afford to be moved at this table by this man, not after the one night they had both agreed to file under did-not-happen, not with her phone warm against her hip and a five-year-old counting cubbies eleven miles away to keep from believing she’d left him too.
She popped the middle knuckle. Pop.
“Here’s what you don’t get to do,” she said, and her voice came out clinical, noun-first, the way it came out when the fear was up — the way she named the metacarpal and the extensor tendon and the deep volar plate like a rosary so the rest of her would hold. “You don’t get to make me the wall between you and your own body. That’s not my job. My job is the tissue. The tissue is fractured. If you skate Thursday you torque a healing fourth metacarpal in the first scrum and the head necroses and you’re done at thirty, not done as in benched, done as in your hand opens jars wrong for the rest of your life, and I will have signed the paper that let it happen because you wanted to look loyal on broadcast night.”
“I have looked loyal,” he said, “for nineteen years. Is the only thing I know how to look.”
The compressor cut out. The room went that flat dead quiet that the rink’s belly does between cycles, and the four-minutes-fast clock ticked, and she became aware of her own pulse in her ears and a faint, swimming wrongness behind her sternum that she’d been pinning on coffee for nine days now, the kind of tired that slept eight hours and woke up taxed, the kind of nausea that arrived at 6:40 a.m. like it had a punch clock — and she shut the thought before it could finish, slammed the drawer on it the way she’d slammed the daycare phone dark, because there were exactly two things in this room she could not survive thinking about at the same time and one of them was the hand and the other had no business in a sentence yet, had no business being a sentence, was probably the coffee, was probably the hours, was nothing.
Bury it. Splint the bone. Pick up the boy.
“Compromise,” she said, and the word cost her, because compromise was the leak in the wall, compromise was how you ended up at twenty-four with a newborn and a sublease in your name and a man on a charter to a city that loved him. “You ice it now, twenty minutes, while I write nothing. I splint it. Tomorrow Renata reads the films before anyone says the word Thursday. If she clears you, you skate and I never said a thing. If she doesn’t, you sit, and you let me be the wall on the record so it’s me Pryce yells at, not you.”
His head turned. She’d offered to take the shot for him and he didn’t have a slot in his life where that went; she could see it not landing, sliding off the trained flatness, and then — slow — something behind the eyes recalculating her as a variable that didn’t read clean.
“Why,” he said.
“Because I’m not signing your hand away to make a man’s broadcast prettier. And because I leave at eight and I don’t have the hours to fight you longer than that.” Dry, exhausted, the only register she had left. “I have a kid who’s currently counting cubbies because he thinks I might not come. So you can ice the hand and let me win the parts of tonight I can actually win, or you can be a thing I lose to and then go home and lose to my five-year-old too. I’d rather not run the table on disasters.”
The kid landed somewhere. His gaze flicked — to her left hand, no ring, never a ring, and back up — and she watched a question form and not get asked, and was grateful, because she did not have a face ready for that question.
He picked up the cold pack. Put it against the back of his right hand. Held it there himself.
It was not a surrender. She knew the difference; she read bodies that lied about pain for a living. This was a man buying a single night because she’d given him a way to take the ice himself rather than have it taken, because she’d handed him ownership of the small thing and he could not refuse ownership, it was the only currency his father had ever minted in him. He’d ice the hand because she’d let it be his choice. Tomorrow Renata would pull the films and the films would not care whose choice anything was, and Lena had not won, not really; she’d traded a hard no for a soft maybe and called it medicine.
She splinted it at 7:31. Ulnar gutter, fourth and fifth fingers buddied, the wrap firm and not cruel, his hand heavy and still in both of hers, the skin over the swelling hot enough to read through the cold he’d held there. He watched her do it. He watched the way she worked, and she didn’t look up, because the lamp was warm and the room was quiet and the wrongness behind her sternum kept circling and she needed both hands steady more than she needed to know what was in his face.
“You’ll keep this on tonight,” she said, taping the last turn flat. “Wet it, it’s useless. Drive left-handed or get the kid Park’s making fun of to drive you.”
“I drive fine.” A beat. The flat voice did a thing at the bottom of it, a roughness, the man under the weapon surfacing for one syllable. “Your boy. He counts.”
“He counts.” She cut the tape. Set the scissors down. Didn’t elaborate, didn’t decorate it, didn’t make her child into a thing for this room to hold. “Most kids do something. He counts.” She straightened, popped the ring knuckle one-handed, pop, the last one, the conversation closing. “Tomorrow. Seven. Renata reads it first or you don’t lace up, that’s the deal, and it’s the only deal.”