Dr. Reyes was maybe forty, dark hair pulled back. I had a feeling that she had delivered this speech before and meant every word of it every time. She had a clipboard and no patience for charm, which I could tell because I had tried the charm approximately thirty seconds in and she had looked at me over the clipboard with an expression that said she had seen better.
"How long am I going to be out?" I asked.
"Minimum two weeks before we reassess. Possibly more depending on how the symptoms progress."
"I have games—"
"You have a brain," she said. "Which is currently more relevant."
From somewhere to my left, Rob Morrison made a sound that was not quite a word but communicated full agreement with Dr. Reyes's position.
It was at that moment that I realized that my entire family was in the room.
I did the inventory. Dad, standing near the window with his arms crossed and his jaw doing the Dylan thing, which made sense because Dylan got it from somewhere. Mom, sitting in the chair next to my bed with her hand on my arm. Dylan, near the door, leaning against the wall with the focused stillness of someone who had been standing there long enough to look like part of the furniture.
"Two weeks, huh?" I said, because someone had to say something.
"Minimum," the doctor said. "No screens for the first seventy-two hours. No noise. No exertion. No flying for another twenty-four hours, which means you're staying in Toronto tonight." She looked around the room. "Questions?"
"When can I skate?"
"When a doctor clears you to skate," she said.
"He's always been like this," Mom said to Dr. Reyes. "Since he was a kid. You couldn't keep him off the ice."
"I'll need you to keep him off it now," Dr. Reyes said.
"We'll do our best," Mom replied, which was the Morrison family's honest assessment of their ability to make me do anything I'd decided not to do.
Dr. Reyes went through the rest of it—the protocol, the follow-up appointments, the list of symptoms that would require immediate attention—and I let it wash over me and nodded in the appropriate places and performedpatient receiving informationwith the efficiency of someone who had been through this enough times to know the shape of it.
My head was a seven. Coming down, slowly, which was something.
Dr. Reyes left, after giving me a look that said she knew exactly whatnodding in the appropriate placeslooked like and was not fooled.
Dad uncrossed his arms and came to stand at the foot of the bed.
He looked at Dylan in the doorway first.
"You should have pulled him back earlier," he said. Not unkind. Just regular Rob Morrison, stating what he saw, which was Dylan's job and the way Dylan had always been held to it. "You know how he gets."
Dylan's jaw did the thing.
"Yes," Dylan said. "I know."
Rob nodded. Filed it. Moved on.
"Decker," he said. To me.
"Dad, he’s—"
"I know," he said. "I know who Decker is. I know what he does." His jaw moved. "I also know what he said."
I looked at him.
"Section 112 has good acoustics," he said.
I didn't say anything.
