“What about… what about the gym? I co-own it with my brother. Matt. He isn’t at the gym right now because he’s at the obstetrician with his wife. Lena. Sh-she’s thirty-six weeks pregnant with their first child. Her blood pressure was elevated at her last appointment, and she’s had a headache that doesn’t respond to acetaminophen for the past two days, and Matt doesn’t know any of the numbers because he asked me not to give him numbers right now. I’d prefer he didn’t have to come here today, which means I’d prefer the answer to my next question to be… ” I pressed harder. “… yes. Is the building still standing? Please.”
Dane glanced back at me. He didn’t smile exactly, but he looked kind. “The back wall’s bad, but Tim and Court got on it fast, and it’s all still standing. Okay?”
I nodded once. I lost the battle with Kayleigh and the mask. My head felt heavy.
“I’m a hockey player,” I said. My voice was garbled, but I wanted him to know about me. After all, he’d saved me. That connection would be a good one. Hockey was the thing I was. It was the clearest sentence I had about myself, the one that had been true the longest and never needed revising. The only sentences I had that weren’t my verbal dump about the gym ownership wereforty-two steps,Sable,can she ride with me, andyou have pretty blue eyes.
I’d said that out loud. To a stranger. With a face full of ash and a knee that would not hold weight. The replay didn’t stop and would not stop. I could feel myself wanting to stim, my fingers already moving, so I pinned them under the strap of the gurney instead.
“Take care of him,” Dane said, sort of to himself, then he tapped the door frame twice and stepped back.
“You got it,” Kayleigh said.
The doors shut. The bay went smaller. Sable shifted against my leg. The siren rose, and we moved.
Genesee Memorial intake was a corridor of fluorescent strips and the wrong kind of beeping. I kept my eyes on the ceiling tiles and counted them. Twenty-two from the door of Trauma 4 to the foot of the bed. The tiles had a stain pattern in the third row that suggested a roof leak above a non-essential utility room, repaired but not replaced. I told this to nobody. Nobody had asked.
A nurse with a shaved head and a soft voice cut open my left running pants from cuff to mid-thigh. He apologized before he did it and again afterward. The material was already ruined, with smoke and water and one black smear that was probably tread rubber from the treadmill belt. I liked those training pants. They were a Tuesday pair. Today was Tuesday. Tomorrow would have been a different pair.
Sable lay on the floor at the head of the bed, harness still on. They had asked if she could be moved. I had said no, and the nurse with the shaved head hadn’t pushed.
“On a scale of one to ten,” the EMT asked. She was small, and her badge said HERNANDEZ. “How would you rate the pain in this knee?”
“Six. It was an eight when the treadmill was on it.”
“Was the treadmill running?”
“No. The belt was off. A ceiling beam came down on the console end and tipped it. The motor housing is the heaviest part. It pinned my lower leg between the rail and the floor. My patella flexed in the wrong direction.”
She didn’t look at me strangely as I self-diagnosed.
“X-ray, then probably an MRI tomorrow if I don’t like what I see. I’m guessing hyperextension, possible MCL strain. We’ll know more when I see the films.”
“How long will I be off the ice? I mean, I play for the Rochester Copperheads. Number twenty-five.”
She paused, then smiled, quick and tired. “My husband goes to all your home games. He’d know you.”
“Probably not me, but he will know Walker Hannan.”
“He keeps saying you’re on a winning streak, right?”
“Thirty-one wins, ten regulation losses, four in overtime. Sixty-six points through forty-five games. Top of the division by five with a game in hand on Hartford. Goal differential’s plus-forty-three on the year, plus-twenty over the streak. Power play sits fourth in the league at 24.3 percent, kill’s second at 86.1 percent. Twenty-seven games left. Calder Cup track if we keep winning.” She blinked at me as I dumped my thoughts on her and cleared her throat.
“Okay then,” she began. Matt said people weren’t being rude for not having a response to what I said. I was just too clever for my own good. I didn’t care either way as long as I could get the thoughts out of my head and into the world because only then did the pressure ease. “You’ll likely be out two to four weeks if I’m right about what this is. Longer if I’m wrong.”
Two to four weeks. Sixteen to thirty-two practices. Eight to fifteen games, depending on the schedule. A road trip in the middle of that to Hartford and Providence, that I was going to miss.
“Okay,” I said.
She touched the back of my hand, very briefly, and then she was gone.
I called our captain, Walker Hannan. After all, Matt didn’t need a phone call from his brother, who was in a hospital bed, today. He needed his phone to be quiet, and I hope identifyingmyself as co-owner meant the firefighters, or cops, or whoever, wouldn’t hassle him.
Cap picked up on the second ring, and from the echo and road noise, he had to be in the car.
“Chip?”
“I was in a fire at Cornish Iron.”
