Page 51 of Slapshot Baby

“You remember that about him?”

“Don’t have to.” His voice turns clipped. “Five minutes around the guy tells you everything you need to know.”

He takes the phone from me and scrolls himself. His eyes move quickly across the screen at first, scanning, then slower, lingering. He stops on something. His thumb hovers.

"What is it?" I ask.

He turns the screen toward me. A text thread with his mother from two years ago.

Kai:

I think I'm ready to talk about what happened with Dad in Chicago. Not yet. But soon.

Laura:

Whenever you're ready, sweetheart. I'll be here.

"I have no idea what happened in Chicago," he says.

His voice is level. But his hand holding the phone has a tremor that has nothing to do with his injury.

"That's okay," I say. "You can ask your mom."

"I shouldn't have to ask my mother what happened in my own life."

The tremor spreads to his jaw. He locks it down, sets the phone on the cushion between us face-down.

"Kai..."

"I'm reading my own conversations like they're someone else's diary."

He's not looking at me. He's looking at the phone between us. "I wrote those words. I made that decision, and I can't feel any of it."

"That's what the exercises are for. We keep going and..."

He stands. The motion is sharp enough that Biscuit lifts her head from the rug.

"And what? Keep scrolling through my phone until I magically feel something? I read a message about Chicago that obviously mattered enough for me to bring it up to my mother, and it's just words on a screen. There's nothing behind them. No feeling, no context, nothing."

He walks to the window. His shoulders are rigid, hands shoved into his pockets.

"I'm not your patient, Ava."

"I never said you were."

"This is what you're treating me like. Exercises and systems and desk calendars. Like if you organize it well enough, my brain will cooperate. I’m not a broken thing you fix."

My chest contracts.

But I don't deflect his words with a joke or smooth things over.

I stay exactly where I am.

"Look at me."

He doesn't turn.

"Kai. Look at me."