Page 133

“I’m not going to call it from a training room. You’ll get an MRI tonight, tomorrow latest.” He’s already not looking at me, he’s writing. “But Beau. I’d start preparing yourself. The way that moved. Rotator cuff, the labrum maybe. This is a surgical conversation, not a tape-it-and-go conversation.”

“Season?” I ask.

He stops writing. “If it’s what I think, your season’s done, son. And we’ll talk about everything after that when we know more.”

The draft is in everything after that. Boston’s in everything after that, the scout who flew in, the first round, the thing my whole life has been pointing at since I was four years old on a pond. A torn-up shoulder in December of your draft year is a number that gets lower the more people look at it. Everybody in this room knows it. Wyatt’s by the door with his hand over his mouth. Cash is pacing a track in the rubber floor. Theo’s just standing, arms crossed, watching me the way he’s watched me since Tuesday.

“Talk to me, Cap,” Cash says. He’s stopped pacing. “Say something. Yell. Throw a thing. I’ll go find you a thing to throw, just—do the normal thing.”

“I’m okay.”

“That is the opposite of the normal thing.”

“Cash.” Wyatt, quiet. “Leave it.”

“I don’t want to leave it. He’s doing the calm voice. I hate the calm voice.” He turns back to me, and under the loud there’s something close to scared. “Be mad. Please. I’d give anything for you to be mad right now.”

They’re all waiting for me to break. To put a fist through the cabinet. To do the thing a guy does when his future tears in half in a barn on a Saturday night.

I don’t.

I just lie there on the table and look at the bright light and feel the same gray nothing I’ve felt for four days, and the only thought I can find, the only one, is that the one person I’d want to call about this is the one person I can’t, and I let her go without a word, and a shoulder is honestly the smallest thing I lost this week.

When we arrive at the hospital, there’s a clipboard. A form, consent for the MRI. The nurse hands it to me and the letters do the thing they do, swimming, rearranging, and any other day I’d grind through it. I’ve got tricks, I’ve spent thirteen years on tricks. Tonight I just hold the pen and look at it and don’t bother. Cash takes it out of my hand without a word and reads it to me low, the parts that matter, and signs where I point, and doesn’t make it a thing, and I love him for it in a way I’m never going to tell him.

“Beau.” The doctor again, gentle. “Did you hear me? On the season?”

“I heard you.”

“You don’t seem⁠—”

“I heard you,” I say. “It’s fine.”

And that’s the thing that finally lands wrong in the room. The it’s fine. I watch it land. I watch Cash stop pacing and Wyatt take his hand off his mouth and Theo’s arms come uncrossed, all three of them looking at me like the injury wasn’t the scary part, the injury was never going to be the scary part, the scary part is the captain saying it’s fine about his own torn-up future with absolutely nothing behind his eyes.

That scares them more than the arm. I can see it scaring them. I just can’t find the part of me that would join them in it.

They take me home after the MRI, the three of them, because Mormor went ahead to get the house warm and because none of them will let me be alone, which they’re doing by pretending it’s about the painkillers and who’s going to drive. Cash drives my truck. Nobody talks. Theo sits in the back with his hand resting on my good shoulder the whole way, not gripping, just there, and I let him.

The Raven House is lit up like always. Inside there’s coffee on, and somebody, June probably, has dropped off food, and there’s a chair pulled close to the couch with a stack of pillows on it for my arm, and nobody announces any of it, it’s all just there, the way Wyatt’s banana was just there. That’s how the guys do it. They don’t sit you down and make you feel held. They just build a soft place around you out of small quiet things and then act like it was always like that.

Cash hands me a coffee. Wyatt takes my boots off because I can’t reach down for them one-armed and he does it like it’s nothing, like a guy just kneels down and unlaces another grown man’s boots on a Saturday. Theo turns the TV to the thing I like and leaves it low.

“You don’t have to talk,” Wyatt says, from the floor, my boot in his hand. “We’re just gonna be here. That’s the whole plan. We’re just gonna be in the room.”

“I’m okay.”

“Yeah,” Cash says. “You keep saying. We heard. We’re gonna be in the room anyway.”

And they are. For an hour they just are, around me, low and easy, not making me do anything, and it’s the kind of thing I don’t have words for and would die before trying to say out loud, so I don’t, and they don’t make me.

Then Mormor comes in from the kitchen with two cups and says, “Out to the porch, gubben. You and me. The boys can keep the couch warm.”

It’s cold on the porch. She wraps the blanket around my good side herself and puts the cup in my good hand and sits in the other chair and doesn’t say anything for a while. Mormor’s the only person I know who’s better at silence than Theo. She lets the cold and the dark do some of the work. Down the street a plow goes by, scraping.

“They are frightened of you in there,” she says finally. “Did you see it? Those three big boys. They are not frightened of the arm. They are frightened because you do not care about the arm, and they have never once seen you not care about the hockey, and it has made them afraid they do not know you after all.”

“It’s just an arm, Mormor.”