I didn’t feel like explaining. I didn’t want to be that damaged person, but it seemed that today I had no choice.
Leaning over, I picked up my crutches from the floor. “I was supposed to call my parents this morning, and I just remembered,” I stammered. I heaved myself out of the chair and began crutching for the door. Damien got up to follow me.
“The game is at one-thirty!” Daniel called over his shoulder.
Chapter Twenty Two: January the Fifteenth
— Corey
“The game is at one-thirty,” my father had said through clenched teeth.
He was behind the wheel of our car, and I was hurrying to throw my gear into the back. The coach was not supposed to arrive so close to face-off, yet again. As usual, my dad’s tardiness would be my fault.
“Sorry,” I had said, running around to the passenger seat.
I don’t remember the drive. There wouldn’t have been any traffic, not in our sleepy little town. What had I been thinking about on the ride to the rink? A homework assignment? The boy I’d just started dating — the one whose face I could barely remember now?
Before my accident, it had been so easy to stare out the car window at the frozen landscape, thinking of nothing at all. I hadn’t known that I should love every moment, that every minute of feeling complete and capable was worshipful. I hadn’t known.
Back at McHerrin, I retreated into my bedroom.
“Nice room,” Damien murmured.
I crawled onto my bed and removed my braces. Scooting up onto the pillow, I set my back against the wall.
A glance at the clock told me that it was almost twelve. I wondered what my parents were doing now, but I was too chicken to call them. Depending on the schedule, my father might have a game. For his sake, I hoped it was an away game. I hoped that one-thirty would not find him standing in exactly the same spot he’d stood last year.
For every one of my games, he had always been right there, in the box with a whistle and a clipboard. It was hard to picture him without those two things. My teammate once asked me in jest if my father wore his whistle to bed at night. Maybe I’d played so hard at hockey because he was always there watching. He was such a good coach, and such a fair man, that I’d never felt hemmed in by being both his kid and his athlete. It was all good, until the day that it wasn’t.
My poor father. He had to watch it all go down.
I was skating hard, backwards and fast. The puck shot across the ice in my direction. I leaned in for the pass, but another skater — an opponent — leaned in harder. She flailed her stick in the direction of the speeding puck, but caught my skate blade instead.
My memory of this part is really just a collage of the things people told me later.
Somehow, she tripped me so badly that I went flying backwards. I flew over the other skater in a neat airborne arc. And then I landed on my back. And then I blacked out for a few seconds.
My father was over me when I opened my eyes. “Corey, are you okay?” he asked me.
“Yeah,” I said. And I believed it. In fact, I eventually got up and skated off the ice.
“So what else is going on with you?” Damien asked me. “Do you have your new semester sorted out?”
I cleared my throat. “I think so. I’m taking a Shakespeare class with Dana. And that psych class everyone raves about. With Professor Davies.”
“That’s a fun one,” my brother agreed, fingering the bill of his cap. “Want to play some RealStix?”
I shook my head. Today I wanted nothing to do with hockey. Not even pretend hockey.
“What was that guy Daniel saying about a game?”
I met my brother’s eyes, which were warm and clear. I tried to tamp down my irritation, because he was only trying to help. “I joined the coed intramural water polo team. Did you ever play?”
Damien shook his head. “Sounds fun, though.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “It’s actually a better workout than I thought it would be. There aren’t any extra players. So at the end of an hour, we’re all puffing like grannies.”
Damien looked at his watch. “I’ll come to your game.”
I shook my head again. “I’m going to sit this one out.”
After my awful crash, I sat the rest of the hockey game out. On the bench, leaning against the wall, my back hurt. But so did my head, and my shoulders. My father wondered if I had a mild concussion. Aside from my intense backache, there weren’t any scary symptoms. So we went home. I took a dose of an ordinary pain killer, and went to bed surprisingly early.
That night, I woke up to crushing pain in my lower back. Terrified, I got out of bed and stumbled into my parents’ room. I barely made it, sinking down on my mom’s side of the mattress. “Corey?” she said, but her voice sounded far away. “What’s wrong?”
That’s when I passed out.