Thrown Off the Ice

by Taylor Fitzpatrick

  A lot of guys choose that road, and Mike won’t deny he’s considered it when shit’s at its worst, when he’s got a migraine so bad he can’t fucking see, when he can’t get the energy to leave his bed, even for the walk he knows Bella needs, or he’s throwing his guts up, or he can’t touch Liam’s cheek or pet Bella’s fur, his hands are shaking so hard.

  He’s not going to do it. He wants to, sometimes, and he knows he’s going to want to more and more as time goes on, that those moments when he thinks it’d be better just to give up before the bad becomes everything, those moments are going to come harder and faster until they’re all he’s going to feel. But he’s not going to do it. He couldn’t do that to the kid.

  It might be crueler to Liam in the end, holding on. What good is a husk going to be to him? What good will Mike be when he hits the point where he can’t get out of bed, or take a sip of water without spilling it all over himself, or remember Liam’s birthday? What will hurt Liam worse, Mike leaving him with a rope or a gun or whatever he chose, with a coward’s way out, or leaving him behind because he doesn’t remember what Liam means to him anymore?

  He’s started to forget things, things that should be easy, words hovering on the tip of his tongue and staying there. Those crosswords they used to do together, Mike providing all the answers and Liam writing them in because the boxes were too small for Mike’s unsteady hand, lately Liam’s been doing them all by himself. He’s gotten pretty good at them. Mike doesn’t know why he’s surprised. It’s a dumb fucking thing to underestimate Liam Fitzgerald.

  They don’t know how long Mike’s got. The prognosis is always broad: ten to twenty years, fifteen to thirty years, we’re just fucking guessing here, honestly we don’t have a goddamn clue. Mike doesn’t know if he’d prefer if it was more precise: at fifty you’re going to die of pneumonia, or at forty-five you’ll look at Liam and for a moment you won’t recognize him. But they have no fucking clue. He has no fucking clue.

  Mike’s been fucked, medically speaking, since he was thirty-two years old, and now, approaching forty-three, he’s outlived the absolute worst case scenarios, has started to stumble his way toward the best case ones. Best case: he makes it to his fucking sixties, and it probably won’t be much of a life at that point. It’s a goddamn joke, and not a funny one.

  Liam’s been his medical proxy for years now, took over as soon as it became logical. His mom’s two hours out from him, same as his brother. She’s getting up in years, and Tom’s got a family. If someone’s going to decide whether he’s going to live or die when he’s no longer capable of making that choice, it might as well be the person who’d have to live with it every day.

  It wasn’t a fair thing to ask of him, but Liam took it on like Mike had offered him a gift. Not that he’s getting many choices, exactly: Mike’s got ‘Do Not Resuscitate’ written all over his file, and he knows Liam would respect that, even if he hated it.

  It’s funny, because sometimes Liam can talk about it, not dispassionate but maybe — calm? Accepting? Liam’s had a long time to adjust to it, after all, almost as long as Mike has. Other times if Mike even hints he isn’t going to live to the ripe old age of a hundred Liam won’t talk to him for the rest of the day. Denial’s never done anyone any good, denial’s not going to keep Mike around any longer, but Mike gets it. There’s only so much time he can spend thinking about it before it becomes a sort of purgatory, Mike already fundamentally dead and just waiting for the ax to fall.

  He’s got time. He doesn’t know how much, but — he’s still got time.

  Lately, the worst part is the sex. Or maybe it’s just that sex reveals exactly how fucking much he’s deteriorated. He’s never had the boundless energy Liam did, but that was more a product of Liam being eighteen and Mike being on the wrong side of his twenties. Now? Liam’s the same age as Mike was when they met, has settled, no longer the impish little shit trying to climb Mike ten times a day, but even so, Mike can’t keep up.

  He can’t push Liam around the way he used to, the way Liam always wants him to, can’t hold him down and give it to him. It’s not that he doesn’t trust his strength, exactly, because it isn’t all gone, though it sure as shit isn’t what it used to be, but he doesn’t trust his balance, his stamina. Used to be he could take Liam apart and then, while he was still catching his breath, get to work on doing it all over again. Now he can get defeated by a few fucking flights of stairs, so the only shit they’re doing is leisurely, and Liam still stops and checks that he can handle it. He usually can. Not always.

  Liam doesn’t make him feel bad about it, which honestly makes him feel worse. Mike remembers when Liam would talk about his hands like a goddamn revelation. Now they’re not good for shit. They used to get beat up as bad as his face did, usually worse, so maybe it’s fitting that he’s lost control of them the same way he lost control of his head, but Mike’s always had them. There are so many things he took for granted before he lost them, but he misses his hands the most, he thinks.

  Misses them, and misses the abstract, the time he might not have, the time he’s lost, just doesn’t know it yet. The time five years, ten years, twenty years down the line that he won’t see, the things he’s going to miss.

  He wants to see if Liam’s hair starts thinning like his dad’s. If he goes gray, like Mike has, or if it stays the sandy brown it’s always been. He wants to see if he needs reading glasses. He wants to see if his sense of humor is as childish in his sixties as it was when he was eighteen, as it still is now. He wants to see if he puts on weight in retirement, gets softer. Wants to see him with those wrinkles everyone associates with excessive smiling, because if anyone would get them, it’d be him. He’s already got the start of them, but Mike wants to see them etched deep.

  He wants to see it, and he won’t, and it’s so goddamn unfair. Always has been, but sometimes it sneaks up on him. Sometimes he’ll be sitting on the couch, or lying in bed, or brushing his teeth, and he’ll get so fucking furious he can’t see straight, because he’s going to stop one day, and Liam’s going to keep going, and Mike won’t see what he becomes.

  He knows it’s worse for Liam. He knows it’s worse, the knowledge that he’s to have to keep going without Mike around. If their roles were reversed — Mike doesn’t like thinking about that.

  If their roles were reversed, Mike knows he wouldn’t have stuck around, wouldn’t have been able to, not knowing that shit would end no matter how hard he held onto it, not knowing that every extra day would make the end result harder to bear. But then, Liam’s always been stronger than Mike. Stubbornly, stupidly stronger, and so much more brave. There’s going to be nothing left for Liam — there already isn’t much left for Liam. Mike’s not the guy he fell for twelve years ago, not even close, a diminished version of himself, and still Liam stays.

  Mike hates him for it, a little. He doesn’t want to leave him, but he doesn’t have a choice in that, and if Liam just left first —

  He hates Liam a lot for it sometimes.

  He’s so fucking grateful the rest of the time, and he doesn’t know how to reconcile those feelings. He doesn’t think he can.

  *

  “You know,” Liam says. “I think I’m cool living this sugar baby life.”

  Fuck knows what prompts the statement. Liam’s unfathomable like that. His mind jumps from point to point and he never bothers to connect the dots for anyone else, just blurts out the most random shit. Mike’s more than used to it by now, has learned to pick up the conversation wherever Liam starts it off. Still, the idea’s fucking rich considering the kind of money Liam makes.

  “You make more than four million dollars a year to my nothing, kid,” Mike says. “I don’t think you qualify as a sugar baby or whatever the fuck.”

  “I’m stupid about money,” Liam says, which is true. Mike had to sit him down and talk him out of buying a boat that cost more than their house last summer. It wasn’t that he couldn’t afford it, but considering he didn’t have a boati
ng license and Mike had zero faith in him getting one, it was an objectively stupid purchase.

  “I’ll probably blow it all in retirement,” Liam continues. “I clearly need your guidance, therefore: sugar baby.”

  “I’ll write you some tips since I’m probably dead or drooling by then,” Mike says. “Left my investment portfolio to you in my will anyway, so you’ll manage.”

  Liam goes very still, and Mike has a split second to regret it before Liam spits out a “Fuck you,” and walks not only out of the kitchen but out of the house entirely, front door slamming behind him and waking Bella up from her nap in the sun. She looks at Mike fretfully, and Mike knows it’s just because of the loud noise, just her reaction to being startled — Bella’s smart for a dog, better trained than most, but still fundamentally a dog — but he swears he can see a hint of reproach in there as well.

  “Fuck off,” Mike mutters. “I know.”

  Liam isn’t out long. He comes in quietly for once; Mike doesn’t hear him, and the only thing that gives him away is the way Bella’s head perks when he comes inside. Mike searches half the house before he finds him in their bedroom, curled up on Mike’s side of the bed with his knees tucked to his chest. Liam, short as he is, tends to fill up all the space around him with his presence, but right now — right now he looks small.

  He doesn’t look up when Mike comes in and sits on the bed, doesn’t show any sign he’s noticed Mike’s arrival beyond the way his shoulders tense. Mike puts a hand on that tense muscle. Liam’s freezing, even the cotton of his shirt burning ice cold against Mike’s skin. Mike has a feeling he went out without bothering to put on a jacket. Some things don’t change.

  “You’re freezing,” Mike says, because it’s easier than ‘sorry’.

  “You’re a fucking asshole,” Liam mumbles.

  Easy or not, Mike guesses an apology’s deserved this time. “Sorry,” he says.

  “It’s not funny, okay?” Liam says. His voice comes out rough, a little choked. “I know that’s your thing, just — I get it, but it’s not fucking funny to me.”

  “C’mere,” Mike says, half afraid he won’t, but Liam takes it as invitation to plaster himself against Mike, cold cheek pressing against his chest, red fingers curling in his shirt.

  “I don’t want you to leave me behind,” Liam says, muffled into Mike’s shirt. Liam never says the word death. It’s always euphemisms. After. Leave behind. Go. Dancing around it like a boxer against a stronger opponent he can only beat if they get too tired to throw a punch before they have a chance to knock him out with one blow.

  Mike doesn’t blame him. He still doesn’t know what the fuck he would do with himself if things were the other way around, and Liam seems to feel so much more than Mike does, or if not more, harder.

  “I don’t want to,” Mike says. “You think that doesn’t scare the shit out of me too, Liam? Who’s going to feed you? You’re going to eat microwave dinners until you die of malnutrition.”

  Liam snorts, pulling back from Mike’s chest to wipe his eyes. Mike’s shirt is wet with tears. This isn’t what Liam deserves. This is so fucking far from what Liam deserves.

  “You’re thirty years old,” Mike says. “You didn’t sign on for this.”

  “Shut up,” Liam says.

  “You can walk away,” Mike says. It’s not the first time he’s said it, and it’s not going to be the last. “I wouldn’t blame you. I’d be happy for you.”

  It’d break his goddamn heart, but he would be. He thinks it might even be a relief.

  “Fuck off,” Liam says, curling back into him, his cheek leaving a hot wet streak across Mike’s throat. “You’re stuck with me. You’d think you’d be used to it by now.”

  You’d think.

  “Don’t know how to be,” Mike says. “Every day you’re a new pile of trouble. Can’t get used to you when you keep surprising me.”

  “Is it — is it really fucking stupid I miss you already?” Liam asks, and Mike’s eyes burn. He swallows past it.

  “I’m so fucking angry every day,” Mike says. It comes out rough, uncomfortably honest. “I’m so angry that I probably won’t see what stupid shit you get up to with your mid-life crisis.”

  Liam shakes against him, and Mike pulls him closer, until Liam’s more in his lap than out of it. He’s heavy, but Mike doesn’t mind. Needs that weight if he’s going to keep on this honest streak.

  “You’re heavy as fuck,” Mike says anyway.

  “Maybe I’ll get fat,” Liam muses. “And bald. And really into model trains or bridge in my old age or something.”

  “God forbid,” Mike says.

  “You won’t be missing much, is what I’m saying,” Liam says, trying and failing to sound light. “Except maybe more chances to make fun of me.”

  “I’m going to miss so much,” Mike says, then turns and hides his face in Liam’s hair, mouth pressed against his temple. “I’m sorry,” he manages. Barely manages.

  “Why do you only apologize for things that aren’t your fault?” Liam asks.

  “I’m a contrary bastard?” Mike guesses.

  “Sounds about right,” Liam says, and Mike tips his head up with a thumb under his chin, takes in his spiky wet lashes, the wet tracks on his cheeks. Tries to ignore the tears, but he knows they’re going to stay with him until the end, however close or far that will be. Mike kisses his temple again, his cheek, his mouth, and all he can taste is salt.

  I love you so fucking much, he doesn’t say, but he thinks it so goddamn hard he’s pretty sure Liam hears it anyway.

  PUTTING IT TO BED (2033)

  Chapter 28

  KNOCK YOURSELF OUT: The Death of an Enforcer

  When I was eighteen years old, I fell in love for the first and only time. It was with a man, which you might think is the point of this article, as it was in some others that have been published here, but it isn’t. With a fellow player, which was, and still is, controversial. With an enforcer, when they were still an indispensable part of every team. When they were there to take hits and throw punches and protect their team. When an enforcer was, as so many joked, a gladiator on skates, not a hockey player.

  We’re getting closer now.

  When I was eighteen I fell in love with a man, a fellow player, an enforcer.

  When Mike Brouwer died earlier this year, it was a minor news story in every market he played in and a sobering reminder of hockey’s dangers to the men he’d played with. I can’t count how many messages I received from NHL players, former and current, when they heard about his death. I heard from friends and former teammates. Heard from members of the Oilers brass, past and present, from the owner down to the team doctor, who told me he still felt guilty fifteen years later. I told him Mike would have told him to get the fuck over himself, and weirdly I think we both felt better after that. Mike had that kind of effect.

  Mike retired from hockey at thirty-two, to little interest. He’d played his part, he’d done his job, it was time. Very few people knew that he retired as a result of post-concussion symptoms that followed him throughout his final year in Edmonton, symptoms that made it both impossible to play and impossible to live a normal life.

  He started to experience chronic migraines that would haunt him for the rest of his life. By his mid-thirties he developed a tremor. It initially only happened when he was stressed or trying to do something that required concentration, but eventually any fine-motor tasks were literally out of his hands. At thirty-nine they diagnosed him with Parkinson's, which was almost certainly directly related to his history of head trauma.

  Mike was on an endless list of medication that was constantly adjusted, and no matter how much it was fiddled with, the side-effects were always terrible. Mood swings. Sensitivity to light. Dizziness, numbness, hypersensitivity, low blood pressure, high blood pressure, depression. You name it, he dealt with it at some point. The drugs he used to treat his migraines left him exhausted. The pills he took to counter the fatigue would make
him dizzy and nauseated. He switched medications. Side-effect: headaches. It was an endless merry-go-round of trying not to feel like shit and feeling like shit anyway.

  I know all of this because I was there for it. First from a distance, then, after I signed with the North Stars, because I lived with him, and did until his death, am writing this in a stupid, empty house I loved until he wasn’t in it.

  It’s probably not hard to read between the lines. There’s no such thing as common-law marriage in Minnesota like there is in Nova Scotia, where I grew up, and the word ‘marriage’ would get Mike skittish as anything, but fuck it, Mike can’t argue: we were married in everything but name. Til death do you part.

  That’s not really common knowledge. Mike has always been a private person, and at the idea of anyone beyond our friends and family knowing about his life, especially our relationship, his response was, ‘it’s no one’s fucking business’. And it wasn’t. But it is now.

  I asked him a few months before he died if I could talk about him. About us. After, I said. I didn’t say the word death. I’d known for years it was coming, but I still couldn’t say it, and writing it even now is horrible. I always thought I was brave, but the idea of him dying had me scared shitless. I knew he didn’t like talking about it — about us, specifically. It wasn’t something I took personally, especially after over fifteen years. It was no one’s fucking business but ours. I got that.

  “I’ll be dead,” he said. He didn’t have the same problem saying the word. “The fuck right do I have, telling you what to do? Knock yourself out.”