Hard Knocks

by Ruby Lang

  Petra shrank back. Ian narrowed his eyes.

  Helen said, hastily, “I think she’s just trying to deflect attention.”

  “With palindromes?” Adam said.

  Petra said, slightly disappointed, “Oh, you’ve heard that one already?”

  He didn’t really answer.

  His shoulders were still tensed, and his eyes still angry and—Helen swallowed—hurt. But he was looking around now, as if he was conscious of the stir he’d made and how large he loomed. He was trying to contain his fury, Helen realized. Another man would have just let it loose, not caring. But even in his anger, he was so ... considerate.

  Ian motioned for him to sit and signaled someone to bring them drinks. Adam’s eyes glittered, and he looked like he could use a dash of cold water.

  He slid in next to Helen. He was hot—seething—and she felt herself go warm.

  Far from being intimidated, Petra was looking from Helen’s face to Adam’s, like an eager bird, a glint of speculation in her eye. Helen wanted to kick her friend under the table, but Adam was crowding her so much that he would have detected any movement.

  “Let’s start again,” Helen said. “How’ve you been?”

  He glared.

  The silence was a little uncomfortable.

  The drinks and some food came, luckily, and Petra abandoned her scrutiny to say something to Ian.

  “May I ask you why you seem to want to put me out of a job?” Adam asked quietly.

  And somehow, the quietness of the question, the way he’d contained himself only to have all that sadness leak out was the worst of all.

  “It’s not about you,” Helen said. She took a big swallow of her white wine.

  His eyes were searching her, and she turned even redder. There were so many reasons why he was wrong for her. Most of all, it was because he made her feel too many things all at once. She was hot and uncomfortable. She also felt guilty, more so because he was looking at her like that, like she was the one who had punched him in the face and left that bruise on his cheekbone. Yes, she had realized intellectually that a call for banning hockey meant that she supported the dismantling of sports teams, the outlawing of the NHL, the dissolution of camps and schools, stores, and an entire community.

  But she hadn’t really, really expected anyone to take her seriously. Except this was Portland, the land where quixotic quests were no longer quixotic. While the town might not be able to get rid of all hockey, there were some who were raring to get rid of the arena, the Wolves, and, by extension, Adam Magnus.

  And yes, although she had told herself that she had thought this through, and weighed the consequences, she hadn’t actually thought far enough or near enough. She hadn’t thought of this person, sitting next to her, whom she knew up close.

  Not very sporting of her.

  So, of course, she said, “I hope you don’t expect an apology.”

  Petra groaned.

  “An apology is what I expect for your sneaking out after that night after making it clear you wouldn’t. For this, though? For this, I don’t even know what this is.”

  “It’s actually a way to keep you safe,” she said.

  Petra snorted.

  “What?” Helen asked, her hands flying out. She almost knocked over her wineglass. “I’m a neurologist. You can’t expect me to support something that involves so many knocks to the head.”

  She was losing control of her limbs and her brain. Best stick to the message.

  “I’m not asking you to apologize,” Adam said, tightly, “or to justify it medically. I’m not asking you to do anything. I just want to know why this, why now? You could have done this before you met me, or you could have said nothing. But instead, you waited until after ...”

  After.

  Out of the corner of her eye, Helen could see that Petra was about to open her mouth again, but Ian settled his hand on her shoulder. He whispered something.

  “Ian just told me to butt out,” Petra announced. “We’re going to the bar.”

  When they were safely away, Helen scooted away from Adam, but he followed her, sliding after her on the seat. Clearly, it was physical intimidation, something he had no doubt mastered. “You don’t have to shadow me like that,” she said irritably. “I’m not making a quick getaway.”

  “Right, because you only bolt after sex.”

  “I was trying to spare you—”

  “That is such utter and complete bullshit,” he growled so low and intense that the table rattled under her fingers and the sound seemed to be sucked from the room.

  His last words delivered in that whisper roared so close to her ear that she could feel the warm force of his breath drive at her. Helen’s face and neck and chest prickled with fear and ... something else, and she saw her fingertips grip a fork so tightly that her knuckles went white. But what she really wanted to do was turn around and kiss him, to touch him right there on his firm, broad chest. She could see it was still tense and bunched, moving up and down. She wanted to soothe him.

  Adam angry was really, really something.

  *

  He was on the edge. His hands were gripping the seat so tightly that he doubted that the leather was ever going to recover. And she was sitting there, staring at his chest like she wanted to lick it. Arousal and anger battled so ferociously in him that he let out a snarl that lifted a loose wisp of her hair, and that wisp drifted toward him—as she drifted toward him and righted herself with a jerk.

  She took a gulp of wine, and Adam enjoyed a rare moment of feeling like he was the only one who wasn’t in control.

  He scrubbed his hands through his hair and wished for a moment that it were longer, so that he could grip it hard and pull it. From the way Helen tracked his hands, it seemed she was having similar thoughts.

  He wanted to make her look straight at him. He wanted to pull her chin right toward him and make those brown eyes widen, and he wanted to listen as her breath came faster and faster. Instead, he put his hands down flat on the table. “Do you blame me for being angry? What the fuck do you think you were doing?”

  She wriggled a bit more. “Look, maybe it was terrible of me to have left without waking you—”

  “That is not what I’m talking about, Helen. That is not the point.”

  “But you were asleep, and I did have rounds. I had to go home and pull on some fresh clothing.”

  “You’re avoiding the goddamn fucking issue.”

  He heard her sharp intake of breath. “Damn right I’m avoiding the issue,” she snapped.

  Then she slumped. “It’s what I do best.”

  This was not going as planned.

  He had intended to find her, be furious with her, and get her to admit she was wrong. A minor offshoot of this plan had been to bring her home to his apartment to have crazy sex and, the next morning, pancakes.

  He even had syrup.

  But part of that scenario was that he was going to feel better and satisfied with what she had to tell him. That the whole thing was going to disappear or that some other Portland neurologist named Helen Chang Frobisher had written the thing. But he’d tried to forget that this was Helen. Difficult, annoying, stubborn, dizzyingly beautiful Helen. She had no doppelgangers. She made no apologies. He would not be satisfied. She was giving him a headache. She’d probably gone into doctoring because she caused so many of them.

  How did she do that to him? How did she twist him up like that, making him angry and hungry and guilty within the space of minutes? He wanted to slam his fists down on the table with all the various and at odds feelings suppressed in his muscles, but he knew he couldn’t. It always scared people, and right now, although he was angry, he didn’t want to scare her.

  He breathed through his nose a couple of times and relaxed his shoulders and hands. He had to say it all. He had to let it out before it strangled him. “I don’t know what’s going on with you, Helen. Maybe I don’t even care anymore. We don’t know each other that well. But let me sp
ell it out for you: This thing hurts the team I play on and it hurts the team’s case for staying here in Portland. You may think this is a one-off thing, a doc just giving an opinion in a paper that no one reads. But that’s not the only thing at play here. It’s just one more blow to an already fragile system—a hit from an unexpected direction, the kind of jolt that makes my teeth rattle. So yeah, this endangers my job, which is already hanging by a thread. It also means you dislike the thing that I do for a living and, in a way, you dislike me.”

  Out of the corner of his eye, he saw her mouth open. But he didn’t care. “It may seem like a small thing, but it was personal. You hurt me in so many ways. You fucking screwed me over in so many goddamn ways, Helen Frobisher. You may have hurt my livelihood. It’s not your fault entirely that my life is not ideal at the moment. For a while, you even made my life seem better. But ... there it is, damaged. And you can’t even apologize to me. You can’t even meet my eye.”

  He was right, and it made his heart sore. She didn’t say sorry. She didn’t meet his eye. She looked at the table.

  He got up and left.

  • • •

  Well, that could not have possibly gone worse, Helen thought, crouched in her shower stall, as if the shower curtain could shield her from her own messes.

  She was terrible. Worse, he thought she was terrible. If she were simply losing her mental faculties and managed to hide it from the world, what would it matter? She could go madly and merrily on her way. But now, one person in the world had incontrovertible proof that she really wasn’t doing very well.

  Not very well at all.

  She wished she had some popcorn. Sarah would probably gag if she could hear Helen’s thoughts. Food! In a bathroom!

  Well, most of Helen’s thoughts would make Sarah gag.

  Sometimes, it was good to talk to Sarah. She wasn’t the most sympathetic person in the world. Sometimes, she wasn’t very nice. But she could probably talk almost anyone off a ledge just by sheer force of will.

  It was possible that Helen was on a ledge.

  She pulled out her phone. There were five messages from Petra.

  Without checking any of them, Helen texted:

  AT HOME. I’M FINE.

  Then she called Sarah.

  “They named this one Sahara. Maybe I get a quarter of a point for this one,” Sarah yelled into the phone. No hello, no how are you. Helen closed her eyes and began to laugh.

  Sarah was always loud after a good birth. It was probably from shouting to be heard above the baby’s cries. She also had a scoring system for baby names. She was determined to have her patients name a child after her.

  “They probably won’t name a kid after me, unless I assist them on multiple births,” Sarah added. “I’m just going to have to work on getting some good breeders into my practice.”

  Helen felt better already. “How’s the kid?” she said.

  “Apgar nine. Nine pounds, five ounces. Big enough for the mom to receive lifelong sympathy, not big enough to put her in any real danger. Short labor, only minor tears. I feel so awesome. Hang on, let me get some juice.”

  Some coins clinked, and Helen heard the rumbling of a machine.

  “So why are you still at the hospital?” Helen asked.

  “I’m covering for Sharma Rai. One of her patients is probably going to pop in an hour or so. Friday nights are party time for the forty-weeks set.”

  Helen thought about this. “How do you do it, Sarah? How do you just keep on going cheerfully? How do you stay so sure of yourself?”

  “There’s always work.”

  “What if your inability to do what you’re supposed to do is the problem?”

  Helen could hear Sarah taking a large gulp. She gave a little sniff.

  “Let me tell you about Saraha’s mom, Le-Anna. Le-Anna is one of those patients, you know, the one for whom every minor thing possible goes wrong. Do you have those?”

  “Yeah, I do.”

  “Well, first of all, the first few weeks, I kept accidentally calling her Le-Ann instead of Le-Anna. She came in on a day when my ultrasound equipment wasn’t working—that was a terrible day. I couldn’t find that speedy little heartbeat without prodding Le-Anna’s belly like a horny dolphin. Then, the mom had a little bleeding and freaked out. We muffed up the timing of her glucose challenge, and she had to come in and drink that horrible sweet drink again. Just a bunch of little things, tiny little things that were not her fault, not my fault, but they just served to undermine the relationship sort of subtly. It was all enough to rattle even me. And you know what, that kid is fine and Le-Anna’s happy and healthy. So, I look at the result. I don’t look at every little thing I do wrong. And believe me, I know I do get a lot of things wrong.” Sarah paused. “Did that help?”

  “Not as much as I’d hoped.”

  Sarah accepted that by taking another long draught. Helen heard the can clank in the recycling bin. “Sarah, I can’t believe you just chugged V8.”

  “I know. The salt. ”

  Sarah continued with nary a pause. “Your problem, Helen, is that you work with too many people with chronic pain. It can make a person feel helpless.”

  Helen was quiet.

  “I was in the lobby the other day,” Sarah said. “Mother brought a newborn down to wait for her husband to bring the car around. Of course, people flocked around her. A woman was there with her elderly father, and she said to the mother, Here’s your baby at the beginning of her life, and here’s my father at the end. And of course, everyone cooed at that, even the old gentleman, but when you think about it, what an odd thing it was to say out loud—even in a hospital. The newborn made it okay, but usually we hate saying it. Her father was dying.”

  Helen clutched the shower curtain.

  “My father is dying,” Helen said.

  She heard Sarah huff and breathe. “I’m sorry, sweetie.”

  And Helen wept.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  He needed to stop thinking about her, Adam thought, hauling weights to his shoulders. Helen Frobisher was obviously too much trouble for him. She was complicated and volatile. To date, Helen Frobisher had:

  Shone a flashlight into his eyes despite his protests.

  Yelled at him on a city street.

  Screwed him and left without a word.

  Called for his profession to be dismantled.

  When he left, her pixyish friend Petra had even followed him out and demanded to know what he’d said to her. He added, Got yelled at by an angry elf to his list of things he could lay at Helen’s feet.

  But even then, he couldn’t dislike her. There was pain, fear, some strange unnamable force at work behind all of this gorgeous mayhem. He could see it all in her hands and face when she had looked up at him: the panic. He’d wanted to reach out to comfort her, but he’d known that if he did, they’d do the same things to each other again and again.

  He wouldn’t have minded some of the things that they did.

  But the rest was a self-destructive cycle.

  Good for you for confronting her then leaving, he thought, hating himself.

  He replaced the weights and wiped the sweat off of them with his towel. He used to like training because it gave him time to think. He was paid to think, in a way. It was his private joke to himself. But lately, he’d had trouble getting his mind on the tasks ahead. Maybe too many knocks to the head had addled him, just as she’d predicted.

  Or maybe the problem was that all of his thoughts these days were a collection of little phrases he wanted to tell her, snapshots of things he wanted to show her. And maybe that was the worst trap of all. He wanted to prove to her that he was worth something, that he shouldn’t be discarded. And why was he even trying to do this now when he had been the one to walk out on her?

  He heard a clank next to him, and he pulled out his earbuds. The Swede—or was it the Norwegian guy?—was doing weights. They nodded in greeting, and Adam went to the leg press machine and toggled the weights
.

  The problem was that the business wasn’t separate from his fears about the future. He disagreed with Helen, but he was headed to the same conclusions she was, in a way: He couldn’t keep playing. And now maybe someday he was going to lose his wits. Of course, they talked about concussion on the teams he’d played on—the doctors, the coaches, the managers all got very earnest looks on their faces. But he hadn’t seriously considered it until Helen. He was going to have to save up for the possibility of debilitating illness on top of it all. So dreaming of lingering in bed with Helen on a Sunday morning, seeing her in sunlight as the light poured in from the huge windows of his apartment—that was out of the question. He needed fat numbers in his bank statement, offers of employment with thick benefits packages that would cushion his soon-to-be-arthritic joints. He could not afford to moon over fleeting images of sunlight in Portland, of Helen’s hand resting gently on his chest, of her sleepy smile. It had never happened; it never would. And even if it did, it was impractical. It didn’t matter if she was going through things. He was also going through things. And now he could add the inevitable deterioration of his brain to the circling drain of his hockey career.

  A tap on his shoulder startled him.

  “You are done?” the Swedish kid asked uncertainly.

  Adam looked up at this young, hungry teammate. He was in the weight room all the time—every time Adam was here, at least, which was often—and he was probably desperate to keep his place on the team, desperate for the team to make it.

  Adam nodded and got up. He’d lost count of his reps anyway. He would pay for that at practice.

  Life without hockey, he thought, for the umpteenth time. What would that be like? Looking at it in the abstract, he felt an unexpected twitch of interest.

  He walked out of the training room in search of his tablet computer.

  • • •

  The last thing Helen wanted to do was talk about hockey.

  It was her own fault. She had fashioned the bomb and lobbed it, and she’d hurt Adam. She still believed she was right, but she didn’t like that he didn’t like her. And the consequence was that the producer of a local public access show wanted her to go on television and act like an expert who had the weight of righteous conviction behind her. She wasn’t sure she had it in her.