No Contact

The quiet room is a closet with a lock that sticks and a lamp that makes everyone look concussed.

I put Ward Keene on the folding chair anyway. I shut the door. I click the lock twice because once is how the last trainer did it.

"Look at my finger," I say.

He looks at my mouth.

"My finger, Captain."

He looks at my finger. His pupils are not friends with each other. Left is a little late. Right is doing the work. I have seen this exact argument in a junior locker room in Duluth and I am not signing the sheet that makes it a story.

"Months backward," I say. "Start at October."

"October. September. August—" He swallows. The swallow is a tell. "July. I can play the third."

"You can sit the third."

"June."

"That's my name. Keep going."

His mouth twitches. He thinks that was charming. It was a collision. I write orientation delayed on the pad and I do not smile at him for noticing me.

Cal Duryea opens the door without knocking. Head coach. Clipboard. The face of a man who has already decided the captain is fine because the captain is the captain.

"How many fingers," Cal says, which is not a test I am running.

"He's no-contact," I say. "If you put him out I write it. If you put him out I call Ruthie from the bench."

"He answered you."

"He looked at my mouth."

Ward sits with his gloves still on like he might be called. Blood has dried in a comma on his left cuff. The room smells like rubber and the lemon cleaner Bo Peck uses when he is angry. Someone is yelling in the tunnel. The Barn is a warehouse that learned hockey and never learned quiet.

"I'm fine," Ward says.

Fine is the word men use when they want you to close the ticket. I shine the penlight again. Left pupil takes the light like it is a suggestion.

"Name the play when you got hit."

He blinks. Once. Twice. "Weak-side dump. I went in first. Their D—" He stops. He finds it. "Their D stepped up. I didn't see him."

"You didn't see him," I repeat, and I write it down so it exists outside his mouth.

Cal exhales through his nose. "It's a hockey play."

"It's a head," I say. "I don't treat plays."

I was hired sixteen days ago because the last trainer signed a sheet after a smile. The player skated a shift and then sat on the ice and asked what city he was in. Fenwick. He was in Fenwick. He is still in Fenwick, selling insurance, and he sends the club a Christmas card that Ruthie pins in the office like a threat.

I do not need a Christmas card.

"Protocol is no-contact until I retest," I say. "Bike tomorrow. Lights if he keeps the breakfast down. He does not dress."

Ward takes the gloves off. His hands are taped at the wrists, old tape, dirty. He has a scar through the left eyebrow that someone stitched in a hurry. He looks at the lock.

"The last guy let me sit ten and go back."

"The last guy does not work here."

Cal wants to argue in the hallway where the players can hear that the coach is still in charge. I open the door for him so he can have the hallway. He takes it. He leaves the clipboard dent in the chair.

Ward stays.

"June," he says, and he gets the month right this time on purpose. "If I sit Saturday, the room thinks I'm made of glass."

"If you play Saturday and you can't find the months, the room thinks I am. I already did that job once. I'm not doing it in your barn."

He looks at me for a long second. Not at my mouth. At the pad. At the block letters I have already started: NO CONTACT.

"My father watches the broadcast," he says, very calm, like he is telling me the weather on the lake. "He will text me that I looked slow. I looked slow because I didn't see a man."

"Then he can text you in the quiet room."

I put the penlight in my pocket. I write the time. 19:42. I write the score, which is not my job and is the only number he will respect: 2–2, late second, they need him and they will not have him.

"Water," I say. "Then you sit where I can see you. If you stand up and wander I will put you in the medical room with the door open so the whole tunnel can watch you fail a test."

He drinks. He does not wander.

I open the lock. It sticks. I hate that it sticks. I leave it open a crack so I can hear if he vomits, and I step into the tunnel and the noise hits me like a shift.

Miles Varga is on the bench with someone else's blood on his lip, not his. He looks at me, then at the closet, and he does not ask. Good. I put him on a list in my head: does not ask.

Henrik Solberg is in the crease talking to himself in Swedish. Greer Lang is already upstairs with a laptop, timestamping the hit I have not watched yet. I will watch it. I will watch it until I can see the moment Ward stopped seeing.

Ruthie Falco is in the tunnel with a coffee that has gone cold. She does not ask if he is fine.

"No-contact," I say.

"Write it," she says. "If Cal dresses him I will be the one who looks slow."

She leaves. I go back to the closet. Ward has his head tipped against the cinderblock and his eyes closed, which is a choice I did not give him.

"Eyes open," I say.

He opens them. Left still late. Right still working.

"I'm going to be a problem," he says.

"You already are. That's the job."

I sit on the equipment crate because there is not a second chair. My knee touches his knee. I move mine. He notices and does not comment, which I file as the first decent thing he has done since he looked at my mouth.

Above us the Barn groans. Someone scores. The floor shakes. Ward's hands tighten on his thighs and he does not ask me who.

I do not tell him.

Between the second and the empty minutes of the third I make him sip water every four minutes like a child. He allows it. Allowing is not clearance. I write the sips. I write that he asked, once, who scored, and I did not tell him, and he did not ask again. That is a kind of obedience I do not trust yet. Obedience can be a smile with its mouth closed.

When the horn ends I walk him out the tunnel the long way so the lot does not get a captain with a late pupil and a C. Bo has the back door. Pia has the other key. She looks at Ward, then at me, then at the sheet in my hand.

"Not my head," she says.

"Not your head," I say.

He gets in a car I do not drive. I stand in the cold until the taillights are a fact that has left.

The lot is dirty ice and a light that buzzes late. A kid in a Pike hat waits on a fence for a letter that is already gone. I do not explain a closet to a fence. I go in through Bo's door. Lemon. Anger. The booth fridge starts its F-sharp like it has been waiting.

I go back to the booth and I finish the note and I lock the pad in a drawer that still has a cheap lock, and I write replace lock on a sticky, and I go home to the brick wall, and I do not sleep until I have named every month backward myself, just to be sure I still can.

I write did not ask under the other notes, and I keep the penlight where he can see it, and I do not clear him, and that is the whole night.

Before I leave the Barn I stand in the lot one more time. Snow starting. Mean. The diner sign is on, pink, a wound I do not enter. I do not need eggs. I need a pad that says no and a lock that will still be cheap in the morning. I get in my own car. I do not look for his. I drive to the brick wall and I name October backward from the driver's seat so the hand and the mouth agree before I sleep.