Breaking Skin

by Debra Doxer

  Her lips seal together and she glares at me. Then she slumps down into the mattress, looking exhausted, and shakes her head.

  “All right then.”

  I take a step back as if I’m going to leave, but I wait on the off chance that she wants me to stay or even ask me a single question about myself. But she says nothing. She returns her gaze to the television as if I’m already gone.

  “I’m still dancing with the San Francisco Ballet,” I say.

  I don’t know why I tell her. There’s no point. She won’t care, but I want her to, and I call myself a fool as her gaze turns on me again.

  “It’s one of the top ballet companies in the country. Every season they turn away hundreds of dancers who try out.”

  I hear how pathetic I sound, but I can’t seem to stop myself. The little girl inside me wants some acknowledgment from my mother, anything at all, even if I have to ask for it myself.

  She licks her lips and lifts her good hand to wipe the extra moisture from her mouth. “Dancing is a waste of time. You should come home and help your sister. It’s the least you can do.”

  My jaw clamps shut at the way her words sting. She’ll never change, and that knowledge twists inside my gut, eating away at me the way it always has.

  There’s no affection in my mother’s eyes when she looks at me, and if it was there before, I don’t remember. How could a mother not love her children unconditionally? How could she not defend them or fight for them? Langley is my niece, not even my daughter, and I know I would do anything for her, fight all her demons and dry all her tears if I could.

  I pick up my purse and swallow my anger. With barely a glance at my mother, I move toward the door.

  “Have you seen your father?”

  Her words stop me. I slowly turn, wondering if I heard her right.

  “Renee saw him,” she says.

  I narrow my eyes, wondering what game she’s playing. “He’s dead.”

  “He’s come back. He missed his favorite girl.”

  Chills crawl up my spine. “His favorite girl? That’s not you, though, Mom, is it? You were never his favorite girl.”

  Her unsteady gaze hardens. She tries to push herself up again but fails and falls back down onto the mattress.

  “He is back,” she says in a raspy whisper. “I always knew he was too mean to die.”

  I spin around and this time I leave the room quickly. My swift footfalls echo through the hallway. The chills travel from my spine out to my limbs and my whole body goes cold.

  “Was she happy to see you?” Carol asks. She’s at the front desk again, sipping from a mug.

  It isn’t easy to calm myself enough to respond. “She’s lost some of her mental capacity. She thinks my dead father has come back.”

  Carol’s face wrinkles with confusion. “She’s as sane as I am. Her speech is affected, though. Maybe you misunderstood her.”

  “I didn’t misunderstand anything.”

  I continue out the door, down the stairs, and don’t stop moving until I’m in the car. Then I turn up the radio and blare the music as loudly as I can to drown out the sound of my mother’s voice in my head.

  “You’ve got to hustle! Follow it up!” I holler over the ice.

  As the coach of Derek’s hockey team, I don’t want to be seen as favoring him, but my attention isn’t evenly divided.

  The boys speed past me down the ice in a tight pack. At the other end, Derek breaks loose and takes a shot. The puck flies past the goalie and hits the back of the net. Derek pumps his fist as he loops around and smiles when his teammates cheer. He looks over at me the way he always does, and I pump my fist in the air proudly.

  My kid’s got skills. It fills me with pride and terrifies me at the same time. If I encourage him, he may want to follow in his old man’s footsteps. A well-placed word of discouragement could point him in a different direction. He says he loves hockey, but he also loves Minecraft and his high-top Chuck Taylors. If it turns out hockey is his passion, I can’t stop him from playing. If he’s anything like me, he’d do it whether I want him to or not.

  But if he’s going to do it, how far am I willing to go to help him when I know I could be hurting him too?

  There’s a business card burning a hole in my wallet. Every time I go to throw it out, something stops me. The name on it belongs to a researcher from the University of California San Francisco. He came to a practice last year with the sole purpose of meeting me. He wants me to be part of his CTE study and to speak out to college and high school coaches around the country about the dangers of repetitive brain trauma.

  When he sought me out, he had no idea I was already experiencing symptoms. He only knew what the rest of the hockey world did. That I have a history of concussions, including one infamous one that ended my career, even though I played for months before I finally admitted I was done.

  Chronic traumatic encephalopathy or CTE. No three letters in the alphabet have more power to scare the hell out of me. It’s a progressive, degenerative brain disease caused by repetitive head trauma. Football makes the news most often for having players and former players with CTE, but ice hockey is a close second.

  There’s no way to know if you have it until you’re dead and it’s confirmed by an analysis of your brain. I’m definitely in no rush to have that test done, so maybe it’s better not to know. If I have it, there’s nothing I can do about it. There is no cure. It’s a high-stakes waiting game, and anyone who cares about me is unknowingly holding a hand of cards. It’s just a big fucking unknown and so goddamned frustrating.

  I’d like nothing more than to spread awareness about the dangers of repetitive head trauma, especially since the leagues are still denying how bad the problem is. They’re finally admitting there is a problem but they want to minimize it, and they still don’t want anyone talking about it because they don’t want the image of professional sports smeared. I heard someone say that if only ten percent of mothers with young children decide to keep their kids from playing football, the NFL is dead. I don’t know if I believe that, but it says everything about the mindset of the NFL, and the NHL isn’t any different.

  All I know is I don’t want Derek or any other player to go through what I’m going through if it can be prevented, and that makes me the worst kind of hypocrite because when I was playing, the violence never bothered me. No matter how many times I got checked, the desire to be out there on the ice never went away. To hear the noise of the crowd and feel the adrenaline race through my veins. I miss it every day. Fuck the consequences. I bet most guys would say the same.

  But the researcher who came to talk to me says you can get CTE just from playing at college and high school levels, even if you never play again, and the coaches aren’t telling players that. If you’re a kid out there risking everything, you need to know it, and your parents need to know it too. If there’s anything you can do about it, like not playing injured and giving your body a chance to recover, then that’s what the coaches should make you do. That’s something I can get behind and that’s why the card isn’t in the trash yet.

  But with Celeste trying to use my condition as a way to get full custody of Derek, how can I go out there and become the poster boy for this cause? I can’t. Not now. I won’t risk it. Bottom line is I want to help, but UCSF will have to wait.

  When practice ends, Derek pulls off his helmet and skates over to me. “Can I go to Conner’s house?”

  I hide my disappointment. “Sure. Just be back in time for dinner.”

  “I will.” He grins and skates off the ice.

  I already told him we would work on the tree house after practice. Didn’t I? I can’t be sure. Maybe I forgot or maybe he did. Either way, I’m disappointed.

  Derek doesn’t seem to notice as he sheds his gear, dumps it at my feet, and takes off with Conner. Sighing, I gather up his things and spot the same few kids who always stick around after practice to talk to me. They help me put away the equipment and ask question
s about what it was like to play professionally. They want to know how it felt to score the winning goal in the division championship game, and they ask if I scored a lot of girls too.

  I laugh with them, happy to reminisce, but I usually play it coy when it comes to girls. They make their own assumptions, and from the looks on their faces, their imaginations are a hell of a lot more interesting than the truth. Even when I was playing, I was never a player, and I’m not one now. People always took one look at me and thought they knew who I was and what I was about. An arrogant hotshot, an egotistical womanizer, brutal on the ice and off. But that was never me.

  I was focused, not arrogant, and I always preferred to be with one woman. I was too driven to waste time fucking around. But when those kids ask me about girls today, only one comes to mind. She has big brown eyes and long dark hair that brushes against the small of her back when she moves.

  Nikki was supposed to be in San Francisco by now, but she’s still here and I can’t stop thinking about her. It would be easier if she were gone. I could start trying to forget her again, but that’s impossible when I see her every day.

  I lick my lips and picture hers. One minute I’m resisting the temptation to kiss her, and the next she’s kissing me. If Langley hadn’t been there, I would have pushed Nikki back inside the house and convinced her to take me upstairs.

  The crazy thing is, I think should would have let me. Until she asked me if I’d been with her sister. When I answered, the light in her eyes faded. A change came over her and she went somewhere I couldn’t follow. She thinks Renee is the reason I’m holding back, but that’s her reason, not mine. My reason is me. She has no idea what she’s getting into with me. She deserves more. But knowing that doesn’t make resisting her any easier.

  There is something about Nikki that draws me in. I can feel a shift inside me when she’s near, as if every cell in my body is attuned to her. That has to mean something. I’m afraid it means we’re meant to be together. Afraid because how can I think that and still be selfless enough to stay away from her?

  The answer is simple. I can’t. I care about her more than I should, more than is good for either one of us.

  When I drive past the dance studio on my way home, I spot Renee’s car in the lot, which means Nikki is there. She was already upset this morning, and I don’t think what happened between us made the situation any better. As I pull into the parking lot, I know I should leave her alone, but I give in to the need to check on her because I hate to think of her in there hurting all alone. I have a feeling she’s already far too alone.

  There’s no one in the hallway when I walk inside the building. Music filters out of the studio by the doorway, and I hear a woman’s voice giving instructions. A quick look through the glass in the door tells me that Nikki isn’t in there. There are two more doors along the same hallway. The next one looks like a locker room, and the one beyond that is closed.

  Eyeing all the little-girl clothes strewn over the benches, I feel completely out of place and wonder what I was thinking coming in here. But I don’t turn back. I continue on to the closed door and bend to look through the glass window. A slim figure spins on the far side of the room.

  There she is.

  There’s Nikki, and she’s dancing to classical music that plays softly inside. She’s wearing a black leotard with a short-sleeved shirt pulled over it, and black leggings pulled up over her knees. Her hair is in a tight knot on top of her head and her eyes have a faraway look, like she’s not even there, but lost somewhere inside her head. Her movements are fluid and graceful as she travels the length of the space.

  Being an athlete, I’ve spent years dedicating myself to intense workouts, but the way Nikki moves, utilizing every muscle, defying gravity with her leaps and turns, it blows my bench presses right out of the water.

  I lose myself in her dance, knowing I shouldn’t be here because I’m intruding on a private moment, but I can’t look away. It isn’t until she stops for a moment and brushes a hand over her cheek that I realize tears are streaming down her face. But her pause is brief and she dances again even as she weeps.

  A band tightens around my chest, and it takes all my strength to stay put and not go to her. She’s working something out in there. Laying herself bare. But I still don’t give her the privacy she deserves. Glued to the spot, I keep watching, drawn in by her pain because I recognize it. I feel it too. Every single day.

  Nikki pushes off the floor into another leap, but when she comes down this time, she winces in pain and collapses to the floor.

  I rush into the room and hear the deep sobs that rack her body. Without a second thought, I bend down, wrap my arms around her, and pull her against me. For a long moment, she lets me hold her. She grips my shirt and burrows into my chest, breaking my heart with how small and vulnerable she feels in my arms. Then her hands release the fabric of my shirt and push against me.

  “What are you doing here?” Her eyes are wide and her cheeks shine with tears.

  “Looking for you. What’s wrong, Nikki? What is it?”

  She wipes her cheeks with the back of her hand. “Just my knee again.”

  “Your knee,” I repeat, but I know it’s more than that. “That’s why you’re crying?”

  She doesn’t answer and instead tries to push herself up. I stand to help her and support her weight as she gets to her feet and balances on her good leg. The moment she puts pressure on the other one, air hisses through her teeth.

  “Nikki—”

  “How long were you watching me?”

  I give her a steady look. “Long enough to see how upset you were before your knee gave out.”

  Her cheeks redden. “I need to sit a minute.”

  I help her to one of the folding chairs against the wall and set her down onto it carefully. She keeps the leg with the bad knee extended and begins to rub it. The way she steadfastly avoids my gaze is understandable. I just intruded on a painful private moment, but now that I’ve seen it, I can’t pretend I didn’t.

  “It will be okay in a few minutes.” She keeps her eyes on her knee.

  I move another folding chair over beside her and sit down. “I think it will take more than a few minutes to fix whatever’s wrong.”

  Her eyes flick up to mine and she blinks rapidly, like she’s holding back more tears. Her expression tenses before she releases a shaky breath.

  “You see more than I want you to, Cole. You probably know more too. I saw my mother this morning.”

  I wait but she doesn’t elaborate. “That must have been hard after all this time,” I say carefully because I know a little from Renee, but I no longer trust it and feel like I’m navigating through a minefield.

  “It might as well have been yesterday. Nothing’s changed. She doesn’t love me.” Nikki looks up to see my reaction and I’m not quick enough to hide my shock or the doubt that follows it.

  How could a mother or a father not love their child? But there’s so much desolation in her eyes, I know she believes it’s the truth.

  “She doesn’t know where Renee is, so I put myself through that for nothing.”

  I gently rub her back and search for something to say to make it better. But what can I say to that? I reach over and touch the wisps of hair that fell from the knot on her head. The shiny strands are like silk in my fingers, but her body is like glass, ready to shatter at any moment.

  “I don’t know what there is between you and your family, Nikki, but no one has the right to make you feel this way.”

  She shakes her head dismissively. “They have every right. I betrayed my family and they won’t ever forgive me for it.”

  “Betrayed them how?”

  She turns and looks at me with an angry gleam in her eyes. The emotion I just witnessed abates and something harder takes its place.

  “Haven’t you heard the rumors, Cole?”

  Rumors. My stomach drops because I have. “I don’t put much stock in rumors.”

  “Th
en you’ve heard something. What was it? What did you hear?” Her question sounds like a challenge.

  I shake my head. “I don’t repeat rumors either.”

  Her dark eyes search mine. If she’s looking for judgment, she won’t find it. I already misjudged her once when I believed the lies her sister told me. I won’t make that mistake again.

  She sighs and turns her gaze to the floor. “The story has been twisted into so many shapes over the years, who knows what you heard. Whatever it was, there’s probably a grain of truth left in it somewhere.”

  Bile pushes its way up my throat because every part of the rumor is despicable.

  “I don’t know how Renee lives in this town or how she can raise Langley here. Maybe that’s why she left. Maybe she wants to make a fresh start somewhere else and she’ll send for Langley when she’s ready.” Nikki’s eyes widen and she gasps as she grips my arm. “Langley! I’m supposed to pick her up from soccer. I’m going to be late.” She jumps up and winces.

  I stand and let her hold on to me for support. “I’ll take you to get her.”

  She shakes her head. “Could you just help me to the car? I can manage from there.”

  “I don’t think you should drive. I can—”

  “I’m fine, really. I don’t know if Langley saw us this morning or not, but I can’t have her thinking anything about us, and I can’t have her telling Renee either.”

  I press my lips together. I’d rather she didn’t leave this way, but I don’t want to cause more problems with her and her family.

  “Are you sure you’re okay?”

  She nods and starts for the door. A few minutes ago she looked like she was going to shatter into pieces, but now she’s sewn the broken parts back together so adeptly, I don’t doubt she’s done it before.

  As I watch her pull off her ballet shoes and slip her feet into sneakers, I’m more determined than ever to help her. Nikki needs someone on her side, and as far as I can tell, people aren’t exactly lining up for the job.