by Ruby Lang
“Why would they ban it? It’s fascinating,” Sarah said, chewing distractedly.
“Clearly,” Petra said. “Sarah, you do realize that you’ve put several wedges of deep-fried potato into your pure, kale-fed mouth, right?”
Sarah’s eyes widened, and she jerked back, as if hit. On the ice, the players pulled apart.
“A few fries aren’t going to kill you, Doc,” Petra said.
Sarah opened her mouth to argue, of course, but Helen didn’t hear her.
The camera had pulled away to reveal the blond player skating around the rink. It was Adam Magnus.
• • •
He was too old for this, he thought as he eased into his hotel room bed later that night. He had stitches on his forehead and a yellow and purple bruise on his ribs, and his legs were mottled with black and blue. His roommate and the rest of his teammates—all younger—were out, armed with cash and condoms. The Wolves loved being on the road. They were especially happy when games took them to LA, land of dry heat and hot women. Never mind that they always lost their games—they’d come to expect that part. For Adam’s teammates, any place was better than Portland, with its rain, its earnestness, and its lack of fans. As for Portland women, according to his fellow Wolves, they were all bitter shrews who didn’t shave their legs—or any other parts. Adam had no idea how any of the Wolves had come upon this knowledge, since none of his women had the bad taste to hang out with these teammates.
Unaccountably, he felt himself thinking of Dr. Helen Frobisher, the woman least likely to show him anything.
God, was he really dreaming about her grooming habits?
He needed a girlfriend.
He also needed to get to sleep so that he’d be able to play the next road games. Unless, of course, he was sent down to the minors yet again.
He recalled the nearly empty press conference the other day and winced. The PR team had geared up for a damage control, but the news outlets that bothered to cover it quoted from the release and then used the accident as a way to rehash the controversy over Yevgeny Molotov’s use of tax-exempt government bonds to fund the building of the arena.
Who could blame anyone for finding a mysterious Russian billionaire more interesting than a couple of banged up hockey players? Molotov consorted with models and the mafia. Rumor had it that he had commissioned a bidet from Prada, that he owned a sex island in the South Pacific, and that he had one wife per continent. The citizens of Portland had questions about how exactly he’d gotten the government to fund the new arena. They had questions about why they needed yet another arena to begin with.
And really, frankly, everyone wanted to hear more about the alleged sex island.
Everyone except Adam. He just needed to buy more time to figure out his life.
At least he had a degree, not that he knew what to do with a BA in psych. He had been playing professionally since he was twenty-two. He had socked away a reasonable amount of money but certainly not as much as expected. He’d spent a lot during his lean years in the minors and had poured a lot into his parents’ farm. But he didn’t know who to talk to about his future. Retirement wasn’t something that his goalie friend Serge wanted to contemplate—he was too busy with his own woes—and manager Bobby would freak out if he knew that Adam was planning to jump ship. Adam might have to go back to school. He might have to figure out what he liked to do.
He really didn’t have time to think about women.
Adam pulled the sheets up. At least the team sprung for nice hotel rooms, he thought as he fell asleep.
CHAPTER THREE
Concussion.
Chronic traumatic encephalopathy. CTE.
Helen reached into her bowl of popcorn, stuffed a handful in her mouth, and crunched mindlessly as she reviewed the National Hockey League’s concussion protocols, then read through PubMed, loading up on as many articles as she could. None of this was new to her. She’d started considering it as soon as her father’s diagnosis had sunk in and she’d begun to suspect his history of boxing. But today, she felt compelled to look at hockey. She hadn’t given the sport much thought in recent years. She usually worked with headache and migraine patients, but studying up on her father’s condition had given her a renewed interest in degenerative brain diseases like CTE: a series of concussions over a lifetime, like invisible stresses lining a porcelain bowl, would leave the brain fragile until a final tap was all it would take for the delicate structure to shatter.
It used to be called dementia pugilistica, boxer’s dementia, or punch-drunk syndrome. It started with headaches and minor attention deficits. By the time the disease ran its course, patients had slurred speech, they became angry and aggressive, or jealous and paranoid. They weaved and listed when they walked. Some of the patients were suicidal.
It was linked to parkinsonism, the set of symptoms that her father had.
Boxers, of course, became susceptible to CTE particularly after long years in the ring. So did football players. So did hockey players.
She’d liked the game when she was a kid. Her brother, Stephen, had played because that’s what boys did in their town if they wanted to seem “normal.” He’d been pretty good, too, but all that pride had turned to horror on the day that Stephen had gotten slashed across the cheek. He’d sunk to the ice, blood pouring out of him, and it was the most terrifying memory of Helen’s childhood. A member of Stephen’s own team had done that to him. The whole team had been trying to trip up the half-Asian kid that day. Her brother still had the scar.
Helen’s parents had withdrawn Stephen from the team after that incident. They’d all worked hard not to think about hockey ever since.
She thought she’d put that awful memory behind her, but now Helen had hockey—or rather, a certain hockey player—on the mind. Every study Helen read, every game she watched, she became more angry. And she had watched a lot of games over the past week.
During her rotations, she had seen patients who battled to put one foot in front of the other, who couldn’t remember the names of their spouses or how many children they had. Some patients couldn’t read; they couldn’t talk. In every way, they became isolated and fearful. That was the worst part of dementia—the loneliness and fear of the patients. Her father had a loving family, but he was alone and afraid, and there was nothing she could do about it. But in rings, fields, and rinks, grown men threw themselves willingly at this kind of brain damage.
Why would anyone make himself into her father? Why would anyone want to be part of that violent culture?
Helen told herself she was detached, that she was just looking into concussion from a clinical point of view. But a corner of her mind knew the truth. Her mind was circling and circling this information because she thought she could do something about it. She couldn’t help Harry Frobisher but she could help someone.
Her own befuddled mind presented her with a vision of Adam Magnus’s sharp eyes.
Ugh. She wished she’d never seen him play. She wished she’d never seen him take off his helmet to reveal his hair dark with sweat, the streak of blood on his forehead. She wished she hadn’t seen his shoulders slumped with fatigue, the dullness of his eyes.
It shouldn’t matter to her. But it did.
She stood up, flapped her arms, then brought herself down in a deep stretch. She pulled her head up. The coffee table held three bowls and spoons and dregs of milk and crumpled paper napkins. Her couch was a mess of medical journals. On the television, the Kings were playing the Avalanche. She was thirty-two years old; it was a Friday night; and she was in a hoodie, eating popcorn and cereal, reading about brain trauma, and hate-watching hockey.
She was getting weird. She’d end up buried under journals. Her elderly neighbor, Alicia, would probably call the police because of the terrible smell coming from the condo.
She would go out and see her friends, but her breaks hadn’t coincided with Petra’s, and as an OB/GYN, Sarah’s hours were crazy.
Helen decided she’d check
in at Stream, the bar that belonged to Petra’s boyfriend, Ian. At the very least, she’d find someone there to talk to. Plus, Stream didn’t have a television (except during World Cup) because it was classy and snooty. She loved to bug Ian about installing one and observe how far back he could roll his eyes. But tonight, the last thing she needed was to think about hockey.
An hour later, she’d showered away the grime of brooding and bad snacks, waved to her neighbor Alicia who was peering from her windows, and driven into the Pearl District to park her car a few blocks away from her friend’s bar.
It had rained earlier in the day, and fog still hovered over the street. But despite the fact that it was November, it wasn’t too cold out. She double-wrapped her scarf around her neck and stepped out into the night, strolling slowly along the sidewalks, pausing to peer in the windows of a bookstore or stare at the red shutters of a burned-out building. She loved living here. The Okanagan Valley was her childhood, but it had changed, and now those memories were overlaid with the pain of her father’s condition. Here, where she had finally landed, after thin years of classes and study and frantic work, she felt like she was among her people. She could sense the mountains in the distance, silent and impassive. She could breathe.
She stopped for a minute to enjoy the evening and stepped back to let an amorous couple pass.
Their progress was slow. She wondered briefly if she could find funding for a study about French kissing and psychomotor retardation. In fact, she could probably whip up the grant proposal while she was waiting for them, if they continued at this rate.
But as they ambled by, wrapped in each other, another giant pedestrian started along the street behind them. Helen stilled. She recognized that outline, that fuzz of blond hair shining under the streetlights. She found herself in front of the living reminder of her obsession and worry and all that she had been doing in the last week: Adam Magnus.
God, he was tall. Taller than she remembered.
He moved much more gracefully off of his skates. Maybe it was because his back was straight and not crouched over a hockey stick, and maybe it was because he wasn’t attired in a sloppy jersey, but with a woolly scarf, jeans, and a tailored tweed blazer.
She had a weakness for tweed.
He was going to look down and catch her staring at any moment now. That really wouldn’t do.
Fight or flight, her brain said.
She took a deep breath and felt her leg muscles tense, and she stepped right in front of Adam Magnus on the dark Portland street.
“You!” she said, poking him in the chest with her finger. “You were playing the day after you got out from the hospital after a car accident. You let Serge Beaufort play the next goddamn game after that! He had a concussion.”
If she was going to feel something for him, she preferred it to be fury.
Adam Magnus looked confused as he gazed down at Helen. Then his face seemed to brighten.
The big lunk.
“The team doctors okayed him to fly in to LA. They said he could lace up,” Adam Magnus said slowly. “It’s not actually my decision.”
There might have been the hint of laughter in his voice.
Maybe flight would have been a better choice, Helen realized. She had not expected him to give her a measured and reasonable explanation.
Adam blinked and gave her a quiet, slow smile. “How’s it going, Dr. Helen Frobisher?”
Helen swallowed.
She was ready to fight with him. After all, he was a brawler, wasn’t he? But she was the one who was furious and irrational and, for some odd reason, frightened for him, which only fueled her anger more. He wasn’t her patient, and he hadn’t been seriously hurt. If she was going to worry over anyone, she really ought to have been more worried about Serge Beaufort. His condition had been more serious and easily exacerbated. Clearly, the team doctors were in the pockets of the owners, or managers, or whatever power structure they had in hockey.
Still, Adam Magnus was here, right in front of her, and he’d been the one whom she had been really watching on her screen for the last few days. Sure, she dutifully viewed other games from other teams, staring at the screen through the tunnel created by her hoodie, like a mad solitary bomber. She was researching. But for some reason, Adam Magnus was the man who drew her. She had learned to pick out his number on the jersey. She knew the shape of his broad back, the tilt of his body as it skated across the ice. And now, apparently, she felt like she had a right to tell him how to run his life.
He was still smiling, still watching her as her anger sputtered out. When she stared at her television, it was easy to convince herself that he was someone brutal and callous. Someone who lived by his fists.
But his smile. It changed him.
She suddenly realized where she was and who she was. She removed her finger from his chest. “Mr. Magnus,” she said, backing away.
“It’s Adam.”
“Right.”
She stepped back even more, aware that she was not exhibiting healthy human behavior. What kind of person—what kind of doctor—launched herself at people on the street and screamed at them to take better care of themselves?
“I’m sorry,” she said, stiffly. “I shouldn’t have poked you. Or yelled.”
Adam Magnus looked amused. “You wouldn’t be the first,” he said.
She peered at him. “You have a new laceration on your forehead,” she said.
He grimaced. “Not pretty, is it? Well, because you were apparently watching the games, you’ll know that I got clobbered pretty hard in LA.” He paused. “You seem to know more about the team now.”
He sounded pleased.
“I studied up,” said Helen. “Apparently, I embarrassed myself the other day.”
And tonight, she thought.
Adam’s face twisted into a grimace. “Well, not a lot of people in Portland really seem into hockey,” he said. “We’re working on it,” he added.
He seemed far from the arrogant, blustering jock that she expected him to be. Of course, he’d never acted cocky, not even in the hospital. Helen had no idea why she thought that would be his personality.
“Well,” she said, “I don’t care about how well your team does. I’m more concerned about the potential for injury.”
Inside, she winced. Could she sound more priggish and insulting? She stepped back and waved—a signal that she was going to leave. But he moved close to her again. He seemed to want to go with her. “Why don’t I walk you wherever you’re headed?” he said. “It’s late.”
“This is a safe neighborhood. I don’t want to put you out,” she muttered.
She shot a sideways glance at him. He shrugged, an easy, graceful roll of those shoulders that somehow left Helen a bit breathless. “That’s a nice scarf. Very—er—jazzy.”
“Jazzy. That’s good, right?” He added, “I’ve got a night off. I needed to think, so I decided to walk around. I live around here.” Almost to himself, he added, “And I’m going to miss it when I’m gone.”
She resolutely did not ask him what he meant.
They walked slowly toward Stream, not saying much, both seemingly preoccupied. But most of Helen’s thoughts had been about him for days. She found it hard to concentrate with this man beside her. She tried not to study him, but live and in the flesh, he was so much person. It was difficult not to stare at his hands, for instance, his wide palms and flat knuckles, which had smashed into jaws and guts countless times, but which, swinging by his sides, looked like they would do well on a piano, spanning octaves and tenths or moving nimbly over arpeggios. Abruptly, her brain devised a test of his fine motor skills, using his fingers and her skin, and she swallowed and swung her gaze away. It was easier to watch him when he was boxed in by television. On television, he was brutal. In person, he was dangerous.
Where had that thought come from?
Nevertheless, she was glad when they reached the safety of the bar. With other people around, she wouldn’t fixate on him
.
Stream was lively and warm. The copper fixtures gleamed brightly under the lights of hurricane lamps. Laughter and chatter rose and ebbed. She and Adam stood in the doorway for a minute, their eyes still needing time to adjust. He had pressed his hand on the small of her back, the lightest touch of fingers. And he turned his head and leaned into her so delicately, as if he wanted to shelter her under the protective curve of his body, as if he were asking a question.
She wanted to say yes.
The evening seemed to have turned into something entirely different from the one she had planned.
Helen took in a breath.
She peered around the bar to see if Petra or Sarah was there, or even the manager, Lilah. But although she knew and nodded at most of the servers, she didn’t see her friends.
“Let’s get that booth,” Adam said in her ear, giving her another light press of his fingers. She felt her body thrill under his hand.
He helped her take her jacket off and hung it up for her. He waited for her to sit down, then slid in next to her.
She cleared her throat. “You have good manners,” she said.
“Minnesota farm boy,” he said. “We’re polite, stoic, and surprisingly good singers.”
“You were a choirboy?”
“There was a lot of Handel in my youth.”
“I’ll bet you looked angelic, with your blond hair and bright eyes.”
“Sing forth, seraphim and cherubim, as they say. Or at least that’s what Handel says.”
She had a sudden vision of him as a Renaissance angel, except not one of those insipid halo wearers, but glorious and powerful, the muscles of his naked back straining as he wrestled with a mortal.
Luckily, the server, Juliet, came by and took their drink orders and handed them menus.
He didn’t look at his menu. “What’s good here?” he asked Helen.
“The hush puppies are really good. They change the food pretty frequently.”
