Hard Knocks

by Ruby Lang

  “You Minnesota farm boys are all the glass-half-empty kind of people,” Serge said. “My theory is that you spent too much time inhaling the tractor fumes and stepping in the cow dung. Makes you guys think you know things about the universe or something. Me, if I blow through all my money, I have a position at my parents’ restaurant in Montreal waiting for me. I say, live it up while we’re on top.”

  “We’re not on top, Serge. And I’m tired, and I don’t have as much saved up as you. And I’m too old for this shit,” Adam said, ignoring his friend. He sighed. “I met someone.”

  “Ah, now the truth comes out.”

  “This great, interesting, smart, difficult woman who turned me inside out. Someone who I would want to imagine spending my life trying to figure out, except I have no life to spend. I can’t even sort myself out, and my future. What makes me think I can go after her or anyone like her?”

  “Well, you want her, isn’t that enough? Most people don’t give it much thought beyond that.”

  “It wouldn’t be enough for her. I wouldn’t be enough. Besides, she made it clear that it would be a fling.”

  “So, you’ve already slept with her? My friend, if you’ve shucked the oyster, you can definitely make the stew.”

  “Jesus, I don’t even want to know what the hell that’s supposed to mean.”

  “It means that she agreed to sleep with you. Unless she had a terrible time, it means she will always consider doing it again. She did have a good time, didn’t she?”

  Adam considered her big brown eyes deep with longing and sorrow, the way she had held back—until she hadn’t. He remembered the surrender of her thrashing body, the dark ripple of her final cry.

  He shrugged again. “I’m not going to pine for things I can’t have.”

  Except he was.

  Serge leaned in. “Maybe you should aim higher. Visualize the results you want.”

  “That’s part of the problem,” Adam muttered. Then his eyes widened. “Oh, seriously? You’re attempting to manage me through this, aren’t you? You’re trying to act like some sort of love coach.”

  “All I’m saying is that maybe you should stop settling for everything that comes your way. Reach a little harder. Or maybe work on the technique. Your last two girlfriends, Cherry and Mary, were you the one who asked them out? Did you even protest when they left?”

  “Their names were Marie and Cheryl. They were fine people, but I was drinking a lot. They wanted to help me. I wasn’t good for them.”

  “You were a sorry shit, but you got over it. Who is this new one, anyway?”

  Adam hesitated again.

  “Actually, you’ve met her. She was the neurologist who took care of you when we got in that car accident.”

  Serge paused, astonished. “How did that—? When did—?” He stopped again.

  “Yeah,” said Adam.

  He snorted and looked down.

  “I wish I remembered her better. She was a brunette, right?”

  “Well, it’s over. Is that really your whole plan, Serge? Life of leisure and maybe work at your parents’ restaurant? Do you want a family? Kids?” Adam asked, trying to change the subject.

  Serge waved his hand. “There is time to figure it all out.”

  “We could be fired at any moment.”

  “You have some savings and investments. You’re large. You can work the farm. Or as a bouncer.”

  Well, at least Serge’s suggestions made more sense than the career test.

  “I’m trying to visualize, as you like to put it, my future, Serge. I’m tired of finding crappy new apartments, tired of trying to make new friends, tired of icing my leg, downing ibuprofen, bruises, stitches. I don’t think I like hockey anymore, Serge. That’s what I’m trying to tell you.”

  He stopped. He didn’t think he’d ever said it out loud before.

  “Well, I don’t like every single minute of it either, especially the waiting,” Serge said, “but most people don’t like what they do for a living. My brother, he works in the office and plays the accordion in a zydeco band at night. Is he happy? No, he is not happy. But he cannot play the accordion for a living. He is not as hopeless as the washboard player in that band—I mean, the washboard?—but still, the accordion is a difficult mistress.”

  “I can’t even play the washboard, Serge.”

  “It will all work out.”

  “How can you—”

  “The rest of my life will not be as good as this, Adam. I may not be very good at the hockey, I may not appear in any record books or earn lots of money, but in my hometown, every time I go home, they unfold a banner with my name on it, and children at the high school gymnasium come up to me and ask me to be in their pictures. My parents are proud of me because I am on an NHL team. It doesn’t matter how bad it is. I just never thought I’d see the day. So you can cluck and worry and feel as dissatisfied as you want. I am going to enjoy it while it lasts.”

  *

  Harry Frobisher lay heavily sedated in an Okanagan hospital with a fractured hip.

  Helen had gotten her long, bumpy nose from him, her cold hands, and her hardheadedness. Or at least she thought she had received that last gift. She wanted to run from the hospital hallway, run out of the town, and back all the way to her living room, to her couch. She had gotten her long legs from her father, too—all the better for dashing away.

  Her mother was sitting stiffly by the hospital bed, eyes glued to a television. Helen and her brother, Stephen, hovered outside the room.

  She was done firing questions at the doctors, done watching, and talking.

  She massaged her temples and practiced her deep breathing again.

  He was going to be fine. He’d broken his hip, that was all. There was no need to have a meltdown. The course of his illness was completely typical of a patient with advanced parkinsonism. He would probably be in the hospital for a while. There was no need for her to lose her shit.

  But her brother was talking to her about the possibility of sending him to an assisted living facility. She should have supported it. She did support it—the logical part of her brain did. It was really better for everyone. But she still didn’t want to say it out loud, because agreeing meant admitting that Harry Frobisher was not going to improve.

  She wanted to put her fists over her ears and stop listening.

  She was used to taking control. But there was nothing she could do here. The doctors were fine, attentive, motivated, and even sympathetic. Her father knew most of them. They all knew him.

  She remembered the first time he had taken her to the hospital. She must have been about five years old. She had loved it from the start. The clean, wide hallways, the scrubs and white coats. She loved the lines on the floors, telling her where to walk in order to get to the wards. She spent a lot of time skipping along those lines. Her favorite thing, though, was following her father around. He wore a suit and tie underneath his coat, and he let her listen to his stethoscope. He introduced her to everyone, and she loved the attention they bestowed on Dr. Frobisher’s kid. She was still young enough that she didn’t know that she was a curiosity—Dr. Frobisher’s half-Chinese child. Someone usually made a variation on the same jokes: “Oh, I see you have a new resident following you!” or “Did you bring along a second opinion?”

  Stephen was eight. He found the whole thing humiliating.

  Helen returned to the hospital with a plan. The next time someone asked if she was the newest addition to the department, she was ready. “I’ll be rounding with Dr. Frobisher in fifteen minutes,” she said.

  Harry had coached her and helped her a bit—a lot—with word choice, but the idea had been hers and hers alone.

  When someone asked if she was the second opinion, she said, “My colleague here—” she would indicate Harry, “and I, we’re about to discuss a course of treatment.”

  The nurses and doctors who laughed and played along with her, she liked. The ones who patted Helen on the head and asked Harr
y how old she was, she didn’t. She was old enough that she knew they were trying to put her in her place, but not quite old enough to figure out how to put that into words.

  One day, she would know a lot of things, she’d told herself. One day, she’d have all the answers, just like Dad did.

  Except, staring at her father, she realized that despite the fact that she was a grown woman with a medical degree, she still didn’t know anything.

  “I don’t want to do this,” she said to Stephen. “I know it’s the right thing to do, but I ... can’t.”

  “Helen, you’re going to have to do better than that,” Stephen said in his bossy older sibling voice. “Mum can’t handle this by herself.”

  She wanted to insist that she knew things that Stephen didn’t. She wanted to summon up a vast store of knowledge and floor him with statistics and treatment options. But she’d always looked up to him, and he knew it. She had no authority with him.

  “Helen, it hasn’t failed to escape my notice that you just haven’t been coming up as often.”

  Helen muttered something about establishing her practice and hospital shifts.

  “Bullshit,” said Stephen. “You still managed to come when you were dancing. You drove up all the time during med school and residency.”

  Helen’s older brother, Stephen, was a professor of Romance languages. His partner, Gordon, was in the chemistry department. It was a joke waiting to be made.

  “And when you’re here,” Stephen continued, “you spend more time quibbling over dosage with Dad’s doctors than you do talking with us.”

  They glared at each other. Or rather, Stephen glowered at her, and she pouted at his reflection in the window.

  “We aren’t doing this. We aren’t going to fall into our old roles again,” he said.

  “At least I know about the disease.” Even as she said it, she knew how false that was.

  “You may know about medicine, but you don’t know what it’s like for Mum or, for that matter, Dad. Staying there is bad for them. I know you don’t like the idea of selling, but Mum feels bad enough about it as it is. You need to summon up just a bit of support. There are stairs; there aren’t any handrails. There are only two bathrooms in that old house, and they’re narrow and easy to slip in. They stove is tricky; the porch is rickety; their driveway is way too long to shovel easily. Aside from that, Mum is isolated. She doesn’t go out. She doesn’t have the time.”

  “She never did that much before.”

  “Well that’s because she’s never liked living there, anyway. We’re gone, and she doesn’t have that many friends. Even after more than thirty years there, she’s still seen as an interloper, that Chinese woman who married the town’s bachelor doctor. I mean, never mind that her aunt ran the laundry in town for fifty years. Never mind that she was born the next town over and she sounds exactly like everyone else.”

  “It was nowhere near as bad as you say. I never noticed that stuff.”

  But of course Helen knew that was a lie. Stephen’s own youth hockey team had tried to take him out, after all. She closed her eyes to the memory.

  “It wasn’t bad for you. You were a girl, and you never had to be a teenager there. You left for ballet school before people could really do horrible things to you. And you weren’t queer.”

  Stephen rubbed the scar on his cheek and gave a short laugh. “Anyone who thinks the Asian experience in North America is a monolith should come look at our family.” He shook his head. “Listen, your experience was different from mine, Helen. And neither of us has any idea what Mum’s has been like. Though God knows, she never made it easier for herself or for us.”

  “But Mum has lived there a long time, Stephen. People are different now. The population has changed. I saw an Indian restaurant on Main Street.”

  “That’s not the point. We’re missing the point.” Stephen scrubbed his face. “If they move,” he said more quietly, “they’ll be near me, Helen. I’ll be able to get up quickly for emergencies. This is all stuff you already know. Helen, you know this is better.”

  “He’s still got some of his faculties. He doesn’t talk as much and he isn’t as active, but he knows, Stephen. It’s all locked up in an uncooperative body. It’s breaking his heart.”

  She was not going to cry. She was not.

  “Do you remember when we were little, little kids,” she said, “we used to hide his ties, because we knew he wouldn’t go out without one? And we wanted him to stay at home a little longer. But he’d always find them within five minutes, no matter how clever we tried to be, no matter how deeply we thought we concealed them? And he’d always put them back in exactly the same place, and the next morning, we’d do it again. He knew that we were going to run off with them. There’s no way he didn’t know. And he let us do it anyway. He never yelled at us; he never even looked frustrated. He’d just lope around the house in his very proper, perfectly pressed trousers, crouching to look in cupboards or on shelves.”

  Stephen smiled grimly. “And he’d call out for them, too. Oxford stripe! Oxy! Paisley! Where are you? It’s a good thing we never thought to separate the herd.”

  “We thought about it. You were smart, though. You knew just how far to push it.”

  He put his arm around her.

  “Helen, what’s going on with you? As you like to point out, you’re around sick people all the time. I just don’t understand. I guess I thought that you’d be better at—”

  She stiffened, not wanting to hear any more. She wanted to shove herself out of Stephen’s arms.

  Luckily, the clack of footsteps announced Gordon’s arrival.

  “You guys, how is he?”

  Her brother-in-law kissed Helen on the forehead and reached over to flick a piece of lint from Stephen’s shoulder.

  “He’s the same,” Stephen said, into Helen’s hair. She unloosed herself from his grip. “We should probably go eat something, maybe, see if Mum wants to come, or pick something up for her.”

  Gordie drove them to a pub near the hospital. Helen was glad he was there. He chattered tactfully while Stephen picked at his turkey club. The mood that she and Stephen had established briefly, the complicity of two children, was broken.

  Gordie was telling them about how the new associate professor in his department apparently had made a Twitter account to post chemistry jokes and rude pictures of himself. All of his students followed it.

  Helen spied a hockey game on the TV. She could pick out Oregon’s blue and gold uniforms. She didn’t know which team they were playing. It hardly mattered. She never paid attention to the games much beyond thinking about the physical impact the players’ bodies made against each other. And, of course, Adam. She breathed in the beery air of the wood-paneled room and turned her fork over in the chicken Caesar salad. Her eyes drifted back to the television. She couldn’t tell if he was on the ice. That meant he probably wasn’t.

  Stephen was asking if she wanted another beer. She shook her head and tried to concentrate. She was tired. She hadn’t slept much on the plane, and she had been at the hospital all day. She couldn’t wait to get back in the car, pick up her mother, and drive back home and sleep in a real bed.

  And there he was: Adam. With a shiver, she gazed at the screen. He coasted around on the ice. She knew him despite the helmet, despite the other players drifting in front of him. She wanted to shake them away impatiently. She wanted to clear away the waitress, who stood in front of her to deliver another beer to Stephen. She wanted to walk right up to the television and stare at Adam Magnus and have him stare back at her.

  The blow seemed to come out of nowhere.

  Suddenly he was falling and then skating forward with fury. Another player entered the brawl, and another, and another. He was buried under a pile of flailing bodies. She could see the blood streaking the ice.

  Helen couldn’t tear her eyes away from the screen. She made a small moan.

  “Helen?” Gordie asked.

  She couldn’
t say anything. What could she say? She was angry with Adam—and scared for him. And most of all, she could not think of why he would do that to himself.

  Stephen glanced at her and at the screen. He wasn’t upset by the sight of a hockey game. He didn’t make the connection. “You’re tired. Let’s go get Mum and go home,” Stephen said, taking out his wallet.

  She wanted to protest. He hadn’t finished eating. But he left money on the table and steered her out of the pub. In the cold, wet air, she found that she was able to breathe again.

  Gordie sprinted off to get the car while Stephen and Helen stood in the rain.

  “So Helen, have you given any more thought to the assisted living facility?”

  “You’re right, of course,” she said robotically.

  “So that’s it. We’re going to put him on the waiting list now if we want to be able to do this.”

  Helen stayed silent.

  Stephen rubbed his face and sighed. Her handsome brother. She didn’t think much about how hard growing up must have been for him. She’d only thought about how Mum favored him, the son. But no one had made it easy for him.

  He looked older. But he and Gordie, they were wonderful and at ease with each other. She wondered if she would ever find that.

  “Look, I know it’s hard for you, Helen. It’s hard on all of us. But Mum and I have talked a lot about this. Dad, too. We’re doing this with or without you. The decision’s been made. We’re all just going to have to get used to it. It’ll be easier on you if you can just let it go.”

  He sighed and hugged her to him. She let him. It was the most she could manage.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Drop the Puck! Should Portland Ban Hockey?

  Helen hated her title.

  She’d written the damn article when she arrived back in Portland after the frustrating trip to Canada. She signed her name and e-mailed it in to the Portland Tribune.

  Ah well, it was only the op-ed page. Even better, it was in a newspaper. No one read newspapers anymore.

  She believed every word she’d set down. She’d tried to be thoughtful. She’d tried to marshal her arguments in a completely logical way, but she was fooling herself that they were lined up like perfect soldiers. Because, the truth was, seeing Adam go down had made her feel helpless, and the helplessness made her furious with him. She was not supposed to feel anything about him. He was practically a stranger—a stranger whose injuries she was now obsessed with checking. He’d injured his knee, was all she could find out, but she knew there was more that hadn’t been reported. She’d seen blood.