Chapter 418: Patty XLIV—Collapse
The corners frightened him. People ridiculed his play of the puck in corners, or made the habit a punch line and whether they approved or not, they often didn’t understand it. For certain, he knew that not one of them entertained for a moment that he was scared of those corners, and even the end boards. The corners meant a puck bouncing, a man going in to retrieve, a hit that resounded throughout an arena, and sometimes, just sometimes, a man that did not get back up.
Fewer things sickened him more than a lifeless body on the ice, blue lips or a pool of blood and the dull thud that preceded it. How much compassion did he have for the fallen man? Patrick knew inside his heart that he wanted them to get back up, maybe smile and rejoin the play. But also, the sick feeling came from the sympathetic pain in his own neck or back, in his nose or skull; it filled his mouth with a salty metallic taste of his own mortality.
The worst
he’d seen so far, so many years ago, against the Montreal Forum’s rickety
boards, Michel Goulet in
Adam Foote still drove him insane. Patrick knew Jennifer would agree with him on it that Adam had to stop his absurd stubbornness about not wearing a visor to protect his skull, especially since Adam did so much physically and put himself into so much danger. If Patrick had his way, then every skater on his team would wear a visor, or better yet a full face shield. As a child he scurried on ragged icy ponds, no helmet or shield, and laughed and had no fear, but now he couldn’t imagine playing on the ice, cold, vulnerable, a skull unprotected, eyes in danger.
So naturally, Patrick felt his lungs constrict and his heart stop as midway through the second period against the Anaheim Mighty Ducks, he saw Footer crouch to block a shot that rose, and Patrick heard the puck make contact with his face. Adam fell forward onto the ice, and he made no move to cradle or touch his afflicted face, a sign worse than any other, and he laid limp and motionless, face on the ice.
“Adam!” Patrick cried and he bolted from his net, at Adam’s side almost before anyone else realized his injury. He pressed his hand into Adam’s back and then shook off his catching glove, touching his slick sweaty jersey, his warm back. “Adam can you hear me!” A pool of blood seeped from underneath his face, but Patrick knew that rolling him over, jostling his head or neck, could harm him even more. Karns would know what to do.
“Is he hurt?” Someone, an unfamiliar voice, perhaps a Duck, said. “He hurt?”
“We need a trainer!” Patrick cried and he waved at the bench, motioning for someone to come to their aid, at this point not carrying from which bench help came. And then he spoke in a quiet voice. “Adam.” He touched Adam’s wrist, cold, but a pulse beat strong, and therefore Patrick’s heart could as well. He frowned and rubbed the small of Adam’s back, hating himself for not being able to absorb his injuries.
Adam regained consciousness as Karns came to his aid, the audience applauded to see him on his own skates, on his own power. Patrick didn’t hear a word from him, but the profuse blood and Adam’s grotesquely swollen eye burned into his brain. First Rob and now Adam, Patrick could feel the cold, windy vacant holes on the ice.
Strong, Patrick thought, he would have to be strong and the wall in net, the anchor, the inspiration to maintain the security of the team. Without Blake and Foote, the Ducks would have to be energized. He couldn’t fail his own duty, and his own expectations of himself.
But Patrick’s heart remained cold, his legs heavy, his mind sluggish, his legs and hips sore and he couldn’t feel the fire, much less manufacture it. One, two, three, a previously scoreless game turned in the manner of half a period all towards the Ducks. Patrick did the best he could in the third period, he held up better but that still didn’t excuse him from the damage already done. Sakic and Drury both scored goals, but they lost their second game in a row.
Odd. Patrick didn’t know why above all things he would think of her. Frail, unattractive girl really, nose too big, eyes too pale, hips too slim, breasts too small, fingers like the long antennae of an insect. He thought of her throat, the most, how it felt under his hand, his fingers could wrap around it, almost meet at the spine, and he had even thought about how easy it could flick his wrist, and snap. Why would he think of her, when she hadn’t crossed his mind in years.
He groaned loudly and shook his face underneath the heated shower water. He could hear Dan Hinote cursing, he could hear doors slamming, he could hear Hartley talking to some of his teammates. A loss is a loss that would be how Sakic would speak of it. We have to learn, grow, move and win tomorrow. True enough, but Patrick’s gut ached knowing that truly, he hadn’t put forth the best of his abilities.
He sat away from everyone else on the bus, he swung one of his legs onto the seat to make sure how obvious it was that he didn’t want anyone near him. Not even Keane made an overture to sit with him, and that didn’t bother him. Well, he did notice how Mike sat next to Sakic, both of them talking, animated, hands gesturing, smiling, and obviously not speaking of the game. What would they be talking about? Joe even pinched his chin at intervals as if taking in and absorbing precious gems of knowledge from Keane’s mind.
Never mind that and Patrick closed his eyes.
If you knew I loved you, if I told you now, would you love me back?
No.
Large eyes blinked, she looked like something unformed in the womb, pulsing at the base of the throat like something newly born and consistently innocent.
If I had a baby, would you stay?
No.
But your wife hates you, doesn’t she? And you hate her?
No where would you get that idea?
Because she’s fucking all your team….
Patrick remembered how he hadn’t hesitated in hitting her, something he’d never done to a woman before or after. He remembered the contact of one of her teeth against his finger, nicking it, the feel of her skin crumpling; her loud gasp and seeing her fall back onto the floor. She didn’t cry, she held onto her mouth, but her eyes although wide, did not seem frightened or even angry, and his remorse for hitting her, faded fast with her lack of emotional vulnerability. Even Schneider had looked more wounded than this woman did now, cornered in the locker room, fists flailing helplessly.
I could have your baby, she said. You’d stay for that, you love babies, her fingers still over her mouth.
You’ll only destroy us both. And Patrick’s heart had trembled, imagining that already she was pregnant. It didn’t feel real, none of it, in a room, dingy room, and dingy bed, ethereal girl where time didn’t exist in her arms and between her legs. And even now, he could physically harm her and not see a normal reaction. Walking into this building was walking off the Earth, and leaving, brought him back to a different sort of suffering, but with a crucial element in himself restored, strength and energy.
The price paid? He watched that woman whither, thinner and thinner until she lost most of the initial exotic beauty that had once attracted him away from his own wife and children. He even watched her come through on her promise to get pregnant, and he did indeed come back to her, watch her with growing interest and affection, pondering how to handle two families when he could barely deal with one. But no baby ever came, he found her huddled, crying, moaning, she’d lost it, and he cried with her, held onto her, his mind feeling the loss of a baby that didn’t exist.
Dinah. Why it was so hard for him to remember her name, he didn’t know. Sometimes he forgot that she’d even existed, sometimes he doubted that she’d ever existed. If it weren’t for Keane’s eventual involvement into the affair, he would have no one else to confirm that he hadn’t been living in a broken dream. Dinah, the sad, dark Indian skin, frail bones, and a chin pointed and determined to bear his child, a ritual, a blood ritual that broke him almost as much as it did her when two more times he watched as she lost her pregnancies.
Why so important to him? The woman had been such a giver, warmth when his days with his own wife and his own teammates, with the fans in the city were fast growing cold. She fed him emotionally and spiritually and he never stopped wondering if he had physically drained her of vitality like a vampire would blood. Simple Dinah, Mike called her, didn’t know how to retain her own strength until one day, she disappeared because she had nothing more to give.
Yes, Patrick didn’t know where she went to, or what happened to her only that she was gone and just as soon as his life with his children and with Michele had begun to improve and just when he’d been traded out of the city. So he didn’t have much time to worry about the girl’s whereabouts or fate because he had other things to do, her purpose for him fulfilled. She had kept him alive when otherwise he’d have cracked, and he knew it, the little woman who wanted to be a little mother, had gone forever, possibly a figment of his imagination, if it weren’t for Keane’s remarks about his ill treatment of her.
Foote’s at the hospital, they won’t allow visitors, concussion, injured eye; he would stay behind on the road trip for observation, and then be flown home when cleared. No they didn’t know how serious the eye injury was.
No he wouldn’t be playing anytime very soon.
Lost.
Collapse.
Melodramatic words and emotions, and still the prospect of sleeping alone tonight, trapped in the dark, loomed before him. He would call Michele, talk with her a little but she would need to sleep, she couldn’t watch over him all night. A child frightened of the dark, and he should be ashamed to be one of them. Not ashamed really, he felt more inconvenienced.
Not Dinah, not even close to her. Patrick looked at Aebischer’s grin, a slow sort of smug smile when he opened the door. No not Dinah but he felt the same detached calm, the same prospect of pleasure unconnected to any sort of wandering in his real life, inconsequential to anything that he would decide to do or be.
“I know how you hate to be alone?” David said another slight twitch of his lips.
Patrick let David in and closed the door. He didn’t kiss him or touch him, he just went to his bed and collapsed on the mattress, looking up at the pretty faced, pale skinned, rosy cheeked young man who not for an instant felt affectionate towards him or prone to do him a favor. Ah but there would be release, wouldn’t there?
“Adam will be okay.” David said, sitting at the edge of the bed, close to Patrick’s leg and he pulled off his shirt revealing an alabaster back, dotted with a few blemishes, a birth mark, a mole, strung with muscle and glowing health.
Patrick sat up a little and leaned forward kissing his waist and he reached forward and touched his belly before lying back down. “I know,” he said.
“Are you too tired?” David asked turning to him slightly, raising his eyebrows.
“No,” Patrick replied.
“Good,” he murmured before he turned off the light.
What David felt he was accomplishing, or actually did accomplish, Patrick didn’t know or care. The only thing that mattered to him was the feel, touch, kiss, pleasure, climax, intimacy of a moment. He could heal and forget, he could escape and enjoy tangling with David, clinging to him, letting him go, laughing and pushing him away. A universe existed here, where he didn’t have to care or obey and he ran his fingers through his soft hair and again felt that creeping feeling inside, remembering that girl he’d abandoned, or killed, however it could have happened.
Patrick’s pleasure done, he let David finish his own and the young man gasped, and collapsed against his bare chest. He felt his cheek, damp, his lips, his hot breath, “I never thought you’d let me inside,” David whispered and he laughed. “I thought it would be forbidden with you, too demeaning.”
Patrick laughed and cupped David’s face in his hands, “It’s not about degradation, just forget about it my love, it’s about pleasure, and forgetting.” This one could relieve his ailments, transport him away, and this one wouldn’t whither, or ask for promises. This one could last.