Page 22 of Puck to the Heart
“Keep in mind, though, you have to keep your head in the game. No distractions, no fighting, no more bullshit.”
“Yes, sir.” The last time I did anything stupid off the rink had been years ago, but no one seemed to remember that.
Coach waved his hands in a dismissive gesture, and I turned again to leave. “No distractions,” he repeated as I nearly skipped down the hall.
In the locker room after the meeting, I geared up, wondering how to prove myself when everyone expected me to be a caricature. An overblown idiot with a pretty face who went through dates like candy, when in reality, I hadn’t been that person in a while.
The drivefrom DC to Raleigh passed in a blink, but every muscle protested when I got out of my car at the hospital. Stiffness kept me from straightening fully until I stretched all the kinks out of my spine.
A tinge of late summer and the liminal space of early fall still clung to the air, humidity lingering in a low-hanging cloud after a long day of rain. It was familiar yet foreign after my time away. I tried to breathe it in and commit it to memory, but the iron band around my chest wouldn't expand to allow me to breathe.
Reason told me to go inside. Walk through the sliding glass doors into disinfectant scented air to find the only person who’d been there for me through everything. Put aside my own pain to be there for someone else.
It hurt, knowing I wasn’t there when my dad needed me. It scared me. My dad was supposed to be invincible, the one who kept the monsters out of my closet and acted as excuses for those parties I didn’t want to attend. He bandaged ouchies and made peanut butter banana sandwiches and stayed up late to help me study world history.
He wasn’t supposed to lie unconscious in an emergency room thousands of miles away.
Seeing him hurt would hurt, knowing nothing I did would help. I hated being helpless. Most things I could handle on my own; grad school, moving across the country, uprooting my life, and… tearing it apart.
Seeing my dad when he wasn’t a paragon of parenthood lay at the bottom of the list of things I wanted to do, but I was allhehad, too.
Spine steeled and eyes dried on a tissue that was more dust than anything useful, I walked into the hospital.
I found Dad’s room and shoved in before my inner monologue convinced me to run away. I always ran when things were hard. Kissed on screen at a hockey game? Hide in the bathroom. Breakup? Move across the country. Embarrassed on a field trip to the ice rink? Call my dad and ask him to pick me up. Bonus points for hiding in the bathroom again.
Inside, the low thrumming and beeping of machines ratcheted my nerves to volatile levels. Thin white blankets covered my father from his cast covered right foot to his plaster encased right arm.
The list of injuries the nurse sent me ran through my mind as I cataloged the bruises and bandages. Concussion, with stitches on one side of his face and a black eye. Radial fracture of the right arm. Bruised ribs from the seatbelt and airbag. Sprained left knee, right tibia-fibula fracture. Casts on the broken bones, splints on the others. Wires and tubes connected him to the machines making my head throb in time with their sounds.
A bear of a man, my father stood well over six feet. My height came from him, and he liked to joke about not passing on his beard to me. Whoever stitched him up only shaved a small area around the damaged skin, leaving a rectangular patch of missing bristly hair on one side of his face.
Hysterical laughter bubbled up at seeing my father’s face, well half of it, without rough salt and pepper hair for the first time in at least a decade. I clamped a hand over my mouth, but the high-pitched hyena laugh turned to sobs in an instant.
When Dad shifted on the bed, I clamped my other hand over my mouth too to keep the keening in. Then I sat in an orange vinyl covered chair for half an hour staring dumbly at my sleeping father until a nurse came in.
His blue scrubs were a nice contrast to the beige of the room. “Hi, are you the daughter?” His syrupy accent was homey, the soft cadence so different from the almost neutral Portland accent I’d grown accustomed to over the past months.
“Yeah, I’m Liv.” If I could’ve unfolded myself from the cramped ball, I would’ve, but I offered a stiff wave instead.
“Mr. Barnes is a lucky man. The breaks are all clean, so unless something goes wrong, he shouldn’t need surgery.” The nurse, whose name badge read Chase, had ash-brown hair and kind eyes. A pastel pink and blue lanyard with a handful of rainbow buttons hung around his neck, and he wore one of those rubber rings on his left fourth finger. He was short, sturdy, and looked like he would be the type of person who would hug freely.
And he made me wish I weren’t alone. Having a hand to hold through this, someone to lean on, someone like?—
“Livy?” My father’s raspy, baritone voice nearly sent me to tears again.
“Daddy, it’s me. I’m here.” I was too far gone to cringe at the name, though I was certain that, under normal circumstances, the word from my youth never would’ve slipped out.
As I watched my father slowly wake and take in his surroundings, I desperately wanted to take his hand, but Chase still checked tubes and wires.
“How long have I been out?” He sounded alarmed.
“I’m not sure. I haven’t been here long.” I glanced to Chase, who checked a chart and explained the medications Dad was taking would make him drowsy before exiting the room.
Dad turned back to me with a confused look. “Buthowdid you get here so quickly, Livy?”
“I… got a last-minute flight.” Truth, sort of.
Except this was my dad, who saw right through me, even through the haze of pain meds. “Try again.”
