Marked by the Puck: Icebound Hearts

By seven thirty the next morning, half the Storm's roster already knows what happened on the ice, and the other half has heard a version of it that's been improved twice over in the retelling. I learn this within ninety seconds of stepping into the training facility, because a wall of a man with a grin like a golden retriever who just found a tennis ball plants himself directly in my path before I've even made it to the medical suite.

"You're her." He says it like he's solving a riddle. "You're the doctor who told Kane to move."

"I'm the team physician, yes."

"You told Kane to move." He says it again, slower, like he's tasting it. "On live ice. In front of seventeen thousand people. While he was standing over a guy he just put through the boards."

"I asked him to step back from my patient."

"That's not what I heard." He sticks his hand out, still grinning. "Remy Bouchard. Right wing. I think I love you."

I shake his hand because there doesn't seem to be a version of this conversation where I don't. "Dr. Voss."

"I know who you are. Everyone knows who you are. You're a legend as of approximately ten hours ago." He falls into step beside me without being invited, which I'm learning quickly is simply how Remy Bouchard operates. He doesn't wait for permission to occupy space near you. He just assumes the invitation was implied. "Kane doesn't move for anybody. I've seen him not move for Coach Morrow. I've seen him not move for the GM. One time I'm pretty sure he didn't move for an actual fire alarm."

"He moved."

"That's the legend part." He holds the door to the medical suite for me, still talking. "So what's the secret? Is it a stare. Did you do the stare. I've tried the stare on him, it does nothing, it's like staring at a building."

"There's no secret. I told him to move and he moved."

"Right, but how."

"With words, Remy."

He laughs, loud and easy, the kind of laugh that fills a room without trying to dominate it. "I like you. I'm going to be your tour guide. You've been here six weeks and I bet you still don't know where the good coffee is."

"There's coffee in the staff lounge."

"There's bad coffee in the staff lounge. There's good coffee two blocks over and I will show you the way." He says this with the gravity of a man revealing a state secret. "Also you should know that Cole Rutherford looks terrifying but he's actually the most normal person on this team, and the two rookies on the third line will ask you medical questions that are actually just them wanting attention, and if anyone asks you about the playoff push before April, they're fishing for inside information and you should say nothing, because management hates when that leaks."

"Noted."

"And Kane." He says it more carefully than anything else he's said, which is its own kind of information. "Kane's not what people think. Mostly. Sometimes he's exactly what people think. But mostly not." He looks at me sideways. "You'll figure that out eventually. Everybody does, given enough time."

I don't ask him to clarify, because I have a sense that clarifying would take longer than I have before my first physical, and because some part of me doesn't want to ask a question that might make my interest in the answer visible.

Morning physicals run from eight to eleven, a steady procession of players I'm still attaching names to faces for, six weeks into a job that everyone keeps reminding me I got young. I run through the standard battery with each of them, range of motion, cardiovascular baseline, the questions about sleep and soreness that most of them answer with the practiced vagueness of men who've learned that admitting weakness to team medical staff sometimes shows up in places they don't want it to show up. I write everything down anyway. I've learned to read between the vague answers.

Dan Hartley appears in the corridor around nine thirty, the team's director of operations, a man whose job description I'm still working out the precise edges of, except that it seems to involve being present in places where decisions get made and saying very little while he's there. He doesn't come into the suite. He stands in the doorway for exactly as long as it takes me to clear a defenseman's shoulder mobility, watching with an expression that isn't unfriendly, isn't friendly either, is simply assessing, the way you'd watch a new piece of equipment to see if it does what it's supposed to do.

Our eyes meet for a second. He gives me a short nod, the kind that could mean anything, and moves on down the corridor.

I file that under things to think about later, and go back to the shoulder in front of me.

Jax Kane is last on the list, which I assume is either a coincidence of scheduling or a deliberate choice by someone trying to give both of us the smallest possible audience, and given the way the locker room operates, I suspect the latter.

He walks in at ten fifty seven, three minutes early, which surprises me more than it should. He doesn't say good morning. He doesn't say anything. He sits down on the exam table with the specific economy of motion I'm starting to recognize as simply how he exists in physical space, no wasted movement, no performance, just presence.

"Cut's healing well," I say, checking the suture line on his cheekbone. "No redness, no discharge. You can stop babying it."

"Wasn't babying it."

"You washed your face one handed this morning, didn't you."

He doesn't answer, which I take as confirmation.

I run through the rest of the physical with the same clinical rhythm I've used on everyone else this morning, shoulder mobility, the old fracture line I make a note to ask about eventually but don't push on today, reflexes, blood pressure. He answers what I ask and nothing more, watching me with that same unreadable attention from yesterday, gray eyes tracking my hands like he's cataloguing something.

I don't fill the silence. Neither does he. The whole session takes four minutes, which is shorter than I've spent with almost anyone else this morning, and somehow feels three times as long.

"You're cleared," I say, capping my pen. "Same protocol. Stitches out Thursday."

He nods once. Stands. Picks up his jacket.

He's at the door before he stops, just for a second, like there's a sentence sitting behind his teeth that he's deciding whether to spend. He doesn't spend it. He leaves.

The door swings shut behind him and the suite goes quiet, that specific quiet of a room that just held more tension than its square footage should be able to contain, and I realize, with a small jolt, that I have been holding my breath. Not dramatically. Just a shallow, unconscious withholding that's been running under the whole four minutes without my noticing, and now that he's gone my lungs remember they're supposed to be doing something.

I exhale. Write up his file. Tell myself this is nothing, that it's simply the residual adrenaline of yesterday's incident still working its way out of my system, that any new physician would feel some version of this static around the player who became the center of her first real controversy with the team.

I am still telling myself this when I hear the door open again.

He's standing in the doorway. Not sitting this time. Not here for anything medical, that much is obvious from the way he's positioned, arms loose, jacket already on, a man who has somewhere else to be and stopped anyway.

He looks at me. Three full seconds, which doesn't sound like long until you're on the receiving end of it, until you understand that three seconds of someone's complete attention is a very different unit of time than three seconds of anything else.

"You made Webb's protocol too conservative," he says.

Then he's gone. The door swinging shut on its own momentum, footsteps already receding down the corridor before I've even processed that he spoke at all.

I stand there staring at the empty doorway, my pen still in my hand, and feel the rage arrive the way clean water arrives when you finally turn off a dripping faucet you'd stopped noticing. Sudden. Total. Almost a relief, in its way, because at least rage is a feeling I know exactly what to do with.

I set the pen down very carefully, because if I don't set it down carefully I'm going to throw it, and I am not a woman who throws things, not even at men who walk into rooms specifically to deliver one sentence of unsolicited medical opinion and then leave before anyone can answer them.

I pick the pen back up. I write, in handwriting considerably more forceful than the situation requires: Patient cleared. No further action required at this time.

It is, I think, the most professionally written sentence I have ever produced while internally composing several that are not professional at all.