It was harder to clean away blood than you expected. It took so much longer than he wanted it to take. When it was done he knew he would never do anything worse. In the low room, in its aftermath, he had found the furthest expression of his corruption. Now there would be no more waiting for the blow, only this unforgivable relief.
The national anthem played and Kelly sang along, a swell of patriotism catching in his chest, how no matter what he did wrong he would always be an American. The game started but they were far enough from the ice that he had trouble following along without the girl’s constant commentary. The last greats of the past age were retired or retiring and she had mourned the passing of her giants, would have spoken in favor of their legacies, their place among the endless, the names and numbers memorialized on uniforms hung in the rafters. He watched her gaze flicking back and forth across the ice, wondered how well she could track the puck. He held a water bottle to her mouth, let her suck the straw as long as she wanted. He reached down with a thumb and wiped the corner of her mouth, dragged the cloudy spittle across the leg of his jeans. It wasn’t only her expressions that had changed. There was plenty of makeup in her apartment but he didn’t know how to apply it to her new face. He’d thought of trying to practice with her but couldn’t bring himself to do it.
There were steroids for the spasms, amphetamines for fatigue, sedatives to help her breathing. The doctors prescribed an antidepressant but somehow Kelly got the idea she didn’t want it, stopped helping her dissolve the pills on her tongue, started taking them himself instead.
She didn’t speak anymore but when agitated she laughed, a yelp, all rasp. At night Kelly might lie in their bed with his head on her fading chest, listen to her breath shallow, then recover, shallow again. The shortness of breath might be pain related, the doctors said, it might be the continued loss of involuntary systems, and one night her breathing would stop, the last breath impossible to name until it wasn’t followed by another.
The doctors kept telling him to talk to her, that her mind was sound. He said he knew, said she was the same person he’d fallen in love with. He’d promised not to forget. It was an easy mistake to make. It was a hard mistake to stop making.
He tried to say her name more often. To force it out of his stubborn mouth. It wasn’t her name he loved but he didn’t know what else to call her. Of all the things she’d lost he doubted she missed the limp.
On the ice a fight broke out and he watched the way fighting on ice was different, how it required a different kind of agility to stay up on your skates with your jersey pulled over your head and fists thumping down on your back and neck. The crowd cheered and he cheered too. He wasn’t going to the gym anymore, hadn’t sparred since the fight. He didn’t plan to ever fight again but he didn’t want his body to go to waste so he kept working out at home. He lifted her from her wheelchair into her recliner, got down on the floor between her and the television, did long series of push-ups, sit-ups, squat thrusts. He installed a pull-up bar in the doorframe between the living room and the hallway, rotated her chair to face him so they could look at each other while he did his grunting sets, shirtless and sweating.
It seemed improbable but he was still growing. He looked taller too but taller was impossible. In the bed he took up more of the space, the covers, the air in the room. He thought often about buying a bigger bed or else another one. In the mirror he often saw he wasn’t as big as he imagined but he was big enough. This was how you stretched the limits of your frame, how you pushed how much muscle you could pack onto these bones, how you learned how much more could fit inside the shell, more again once the human was mostly gone.
When he didn’t know what else to do he plucked her from her wheelchair and carried her around the apartment, being careful not to strike her head against lamps or doorframes or walls. When the weather was better he would take her for walks outside, carrying her up and down the sidewalk, going farther every day. When she started to burn from the sun he smeared her face and neck and hands with sunscreen, found her sunglasses so the light wouldn’t hurt her eyes.
Despite his protests to the doctors she wasn’t exactly the same person she had been before, not the girl with the limp. That person never would have let him carry her, never wanted anyone’s help. But what choice remained. She made noises he interpreted as agreement or disapproval but mostly he was guessing.
At last a whistle blew. The referees separated the fighters, securing them for an agreed-upon number of minutes, the penalty box the punishment for bad behavior, the power play the reward for someone else’s. Every game a microcosm of a longer one. Kelly thought he would wait a long time for his punishment, had already decided he would not fight it when it came. In the meantime, he would be with the girl, sharing her life. It was what he had told himself he wanted, even if he’d never said he wanted it like this.
At intermission, he saw the group of boys before he saw Daniel emerge from their number, walking with the others in their blazers and khakis, shirts and ties. Coming up the stairs and then past, into the concourse, laughing and talking with his friends. Daniel inches taller, his face leaner, a teenager at last.
Kelly knew he should let Daniel pass without acknowledging him but he didn’t think he could help calling out. He couldn’t leave her behind so he backed her away from the railing, pushed her out into the concourse where the boy would see them.
When the boy passed Kelly said Daniel but the boy didn’t hear or if he heard he didn’t turn. And for a moment Kelly saw not the boy passing but the brother, saw how Daniel was growing to look like the brother even though they were not blood.
The boys moved as a unit through the crowd, followed one another into breaches in the confusion, then clumped back up in open spaces. They were moving faster than Kelly could, loudly weighing options for food, souvenirs, talking about the game, the chances for the next period. They cheered for the home team, applied all their boyish arcana, the percentages and statistics and strongly held opinions gleaned from televisions and fathers.
He thought he wanted something else from the boy but what. He couldn’t want thanks and hope to get it. He couldn’t want a relationship with the boy because those days were done. He had been brought into the boy’s life to do something for the boy that the boy couldn’t have done himself and now the deed was done. Now he only needed the boy to see him. He needed the boy to look up at him and see this new body, the spent man within, maybe changing again. But what he wanted to believe had changed him most was not what he had done in the low room but what he had done in the first basement, where he rescued the boy. That despite what happened next it was from the first the salvor he’d wanted to follow.
What he wanted to ask was if the boy was at least safer than before. If safer was enough to be worth the cost.
The boys moved forward faster, slipped away through the cracks in the movements of the crowd. When Kelly pushed at the crowd most of the crowd moved for him, gave the wheelchair room. Others balked, hesitated, looked too long at her, at him, their new bodies, her loose limbs, his logoed t-shirt tight, how the team’s wings and wheel stretched taut over his immense muscles. When he couldn’t maneuver the chair forward through the crush he picked her up into his arms, left the chair where it was. Her body was so soft, limp against his chest, she was lighter and he was stronger. She started to make some noise and this time there was no ambiguity whether she approved or didn’t approve.