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She keeps drawing. That’s how I know what it cost her to say.
I want the kid’s name. I want to know whether anybody in that building knows about it and I want to know which adult decided it wasn’t worth a phone call, and I would like forty minutes and a yellow pad and I would have it solved by Thursday, and I’m good at this, and that’s the problem, because I have never in my life been good at something and then not done it.
Her mother is nine feet down that hallway with my file in her hand.
If I pick up a phone about this, there’s a version of me that’s a man who got into a woman’s life through her kid.
So I sit there with my paperwork on the chair and I don’t ask her the name.
“That’s the hard one,” I tell her.
“Yeah.”
“Walking away works on the ice. It works because everybody’s getting paid and there’s a whistle.” I let that sit a second, because it’s true and she will know if I decorate it. “It doesn’t work in a lunchroom. I’m not going to tell you it does.”
“Everyone tells me it does.”
“Everyone’s hoping you’ll stop bringing it up.”
Her pencil stops. It’s the first time I have ever gotten her to stop the pencil, and I would like it noted that I didn’t do it with a joke.
“There’s a woman who won a national title in judo at fifty-one years old,” I say. “Started at forty. Forty years of people saying things where she could hear them, and then she went and got the belt. I read about her on a plane.”
Tova thinks about that for a while.
“Did she beat up the people?”
“No idea. She never says.”
“That’s the good part.”
“That’s the good part.”
She goes back to the television.
Astrid comes out with my folder and says my name, and Tova’s head comes up about an inch and goes straight back down to the page, and I get up and follow her mother down the hall into a room nine feet by eleven.
“You are quiet today.”
“I’m a mystery, Doc.”
“Mm.”
Two things now. My own arm, and her kid’s school.
I lie down on the table and let her start on the shoulder. It’s the one part of this I’m still telling her the truth about.
Chapter twelve
Astrid
Colt receives the puck without turning his chest.
I stop the film and take it back three seconds. The pass comes from below the goal line, and six weeks ago he would have rotated through the right side to buy himself the reach he does not have, bringing the defender around with him. Now his feet arrive first, his left hand gives the blade enough angle, and the puck is gone to Roman before the contact ever reaches him.
I watch the sequence again. The right shoulder still protects itself, the same guarded half inch it has held since November, and the rest of him has stopped paying the full price for it, and I write the timestamp beside the note.
Nineteen minutes.
