Coach said nothing. Twirling the lanyard around and around his finger. June turned back to me. “What would you like?”
To stop hurting like hell. I shrugged. “To be good enough to play by next Friday?”
“Oh, hon.” She put her hand on top of my hand, and something rushed my chest so hard I held my breath to stop from tearing up. She was shaking her head. I focused on the shiny mink pelt of her hair, and let the words turn to bubbles over her head. Out for the rest. Of the season.
Coach’s orbiting lanyard dropped dead. He said something. She said something. He dropped the nice and told her whose house this was. She grabbed up my pill bottle and shook it at him. “Playing with fire,” she said. And so on. I was the little kid wishing Mom and Dad would quit fighting. At one point she came back over and asked me, close to my face, did I know what I was taking. She said it was hydrocodone and something. Not oxy then, I said, and she said it was really no better than that. I was struggling for words and possibly catching the asshole bug from Coach because I asked her whatever happened to Kent’s “pain is a vital sign” and all that.
She hissed at me: “Kent Holt is a fucking hired killer for his company.”
Those words, from her mouth, stopped my clock. She and Coach left the room, but I heard them out in the hall. Coach using his fifty-yard-line voice, and she was also plenty loud enough, telling him she used to see two or three narcotic patients a year and now that many every day. Then she gave up on him and came back to work on me. Telling me how pain is a body’s way of taking care of you, letting you know when to stop. Telling me to think of my future. She had no clue. My future was football. Playing through the pain is what you do.
She left, I slept. Woke up confused, then ticked off. I wasn’t some child, having my little pharm party. I was going by the book, doctor’s orders. Being a General was serious work. Coach knew. She didn’t.
By the time I got in to see the bone doctor, the basketball-size knee was down to a softball. All week it had been parading its bruise rainbow: black-green-yellow-brown. Coach found me some crutches and I was getting around. It felt good to move. Except for hurting like hell.
The bone doctor turned out to be a long-jawed man with skeleton hands and no time to spare. He checked me over in the hospital waiting room, on his way to a day of cutting people up. All I could think of in those plastic chairs was the night Mom OD’d and I got thrown in the deep end of the foster shitpool. I’d been swimming ever since. I wished I was five and could hold Coach’s hand while I dropped my sweatpants and let Dr. Bones poke my leg. He said the same as June about not trusting the first X-ray. Even without the MRI he could see surgery was indicated. Meniscus this, ACL that, the leg needed to be stabilized, my PCP should get me into a cast and PT. More letters than you want to hear. He reupped my Lortabs and said to come back after I got the MRI. I thought Coach would ask him how soon I could get back to playing, but he didn’t.
After we got out to the car, I told Coach I didn’t want those skeleton hands cutting me open. He looked over at me, the square teeth behind his lips, freckled hands gripping the wheel. Rarely had I told him, flat-out, what I did or didn’t want. Any foster kid can tell you why.
“I hear you, son,” he said. Then he called Watts on his car phone and we went straight to the pharmacy to pick up my new prescription. Coach was going to run in, but I said I’d go. Wanting to prove something. I got out and crutched across the lot, all stupid proud. I got this, I’m thinking, as the doors swoosh open. I got this, down the aisle to Pharmacy. They said fifteen minutes. I browsed magazines and condoms and found a place to sit down on a crate of Ensures.
Finally they yelled my name. I paid with Coach’s card. The white paper bag had a thing stapled to the outside, pretty obvious, that said OxyContin. That shook me. I was still trying hard, playing I got this, but on my way out I stumbled, running smack into a homeless guy.
“Whoah, you blind?” he said, in such a pitiful way that I sorried myself all over him: sorry, careless, my bad, sorry. Coach was watching from his car. I gave the guy another look and almost lost my breakfast. He must have said I’m blind. He had no eyes, just two caves in his wrinkled face. A big nursey dog on a harness. Not homeless, just a person going into Walgreens for whatever drug they give a guy so he can stand his life in the hopeless fucking darkness.
I got in the car feeling rattled. Those empty caves. Blind, blind, blind.
42
This was legitimate, not using. With all the blood pumping through my heart, I believed that, and vowed as much to Coach. I would follow doctor’s orders to the T, and he’d let me play.