Breaking Skin (19 page)

I say the words to hurt him because I’m hurting, but I don’t know if they work because I can’t seem to meet Cole’s eyes as I say a soft good-bye and go inside.

W
oodbridge Village has residences of varying amenities, depending on how independent the occupant is and how good their benefits are. My mother, Maggie Taylor, got lucky on one count, but not so lucky on the other. Because my father worked for the post office for over thirty years and she refused to let him divorce her after he left, her benefits are decent, but she needs constant care.

Renee calls Woodbridge a nursing home. They call themselves an assisted living facility, and I think my mother is one of the youngest residents there at only fifty-six years old. Due to an undiagnosed heart problem, a blot clot formed in her body and caused her first stroke. Her second stroke happened because she stopped taking her blood thinner medication and developed another clot. She thought the medication was too expensive, and now she’s paying a high price for that decision.

The doctors recommended she stay here until she regains her mobility. Caring for her at home would be a full-time job, one neither Renee nor I are willing or able to undertake. Two years after her last stroke, she’s still here. Renee thinks she’s depressed and isn’t trying to get better.

When Renee talks about our mother, I listen but I can’t connect with the information or the emotions. My sense of detachment isn’t normal; I know that. But my upbringing wasn’t normal, and after what happened, I don’t know how I’m supposed to feel or react. It’s easier not to feel anything.
My superpower
. Too bad it’s useless against Cole.

I close my eyes and force my thoughts of him away. Thoughts that have followed me all morning long. When I open them again, I study the yellow clapboard buildings that sit high on a grassy hill. My mother’s home now. A place I’ve never visited before.

I give my name at the front desk, even though it’s unlikely I’m on my mother’s list. But Carol, the woman I spoke to on the phone, is there. I read her name on a small tag pinned to her shirt. She approaches me with a friendly smile when I announce myself. With clipped brown hair, a round face free of makeup, and a perfectly pressed pink uniform, Carol strikes me as a no-nonsense, efficient sort of person.

“I’m glad you made it. Your mother was still asking about your sister when I got here this morning.”

She walks down the white-tiled hallway that leads away from the reception area and looks over her shoulder at me, silently suggesting I follow. I take a deep breath because I’m sure that hallway leads to my mother, and my only thought is that I wish it were longer. I wish it were a hundred miles long.

I smooth my hair and tuck the sides neatly behind my ears as I make my way to where Carol has stopped. I hate how nervous I am and that I feel the need to make myself presentable. My mother will be so shocked to see me here, what I look like will hardly matter.

“Right in there. She just finished her breakfast.” Carol points to an open doorway down an adjacent corridor. With an encouraging smile, she turns and walks away.

I stand there and stare at the doorway as if it’s an entrance to a more sinister place, a dark cave where a bear may be lurking. I haven’t planned what to say. I don’t know how she’ll react to me, so I didn’t see much point.

Soft footfalls behind me catch my attention and I turn to see another nurse dressed in the same pink uniform look at me oddly, probably wondering why I’m lingering out here. I’m wondering too. My mother is just a woman, not a bear, although oftentimes I’ve wondered if she’s a monster.

With a fortifying breath, I approach the door and hear the sound of the television playing inside. When I step in and see her, I grip the strap on my purse tighter. She looks so small lying beneath a white blanket. The mattress tilts up behind her back so she can see the screen. The last time I saw her, she had a few streaks of gray in her hair, but now it’s all white and cut short. She’s a shadow of the woman I remember.

“Renee, finally,” she says, but her words are slurred. The left side of her face droops and her left arm lays limply on top of the blanket.

I take another step into the room. “It’s Nikki, Mom, not Renee.”

She squints at me. “Nikki?”

One more step puts me directly beside her bed. My palms are slick with sweat as I put my purse down on a chair.

“Where’s Renee?”

Old hurts, buried deep inside, show signs of life. My mother hasn’t seen me in years, but she wants to know where Renee is.

“I don’t know where she is. That’s why I’m here. To see if you do.”

She works hard to sit up straighter, and I make no move to help her.

“How on earth would I know?” she asks. “I’m stuck here.”

“Renee has been gone a week. Did she mention anything to you about taking a trip or planning to go somewhere?”

She looks around the room. “Where’s Langley?”

“She’s at school. I’m looking after her while Renee’s gone.”

“You?” She scoffs. “What do you know about children?”

My back stiffens and I fold my arms over my chest as if they’re a shield that can protect me. “I know how to love them, which is more than you did.”

Her eyes fill with fire. She scowls and her lips move but I can’t understand the sounds that come out. In her anger, her speech is nearly unintelligible.

“Look, I didn’t come here to upset you. I came because I’m worried about Renee. Do you have any idea where she might be?”

Her lips seal together and she glares at me. Then she slumps down into the mattress, looking exhausted, and shakes her head.

“All right then.”

I take a step back as if I’m going to leave, but I wait on the off chance that she wants me to stay or even ask me a single question about myself. But she says nothing. She returns her gaze to the television as if I’m already gone.

“I’m still dancing with the San Francisco Ballet,” I say.

I don’t know why I tell her. There’s no point. She won’t care, but I want her to, and I call myself a fool as her gaze turns on me again.

“It’s one of the top ballet companies in the country. Every season they turn away hundreds of dancers who try out.”

I hear how pathetic I sound, but I can’t seem to stop myself. The little girl inside me wants some acknowledgment from my mother, anything at all, even if I have to ask for it myself.

She licks her lips and lifts her good hand to wipe the extra moisture from her mouth. “Dancing is a waste of time. You should come home and help your sister. It’s the least you can do.”

My jaw clamps shut at the way her words sting. She’ll never change, and that knowledge twists inside my gut, eating away at me the way it always has.

There’s no affection in my mother’s eyes when she looks at me, and if it was there before, I don’t remember. How could a mother not love her children unconditionally? How could she not defend them or fight for them? Langley is my niece, not even my daughter, and I know I would do anything for her, fight all her demons and dry all her tears if I could.

I pick up my purse and swallow my anger. With barely a glance at my mother, I move toward the door.

“Have you seen your father?”

Her words stop me. I slowly turn, wondering if I heard her right.

“Renee saw him,” she says.

I narrow my eyes, wondering what game she’s playing. “He’s dead.”

“He’s come back. He missed his favorite girl.”

Chills crawl up my spine. “His favorite girl? That’s not you, though, Mom, is it? You were never his favorite girl.”

Her unsteady gaze hardens. She tries to push herself up again but fails and falls back down onto the mattress.

“He is back,” she says in a raspy whisper. “I always knew he was too mean to die.”

I spin around and this time I leave the room quickly. My swift footfalls echo through the hallway. The chills travel from my spine out to my limbs and my whole body goes cold.

“Was she happy to see you?” Carol asks. She’s at the front desk again, sipping from a mug.

It isn’t easy to calm myself enough to respond. “She’s lost some of her mental capacity. She thinks my dead father has come back.”

Carol’s face wrinkles with confusion. “She’s as sane as I am. Her speech is affected, though. Maybe you misunderstood her.”

“I didn’t misunderstand anything.”

I continue out the door, down the stairs, and don’t stop moving until I’m in the car. Then I turn up the radio and blare the music as loudly as I can to drown out the sound of my mother’s voice in my head.

“Y
ou’ve got to hustle! Follow it up!” I holler over the ice.

As the coach of Derek’s hockey team, I don’t want to be seen as favoring him, but my attention isn’t evenly divided.

The boys speed past me down the ice in a tight pack. At the other end, Derek breaks loose and takes a shot. The puck flies past the goalie and hits the back of the net. Derek pumps his fist as he loops around and smiles when his teammates cheer. He looks over at me the way he always does, and I pump my fist in the air proudly.

My kid’s got skills. It fills me with pride and terrifies me at the same time. If I encourage him, he may want to follow in his old man’s footsteps. A well-placed word of discouragement could point him in a different direction. He says he loves hockey, but he also loves Minecraft and his high-top Chuck Taylors. If it turns out hockey is his passion, I can’t stop him from playing. If he’s anything like me, he’d do it whether I want him to or not.

But if he’s going to do it, how far am I willing to go to help him when I know I could be hurting him too?

There’s a business card burning a hole in my wallet. Every time I go to throw it out, something stops me. The name on it belongs to a researcher from the University of California San Francisco. He came to a practice last year with the sole purpose of meeting me. He wants me to be part of his CTE study and to speak out to college and high school coaches around the country about the dangers of repetitive brain trauma.

When he sought me out, he had no idea I was already experiencing symptoms. He only knew what the rest of the hockey world did. That I have a history of concussions, including one infamous one that ended my career, even though I played for months before I finally admitted I was done.

Chronic traumatic encephalopathy or CTE. No three letters in the alphabet have more power to scare the hell out of me. It’s a progressive, degenerative brain disease caused by repetitive head trauma. Football makes the news most often for having players and former players with CTE, but ice hockey is a close second.

There’s no way to know if you have it until you’re dead and it’s confirmed by an analysis of your brain. I’m definitely in no rush to have that test done, so maybe it’s better not to know. If I have it, there’s nothing I can do about it. There is no cure. It’s a high-stakes waiting game, and anyone who cares about me is unknowingly holding a hand of cards. It’s just a big fucking unknown and so goddamned frustrating.

I’d like nothing more than to spread awareness about the dangers of repetitive head trauma, especially since the leagues are still denying how bad the problem is. They’re finally admitting there is a problem but they want to minimize it, and they still don’t want anyone talking about it because they don’t want the image of professional sports smeared. I heard someone say that if only ten percent of mothers with young children decide to keep their kids from playing football, the NFL is dead. I don’t know if I believe that, but it says everything about the mindset of the NFL, and the NHL isn’t any different.

All I know is I don’t want Derek or any other player to go through what I’m going through if it can be prevented, and that makes me the worst kind of hypocrite because when I was playing, the violence never bothered me. No matter how many times I got checked, the desire to be out there on the ice never went away. To hear the noise of the crowd and feel the adrenaline race through my veins. I miss it every day. Fuck the consequences. I bet most guys would say the same.

But the researcher who came to talk to me says you can get CTE just from playing at college and high school levels, even if you never play again, and the coaches aren’t telling players that. If you’re a kid out there risking everything, you need to know it, and your parents need to know it too. If there’s anything you can do about it, like not playing injured and giving your body a chance to recover, then that’s what the coaches should make you do. That’s something I can get behind and that’s why the card isn’t in the trash yet.