Page 73 of Unmanageable

“Yes!” Yuri beams, clapping his hands together. “Beautiful! You dissolved! You allowed the mountain to pass through you!”

“Yuri, that hit the post,” Cash frowns, standing up straight. “If it’s two inches to the left, that’s a goal. That’s a loss in a tie game.”

“But it was not,” Yuri counters, unbothered. “Do it again.”

For the next forty-five minutes, my notebook becomes a total disaster.

I’m supposed to be documenting his recovery tracking and shoulder load management for the front office. Instead, I’m frantically writing down phrases like “Your pads are the roots of an ancient oak” and “Do not cut the mother ice.”

“Why did your shoulder lift?” Yuri asks after a particularly awkward scramble.

“Because the oak tree got sniped, Yuri,” Cash pants, his jersey soaked through with sweat, his face bright red behind the cage.

“Your shoulder lifted because you feared the shadow of the hawk,” Yuri tells him, waving a finger. “The blocker is the sky. The hawk cannot hurt the sky.”

I flip to a fresh page and write:

If blocker is sky, what are the skates?

Five minutes later, Yuri tells Cash to “Glide like oil on water.”

“Glide like oil,” Cash repeats, his voice entirely deadpan. He looks over at me through the glass, his eyes wild, pleading for a rescue mission.

By the time Yuri calls it, Cash looks like he’s just crawled out of a trench. He plods heavily toward the locker room gate, his head down, his stick dragging on the ice behind him like a broken spirit.

Yet, as I watch him go, I realize something.

His shoulder didn’t flinch once during that last drill. The tiny, protective hitch he’s been trying to work out since the injury was completely gone.

He was so busy trying to figure out how to be a river that he forgot to be afraid of the pain.

Ten minutes later, the locker room door clicks open.

Cash walks out, his massive, battered gear bag slung over one shoulder. He’s showered, his blonde hair damp and sticking up in three different directions, wearing a clean gray sweatshirt and black track pants.

We walk out of the rink in total silence, our sneakers clicking against the concrete as we hit the gravel parking lot. The sun is bright, burning off the last of the humidity from last night’s storm, making the air feel thick.

We walk half a block before we both stop by the van. I turn my head slowly to look at him.

“What,” I say, my voice flat, “was that?”

“I don’t know, Scottie,” he says, his voice a low, horrified whisper. “I honestly don’t know. At one point he told my blocker to become a lung. A lung, Scottie. How do you block with a lung?”

“He told your glove hand to be the moon, Cash. The moon.” I rub my temples, feeling a headache brewing. “I have six pages of notes and I look like a lunatic. I wrote ‘Do not cut the mother ice’ in all caps.”

“I tried to flow around the mountain,” he says, letting out a long, low groan as he covers his face with his hands. “My shoulder doesn’t even hurt because my brain shut down to protect itself from the philosophy.”

“We have three more sessions with him, Cash. It’s non-refundable.”

Cash looks at me, his eyes filled with genuine terror. “Three more? Scottie, by tomorrow he’s going to have me meditating in the crease while guys shoot pucks at my ribs.”

“You’re the river, O’Connell,” I say, a small, involuntary laugh breaking through my lips. “Start flowing.”

“I hate the river,” he mutters, though the corner of his mouth twitches upward. “I want to go back to being a wall.”

***

By 8:30 PM, the absolute ridiculousness of the afternoon has faded into a pleasant, humming exhaustion.