Page 71 of The Forbidden Center

I’ve wanted something off this woman since the second week of November. It turns out the first thing I ever get is this.

“Ten,” she says. “Chin level. You are hunting with it.”

“I’m looking at Roman.”

“You are not looking at Roman.”

“Roman’s having a wonderful time. Somebody should be watching.”

Out on the ice Roman has taken Cross’s stick off him to demonstrate something, the most irritating thing one hockey player can do to another, and Cross is standing there with his hands on his hips like a man whose car has been towed.

Astrid looks up at that. Not long.

“Does that work?”

“Taking the stick? No. Never. Not once in the history of the sport.” I get the last of the twenty seconds and hit the rail and the belt slows down. “He’ll do it again Tuesday.”

“Why does nobody stop him?”

“Because he’s right about what he’s showing him, and because the only person in this building who could tell him is me, and I’ve decided to let him find out on his own.” I get off the treadmill and reach for the towel with my left hand and put it down and pick it up with the right. I notice. I do it anyway. “It’s more fun this way.”

“That is a cruel way to run a room.”

“It’s the only way to run a room. You’ll see.”

She writes for another few seconds and then clicks the pen shut and puts it in the pocket where it lives.

Tuesday, the kid is in the waiting room again, sideways in the gray chair with one shoe off and the notebook open on her knee, drawing the television over the reception desk for what has to be the fourth time.

“You’ve drawn that before.”

“I’m getting the cable right. It goes behind the bracket and then there’s a bit where it comes back out.” She doesn’t look up. “It’s wrong in all the other ones.”

“Nobody’s going to check.”

“I’m going to check.”

I sit down two chairs over, where I sit now, and get my paperwork onto the chair between us, and Gabi says something to somebody on the phone about an authorization and loses.

“How’s the hand?”

Tova holds it up without stopping the pencil. The knuckles went down weeks ago and there’s nothing left to look at, which doesn’t stop either of us doing this.

“It’s fine. It was fine in a week.”

“They do that.”

“You said twenty-seven bones.”

“There are twenty-seven bones.”

“I looked it up. There’s twenty-seven if you count the wrist as part of it, and my mother says it depends what you count as the wrist.” She turns the notebook sideways. “You were close.”

“I was accurate. Your mother’s running a different system.”

“She does that.”

Then she says, to the page, flat as a weather report, “There’s a kid who says stuff. Not to me. About me, where I can hear it.”