Firebird (The Firebird Trilogy #1) Page 19

  He jammed the End button, couldn’t jam it hard enough, and threw his phone at the couch. He hopped into the kitchen, snatched the ubiquitous bottle of Chopin by the neck, and hurled it against the floor. Glass and vodka showered his legs. He tore the shot glasses, the tumblers, from the cupboards and launched them at the breakfast bar. Something needed to break before he did.

  “Mr. Volynsky!” Cerise, hands over her mouth, froze at the hallway entrance. Alex’s bare foot bled pink into the vodka on the floor. He tried to explain to her, to construct words, but could only shake his head. The last tumbler slid from his hand and splintered, and so did he.

  “She’s gone,” he whispered. “She didn’t even want me to know.” He lowered his head to his hands and let out a despondent wail. Not again. Please not again.

  He began to sob, like a fucking child.

  He gaped at the shattered glass around him in which reflected patterns of light and dark he recognized as his own face, as though viewing himself through an insect’s compound eye.

  Cerise watched him with a mixture of fear and pity. “Mr. Volynsky, do not move one inch. You’ve already cut yourself. I’m gonna clean this—and you—up, and then we’re going to your doctor.” From the hall closet, she retrieved a Swiffer that must have belonged to the housekeeper. Cerise swept the glass and liquid, the former into a dustpan while the Swiffer’s cloth pad absorbed the latter. She vanished into the bathroom, then returned with Band-Aids. “Sit.”

  He propped himself on one of the stools. She affixed two bandages to the underside of his foot.

  “Mr. Volynsky, have you been drinking? Because if you’ve been drinking while taking painkillers, we are going to have a problem.”

  “No. You don’t understand.”

  “And I don’t think I want to. Good Lord, they weren’t joking about your temper. Get your crutches. I’ll get your shoes. Let’s go.”

  ***

  Alex sat on the examination table with his leg extended as the doctor cut into the cast and pried it apart. Inside, from knee to ankle, was some alien limb, pale and atrophied, a starving child’s leg. Ridiculous in comparison to the thigh above it thick with muscle. A black L flipped on its side, leering at him like a rotted mouth from a leg resembling a plastic toy, marked the surgical incision where his artery and tendons had been reattached.

  “We’ll get you set up to start PT this week,” the doctor said. “We’ll need to rebuild the strength in your tendons as well as the muscles so you can walk. That’s our main goal. It’s about four months, depending on how you respond to treatment.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then you can resume light athletic activity. Nothing that puts too much weight on it or involves sudden stopping and starting.”

  No morning runs and soccer. No afternoon basketball. No squat lifting. No dancing. No skating and thus no hockey. He hadn’t expected to run a marathon that afternoon, but the upper-body workouts were getting tedious, and he missed his routine. It gave him something to do, even if it served no purpose.

  The doctor took him down the hall for X-rays, which revealed he was healing fine, then fit him into a walking boot. “Go across the hall. They’ll schedule your first appointment. Good luck, Aleksandr. I’ll see you in about two months.”

  “Thanks.” He shambled into the waiting room and breezed past Cerise, who trailed him to the PT department.

  “You’ll be back to your old self in no time.” She patted his shoulder, but it did not comfort him. He needed to be better than that. Someone else entirely.

  ***

  Stephanie

  A typical February in Buffalo, or so she’d heard. Four feet of snow, subfreezing temperatures and subzero windchills, and a layer of ice secreted beneath the harmless white fluff on the sidewalks. Thanks, Canada.

  Stephanie had procured a one-bedroom condo downtown, in a historic renovation helping to revitalize the area. Rooftop deck, gym on the ground floor, her own parking space, all for under thirteen hundred a month and bigger than the place in Seattle. She had arrived far too late to sign up for the current season of adult hockey, but she applied as a free agent for the summer Weekend League, bought USA Hockey insurance, and crossed her fingers at least one team would be willing to take a chance on an experienced defenseman who happened to own a uterus.

  The job was more than she could have hoped for too. No assholes. A team with a proud history and the perseverance to overcome their struggles until they had won it all. Inevitably, however, talk of the team dredged up a name too painful to dwell on for long, though their Cup run and ultimate victory had hinged on it. Somehow, she would have to cope. To not feel her composure crack at the mention of Aleksandr Volynsky.

  “Happy birthday to me.” She uncorked one of two wine bottles she’d purchased on the way home, took a hearty swig straight from it, and ordered sushi before sifting through the mail. Birthday cards from her parents, Rhonda, even Dave, and one with no return address sent to her old place in Seattle. She listened to her voice mails. Parents. Rhonda. Why did people even bother sending cards?

  Giving in to curiosity, she unsealed the suspicious envelope as her stomach flip-flopped. It would make sense. The one person who didn’t have her new address.

  Two figures, a boy and a girl, ice-skating on a pond sprinkled with white glitter. Stephanie steeled herself and opened it. No preprinted poem, just a note in familiar, small block letters:

  You are braver than you believe, stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think. But the most important thing is, even if we’re apart…I’ll always be with you.

  Love,

  Alex

  She stumbled back as if the card were radioactive. Winnie-the-Pooh. He remembered.

  She flicked her gaze to her phone. The craving for him, ingrained in her like an instinctual response, flared to life. The hunger in his emerald eyes, the terrifying and awe-inspiring intensity of his love. But as contact between them had dwindled, faith in the inevitability of their lives together had flickered out like stars at dawn’s first light.

  “I can’t do this,” she whispered, scrabbling across the counter to the phone only to break down before she could find his contact entry. She wilted to the floor and crossed her legs, and with her head in her hands rocked back and forth until the sobs had depleted her of the energy to speak.

  She hadn’t slept through one goddamned night since moving, had spent each one curled up with the Pooh bear she’d kept despite her vow to destroy all remnants of him. Had not accepted what the vacancy beside her implied. If she slept, she had given up. Admitted defeat. Letting go meant she had reconciled their promise to each other as the dream of two lovestruck teenagers with nothing but naïve hope to keep it afloat. Adult relationships, unfortunately, required more than dreams to nurture them.

  But she was so cold, like the empty space beside her, her body a shallow grave for her broken heart.

  ***

  A few days later, a package wrapped in many layers of tape and insured for one thousand dollars, addressed again to her old Seattle apartment, arrived in another act of attempted emotional murder. Inside the small Priority Mail box lay the velvet ring box. Stephanie thumbed it open and plucked the ring from its satin bed. Tears streaked down her face, but she ignored them. She placed the diamond-studded white gold on her left ring finger, from which people once believed a vein ran directly to the heart.

  Then she slid it off, set it back in its cradle, and hid the ring with the rest of her keepsakes in the memory box stashed in the back of the closet. She had to make a genuine effort this time. Not stand in her own way any longer.

  The box must go.

  Stephanie carried it to the kitchen and set it in the sink. She dug her candle lighter out of the junk drawer and touched the nozzle to the box, her finger on the trigger. Her hand was shaking. She could not bear to part with what little of him remained.

  “Oh, goddammit!” She scooped it up and hurled it down the hallway, where it disgorged its con
tents like spiritual vomit all over her carpet. Too disgusted to clean it up, she kicked it out of her way and in a fit of tears slammed her bedroom door on it.

  ***

  Aleksandr

  Alex picked up his jangling cell phone. “Da.”

  “Hey, man. It’s Jacob. You up for a drink? Figured you needed to get out of the house.”

  “Sure. Where?”

  “The Keg and Barrel, half an hour?”

  “Yeah. Okay.”

  He couldn’t drive, so the Mercedes had been sitting under a tarp in the garage since the accident. Alex requested the security guard call him a cab. When he arrived at the bar, Jacob was already sitting on one of the stools, a pint of dark beer before him. Alex propped his crutches against the counter and hopped onto the stool next to him.

  “Good to see you, man.” Jacob stuck out his hand. “What’s the prognosis?”

  “Just got the cast off, so PT starts soon. Third surgery coming up. One day at a time, I guess.” He ordered a double Jack and Coke. “Trying to walk again before I think about anything else.”

  “You okay? I mean personally.”

  Alex knocked back half the drink. No point in deception. “No. I ruined her life, she left town, not much else to say.”

  Jacob shook his head. “It’s okay to talk about it, you know? I don’t mean in some emo bullshit way, just…if you need to talk. That’s all.”

  “She even told me, ‘You could have any woman you want.’ Blya, I know that. I’ve been doing that shit since I was eighteen. But none of them is her. Not the girl I’ve been in love with since I was sixteen.”

  “Wow, dude. Really?”

  He took another swig. “Put me out of my fucking misery.”

  “I gotta say you’re starting to make a lot more sense now.”

  Alex gave him a sidelong look. “What do you mean?”

  “The image, right? Letting everyone think you fuck ’em and leave ’em, but it’s all because you can’t be with the girl you love. The media loves a bad boy. You’ll always give them something to feed on. A hopeless romantic is a nice feel-good story, but it doesn’t have legs.”

  Alex chewed on an ice cube. Few understood what a romantic truly was, the torment of such passion. “No shit.”

  “Nicole and I met when we were kids, so I get it. That’s rare as hell these days, and you’re the last person anyone would expect to be holding out for his high school sweetheart. So the real question is what the hell are you doing here? Why aren’t you wherever she is?”

  “Well, there’s my injury, and my dead career.”

  “You can’t get that back. You can get her back. That’s what you want, right?”

  Alex stared at the bar’s dark, polished hardwood, studied the whorls in it as though it held some message to decode. The key to why he’d been so cruel to her, because he sure as hell couldn’t figure it out. He hadn’t wanted her to see him so weak, so helpless. But his viciousness to her of all people, when she only meant to help, after she’d given him the one thing he’d have sacrificed everything for…“More than anything.”

  “Then don’t let her slip away again. Maybe you don’t get another chance after this.”

  “I’m sorry,” Alex said after a few moments.

  “For what?”

  “For thinking you belonged in the AHL.”

  Jacob laughed. “We must all look like a bunch of talentless shits next to you. Fucking Mites on Ice. I felt like we were turning a corner, though, before…And it was all you, man. You would’ve been a great captain, like you were in Buffalo. You don’t let anyone get away with anything.”

  “The perks of being an asshole.”

  “You’re not half as bad as you think you are. And Stephanie loves you—”

  “Let’s not get carried away.”

  “She does. If she didn’t, she wouldn’t have left town. You wouldn’t matter, and she wouldn’t care if she saw you around or not.”

  He had a point.

  “So you go after her. You do whatever you have to do.”

  “Every time I think I’m doing what’s best for her, I completely fuck it up.”

  “There are times when you need to stop thinking so much and just follow your heart. This is one of those times.”

  Alex twisted the glass between his palms. “The things I said to her…I don’t even know why. She deserves better.”

  Jacob chuckled. “They all deserve better. Shit, I don’t know what the hell Nicole sees in me half the time.”

  “I don’t know what to say to her.”

  “Start with the hardest thing: ‘I’m sorry.’ After that, everything is easy.”

  “I don’t know if it’s so simple.” I don’t know what’s wrong with me. “Maybe she’s better off.”

  “That’s her choice, but do you want to leave it like this? At least show her you’re willing to put the effort into making it work.”

  “Yeah. I guess. Thank you. I, uh, don’t have a lot of people to talk to, you know.”

  “No one gives you a fair chance, but I think you’re a good guy deep down.” He extended his hand. “And I’m happy to call you a friend.”

  A friend. He could almost believe Jacob meant it.

  Chapter Twenty

  The first couple of weeks of therapy had involved massage, stretching, and joint mobilization to help him regain range of motion. Alex did little in those sessions except lie there and fight through the inexorable pain, though PT was meant to mitigate it.

  The first actual exercise, as simple as it was, convinced him he would never walk again.

  The physical therapist helped him to a set of two steps. “Stand on the bottom step with your heels off the edge.”

  Alex did as instructed, staring with scorn at his shriveled leg and putting most of his weight on his left foot.

  “Now push up on your toes, then count slowly to ten and lower yourself back down. You can use your arms for balance if you need to. We’re going to do this four times with your knees straight and four times with your knees bent.”

  He held out his arms, his tendons already protesting.

  “Ready? Go.”

  Alex rose on his toes. His Achilles’ screamed, and beads of sweat popped out on his brow, his upper lip.

  “Aleksandr, you went very pale. If it hurts, you need to tell me.”

  He had to walk. He had to. She wouldn’t want a cripple.

  “One,” he grunted. “Two…”

  “Don’t push too hard. You don’t want to rupture the tendon again.”

  “It’s been two and a half months.”

  “And it can take a year to fully heal. You need to slow down if it hurts too much.”

  “Three…Ah, blya.” He hopped off the step, into the therapist’s arms.

  “I’m recommending a brace for you. It’ll help stabilize your foot and strengthen the tendon.”

  “I have to walk.”

  “Even when you’re done with therapy and off crutches, you’ll probably need to walk with support for a while.”

  “Like with a cane?”

  “Yes.”

  “Like a fucking old man. I’m not even twenty-six.”

  “It’s not forever. Not if you take care of yourself and avoid reinjuring the tendons.”

  How could he face her like that? With a cane. Broken.

  “Let’s work on some more stretching and mobilization. We’ll come back to this next week. We’ll get you there, Aleksandr. I promise.”

  You can’t promise me anything. He lay back on the table, and the therapist endeavored to manipulate him into a functioning human being once more.

  ***

  He had to get out of the condo, whose capaciousness reminded him not of his wealth but of his solitude. Going to the gym downstairs wasn’t cutting it, either. Where he used to work out four and a half hours a day, he managed an hour in the morning and another in the afternoon. Bench presses, lat pulldowns, arm curls, whatever he could do sitting or lying down and w
hich did not require use of his right foot. In an ironic twist, the abeyance of his normal activities exhausted him, and he napped for hours at a time.

  Every day he checked his mail, his email, his voice mails and text messages, hoping. Then despairing when Stephanie’s silence confronted him. She had moved on. Found a good man, constructed a new life. Sometimes she co-anchored the Gladiators’ pre- and postgame shows as a substitute and contributed to the podcasts on their website. Had he not been traded, she’d be talking about him. He would be playing, able to walk.

  No. If they hadn’t traded him, she would be in Seattle, married to someone wrong for her and thus who couldn’t hurt her as badly as he had. And they might never have crossed paths again. Better for her, perhaps, if they hadn’t. He had watched her online, saw the glow in her face, the confirmation that what she had needed most to find happiness was to be as far away from him as possible.

  Alex iced his foot, then wrapped the brace around it and encased it in a thick sock. Putting pants on was the most difficult task. Unable to bear weight on his right foot, he had to sit on the edge of the bed and wriggle into his jeans like a caterpillar. He limped to the dresser and selected a plain, dark blue T-shirt that drooped from his leaner frame. In the mirror, the scar on his face seemed more pronounced. He’d grown so pallid, even with naturally fair Eastern Slavic skin with ruddy undertones, prone to sunburn. Where others with a face like his—opposing players had hurled epithets questioning his sexuality at least once a night—might have gone to great lengths to fix the damage, he wore the recessed, puce-colored welt as a badge of honor. Sixteen stitches, and four implants to replace his shattered teeth. He was a hockey player, not a fucking model.

  He hadn’t shaved in days, and he needed a haircut. His hair had started curling over the tips of his ears, flopping onto his forehead. Dark circles smeared the thin skin under his eyes. Subtle warnings to others to stay away. Still, he craved human contact. For all of his infamous churlishness, he was, like anyone, a social animal.