Page 95 of Goaltender Interference

It seemed like hours that they worked, but when Aiden looked at the microwave clock, it had only been about ninety minutes. He still felt exhausted, but his living room and kitchen looked habitable for the first time in months. He tried not to look at the couch, leaned instead against the kitchen island.

“Go upstairs and take a shower,” Mom said, her voice a little softer. She looked at him, dark brown eyes warm and concerned instead of stern. “I’ll be down here deep cleaning.”

“I can help—”

“Aiden,” she said firmly. “Go and take a shower. You desperately need it.”

He opened his mouth to argue, but she was shifting toward the other end of the comforting/stern continuum, so he decided to cut his losses and do what she told him. He nodded silently and retreated up the stairs.

It was ridiculous, really, that sometimes something as simple as taking a shower seemed so insurmountable. He had been taking showers in a professional setting, multiple times a day, for years of his life. He had taken them frequently at home, too, because his brain had all kinds of weird rules about what was clean and what wasn’t, what was an outside piece of clothing and what was safe. But sometimes there were periods, like this one, where it seemed like even trying to muster up the energy tothrow his dirty clothes in the laundry or stand under the warm spray of water just seemed impossible to consider.

He stood there now, naked, and shivered. He probably wouldn’t be doing this if he’d been any less frightened of his mother’s disapproval. But now that he was here, he was going to have to see it through. Mechanically, he scrubbed his body; mechanically, he washed his hair. It was getting really long now, and it had been so tangled and greasy that even the conditioner was kind of a job to get done. It took so much energy, and he was exhausted by the time he was finished. He took a deep breath and wondered what the hell was wrong with him.

Finally clean, he went back into his bedroom to get dressed. He chose one of the dresser drawers full of identical sweatpants and hoodies, all in varying shades of gray or black. It had been a long time since life had had color in it, really. It hadn’t again since Montreal.

By the time he came back downstairs, Mom was already heating up oat milk for cha. He’d had the spices and the tea at home, but he rarely made it for himself, because it was never as good as she made it. Seeing her in his kitchen, aggressively grating ginger and unpacking a Tupperware container of handvo from her tote bag, made him feel for a second like maybe everything might be okay after all. And then he remembered why he was feeling like this and sighed. It wasn’t.

She looked up at the noise, her serious face still concerned. She had a permanent frown line creasing her forehead, the way she worried about him and Hannah. Not that she needed to worry about Hannah, who’d never done anything once in her life to need to be worried about. “Aiden,” she said, “you’re feeling a little better, yes?”

“Yeah,” he said. It wasn’t entirely a lie. Physically, anyway, the shower had helped. Wearing clean clothes had helped. The rest of it? There wasn’t a solution for that.

“Take a plate. The cha will be done soon. And then we will talk. You still have moong dal and rice? Yogurt in the fridge? I’ll make you khichdi and kadhi for dinner.”

“Yes, Mom,” Aiden said, resisting the urge to roll his eyes. There were certain pantry staples that he always had in bulk. And even though he was barely leaving the house these days, some things went automatically on the delivery list. She’d drilled that into his head from a young age, too. He took the plate anyway and went over to the table, pulled out one of the chairs and slid into it.

“I can see you’re not feelingtoobad if you can still take an attitude with me,” she said dryly, and poured the cha through a strainer into the mug she’d taken down from the shelf.

“I’m really fine,” he tried to insist, poking at the handvo with a fork. Handvo was a light but satisfying meal, and his mother’s version of it was spicy but not overwhelmingly so, and it took his stomach twisting unpleasantly at the thought of it to realize just how bad not eating had fucked him up.

She didn’t even dignify that with an answer. Instead, she poured her own cup, and took the seat directly across from him at the table. “All right. Now you’re going to tell me what, exactly, is going on over here.”

“Well,” Aiden said, a little lamely. “You know Matt and I reconnected over the summer.”

“Yes,” Mom said, drawing the word out long enough that, if Matt had been in the room, he probably would have been preemptively ducking for cover.

“Don’t be upset with him. It wasn’t his fault. I just—well, things were going well, overall, but the longer the season went the more I just... I wasn’t getting any better. In my head, Mom. It’s been a mess in there since I retired, and I wasn’t getting any better. I was trying, but I just... I wasn’t. And I didn’t want todrag him down with me. I didn’t want to ruin his life, not for the second time.”

“Aiden...”

“It’s just like since I retired, everything is so fucked up. I don’t have hockey. I don’t have my routine. I don’t have a purpose. I don’t haveme. Not really.”

She just looked at him, contemplative and sad. She extended her arm and took Aiden’s hands in her own. His fingers felt like ice, and hers were warm. “My poor boy,” she said, after a moment. “It’s never been easy for you, has it?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” he said, and his tongue felt too thick in his mouth.

“I don’t know how much you remember about your childhood,” Mom said, “but you were always...we always knew that you were a little different from the other children. You never wanted to play the same kinds of games that they did. Your favorite thing to do as a toddler was to sort things into even stacks. You were so particular about what you ate and how it was prepared. And then when you decided that you wanted to play hockey, that’sallyou thought about after. It was almost like the other children didn’t really exist to you, except in relation to the team.”

Aiden didn’t remember,really. He had vague memories of other children, mostly in hockey rinks, but he’d been so focused on being the best at hockey, first at skating, and then when he’d finally convinced Dad to let him play goalie, he was shifted off into a whole other world by himself. It hadn’t really mattered—what had mattered was learning how to play goalie. Learning how to be thebest.

It wasn’t until later on that a coach had taken him aside and told him that if he wanted the boys to play for him—reallyplay for him—he couldn’t be a mountain, or a world apart. He’d made a conscious effort at that too, running a little mentalchecklist where he’d force himself to talk or to make jokes with the other players a certain amount of times per practice. After a certain point, it became a little more natural, but he still often had to remind himself how to act or how often he needed to speak to someone to keep up a relationship. After his retirement, it was like all of that had fallen apart, too.

“You were always different, and that’s just one of the reasons we loved Matthew so much, when he was around the first time. It was so clear that he saw that about you and loved it. Loved youfor it. For a while, the worry I’d had about you being lonely, well. I could set it aside. I understood why things ended. I understood why it was so hard for you. But Aiden...it’s so hard to watch you struggling like this. What canIdo to help?”

Aiden realized he was gripping her hands too hard, hard enough that he’d probably hurt her, even if her face never reflected it. Neither MomorDad had ever made him feel weird or different as a kid. They’d never taken him to a doctor. They’d just let him put his head down and focus on goaltending with the kind of single-minded drive that had taken him to a probable Hall of Fame career. But they’d always known... “Mom, why didn’t youdoanything about this? About me?”

She looked, for the first time, a little guilty. “What would we have done about you? You always seemed happy, or whatever happy meant for you, and you were so successful, we never wanted to upset things. I wonder now whether we shouldn’t have...but you’re almost middle-aged now, and it’s far beyond second-guessing that.”

Aiden let go of her hands. His own palms and fingers felt disgustingly sweaty, and he wiped them on his pants. “I was seeing a therapist in Montreal. Before I left.”

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