Howard Shrier: Boston Cream

I opened my eyes, took a few more breaths and sat up very slowly, trying to will the pain away from my head. I rose softly, not too steadily, and stood rocking gently back and forth until I found the place where I was centred, and kept breathing until I was sure I wouldn’t fall down. I breathed some more and decided it was worth risking one foot forward toward the bathroom. Then the other foot. I told myself there were lovely liquid gelcaps in there, plus a toilet, even a tap where I could wash my face and rinse my mouth and cool a cloth to put on the back of my neck. Step by step I did it. Out of my room, across the hall and into the bathroom. I exceeded the recommended dosage of Tylenol, but not by that much. Peed in the dark. Showered in the dark-lukewarm, to keep the blood from rushing to my head. Shaved in half-light. It all helped a bit, especially the cold cloth on my neck. Coffee helped too. Getting dressed was largely neutral. By seven-thirty the pain was receding and I felt ready to leave for my meeting. Functional and focused, which meant no one needed to know about this little setback. Not Jenn, or the agency’s insurance people, or anyone even distantly related to me. And definitely not Dr. Nancy Carter.

If her name is familiar, it’s probably from the sports pages. She’s the neurologist who treats all the hockey and football players with head injuries. I was lucky to get an appointment with her, her receptionist said. “She needs people like you for a new study she’s starting.”

People like me. The concussed. The severely concussed. I had sustained what Dr. Carter called a contrecoup, my brain banging against my skull when I was hit from the side but good with a barbell, resulting in a Grade 3 concussion.

She said a third of the players she saw developed post-concussion syndrome: “You might get headaches, bad ones, and experience dizziness or sensitivity to light. You might notice behavioural changes, such as depression, anxiety or irritability.”

“If I don’t notice,” I said, “my mother will.”

She was right about the headaches: more frequent and intense than any I’d ever had. The first month, there were days I wouldn’t get out of bed for fear I’d set one off. Or puke. That was always fun first thing in the morning. I sometimes got dizzy without warning. One time I came to on the floor with a nasty welt on my eyebrow and no memory of falling face first. My focus, whether at work or at home, was also Grade Three. I’d stare at my computer, unaware of what I was reading, or forgetting what I’d been searching for. Was I depressed, anxious and irritable? Tick all those boxes. Just ask Jenn, ask my family. Ask anyone who had the displeasure of my company back then, especially after we changed the clocks in the fall and light began to bleed from our northern skies.

Only after three full months did Dr. Carter clear me to start light training. Oh God, I wanted to shout, bring it on. Exercise and martial arts are how I normally keep myself sane. But those first workouts wouldn’t have tired out someone in a walker. I had zero endurance. Light pedalling on a stationary bike could bring on the whirlies. I had to do the simplest katas in slow motion to avoid falling on my ass. And even as I improved over the following month and began to believe I might one day actually get back to full strength, Dr. Carter forbade contact training. “Once you’ve had a concussion, others happen more easily unless it completely heals. Think Eric Lindros. He was done as an elite player at thirty. You don’t want that, Jonah. That means thirty days symptom-free, no cheating, before I let you off the leash.”

Which had meant no Krav Maga training with my teacher, Eidan Feingold. Eidan didn’t know the meaning of hold back; when we sparred it was all-out war.

Finally, a week ago, at my monthly exam, I told her I had reached the thirty-day mark, which was so close to true. There had been one headache the first week that I didn’t count because I’d had a few glasses of red wine the night before, and another around the twentieth day that came and went so fast I didn’t even take a third gelcap.

You call that cheating?

So Dr. Carter had cleared me to go back to fieldwork and resume light contact training-no blows to the head, even with headgear-and no isolated headache was worth reporting. Everyone gets one from time to time, whether from stress, alcohol, a bad night’s sleep or a broken heart.

Maybe I wasn’t quite ready to spar with Eidan or win a bar fight with a head butt, but I did feel I could brave the morning traffic from Riverdale, on the east side of the Don River Valley, to Bathurst and Lawrence in the northwest end. Compared to what I had been going through since the fall, that made it a pretty good morning.

Ron and Sheila Fine lived in a bungalow at the wrong end of Glengrove Avenue, west of the Allen Road. The lot was big but the house was old and tired. If any renovations had been made to it since it had been built, they were craftily hidden. On the better blocks of the street further east, old small houses on big lots like this had been torn down and replaced by monster homes. At this end, the gentrification was scattered at best; many of the houses were still occupied by their original owners: Italians, Jews, Caribbeans.

I met Ron there on a cold March morning, the sun high in a hard blue sky. He was an optometrist with a storefront in a strip mall on Marlee; Sheila was principal of a Jewish day school attached to a Conservative synagogue on Bathurst. She had left the house before I got there, to open the school for early daycare drop-offs. His shop was a five-minute drive away and he didn’t open Wednesdays till ten, so he was the one to fill me in on his son David’s disappearance in Boston. Two weeks now missing.

“He is not the kind of boy to simply vanish,” Ron told me.

“Boy?”

“I know, I know. He’ll be thirty on his next birthday.” Ron was about fifty-five, dressed in a white shirt and black pants, a skullcap clipped to his greying hair, a face that seemed kind and open. The lines on it told you he had spent a lot of time both smiling and frowning. A thinker and a feeler.

“And he’s a surgical resident?”

“Past that already. He’s a transplant fellow at Sinai Hospital in Boston.”

Another Jewish overachiever, like a certain older brother I know. I was glad my mother wasn’t in the room. Her sigh of envy would have filled it.

“To be honest,” I said, “you’d have better luck with someone in Boston, someone with local contacts and a better grasp of the city.”

“And I’ll be honest with you, Jonah,” Ron said. “That’s what I thought when your brother told me about your agency. Initially I was only going to ask you for a reference. I didn’t want to pick someone out of a Boston phone book. I wanted a personal recommendation. I hoped there was someone you had worked with or knew of.”

Then he said something that went straight past surprising to stunning. “But your brother said some very nice things about you. Very good things.”

I tried, and likely failed miserably, to hide my surprise. “Like what?”

“That you don’t give up, Jonah. That you never have since you started out, not even once. No matter what happened to anyone. You break a few dishes, he said, but you keep at it. You don’t care who you piss off, pardon my language, but that’s what Daniel said. And he said you play above your weight. I’m not a big sports fan but I know what that means.”

“You’ll get my best.”

“You can’t understand the hell we’ve been through the last two weeks,” he said. “It doesn’t sound like a long time, two weeks-some people suffer all their lives-but in seconds, half seconds, micro-seconds, it’s agonizing. Where is he, Jonah? Is he alive, is he dead? I have no idea how Sheila is hanging on. I have no idea how I’m hanging on. I can tell you’re not Orthodox, Jonah. But do you believe in Hashem?”