Ice Break

Everyone treats therapists like we're made of glass. I'm thirty-four years old and I've been a practicing clinician for nine years, and still, the moment I mention what I do, people soften their voices. Like I might crack.

I don't crack. I bristle. There's a difference.

Anyway. Second day of the professional development conference, and I'm in the hotel's repurposed conference room with forty other adults learning how to do CPR on a plastic torso. Mandatory first aid certification. Everyone in my field has to renew it every three years.

And of course, of course, the breakout pairing sheet puts me with Jose.

If you've never been to one of these conferences, you don't know Jose. Set carpenter for a theater company here in Winnipeg. Thirty-six, forearms like rope, permanent smudge of sawdust somewhere on him. We've crossed paths at maybe six of these things over the years. Every single time, we end up on the same team. Every single time, we argue.

He thinks talk therapy is "just listening with extra steps." I think set construction is "making big furniture." We've said these things to each other's faces. Once, two years ago at a trauma-informed care workshop, I told him his trade was basically arts and crafts with a nail gun. He didn't speak to me for the rest of the day. Then the next morning he bought me a coffee and called my profession "talk show hosting without a camera."

So. You can imagine my mood when I saw our names on the same line.

"Great," I muttered, dropping into the chair beside his.

"Great," he agreed, not looking up from his pen. He was drawing something. A hinge, probably. The man draws hinges the way other people doodle hearts.

The instructor was a perky woman named Elisabeth who kept calling the CPR dummy "our friend." Our friend had no face below the nose. Just a bald plastic head with a mouth hole.

"Remember, one hundred and ten compressions per minute," Elisabeth chirped. "The rhythm of the classic disco song 'Stayin' Alive.'"

Half the room started humming it. I watched Jose's mouth twitch.

We got called up in pairs. I went first, because I'm not a coward. Knees on the mat, hands stacked, compressions going. I've done this certification four times. My form is textbook. I could do this asleep.

"Elbows," Jose said quietly.

I kept pumping. "What?"

"Lock your elbows. You're bending on the upstroke. You're losing depth."

"I'm not bending."

"You are. Slightly." He crouched down next to our friend the faceless dummy and peered at my arms like he was checking a level. "There. Right there. Little bend."

I stopped, arms locked, and looked at him. "I have done this four times."

"And I've built load-bearing stairs," he said. "You learn real fast what happens when something flexes that shouldn't."

He was right. That was the infuriating part. I watched the video playback Elisabeth did on the tablet afterward and there it was, a visible dip in my elbows on every compression. Point three centimeters of lost depth. Jose had seen it from six feet away.

"Good eye," Elisabeth said to him, beaming.

"Thank you," Jose said, and gave me a look. Not smug. Worse than smug. Gentle. Like he was being nice about it.

I hated it.

"I don't need coaching," I told him on the walk back to our seats.

"Didn't coach. Observed." He clicked his pen. "There's a difference."

"You know there's a whole literature on unsolicited feedback."

"You know there's a whole literature on people who can't take it."

The woman in front of us turned around. We both shut up.

Break came at eleven. That's when Elisabeth dropped the bomb.

"So, funny thing," she said, shuffling her folder. "We're short one mannequin. The hotel was supposed to deliver two adult dummies and we only got one. There should be a second one in their storage somewhere. Can I get two volunteers to go hunt it down? Take the keys."

Every hand in the room went up except mine. Because free escape from CPR disco hour? Obviously.

Except Jose's hand was up too, and Elisabeth pointed at us like we'd planned it.

"Perfect. You two already work well together."

"We do not work together," I said.

"You're paired," Elisabeth said, in the tone of a woman who was not going to have this argument. She handed me a key card on a lanyard. "Basement level. Maintenance will point you to storage."

So that's how the two of us ended up in a service elevator, alone, descending into the guts of a mid-tier business hotel. Jose leaned against the wall with his arms crossed. I watched the floor numbers count down.

"Two years since the stair comment," he said.

"What stair comment?"

"Yours. Arts and crafts with a nail gun."

"You remember that."

"I remember everything people say about my trade." He shrugged. "It's a habit."

The doors opened on concrete and pipe smell. Fluorescent lights. A sign pointing toward MAINTENANCE, another toward RINK ACCESS. This hotel was connected to a community hockey complex, I'd learned. Weird layout. The rink sat below us somewhere, under the parking structure.

Storage was locked. Elisabeth's key card didn't work on it.

"Great," I said. "Fantastic. We tell Elisabeth the mannequin doesn't exist and go back to humming disco."

"Or," Jose said, "we look around. She said basement level. Basements have rooms."

I should have argued. I didn't, because honestly the alternative was forty minutes of compressions, and my shoulders already ached. So we wandered. Past a laundry room humming with industrial dryers. Past a door labeled CHEMICAL STORAGE with a lock I wasn't about to touch.

Then a big rolling metal door, half open, warm air pushing out of the gap. Painted on it, stenciled: ZAMBONI ROOM. AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL.

Jose stuck his head in like he was born sticking his head into places. "Hello? Anyone?"

No answer. He looked at me. I looked at him.

"We're authorized," I said. "We're personnel. We're personnel with a key card."

"That's not what that sign means."

"Are you the fun police too, or just the elbow police?"

He grinned. That was the problem with Jose. When he wasn't being insufferable, he was handsome, and he knew it, and I knew it, and we both pretended otherwise for the sake of the rivalry.

We went in.

The zamboni room was huge and warm and smelled like machine oil and clean ice. The machine itself sat in the middle, a big blue and white beast with its tank half full. There were tools on pegboard walls, all hanging in perfect outlines, which told you everything about whoever ran this place. Tire chains. A shelf of labeled jars. And a workbench with a radio playing something soft and old.

"Okay," Jose said, hands on his hips, doing a slow turn. "This is the cleanest room I've ever seen."

"It's a garage."

"This is not a garage. This is a cathedral of a garage." He pointed at the pegboard. "You see the outlines? Every tool traced in marker so you know if one's missing. This person is my kind of person."

"You're easily impressed by organization."

"I'm easily impressed by care." He turned. "There's a difference."

He kept saying that word. Difference. Like it was his favorite.

I was already drifting along the far wall, because that's where the interesting stuff was. Framed photos of hockey teams going back decades. A plaque. And then, mounted on the wall near the door, a wooden thing about the size of a hardcover book, brass ring, glass face, a needle floating inside.

"Jose."

He came over. "Huh. Barometer."

"You know what that is?"

"It's an aneroid barometer. Measures air pressure. That needle there, it drifts depending on whether the pressure's rising or falling. Falling means weather's coming. Storm, usually." He tapped the glass gently with one knuckle. "Old ones like this, the needle sits on a second pointer. You push the pointer to the needle, come back later, and see which way it moved."

"Who puts a barometer in a zamboni room?"

"Rink managers care about ice. Humidity, temperature, pressure. All of it messes with a freeze." He was reading the little brass plate under it. "It says property of R. Reese. There's a date. Nineteen sixty-one."

"Nineteen sixty-one. That thing's older than both of us."

"It's beautiful is what it is. Look at the wood grain. Someone maintained this. Oiled it." He leaned in close, breath fogging the glass for a second. "Needle's dropping. Weather's coming."

"You have no way of knowing that's true. You tapped it once."

"Trends. Look at the marks on the face. Someone logs it." He straightened up and looked around the room like it was a museum. "This Reese guy probably still works here. Probably has worked here since before the hotel existed."

"You're showing off," I said.

"I'm being interested."

"You're performing being interested. It's a thing people do. You find one fact, one tiny expertise, and you deploy it at a woman in a basement."

Jose turned around slowly. "Is that what I'm doing?"

"Isn't it?"

"You asked me what it was."

I opened my mouth. Closed it. He had me there. I had asked. I'd said his name in a dark basement specifically to summon him to a barometer.

The radio on the workbench changed songs. Somewhere above us, forty adults were humming Stayin' Alive without us.

"We should find that mannequin," I said.

"Probably," Jose said, and did not move toward the door. He moved toward me.

"You know what your problem is?" he said.

"I'm sure you'll tell me."

"You can't stand not being the smartest one in a room. Even a room with a zamboni in it."

"That's not..." I stopped. Because the worst part was the little flare of heat it gave me, being read like that, accurately, by a man with sawdust permanently on his forearms.

"Say it back to me," he said. "Tell me I'm wrong."

"You're not wrong." My voice came out quieter than I planned. "You're a smug, annoying..."

And then he had me backed against the shelving unit. The one with the labeled jars. His hand landed flat on the shelf beside my head, not touching me, just caging me in, and the whole row of jars shivered and settled.

"You need to learn when to shut up," he said.