3. Greer #2
It is the first thing I will ever hear him say in a hallway, and the way he says it tells me three things at the same time.
One: he has known I was the new PT for a month, the same way I have known he was the head coach.
Two: he has had no idea, until he walked through that door, that the new PT is the woman from the Bellamy.
Three: he does not, right now, know what to do with either of those facts.
I do not, for a long second, know what to do with my own face.
We look at each other in the silence of a glass-walled office on the third floor of a six-story building that costs the franchise eighty million dollars a year to operate, in the eight or nine seconds before either of us has remembered how to be at work.
He says: "I'm here for the physical."
I say: "I know."
He sets his bag down on the chair by the door.
The bag is old leather and the leather is soft from years of being carried.
His hands are not shaking. My hands are not shaking.
We are both, in entirely different ways, very good at the part where you keep the camera on you and the panic somewhere else.
"Coach Larsen," I say, because if I do not get back into the script, the script is going to leave without me, "please take a seat on the table. I have your file pulled up. We'll start with vitals and then we’ll move to the range-of-motion work."
He looks at me.
He says, with the smallest possible inflection on the second word: "Ms. Callahan."
He moves to the treatment table. He does not, at any point in those four steps, take his eyes off me.
I pull on a pair of nitrile gloves with my hands behind the counter, where they are doing the small precise work my hands have done a thousand times in clinical rooms. The gloves make their soft creased sound between two latex membranes that I am suddenly hyperaware of.
The lamp above the table hums in the way lights in glass-walled offices always do.
The man on the table is breathing slowly, in the steady controlled way of a person who has been told a great many times in his life that he is being watched.
I pick up the blood pressure cuff.
"Roll up your sleeve, please."
He rolls up his sleeve.
His forearm is one of the things I have been looking at for three weeks every time I have closed my eyes, and now it is six inches from my hand under the fluorescent light of a thirty-eight-thousand-dollar treatment table, and the small dark hairs on it are exactly the small dark hairs of the man who put one of his hands on the back of my neck and did not let go for six hours.
I take his blood pressure. It is 122 over 78.
His pulse, when I find it with two gloved fingers at the inside of his wrist, is sixty-one.
The wrist is warm under my glove. The skin on the inside of his forearm is soft and pale from twenty years in long sleeves under shoulder pads, and the small scar on the side of his thumb — I noticed it at the credenza in suite seventeen-fourteen three weeks ago without permitting myself to notice that I was noticing.
The numbers go on the intake form. 122 over 78. Sixty-one. I do not, while I write them, look at his face.
He says, very low: "Greer."
It is the first time he has said my first name in this room. The sound of it does the thing it did in suite seventeen-fourteen, which is that it dismantles me in a place under my ribs in a way I do not, on the first morning of my dream job, have any words for.
I look up.
"Coach Larsen," I say, in the voice I have been training for a week, "I am going to finish your physical now. Then we are going to figure out the rest of it. Not in here. Not today. But we are going to figure it out."
He looks at me for a long second.
He says, very low: "I'm sorry."
"You have no reason to be."
"I should have known your name before I let you out of that suite."
"I should have given it to you. I chose not to. That isn't on either of us."
He nods, once.
We look at each other for one more second across the small clinical space of the office I will be working out of every weekday morning for the rest of the season.
"Coach Larsen," I say, professional, level. "Range of motion."
He looks at me for one more second. His eyes go down to the file on my desk, to the gloves on my hands, to the badge on my hip, to the small Boston Barons logo embroidered on the chest of the polo I have, with horrible timing, put on this morning.
He puts each one of those facts somewhere he is going to have to deal with later.
He nods, once.
He says, calm and even: "Range of motion."
He stands. He unzips the quarter-zip and pulls it over his head. He pulls off his track pants, revealing athletic shorts which I guess makes sense when he knows the morning starts with a physical.
I turn to the counter to give him a beat of dignity. I hear the soft fabric sounds of him folding the shirt over the back of the chair by the door. I hear him sit back on the table.
"Ms. Callahan."
I turn around.
His left hip — the famous hip, the post-Cup hip — is bared above the waistband.
The scar runs in a clean arc from the crest down toward the joint, faded silver, surgical.
Three different sports-medicine journals have published case studies on this hip.
The MRI footage is in the public domain.
On the second date of my third year of grad school, I used the original press photos of the post-surgery rehab as a talking point with a man who would later turn out to be Brennan.
In a moment I am, somehow, going to put my hands on it.
My hands are doing the small, precise work they have done a thousand times when a voice from the hallway calls out, "Dad? Are you in there?"
My hands stop. The gloves stop. The lamp keeps going. Everything else in my body stops at the same time.
I turn slowly. Kieran is still on the patient table, his palms flat on his knees, his face the perfect stillness that costs him something to maintain. He is looking at the door.
I look at him.
He looks at me.
The door bursts open.
"Dad! Greer, oh my God, are you guys — wait, you haven't met yet, have you?"
My best friend Indie, twenty-six years old, five-foot-eight in flats, with her father's blue eyes and her mother's mouth and a ...and a smile that has been, for three years, the warmest welcome in any room I have walked into with her.
She is in workout clothes — leggings and a cropped Center Ice Boston sweatshirt with her foundation's logo in white block letters across the front, hair in the loose ponytail she wears straight from a board meeting.
She is in the open doorway of my office, one hand on the frame, looking from her father on the treatment table to me, two feet from him with a pen in my hand.
I do not, for a second, answer her.
I cannot, for a second, look at Kieran.
On the treatment table behind me is the stranger from the Bellamy. The woman in the doorway is my best friend. The man who slept against my side on the seventeenth floor of a hotel three weeks and one day ago is Indie's father.
The understanding lands in pieces.
I look up at her, make my face do the thing I have been training it to do for a week, and answer with the voice that matches the headshot on the badge in my purse.
"We were just finishing up his physical."
Indie laughs — the small bright laugh she has been doing since she was twelve — and walks into the room.