4. Kieran
Kieran
This morning is the first morning of the season I would prefer not to have arrived.
I am late, and I am walking through the practice facility on the way to my first appointment of the day, which is the same first appointment every other man on the roster has on this same first morning every fall, which is the pre-season exec physical with the new PT.
The new PT's last name is Callahan. The credential is from Northeastern. The references in the file my GM walked into my office with four weeks ago were the strongest references any candidate at this level has had on his desk in fifteen years.
The first appointment of the day, professionally speaking, is a thing I have hated since I was a player.
This morning, I am bracing for it the way I have braced for it every fall for the last twenty-six years.
My left hip aches the way it always does when I walk into an air-conditioned building from a cool morning.
The bag on my shoulder is the same bag I have carried since the year I made head coach.
The elevator to the third floor will take me to this same office a hundred times a year until somebody else's name is on the door.
I knock on the new PT's office door at 8:59.
A voice from inside the room, with its back to me, says: "Coach Larsen, please have a seat. I'm just pulling your file. Give me one second."
I do not, for the second, breathe.
She turns.
It is her.
For the first second, I have nothing in my head.
Twenty-four years in a sport that taught my body what to do with my face.
Four years of head coaching that drilled the face for hallways and press rooms and arena tunnels.
Seven years of widowerhood that drilled it for a city that took eighteen months to stop coming up to me at restaurants.
None of that training is, in this second, useful.
She looks at me.
I look at her.
Neither of us moves. Neither of us speaks. We have, between us, more than a decade of experience keeping our faces still in public, and that is the only reason we both survive the next two seconds.
She says, very low: "Coach Larsen."
I say, just as low: "Ms. Callahan."
It is the worst pair of words either of us has said to anyone all year.
She sets the file down on the credenza. Her hand is steady. The hand that is not on the file is closed loosely at her side. She looks me in the eye, which is the bravest thing I have ever seen another adult do in a clinical room. She says: "Please give me a moment to close the door."
She closes the door.
She turns back to me.
"Coach," she says, with the control of someone who has run this scenario internally five times before saying it out loud. "We are going to do 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."
"Yes."
"Are you all right to proceed?"
"Yes."
"I'm sorry."
It is the first thing she has said in this room that is not professional. She says it the way she said no, not really to me in the suite three weeks ago — the way a person says a thing they have been holding inside for too long.
"You have no reason to be," I say.
She nods, once. The professional mask settles back into place by visible degrees. She gestures to the patient table.
"Please take a seat. I have your file pulled up. We'll start with vitals."
I take a seat on the table.
She takes my blood pressure. She takes my pulse. Her hands do not shake. She writes a number on a form. She does not, while she writes, look at my face, and I am, mercifully, allowed to do the same.
I take off the quarter-zip and my track pants, and sit back on the table.
She palpates the scar. The joint capsule. The IT band. She names the structures she is checking under her breath the way an experienced PT does — half for the chart, half for the patient, half for herself. She is good. Better than my last three PTs.
"Range of motion is better than your file said," she says, to my hip, to her notes, to the floor. "You've been doing the maintenance work."
"I have been doing the maintenance work."
"With whom?"
"With nobody. I do it myself."
She makes a small noise that is not a laugh and is not a disagreement, and is the noise an experienced PT makes when a forty-seven-year-old patient claims he has been doing his own twice-weekly hip maintenance on the road.
It is the same noise I heard her make over a glass of bourbon in suite 1714 when I told her I was working a gala for a sport some of the donors did not watch.
Neither of us says so.
She moves to my knee.
I do not look at her face.
She does not look at mine.
A voice from the hallway calls out:
"Dad? Are you in there?"
Her hands stop. I look at the door. Greer looks at the door. Neither of us has time to choose a face before the door bursts open.
"Dad! Greer, oh my God, are you guys — wait, you haven't met yet, have you?"
My daughter is standing in the doorway of the new PT's office in a windbreaker, and the easy, untroubled smile of a person who has never, in her twenty-six years, had reason to suspect her father of anything.
"Oh my God. Dad, this is Greer. Greer, this is my dad. You're going to LOVE each other."
I say, in my post-game voice, the voice that has lied for me through every press conference of my career: "Indie."
I do not say anything else, because there is no sentence available to me in this language.
"Hi Daddy." She crosses the room in three steps and kisses me on the side of the head. She turns to Greer. "Are you okay, hon? You look like death."
"I'm fine."
"Liar." Indie reaches into her tote and produces a granola bar, which she presses into Greer's hand. "You haven't eaten. Eat."
Greer takes the granola bar. She tears the wrapper. She takes a small bite. She chews but it’s obvious she does not want to.
She says: "I'll be right back."
She walks out of the office at a controlled, professional pace that is going to cost her, in two seconds, the second-to-last shred of dignity available to her this morning. The door of the staff restroom across the hall closes behind her.
I sit on the patient table with the half-eaten granola bar in my line of sight on the credenza and my left hip humming with the residual heat of her gloved hand.
Indie sits on the corner of the desk. "She's been off for like two weeks.
I keep telling her to go see somebody. She won't go.
She is the worst patient." Indie picks at a loose thread on her tote.
"I think it's stress. She just started here.
She just broke up with that asshole. She is running on nothing. "
Through the half-open door behind her, the muffled sound of Greer being sick in the staff restroom travels across the hallway. Indie winces.
"God."
"She has been sick for two weeks?" I say.
It is not a question. My voice is steady. The professional mask, which has held through the recognition and the acknowledgment and the vitals, is the mask through which I am saying this.
"Yeah." Indie has not looked at me. She is still picking at the thread on her tote.
"Two, two and a half. She thought it was something she ate, then she thought it was the flu, then she thought it was a bug from her last trip to Providence, but it's been too long for any of that.
I keep telling her to go in. She keeps saying she's fine. I don't know."
"Two and a half weeks."
"Roughly. She was off at brunch the Sunday after camp opened. She hasn't kept much of anything down since."
"Mm."
The gala was three Wednesdays ago. Three weeks ago tomorrow.
I do the math. I do it twice.
I sit very still on the patient table in the office of the new PT for the Boston Barons in the third-floor west wing of the practice facility I drove into this morning with the dull steady ache in my left hip and the unreasonable hope, somewhere very far down in my body, that the woman from the Bellamy was still alive somewhere in the world and was eating breakfast and was happy.
I sit very still.
I wait for her to come back out of that bathroom.
Because I think — God help me — I think I might be a father again.