6. Kieran
Kieran
By the time the sky over the Seaport has gone the dark navy it goes at this time of year, I have been at my desk on the sixth floor of the practice facility for the better part of the afternoon and have not, in any practical sense, written a single useful sentence.
The screen in front of me is the second period of Pittsburgh's last game against the Rangers.
The screen behind that one is a sticky-note color-coded depth chart that my assistant coaches updated forty minutes ago.
The screen behind that is the digital file Greer Callahan, attending PT, has uploaded to Dr. Mehta's queue clearing me for full participation, no restrictions, six-week follow-up.
Since the file went up to Dr. Mehta's queue, the clearance file has been opened twice. Both times by me.
Twenty-five years in this sport have not given me any practice at the version of this day that is happening to me.
I have been a father. I have been a coach.
The version of those two jobs that requires me to coach a team while the woman who is carrying my child is two floors below me clearing my hip for full participation is not a version I have, in any of my twenty-five years, encountered, and tonight, in late October in the year my contract is up, I am not going to learn it before the coordinator meeting starts.
The laptop closes under my hand.
The elevator down to the second floor is the slow elevator. I stand against the back wall and look at the floor numbers and try to find whatever version of myself the room downstairs is expecting.
The team's coordinator meeting is held in the long glass room next to the video suite, around a table somebody on the build committee chose for the way it photographs in team-issued documentary footage.
My two assistant coaches are there. My goalie coach is there.
My video coordinator is there. The assistant GM, who attends every other meeting, is not.
The chair at the head of the table is mine. I take it.
Doyle, my goalie coach, slides a tablet across the table at me. "Defensive pairings against their top line. If we're matching Reznikov-Halonen the whole game, my goalie's working on a sixteen-foot angle to his right hash all night. I need to know what you want me to coach him into."
It is a good question. In the small clean world of an NHL coordinator meeting on the night before a home preseason game, it is the only question.
Six men around a table with an average annual salary that could buy each of them a small island, all looking at the head of the table, waiting for the answer to a six-year-old question about defensive pairings.
The answer goes through my mouth before I have to think about it.
"Reznikov-Halonen against their first line first half.
I want to see if Mikko can still close on their playmaker before the goalie has to think.
If he can, we ride it. If he can't, I'm flipping Tremblay-Halonen on for the second period.
Coach him for both. He'll have a feel by the second intermission.
Tell him I don't want him compensating early. "
Doyle nods. He picks the tablet back up. The video coordinator says something about Pittsburgh's power-play formation. That answer goes through me, too. The room moves on.
Somewhere in the part of my brain that does the job, I am fully present.
Somewhere else, I am sitting on a patient table in a third-floor office watching a woman put both her hands on the edge of her counter to keep them from shaking.
The two parts of my brain do not, at any point in the next forty minutes, look at each other.
The meeting ends. The call sheet for tomorrow's morning skate goes in my bag. My assistants get the dawn call. The video coordinator gets the overnight ask on Pittsburgh's power-play setups.
Somehow, I have correctly attended a coordinator meeting.
The drive home is the same drive home I have made on the same road in the same brownstone-Beacon-Hill direction for four years.
The bridge over the Charles. The first turn onto Storrow at the speed traffic allows.
The familiar slow approach up the hill in the dark with the Christmas-light strings somebody on Mount Vernon has already put up because that person always puts them up the second the temperature drops. The dark blue door, three steps up.
The brownstone is empty.
It was empty when I left this morning. It has been empty in the controlled, livable way it has been empty since Indie moved out of the upstairs bedroom seven years ago and into the Beacon Hill apartment her trust fund bought her, and I stopped having any practical reason to come home to a lit kitchen.
Since then, the brownstone has been a place I go to sleep, mostly. Not a place I spend evenings.
The leather bag goes on the bench inside the front door.
The coat on the hook above it. I turn on the under-cabinet kitchen lights, which I do not usually turn on this late.
A conversation is going to happen in this kitchen tonight, one way or another.
I would like the lighting to be acceptable for either outcome.
The refrigerator has nothing in it I have any interest in.
I head to the small library on the back of the first floor, Cara's writing room, now my default film room when I am too tired to watch film at the office.
I have my laptop on the ottoman and Pittsburgh-Rangers, second period, faceoff three, playing in front of me, although I am not, in any meaningful way, watching it.
Pittsburgh wins the faceoff. The Rangers recover, swing, lose the puck on a back-pressured turnover at the blue line.
The right winger finishes on a one-timer at the top of the circle.
The video coordinator's note in the margin says watch how their D pinches off the boards here, this is the kill for our breakout if we don't handle it.
The kitchen, eighteen feet behind me, has the same quiet hum it has every night. The brownstone, has the same quiet creak of an old house cooling in late October.
Seven years of not minding any of this.
Tonight, somehow, I cannot stand the sound of it.
Sometime past eight the film pauses under my hand.
The laptop screen goes black after the screensaver kicks in.
On the wall above the bookshelf in front of me, Cara's degree from BU and my framed jersey from the Cup year hang side by side because Indie, the summer she was fifteen, took the staple gun and made me put them up together on the day I told her I was going to take the Barons head-coaching job and travel less.
The wall holds my eyes for a long stretch.
What I want has not been a question I have been allowed to ask myself in seven years.
The question has been what is the right thing to do.
I have answered that one correctly enough times to build a life I do not, on most days, mind.
I have answered it for my daughter, for the franchise, for the seventeen people on my staff, for the four assistant coaches I will be in a film room with at dawn.
What I want has not been on the list.
But tonight, it is on the list tonight.
Tonight, in my late wife's chair, with the woman I have not been able to stop thinking about for three weeks somewhere in the city deciding whether to come to my house, I am letting myself ask.
I want her to come.
I want her to come and sit at my kitchen island and let me put a glass of water in front of her and let me ask her the questions I have been making lists of for the last six hours.
I want her to keep what she is carrying, if that is what she wants.
I want her to not be the one who has to carry it alone, regardless of what she decides.
I have not yet considered any of those wants with the rest of my life; my daughter, my contract year, the seventeen people on my staff, my generous salary.
None of that has stopped being true. The careful, reasonable man who has answered the right-thing-to-do question for seven years is still in this chair, and he still has all of his arguments.
I owe him a great deal. The seven years of life he has built have kept my daughter and the franchise and most of the rest of us upright.
What is new, tonight, is that he is not the only one in the chair.
The silence runs another long stretch.
At 9:47 PM the phone comes out of my pocket.
Whenever you're ready.
I send it. The phone goes facedown on the arm of Cara's writing chair.
The wall above the bookshelf has framed photographs: Cara at the chip-shot at the fundraiser the year she was sick, Indie at her grad-school graduation, the three of us at Indie's eighth-grade Christmas concert.
From left to right and back again, the count of the photographs goes the way the count of players on the bench used to go in the third period of a close playoff game when my hands needed something to do they could not do.
At 10:13 PM the phone gives me the small soft buzz of a reply.
The screen says: I'll come now if that is ok.
For several seconds I am still.
Of course , I reply.
Then up. The kettle goes on the burner. The glass Cara picked out at the estate sale on Charles Street comes down from the cupboard. The small lamp at the kitchen island, the one she picked out the spring before she got sick, the one not turned on in years, gets turned on.
The brownstone is the same brownstone it has been every night this week. The video coordinator is still going to want the overnight breakdown on Pittsburgh's power-play setups in his inbox by five.
None of those things have changed.
One thing has.