9. Greer
Greer
By the end of the first home stand, I have filed three weekly reports, treated forty-one patient encounters, kept down most of one full meal a day, and seen Coach Larsen in the building four times.
Four times, and not once alone.
Monday, in the medical wing hallway after the morning skate, with two assistant trainers behind him and a video coordinator in front.
Wednesday, in the staff dining room, across two long tables of players and a head trainer between us.
Thursday, at the elevators on the third floor, with the assistant general manager half a step behind him and a phone in his hand.
Friday morning, on the bench-side runway from the locker hallway to his office, with a Globe reporter ten feet off his right shoulder.
Each time, he has nodded at me the way a head coach nods at his head PT when there are witnesses.
Barely. Eyes on the middle distance. I have nodded back the same way.
And the part of me that walked into his kitchen at almost midnight on Tuesday has, each time, stood very still inside the part of me that is at work.
We have not spoken privately since the kitchen.
The card with his handwriting on the back sits at the bottom of my desk drawer under a stack of intake forms. I have looked at it twice. I have not picked it up.
I leave the building on Friday afternoon at five.
The Subaru is in the same spot in the same garage I sat in for eleven minutes on Monday morning before I could make myself walk into the elevator.
The badge in the front pocket of my purse has a smaller picture of my face on it now, which has been printed onto a new permanent ID since the temporary one expired Wednesday.
The pregnancy test is no longer in the bag.
I left that in a coffee-shop trash can on Newbury Street on Tuesday morning on my way in, because I could not, after the kitchen, keep carrying it around like a thing nobody was allowed to know about.
I put the bag on the passenger seat. I put the key in the ignition. I do not turn the key.
My phone, on the dash, has been buzzing the whole way down to the garage. I look at the screen.
Lena.
I answer.
"Tell me what happened on Tuesday."
I tell her about the office and the granola bar and the bathroom and the silver mirror at the back of the elevator.
I tell her about the brownstone and the dark blue door and the man in a sweater pouring me a glass of water in a kitchen somebody with very good taste designed.
I tell her about almost six weeks and about are you safe and about the green box of ginger candies he gave me from the desk of a former player's wife.
I tell her about what do you want to do and about my head shaking once and about the air in my lungs being the first full lungful of air I had had in eight days.
I tell her about the card in my drawer and the four nods in four hallways and the four nights this week of not sleeping.
She listens, all the way through, and does not interrupt me.
When I run out, she is quiet for a long beat.
Then she says: "Greer."
"Yeah."
"Have you eaten anything today?"
"Half a banana. Some toast. Saltines."
"That's not enough."
"I know."
"You are flying to the West Coast on Sunday."
"I know."
"You are going to be on a plane for six hours and then in a hotel for five nights and then on a plane back, and you are going to be doing the head PT job for the Boston Barons on a road trip the whole time."
"I know."
"You need to call one of the names I gave you on Monday."
"I will."
"Greer."
"Lena."
"You don't have to do this alone. You know that, right? You don't have to."
I close my eyes against the back of the Subaru's headrest. The garage is cold. The car is cold. The phone is warm against my ear.
"I know," I say.
"What do you want this to be?"
It is the question I have been waiting to be asked, the question I have not let myself ask in my own bathroom mirror, the question Indie would, if she knew anything, ask me the exact same way.
"I don't know yet."
"Okay."
"Lena."
"Mm."
"He said I didn't have to do it alone."
"That is a man who has had practice being trustworthy."
"I think I believe him."
"That is, I think, the right thing to think. "I am driving up on Tuesday," she says. "I have a clinic appointment at Brigham at one. I have an hour before and an hour after. We are getting lunch."
"I'll be in Anaheim."
"Then we are getting lunch the day you get back."
"Yes."
"Eat the saltines."
"I will."
"Promise."
"I promise."
She hangs up.
The phone goes dark on the dash. I do not turn the key. I sat in this same spot for eleven minutes on Monday morning before I could make myself walk into the elevator, and I am sitting in it now for the same reason, which is that I do not have anywhere I am ready to go.
After another few minutes, I drive home.
***
Saturday morning, I wake up at the time my body has decided to wake me up which is too early and not by my choice. I run a shower. I make a piece of dry toast.
Indie has texted me twice.
omg are we still on for tomorrow??
because I am going to need wine and snacks and the play-by-play of your week
I stand in my kitchen in Indie's old sweatpants and a tank top and stare at the screen and remember that my best friend is, on this Saturday morning, expecting me at her apartment tomorrow night for the standing Sunday wine-and-snacks routine we have been doing for three years.
I type back.
hey love. flying out tomorrow w the team. west coast trip. three games five nights. rain check?
She reads it. She types. The bubbles go for a long time, in the way bubbles go when somebody is typing and deleting and typing and deleting.
ughhhhhhhh.
ok yes when you're back.
and i want every detail of every flight meal lol
deal.
I put the phone down on the counter and take a long breath. I take another.
It is, all in all, the second-easiest lie I have told my best friend this week.
The first was that I am fine.
I pack for the road trip in the slow, methodical way I have been packing for hockey road trips since I was twenty-three and an intern at the Providence Bruins.
The black team hoodie. The compression sleeves.
The two pairs of work pants. The three polos with Barons logos on the chest, which still feel like somebody else's polos when I pull them out of the closet.
The travel-sized supply of compression-cuff replacements. The KT tape. The duffel.
The saltines and ginger candies, in the small green box, go in the front pocket of the duffel. I have been eating the candies one at a time since Tuesday. The box is two-thirds full now.
When I am done packing, the duffel sits on my bedroom floor, ready, and I am standing in front of the full-length mirror on the back of the closet door in the sweatpants and the tank top, and the woman in the mirror is somebody I have not, in five and a half weeks, looked at directly.
I look at her now.
She is the same woman I have been looking at for twenty-six years, except in three specific places.
Her face is paler than I have ever seen it.
The skin under her eyes is the color of a healing bruise.
And the front of her, across the lower belly under the band of her sweatpants, the place I have been pretending I have not been monitoring, is fuller than it was four weeks ago.
It is not a bump. There is no bump at five and a half weeks.
There is fluid. There is the small loosening of muscle a body does when it has been instructed by hormones I have learned the names of from textbooks to make room for something it has not yet been asked to make room for.
There is, when I turn sideways, the faintest forward curve under the band that was not, four weeks ago, there.
I take my hand off the band.
I put it, briefly, in the place under my navel where Kieran had had his forehead in his hotel suite the night I had told him I had not been touched the way he was about to touch me.
I take the hand off.
I close the closet door.
I get into bed early. I do not sleep.
Sunday morning, at seven, my Uber pulls up outside my building. The driver puts the duffel in the trunk. We get on the Pike toward Logan. The sky over the city is the cold gray of a late-October dawn.
The team plane is parked on the south apron at the Atlantic terminal.
The traveling party loads in the order the traveling party loads; coaches first, into the front section, then medical and training staff, then the players.
I am with Will and Dr. Mehta and one of the assistant trainers I have recently met.
We board through the rear door. Our seats are in rows seventeen, eighteen, and nineteen.
I sit in row seventeen, on the aisle, facing forward.
Six rows ahead of me, in row eleven, on the aisle, facing forward, is Coach Larsen.
His head is bent over a tablet. His left hand is around a paper cup of coffee. His right hand is on the armrest. His shoulders are set the way I have been looking at them, in different hallways and a glass-walled office and his kitchen, for the last six days.
He does not, for the entire taxi to the runway, turn around.
He does not, for the entire takeoff out of Boston and over the Atlantic and back across the city and out over the Berkshires toward the dark of the country beyond them, turn around.
I am grateful in a way I have rarely been grateful for anything in my adult life. My throat is tight. My eyes are closed. My hand is not in any place anyone on this plane can see.
The plane levels off. The seat-belt sign goes off. The traveling party shifts. The coaches stay where they are. The players get up to walk.
I stay where I am.
The green box comes out of the duffel under the seat in front of me. A ginger candy goes on my tongue. The duffel goes back where it was.
Somewhere very far below us, the country is opening up. Somewhere six rows ahead of me, a man I have not spoken privately to in five days is doing the work he is paid to do.
I do not turn my phone on for the rest of the flight.
I do not need to.
The next conversation is going to happen when I am back in Boston. I have, for the next five days, work to do that has nothing to do with what is in my body.
I close my eyes.
I do not sleep, but I do, for the first time in six nights, rest.