11. Greer
Greer
The calendar on my second monitor, the morning Priya files her protocol, looks like this:
The first appointment of every day this week, before anything else, is Coach Larsen. The last appointment of every day this week, after the players have left the building, is Coach Larsen. Each appointment is one hour.
Priya gave me the protocol and the scheduling.
She scheduled it the way an audit reviewer would expect to see it in April. Hour-long sessions. First and last of the day. Door closed. Same room, same table, same protocol the orthopedic surgeon at MGH and the team doctor at Logan have all signed off on.
What it looks like to the audit log and what it looks like to me are not the same thing.
Three sessions go past me before the fourth one breaks the protocol.
Tuesday morning. Tuesday evening, after the players have left the building.
Wednesday morning. He shows up to each one in track pants and a long-sleeved tee, hair wet from the shower he takes between the afternoon film review and the evening session, because the heat of the shower opens the joint and saves us the first ten minutes of warm-up.
Tuesday morning, he says good morning, gets on the table, and does not say another word that is not a number for the next fifty-eight minutes. I say good morning, take him through the protocol, sign the file, and tell him I will see him at six. He says he will see me at six.
Tuesday evening is the same.
Wednesday morning is the same.
The first time my heart rate spikes during a session is the Tuesday-evening one, when I have my thumb on the joint capsule and he lets out a breath he has been holding too long.
The second time my heart rate spikes is the Wednesday-morning one, when he tells me at the end, very politely, that the hip is improving and thanks me for the schedule.
He has not, in three sessions, used my first name.
He has not, in three sessions, looked at my face for longer than the clinical eye contact the protocol requires. He has not asked me how I am.
The joint capsule has, in the way the joint capsule of a forty-seven-year-old former NHL center who has been doing his own maintenance work for a decade does, started to give. He is going to be standing on the bench Thursday night. I am going to have done my job.
The fourth session, the one that breaks the protocol, is Wednesday evening.
He arrives on time, the way he has arrived every other session.
He closes the door behind him.
He gets on the table.
I wash my hands. I pull on the clean pair of gloves. I tell him, the way I have told him every other session, to lie on his left side and breathe.
I work my thumb along the scar. I work my fingers along the joint capsule.
I work the IT band. The IT band is the easiest part of the protocol.
It runs the length of the outside of the thigh, and the work my hands do on it is the long even pressure my hands have done a thousand times on a thousand thighs at a thousand training tables.
Not the part of his body I have learned to be careful about.
I work the IT band.
His eyes are closed.
He says, quietly, into the table: "How are you sleeping?"
The room goes very still.
He has not said anything in the last three sessions that was not a piece of professional information. He has not, since the morning he walked through that door and recognized me, asked me a personal question in any room a Globe writer could have walked into.
I keep my thumb where it is.
I keep my voice exactly where it has been.
I say: "I'm not."
He is quiet for a beat.
He says, just as quietly: "Me neither."
My hand on his hip is steady. His body on the table is steady. Neither of us moves an inch out of the professional position. The clock on the wall above the credenza keeps the time.
Something in the room has, in the last six seconds, changed.
I do not, for the next ten seconds, breathe.
He does. He breathes the way I have told him to breathe, slow and even and into the part of his diaphragm we are trying to keep loose. He breathes because he is a man who has trained himself for forty-seven years to keep breathing when something has changed in a room.
When I trust myself to move my thumb again, I move it.
I work the joint capsule. I work the back of the hip flexor.
I run the small slow circle along the line where the scar meets the muscle of the upper thigh, the line I have been running the small slow circle along for three sessions, the line that is, in his body, the most particular piece of his sport-injury history.
He keeps breathing.
I keep working.
We do not say anything for the next twenty minutes.
When the protocol is done, I tell him, in my regular voice, to roll onto his back.
I take him through the mobility drills. The hip moves through the range it is supposed to move through.
He has been compliant, all week, the way patients who used to be elite athletes are compliant — no resistance, small precise execution, no commentary at all.
He sits up at the end.
He puts his feet on the floor.
I am at the credenza writing notes into the file when his hand comes up.
I do not see it come up. I hear the cuff of his long-sleeved tee move across the corner of the table behind me.
When I turn around, half a step toward him to hand him the new strip of KT tape, his hand is already extended, palm open, in the small careful way a man extends his palm when he is about to take a thing somebody is about to hand him.
Except the thing he is reaching for is my hand.
He is two feet away from me on the table, and his hand is in the air between us, palm up, in the half-second of a reach that has not yet committed.
I see it.
He sees me see it.
I do not step back.
I put the tape on the credenza behind me, slowly, with my eyes still on his. My hand comes back around to the front of me, and I put it, palm down, in his palm.
His fingers close around mine.
We do not, in the next two seconds, say anything. His hand is warm and dry. He is not gripping. He is holding.
His thumb passes once, very lightly, across my knuckles.
Then he lets go.
He says, very low: "I shouldn't have reached."
"I know."
"You should have stopped me."
"I didn't want to."
"Greer."
"I know, Kieran."
He stands up off the table. He picks the KT tape up off the credenza himself. He says, in the postgame voice that has held him together through the last twenty months of his life, that he will see me tomorrow morning at six.
I say, in the head-PT voice that is holding me together through the same: "Six AM, Coach."
He walks to the door. He puts his hand on the handle. He pauses, half a second, with his back to me.
He says, without turning around: "Goodnight, Greer."
He goes.
The door closes behind him.
I stand at the credenza with my hand still warm from his for what is probably forty seconds and feels like ten minutes.
Then I walk to the door. I turn the lock. I lean my forehead against the wood. I stay there until my breathing has come down to a normal rate.
When I pull my forehead off the door, the lamp above the table is still on.
The KT tape is in its small open box on the credenza.
The file is open on the laptop. The protocol notes have a row at the bottom marked Day 3, evening session: ROM improved across all six axes.
Patient compliant. Capsule give increased measurable.
No flare events. Recommend continuation per Mehta protocol.
I save the file and close the laptop. I turn the lamp off. I leave the office. I get into the elevator. I go down to the garage. I sit in my Subaru.
When I finally turn the key, the dashboard tells me it is past nine.
There are four sentences in my head, in the order they go in.
One: he broke the protocol tonight when he reached for my hand.
Two: I broke it when I held on.
Three: One of us is, before this is over, going to do it again.
Four: Both of us are.
I close my eyes.
I do not, this time, mind that I am not going to sleep.