12. Kieran
Kieran
On Day Four of the hip protocol, Mikko sits down across from me in the players' lounge with two cups of coffee and slides one of them across the table.
The lounge is empty between practice and the afternoon film review.
The big televisions are on the morning's highlights from the Western Conference, with the sound off.
The window over Mikko's left shoulder looks out onto the practice rink one level down, where one of the call-ups is doing post-practice extra work with the goalie coach on his outlet pass.
"You look better," Mikko says, in the slightly compressed English a man speaks when his accent has not, after twelve years on this side of the Atlantic, gone away. "Better than yesterday."
"It's getting easier to move."
"I wasn't talking about your hip."
He takes a slow sip of his coffee and looks at the screen behind me, not at my face.
I take a slow sip of mine.
In nine years of knowing each other across two organizations and one Cup Final, there are exactly three things Mikko has ever said to me without looking at me when he said them. This is the third.
"Mm," I say.
"Mm yourself."
He sets the coffee down. He puts both his elbows on the table. He gives me the small, careful nod of a man who is not going to ask the question he wants to ask and is also not going to pretend, anymore, that he does not have the question.
He says: "Whatever it is, Coach, it's good on your face. That's all I am going to say about it."
"Mikko."
"That's all I am going to say about it." He picks the coffee back up.
"I'll talk about your hip when you want to talk about your hip.
I'll talk about line matchups when you want to talk about line matchups.
The other thing, I will not ask you about.
But I notice it, and it looks good on your face, and somebody who has known you since you were a different man should, I think, say so. "
I do not, for several seconds, have a sentence.
"Thank you," I say, finally.
He nods. He drinks his coffee. He goes back to watching the highlights without the sound.
We sit there together for another long stretch and do not say anything else.
When he stands up to leave, he taps the table twice with two fingers, the way he taps the boards twice with his stick after a goal he liked.
"Be careful with it," he says, on his way out.
"I will."
He goes.
The lounge is quiet. The televisions keep running highlights I am not watching. I sit at the table with my hands wrapped around the cup he handed me and do not, for the next eleven minutes, get up.
The morning session went the same way the last three morning sessions went, which is professional, careful, and arranged in such a way that neither of us has to look at the other for more than the four or five seconds the work strictly requires.
The afternoon film review goes the same way the last three afternoon film reviews have gone.
I am, somewhere on the surface, fully present in it.
Somewhere underneath, I am doing the only thing I have allowed myself to do all week, which is to think about what I am going to say to Greer Callahan at the end of the evening session in three hours.
I made the decision Tuesday night in the chair in Cara's writing room. The next morning, in the seat of my car in the practice-facility garage before I went up to her office, the decision was still there. Every hour since, I have declined the option of unmaking it.
It is not a question I am going to ask her tonight. It is a thing I am going to tell her. The asking part comes later, on a timeline that is hers. The telling part is mine.
That is the line I am holding.
Once film review ends and the assistants take their notes back to the coaches' room, I head to her office and knock on the door.
She says, "Come in."
Greer is at the counter with her laptop open and a tablet beside it and a half-empty water bottle, and a sleeve of saltines on the credenza.
The lamp above the table is on. The schedule on her wall has my name on it in white letters and a strikethrough across the morning slot where Day Four's morning session has already happened.
She has not been sleeping. The half-moons under her eyes are darker tonight than they were yesterday. The polo with the Barons logo on it is one she has worn three days this week, probably washed and ironed and put back on. Her hair is in the same low ponytail it has been in all week.
She turns to look at me.
"Coach."
"Greer."
She gestures to the table.
I get on the table.
She washes her hands. She pulls on the gloves. She walks me through the protocol in the same two sentences she has used the last six times. She tells me to lie on my left side. She tells me to breathe.
I do.
She works the scar. The capsule. The IT band.
Her hands are warm, even through the gloves.
Her thumb runs the small slow circle along the line where the scar meets the muscle of the upper thigh, the line she has been running it along for four days, the line she has not, since Wednesday evening, lifted her thumb from for a single second longer than the protocol requires.
We do not say anything for thirty minutes.
When she comes around to my hip flexor and pushes the small careful pressure into the part of the joint that has been doing the most work all week, I let out a breath I have been holding for too long.
She does not, this time, react.
She keeps working.
When the protocol is done, she has me sit up.
She runs me through the mobility drills.
She tells me the hip has, by her chart, made it back to seventy-five percent of where it was on the morning of the season opener, and that by Monday she will be willing to write Priya the note that clears me for full bench mobility and ends the twice-a-day schedule.
She says it with her eyes on her chart.
She turns to the credenza to type the note. She closes the laptop. She picks up the box of KT tape and puts a new strip across the scar.
She steps back.
She says: "You don't have to do this two times a day if you don't want to. The morning sessions, after Friday, could be once a day with the home program covering the gap. I would sign off on that."
"It's protocol."
"I know."
"Priya wrote it."
"I know."
"I'm finishing it."
"Okay."
She is standing four feet from me with her hands behind her against the stone counter, the way she has stood since Wednesday evening at the end of every session. Her eyes are on my left knee.
I sit on the table for another long second.
Then I say her name.
"Greer."
She looks up.
"Before I leave, I want you to hear me say one thing. I am not asking you for anything tonight. I do not want you to answer me. I want you to hear me say it because I have been carrying it inside my head for four days."
She does not move.
I say, slowly: "I think we should give us a try, Greer.”
Her face does not move.
"I am not asking you tonight. I am not asking you tomorrow. The asking part is on whatever timeline you decide. I am telling you because I think you deserve to know where I stand before you make up your mind."
She does not, for ten seconds, say anything.
Then she says: "Okay."
It is the same okay she said in my office on the day she could not answer me.
It is the same okay she said at my kitchen island when I told her she did not have to do this alone.
She has heard me. She is going to keep what I have just said inside her own head until she has figured out what to do with it.
I am not going to ask her to do anything else with it tonight.
I get off the table. I pick up my coat from the chair. At the door, with my hand on the handle, I say, "Goodnight, Greer."
She says, "Goodnight, Kieran."
It is the first time, in this office, she has used my first name.
I close the door behind me.
The hallway is empty. The medical wing is quiet. I take the elevator down, walk to my car on the good leg, and sit with my hands on the wheel for a long minute before I turn the key.
Then I drive home.
The brownstone is dark. The under-cabinet lights are off.
I make a piece of toast and eat it standing at the counter. The plate goes in the dishwasher.
The phone in my pocket does not buzz. I did not expect it to. She gets to take however long it takes.
Upstairs, I take off the clothes and get in bed.
I sleep, for the first time in eight nights, the way a man sleeps when he has finally said the thing he should have said sooner.