14. Kieran
Kieran
I get to the cemetery before the groundskeeper opens the front gate.
The side gate, two hundred yards down the perimeter road, has a combination lock the head groundskeeper gave me the morning of my wife's funeral.
He is a former Bruins season-ticket holder who took the cemetery job after he retired from a career at Liberty Mutual.
He told me, that morning, to come whenever I needed to.
I have not, in seven years, abused the privilege. I come on the days I need to come. The days I need to come are a small number, and the largest one of them is today.
The frost on the grass between the rows makes the small, dry sound under my boots that frost makes.
The air over the harbor in the distance is the color of the inside of a shell.
The maples along the perimeter are bare.
The grave I am walking to is in the second row of the third section, six down on the left.
I stop in front of it.
The headstone is the same headstone Indie and I picked out the spring after the funeral, when the ground had thawed enough to set it. The stone is dark gray granite. The inscription is the name, the two dates, and one of the lines from the poem she had asked me to read at our wedding.
Every November for seven years, I have stood in front of this headstone on this day. Five of those years I did not speak out loud. The two years I did, I apologized for things I did not have the language for at the time, and the speaking did not, particularly, help.
This year I am going to try it again.
I take a slow breath.
I say, in the voice I used to use in the kitchen when she was working at the table and I was making her tea: "I met someone, Cara."
The wind picks up across the section. The frost is going to be gone in an hour. The harbor is going to be gray.
I say, "I'm telling you because I think you'd want to know."
I stand there for a long beat with my hands in my coat pockets and my eyes on the line of the inscription I have read more times than I have read most things.
I say, "Her name is Greer. She's twenty-six. She works for the team. I am not going to try to describe her in a sentence here, because you would, if you were here, take one look at my face and tell me she does not need to be described."
I take another breath. The breath comes out as steam.
"Indie doesn't know yet. I am, by some miracle, going to figure out how to tell her. But I am not going to do it until Greer is ready."
I stand for another beat.
"I am sorry, in advance, that I am not going to be back here as often as I have been. I am still going to come. I am just going to come less."
The wind moves through the maples at the perimeter. The light over the harbor starts to come up.
I stay for another ten minutes and do not say anything else.
When I leave, I go out the side gate the way I came in.
I drive back to the brownstone. Mikko's car is parked at the curb when I pull up. I texted him last night and asked him to come over for the day, because it is the night before Thanksgiving and the morning of Cara's anniversary and I did not want to do the second half of the day alone.
He let himself in with the key I left under the planter by the front steps. He is at the kitchen island with a cup of coffee he made himself.
"Morning, Coach."
He looks at me without saying anything, then goes back to his coffee.
I take off the coat. I hang it on the hook. I let my shoulders drop in a way I would not let them drop in front of anyone else.
"You came," I say.
"Of course I came."
"Thank you."
"Thanksgiving tomorrow. You ready to cook?"
"Indie is doing most of it. There will be four of us.”
He nods. He drinks his coffee. He says, after a long beat: "Greer?"
I do not, for a second, answer.
He puts the coffee down and looks at me — the captain of my team and the oldest friend I have, in the same gaze.
"How did you know," I say.
"Three things." He counts them off on his fingers.
"One. The morning of the new PT's first day, I saw your face when you came out of her office.
I have not, in nine years of knowing you, seen that face.
Two. The schedule you wrote for the hip flare-up week was first-and-last of every day, audit-clean.
The previous PT, when you flared up after the playoffs, scheduled you in the middle of his afternoon block like every other patient.
Yours was different. Three. The look on her face when she walked past me in the hallway yesterday is a look I have seen on a face before.
The face was my own. The woman I was thinking about that day became my wife three weeks later. "
The kitchen is, for a long stretch, very quiet.
I say, finally: "I'm in a thing I can't be in."
"I know."
"Mikko."
"I figured it out at the rink. I am not going to say anything.
To anyone. Not to Indie. Not to Priya. Not to my wife.
Not to Sasha. Not to a Globe writer if a Globe writer shows up on the bench bus on Sunday and asks me a direct question.
I am telling you because I want you to know I know, and because the not-saying-anything is, between us, on the record. "
"Thank you."
"Mm."
He drinks his coffee. I get one out of the cupboard and pour my own.
We sit across the island from each other and do not say anything for a while.
Then he says, looking at his cup: "Is she okay?"
"She is — yes. She is okay."
"Are you okay?"
"I am better than I have been in seven years."
He nods.
He says: "Cara would have liked her."
It is the sentence I have not let anybody else in my life put in the air.
Mikko is the only person who knew Cara well enough to be allowed to say it, and he is, in the way Mikko knows how to do things, saying it as a statement and not a question, so I do not have to do anything with it except hear it.
I do not, for a long second, have any words.
I say, finally: "Yeah. She would have."
We drink our coffee.
When we are done, Mikko opens his laptop on the kitchen island and pulls up a Russian-league game from earlier in the week. There is a defenseman over there he has been wanting me to look at because he thinks the player might be a good fit for our depth chart at the deadline.
We watch the game.
The defenseman is fine. He is fast, and he is heavy, and he keeps his feet under him in the corners. He is not, by the second period, somebody I would build a deadline trade around — but he is somebody I would think about as depth.
I tell Mikko that.
Mikko nods. He closes the laptop.
"Guest room is made up."
"Thanks, Coach. I could use a nap."
He picks up his bag and goes upstairs.
I sit at the island with the second half of my coffee in front of me, and I look out the window at the maple at the corner of Mount Vernon, and I think about the woman who slept against my side last night for the first time.
She has, in some quiet way I have not yet figured out how to say out loud to anybody but a headstone, become the person I am going to live the next part of my life around.
I have not told her that yet.
I am going to.
Not tonight.
Not tomorrow.
But before Indie finds out, and before this season ends, and before the contract talks open in March.
Before then.
I finish my coffee. I rinse the cup. I turn the under-cabinet lights on and I go upstairs.
The guest room door is closed. Mikko, in there, has already gone to sleep.
My bed is the bed she slept in last night.
I get into it on the side she slept on and I rest.