18. Kieran
Kieran
Saturday morning, the arena tunnel, half an hour before the skills competition opens to the public.
The national broadcast crew has set up a portable lighting kit in the corridor between the East locker room and the visiting bench.
The producer with the headset around her neck has asked me four questions she has already asked the West coach this morning.
She is going to ask the same four questions of every head coach and general manager in the building before she gets on the plane home tomorrow night.
I have answered three of them.
The fourth is the one she has been working her way toward.
"Coach Larsen," she says. "You've been in this league for twenty-two years. Your contract expires in May. What's left?"
I look at her.
The camera is six feet away. The boom is over my left shoulder. The producer's eyes are not unkind.
I respond, "I'll let you know."
She smiles. "Coach?"
"That's my answer."
She nods at the cameraman. The cameraman cuts. The producer claps me on the arm.
"Thanks for not making me work harder than I had to."
"Always."
I walk away from the lighting kit.
The corridor smells of cold concrete. Mikko is at the far end in the kit the league has assigned him for media availability, the same charcoal sweater I have seen on him every Saturday morning of his career. He nods at me. I nod back. He turns back to the TSN reporter.
I have my hand in the inside pocket of my suit jacket, on the small piece of paper Greer slipped into it in the empty kitchen of her apartment yesterday morning before I drove to Logan. The paper is folded once. The note is in her handwriting. I have not yet looked at it.
I will look at it tonight.
* * *
The skills competition runs through the early afternoon.
Sasha wins the hardest-shot event. He is, in the post-event scrum, bright and easy and exactly the version of himself the league has been hoping to put on television all weekend.
The reporters get their lines. The franchise's communications director texts me good for him, good for us, and I write back yes and put the phone in my pocket.
I have three other texts I have not yet answered.
One is from my GM in Boston.
One is from an agent I have not returned a call to in eight days.
One is from the senior associate at the firm that has handled my contract for fourteen years, and it is two lines long.
Call me when you can. Before the deadline if possible.
I do not, at the skills competition, call him back.
My hip aches by the time I am in the cab back to the hotel.
Twenty-two years of standing on benches has caught up to me, and the All-Star weekend has, by tomorrow night, asked me to stand on more of them than I had budgeted for.
I ice in the hotel room. I take the prescription anti-inflammatory the team doctor wrote me in October.
I lie on the bed with my eyes closed for an hour and I do not, for the entire hour, sleep.
When I get up, the light outside the window has gone the dark blue of late January on the East Coast. The dinner the league has scheduled in the ballroom downstairs is in forty minutes. On the bed beside me sits the folded piece of paper from Greer's apartment.
I open it.
The note is one line, in her clinical handwriting, the same handwriting I have watched her fill in different patient files in the last four months.
sixteen weeks today. soft turn under my hand twice this morning. you have a kid in there, Larsen. miss you.
I read it twice as I smile.
I fold it back along its crease.
I put it in the inside pocket of the suit.
I go downstairs.
* * *
The league dinner runs on the format the league has used for fifteen years.
Head coaches at one table, GMs at another, a small number of owners near the center.
I sit between the West coach and a player from the Western roster who lost his father in October.
The West coach asks me about the Barons' road trip.
The player asks me about a teammate of his who used to play for me in Hartford. I answer both questions briefly.
The dinner ends at nine-thirty.
I take the elevator back up to my floor.
When I get to the room, the phone in my pocket buzzes. Greer.
I answer with the door of the room closed behind me.
"Hi."
"Hi."
"How was dinner?"
"It was fine. I sat between two strangers. The West coach has a son who is going to be a goalie."
"Mm."
"How was yours?"
"It was leftovers. Nothing special."
I sit on the edge of the bed in the suit.
"Greer?"
"Yes."
"Tell me about your day."
"That is not a very long story."
"Tell me anyway."
She tells me about her clinicals and that she felt the turn under her hand four times today, which is the most so far. She tells me about the bag of pretzels she ate at three which has become sort of a pattern since she has been craving salt.
I take the suit off. I hang it on the back of the chair.
I sit on the bed in the dress shirt and the suit pants and I tell her, in return, about the hardest-shot competition, about Sasha grinning at me afterward like a kid who had just been told he could keep the prize, about the producer in the tunnel and the eight-word interview that made the four o'clock news.
We do not, in any of the next forty minutes, talk about the contract or the deadline or the man from Chicago.
When she is ready to hang up, she says: "Goodnight, Kieran."
"Goodnight, Greer."
I hang up.
I lie on the bed in the dress shirt with the lamp on and the small folded piece of paper on the nightstand beside the bed and I do not, for what is probably an hour and a half, sleep.
* * *
Sunday afternoon, the East wins the All-Star Game in a shootout.
Sasha gets the deciding goal. The crowd loses its mind.
The cameras pan to the East bench. I do my small clean coach's pump-of-the-fist and I shake hands with the West coach and I do the trophy presentation with the league commissioner and I give the four-minute on-ice interview the league requires me to give.
I say the things the head coach of a winning All-Star team says.
By the time I am back in the locker room, my phone is full.
I read three messages.
The first is from Greer. that goal. that GOAL.
The second is from my daughter. Daddy, Sasha. SASHA.
The third is from Mikko. Drinks at the league reception tonight, Kee. They are giving us a private room. You will get free bourbon.
I write yes to all three.
I shower. I get back into my suit. I do the post-game scrum.
The league reception starts at six-thirty in the same hotel I have been sleeping in for three nights.
The private room is on the top floor.
I walk in and see Magnus Whitcombe twenty minutes later.
I have been making the rounds: the West coach, two GMs I know, the league's chief disciplinarian.
I have a bourbon in my hand. Magnus is at the far wall, in the dark charcoal three-piece I have seen on him three times in my career, talking to the league's general counsel.
He sees me. He says something to the general counsel who then walks away.
Magnus crosses the room.
He stops at my elbow.
"Coach."
"Magnus."
"Can I steal you for two minutes?"
"Of course."
He nods at the small alcove off the main room where the league has set up a coat-check station that is not, this hour, being used.
The bartender at the main bar cannot see us.
The senior writer at The Athletic cannot see us.
Magnus stands with his back to the doorway.
His hand goes to the pocket of his jacket.
"Kieran."
"Magnus."
"Ten days ago we had a phone call. I'm here in person to say the same thing. I would like you in Chicago. When you're out of contract, I want a meeting. I am telling you, in person, that the call I made last week wasn't a test balloon."
"Okay."
"I wanted you to know it from me. Not from an agent. Not from a writer. Not from Declan."
Declan Walsh is my GM. He and I came to the Barons together in October. He does not, as of tonight, know that Chicago has called me twice.
"I appreciate it."
"What you do with it is your business. I will not come at you again before the deadline or send anyone else, either."
"Thank you."
He puts his hand out.
I shake it and he leaves.
I stand in the alcove for half a minute with the bourbon still in my hand.
Then I go back into the reception. I finish the bourbon at the bar. I find my GM. I tell him I am leaving. He nods, the small clean GM-nod that means I noticed Whitcombe pull you aside, and I am going to ask you about it tomorrow, and not before.
I take the elevator down to the lobby.
I walk out of the hotel.
I get in the first cab in the line.
* * *
In the back of the cab, in the dark, with the headlights of late-Sunday traffic going past in the opposite lanes, I call her.
She answers on the first ring.
"You're done?"
"I'm done. In a cab. On the way to the airport."
"How was the reception?"
"Whitcombe pulled me aside in the coat-check alcove. He said the same thing he said on the phone. He said he wouldn't come at me again before the deadline but he wants me in Chicago."
"Okay."
"I am in the back of a cab. I have your note in my inside pocket. I am two hours and a flight away from being in the same room as you, and I have been thinking the same thing for the entire drive."
"And what is it you are thinking?"
"I love this. I love this whole thing. Not just you.
I love what is happening in your body. I love that you slipped a piece of paper into my inside pocket yesterday morning and I love that I have been carrying it since, and I love that you wrote Larsen on it because nobody has called me that in that tone of voice since 2010. "
She is, on the other end, quiet for a long second.
"And I have been carrying that note across a ballroom, across a locker room, across an All-Star bench, and across the alcove where Magnus Whitcombe just told me he wants me in Chicago. The thing in your stomach has been the thing in my head the entire weekend."
"Kieran."
"Yes."
"I love you too."
"I know."
"The kick was hardest at the start of the third today. I think the baby liked the energy in the building."
"I missed it."
"You can put your hand there tomorrow morning and see if it happens again."
"I will."
"Goodbye, Kieran. Drive safe to the airport."
"Goodbye, Greer."
She hangs up.
I sit in the back of the cab in the dark with the phone in my lap and the small folded piece of paper still in my inside pocket and the bourbon warm at the back of my throat, and I do not, for the rest of the drive to the airport, do anything at all.
The cab pulls up to the terminal.
I get out.
I walk through the doors of the terminal with my bag on my shoulder and the suit jacket folded over my arm, and the four-month clock starting, with this Sunday night, to run for real.