21. Greer
Greer
The phone alert comes at seven-thirty on the Thursday before the trade deadline. I am on the edge of the bed in my work polo and a pair of soft maternity pants, drying my hair, when the screen lights up.
The alert is from the Globe sports app; I subscribe to it for the morning briefing that aggregates other papers' sports headlines. The headline today is one line.
Barons baby watch: head PT pregnant, father unknown.
I read it once, then twice, then a third time before I unlock the phone and open the link.
The piece is in the Boston Herald's daily Around the League notes column, bylined to the same senior beat writer Mikko told Kieran two weeks ago he had been holding off.
Pat Hennessy. The item is two sentences.
BARONS BABY WATCH. Head physical therapist Greer Callahan, 26, hired in October, is expecting. Sources say she has declined to name the father. The team has no comment.
I sit on the edge of the bed for a long minute, then I get up and throw up in the toilet for what is probably ninety seconds.
The morning sickness left in December. The throw-up now, at twenty-two weeks, is not nausea; it is the thing my body has done since I was eleven every time it has been asked to absorb more than it can hold at very short notice.
I rinse my mouth at the sink and sit on the bathroom floor with my back against the cold tile. The phone is on the bath mat beside me, and I do not pick it up for two minutes.
When I do, the screen has three new alerts on it. The first is from Twitter: Pat Hennessy posted the notes column at six fifty-five, and by seven thirty-one the item has been retweeted four hundred and twelve times. The second is a missed call from Lena. The third is a text from her.
I just saw the Herald. Call me when you can breathe.
I close my eyes and dial her back.
She picks up on the second ring.
"Greer."
"Lena."
"You saw it."
"I just threw up on my bathroom floor."
"Okay. Indie will see it by lunch, mija. You have to get to her first — on your own terms, before somebody at her foundation forwards it to her."
"I know."
"You are never going to be ready for this, but you need to do it today."
"I know."
"I love you. Drive safe."
She hangs up.
I sit on the floor for another half a minute, then I stand up, rinse my mouth a second time, and look at the woman in the mirror.
Twenty-six years old, twenty-two weeks pregnant, fully showing under my clothes, hair half-dry, eyes red.
The head physical therapist of the Boston Barons.
The lead two-sentence item in a Boston Herald notes column.
The woman whose best friend has not seen it yet.
I have twelve minutes before I have to leave.
I finish drying my hair, put on my work boots, pack my bag. A small bag of pretzels and a bottle of water go in my purse for the drive — the practice facility is forty minutes out in morning traffic and my body is not going to want anything heavier.
* * *
I do the morning skate from the treatment-room corridor with my chart on a clipboard, watching the players come off the ice one at a time.
Two of them ask how I am. Sasha is the first — he doesn't look at the front of me, only at my face.
Doc. He hands me the kinesio tape he wants on his right forearm and walks past.
Mikko is the last off the ice. He hands me his stick without looking at me, the way he does every morning, and says low, half a second of contact: Coach saw it twenty minutes ago. He is not coming down to the medical wing this morning. He told me to tell you he will be at your place at six.
He walks into the locker room without a second look. He is the only player on the team who has known about us for any length of time.
I stand in the corridor with his stick in my hand for a long second before I walk back to the medical wing.
* * *
At eleven fifty-five I close the door of my office, take a prenatal vitamin, drink water, and call Indie.
She picks up on the first ring.
"Greer."
"Indie."
"I just saw the Herald thing. Are you okay?"
Her voice is the small, low voice my best friend uses when she is being kind to me. It is not the loud, bright voice she uses when she is happy. She has been bracing all morning, by my read.
"I'm okay. As okay as I am going to be on the morning the city of Boston finds out."
"You are not okay."
"No."
"Greer."
"Yes.”
"The Herald says father unknown."
"They got that right. They do not know."
"And me?"
"Indie."
"You promised me the first night the team was back. They've been back since Tuesday."
"I know. I was waiting until I could come to you in person. I was going to call you tonight."
She is quiet for a second.
"Then come over now."
"I am at the building tonight. The earliest I can give you what you are owed, and the time you need to hear it, is Sunday."
She is quiet for what is probably four seconds.
"Why Sunday?"
"Because the rest of it is bigger than this, and I want to do it in person, and I want to do it on a day neither of us has anywhere else to be. Sunday is the soonest I can do that and the latest I can wait."
"Okay. What time?"
"Two. Indie, don't read anything else online about it. Don't take any calls from the Herald or the Globe or anybody else. I am going to tell you everything in person, and I want you to hear it from me first, not from a tweet thread.
"Okay."
"Promise me."
"I promise."
"I love you."
She does not, for a second, answer. Then: "I love you, Greer."
She hangs up.
I sit at my desk in my office on the third floor of the practice facility with the phone in my hand and the door closed, and I do not move for the next ten minutes. The kick comes around 12:03 — hard, then again at 12:05, then a third time at 12:08. The baby has been doing this all week.
I put my hand on the front of me, over the polo and under the cardigan, where the small steady rhythm under my palm has been the only honest thing in my life since October.
I have three days to figure out exactly what to say. Three days to figure out how to say it in a way that doesn't end with my best friend never speaking to me again. I don't know if three days is enough, but it is what I have.
* * *
I leave the building at five and drive home through the late-afternoon spring light along the river, the bare maples still bare on Storrow, the runners along the esplanade in their first lightweight shells of the season.
The radio is off. The phone is facedown on the passenger seat. My hands are at ten and two.
I do not, in the forty minutes of the drive, cry.
When I get home, the under-eaves light at the front door of my building is on, the way it is every evening in March by five forty-five. Kieran's SUV is at the curb across the street, parked legally, with him in the driver's seat reading something on his phone.
He sees the Subaru pull up and crosses the street as I park. We do not touch on the sidewalk. I unlock the front door, climb to the second floor, unlock my apartment. He follows me in and closes the door behind him.
In the front hall, he puts his arms around me from behind and his face against the back of my hair. Sunday, he says, into the back of my hair.
"Sunday."
"You called her."
"At lunch. She agreed to wait. She is going to wait."
"Okay."
He holds me there for what is probably ten minutes, both his palms flat against the front of me where the kick has started up again in the last sixty seconds. The small steady fact under his palms is what I am going to be carrying into Indie's apartment on Sunday at two in the afternoon.
After ten minutes, he turns me around and looks at me. "Eat first. Then we figure out what you're going to say."
"Okay."
"Greer?"
"Yes."
"I will be at your apartment Sunday night when you walk out of hers. Whether happens in there, I am here."
"I know."
He has brought a bag from the bakery on the corner near the brownstone, soup from the place in the South End I have been going to since I started feeling better, and decaf tea.
We sit at the kitchen table for the next two hours and do not talk about what I am going to say on Sunday.
Instead, we talk about the deadline, four days off; about Mikko, who has agreed to finish the season as captain and retire on June 30; about the back-to-back this Saturday in Detroit that Kieran is, between now and Sunday at two, going to coach.
When the soup is gone and the bread is gone and the tea is half-gone, Kieran reaches across the table, takes my hand and stands. In the front hall he kisses me on the forehead, puts his coat on, picks up his keys.
"Greer."
"Yes."
"I love you."
"I love you, too, Kee."