26. Greer
Greer
The headline is two lines:
I do not move for a full minute.
When I move, I open the article and read all sixteen hundred words.
The piece names me. It names Kieran. It names the gala.
It names the date. It names Indie, with the bylined sentence Larsen's daughter, Center Ice Boston executive director Indie Larsen, did not respond to requests for comment.
It cites two sources close to the team. It does not, in any of the sixteen hundred words, name a single source on the record.
I set the phone down on the table.
For probably another minute, I did absolutely nothing else.
Then I text Kieran.
you saw it.
He writes back in nine seconds.
I saw it. On my way to you. Twenty minutes.
I put the phone down again and get up from the table.
I walk to the bathroom, but this time, I don’t throw up.
The throw-up at the Herald five weeks ago was my body absorbing what it could not yet hold.
This morning my body has nothing left to give up.
I sit on the bathroom floor with my back against the cold tile and my hand on the front of me, and I do not, for several minutes, move.
The kick comes once.
I stay on the floor until I hear his key in the door.
* * *
He comes into the bathroom in the suit he was going to wear to the morning skate. He kneels in front of me on the floor and puts both his hands on the sides of my face and holds my face there for a long second without saying anything.
"Kieran."
"I'm here."
"They named the gala."
"I read it."
"They named Indie."
"I know."
"Did she — "
"I called her on the way over. Voicemail. She is still not answering my calls."
He helps me up off the bathroom floor and walks me to the couch in the front room and sits beside me with his arm around me, and we sit there for what is probably ten minutes before either of us says anything.
Then he says: "Priya is going to call you. The general counsel will be on the line. They are going to want to meet at the building this morning."
"Okay."
"I am not going to morning skate. I am going to be in that meeting with you."
"Kieran. You have Game 5 tomorrow night."
"I am going to be in that meeting with you, Greer."
"Okay."
I lean against him. He puts his hand on the front of me. The baby kicks. We do not, for the next forty minutes, move.
Priya calls a few minutes before nine. The general counsel, a woman named Susan Park, who I have met twice in eleven years, is on the line.
The call is professional, careful, and uses the phrase administrative leave with full pay in the second sentence.
They want me at the building by eleven. They want Kieran there in a separate room.
They want my own attorney on the call if I have one.
I don't. Priya says she will arrange the franchise's outside counsel to sit on my side of the table as well, with the understanding that she would also pay for counsel of my own choice if I would prefer.
I tell her I will think about it on the way in.
I hang up.
Kieran sits beside me on the couch. He says: "Lena."
"I'll call her from the car."
"Okay."
I shower and dress in the soft black knit dress, the long charcoal cardigan, no makeup, and pack a small bag with my laptop and a notebook, and the small zip pouch of my prenatal vitamins. Kieran drives the SUV. I sit in the passenger seat and call Lena.
She picks up on the first ring.
"Greer."
"Lena."
"I saw it. I have been waiting for you to call."
"They want me at the building by eleven. Administrative leave. Licensing board to be notified."
"I am driving up. I will be there by six. Tomorrow we figure out the rest of it."
"Lena."
"Don't argue, mija. Eat something between now and the meeting."
"I will."
"Drive safe."
She hangs up.
I look at Kieran in the driver's seat. He doesn’t take his right hand off mine for the rest of the drive.
* * *
The meeting is in the small conference room on the fourth floor that I have, in seven months at the franchise, sat in exactly three times.
Priya is at the head of the table. There is an empty chair for outside counsel of my own. I tell them I will sit through this without it.
The meeting takes forty-five minutes.
By the end of it I have been placed on paid administrative leave effective immediately, with full benefits through the end of the season; the state PT licensing board has been notified of my disclosure and asked to handle the inquiry on an expedited basis; the franchise's outside counsel will represent me at no cost through the licensing board process; the franchise's communications director will issue a statement at one this afternoon.
Susan slides the form across the table. I sign.
Priya walks me to the door of the conference room.
In the hallway, before she opens the door, she says, very quietly: "You did this right, Greer. The piece is bad but it’s not your fault. The protocol you followed protects you. I will say so in writing if the board ever asks me."
"Thank you, Priya."
"Go home. Sleep. Whatever you need to figure out, figure it out from home."
"Okay."
She opens the door.
The practice facility's parking garage on a Thursday in late April is gray and quiet, the late-morning light flat before a rainstorm.
There are two cameras outside the elevator on P3 when I come out, both of them held by men in Patriots windbreakers I do not recognize from any of the team's media days.
One of them shouts my name. The other takes a picture.
I keep walking.
Kieran is at the SUV at the far end of the row. He sees the cameras and starts walking toward me. The cameras turn toward him. I shake my head once, fast, and he stops where he is and lets me cross the rest of the row to him alone. The cameras keep taking pictures.
I get into the passenger seat. He gets in on the driver's side. We pull out of the garage and the cameras follow us to the exit ramp.
By the time we are on the Pike, the photos are on Twitter. By the South End exit they have been retweeted nine hundred times.
* * *
He drives me home and walks me into the apartment, and we sit on the couch with the television off and the phone on the coffee table for an hour. He calls Indie twice. Voicemail. He sends her one text.
Please call. I love you. — Dad.
He does not get a reply.
At one-thirty he leaves for the practice facility. He has Game 5 video at two. He hugs me at the door for a long minute before he leaves.
I sit on the couch with the television off and don’t feel like doing anything.
* * *
My mother calls a little after four.
My phone vibrates on the coffee table with her name, and I hesitate for two rings before answering. The third ring I pick up.
"Mom."
"Greer."
"You saw it."
"Your father showed it to me at lunch.”
"Mom — "
"Are you safe?"
"I'm safe."
"Do you have food?"
"I have food."
"Do you have somebody with you?"
"Lena's on her way. She'll be here at six."
"Okay."
She is, on the other end, quiet for what is probably six seconds.
She says: "Greer."
"Yes."
"Your father and I have been talking about coming up to Boston."
"Mom. No."
"We could be on the road by tomorrow morning."
"Mom. Please."
"Honey."
"Please. Stay in Florida. I have Lena. I have — I have him. Right now I am at capacity. I cannot also have you and Dad in my apartment."
"Okay."
"I love you."
"I love you, honey."
"Mom."
"Yes."
"Thank you for not — for not asking me what I am going to do."
"Greer."
"Yes."
"That's not for me to ask, honey. You're my daughter. I love you. Call me on Saturday."
She hangs up.
I sit on the couch with the phone in my hand.
The call lasted six minutes and seventeen seconds.
My mother has, in those six minutes, not asked me a single one of the questions I most need somebody to ask — did you love him before this.
did he know what he was doing. are you all right with the way the world is going to look at the two of you now.
She has also not asked me a single one of the questions I have been most dreading — did you sleep with him knowing who he was.
did you keep this from Indie on purpose. how could you do this to her.
I close my eyes.
I am, for the first time since the call from Priya at nine this morning, glad to be alone in this apartment for the small window before Lena gets here.
* * *
Lena arrives a few minutes before six. She has driven the whole way from Providence in two hours with the rain following her up I-95.
She comes through the door in the leggings and sweatshirt I have seen her in a hundred times and an overnight bag over her shoulder, and she does not, right away, say anything.
She drops the bag. She hugs me in the front hall. She holds me there for what is probably two minutes without a single word.
When she lets me go, she walks past me into the kitchen, looks at what is in the refrigerator, and says: "I'm making you a quesadilla. Sit."
I sit.
She makes me a black bean quesadilla with the queso fresco her mother sends her every month from Texas. She makes me a glass of sparkling water with lime. She sits across from me at the small kitchen table and watches me eat.
When the plate is empty, she says: "Tell me everything."
I tell her everything — Brigid's column and the throw-up and Kieran in the bathroom and the meeting at eleven and the administrative leave and the cameras in the parking garage and my mother's call at four. She listens without interrupting.
When I am done, she says: "You are going to be okay."
"Lena?"
"Yes."
"I think I have to leave Boston."
She looks at me for a long second.
"After the baby?"
"After the baby. Maybe before. The job in Pittsburgh — they've asked twice. I haven't said no since the second ask. The salary is the same. The clinic is smaller. The press in Pittsburgh would not care about me past the first week."
"And Kieran?"
"Kieran has Game 5 tomorrow."
"That is not what I asked, mija."
"I know."
I do not, for several seconds, answer her.
I say, finally: "He cannot fight for me without losing his daughter. He cannot lose his daughter and still coach a Game 5. His prep day for tomorrow's game is already gone, and he has to coach it anyway."
"Greer."
"Yes."
"I'm going to tell you something you do not want to hear."
"Tell me."
"He is going to figure out what to fight for. You are not the one who has to figure it out for him."
I look at her. She does not, in the look back, blink.
"And if I don't give him the choice?"
"Then he doesn't get to make it. You don't get to find out what he would have decided. Six weeks from now you are in Pittsburgh with a baby in your arms wondering if he would have chosen you, and he is in Boston with a daughter who is still not speaking to him wondering if you would have stayed."
I close my eyes.
* * *
Kieran calls a little after eight.
He calls between Game 5 video review and the team flight to New York.
He says he wishes he were here, that he saw the photos from the parking garage, that the franchise's communications director has logged forty-three calls from outlets since one this afternoon and the line is holding. He says he loves me.
I tell him I love him. I tell him about Lena and the quesadilla and my mother. I tell him I am going to sleep.
I do not tell him about Pittsburgh.
He does not tell me about whatever is in his own head about the next thirty-six hours and Game 5 and Indie.
We hang up.
I sit on the couch with the phone in my hand.
In the seven-minute call, I said none of the things I most needed to say to him, and he probably said none of the things he most needed to say to me, and we both did it on purpose because neither of us has, this evening, the energy to also be the person who breaks the other's heart.
Lena watches me from the armchair. She does not, when I look up, say anything.
* * *
A little after eleven, I open the laptop on the kitchen counter.
I pull the resignation letter out of the drafts folder.
I wrote it ten nights ago, the night Lena drove up after the licensing-board conversation Priya and I had on the phone in the afternoon.
The letter is one paragraph. It thanks the franchise.
It names the licensing-board inquiry as the reason.
It offers to assist in the transition over the next four weeks.
It is signed Greer Callahan, DPT, Head Physical Therapist, Boston Barons.
I read it through three times.
I change two words. I change a comma. I save it back to drafts.
I do not send it.
Lena is asleep on the couch under the throw blanket I gave her when she moved into her apartment in Providence. The television is off. The radiator under the window hums.
I sit at the kitchen table with the laptop closed.
Finally, I go to the bedroom and lie down in the bed without changing out of my clothes. The pillow next to mine still smells like him. The duvet is still pulled back the way he pulled it back at five this morning when he left for the team flight.
I close my eyes, but cannot find sleep.
The letter is in drafts.
Tomorrow morning I will decide whether to send it.
Tomorrow morning Kieran will coach Game 5 in New York.
Tomorrow morning Indie will, likely, still not be answering the phone.
I lie in the bed with my eyes open and let the dark of late April in Boston come in through the front window.
The night is the longest I have had in this apartment.