Nolan
Chapter four
Fans met us at the airport, thousands of them, with faces pressed against the terminal glass. It was a wall of blue turned out for a team that was chasing its first Cup in forty years. We landed in the early afternoon, the day after the clinch.
The city was already going crazy, and we still had a series to play. At the barricade, a kid, maybe ten, sitting on his father's shoulders, held out a jersey and a marker.
"You blocked two shots in the third," he said. He spoke like a scout filing a report.
"Somebody had to." I signed the shoulder and handed it back up.
"My dad cried at the horn."
"I did not cry." He was protesting too much.
"He cried in the car, too."
"Okay, bud. We're done," the dad said.
I grinned as they backed away.
I shook every hand I could reach and smiled until the muscles in my face quit. By the time I shut the condo door behind Elias and me, I'd had about all the being-loved I could take in one day.
The next morning I was awake and down on the bedroom floor at a quarter to five, a lacrosse ball wedged under the hip. I was breathing through the slow work of talking the joint into another day when the phone lit up on the nightstand.
Nobody called about good news at that hour. The name on the screen stopped me.
Eileen Danaher.
I pulled the phone to my ear. "Eileen."
"Nolan, I'm sorry to call so early." Her voice was steady. "I didn't want you hearing it first on the internet or TV."
I knew. She didn't have to say it, but I remained quiet and let her speak.
"Vern passed away in the night. It was peaceful, in his sleep. The nurse found him a little after four."
"Eileen, I'm so sorry."
"Thank you. He wasn't in pain at the end.
They promised me that, and I believe them.
" She took a breath. "He watched you clinch.
Well, most of it. He fell asleep in the chair before the third and never saw the horn, but I didn't have the heart to wake him.
" She sniffed. "I keep thinking I should've woken him. "
"You let him rest. That was the right choice."
Vern Danaher was the man who scored the goal. Everyone in the city knew which one. It was overtime in Game Seven of the 1986 Cup Final. It was St. Louis's one and only Stanley Cup. The riverboat whistle blew in the arena for nine full minutes.
Forty years on, they still ran the clip of the goal before every home game. I dressed in Vern's old stall, assigned to it on my first day with the team. Misha told me whose it had been, whispering like it mattered.
He'd asked me to lunch in my second season in St. Louis.
It was a Tuesday at a diner on Manchester.
Between the coffee and the eggs, he told me he was dying—a slow blood disease.
He had a request for me. Look in on Eileen when it's time.
The suits forget the old men, and she won't ask anybody for anything.
I'd said yes. Then I started driving to their place on off-days to sit with him. I'd kept it up for two years.
I never told anyone. It wasn't really a secret. I just never had a reason to bring it up, and it was a quiet part of my week that belonged to me. It was a few hours of hockey stories and a fresh-baked plate of cookies from Eileen.
"I'll come out," I said. "This morning, if that's all right. Tell me when."
"You don't have to do that. You've got—" She stopped herself. "You've got the whole world needing you right now."
"I'll come out this morning."
She didn't argue. "Come at ten," she said. "There'll be coffee and too many people, but I'll be happy to see you."
After the call, I stayed on the floor with my back against the bed and the bad leg straight out in front of me. Elias appeared in the doorway.
"Bad call?" He could read it on my face.
"An old friend died, Vern Danaher. He captained the '86 team." I gripped the mattress and started the business of standing, not bothering to hide any of it. "I'm going out to his place this morning to see his wife."
"I'll drive you."
"You don't have to do that," I said.
"I go where you go. That's the job. What time?"
"Ten."
"I'll have the car around back." He looked at my leg and then left me to it, silently padding back down the hall in bare feet.
***
The city had turned blue while we were away in Vegas.
It wasn't everywhere, but it felt that way. A bar had strung blue Christmas lights along its awning. A third-floor window in a brick four-flat flew a flag with the Steamers' wheel on it. Half a block down, a woman walked a dog in a Steamers sweater, completely inappropriate for the late May heat.
Elias drove. It wasn't the black SUV he'd arrived in. It was a plain silver sedan out of nowhere, the kind of car nobody looks at twice. He drove the way he did everything: no wasted motion.
I sat canted to the right, left leg stretched into the footwell as far as it reached. Getting in was a chore. Low seats were an enemy. I dropped the last four inches, wrenching the hip.
"Cut through the park," I said.
Forest Park opened green and enormous ahead of us, a light haze rising off the grass. Some mornings, when the weather was reasonable, I walked the far wooded side before the joggers were out.
Elias had shoved his sleeves up against the heat, and his right forearm rested on his thigh—long ropes of muscle, with a vein standing off the back of it.
I'd seen his full body on TV when I was seventeen, and I Googled it in Vegas the night before the clinch game.
I sat in my adjoining room with my laptop while he was in the shower.
"Tell me about him," Elias said. "Danaher."
"He scored the goal." I glanced at a jogger in the park. "Overtime, Game Seven, the only Cup this city's ever won. Anybody over sixty in this town remembers where they were standing when it hit the net. He was the captain. Left wing. I dress in his stall."
"And you visited him since."
"Every week when I was home and had days off. He was sick for a couple of years." I reported it all in a flat voice. Vern would've wanted it plain and direct.
I'd said more than I intended. I watched as we left the park and headed south. "Who taught you that?" Elias asked.
"Taught me what?"
"To be the one who shows up for the old men. That's a little unusual." He glanced in the rearview mirror and then at me. "Usually it's the older guys looking out for the younger ones . Did you have your own Danaher coming up?"
"Not like that." We pulled up to a stoplight.
"I was twenty when I got traded to Carolina mid-season.
It was a bad team trying to build something.
They wanted the young guys to have somebody a couple of years ahead of them to watch.
That was me." The light changed. "It was all instinct. My Vern was my grandfather."
I shifted the leg. "Turn's coming. Tamm, then left. He never left Dogtown. He won a Cup, had the ring, and he could've bought anything, but he stayed on the block where he grew up."
Elias slowed into the turn, and the street narrowed to two-story brick two-families, shoulder-to-shoulder, with narrow gangways between them. The cars had already doubled up near the house along both curbs, more than a modest street was built to hold.
"That's it," I said. "The one with the people standing out front."
We parked a block down and walked back. I took it slow.
The house was overflowing with people. There was coffee, like Eileen promised. A dozen hushed conversations ran back and forth. I knew maybe a third of the faces, old men, mostly, thick through the neck and careful on their feet. A couple of them leaned on canes.
They were survivors, members of the '86 team, turning out to honor their captain forty years on. A woman in a gray dress touched my arm. She was front office, sent to be seen doing the decent thing.
"Nolan. I'm glad you're here." Her voice was low.
"Terrible timing for the family. Well, there's no good timing.
The team's going to do something at Game One.
It will be a moment of silence, maybe his number on sleeves.
We're still working out the shape of it.
" A small pause. "It'd mean a great deal if you'd be part of that. Whatever you're comfortable with."
"This week's for Eileen," I said. "Ask me after the funeral."
"Of course." She pressed my arm and turned toward another knot of mourners.
I stepped past her toward Eileen. She was busy with others and waved briefly.
I'd lost Elias while speaking to the team representative. I found him in the front room with three of the old players and a younger woman I took for a daughter. Walt Petranek had the floor.
"So, it's October, banner's going up that night, and this kid walks in—first-rounder, hands like you wouldn't believe, head like a paint can—and dumps his bag in Vern's stall.
The whole room goes quiet. Vern comes in with his coffee.
Looks at the kid. Looks at the bag. Doesn't say one word.
Just stands there and drinks his coffee.
Kid's getting dressed, and he starts to feel it, the way you feel storm clouds moving in.
Takes him ten minutes. Ten! Finally he looks up and says, 'Am I in your seat, sir? ' And Vern says—"
Petranek grabbed a chair back to steady himself. "Vern says, 'Son, you're in my seat, but it's your team now, so take it.' The kid moved so fast he put his elbow through the drywall."
The group erupted in laughter. Elias said something short and listened a long time. Then he said something short again.
Ask, listen, ask. Give them all the attention and none of yourself. Those men would go home and tell their wives about the easy tall fella at Vern's, and they'd be unlikely to know anything about him.
He's me.
I didn't get to watch for long. Elias's phone must have buzzed, because he touched the daughter's arm and slid out of the group, and I tracked him to the side door and the gangway.
I ended up in Eileen's kitchen—small and yellow, with a parish calendar on the wall. She hadn't forgotten the cookies. They were on the counter. Through the window over the sink, I watched him in the shade between the houses, phone to his ear, back half-turned. His shoulders tensed.
By the time he came back inside, it had all smoothed over. "Everything alright?" I asked when he reached me.
"Home office in Seattle," he said. "Nothing interesting."
When I returned to the front room, Eileen had finally broken free of a cluster of relatives. She nodded toward the kitchen, and I followed.
"Sit," she said. "You're standing like Vern stood, all the weight on one leg, like the floor's not level."
I sat. She stayed on her feet.
"Thank you for coming. You didn't have to, today of all days. Half the city wants a piece of you this week."
"I told him I'd look in on you."
"You coming today, he'd have expected it. He stopped worrying about me a long time ago. He'd watched you show up too many times to wonder whether you'd be here."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah." She gave me a small, tired smile.
"He liked how you played. Said you played the right way, which from Vern was the highest compliment.
" The smile thinned. "But these last months he saw something different.
A few weeks back he turned to me in the middle of a game and said—" She stopped.
Weighed whether to continue. "He said that boy's leg is gone. Look how he's hiding it."
We were both quiet for a moment.
"He wasn't being unkind," she said. "Worried is what he was.
He said he knew that skate, because he did the same thing his last two years, hid a bad wheel from the whole building, and it cost him the rest of his life on that hip.
" She looked into my eyes. "He wanted to tell you himself.
Kept meaning to, on one of your visits, and kept deciding it wasn't his place.
But he didn't want you doing what he did, playing on it till it was ruined, and all the damage that came from favoring it. "
I looked at the coffee I wasn't drinking.
An old man dying in a chair in Dogtown had seen it. He wasn't the only one. The trainers saw it every morning; that's what the quiet adjustments to my program were. The coaches saw it; that's why my shifts had gotten shorter in back-to-backs and nobody said why.
"He should've said something," I told her. "I'd have wanted him to."
"I know. That's why I'm saying it for him." She placed a hand on my shoulder. "You don't owe this city your body, Nolan. Vern would tell you the same if he could. He'd tell you to find out how bad it really is. Nobody who needs you playing is ever going to ask that, so you'll have to."
I didn't have an answer to that. So I reached up, placed my hand over hers, and held on for a second.
She patted my hand and then took both of hers back as she became a hostess again. She told me to go rescue that tall friend of mine before the Petranek boys talked his ear off.
***
We didn't talk for the first few blocks of the drive home. Elias stopped at an intersection to let a kid on a bike wobble across in front of us. He waited until we were back in the park to ask his question again.
"How's the hip?"
He wanted more than creaks. I couldn't use that again.
"It's gone," I said. "The left one. It won't pivot cold. It takes forty minutes of heat and floor work before I can walk like a normal person, and it's getting worse, not better."
We turned right near the Jewel Box. "I don't know if it's normal," I said.
It was the first time for that admission.
I didn't say it to Brick or Hannah, my closest friends.
I kept it from myself most of the time. "Guys' hips go.
Everybody's body picks up damage, but I don't know if this is that or something else. It just doesn't feel right."
Elias glanced over. He started to say something back, and then he didn't. Instead, he was polite. "Thank you for telling me that."
I wanted more.