8. Nolan
Chapter eight
Nolan
Elias took us out through the service entrance without asking. Fans and the media had found the back door two days ago. Now, the loading dock had a knot of twenty people, adults and kids, holding coffee cups and phones. One boy wore a Danaher jersey with the sleeves hanging over his hands.
"So much for a clean getaway," I said.
Fans called my name. Reporters held microphones over the crowd, hoping for something.
Elias loaded me into the SUV and pulled out. He threaded through haphazardly parked vehicles. Cars idled in the narrow gaps between buildings, and a van at the corner had its hazards blinking.
It was media day. The league flew in a hundred and fifty credentialed people to ask twenty men how it feels, and we'd spend four hours not answering or using the fewest words possible.
Hannah called before we'd cleared the block.
Hannah Kessler was the only call I would have answered on the drive.
She was an internal medicine doc at Barnes-Jewish, three blocks away from the Colchester, a friend who'd never once asked me for a ticket or a photo or anything she could tell somebody she'd gotten from me.
She'd figured out the hip at her kitchen table two years ago, watching me stand up from dinner. She confirmed the observation with me and never said another word about it. That was the whole friendship, right there.
"The whole city's lost its mind," she said. "I couldn't get a table at Winslow's. There's a line. People are wearing your face on a shirt, Nolan. It's not a good likeness."
Elias kept his eyes on the street and pretended he wasn't listening.
"No?" I asked.
"They gave you a chin you don't have. How are you, and don't give me the canned media comment."
With Elias eighteen inches away, I gave her less than she wanted. "Big day," I said.
A pause on her end. She heard me editing. "Okay," she said. "You're allowed to feel it for one day. Tomorrow you can go back to being a stone. Eat something that's fun, I'm not coming to the game. You'd hate me being there, but win it, for me."
"Will do."
"Goodnight, Nolan. It's still morning, but I'll say it now."
Elias drove down Lindell Boulevard and cut over to Market on Jefferson. Every planter on Market Street wore blue ribbons. City buses rolled past, wrapped in Steamers logos. At Kiener Plaza downtown, the fountains ran blue.
"You slept last night," Elias said.
"Some."
"You reached for the coffee with your left this morning." He changed lanes. "You don't do that on the days the hip's bad. The reach costs you on that side."
I looked at him. He knew my body as well as I did.
Elias slid his hand off the shifter, and for a second the backs of our fingers rode together on the console. Neither of us said anything. It worked.
At the arena, satellite trucks were stacked three deep on the east lot, dishes all tilted toward the same piece of sky.
"The Ringling Brothers would be proud," Elias said.
"There ought to be elephants—and clowns."
We entered through the players' entrance and left the heat outside. At ice level, the league had built a small city: pipe-and-drape backdrops, cable runs taped to the concrete in long silver spines, and under all of it the cold coming up through the concrete.
Jamie sat at a table two over from mine, back straight, the same tell he had when he was holding a full house. "I'm just trying to soak it all in and help the team any way I can," he explained to a national writer. He'd said it four times already and would say it forty more and mean it every time.
Wes was down at the far end handling the big-picture questions—what this run meant to the city and what it would mean to finish it.
"This city's earned this. They've been waiting a long time," he said as I passed.
"We're not doing it for us. We're doing it for the people who've waited forty years for it. "
A woman from the front office found me before they turned my microphone on. "Game One," she said, low, beside the podium. "Moment of silence, his number on a patch. Eileen will be at the glass for it, and she asked—"
"Yes."
"—if you'd be the one to walk her down."
"Yes," I said again. "Tell her I'll come get her from the suite."
She pressed my arm and went off to manage something else.
Then the mics went on.
"Nolan, how's the group feeling coming in?"
"Feeling good. We've got work left, but we like where we're at."
The next one. "Forty years this city's waited. Do you feel that?"
"You try not to. You focus on tomorrow's first shift. The rest takes care of itself."
"Is this the best team you've played on?"
I smiled. "Ask me in two weeks."
They nodded at every comment as if it were meaningful.
A columnist I'd known for three years got his turn near the end. He was a local guy who quoted equipment managers in his column.
"Fourteen seasons, and I can't remember you missing ten games. What do you tell the young guys about playing through it?"
I gave him the answer I'd been giving since I was twelve.
"Pain's part of the job," I said. "Your body's going to talk, but you get to decide what's worth hearing. You play the game in front of you."
It came out smooth as ever.
The next question was from a writer I didn't know. He was younger, glancing at his phone.
"You came up with that Carolina organization when they were rebuilding. Any lessons from those years you're drawing on now?"
"That was a long time ago," I said. "Good people down there. You learn the most from the losing years, and we did a lot of losing." A couple of laughs from the gathered crowd. "Mostly it taught me to keep my head down and work."
The moderator called time. I picked up my water bottle and headed out.
They cut us all loose a little after one. I caught myself checking the edges of the room. Ten days ago I'd have walked out of a place like this without looking at anything but the clock. I found Elias leaning against a pillar past the last camera platform. My shoulders dropped a notch.
"Maddie's got new pads," Brick said.
He was fifteen feet away, with a protein bar in one hand. "Thirty-four inches. Jen wants to know if you're coming to dinner—"
He stopped. He looked from me to the pillar and back.
Brick said nothing. He bit the protein bar and picked the sentence back up where he'd dropped it.
"Jen's doing the brisket," he said. "Maddie's got an entire presentation about the pads. She made a YouTube video."
"Video?"
"She's her mother's kid. Bring an appetite and applause."
We walked out the back together, past the equipment room and the loading bay, and Brick didn't shut up the whole way.
"Forty years. You believe this city?" He wasn't really asking. "I heard they sold out the watch parties. People are paying money to stand in a bar and look at a screen. We're playing four blocks away."
"You could sell them your ticket."
"I could sell them Maddie's ticket. She's not using it. She wants to watch from the couch with her goalie pads on."
A Zamboni sat off to the side with its guts open. A guy from ice ops was half inside it, and Brick slowed down. "Hey. You need this ice by Thursday, you know that, right?"
The guy flipped him off without climbing out of the machine.
"Love this guy," Brick said, and kept walking. "Jen's already crying. The series hasn't started yet. She's crying in advance. I said save some for the actual thing, and she looked at me like I don't understand her at all, which—fair."
Brick's truck was in the players' lot, two spots down from where Elias had parked the SUV. I waited for a comment from him the entire way. He never let things go without comment. He'd once chirped me for a haircut in Winnipeg from forty feet away in a hotel lobby.
He unlocked the truck, threw his bag across to the passenger seat, and stopped with one hand on the door. The comment appeared sideways.
"Tall guy's all right," he said.
That was it, nothing more. He got in and drove away.
***
The night before Game One, I worked on my hip in the living room. I'd never done it out in the open.
It wasn't a conscious decision. I came out of the shower, and the mat was still rolled in the bedroom closet. Elias was in the living room with hockey running on the big-screen. It was Boston's forecheck, and he'd queued it himself.
It was nine o'clock, and the joint needed forty minutes of attention whether or not anybody watched. Doing it in the bedroom would feel like hiding.
I carried the mat out, dropped it by the recliner, and got down on it in stages, hand to the chair arm, good side leading.
Elias didn't say anything. He turned the tape volume down two clicks and kept watching the TV.
I did the knees-to-chest work first, one at a time. The outside air pressure had been dropping all day. The hip signaled its annoyance. Storms were moving in from Kansas City.
The roller was in the basket by the window. Elias got up, crossed the room, and handed it to me without a comment.
"Boston pinches hard on the weak side," I said, working the band down the outside of the thigh. "Watch—their second pair especially."
"I saw it."
"Somebody's going to get a breakaway off that this series."
"Might be you."
"Might be Jamie. He's faster than me."
The tape ran, and the cathedral bells tolled ten. I got the lacrosse ball under the glute and leaned my weight onto it against the floor. The pain was sharp and familiar.
"Ask me the thing," I said.
Elias looked over.
"When you first got here, you asked if somebody had told me a window, and I stonewalled you." I rolled my weight another inch onto the ball and exhaled.
"You did."
"Ask me again."
He stood and then sat on the ottoman, close to me, with his forearms on his knees. He didn't ask. Instead, he waited.
"This is the last one," I said. "The window's not closing.
It closed. I've known since October—training camp, first week, the hip told me.
I could have stopped then, but I signed up for the year anyway.
" The ball sat under the deepest part of the ache and I stayed on it.
"There's no next run. There's tomorrow, and then there's up to six more games if we're lucky. "
The information was out. I delivered it directly, the way I'd have wanted it from anybody else. I had told no one else, not Brick, Hannah, or even the mirror.
Elias didn't console me. He didn't tell me about hip resurfacing or the guys who play till thirty-nine now. He sat with the information and then asked me a question.
"What does it feel like?"
"Like being late," I said. "For everything I've done since I was a little kid, my body has responded instantly. Now I ask and there's this—gap. Nobody upstairs can see it yet, but I can't see anything else."
Elias reached out and rested his hand on the hip.
"I'm glad you shared," he said.
***
I woke a little after one and padded to the kitchen for a glass of water.
The living room lights were off, but Elias was in the room. He never sat in the dark. He read late and worked late. Now, he stood at the windows, silhouetted by the glow of the streetlights.
He was looking down.
"What," I said.
He didn't startle. He'd likely heard me get up.
"Not sure yet."
"Not sure of what?"
He turned to face me. "I say nothing until I'm sure of it. It's a useful habit."
I walked up to the window and looked down. The street was empty except for a few parked cars.
"Game's in twenty hours," I said.
"And you need sleep," he said. "Go to bed, Nolan. This part's mine."