3. Greer
Greer
The first morning of the rest of my life begins in a parking garage.
I have been sitting in it for eleven minutes.
In my purse, the pregnancy test I took three days ago in the bathroom of a coffee shop on Newbury Street is still wrapped in a paper towel inside a Ziploc bag.
I do not know why I kept it. I do not know why I brought it with me.
What I do know, sitting in my Subaru on the first morning of my dream job with my body doing the thing it has been doing for six mornings in a row, is that none of this is going to be any less real by the time I make it to the elevator.
I get out of the car.
The badge in the front pocket of my purse has my picture on it.
The picture is from a head-shot session four weeks ago, when I was a woman who had not yet been at a charity gala on a Wednesday night and had not yet come home in a borrowed dress at six in the morning and had not yet, three weeks later, been a woman who could not, anymore, keep down dry toast.
That woman is the woman the Barons hired. Today is the day I have to be her again.
I take the elevator up.
The doors open onto a lobby that is mostly glass and mostly sun.
A floor-to-ceiling window faces the practice rink one level down.
The ice is fresh. The Zamboni is just finishing.
The cold air from the rink reaches me through the door at the top of the stairs, and the resinous burn of new ice in my nose is the only sensation today that feels, in any real way, like home.
The woman at the front desk has her hair in two braids and looks at me like I am the most normal thing in the world.
"Greer Callahan," she says, glancing at her screen. "First name on the schedule. Coach is excited to meet you."
I make my face do the thing it is supposed to at this point. "Excited to meet him too."
"Beverly will take you up."
Beverly Marshall, head of team operations, is in her mid-fifties, in a navy Barons quarter-zip and a sensible bob, with a name tag and a manila folder of HR paperwork tucked under her arm.
She has the brisk warmth of somebody who has onboarded twelve hundred new hires across three sports and is not about to make a fuss over the twelve-hundred-and-first.
"Greer. Welcome." She shakes my hand once. "Walk and talk?"
"Walk and talk."
She steers me down a hallway lined with old game-jerseys in shadowboxes, giving me the rundown on badge access, expense reimbursement, the staff dining room hours, and the half-flight of stairs I am to use if the elevators ever go down during a game.
We pass two players I recognize from the wall before I recognize from their faces.
Sasha Reznikov, thirty-one, Russian, alternate captain, looks at me for two seconds longer than is polite, then goes back to his phone.
étienne Tremblay, the French-Canadian winger, walks past us in a towel, says bonjour, mademoiselle with one hand over his heart, and is gone.
"étienne does that to everybody under fifty," Beverly says, not looking back. "Wave back if you feel like it. Ignore him if you don't."
"Noted."
"Your office is up here."
The medical wing is on the third floor, on the west side. My office is a glass-walled rectangle with a treatment table, two monitors, a credenza, an industrial-grade ice machine, and a tablet on the desk with my appointments for the day already pulled up.
Beverly walks me through the basics — the badge reader, the door code, the panic button under the desk — and hands me the manila folder.
"Anything you need that isn't in there, my line is the second one in the staff directory. I'm in the building until six." She pauses at the door. "Coach's physical is your first appointment of the day. He hates the physical. He’ll be polite about it but he’ll want it over with by 9:01."
"Got it."
"Welcome aboard, Greer. We needed somebody good. The last guy could not, professionally speaking, find his own ass with a flashlight."
She leaves.
A minute later there's a knock at the open doorway. A tall blonde man in a Barons sweatshirt, late-thirties, leans his shoulder against the frame with a coffee in one hand.
"Mikko Halonen," he says, in an accent I cannot yet place. "Veteran around here. Welcome aboard. Coach has been looking forward to you for a month."
"He doesn't even know me."
"Coach has read your file." Mikko squints at me, professional, kind. "You doing okay? You look a little pale."
"Late night."
"On a Tuesday?"
"On a Tuesday."
He lets it land, lets it go, and gives me a small two-finger salute, and is gone.
I sit in the chair. I breathe.
The tablet on the desk says, in white letters on a deep navy field:
9:00 AM — Larsen, K. — Pre-season exec physical
I have been bracing for this for four weeks, ever since the offer letter, ever since the moment Indie said, oh my God, you do realize that means you're going to be working for my dad?
This is going to be hilarious. I have rehearsed the handshake, the small talk, the version of myself that is going to walk into the locker hallway and treat the head coach of the Boston Barons exactly the same way she treats every veteran centerman and every backup goaltender.
I have not rehearsed any of it while pregnant.
In fact, I have not rehearsed it at all in the four days since I sat on the closed lid of a coffee-shop toilet and watched two pink lines develop in front of me.
The version of me on the offer letter is a woman who said yes to this job at the end of a year of working in Providence and a decade of working toward Providence and a lifetime of being the kid who did her homework.
That woman does not have a pregnancy test in her purse.
That woman has not slept with a stranger in a hotel suite.
That woman is, with every passing day, slightly less my problem.
I press the heel of my palm against my sternum and breathe through my nose and remember what Lena told me on the phone last night: go in. Do the job. Be the woman in the headshot. You can have all your feelings about it in your car at 5pm.
The clock on the tablet says I have a little under half an hour.
A little under half an hour is enough time for two things to happen.
It is enough time for me to put my professional face on, the one I wore through three years in Providence, the one that turns me into a different person — competent, brisk, eyes on the body and not on the human inside it.
And it is enough time for the nausea to do whatever it is going to do this morning, which based on the previous six mornings, is going to involve at least one trip to the bathroom.
I have one of those, at least. I make it to the staff restroom at the end of the hallway before my body decides what it has decided.
When I come back to my office, face washed, mouth rinsed, a mint chewed and discarded, there is not much time left on the clock.
I sit. I do not look at the door.
The pregnancy test in my purse, three days old, wrapped in paper towel inside a Ziploc bag, is a small, heavy thing on the credenza behind me.
I brought it to work because my apartment did not feel like a safe place to leave it and the bathroom at the gym did not feel like a safe place to throw it out, and now I am stuck with it for the rest of the day like a piece of evidence in a trial nobody has filed yet.
My phone buzzes. Indie.
GOOD LUCK TODAY OKAY?? you are going to be incredible. my dad is going to love you. coming by later to bother you between meetings. KISSES.
The text gets two readings. I type back thank you boo and then put the phone face-down on the credenza next to my purse, because right this moment I cannot be a person who has texts from her best friend on her screen.
For a long second my hand rests, briefly, in the place under my navel where my own body has been quietly informing me, for six days, that the rules have changed.
Eight years of education and three years of clinical practice have taught me what bodies do under load.
None of those years prepared me for the load my body is under this morning.
Off my stomach, the hand returns to my lap. I straighten my back. I become, by a slow and deliberate act of will, the woman in the headshot.
The clock is close to the hour.
I stand. I face the counter and pull up the intake form on my second monitor and pretend to read it.
The form has rows for blood pressure, resting heart rate, range of motion in the major joints, soft-tissue assessment of the hip — the famous hip, the reconstructed-after-the-Cup hip, the hip every Bruins fan and every Barons fan can describe in three sentences and a wince.
There is a knock.
"Come in," I hear myself say.
The door opens behind me.
"Coach Larsen, please have a seat," I say, with my back to the room, in the voice I have spent three years practicing. "I'm just pulling your file. Give me one second."
I turn.
It is him.
For the first second I have nothing. No thoughts. No words. No feeling. My brain stops in the way a phone goes white when you drop it on tile.
The second second comes back with a hammer.
The man on the other side of the door I closed behind me in the small dark hours three Wednesdays ago, the man with salt at his temples and the lean cut of him and shoulders that have been hit professionally for a living, is wearing a charcoal shirt and a Boston Barons quarter-zip in a heavier navy and a face that is not, in any version of this morning that I had imagined, the face of a stranger.
He says, very quietly: "Ms. Callahan."