5. Greer
Greer
I come back out of the bathroom without any idea how I am going to walk back into my office.
My face is washed. My mouth is rinsed. The mint is on its way down.
The reflection that watched me grip the sides of the staff-restroom sink for a full minute did not have any useful advice about what to do next, and the only thing the reflection could offer me was the small piece of professional muscle memory that said go back in the room.
So, I go back in the room.
Indie is on her feet the second I clear the doorway.
She has her tote in one hand and the easy unguarded concern she has been wearing in my direction since the day she sat down next to me at a continuing-ed conference in Quincy three years ago and said please tell me you are also here against your will.
"Oh my God, are you okay?"
"I'm fine."
"You are not fine."
"Indie."
"You barely ate anything.”
I take another small bite of the granola bar. My stomach holds the bite. The world stays where I left it.
Kieran is by the door. He has, in the four minutes I was in the bathroom, put his track pants and quarter-zip back on, and he is leaning against the door-frame at the controlled angle of a man whose career has trained him to make a body that costs the franchise eighty million dollars a year look, in a hallway, effortless.
I do not look at him.
He does not look at me.
"It's just first-day nerves," I say to Indie, in a voice I am operating from a foot above my head. "Skipped breakfast. Got hit with the new-office smell. I'm going to be fine."
"You have been off for two weeks, Greer."
"I know."
"You are going to a doctor."
"I will call today."
"Promise."
"I promise."
She looks at me. The look has, in three years, become the look that gets me to do the thing I would not otherwise do.
I love you and I am paying attention. In three years, I have not lied to her about anything that matters.
I am about to look her in the eye and lie to her face about the only thing that matters, and the only mercy in the room is that she is going to believe me, because she has never had any reason not to.
"Okay." Her phone buzzes in her tote. She looks at it, swears under her breath, and starts moving. "Shit, my meeting. Dorchester at 9:30. Daddy, I love you, dinner Sunday."
"Sunday," Kieran says.
"Greer, I am calling you at noon. If you have not made an appointment with somebody by then I am going to come back here and make one for you. Are we clear?"
"Crystal."
She kisses me on the cheek on her way out. She kisses her father on the side of the head on her way past him and closes the door behind her.
The door is closed.
The office is silent.
Kieran is still by the door.
My back is to the counter. My hand is on the edge of the counter. The granola bar is in my other hand. The clearance form is on the second monitor behind me, half-filled out, with the row for attending PT signature still empty.
Through the glass walls of my office, six people walk past my door in the next fifteen seconds. Any one of them could glance in.
He says, very quietly: "How far along?"
Three words. Not a question.
I open my mouth.
Nothing comes out.
I look at him.
He looks at me.
He does not repeat the question. He does not soften it. He stands by the door, in his charcoal quarter-zip, and waits. He has learned to wait. He is not, this morning, the one who gets to decide what comes next.
The seconds stretch.
My hand on the counter is shaking. Until that second, I had not noticed.
The granola bar wrapper crinkles when my fingers tighten on it. He hears the small sound and does not look at the granola bar. He looks at me.
I do not say I don't know. I do not say Why are you asking.
I do not say Not now. I do not say anything, because every sentence available to me has, attached to its tail, the entire architecture of three weeks of not telling anybody, and the four days of knowing exactly what the test had said, and the morning of throwing up in a staff bathroom on the first day of my dream job, and I cannot say any one of those sentences without saying all of them, and I am, in the corner of my own office, not yet ready to say all of them.
He sees the answer.
I watch him see it.
His face does not move. His shoulders do not move. His eyes do something quiet and contained that I am, somehow, going to remember for the rest of my life.
He says: "Okay."
The okay is not a word for me. The okay is a word he is saying to himself, like a coach saying okay in the half-second after a call has gone the wrong way and before he decides what the bench is going to do about it.
He says: "Come to my house tonight. I'll be home after six. Come when you can and we can talk."
"Okay."
He takes a business card from the inside pocket of his quarter-zip.
He clicks a pen open against the credenza, turns the card over, and writes two lines in the small careful handwriting of a man who has been signing autographs since he was nineteen.
He sets the pen down. He slides the card across the counter toward me.
"My personal number," he says. "Address on the second line. Text or come. Either is fine."
I look at the card. Kieran Larsen, Head Coach, Boston Barons on the front. A phone number and a Beacon Hill address on the back. I do not, immediately, pick it up.
He says, in a voice that is not the post-game voice, in the voice I heard in suite 1714 three Wednesdays ago: "Greer. Whatever you need this conversation to be, that is what it will be."
I cannot say anything. I just nod.
He waits one more beat. Picking up his leather bag from the chair by the door, he walks into the hallway of the third-floor west wing, a man whose presence at podiums during Bruins coverage I've noted for the past ten years.
Charcoal quarter-zip. Leather bag. Hip not visibly bothering him.
Eyes on the middle distance. A man on his way to a meeting.
The door closes.
I stand at the counter for a long minute and do not move.
The granola bar in my hand is, again on the credenza.
The hand that is not shaking goes, briefly, to the place under my navel where my body has been, for six days, informing me of a fact I am professionally trained to identify and personally unequipped to face.
I take the hand off. I straighten my back.
There is a knock at the door.
étienne Tremblay is standing in my doorway with one hand up and a small wave and a bonjour, doc and his ankle taped up wrong, and the world resumes.
étienne first. Then Sasha. Then Mikko, who looks at me for two seconds longer than is necessary on the table.
Water, between patients. Half a granola bar at lunch.
The half stays down. Two minor-league call-ups whose names I do not yet have memorized, an assistant equipment manager with tennis elbow, a video coordinator who has, somehow, hurt his shoulder watching tape.
By mid-afternoon a string of patients has come through the door, two intake forms have been filed, and the staff break room has held me long enough for a cup of decaf tea I did not drink and an assistant trainer named Will who told me, kindly, that my color was improving and that the first day of any season is the worst one and that nobody on the staff is going to expect me to be at full speed before Halloween.
I thank him. He gets the practiced version: I'm okay, the first day is the worst day, I'll be at full speed by Friday.
He nods. He believes me. The Barons hired him for that, too.
By late afternoon I am back at my desk with Kieran's intake form open on the second monitor and the bracketed empty box where the attending PT signature goes.
I have what I need to clear him. The vitals were within range.
The partial range of motion I got before Indie burst in showed the hip in better shape than his file said.
The verbal history he gave me — twice-weekly self-maintenance work, no acute flare-ups since spring, no new symptoms — is consistent with the imaging from his last MRI.
None of which is going to come up in the file. None of which has to.
I type cleared for full participation, no restrictions, six-week follow-up. I review it. I sign it electronically. The timestamp says 4:53 PM. The file uploads to Dr. Mehta's queue.
I close the laptop.
The third-floor west wing of the practice facility I drove into this morning, on the first day of my dream job, still has the small efficient hum it has had since I sat down.
Both my hands are on the edge of my desk, where I have put them to keep them from doing anything I have not yet given them permission for.
The card sits on my desk under the lamp. I look at it. I do not pick it up.
He told me I could come when I was ready. He told me either was fine. He told me whatever I needed this conversation to be was what it would be.
I have to become the woman who can pick that card up and put the number into her phone. Right now, that woman has not yet arrived.
She will. I am going to make her.
After the file uploads, I pick up my purse with the pregnancy test still wrapped in a paper towel in a Ziploc bag at the bottom of it, and I walk out of my office, and I take the elevator down to P3, and I drive home in my Subaru in late-October Boston traffic with both hands on the wheel and the radio off.
I am going to him.
Somewhere between here and a dark blue door three steps up from a sidewalk in Beacon Hill, I am going to find the version of myself who can do that.