10. Kieran
Kieran
I twist because the drill calls for it. The forward I am demonstrating for is a third-line center I have spent two weeks teaching to read the high-low pinch off the boards, and the breakout against an aggressive forecheck requires the demonstrating coach to pivot off the inside leg and lay the puck back to the strong-side defenseman in one motion.
I have done this demonstration in this building forty-six times since I took the job.
I have done it on this leg, with this hip, since the spring of the year I won the Cup.
I push off.
The hip does not let me.
It is not a tear. It is not a re-break. I have spent enough of my adult life in the company of orthopedic surgeons to know the difference between a thing that has come apart and a thing that has caught.
This is a thing that has caught. The post-surgical scar tissue around the joint capsule has, somewhere in the last fifteen feet of edge work I just did, decided it is not going to permit the inside-leg rotation today.
I keep my face still.
The puck goes back to the defenseman. I straighten up. I tell the third-line center, in the same voice I have been telling him in for two weeks, that he is going to read the high-low pinch and that the rotation has to come from the hips and not the shoulders.
He nods. He skates back to the line.
I skate to the bench. I make it look like I am going for water.
Mikko is already there.
He is on the bench with his elbows on the boards and his stick across his lap, watching me. He has been watching me since I twisted. He does not, in the second I get to the bench, look at the assistant on my right who is pretending he was not also watching me.
He says, very low, without moving his mouth more than the bench-side cameras would forgive: "Hip?"
"Yea."
"How bad?"
"Not bad. I'm finishing the drill."
"You're not finishing the drill if you twist on it again, Coach."
He says this without looking at me. He says it the way a captain talks to a head coach when he does not want to sound like he is telling the head coach what to do.
"I know."
"Then run the rest from the bench."
He pushes off and skates back to his line.
I run the rest of the practice from the bench.
The assistant on my right, who has by now done his half-step three more times than he did during the season opener, does not, by the end of practice, look at my face directly.
The two assistants on the other side of the bench glance over once each.
The Globe reporters in the rafters cannot, from forty feet up, tell that anything is happening with my hip.
Doyle, on the far ice with the goalies, has not, in twenty years of running the goalie corner of a practice, looked over at anything that is not the goalie corner of a practice, and today is no exception.
We finish on time.
I send the team off the ice. I skate to the gate slow, on my good leg, with the bad leg dragging the smallest amount it has dragged since the year of the surgery. I make it to the runway. The door closes behind me.
Dr. Priya Mehta is standing in the runway.
She is in her clinical whites with her ID lanyard around her neck and her tablet against her chest. She is leaning her shoulder against the painted concrete. She has been waiting for me.
"Coach."
"Priya."
"You finished the practice on your good leg."
"I finished the practice."
"You finished the practice on your good leg," she says again, mildly. "Don't pretend, please. I am not the press, and I am the only person in this building with the authority to bench you."
"Hip caught."
"I know it caught. I watched from the medical room window. Get into my office."
The medical-wing office of the head team physician is on the second floor, west side, two doors down from the room where the team-issued tape gets stocked and three doors down from a glass-walled treatment room.
Priya closes her door.
She palpates the hip. She runs a quick range-of-motion battery.
She watches me walk a small lap around her office on the same good-leg gait I tried to bury on the way off the ice.
She types things into her tablet at a speed that tells me she has, on the way down the hallway, already drafted most of what she is going to put in the file.
She sets the tablet down.
"You are seeing the head PT twice a day for a week," she says. "Twice. A day. Starting tomorrow morning. That was not a question. I’m not asking. I’m informing you that I am putting it on the calendar before you leave this office, and that the first appointment is going to be on the schedule at six AM, before the morning skate, because I do not need a Globe writer to see you walking into the medical wing in the middle of the day looking like you do right now. "
"Priya."
"The second appointment will be at the end of every day. After the players have left the building. Audit log clean. Door closed. Full hour each."
"Okay."
"You have a game on Thursday."
"I know I have a game on Thursday."
"You are going to be standing on the bench for that game on Thursday because if I see you sitting on a stool behind the bench, every reporter in this city will be writing the same story by midnight.
The head PT is going to clear you for full mobility by Thursday morning.
The way she is going to do that is the protocol I have just told you about. Are we clear?"
"We are clear."
The hallway has emptied. The players are in the room. The assistants are in the coaches' room. I take the elevator to the third floor with my hand light on the rail and my left leg doing the small careful work my left leg does when it has been instructed to behave on a downhill.
The medical wing on the third floor is quiet.
Will is at the front desk talking to one of the call-ups about a knee.
Mehta's nurse practitioner is in the small room at the end of the hallway with the door open and a phone against her ear.
The door of the glass-walled office near the middle of the hall is closed.
I walk to it.
I knock.
A voice from inside the room, a voice I have not heard outside of a hallway in twelve days says, "Come in."
I open the door.
Greer is standing at the counter, her back to the room, in her work pants and the polo with the Barons logo on the chest. She has a tablet in her left hand and a pen in her right.
The schedule on the wall to her left has been updated within the last hour, which I know because Priya's office got copied on the same scheduling email I got.
She turns.
"Hi."
"Hi."
It is the third sentence we have exchanged privately since her best friend's smile bloomed in the doorway of this office twelve days ago.
She sets the tablet down. She sets the pen down. She looks at me. Her eyes are the same blue-green they are every time I have allowed myself to see them clearly. The small dark half-moon under each one has gotten a fraction lighter than it was twelve days ago and not, in any way, gone.
She washes her hands at the sink and pulls on a clean pair of nitrile gloves. She opens her laptop on the credenza, pulls up the file Priya has just shared, and reads through the new protocol.
When she turns back to me, she is the head PT for the Boston Barons. Not the woman from the Bellamy. Not the woman who sat across from me at my kitchen island eight nights ago. The head PT. On the clock.
She walks me through the protocol in two sentences. She tells me to take off my track pants and lie on my left side. She tells me to breathe.
She palpates the scar. She palpates the joint capsule. She works her thumb along the line of the IT band.
We do not look at each other except where the work requires it.
She has me roll onto my stomach. She has me push my hip into her hand and hold.
She tells me, after the second set, that the joint capsule has more give than it had on my chart at the season opener, and that she does not, on a first-day assessment of a flare-up, want to push past the give she has.
I do not, on a first-day assessment of a flare-up, want her to.
When the forty-five minutes are over, she has me sit up. She runs me through three small mobility drills on the table while she watches my face. She tells me which one to do at home tonight and how many times. She gives me a strip of KT tape across the scar and a small reminder note about ice.
She says: "Tomorrow morning. Six AM."
"Six AM."
"I want you to walk out of this building tonight on the good leg. I do not want you doing the limp-and-recover thing you were doing in the hallway. If you cannot do that, you tell me before you leave."
"I can do that."
"Then do it."
I get off the table. I put the track pants on. I pick up my coat. At the door, with my hand on the handle, I look back at her.
She is standing at the counter with her back to me again, both her gloved hands flat on the stone, because there is nothing else her hands have left to do in this room.
I say, quietly: "Thank you, Greer."
She does not turn around.
She says, just as quietly: "Goodnight, Coach."
I close the door behind me.
I walk out of the building on the good leg.
The brownstone will be dark when I get there. The chair in the back-of-the-house library will be empty.
It is going to be a long week.
I take the elevator down to the parking garage.