20. Kieran
Kieran
Declan Walsh is in the chair on the far side of his desk on the sixth floor of the practice facility at nine o'clock on a Tuesday in the third week of February, in the same charcoal suit he has been wearing to every nine-o'clock meeting since I took the job, and the door is closed.
In the eighteen years I have known him, has never closed the door for the first part of any nine-o'clock conversation we have ever had.
He has, this morning, closed it before I sat down.
"Coach."
"Declan."
"Sit."
I sit.
His desk is neat at the front and full of binders at the back. The binder at the top of the right-hand pile is the cap-management binder his consultant updates every Friday.
Declan has it open in front of him.
He turns it around and slides it across the desk.
"Read the highlighted line."
I read the highlighted line.
The highlighted line is Mikko's. A thirty-four-year-old captain on an expiring deal. The no-trade clause on his contract expires seventy-two hours before the league trade deadline.
I look up at Declan.
"You are floating it."
"I am floating it. Two picks and a prospect. Western team. I'm not telling you which one."
"Why?"
"Cap space. We free four-point-eight million by March. We use it to take a run at the UFA forward I am about to fly out and have lunch with on Friday. If we get him, we have a top-six for the playoff run, one player deeper than today."
"You are floating trading my captain six weeks before the playoffs."
"I am floating trading our pending UFA captain who, by the agent's last call with us, has already decided he is retiring on June 30."
I look at him.
"He told the agent?"
"He told the agent the Tuesday after the All-Star Break."
"He has not told me."
"He is going to tell you. I am asking, before he does, what we do with the asset between now and the deadline."
I lean back.
"Declan. We took this job together in October. I am not, in our first season together, going to be the head coach who agreed to trade Mikko Halonen at the deadline of his last."
"You don't have to. I am asking you what you would say if I told you the trade was on the table. The decision is mine."
"I would say no."
He nods. He closes the binder. He puts it back on the pile.
He says, without changing his tone: "Kee."
"Declan."
"I have been hearing things."
I do not, for a long second, move.
He folds his hands on the desk.
"Locker room talk. About a staff member."
"Okay."
"I don't ask questions I don't need answered. I have, in eighteen years in this league, made it a policy not to ask any head coach about his personal life. I am not asking you one this morning."
"Okay."
"But if there is something to address, I would like to hear it from you. Not from a reporter."
The office is, in this second, very quiet.
I look at Declan. I look at the desk. I look at the small, framed photograph behind his head of his two grown sons on a fishing trip.
I think about the woman who is, this morning, at her desk in the medical wing two floors below mine with the secret she has been carrying for nineteen weeks.
I think about my daughter, who is at her desk at Center Ice Boston on Boylston Street, three subway stops east of where I am sitting.
I say: "I am not going to address it today."
He nods.
"I will tell you what you need to know in the order you need to know it."
"For what it's worth. The Globe is sniffing. I have, since Monday, had two calls I have not returned. If the Globe gets it before you get to whoever needs to hear it from you, that is going to be the version of this story that exists for the next twenty years."
"I know."
I stand and shake his hand across the desk before I leave his office.
The hallway on the sixth floor is empty at nine-twenty on a Tuesday except for the assistant on the team-services desk and the smell of coffee from the small machine. I go down to my office and close the door.
I do not, for what is probably ten minutes, do anything else.
* * *
The day passes.
Practice runs from eleven to one. Video runs from one-thirty to three-thirty.
The team flies to Pittsburgh at four-forty-five for the back-to-back.
I do not, on the plane, look at Mikko any longer than I look at any of the other players.
I do not go to the back of the plane where the four-corner card game is being played.
When we land, I text him.
Your place tomorrow night. After the second game.
He writes back inside thirty seconds.
Pasta or salad.
Pasta.
Done.
We win the first game. We lose the second in overtime. Mikko has the assist on the winner in the first and is on the ice for the goal we give up in the second, and he is, in the locker room afterward, his captain self — not letting the loss live in the room.
We fly back to Boston late Wednesday night.
I drive home from Logan at one-thirty in the morning. I sleep four hours. I do practice. I do video. I leave the facility at five.
I drive to Mikko's apartment in the South End.
Mikko's apartment is on the fourth floor of a building three blocks from Greer's. He buzzes me in and has the door open before I knock.
"Coach."
"Mikko."
"Come in."
His apartment is small and tidy. His wife is still at her sister's in Vantaa. The kitchen smells of garlic and red sauce. The table in the small dining alcove is set for two.
He pours us each a glass of red wine as we sit down to eat.
His mother taught him how to make this pasta. The bread is from the bakery on the corner. The salad is arugula and parmesan. We eat in silence for most of the meal.
When the plates are empty, he refills my wine without asking.
He looks at me.
He says: "Kee, I told the agent last week."
"He told Declan."
"I knew he would tell Declan."
"You are done in June?"
"I am done in June."
"Okay."
"I would like to go out on a Cup and play with my captain's letter on my chest until June 30."
"You will."
He drinks. He sets the glass down.
He says, quietly: "You can trade me, Kee."
"No."
"Two picks and a prospect. Four-point-eight in cap. A top-six in my place for the playoff run."
"No."
"Kee."
"You're a Baron. You finish here."
He looks at me for a long beat.
He picks up the bottle. He refills both glasses.
He says: "Then I have to ask you for something."
"What."
"Tell your daughter before the press does."
I do not, for a long second, answer.
"Kee."
"Yes."
"The Globe called me last Wednesday."
"What?"
"They asked, in the careful neutral way they ask, if I had any insight into who the father was of the baby of the physical therapist of the Boston Barons. I told them to ask their own questions. They thanked me. They hung up."
"Okay."
"I can hold them off until next Wednesday. The reporter is decent. He owes me three favors. He will take a hold-off if I ask. Wednesday is the line."
"A week."
"A week."
I close my eyes for half a second.
I open them.
"Mikko."
"Yes."
"You have known."
"I figured it out at the brownstone at Thanksgiving. I have been waiting for you to tell me."
"Did you tell anyone?"
"I told my wife on the plane back from the All-Star city. Nobody else."
"Will she talk?"
"She will not."
"Okay."
He looks at me across the table.
He says, low, "Indie has to hear it from you, Kee."
"I know."
"Drink the rest of your wine."
I stand and pull my coat off the back of the chair. I put it on as he walks me to the door.
At the door, he hugs me, the hard, fast hug of a man who, in nine years, has not been a hugger.
"Coach."
"Mikko."
"A week."
"A week."
I go.
* * *
I sit in the SUV at the curb in front of Mikko's building for twenty minutes.
I pick up my phone and open the thread with Greer.
I type, with both my thumbs:
I love you. Mikko has known since Thanksgiving. He is going to hold the Globe off until next Wednesday. I think we have a week.
I send it.
I put the phone down.
I sit, then, for another minute in the dark of the SUV with the heater coming on and the cold of late February in Boston outside the windshield. The four-month timeline Greer and I have been running on has, between nine this morning and seven-thirty tonight, become a one-week timeline.
The phone buzzes in the cup holder.
I pick it up.
The reply is two lines.
I am awake. I am at my apartment. Come over.
I drive the three blocks.
I park.
I walk up the steps of her building and let myself in with the key she gave me the second week of January.
She is in the front hallway in the green cardigan and sweatpants and wool socks.
She looks at me.
She does not, in this minute, say anything.
I close the door behind me.
I take three steps across the hallway and put both my hands on her face. I kiss her, slow and hard. There has been no clean place all day to put what happened, and this is where it goes.
She kisses me back.
She says, into my mouth: "A week."
"A week."
"Then I am going to tell her on Sunday."
"Okay."
"And you are going to be at my apartment Sunday night when she walks out the door?"
"I will be."
"Okay."
She presses her forehead against mine.
We stay there for a long minute in the front hallway of her apartment with the door closed and the lamp in the front room on and the small turn under her hand under my hand doing what it has, in the last four days, been doing more and more often.
"Kieran."
"Yes."
"Sit down."
We sit on the bench inside her front door in her apartment in the South End on a Tuesday night in the third week of February, and we let the week we have, between us, start to run.