31. Greer
Greer
The Stewart is the small private family-and-staff suite on the second tier of the Garden. The franchise keeps it for the wives and parents of the players and the head coach. It seats fourteen at full capacity. Tonight there are eight of us in it — six wives, Sasha's fiancée, and me.
The eighth was supposed to be Indie.
She is not in the suite when I walk in. The seat next to mine, the one I asked the franchise's family-services coordinator to keep open for her, is empty.
I take my place by the window. The wife of the third-line center, who I have been to four pregame meals with this spring, gives me the small wink she gives me every game and goes back to her phone.
Mikko's wife, Anya, in a soft green blouse and the same hairstyle I have seen on her twice now, meets my eyes from across the room and crosses to me and squeezes my elbow once, hard, and goes back to her own seat.
I sit in the seat next to mine without Indie in it.
The Garden below the window is already filling, standing-room down the upper bowl by 6:08, the soft constant hum of seventy-two hundred people working up to the loud they are going to be in eighty minutes.
At six twenty-eight, Indie walks into the suite.
She is in jeans and a soft gray pullover I have not seen on her before. Her hair is in a loose bun. Her hands are at her sides.
She does not, when she walks into the suite, look at any of the wives.
She walks straight to my row, stops at the chair next to mine, and sits down.
She does not look at me.
She says: "Hi."
"Hi."
"Did the warmups start?"
"They start at seven."
"Okay."
We sit beside each other through the warmups, through the anthem, through the puck drop. The Hurricanes' captain wins the faceoff. Sasha picks the puck off the boards. The crowd lifts.
Game 7 begins.
* * *
We score in the second.
Mikko deflects from the slot at 11:08 to make it 1-0. The Garden crowd lifts into a single long roar that takes ninety seconds to die down. Indie does not, on the goal, stand. She stays seated next to me with her hands flat in her lap.
The Hurricanes tie at 17:42 of the second on a power-play one-timer.
The third period starts the way Game 7 third periods start, with both benches breathing through the boards and the crowd on its feet.
I have spent seven months learning the shape of my partner's back behind a bench. Tonight his shoulders are squared, his weight is on his right foot, his clipboard hand is at his hip and his calling hand is at his ear. The game is even and could go either way.
He does not, in any of the third period, look up at The Stewart, but I don’t need him to. I know where he is. He knows where I am.
With six minutes left, the Hurricanes' first line gets a clean entry on a stretch pass and the Hurricanes' top-line winger — a kid from Sweden who scored twice in Game 5 — beats Sasha to the rebound and puts it five-hole on our goalie at 14:13.
2-1, Hurricanes.
The cheering stops. What replaces it is the sound of seventy-two hundred people pulling in breath at the same time.
Indie reaches over, in the quiet, and puts her hand on my arm.
She does not look at me.
She does not say anything.
She just puts her hand on my arm and leaves it there.
I do not move.
The baby kicks, twice.
Indie's hand stays.
* * *
The clock runs.
We pull the goalie with 1:47 left.
We get a flurry — Sasha at the dot, the third-line center down low, Mikko at the far blue line waving for a chip — and we cannot solve their goalie. The Hurricanes' winger chips it past Sasha at center. The puck goes the length of the empty net.
The horn goes.
3-2.
The series is over.
The Garden is, for what is probably ninety seconds, completely silent.
I have never heard the Garden silent. Not at a 7-0 home loss.
Not at the moment-of-silence before a memorial-night game.
Not at the late-game empty-netter that ends a regulation game.
Tonight the Garden goes silent for ninety seconds, with seventy-two hundred people standing on their feet not making a sound, the Hurricanes' bench mobbing each other at center, and Kieran standing at the home bench with the clipboard at his hip and his other hand flat on the boards and his head, briefly, down.
He lifts his head.
He shakes the Hurricanes' coach's hand at center. The cameras find them. The handshake line happens.
He walks off the ice but does not, on the walk off, look up at The Stewart.
Indie lifts her hand from my arm. "Where do we go?"
"The corridor outside the dressing room. The coordinator will take us. The boys come out one at a time but he usually comes out last."
"How long?"
"An hour. Tonight, longer."
"Okay."
She does not, for several seconds, move.
Then she stands.
She holds out her hand.
I look at it.
I take her hand.
She walks me out of The Stewart and down the staff stairwell to the dressing-room corridor on the lower level.
* * *
I have walked past this corridor two hundred times this season and never been in it. It’s narrow and smells of ice and equipment and the disinfectant the league has probably used since 1979. Small, flat fluorescent lights line the ceiling.
The wives are already there.
Mikko's wife. Sasha’s fiancée. The third-line center's wife and her sister. They look up when I come in with Indie. They just look up, take us in, and go back to their own waiting.
We stand against the wall.
The players come out one at a time over the next hour, the fourth-line winger first, the centermen in a small wave, the defensemen later, Sasha somewhere in the middle.
Sasha sees Indie and me and waves. Mikko comes out last among the players and stands against the wall opposite where we are with his wife.
The corridor empties.
The assistants come out. The video coordinator comes out.
Then the door of the head coach's office opens, and Kieran walks out.
He is in the dark blue suit. The tie is gone.
The dress shirt is open at the collar. He looks like a man who has, in the last sixty minutes, lost the season he has been coaching for eight months and the game he has been coaching for forty years and an empty-netter he could not, on any of the previous seven thousand nights of his life, have done anything to prevent.
He sees me, and without looking at Indie, he crosses the corridor, stops in front of me, puts both his hands on the sides of my face, and presses his forehead to mine.
He does not, for a long second, say anything.
His breath against my mouth is short, dry — eleven hours without food, sixty minutes of hockey held behind his face since puck drop, and a dressing room full of grown men who needed him to be their coach for sixty more seconds than they could be their own.
His forehead presses harder against mine.
He says, very low: "Greer."
"I'm here."
"I'm sorry."
"Don't be."
"I am."
"Kieran."
"Yes."
"I love you."
"I love you too, Greer."
We stand like that for what is probably twenty seconds with his forehead on mine and his hands on the sides of my face and the corridor full of the silence the corridor gets in at this hour after a loss.
Finally, he looks past me, at the end of the corridor, where Indie has been standing since the moment he came through the door.
His face softens the way it has softened twice in eight months; once on the morning at the brownstone when I told him about the kick, once at the door of my apartment when I told him Indie had said come over.
He says, into the small space between him and me, but loud enough that Indie can hear it: "She came."
"She brought me down here, Kieran."
He does not, in the next second, move.
Indie does not, in the next second, move either.
Then she crosses the corridor.
She stops at his elbow and looks up at him.
She says, "Dad."
He turns toward her and pulls her into a hug.
She lets him.
She closes her eyes.
She says, into the small space between his shoulder and his neck, "I'm sorry about the game."
"I'm sorry about everything else."
"I know."
"I'm sorry, Indie."
"I know, Dad."
He stays with her arms wrapped around him for a long second.
When he pulls away, he looks at her, then at me, then at her again.
He says, "Come home with us tonight."
She closes her eyes.
She says, very quietly, "Okay."
He puts his right hand back on my lower back and he puts his left arm around Indie's shoulder. We stand in the corridor like that for what is probably another minute.
Then we walk out the family door together.
* * *
We take the usual route home — Kieran at the wheel, me in the passenger seat, Indie behind me with her hand on my shoulder. None of us talks the whole way.
He parks beside the brownstone. Inside, the house is dark and cold. We haven’t been home since seven this morning.
Indie stands in the front hall for a long second with her coat still on. She is looking at the staircase up to the second floor, the one she has walked up ten thousand times in her life, the one I have walked up in her father's company every weekend since Christmas.
She says, quietly: "I am going to sleep upstairs in my old room."
Kieran nods.
He says: "Of course."
"I have not slept in this house since February."
"I know."
"Goodnight, Dad."
"Goodnight, Indie."
She kisses him on the cheek, the small careful kiss she used to give him every Sunday night when she still lived here. She turns to me and puts her hand briefly on my arm.
"Goodnight, Greer."
"Goodnight, Indie."
She climbs the stairs.
We listen to her go up.
When the door of her old room closes upstairs, Kieran lets out a breath I am not sure he has let out in eight months. He puts both his arms around me in the front hall. He puts his face against the top of my hair.
He stays there for a long minute.
When he lifts his face, he says: "Bed?"
I can’t help but smile. "Definitely."
We go up to the bedroom together.
He helps me out of the maternity dress. He gets out of the suit. We get into the bed. He slides up behind me, his arm under my ribs, his hand flat against the front of me where the baby has been turning all night.
He says, into the back of my hair: "I’m so glad she came."
"I know, Kee. Me too."
"We lost the series. And I have, in the same hour, gotten my daughter back."
"I know."
He breathes out, slow.
"Sleep, Greer."
"Sleep, Kieran."
I close my eyes.
I sleep against him in the bed in the brownstone for the first time in nine weeks, his daughter asleep upstairs, the house quiet around us, the baby moving under his hand.
The Barons lost Game 7.
But tonight, all is ok.