Delay of Game (4 page)

With his right hand, he reached up and rubbed his jaw, like all his shouting was causing him pain. And his breathing was coming in short gasps, but that didn’t stop him. It only slowed him down for a minute.

I kept my trap shut and took it. He was the coach. He had to get it out of his system, and I had to deal with it. That’s just how it goes. But he seemed even more worked up than normal, and that was my fault.

“Ten fucking games! Automatic! A fucking appeal won’t do any fucking good on something like this. You got—”

Scotty had just been getting up a good head of steam when all of a sudden he stopped screaming at me, flexed the fingers of his left arm, tensing and relaxing them over and over again, and swayed like he was going to pass out.

“Scotty?” Bergy zipped across the room and pulled Scotty’s arm around his shoulder. “Get Doc in here right now!” he shouted, trying to ease our head coach backward and to a chair.

“On it.” Hammer blew through out of the room, and half the team was on their feet trying to figure out what the fuck was going on and what to do.

“I’m… I’m fine,” Scotty argued, but anyone could tell that he wasn’t anything close to fine. He wasn’t breathing normally. He was sweating even more profusely than he had been at first. And the look in his eyes was terrifying—wild and darting from side to side as if he couldn’t slow them down or focus on anything.

Within seconds, Dr. Mitchell burst into the room with the arena’s emergency medical team on his heels. They wheeled a stretcher in, plus some other cart loaded with medical paraphernalia. They forced Scotty to lie down on the stretcher, everyone crowding around to work on him until none of the guys on the team could see him or what was going on.

What the fuck had I done? I knew I’d pissed him off, but now it looked like I’d gotten him so upset that he had a fucking heart attack or something. Was that what this was? Was this what a heart attack looked like?

“Sara,” I croaked out, but I didn’t say her name loud enough that anyone else could hear me over all the voices of the men dealing with our coach. But shit, I didn’t know if Scotty was literally dying in front of our eyes. I knew fuck all about what was going on, other than that I was the one who’d caused it, but his daughter ought to be here. She ought to know. She ought to be with him.

I cleared my throat and tried again. “Sara. Someone needs to get Sara.”

Hammer came back through the double doors just as I said it. “Jim’s on it, and he’s heading in here, too. He’ll be here in a minute. They both will.”

Doc’s voice filtered through the room and reached me as he spoke to the EMTs. “He’s having a cardiac event.”

He
was
having a heart attack. I slumped down on the bench in front of my stall, unable to process it all. A few of the other guys had heard Doc, too, and the whole room was filled with rumbles as one guy told the next and everyone questioned what was going to happen. I could only stare.

I’d just killed Scotty. I’d just killed Sara’s father. He was the only family she had, and I’d just gone and given him a heart attack, and now he might be fucking dying while all I could do was sit there and watch, and she was going to be all alone in the world.

Bergy whistled to get everyone’s attention. “Let’s stay out of their way. Everyone step back and let the professionals do their jobs.”

The boys backed away, slowly taking off their pads and skates and the rest of their gear. I still hadn’t moved a muscle. I was too stunned by what I’d just witnessed to do anything more than remember to breathe.

They’d put an IV in Scotty’s arm and hooked him up to monitors and God only knew what the fuck else, and they were starting to roll his stretcher out of the locker room. But Sara still hadn’t arrived from the owner’s box. With all the fans trying to leave the arena, that could easily take several more minutes while she tried to fight her way through the exodus.

“Sara’s not here yet,” I said. “Doc, you have to wait for her.”

He didn’t even slow down or look over at me. “We can’t wait. He’s got to get to the ER right now.”

Right. Because I’d just caused my fucking coach to have a goddamn heart attack and he might be dying.
Fuck
. “What hospital are you taking him to? I’ll bring her.” I was already dressed. I could leave as soon as she got down here.

“Kaiser,” he shouted over his shoulder, and the doors closed behind them.

Hammer and Bergy were talking, trying to calm the boys down even though you could tell they were just as worked up as all of us were. Hammer especially. He’d worked alongside Scotty for more than a decade. Each time Scotty had been hired by a new team, he’d insisted that Hammer had to be one of his assistant coaches. Bergy had played for them for several years, too, and had been coaching with them for two seasons now.

Whatever they were saying completely went in one ear and came out the other with me. I couldn’t focus. I couldn’t think about anything but Doc’s words:
He’s having a cardiac event.

Sara came running through the doors, wild-eyed and on the verge of tears with her long brown hair flying behind her.

I didn’t wait for Hammer or Bergy, or even Jim, to tell me I could go. “Come on,” I said to her. “They’re taking him by ambulance already.” I took Sara by the elbow and guided her out to my truck. I’d fucked this up; now I had to find some way to make it right.

“
IS HE HAVING
a heart attack?” I asked Jonny. He was walking so fast that I practically had to run to keep up, which wasn’t easy to do in my pumps. Why the hell had I even worn them to a game? It was just the other girls and a bunch of hockey players who would see me at the Moda Center. Who was I trying to impress? “Please tell me he was just having some sort of panic attack, something from stress. Not a heart attack.”

Jonny didn’t slow down for a second. “I’m sure the doctors can explain things to you better than I can.”

“I already know he’s having issues with his heart,” I said. “Just fucking tell me, Jonny.”

We’d gone through the glass doors leading to the parking garage already, but he still didn’t slow down. That only made my anxiety increase. Why was he in such a hurry? Why had they taken Daddy in the ambulance without waiting for me? They knew I was here. They knew I was on my way down. I’d left the owner’s box the second Jim had called Rachel and told her something was happening with my father.

Jonny finally came to a stop in front of his pickup truck, a huge monstrosity of a thing, and opened the door for me. Even with my pumps, he had to give me a boost to climb up into the beast. Once I got into the seat, he stared at me with his always-serious hazel eyes, not saying a word.

“It is a heart attack,” I whispered. Tears stabbed at the backs of my eyes, and I tried to blink them away. If it wasn’t something to do with Daddy’s heart, Jonny would have just told me as much. He wouldn’t stand there staring at me like that—silent. His silence told me everything.

“I’ll get you there as quick as I can. They only left a few minutes ahead of us.” Jonny shut my door and raced around to his side to climb in. He managed it a lot easier than I had, and he was backing out of his spot and driving us away in no time.

I brushed the back of my hand over my eyes to dry the tears. I couldn’t cry. Not now. I needed to hold it together until I knew whether there was a fucking good reason to cry or not. But I couldn’t seem to make the stupid tears stop. It was probably because of my stupid hormones. Stupid, fucking pregnancy hormones. I’d been all kinds of stressed out and easily upset lately, and it pissed me off. I wanted it to just stop, but I was afraid it was only going to get worse from here.

Jonny kept giving me these worried glances while he drove, so I tried even harder to buck up and get myself together. I didn’t need him freaking out because I was crying. It wasn’t any use, though. Every time I tried to blink back some tears, new ones pressed to the surface. Fucking tears. Fucking tears and fucking hormones.

A few minutes later, he pulled into the parking lot by the ER and screeched into a parking spot. I still had those damn tears in my eyes, and I fumbled with my seat belt so much that he had to come around to open my door and unlatch the stupid thing for me. He didn’t even wait for me to attempt to climb down; he put both hands on my waist and lifted me out of his truck, setting me on my feet in front of him. Then he took my hand in his and led me into the ER lobby. It was as though he was in an even bigger hurry to get there than I was.

Doc met us as soon as we got through the automatic sliding doors, detouring us to the waiting room. “We paged his cardiologist on the way. He met us as soon as we got here and took your dad back, but you can’t go in there right now.”

“He’s having a heart attack? For real this time?”

“I think so.”

“You think?”
Think
wasn’t good enough for me. I needed to
know
.

“His heart wasn’t beating in a normal sinus rhythm by the time we got him into the ambulance. We had to shock his heart—”

“Oh God.” The room was spinning, and I was suddenly glad that Jonny had a firm grip on my hand. “He’s going to die, isn’t he? I can’t—”

“Slow down, Sara,” Doc said. “We shocked his heart, and that brought it back into a normal rhythm. He was alert and aware the whole time, and he got immediate care from the cardiologist who already knows his history. I can’t say with certainty that what he was experiencing was a heart attack, but he was having a cardiac event of some sort. We’ll know more once they’ve run some tests, and then we can come up with a game plan.”

“So he’s not going to die?” I needed someone to tell me that or I wouldn’t be able to breathe.

“You know I can’t promise you that, especially since I don’t know for sure everything that’s going on in his body. But he’s got a much better chance of coming out of this and living a long time than he might have if he’d been at home. Other than being in a hospital, a hockey arena is one of the safest places he could have been. We had doctors on site, EMTs, a defibrillator—everything we needed to get him the care he needed as soon as possible.”

“Come on,” Jonny said. He tugged me over to a row of chairs. “You should sit. It may be a while before we hear anything else.”

I let him ease me down into a chair. He sat next to me, still holding my hand. I didn’t want him to let go of me. His hand, his immense presence, helped me feel safe at a time when I felt as though the rug was being pulled out from under me. He was keeping me upright. He was keeping me steady.

“Exactly,” Doc agreed. “And remember, there’s no reason to worry until they tell us there’s a reason to worry.” He excused himself and went to talk to the others who had come to the hospital with the ambulance.

Except there was every reason to worry. Daddy’s cardiologist had already told him that if he didn’t make changes, a heart attack was likely. He’d said Daddy needed to make those changes before it was too late. Had we already crossed that barrier into
too late
territory? Had he done too much damage to his heart?

We had a prolonged silence, Jonny and I, during which I ran through a litany of things in my head that I could have done better to make certain my father lived a longer life. I could have forced him to quit eating red meat; I could have started making changes to his diet years ago, once I started noticing he was gaining some weight; I could have made him go to see a counselor to reduce his stress once I’d noticed it was getting out of hand. There were a thousand things I should have done that I hadn’t.

“I’m sorry, Sara,” Jonny said, interrupting my mental berating of myself. His voice was soft. He was always quiet when he spoke, and him speaking much at all was pretty rare, at least around me. Until today, it seemed. Maybe he talked more when I wasn’t around, but I couldn’t know that.

I shook my head. “There’s nothing you have to be sorry about. Daddy did this to himself.”

“No, I—” He stopped so abruptly that I looked up to see why. He was staring at me with those damn serious eyes, big hazel orbs full of words that refused to come to his lips. “Just know that I’m sorry. I never meant for this to happen.”

Color me confused, but I didn’t get a chance to sort out what he meant by that. As soon as the words left him, the door opened and the waiting room was flooded by pretty much everyone involved with the Storm—players, coaches, wives, girlfriends, trainers, equipment guys, even some of the kids—all of them here to wait for news about Daddy and to keep me from going insane. Or at least to try to do that. I doubted it would be any use trying because I was pretty close to having crossed that line already.

Jonny let go of my hand and went over to the coffeepot next to the wall. As soon as he left his chair, Dana took it. Laura Weber, who was like a den mother with all the players’ wives and girlfriends, sat on my other side. Other women filled in around me—Laura’s daughter, Katie, and Rachel Shaw, who pulled her little girl, Maddie, onto her lap. These were my girls. They were the ones who were always there for me, who had become my Portland sisters in this crazy life.

They didn’t even have to say anything; I just needed them to be there with me.