The Husband Hour(66)
Lauren stood up. Matt paused the footage.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “You wanted to hear—”
“I know, I know,” she said. “It’s fine. This is not news to me. Pete was with me a lot in the days following Rory’s death. I asked him a million questions. I kept thinking that if I heard every detail, it would somehow make sense. I guess I’m still waiting for it to make sense. It never will.”
“Lauren, there aren’t any answers from his time in the military. If you’re looking to make sense of it all, you have to go back.”
She looked at him. “Back to what?”
Matt closed the Pete Downing interview and pulled up a new file. Lauren sat down.
A skating rink filled Matt’s computer screen. In the foreground, a blue-eyed, thirty-something-year-old man.
Matt turned to her. “This is John Tramm, former assistant coach to the Flyers. Current coach of the Villanova men’s ice hockey team.”
Matt pressed Play.
“There was no hard-and-fast protocol for players who took a hit to the head. So they’d sit on the bench and the team trainer would evaluate them. And there is the expectation for the player to just shake it off. Nothing overt, of course. But hockey culture demands resilience. Guys feel pressure to prove their toughness, and, frankly, they know they can be replaced. Especially the rookies.”
Lauren closed her eyes, suddenly back in Rory’s first apartment in LA, his rookie season. “Are you sure you don’t have a concussion?”
“Jesus, Lauren. Now you’re a doctor?”
Matt, on audio, said something, snapping her attention back to the screen. “I understand there’s a class-action lawsuit by about a hundred retired players.”
The coach answered, “Yes. The lawsuit is in light of the new research about CTE. One of the first to be studied was one of our guys, Larry Zeidel. He was a Flyer. Nickname was Rock. A great guy—everyone loved him. Then he retires and suffers from debilitating headaches. Starts having a bad temper, gets violent, makes crazy financial decisions. Impulsive decisions. His entire life fell apart.”
Lauren nodded, tears sliding down her face.
Matt closed the file and clicked on the next interview.
“I want to show you my conversation with a neurologist.”
A doctor’s office, plaques on the wall, a neat desk. The neurologist had white hair and a very direct gaze. Again, off camera, Matt led the subject of the interview through questions. This time, there were visuals, slides of the brain, normal and diseased side by side. Lauren leaned forward, barely breathing.
The sound of Matt’s voice off camera: “And can you explain exactly what CTE does to the brain?”
“In CTE, a protein called tau builds up around the blood vessels of the brain, interrupting normal function and eventually killing nerve cells. The disease evolves in stages. In stage one, tau is present near the frontal lobe but there are no symptoms. In stage two, as the protein becomes more widespread, you start to see the patient exhibit rage, impulsivity. He most likely will suffer depression.”
Lauren stood up and started pacing.
Matt closed the file. “Does any of this sound familiar to you, Lauren?”
She didn’t bother answering. He knew it did.
“This isn’t the film I was looking for, Lauren. I’d love to hear that Rory was just a gifted athlete turned selfless hero. But he was damaged. He was making irrational decisions by the end, wasn’t he? As if his mind weren’t his own?”
She turned to him, breathing so hard and fast she couldn’t speak.
“I’m not trying to diminish his accomplishments,” said Matt. “His talent. His bravery. I’m not saying that he failed. I’m saying the system failed him.”
She nodded. “Maybe.”
“Not maybe. Definitely. And I need to get this film finished, for other guys like Rory out there. And other women like you.”
She didn’t say anything, just moved her head in a slow, hesitant nod. It was all he needed to start staging the room.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Matt clipped the mic to her top and tucked the sound pack behind her, out of view. She wanted to rest her head on his shoulder, to have him hold her. Her emotional scale was really out of whack.
Matt sat in the chair facing her.
“Are you ready?”
She took a deep breath. “I’m ready.”
“Let’s jump ahead, to the summer of 2011. How did Rory react to the news that he didn’t get an offer from the Kings?”
She’d known nothing about it until his agent mentioned it—at their wedding. Jason said something about how she shouldn’t worry, that someone else would make an offer and he would land somewhere. “This is just a speed bump.”
Lauren was furious that Rory hadn’t told her.
“What’s the point?” he’d said. “I’m done with hockey.”
“No,” she said to Matt. “I didn’t know about the offer until his agent brought it up. He was just a month away from basic training.”
After their honeymoon in Jamaica, they had only two weeks together before Rory left for boot camp at Camp Darby in Fort Benning, Georgia. She crossed each passing day off her calendar, the deadline looming like a guillotine.