The Might Have Been

CHAPTER Twenty-eight





Once, between the first time she left him and the second, Renee came home from work and told him a story: she was setting up a PowerPoint display to show a redesign of the bank’s logo to a focus group and while she was plugging the projector into her laptop, one of the women there was telling everyone about her mother, who was in the hospital after a stroke, on a respirator, expected to die. Among them was a new assistant manager, a freshly minted MBA from Marquette, and when the woman finished her story, he had shaken his head and said, “What is she? Sixty? She’s had a good life. Let her go.” Edward Everett and Renee laughed about the story. “You’ve had a good life,” she would say when he complained about feeling stiff on waking in the morning, when, before the season started, he sometimes said that he was ready for bed as early as nine p.m., when he asked her to repeat something she had said.

For the days that remained of the home stand after he received the divorce papers, the joke came back to him often but it was no longer funny. Until now, sixty was another generation, not his. Even when he had turned sixty, it hadn’t seemed anything more than a number he would write on a form that asked “age.” Sixty was his mother when he lived with her after his injury in Montreal, his mother counting out blood pressure and cholesterol pills at the breakfast table. Sixty was his uncle dying of a heart attack four years after Edward Everett stopped working with him, too many steaks and cigarettes.

But now, with his wife gone and as he waited for the “Organizational Changes” email with his name in it, he felt the full brunt of sixty: sixty and no idea of how he’d arrived there so quickly; sixty and no notion of where he would be next year. You’ve had a good life. You’ve had a good life.

At the ballpark—not quite a ballpark—he went through the motions, twenty years of managing making it like riding a bike, still saying the right things, making the right moves, knowing when to pull a pitcher, when to pinch-hit, when to shift the fielders in a situation where a hitter would be more likely to hit the other way, effective enough that they went on a winning streak, the home stand nine wins and two losses.

Then, after the games, he cleared out quickly, often even before all of his players had gone home. Two nights after Sandford’s gem of a game, alone in the damp locker room, the dripping showerheads leaking water even more rapidly, the pipes developing a whine, it struck him that his father had hung himself in such a place, bitter over the fateful “no” he had said to the man who became one of the greatest football coaches in college history. What had sent him over the edge? he wondered. Did suicide sit in the body like a cancer gene, waiting, inevitable? Was it festering in him?

But at home, things were no better. He began over and over the steps he knew he needed to take. He studied the financial form attached to the divorce agreement—assets, debts, property—but every time he set out to make progress on it, it seemed daunting. How much was his car worth? How much could he sell his house for? As for his bank statements, they were all a jumble, stacked in a drawer, still in their envelopes and in no particular order: May 2007 on top of January 2003 on top of March 2006. How had he let it get to such a state? He put the financial disclosure aside, still blank, and went down to his basement, regarding the boxes that filled so much of the space there, so many things he had no need to hold on to, thinking he should haul them to the curb, take them to the Goodwill, but it all seemed so overwhelming and so he went back upstairs, closing the door on the chaos.

Renee haunted the house—the bedroom, yes, where he lay awake at night, seeing her with whoever represented her “moving on,” a man younger than he was, faceless, propping himself above Renee on his elbows, driving into her, Renee’s face fixed in a way he remembered too well, her eyes squeezed shut, her lips parted slightly, on the very edge of coming. They were in the living room, on the sofa, on the floor. In the kitchen, as he shook dog food out of the bag into Grizzly’s bowl, they were with him at the table, Renee leaning across toward her faceless “moving on,” a foot nudging his foot. (I have an idea, the two stumbling toward the bedroom.) He wondered if the man had been there when he’d been on the road, and stripped the bed, looking for proof, knowing at the same time it was ludicrous, the ghost of stains mottling the mattress pad offering him evidence of nothing.

To avoid seeing them, the hours away from the ballpark became a wasteland of television and junk food; he wallowed in nostalgia (But then, wasn’t that the purpose of nostalgia, the wallowing?), watching especially game shows from the late 1960s and the 1970s, the time he had come to think of as his prime, Edward Everett, the invincible athletic stud: Let’s Make a Deal, The Match Game, The Newlywed Game, studying the contestants in their thirty-year-old fashions and hairstyles, the men in broad-lapeled jackets and wide ties, the women jumping up and down in polyester slacks and blouses, beehive hairdos and perfect perms. He wondered if they sometimes stumbled upon their younger selves when they, too, sleepless, were flipping channels, and sat thinking, How did I become who I am now? How many of the contestants were still alive, how many of the couples laughing about their ignorance of each other were still together, still preferred the morning when they made whoopee, still called each other “babycakes”?

In the early morning hours, when the game shows disappeared and the infomercials moved in, magic vitamins and foolproof investment schemes, he went through his boxes of game log cards, counting his players who had left the game long ago, smarter men than he, players who saw their years in the minor leagues as an interesting diversion on their way to practicing law or opening a pharmacy or becoming, as one of them had, a professional fishing guide in Montana. He found Christmas cards they’d sent with small notes letting him know how far they had moved away from the game he could never seem to let go: “Here’s me and the missus at the lake.” “Here’s the kids with Santa.” More recently, the cards from some of them contained snapshots of grandchildren, fat-cheeked infants with oversized baseball caps sitting cockeyed on their heads. He realized they had seen the open door to the world outside the locker room as an invitation and not banishment; baseball was just an interesting visa stamp in the passport of their lives, while he had gotten stuck at the border, unable to cross.

One day, going through boxes, he found the snapshots that Julie had sent him.

He spread them across the kitchen table, arranging them chronologically by the dates on the postmarks: two dozen images of the boy lined up, looking back at him, the father he had never met: the father, it struck Edward Everett, he may never have known he had. He wondered if the boy had ever thought to look for him; maybe he had trailed him up until Lexington, where Edward Everett lived before Perabo City, and then had given up one address short, just missing the connection.

One by one, Edward Everett picked up the photographs, looking closely into the face. The boy’s eyes were brown, he realized—his color, not Julie’s—but the child’s face more closely resembled hers, was round where his was more angular, and yet the chin was his, not Julie’s: while hers came to a slight point—he had once called her his little elf—the boy’s chin was square. How odd, he thought, to have pieces of himself out there, somewhere, eyes, chin, hair. He tried to envision what the boy would look like by now, the grown man he would have turned into, thirty-two, thirty-three, maybe a father himself. I promise you, son, I won’t abandon you the way my own father did.

Sitting in the kitchen, trying not to acknowledge the ghost of Renee and her new man who tugged at his consciousness (I have an idea, hand extended, stumbling toward the bedroom), he realized that the photographs revealed nearly nothing about the life the boy was living. It occurred to him that Julie must have chosen the photographs in the same spirit that caused her to refuse to give him a return address or to write a note giving him news of herself or the boy. There was never another person in any of the photographs, only fragments of them: the forearm and shoulder of whoever held the boy outside the church at his baptism; a disembodied upraised beefy hand of a man holding a glass aloft, joining the boy in the toast he was making; the edge of a white dress worn by the girl standing beside him on the altar at his First Communion; the shadow of whoever snapped the last photograph, the boy on his bike, the shadow spilling across the sidewalk, submerging the bike’s rear tire.

What anger she must have carried, he thought. He couldn’t even recall the name of the woman in Montreal: Hester, Heather, something; did he ever know her last name? He couldn’t even conjure her face, what color her hair was. He saw his hand on her hip, remembered that her dress had been some slick and shiny material: silk? He remembered her stockinged feet, high heels in her hand, an orchid behind her ear, her slapping her fiancé. Nothing beyond that. She was upset and he comforted her; it was a response out of kindness, wasn’t it? It was a blip in his life; she had vanished into the vast country of the past.

He collected the photos, returned them to the envelope and then lost them again; the next night, home before midnight following a seven–three win, a complete game by Sandford, he wondered if he had perhaps missed something in them that might give him a clue about where they had been taken. But he couldn’t find them.

Searching for them, however, led him to wonder if he had done enough to try to find Julie and the boy. He remembered the phone number he had punched into his cellphone on the day Webber broke his shoulder and scrolled through the call log looking for it. On the third ring, a woman answered and he gripped the phone more tightly.

“Is this the home of Colin Aylesworth?” he said. “I’m looking for—”

“I’m sorry,” the woman said. “He’s deceased.”

His son was dead. He sucked in his breath, his forehead suddenly clammy.

“I know this is awkward,” Edward Everett said. “But what was … how old was he?”

“He was eighty-three,” the woman said. “I was his …” She was going to say daughter, he knew, and it would turn out to be Julie, after all these years. Ed? she would say, her voice full of forgiveness. But the woman went on. “… wife. Are you a former patient of his?”

“Yes,” Edward Everett lied.

“It’s been touching how many have called to say what a wonderful doctor he was,” she said. “He was always so good with the children who came to see him.”

“Are you at all related to a Julie Aylesworth?” he asked.

“He had a sister, Julie, but she passed a long while ago, when they were just children themselves,” the woman said.

“No other?” he asked.

“I’m sorry?” she said. “I don’t know what his sister has to do—”

“I meant, I’m sorry for your loss. Your husband was a wonderful doctor.”

“Did your scars heal?” she asked.

“Scars?”

“Most of the children—the burns—but he worked so hard to make sure that their faces, at least … so they could lead normal lives. Did yours heal well?”

“Yes,” he said. “Your husband did good work. He saved my life.”

He went through boxes in his basement, hauled mildewed books and clothing to the curb and took to the Goodwill what the water in his basement hadn’t ruined, wondering: When did I acquire this and why did I hold on to it?—golf clubs, tennis rackets, copies of Street & Smith’s Baseball Yearbook from the 1960s to the 1980s. He was in one of them, he realized, and found the issue for the 1977 season that contained the statistics for anyone who had appeared in a major league game the year before. The pages were gray and brittle, flecks of paper drifting to his living room rug, settling onto the folds in his shirt, the tips of his shoes. He found himself in the back, at the final entry of an appendix, “Players with fewer than ten official at-bats,” his last name and first initial, a single game and a string of zeros, save for the columns for batting average and slugging percentage, which read simply “—,” the equation a mathematical impossibility, zero-indivisible-by-zero. Still, that single impotent line was evidence he had been there.

He pulled out the issue and boxed the others and took them to the Goodwill, along with two boxes of his father’s clothing his mother had sent him twenty-five years earlier, when she finally got around to clearing out his father’s possessions. “You might be able to wear some of these,” she had written in a brief note, scrawled on a sheet of green paper she’d torn from a stenographer’s notebook. When they arrived, he was living in Sioux City, his second season coaching, and he had come home after midnight to find the boxes in the hall of his apartment building, blocking his door. He’d opened them, the inside of the box musty, and stared at the wrinkled, hastily folded shirts and slacks. He had no idea what his mother might have been thinking: what would he want with the clothes of a dead man? He considered throwing them away but felt a twinge of guilt: these clothes had once been something his father would have run his hands across as he flipped through the shirts, trying to decide what to put on his body that day. So he had hauled them around for nearly half his life. But, by now, certainly whatever obligation he had to them as remnants of his father had expired; they were just pieces of stitched cotton and rayon.

Out making his runs to charity, he noticed that so many of the landmarks of his life had disappeared. The jeweler’s where he found Renee’s ring was shut, the name and hours of operation painted on the glass front door nearly chipped away: how long had it been closed? The office of the physical therapist where he’d gone after surgery on what had been his good knee had vanished—the operation necessary because too many years of favoring his injured one wore the other out as well. Now the building was missing, just a dark gap between a bowling alley and a nail-and-tanning salon. When had that happened? Gone, too, was the diner where he’d met the first woman he dated when he moved to Perabo City—Sheila? Shirley? She’d been a waitress, they’d flirted, he left her extravagant tips—five dollars for a four-dollar meal—and they’d seen each other for two months.

It was not just the ball club that was leaving town: the town was leaving town.

One night, as he watched a bearded man and his skinny wife win a new refrigerator on The Newlywed Game, he could hear another party next door at the Duboises’. He moved through the kitchen and out onto his deck, easing the door closed, wincing at the sharp click of the latch, and stood in the shadow, listening. On the deck next door, all he could make out were silhouettes of perhaps a dozen people, voices overlapping voices, until he heard Rhonda exclaim, “Oh, Neh Neh,” her nickname for Renee that she resurrected when she’d been drinking. He stepped farther out onto his deck, squinting into the night as if it would make the dark forms somehow distinct. Renee’s laugh came back to him, followed by a male voice: “If I’d known this, I’d never—” Never what? Never have taken you from your husband.

He went back inside. Grizzly lay sleeping in his corner of the kitchen and he raised his head, briefly and indifferently, and then pawed at his bedding for a moment before going back to sleep. In the living room, The Newlywed Game had given way to The Dating Game, and as the host introduced the three bachelors sitting smugly on their high stools—all wide lapels, permed hair and toothy smiles—and the bachelorette began asking them questions peppered with double entendres, Edward Everett got the itch to call women he’d known, and the next day he did. Certainly one was stuck in her own bit of stasis while everyone else rushed on into their private futures; certainly one would exclaim, Oh. I was just thinking of you. Anita answered the phone, breathless after dashing inside from unloading groceries from the car, she said, thinking it was her daughter calling to be picked up from dance class, and then was confused when Edward Everett told her who he was. Magda, whom he’d met on her second day in the country after she’d emigrated from Poland, didn’t answer but her answering machine had two voices on it: “Hi, this is Roger. And Maaaagdaaaa! We’re probably out walking our Weimaraners. Leave a message.” Some had just disappeared: Sharon’s number was disconnected; Liz’s belonged to a body shop.

One was happy to hear from him, Audrey, a new-accounts clerk he’d met when he took one of his Spanish-speaking players to the bank to help him open an account. “Ed,” she said in a delighted voice when he told her who he was. “We must be on the same wavelength.” She had a confession, she said. “I called you once but didn’t have the nerve to leave a message. And now here you are. It’s kismet.” But soon, she was crying, going on about her most recent boyfriend, whom she’d learned too late was married with a baby on the way; going on about a fight she’d had with a co-worker who, she was convinced, had dinged her car in the parking lot but denied it. He remembered why he’d stopped seeing her and as soon as he could graciously do so, got off the phone, agreeing vaguely when she suggested he drive over to see her after the season ended.

On another night—after a one–nothing win, another gem for Sandford, the win coming when Mraz ended it with a ninth-inning home run arcing over the decaying green wall in left—he called directory assistance in Osterville and asked for the number for McLaughlin, Randall, and called it without hesitating because if he hesitated he would come to his senses. Even as the phone rang, he thought, Hang up. As it rang a second time, he thought: Hang up. In the middle of the third ring, Connie answered in a cheery voice and he was caught off guard.

“Hi,” he croaked out.

“Can I help you?” she asked from six hundred fifteen miles away.

“Con?” he said.

“Who is this?” she asked, and when he told her, she exclaimed, “Oh, my gosh. Ed. My Lord, it’s been … well, a lot of water under, as they say.”

“Yes,” he said. “Too long.”

“Your name came up last year, at the reunion. Forty years since high school, if you can believe that. People started asking about people who weren’t there.”

He wondered if she was still married to McLaughlin, how he could ask. He saw them starting out slowly, phone calls every couple of weeks. When the season was over and he was at the end of baseball, he could drive over to see her. They could have dinner; maybe the Victorian tearoom where they’d had their first, awful date thirty years earlier was still open. They’d see how things went. The thought struck him: was she jowly, double-chinned, her white hair thinning? He was no prize, though: not obese, but slow, achy in the morning, his knee forever in pain.

“How’s Billy?” he asked, her son’s name pushing into his memory: the frail boy yelling “Stop” when they wanted to put the giant stuffed bear into the trunk.

She laughed. “He’s William now. Not Billy. His son, William Junior, got married last year and they’re expecting a baby. I keep saying, ‘I’m too young to be a great-grandmother.’ What about you? I’ll bet you’re married and have a whole passel of kids.”

“No,” he said. “I was. Married, I mean.” He shrugged, although she couldn’t possibly see that over the phone.

“I’m so sorry,” she said, a touch of what seemed genuine concern in her voice. He waited for her to tell him about herself, about marrying McLaughlin and divorcing him—a rebound relationship after he had gone off to Erie.

“Randy and I …” Got divorced, he waited for her to say, but she went on. “I guess you don’t know. I married Randy McLaughlin. It’s been thirty years.” She laughed. “I can hear you thinking, him? But he’s a dear, a good daddy to Billy. William, I mean. We should all get together sometime if you’re over this way.”

Edward Everett wanted the call to end after he learned that she and Randy McLaughlin were still together, but he couldn’t graciously hang up until the conversation came to some kind of ending. Finally, she said, “Oh, Randy just drove up. He would love to say hey.”

“I’d like to,” he lied, “but I have a conference call in fifteen minutes and I have to go over some game logs beforehand.”

“Conference call? This late at night?”

“The director of PD is … Well, he wants what he wants when he wants it.”

“I know the type. Now that you have my number, don’t be a stranger. And I’ve got yours off caller ID. William gave us this fancy phone package for Christmas. It’s all beyond me. Call waiting. Wireless Internet.” From the background of where she was, he heard a male voice calling, “Hello? Hon?”

“I need to get going here, Connie.”

“Sure, stay in touch.”

He started to hang up but not before, from her end, he heard her say, “You won’t believe …”

He sat in the darkness, folding the scrap of paper with her number in half, then in quarters, then eighths, until it was so small he couldn’t make any more folds in it. He pushed himself out of the chair and used the foot lever to spring open the trash can and dropped the scrap on top of the coffee filter from earlier in the day and went to bed.

Two days later, on the weekend before the All-Star break, Marc Johansen, MS, MBA, emailed to say he wanted to meet. “I’m in St. Louis for family business,” he wrote. “Am overnighting a plane ticket for Sunday. Meet Monday. Directions attached.” Short, efficient. Edward Everett wondered if Claussen’s email from Mark Johansen, MS, MBA, just before the organization had fired him had been as curt.