The Might Have Been

CHAPTER Thirty





Later, safe in his suite in the airport Hilton, twisting the cap off a mini-bar bottle of Jim Beam and slumping, drained and dumb, into an upholstered wing chair in the room, while plane after plane thundered over him, the aftermath of the crash came to him in pieces like a collection of photographs someone had once organized to illustrate a sequence but then dropped, scattering them, confusing the order:

From outside the plane, he could hear sirens approaching but the smoke outside made it impossible to see how near the vehicles were. Inside, the crew was up and moving, forcing open heavy doors, unfurling a gray inflatable slide.

“Please,” the flight attendant who had served their drinks implored, “orderly, orderly.” But passengers ignored her, shoving one another. A plump man wearing a Cardinals cap knocked into the attendant and she tumbled against a small girl. A teenaged boy with a faint blond mustache dusting his upper lip clambered over seat backs, kicking the newlywed husband in the head.

Outside the plane, emergency crews were spraying white foam. It slid across the wing in a wave, some of it blowing in through the emergency exit in the row behind Edward Everett and he felt it wet and sticky on his face, burning his tongue, gagging him.

He was little more than part of a herd, following dumbly the hand signals and exhortations of airmen in uniform directing them across the field, away from the wrecked plane, the tight knot of a hundred or so fellow human beings stumbling across uneven ground, kicking up grasshoppers that stung his hands when they flung themselves up to avoid being trampled. Meg held on to him, unsteady in her impractical heels.

Beside him on the plane, Meg was sobbing. The newly married woman unclasped her seatbelt and stood but it was evident from her vacant gaze that she had no notion she was standing. When she sat back down, she miscalculated, landing partly on the armrest, and slumped into the aisle, her legs splayed in front of her until her husband stood, losing his balance briefly, and then righting himself to take her limp left hand, her good hand, and tug on it gently until she showed him a sign of recognition and he helped her up.

The right leg and crotch of his jeans were damp. At first he worried that he had peed himself, but when he dabbed at the stain tentatively with two fingers of his right hand and held them up to his nose, he realized it was beer.

Beside him in the frenzy of passengers surging for the exits, Meg laid her hand in the crook of his elbow, giving him a squeeze that he understood as Don’t leave me.

Meg was taking his hand and tugging it, insistent, pulling him toward an exit, where he lost his balance and slid headfirst down the chute, clawing at it to keep from falling onto the newly married woman, who was below him, but banging into her shoulder, the fire suppression foam covering their clothing, soaking their hair, until he tumbled at last onto the ground, his face buried momentarily in the foam, and he shoved at the bodies falling into him, thinking: how odd to survive the crash only to drown.



On the bus, he gazed back at the plane. Its underside was scorched, the fuselage sitting in a lake of foam that was beginning to melt. The emergency vehicles turning around made broad arcs in the high grass, clouds of grasshoppers appearing and vanishing, appearing and vanishing, as the vehicles bounced across the field to the roadway. He thought: My laptop! My luggage! But the bus was pulling away, joining the line of other buses, its engine rough, the foul scent of diesel fuel filling his nostrils.

He spit something hard and sharp out of his mouth into his cupped hand, a fragment of a tooth, one edge tinged with black, the decay that had made it vulnerable. He considered dropping it onto the floor but it seemed somehow valuable and so he slipped it into the change pocket in his jeans.

Disembarking at the curb outside the St. Louis airport, they moved as a herd, docile now, unlike their frantic push to get out of the plane, down the steps of the bus into the hot and humid St. Louis late morning. He stepped onto a splotch of bubble gum, which stuck to the sole of his right shoe, and every time he took a step his foot made a sucking schmack. Inside the air-conditioned dimness, the terminal seemed frenetic, a pace that confused all of them. They stood there, blinking, as a soldier in camouflage fatigues set down his pack and embraced a gray-haired man.

On the bus—or was it the plane?—Meg handed him a folded piece of paper. He opened it but his mind couldn’t make sense of it: letters and numbers in an unsteady hand, as if someone either very old or very young had written it, and he stared at it until she took it back, folded it again, and slipped it into the pocket of his shirt, saying, “Where are you staying?” But he couldn’t remember if he answered her.

In the hotel room, he finished the whiskey, drinking directly from the bottle, replaced the cap and returned it to the mini-bar and then realized what he was doing, removed it and laid it delicately into the lined wastebasket beneath the desk. He went into the bedroom. It was then that it struck him he had no change of clothes, no toothbrush, no razor. He sat on the edge of the bed and lay back, thinking he would get up in a moment, at least wash his face and hands, but he closed his eyes. He had the sensation of his body spinning. Then it occurred to him that he could not go to his meeting with Marc Johansen, MS, MBA, in clothing reeking of sweat and beer. He sat up, took off his clothes, pulled the complimentary robe off the hanger in the closet, put it on and went down to the laundry on the ground floor. When his clothes were finished, he went back to his room, and lay down without pulling back the blankets. From across the room, his cellphone rang and he thought he should answer it but closed his eyes and didn’t remember it ceasing to ring as he fell asleep.

The directions Marc Johansen, MS, MBA, gave him took him thirty miles from the Hilton, past affluent residential developments and a shopping plaza with stores designed after Swiss chalets, past exit after exit of Denny’s and McDonald’s and Ruby Tuesdays and Lowe’s. He realized he was out of sync with the pace of heavy traffic in a large city and, as the stream of cars and trucks rushed past, he kept his rented sub-compact in the right lane, often caught behind lumbering trucks hauling heavy construction equipment.

After a time, he came to a state route that led him to a series of county roads that rose and fell along the edge of the Ozark Mountains, past modest tract houses and trailer parks, and then farther still, past limestone rock faces and wooded areas, until he reached a narrow private road marked with an etched wooden sign reading “Gossage Farms” and turned onto it, creeping uphill between trees so dense their branches scraped the roof of his car. When he crested the hill, the landscape opened onto a lush pasture on both sides of the road, bounded by wire fencing. Spread across it, forty or fifty horses grazed while, a hundred yards off, two figures cantered along a ridge.

Finally, he came to a metal gate at the end of a drive leading to a barn and, beyond that, a broad stone house with a wraparound porch. The gate was closed and he pulled over and got out, struck immediately by the overwhelming stench of manure and damp hay. As he was about to lift the fence latch, a voice called out, “Jesus, don’t,” and a man he hadn’t noticed trotted toward him. He was short but fit, wearing a black Stetson that shadowed his face. His rubber boots and the cuffs of his jeans were caked with what at first seemed graying mud but when he reached the gate, Edward Everett could smell that it was manure. The man lifted the cover on a metal box mounted to a fence post, flicked a switch and a humming Edward Everett hadn’t previously heard ceased.

“We don’t need any lawsuits,” the man said, unlatching the gate. “You can leave your car there so it doesn’t get filthy.” Once Edward Everett was through the gate, the man shut it and turned the current back on, the fence sparking briefly as an insect flew against it. “Be careful where you step.” The man pointed to a dollop of manure less than a foot from where Edward Everett stood, black and green flies swirling above it.

“I’m looking for—” Edward Everett said, trying to watch his feet among the manure piles and yet keep pace with the man who was taking careless strides along the gravel drive, clearly unconcerned when he stepped into one of the piles.

“Me,” the man said, and Edward Everett realized it was Marc Johansen, MS, MBA.

“I didn’t recognize you,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

“I have no idea why,” Johansen said, his tone suggesting he might be joking but Edward Everett wasn’t sure. “This is one of my mother’s places and every year I come out and pretend to be a rancher for a week.”

He led Edward Everett to the porch, stopping at the bottom of the steps leading to it to slip off his boots. “Come on in,” he said. “Give me a chance to clean up and then we can get down to business.”

Inside, Johansen left him in a massive great room with a granite floor and a two-story-high exposed-beam ceiling. Along one wall, four large windows looked out onto another pasture, which ran unimpeded for as far as he could see. Dotting it, rolled bales of hay browned in the sun. The room was furnished with several dark leather couches as well as cherrywood coffee tables bearing carefully arranged arrays of thick, glossy magazines fanned out. He sat gingerly on one of the couches, waiting. A rush of water poured through the plumbing as if someone had flushed a toilet, soon followed by a steady hiss.

After a few moments, he felt uncomfortable sitting idly and so picked up one of the magazines and realized that every one of them was an identical issue of Architectural Digest. He flipped through it. “Italian Marble Renaissance,” read one headline for an article on bathroom floors. “Peak Performance,” read another about slate and tile roofs. As he started to close it he saw that the spine was broken and when he laid it flat, it opened naturally to the beginning of a spread about the very house he was in, a full-page photograph of the room in which he sat, sunlight slanting in through the windows. On page after page, the spread showed stone floors, granite counters, bathrooms with sunken tubs, cherrywood cabinets that reflected recessed ceiling lights.

He turned to the opening page: “As a girl, Sylvia Johansen cherished her family’s annual visits to the Missouri horse farm of her grandfather, Michael Gossage,” it began. “ ‘When my husband died, I asked myself where I wanted to spend the next thirty years of my life and I realized that was it,’ Mrs. Johansen said. Her family had sold the original property in 1973 and so she spent fourteen million for a rolling five-hundred-acre expanse in nearby Franklin County and another nine million re-creating her grandfather’s house. Using the family’s extensive collection of historical photographs, she turned to architect—”

He closed the magazine and returned it to the table. The house was silent, Johansen clearly finished with his shower, and Edward Everett wondered if they were the only people in it. This must be what real wealth sounds like, he thought, this almost utter silence, as if the house were reverential of the very money that had built it. Twenty-three million dollars, he thought. Did that include the furnishings? How much did the couch he was sitting on cost? Could a couch cost as much as five thousand dollars? The last one he’d bought came from a closeout sale at a bankrupt furniture store, the one he and Renee had bought last Christmas when she announced abruptly that she was tired of the used furniture they owned and he had taken her to the store as a way of placating her. It had cost what had seemed to him the improbable sum of nine hundred dollars and he had cringed when he signed the credit card receipt that, with tax and delivery, called for just north of a thousand dollars. For a short while, it had made her happy and she had scoured the ads from the Sunday Des Moines Register for other bargains, but then one day she noticed that Grizzly’s claws had begun snagging the fabric when he jumped on the couch to sit with them while they watched television and that had been the end of her happiness over it. Less than a year after he’d bought it, the fabric was water-stained and the cushion where he sat sagged. A thousand dollars, more than he had ever spent for a single piece of furniture in his life, but compared with the substantial piece he was on, it seemed made of balsa wood and cheap cotton.

Then it struck him: The furnishings in this room cost more than I earn in a year. He felt a sick weight in his chest. What could someone possibly do to afford such a place? It’s one of my mother’s places, Johansen had said. Edward Everett had thought of Collier as wealthy, with his splendid home in the hills of Perabo City and his eleventh-floor condo two blocks from a beach in Destin, Florida, but Johansen and his mother made Collier appear middle-class—made Edward Everett seem two inches from welfare. Perhaps over all the years of his getting up every day and going to a ballpark somewhere in a small town, he had earned a million; with the jobs he had in some winters, maybe as much as a million and a half. What was that? Five percent of the cost of this house?

“I’m sorry to have kept you waiting,” Johansen said, coming into the room. He was barefoot, his hair damp, his feet slapping on the stone as he walked across it. He had changed into black jeans and a beige polo shirt with the big club’s logo over the left breast, a cartoon snarling cougar. He sat on the couch perpendicular to the one where Edward Everett sat, glancing at the row of Architectural Digest magazines on the table. “I had hoped she would have put those away by now. There’s something gauche about it. Oh well, I didn’t bring you here to talk about my mother’s choice in magazines. Look—” He tapped a palm against his forehead. “Slow down, Marc; manners. How was your flight?”

Edward Everett considered telling him the truth but said, “It was fine.” He suddenly felt even more self-conscious in Johansen’s presence, here in the same pair of jeans and shirt he’d worn on the flight while Johansen felt comfortable enough to slouch on a how-many-thousand-dollar sofa and rest his feet on the coffee table.

“I hate like hell all the flying I have to do,” Johansen went on. “Last year, I logged ninety-six thousand miles. It’s a hassle and a half. All the security crap. I guess there’s a reason for it, post nine-eleven, but I’m thinking anything under four hundred miles, I’m driving.” He let out a breath. “Look, I’ve never been good at chitchat. I work on it because my wife tells me I ought to. ‘They’re not just employees, they’re people,’ she says. And so, fine. Cross that off the list.” He made a motion in the air as if he was drawing a check mark. “I hope you’ll forgive me if I get down to things. I have to get to Dallas for a breakfast meeting tomorrow. Things are … well, you’ll understand in a minute.”

He paused, evidently giving Edward Everett an opening to say something, but he wasn’t sure what the moment demanded, and so Johansen went on. “When I came on board I promised the brass I wouldn’t make any significant changes until I had reasonable confidence that I understood how things were. I think I’m there now.”

He paused again and, because the moment clearly demanded some sort of response from him, Edward Everett said, “I know there have been problems.”

“So, you’ve seen them, too?” Johansen said.

“I know that Webber’s getting hurt hasn’t helped things,” Edward Everett said. “Maybe I could have—”

“Webber?” Johansen said.

“The shortstop,” he said. “The one whose shoulder …”

Johansen furrowed his brow. Could it be that he had no idea, without being in front of his almighty spreadsheets, who Webber was?

“I filed a report,” Edward Everett said. “He’s having surgery this week but he’ll probably never—”

“Oh, wait,” Johansen said. “I remember. Kid we picked up from Baltimore. What about him?”

“You mentioned problems and so I thought that was one I could explain.”

Johansen snorted. “This is about larger issues. We certainly aren’t going to kill one of our franchises over one hurt player.”

Edward Everett felt a flutter in his chest. “So, Perabo City is killed.”

“That’s a good part of the reason I brought you down here,” Johansen said. “We decided to shut it down sometime back. I thought you knew.”

“No,” Edward Everett said. So there it was, he thought. Killed, Johansen had said. He thought he had been prepared for this moment but it was like when his mother died. He’d been expecting it for more than a year but when a nurse called him from the hospital, it had still come as a shock—the finality nothing could prepare you for.

“We needed to rebalance our portfolio, to use some of the lingo from my former life,” Johansen said. “I know that the routine is to say, ‘It was a hard decision,’ but it really wasn’t. The fact of the matter is that the owner, what’s-his-name, the meat guy …”

“Collier,” Edward Everett offered.

“Collier. Right. A piece of work. He ran a shoddy, cut-rate franchise. I mean, who operates an entire baseball operation out of a meat company? Then he tried to play hardball with the wrong people. So when we had to get rid of one of our single-A teams it didn’t take long to decide where the hammer should come down.”

“What did he do?” Edward Everett asked, thinking that it was so much like Collier to make a mistake and leave others to pay the price.

“He’d probably sue me for saying I didn’t like his shirt and so I’ll just say he played his hand as if he were sitting on four aces when all he had was seven-high.”

So it was over, Edward Everett thought; there was no softening it. Marc Johansen, MS, MBA, had made him get on a plane that had nearly killed him and come here to sit in a house that cost more than what he would make in twenty lifetimes for this. You can’t fire people long-distance, he could hear Johansen’s wife saying. His being here was just another exercise in her making her husband into a better human being.

“Tell me,” Johansen said, “does he pull that shit with the Lincoln Logs story all the time?”

“What?” Edward Everett said, his tone perhaps sharper than he intended.

“You know. ‘My daddy told me he got me something and I thought it was Lincoln Logs’ and all that crap.”

“Oh,” Edward Everett said. “Yes.”

So, Edward Everett thought, I’m nothing more than collateral damage. He wondered how much longer he needed to stay. He pictured himself on the drive back to the airport hotel, defeated, someone who belonged in the slow lane, a frightened old man confused in traffic. What would he do now? He saw himself as Johansen surely must: gray, balding, fleshy, not much different from the lost old men that Edward Everett saw in supermarkets, lame men slumped in motorized shopping carts, straining to reach the canned soup on the higher shelves.

“So, look—” Johansen began. The door from the wraparound porch opened and Johansen stopped speaking. A woman was saying, “… have Dr. Tao look at his fetlock.”

“I hope it’s all right,” said another woman. “It’s so soon after you had to put down Falcon. I shouldn’t have taken that jump.”

“You’ve done it a hundred times,” said the first woman. “I’m sure—” The women stopped at the entrance to the room. In the dimness, they seemed to be twins, both slight, not much over five feet tall, their hair done in identical shoulder-length braids. “I’m sorry,” the first woman said. “I didn’t realize anyone was here.”

Johansen stood and Edward Everett did as well. “Mother, Joni,” Johansen said as the two women came into the room, their boots clacking on the stone floor.

“I’m Syl Johansen,” the first woman said, and as they came nearer, Edward Everett could tell they were not, in fact, twins. While the first woman was clearly older than he was, perhaps in her mid-seventies, the younger woman was no more than thirty. Syl extended her hand to shake Edward Everett’s, her grip much stronger than he would have expected from someone so tiny.

“I’m Ed Yates,” he said dully, not wanting to but nonetheless thinking of the money she had.

Syl cocked her head to one side. “Like the Irish poet or the American novelist?”

“I’m sorry?” Edward Everett said. “I don’t—”

“Ed manages for us up in Iowa,” Johansen said.

“Oh,” Syl said, giving the younger woman a look that clearly suggested the answer Johansen had given had immediately moved Edward Everett from one category, “men who were interesting,” to another, “men for whom she had no use.”

“Mother thinks of you as something like a two-legged polo pony,” Johansen said.

“I do not,” Sylvia said.

“Your words, Mother,” Johansen said, adding a wink, as if Edward Everett were now part of a conspiracy he didn’t fully understand. “As far as Mother is concerned, I live in two worlds. There’s my old world, working for my grandfather’s company, and there’s my new world, where I deal with two-legged polo ponies. Ed, sorry to say, you’re part of the second.”

“Stop it,” Sylvia said. “Mr. Yates, I don’t know what my son is—”

“Last month,” Johansen said, “at the Bridle Boutique—that’s B-R-I-D-L-E, as in horses, it’s a fund-raiser for abused equines—those things always have such clever—”

“I’m sorry,” Edward Everett interrupted, no longer masking his anger over being caught in a game between Johansen and his mother just when Johansen was about to tell him he was finished. “I’m sorry, but I think I’m just going to go.”

“I don’t understand—” Johansen said.

“I didn’t fly all the way here to lose my job and be made the butt of a joke.”

“Lose your job?” Johansen said.

“Marc, did you fly this man all the way—” Joni said.

“Good Lord, Ed,” Johansen said, laying a hand on Edward Everett’s shoulder. “I wouldn’t have flown you here to tell you I was letting you go.”

“He’s too much of a coward for that,” Sylvia said.

“Syl, you promised,” Joni said. “Mr. Yates, I apologize for my mother-in-law’s rudeness, interrupting your business with my husband.”

“Business?” Sylvia snapped. “The company his grandfather started is business. This is a hobby.”

Her daughter-in-law took her arm firmly. “Enough,” she said, sharply, pulling Sylvia with her out of the room.

“Joan, this is …” Sylvia began to say, but whatever this was, Edward Everett did not hear because they were soon beyond earshot.

“Please,” Johansen said, his voice soft, perhaps even penitent. “Sit down and hear me out. I wasn’t going to fire you. I was going to ask you if you wanted a job.”

By the time he left Johansen, it was dark, nearly nine p.m. As he crept down the long, narrow, steep road that led from the horse farm, he slid one of the CDs Johansen had given him into the car’s stereo. After a moment, a woman’s voice came from the speaker: “It’s a pleasure to meet you. Es un gusto conocerie.”

He repeated the phrase. He could hear the Midwestern awkwardness in his pronunciation and he said it once again before the woman’s voice went on: “The pleasure is mine. El gusto es mio.”

“El gusto es mio,” he repeated.

He was going to Costa Rica and he had Renz to thank. Renz, whose voice dripped with sarcasm when he complained about delinquent spreadsheets, when he spoke to him about pitiful Ross Nelson. He’d hated Renz and now he had to thank him for his new job.

“What do you know about any of the proprietary metrics we’ve been using?” Johansen had asked after the two sat down again.

“A little,” Edward Everett had said tentatively, thinking surely Johansen was not offering him a job centered on the arcane statistics he and Renz loved so much.

“There won’t be a test,” Johansen said, his voice still soft, no doubt to compensate for his mother’s shocking behavior. “The main point is that we’ve been taking a look at some of the Poe scores across the organization.”

“Poe?”

“I’m sorry. P-O-E. Performance Over Expectation. It’s a value we derive by combining several—” Johansen laughed. “Short story: Renz—did you know he sleeps maybe three hours a night? He’s going to have my job before the year’s out … That would make my mother happy, at least. At any rate, Renz started playing around with … well, the tools we use when we prepare for the draft. We think they can predict, with some accuracy, how a player will perform at various levels in the organization based on … well, never mind what it’s based on. At any rate, he thought that if we backdoored it, took a look at what the numbers might have predicted about players who already had a track record, we could tweak it so it would have even more accuracy as a predictor. Renz started to notice that some players were outliers—”

Edward Everett opened his mouth to ask what an “outlier” was but Johansen caught himself, smacking his forehead. “Look, I am who I am and so forgive the jargon, because the method is not important. What’s important is that Renz asked: what conclusions can we draw about the outliers—you know, the players who perform better than the numbers would have predicted—and one of the factors he looked at was coaching. I mean, it’s simple. I should have thought of that but I didn’t. Renz did. The already-too-long story made short is that he took a look at data for players that’ve run through your teams going back twenty years and found a not inconsequential—oh, hell. When we started correlating aggregate POE scores to coaching, your numbers were damn good. This year, for example, Martinez—we really thought he was nothing more than an organization player, maybe he’d get, best case, three years, but surely not much above A ball. But now he could turn out to be something. And there was that kid you had in Missoula, independent ball, who stuck it out for four seasons with the Giants. How many guys in indie ball ever get to the big leagues? One in a thousand? A handful of outliers—you can ascribe that to acceptable error, but yours were not statistically insignificant.”

Not statistically insignificant. In the world of Marc Johansen, MS, MBA, that amounted to something approaching praise, Edward Everett guessed.

On the CD, the woman was saying, “Can you direct me to … Puede usted decirme cómo llegar a.” He laughed. He’d fretted about hanging on in Perabo City, as if managing a broken-down single-A team was something to fight to hang on to. He’d let his vision narrow. Baseball was dead in Perabo City, but it wasn’t dead to him.

Costa Rica. He had no idea where it was, exactly. Somewhere south, somewhere they spoke a language he knew only well enough to communicate in a rudimentary way with his Latin players. “Untapped territory,” Johansen had called it. “Think of Nicaragua, Venezuela, the Dominican Republic as tapped-out mines. Everyone and his brother has scouted every bush, every rock.” Costa Rica was another story and Costa Rica was where he was headed. “We’re going to find the best athletes and you’ll help turn as many of them into ballplayers as you can,” Johansen said.

They would pay him half again as much as he earned for this season. “We’ll make it a three-year contract,” Johansen had said. “We know you don’t want to leave everything without a guarantee.” Leave what? Edward Everett thought. If he stuck out the full three years, they would give him another year’s salary in deferred compensation to reward him for staying. It was nowhere near twenty-three million dollars but it was something most people didn’t have: a guarantee he wouldn’t be destitute for the rest of his life.

When he got back to the hotel, it was past ten. Parking the car, he thought of himself as he’d been the day before: someone certain he was going to lose his job, someone certain, for how many minutes, that he was going to die in a crash with a hundred strangers. That was a different self. That self was grateful for what amounted to table scraps from the banquet of life, as his father had once said apropos of his own settling. The self shifting the car into “park” and setting the emergency brake as a massive American Airlines jet swooped over him had a guarantee of more than a quarter million dollars over the next thirty-six months, all for leaving a town that no longer had any hold on him and moving to a country he couldn’t even pick out on a map.

Hell, he thought, the self he had been when he left this very lot earlier in the day was a different man. That man had been stunned, that man had despised Marc Johansen, MS, MBA, for the decision Edward Everett was certain would mean deprivation for the rest of his days. That self never would have seen Marc Johansen, MS, MBA, as a living, breathing human being with a mother he’d made unhappy—a mother who made the same pronouncement about her son’s desire to be part of baseball that Edward Everett’s had three decades ago when he had told her that he had signed the minor league contract with the Cleveland organization. We’re brothers of a sort, he thought with a laugh. He’s the rich brother, sure, but brothers.

Just before Edward Everett had left, Johansen walked him out to his car. After he shut off the current to the fence, as Edward Everett was about to open his car door, Johansen had said, his voice kind, “You know, what happened to you was the shit.”

“How do you mean?”

“That injury. Montreal,” Johansen said. “I Googled you. What a day you were having, and then, bang, all over.” Even in the darkness as they stood on either side of the gate, Edward Everett could see Johansen shake his head sadly. “I don’t know how you didn’t give up. Someone else, they’d’ve thrown in the towel. Succumbed to bitterness.”

Touched, Edward Everett said, “It never occurred to me.” Of course, it had—but in this new version of his life, he hadn’t fallen into bitterness over his bad luck.

“It’s probably no consolation,” Johansen said, “but at least you got there. You know? For a minute and a half. I … A lot of guys say that it was the curveball that kept them out of baseball, but for me it was everything. Hit the curve? Hell, I couldn’t hit a fastball. Or a change. Or a ball someone laid out there on a plate and said, ‘Take your best cut.’ ” They shook hands and Johansen said, “You must really love the game.”

“I guess I do,” Edward Everett said.

Walking from his car toward the bright foyer of the hotel, he thought, What a difference a day makes. There was a song like that, it struck him, and he pushed open the door to the air-conditioned lobby humming the tune. He hummed it as he jabbed the button for the elevator and was humming it still when, just as the doors slid open and he waited for two children in swimsuits to exit, a woman coming up behind him spoke his name.

“I kept telling myself I was going to leave in fifteen minutes,” she said when he turned around. Meg. The woman from the flight. “For an hour and a half, I kept saying, ‘Fifteen minutes, fifteen minutes,’ but every time fifteen minutes passed, I thought about going back to my daughter’s and how messed up they were—all of their New Age blady-blah about how this had to happen and there was a reason I survived. But then I thought about how I at least have a messed-up daughter who I can visit and a granddaughter who doesn’t deserve her silly name. But you had this boy that you never—and I felt so sorry for you.” She shrugged. “Maybe it’s my own New Age blady-blah but something told me I should come here.” She laid a hand gently on his arm. “Is it okay to go upstairs?”

“Yes,” he said.

In the morning when he woke, she was gone. She left a note on a hotel postcard. “Forgive my presumption.” And then a phone number with an area code the same as his. Just before he checked out, when he was pulling back the covers to make certain he wasn’t leaving anything behind—despite the fact that he had no luggage, it was a force of habit after hundreds of nights in hotels—he found a pink sock she evidently hadn’t been able to find whenever she’d left, an anklet with the fabric worn thin at the heel. He folded it neatly and put it into the pocket of his jeans.

The flight, as he felt fate owed him, was uneventful. There was no rain and nearly no turbulence. When the plane began its descent, they passed over a river he thought must be the Flann, the one that ran along the edge of Perabo City. Fields around it were in flood still; the tops of trees poked out from the water, as did the roofs of houses and barns. The water seemed placid, unthreatening to anything at all. It ebbed and flowed gently against the sides of buildings and their reflections rippled against the actual structures. Under the full sun, the water gleamed and he thought that it was actually beautiful. What would that be in Spanish? he wondered. “Agua” was “water” and “hermoso” was “beautiful” but how would he say it in a sentence? El agua es hermoso. That isn’t right, he thought, but close enough. “Agua es hermoso,” he said aloud. “Agua es hermoso.”