But he was kind of asking, wasn’t he?
“Were you feeling all right?” I didn’t know how else to put it.
He surprised me by smiling. “No, not at all.”
“Bellyache?”
“Yeah, a two-month bellyache called Vivian-itis.” He exited at Elysian Park and wound through the back ways.
“Shut up.” He was making my face and neck tingle again.
“Symptoms include desperate longing and an inability to do anything but feel like a douchebag. Patient can’t do shit on the field but stand there like an ass, wondering what the fuck he’s doing with his life. It’s chronic. No known cure.”
“We’ll try to manage the symptoms.”
He pulled up to a back gate where a security guard sat by a portable wood stand. The guard was older than dirt, with a big smile and a bounce to his step as he approached the driver side.
“Number nineteen!” he exclaimed. “You’re early. Grounds crew isn’t even here yet.”
“I know.” He handed the security guard his license. “I’m just making sure it’s all there.”
“I think you’ll be pleasantly unsurprised.” He crouched to look through to me. “Hello, miss. Do you have a license you can show me?”
“Oh, sure.” I fished it out, and he went to his little stand and wrote down our license numbers. “I still don’t know why I’m here.”
Dash rested his head against the back of the seat, eyes running up and down my body and landing on the bare ankle over my Keds. He stroked the bone and the skin along the edge of the sneaker. “If I tell you, it’s going to be weird.”
“I like weird.”
“Good.”
The guard handed back our IDs and hit a button on a little grey box he’d taken out of his pocket. The chain-link fence swung out.
Dash pulled forward.
Dodger Stadium was not a suburban, outer-city stadium. It had landed like a spaceship in the middle of the densest part of the city, with a huge forest of a park on the west side and the concrete crease of the Los Angeles River on the east.
The south crescent of the stadium was three hundred acres of sixteen thousand parking spots. I’d seen the lot full, clothed in darkness and spotted with floodlights. I’d been stuck in it for an hour, trying to get out after the eighth inning of a late-season blowout and during meaningless mid-season games. If there was a better way to plan for the exodus of sixteen thousand cars, no one had come up with it in time for Dodgers Stadium.
But that morning, the lot was empty as a winter’s day, its grey as uninterrupted as a Christmas sky. The stadium below looked shoved into a corner like an afterthought. I took a deep breath. I’d never come in this way. Never seen the structure from that angle on such a clear morning. It was both diminutive and majestic.
“It’s overwhelming,” I said.
“You should see it from the field.”
He twisted down into the lot, and everything fell back into proportion. After a few more checkpoints, we pulled into the back of the stadium, where an empty spot waited among many. The sign at the head said “Dash Wallace #19.”
“It must all be worth it for your own spot at Dodger Stadium.”
“Money’s pretty good too.” He shut off the car but didn’t move.
I waited. He tapped the wheel.
“Why am I here?” I asked gently. “It’s hours before game time, and you have plenty to do, I’m sure.”
“Trust me.”
Did I trust him?
He hadn’t earned it.
But I did. I needed to. The alternative was unspeakably dreary.
“We’re already at the stadium, slugger, and the sun’s barely up. I must trust you.”
He pulled back and took a look at me, eating me for breakfast, before getting out and opening my door. I took his hand and stepped out. When my little rubber sole hit the asphalt, I’d accepted a challenge I didn’t think any living woman could meet.
forty
Dash
In hindsight, I was crazy. At the time though, I was getting control of my life. Being proactive. Solving problems. Fixing what was broken. All of those phrases seemed sensible when put next to what I was doing.
When she was finally in arm’s reach, I knew everything would be all right. She would forgive me. I could have her again. Shit started clicking. It wasn’t anything I could point at. I wasn’t playing, so I didn’t have any stats, but my guts stopped twisting. I felt hopeful. Not skipping-on-daisies hopeful, but I didn’t dread getting on the field for opening day.
The bowels of the stadium were empty and scrubbed clean. The floors and walls would get progressively filthier over the season, but now they smelled like pine and bleach. New things.
“Wow,” she said when I turned on the lights in the locker room. “I never thought I’d see this.”
“How unimpressive is it?”
“Not special at all.” Her eyes were as big as donuts, fingers drifting over everything. She stopped at my jersey. WALLACE and a big #19.
“I wanted you to see it before it got too busy.”
She plucked my glove off the shelf and put it on her left hand. “No pin. You sure you’re okay with that?”