fifty-four
Dash
She didn’t come for the walk. I sneaked away after batting practice to call her, but she didn’t answer, and the text I sent right after got no response.
Traffic.
Getting into and out of the north side of downtown sucked on game nights. And Fridays were generally bad.
Next time, she had to leave earlier. I couldn’t deal with this.
I tapped each base, pretending she was there, but as we took batting practice, I had an empty mental place I tried to fill. Something I didn’t do. As if I’d forgotten to brush my teeth. I had to go back and do it, but she wasn’t there. Not in her seat above the dugout even during the national anthem.
Forty thousand people in the stands couldn’t distract me the way the absence of one could.
At first, I thought it was traffic. But by the top of the ninth, her absence was assumed, and it turned from an irritation to outright worry. She wouldn’t just no-show unless something had happened.
Yes, bases were loaded with no outs.
Yes, Rodriguez was coming up to bat. I had all that handled, but when I glanced at her seat behind the dugout, she wasn’t there. I got annoyed with myself. I’d been so worried about my performance and the effect my rituals had on my play that I hadn’t worried about her and where she was. I hadn’t trusted her. Hadn’t assumed she had a life that needed me as much as I needed her. She could slump, strike out, make errors.
And where was she? Was she all right?
Rodriguez was three and oh. One out. He was going to swing. He only needed to get it far enough for the sacrifice. Anything in his wheelhouse would be in play.
I hopped right when I saw the catcher’s signal. Moved forward when I saw the batter move his front foot to left field. Back half a step when I caught a glimpse of how the pitcher held the seams of the ball. The crack of the bat reached my ears long after I knew where the ball was going.
And even then, I was off by about eight inches. The difference between catching it and missing. An out or an error. So I pushed off my toes a little harder. Leapt a little higher. Stretched farther. Still, as the millisecond unwound and the ball spun a little higher and I knew the batter was running, I twisted to get another inch out of my arm.
My wrist bent back predictably as the ball landed full force in the web of my glove, and I closed the fold around it. Then, having reached the apex of my leap, I started falling.
I was in an unexpected position, and my reflex was to protect the ball, not my throwing arm which, because of the last twist, had gotten into the space between my body and the ground.
When I fell, my body weight landed on my hand, and my wrist was at an angle I could not have predicted would result in the entire arm bending in a way it wasn’t supposed to.
I didn’t hear a crack or anything else. The entire stadium went silent with the held breath of forty thousand souls, and the vibration and volume of the silence funneled into pain.
But I couldn’t just lie there.
Whitten was running home from third.
I held up my glove and opened my hand. Youder had probably read my mind before I even hit the ground. He skidded to my side, getting dirt on my face, and plucked the ball out of my glove.
The silence erupted into a joyful roar.
The last thing I thought before the stadium lights were blocked out by the shadowed heads of trainers and coaches was that this had happened because Vivian wasn’t there, and I cared more about what had happened to her than I cared about my broken arm.
fifty-five
Vivian
The TV in Sequoia Hospital’s ER waiting room had been set to the news, which was always depressing. I pitched the idea of the ball game hard, and I got a few sickly backers. They changed the station deep in the third inning. Dash struck out, and I crossed my fingers and prayed he did all right on the field.
Iris’s head was on my lap. Everything had gone quickly and slowly. Having finally gotten a day shift, her mother was at work until six. Iris’s brother was old enough to walk home with her, but he couldn’t take her to the hospital. Her abuela wasn’t answering the phone from the dialysis clinic. The rest of her emergency contacts, by some freak occurrence, were seriously indisposed. I couldn’t wait for the office to make another phone call or get the nurse in, so I made an off-book executive decision that was probably going to get me fired.
I brought her to the hospital.
I’d expected them to tell me she was tired. I thought they’d roll their eyes at me, but thankfully, after only two solid hours of red tape and waiting, they took a blood sample.
They roused her enough to give her a piece of candy. She perked up as if it was Saturday morning.