“If you have nerve damage and we don’t take care of it, you’re doing a lot of waiting from the sidelines.”
He was surprisingly strong, peeling my fingers off the edge of the ambulance entrance. He hopped in the back, and the other trainers got in too. The door was about to slam when I heard Youder’s voice from outside.
“Wait up!” He appeared in the narrow slit between the nearly closed doors. “Nice game, Wallace.” He put the phone in my outstretched hand.
“Couldn’t have done it without you,” I replied.
“You won’t have to.”
Before what he was saying sank in, the doors snapped shut and the siren started pulsing.
I called her anyway, hoping against hope that she was all right. I cared about my arm and my career, but not half as much as I cared about Vivian Foster.
fifty-seven
Vivian
My phone was in my bag, and I was on the 10 freeway. I couldn’t pull over and get it, and I couldn’t answer at fifty mph, which on the 10 was as close to the speed limit as I’d ever gotten near downtown.
The radio announcers celebrated the Dodgers’ win, giving only the most perfunctory non-news of Dash’s injury. They were waiting to hear, but he’d had the game of his career. I’d seen his single misstep from the waiting room. The strikeout in the third inning had been boxed by two doubles, a home run, and seamless fielding.
Once I took the exit and got near the stadium, traffic slowed down. Since most everyone was exiting, the lanes coming in had been blocked off to make more lanes coming out, and still the lot was locked up. I spun right and went back into Elysian Park, looking for the entrance Dash had taken me through on opening day.
My phone rattled “Take Me out to the Ballgame.”
To hell with this. I pulled over and answered. The sound of sirens and voices came through the speaker.
“Dash?”
“Hey, are you all right?” he asked.
“I’m fine. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
“It’s fine. I—” The signal broke up.
I got out of the car, trying to hear past the cacophony of crickets and the parking lot below. A backup of cars leaving the stadium passed. I’d never known about this exit, and it was still jammed.
“I tried to get there,” I said. “But I’m sorry. I can’t live with myself if you were right. Maybe there’s something to it. Maybe you needed me and I failed you.”
“I—you—listen—nonsense—”
Between the bad signal and the siren, I couldn’t hear—
Siren?
The trees went red then nighttime green again.
The whoop of the ambulance siren came from the phone and from below. The situation explained itself quickly. The exit had been opened for the ambulance, and a few hundred opportunists had tried to use the exit before security had a chance to usher fan cars to the side.
I locked my car, left it on the side of the road, and ran down the hill, between crammed cars, waving at the driver of a Chevy who wasn’t paying attention that, yes, I wasn’t where I was supposed to be, holding my hands up in front of a news van, getting caught in the lens of an ESPN camera hanging out of the back of another van, until I was at the front of ambulance.
I ran around to the side and knocked on the driver’s door. “I need to get in!”
The driver ignored me. I looked like a crazy fan, but there were hundreds of cars in the way. He couldn’t speed away from me.
Right.
I texted Dash.
I’m here!
Where?
Banging on the door in a sex
sec
I ran around and banged on the back of the ambulance. I was sure I was going to get arrested. Not a doubt in my mind I would get hauled away, and the cameras from the two news vans were going to capture it all.
The doors clacked, and I stepped back so they could swing out.
He was shirtless, sitting on the edge of a gurney like a god in a sling.
“Hey, slugger,” I said.
I didn’t know if he could hear me over the sirens and horns and yelling. But he smiled and was suddenly so well-lit he looked flooded with white. I turned to see the source of the light.
The cameras. He hated off-field cameras. Yet there they were, and he was right in front of them in a shirtless, vulnerable position. I wanted to protect him.
I turned around toward the cameras, but the reporters just came at me, barreling past my pathetic attempt to block their lenses. I fell, and from the ground, I turned back to Dash. He was half standing, right arm wrapped to the shoulder, left arm out to put his hand between his face and the lenses.
Or so I thought.
“Back off her,” he shouted, his deep voice working a different sound spectrum than the sirens. “Just step back.”
He was looking right at the cameras. I knew how much that bothered him. I knew he was seeing the parts of himself that shamed him the most. The parts he tried to keep under control.
The trainers tried to get him to lie down, and he shoved the older one away, taking the man’s shirt in his good fist.
Don’t don’t don’t.
Don’t hurt him.
A replay of his episode with his mother, on camera, in front of the world, was about to happen.