by Mike Lupica
His shoulder growled, but didn’t bark. Or howl. That was a good sign.
He resolved to take a day off from baseball to rest his arm and maybe ice it a bit more once he had the apartment to himself. His dad was working the lunch shift at the restaurant, and his mom was cleaning two apartments today, filling in for a housekeeper friend who came down with the flu. Amelia was at her friend’s apartment on Gerard Avenue.
Before Graciela García left that morning, she told Nick that Mrs. Gurriel would be around all day, in case he needed anything.
Before she left, Nick asked Amelia if it was possible to over-ice an injury. “Impossible,” she’d said. He didn’t know how she knew, but he trusted her judgment. So after everyone left for the day, Nick got back in bed, laid the ice behind him, and read a book his mom brought home from the library, about a boy who got to be a batboy for the Detroit Tigers one summer.
He’d already texted Ben and Diego to let them know he was feeling better. They asked if he wanted to hang out, but he said he was going to try to take it easy and chill. Hard not to be chill when you had an ice bag permanently attached to your shoulder.
After he’d fixed himself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for lunch, a triple-decker, he decided to go down and visit Mrs. Gurriel.
She had a way of making him feel better about almost everything.
When she opened the door and saw it was Nick standing there, her face lit up.
“To what do I owe this great pleasure?” she said grandly, like she was welcoming him into Buckingham Palace.
“I haven’t seen you in a few days,” Nick said.
“What’s wrong?” she said, her face instantly awash with worry.
“Does something have to be wrong for me to come visit my honorary grandmother?”
“No, it does not have to be,” she said. “But something is, Nicolás. So why don’t you come in and tell me about it.”
She sat at one end of her plush pink couch, and Nick sat at the other. Mrs. Gurriel had lots of little trinkets and old picture frames adorning her apartment. It was like walking into a museum, and Nick was careful not to touch anything. She asked if he’d like something to eat or drink, but he politely declined. From somewhere in her apartment Nick could hear what he knew by now was opera music. Mrs. Gurriel loved the opera. She once told him it was the music she expected to hear in heaven someday.
“So,” she said, “what’s going on in your beautiful life?”
Nick shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “Not always so beautiful,” he said.
“I am referring to the beauty you carry around inside you, Nicolás.”
He told her what happened. She listened without interrupting, nodding occasionally, her face solemn.
“Uh-huh,” she said after he’d finished. “How soon were you able to apply ice to your shoulder after it happened?”
“Not until I got home,” he said. “Didn’t want to stress out Mom.”
“Of course,” Mrs. G said, giving Nick a knowing smile. “Mind if I take a look? See where the problem is?”
“Be my guest,” Nick said.
She told him to turn around so his back was facing her. She moved over on the couch and proceeded to press her fingers into various spots behind Nick’s shoulder.
“Tell me when it hurts,” she said.
“There,” Nick said when she got to a muscle near the top of the shoulder.
“Just as I thought.”
“What is it?”
“The deltoid muscle,” she said.
“What does that mean?” Nick asked, his nerves getting the better of him.
“It means you’ll likely be fine,” she said. “It would be bad if you tore it, but I don’t think you did.”
“You can tell all that just by poking around back there?”
“Before I became a nurse in the states, I worked as a sobadora in Mexico,” she said. “A massage therapist. I can see more with my hands than my aging eyes these days.”
She asked Nick to call his mom and assure her that everything was fine, but he was a little stiff and Mrs. Gurriel thought a deep-tissue massage might be the best thing for him.
“But I don’t want her to worry,” Nick said, still uncertain that telling his mom was the best idea.
“She won’t once I talk to her,” Mrs. G said. “But I would never work on you, not for one second, without her permission.”
As soon as Graciela answered, she asked Nick if he was all right. He said he was, and that Mrs. G wanted to talk to her. Mrs. G spoke quickly in Spanish to Nick’s mom, smiling the whole time until she ended the call.
“So,” she said, clapping her hands together, “let us get to work.”
“And this is going to make my shoulder feel better?”
“Well,” Mrs. G said, “maybe not at first.”
“This is going to hurt, isn’t it?” Nick said.
“What do you boys say?” she said. “No pain, no gain.”
Nick lay on his stomach and Mrs. G knelt next to the couch. She wasn’t kidding. It did hurt at first, not that he would let her on to that. He was amazed at how strong her hands were as she worked both shoulders and the middle of his back. Curiously, she spent very little time on his deltoid muscle.
As she worked, she explained to Nick that the last doctor she worked with taught her something called active release technique.
“It’s abbreviated as ART.”
“Like actual art?” Nick asked.
“The doctor said it is if you do it right.”
“So you help the injured muscle by working other muscles?”
“That’s the idea.”
She worked on him for a while, and eventually the pressure from the massage started to hurt less. The opera music played soothingly in the background. Nick could feel himself drooling on one of Mrs. Gurriel’s couch cushions, his eyes fluttering shut, when finally he heard her say, “All done.”
Nick groggily pushed himself up, and Mrs. Gurriel had him raise his arm, ordering him to move it back and forth.
He did.
“And?” she asked expectantly.
A wide smile formed on Nick’s face.
“It doesn’t hurt!” he said.
“Good,” she said. “If I had thought you’d done any real damage, I would have referred you to a doctor I know near the Stadium who deals with athletic injuries. But based on my professional opinion, I didn’t believe you did, and the proof is standing right in front of me.”
“What’s it going to feel like when it’s time for me to pitch again?”
“Why don’t we find out?”
“Where?”
“Right here,” she said, “at Gurriel Field.”
She held up a finger for Nick to wait, and scurried into her kitchen. She came back a few minutes later, proudly holding up what roughly resembled a baseball.
“I made it out of Bounty paper towel and some packing tape,” she said, casually tossing the ball to Nick.
Then the elderly woman with the white hair shifted the chair closest to the couch out of the way and moved back near the door to the kitchen. She motioned for Nick to back up toward the front door.
“You’re going to catch?” Nick said, skeptical.
“You think I can’t?”
“Are you sure you want to do this?”
“Just pitch,” she said, picking up a pillow from the couch and walking it over to the kitchen, dropping it on the floor in front of her.
“Home plate,” she said.
Then she got into a catcher’s crouch, and Nick couldn’t help but be impressed.
Then the two of them played catch. Nick didn’t go into a full windup, but made sure to simulate his pitching motion.
He threw softly.
But he threw without pain.
“How does it feel?” Mrs. G said after a few throws.
“Good?”
“Was that a question?”
“I feel great,” Nick corrected.
Nick threw a few more, with the opera music cheering him on from the other room.
Finally Mrs. G said, “Okay, last one. And bring the heat. That’s what they say, right?”
“That’s what they say,” Nick affirmed.
And that’s what he did, throwing a perfect strike across an apartment that, funny enough, seemed to be full of baseball today.
Baseball and the magic of Mrs. G.
27
Nick’s mom spoke again with Mrs. Gurriel when she got home from work, and Mrs. G said Nick had suffered a slight bruise to his shoulder muscle, nothing more. And that she treated it the same way she would have done a back spasm.
“I would never do anything to jeopardize Nicolás’s right arm,” Mrs. G told Nick’s mom. “I know how valuable it is.”
“She said that?” Nick asked his mom later.
“Her exact words.”
“What she did for my shoulder today feels like an answered prayer.”
“May it be the first of many.”
Nick told his mom that since his shoulder was feeling better, there was no point in telling his dad about it. But Graciela reminded him that while his father was adamant about keeping family secrets from the world, he didn’t much like when family secrets were kept from him.
“Technically,” Nick said, “it would only be a secret if I was still in pain, which I’m not.”
“If it starts to hurt again, you promise you’ll tell me?” his mom warned.
“I promise,” Nick said. “I’ve read up on all the pitchers who weren’t careful after serious arm injuries and never recovered.”
She hugged him to her and planted a kiss on his cheek. “You really did scare me,” she said, almost like a reprimand.
“I’ll try not to do it again.”
“Get out of the way next time!”
“Oh, sure,” Nick said, slapping a palm to his forehead. “Now you tell me.”
He planned to meet Ben and Diego at the field after lunch the next day. Ben had already made Nick swear on their friendship that he wasn’t trying to hide an injury.
“I swear,” Nick said on the phone. “Honestly, I’m fine.”
But knowing Ben, he’d have to prove it to him on the field.
In baseball, you always did.
* * *
• • •
Nick raced out of his apartment the next morning, ready to get out into the summer air after being cooped up for twenty-four hours. Before he left the building, he knocked on Mrs. G’s door.
“Everything all right?” she asked.
“Yes,” Nick said. “I just wanted to thank you for what you did for me. You’re like my guardian angel.”
“And I always will be,” she said, winking.
“I gotta tell you, Mrs. G. After that hit, I thought my season was shot.”
“I keep telling you, Nicolás,” she said. “That’s not the way your story is supposed to end.”
On the way to Macombs Dam Park, he carried an old baseball, feeling the seams, rolling it around in his hand, adhering the grip that he used for his fastball.
“He’s baaaaaaack,” Diego said when he saw Nick coming up the sidewalk.
“Back from where?” Nick yelled. “I didn’t go anyplace.”
When he arrived at the field, he set his equipment down near the bench on the third-base side of the field.
“How we lookin’?” Ben said.
“Fine,” Nick said. “Same as we were lookin’ when you asked last night and then again this morning.”
“If you’d really gotten hurt and missed the rest of the tournament,” Diego said, “that pretty much would have ruined my whole summer.”
“His summer,” Nick said to Ben, jerking a thumb at Diego.
“All about him,” Ben said.
Diego grinned. “Why do you think I wear number one?” he said. “It’s like my uncle, the one who plays the trumpet, always says: if you don’t blow your own horn, then there is no music.”
They formed a triangle in the infield and did some light throwing. Nick felt no pull behind his shoulder, no pain, no nothing. Just sweet relief. He’d promised Ben that he wouldn’t do any real throwing today. But he made a deal with himself that if he remained pain-free, and didn’t require a return trip to see Mrs. G, he would have a throw day tomorrow.
They all kept track of the standings on the Dream League website. So far, the Blazers were the only undefeated team. The Giants, Eric Dobbs’s team, were right behind them, with their one loss having been to the Blazers. But if both teams won out the rest of the way, it would be Nick against Eric with a championship on the line, and maybe a trip across the street.
Fine with me, Nick thought.
Ben kept repeating the same line: “You beat him once. We beat him once. You can do it again and so can we.”
Nick wanted to try out hitting, to see if swinging a bat affected his shoulder at all. Turned out it didn’t. On the Blazers, they frequently talked about what a great closer Kenny Locke was, and how many saves he’d gotten in the tournament. But maybe the biggest save in Nick’s season belonged to Mrs. G.
Nick planned to invite her to the championship game if the Blazers made it. And if he got to throw that first pitch at Yankee Stadium, Nick wanted her to see that, too. So she could witness firsthand how his baseball story ended, at least for the time being.
After Nick, Ben, and Diego practiced fielding grounders and fly balls, and even some bunting drills, Diego announced that he wanted Ben to pitch while he tried to hit left-handed.
“Please don’t do this,” Ben said.
“You know how bad you look when you try to be a switch-hitter,” Nick reminded him.
“Today is going to be different,” Diego said. “I can feel it.”
“My mom taught me the definition of insanity,” Ben said. “It’s doing the same thing over and over again but expecting a different result each time.”
“Just a few swings,” Diego said. “Promise.”
The swings did not go well. The best Diego could do was a slow roller back to the pitcher’s mound before he finally gave up.
Ben looked at Nick. “Think you’ll ever be able to unsee that swing?” he said.
“Never.”
Ben nodded. “Same.”
“It looked like he was trying to swat away a swarm of bees,” Nick said.
“Or like someone swinging at a piñata blindfolded,” Ben said.
“You guys finished?” Diego said, leaning on his bat.
Ben laughed. “Why, you want some more?”
“You guys treat me like I’m the piñata!” Diego said.
They sat there in the grass, their backs to the high fence behind home plate, sipping from their water bottles, looking out at the empty field before them and all the familiar sights: the nearby fields, the subway tracks above River Avenue, the huge New Balance billboard. Nick would remember so many things about this neighborhood when he was living somewhere else someday. But this part of the world, the view from this field, was what he would remember the very best. Some of his happiest memories were made here.
“Why can’t it just be like this?” Nick said.
“Like what?” Ben said.
“Like . . . I don’t know. Normal.”
“This is normal,” Diego said.
“I mean all the time,” Nick said, falling back into the grass, placing a hand under his head. “You guys talk about me like I’m this brilliant baseball player, even though you’re both as good as I am. But it’s like you’d rather be me, or something.”
He wasn’t saying it to be boastful, and
Ben and Diego knew it. They both sat quiet while Nick vented.
He had his glove in his lap, turning it over in his hands, noticing a new place that might require some sewing before the Blazers’ next game.
“But the truth is,” he continued, “I want to be you guys.”
“Then you wouldn’t be you,” Diego said. “You wouldn’t be a pitcher.”
“He’s not just talking about baseball,” Ben said.
“Look, I’m not saying that everything is perfect in your lives,” Nick said. “I’m not an idiot. I know everybody has stuff they’d like to change.” He paused. “But look at you, Ben. Your grandparents came over from Ireland. I know you say you’re Irish American. But people don’t look at you that way. They just see you as being American American.”
“So are you,” Ben said. “We’re both American.”
“It’s different,” Nick said.
“I know,” said Ben, respecting Nick’s point of view. “But not everyone who came here back then had it so great. Most probably didn’t. From what my parents have told me, people looked at my grandparents as a bunch of lousy job stealers. They’d show up looking for jobs and see signs that said, ‘No Irish Need Apply.’”
“I get that,” Nick said. “But nobody was looking to arrest them once they got here. And, Diego, because you’re second-generation American, you don’t have to worry, because your parents are American citizens.”
“Same as your mom and dad will be someday,” Diego assured him. “The way you and Amelia already are.”
“But we’re just as likely to be sent back to the DR,” Nick said. “Well, my parents would be sent back. I’d be going for the first time.”
“Maybe if it hasn’t happened yet, it never will,” Ben said, trying to sound positive.
“Or it could happen tomorrow,” said Nick.
In the distance, they saw that two kids about their age had shown up to play catch on the field closest to River Avenue.
“I just feel so powerless,” Nick said.
“I hear you,” Ben said.
“But no matter what happens,” Diego said, “you’ve got us.”
“And Marisol, too,” Ben said. “Don’t forget that.”
