Hardball

by CD Reiss

  Should I send a car for you?

  I looked at my watch. If Iris slept for an hour, I could make it to Echo Park in thirty minutes, which was still an hour and a half before anyone sang the national anthem.

  I have my gold Volvo. It’s superfast.

  Are there any kids around? I want to tell you all the dirty things I’m going to do to your body

  He wouldn’t talk dirty when I had kids in the library. I was usually watched by no more than dancing bears and clown cutouts at two, but little Iris, breathing in shallow sleep, counted as a kid.

  It’ll have to wait until tonight

  Too bad

  I’m shutting off the phone at 2:40. Let me know if you need anything before then

  He shut off the phone in the stadium to keep his mind on what he was doing, and devices weren’t allowed in the locker room or dugout anyway.

  See you later, Slugger

  I shall say good night till it be morrow

  I left it there and got back to my requisitions. I didn’t notice the time again until three, and I sat straight with a start. I should have been locking up. That extra five minutes on a Friday, with traffic to Echo Park on a game night, was going to count for an extra ten minutes of travel time.

  “Iris?”

  She’d slept the entire hour.

  I put my hand on her shoulder. “Iris, despiertate chiquita. Wake up.”

  I shook her a little and patted her. She didn’t move, and her breath was so slight I couldn’t detect it right away. I panicked, getting hot and cold at the same time. She looked too relaxed. Nothing was moving. Not her eyelids or her fingers. Nothing. I put my fingers on her cheek. She was alive.

  Jesus. My head went crazy sometimes. Of course she was alive.

  “Iris? Come on. Time to go.”

  She didn’t look good.

  That instinct that had freaked me out? The one where I’d thought she was dead? The instinct was right, but the conclusion was wrong.

  She was not all right.

  I picked her up. She was a complete dead weight.

  I left everything at my desk and ran her downstairs.

  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.

  Iris had suffered a sugar crash. She had undiagnosed diabetes, which explained the incontinence and constant exhaustion. It explained her rabid addiction to my bowl of apples.

  Iris cried when they put in the IV catheter, squeezing my hand weakly. But it took exactly three seconds for her to wake up completely. She smiled and devoured the applesauce the nurse put in front of her.

  Suddenly, I didn’t care if I lost my precious job.

  “No han llegado, I’ll watch. Don’t worry,” I told Iris’s mother when I finally got her on the phone. Her employment situation was so precarious that leaving to see her daughter in the hospital would lose her hours of pay at best and get her fired at worst. All she needed was a time buffer.

  I stayed and tried to contact Iris’s aunt and grandmother. All it would take was a few hours of my time, and I had a few hours. I was already slated to leave school early, so it didn’t matter.

  Not really.

  Except it did.

  Her aunt showed up at the hospital at seven o’clock, all apologies and tears, rattling off complex explanations and thank yous. My Spanish was good but not that g
ood. I kissed Iris and her aunt and ran out.

  I crossed the waiting room early in the ninth inning. The TV had earned a few new viewers. One out. Bases loaded. Dodgers up by one.

  Rodriguez at bat.

  “That guy’s a clutch homer waiting to happen,” said a middle-aged man with his arm under an ice pack.

  Jesus! And three balls. No strikes. He’d be crazy not to swing at anything near the strike zone. If he touched the ball with the bat and it stayed fair, one man was coming home. If he got behind it, two men home. If he got it to the outfield, sac fly brought one man home. Which would put the home team in a terrible position in the bottom of the ninth.

  Dash was a speck between second and third, hopping right then taking half a step forward.

  I didn’t know what kind of game he’d had. I’d only seen one strikeout. If it was bad, I would feel as if it was my fault, and he might act as if it was too. I felt as though our whole relationship pivoted on this play.

  I hated that. As much as I loved him, I hated that.

  Rodriguez swung. Everyone in the waiting room held their breath.

  Line drive to left. Hard and high. Gorgeous Dash Wallace leapt for it, stretching the length of his body, turning in the air, catching the drive, and landing hard on his right arm.

  Everyone in the room gasped.

  Dash rolled and held up his left arm, serving the caught ball like an apple in a bowl. Youder, the second baseman, was already there. He grabbed the ball from Dash’s glove and drove it home.

  The runner was out.

  Side retired.

  Game over.

  The sick fans in the emergency room at Sequoia Hospital cheered, but my eyes were glued to the TV.

  Men were running onto the field.

  Dash wasn’t getting up.

  He needed me.

  fifty-six

  Dash

  The pain was broken apart by region. My fingers were numb, and my shoulder felt as if a blade had been wedged in the joint. Everything between those two points felt as if it had been twisted loose and rearranged.

  “I need my phone,” I said through my teeth.

  I’d walked off the field after I was offered a stretcher. My arm was fucked, but my legs were fine. And Vivian hadn’t shown up. It wasn’t like her to be late, much less a no-show.

  “Gonna call your mama?” Youder’s voice came from the doorway of the training room, where I was getting a workover from three guys in white shirts.

  “Vivian,” I growled. “I don’t know what happened to her.”

  “Does this hurt?” a voice asked right before a shooting pain went up my arm.

  “Yes!”

  “Where’s the phone?” Youder asked.

  “Locker.”

  “We’re sending you to Sequoia,” Marv said. He was the veteran trainer. A medic in Vietnam.

  I looked down at my arm, but it was covered with cold compresses. “Fine.”

  “We’re going to pull the stretcher into a gurney. It might jog a little.”

  “No fucking way. My feet are fine.” I tried to get up using my good arm, and I had to ignore the pain in my other shoulder.

  Marv pushed me down. “But your shoulder needs support. The ambulance is waiting.”

  “Overkill, Marv! Total fucking overkill.”

  “The team’s paying for it. Might as well use it.”

  They wheeled me out the door. I didn’t forget Youder was supposed to get my phone, but it wasn’t until we were outside and the flashing red lights of an ambulance lit the side of the stadium that I realized he still hadn’t come back with it.

  “Wait.”

  “What now?” Marv asked, not waiting at all.

  I grabbed the edge of the ambulance with my left arm. For the first time since I was wheeled out, I heard the sounds of the parking lot. Horns, shouts, and cheers that got louder when I stopped the progression of the gurney. Fans waited for me behind sawhorses, and men with big network cameras stood in a special closer area.

  “Youder has my phone,” I said quietly to Marv. I didn’t want the mics to pick up what I was saying.

  “Probably.”

  “We have to wait.”

  “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 wer
e 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.

  “Dash!” I shouted.

  I didn’t know if he heard me over the din. Didn’t know if it was my intervention that brought him back to earth, but he stopped.

  The conversation between Dash and the trainer was wordless and brief. The trainer nodded. Dash let go, patting the guy’s shoulder. I scrambled to my feet. Grimacing, Dash slid down to the ground and toward me.