The Comeback Season

by Jennifer E. Smith

  “Have fun at archery,” she says, patting her on the back.

  Afterward, Mom turns out onto the main road to run the errands that Ryan had agreed to help with out of sheer boredom. They park in the center of town beside the village green, and at the dry cleaners, Ryan stands dutifully with a pile of clean shirts, the plastic sticking to her arms in the heat, waiting while Mom chats with the owner.

  When she’s done, Ryan agrees to drop the clothes off at the car and meet Mom in the grocery store, but as she makes her way across the green, fumbling with the bulk of Kevin’s shirts and trying to see from behind the billowing plastic, she notices Sydney and Kate. They’re both sitting on the edge of the fountain, their legs dangling, their faces tilted back to catch the sun. They haven’t yet seen her, and Ryan stands frozen for a moment, suddenly weary at the thought of the ensuing conversation. She knows what will happen as surely as if it were already a memory.

  “Ryan Walsh,” Sydney says, swinging her head around. She says her name casually enough to leave no question of it being anything other than ironic. Sydney has developed a rare ability to make even the most ordinary interactions feel like she’s doing you some great favor. As if by simply deigning to talk to you, she’s somehow being charitable.

  Ryan tries to tamp down the dry-cleaning plastic without much success as she stands rooted a few feet away from the fountain. It’s almost worse when the rest of their posse isn’t around. However illogical, it’s harder to bear when they’re not at school, when there isn’t an audience or a peanut gallery to observe their interactions. Without the benefit of a stage, the drama of it all feels silly. It’s when they’re alone together—all the distractions, all the maneuverings and calculations stripped away—that she remembers most clearly how things had once been between them.

  “How’s your summer so far?” Kate asks.

  Ryan wills herself to take a few steps forward, and she finds herself standing at knee level with the two girls on the fountain.

  “Good,” she manages. “What about yours?”

  “My parents are in France for most of it,” Sydney says, sliding down and flashing Kate a meaningful smile. “So you know what that means.”

  Ryan can guess it means a series of parties supervised by some bored college kid Sydney’s parents have paid to keep her out of the alcohol cabinet. It probably means afternoons by her pool, boys huddled around the ping-pong table, cheap beer in cardboard cases and pizza deliveries at midnight.

  Sydney shifts from foot to foot, and Ryan stares dumbly at her jeweled flip-flops and painted toenails. Kate hops down too, and the three of them stand together without speaking. Ryan feels like they’ve graduated from one level of un-friendship to another. Now that the boundaries are clear, now that they’ve boxed her into a new category of person to be dealt with and she’s proven her ability to adapt to this new set of rules, they’re able to relax in their efforts to exclude her. She feels a bit like a trained animal. If she doesn’t ask about the party at Sydney’s house, they won’t have to voice what is already understood: that she’s not invited.

  “So, have you been hanging around with that guy at all?” Sydney asks, utterly transparent. “What’s his name again?”

  Ryan clears her throat. “No,” she says. “I haven’t seen Nick.”

  Kate raises her eyebrows at Sydney, and they both struggle to keep their faces blank. Ryan’s desperate to know whether Lucy’s seen him at all, but she refuses to ask.

  A few kids whisk by them, chasing after a rubber ball, and Ryan shifts the shirts in her arms. An old beat-up car—a red bug so faded it’s nearly pink—lurches around the corner, lumbering noisily across the cobblestone streets that line the green, and without thinking, Ryan shouts “Punch buggy!” and gives Kate a light knock to the shoulder. Before she has the chance to be horrified, she notices Sydney’s hand balled up as well, and Kate points at her, laughing.

  “She beat you to the punch,” she says. “Literally.”

  Sydney smiles ruefully, but Kate is nearly doubled over at the humor of it all—their old joke, the trigger instinct—and after a moment, Sydney and Ryan are laughing, too. Across the green, Ryan sees her mom struggling with her shopping bags as she emerges from the grocery store, and she wipes at the corner of her eyes and adjusts the laundry in her arms.

  “I should go,” she says, and Sydney stops laughing abruptly and stiffens, not the least bit unclear in her message: that she could care less whether Ryan stays or goes.

  “See you around,” Kate says. Sydney only lifts her chin as she turns to leave, but Ryan doesn’t mind. She can see the situation as if she were a bystander, as if she were somewhere outside of herself. She can see the differences between herself and the new girls they hang out with, can see the way she’s become a social liability. Ryan knows she should feel worse about it all, but the truth is, she can understand what they’re doing. And she doesn’t really blame them.

  But sometimes, she does miss them.

  Chapter Thirteen

  * * *

  WHEN KEVIN MOVED IN WITH THEM, THE BASEMENT where Ryan used to watch the games with Dad had been turned into a makeshift storage space. In the debate over what pieces of furniture to use where, Mom won nearly every argument, and as a result, the basement is now littered with the remnants of Kevin’s bachelor life—an oversized globe, a treadmill that hasn’t worked in years, a portable putting green, a corduroy couch, and three mismatched pieces of wooden furniture that block the television set.

  Once, before the basement had grown dusty and dank, there’d been a dartboard and a small refrigerator with cans of pop. The ping-pong table hadn’t always been used to stack laundry, and the couch hadn’t always housed Kevin’s music collection. The walls are still covered in Cubs paraphernalia—a replica of the Wrigley marquee, a clock with the mascot, a cubs only parking sign they’d stolen after one memorable game from the lot near the field—but most of these have grown faded, or have tilted on their pegs so that the room now has an off-balance, slipshod look about it.

  Ryan has learned to be content with watching the games upstairs in the den, wrestling Emily for the remote or waiting for Kevin’s interminable golf tournaments to end before she can switch the channel. But today begins what is arguably the most important series of the season, and though the TV in the basement only works occasionally—often going staticky or blurry without reason—Ryan decides to risk it. This, of all games, deserves better treatment than most.

  Call it what you will—the Windy City classic, the Red Line rivalry, the crosstown showdown—but the series against the White Sox is a battle for far more than just a couple of afternoon ball games. It is this series, more than any other, that brings the city of Chicago to its feet as the Northsiders and Southsiders begin the fiercest staring contest of all across the line that divides them so decisively.

  It is, in Chicago, the closest thing there is to all-out combat.

  It’s a form of warfare. It’s a call to arms.

  In the fall of 2005, the White Sox had won their first World Series pennant since 1917—a hefty nine years short of the Cubs’ last win in 1908, but still, a long time to wait. Up until then, the balance of power in the city had been clear. The home of the White Sox—Comiskey Park, and then later, U.S. Cellular Field—sat half-empty most days, dotted with green where the vacant seats stood out in the dwindling crowds. A few years ago, over six thousand seats—the entire upper deck—were simply lopped off to reduce the appearance that nobody was coming to the games.

  “If they played the way we do,” Dad once said, “they wouldn’t have a single fan. It’s only because they’re halfway decent that they draw any crowd at all.”

  “And what about us?” Ryan had asked.

  “We’ve spent nearly an entire century losing, and look at Wrigley Field,” he said. “Not an empty seat in the whole place. That’s what you get as a Cubs fan: a lousy team, but a great view.”

  Despite breaking their long losing streak, the Whi
te Sox have yet to get rid of the chip on their shoulder, the inferiority complex that comes with being second place in a city whose heart belongs to the Cubs. And the Cubs—forever looking to shake the curse that has followed them for so long, the awful streak that trails them like a ghost—see the series as their chance to prove themselves. There’s always a possibility of tilting the balance, a whirling, dizzying hope that this moment might be the one to change all those to follow.

  But the Cubs have fallen to last place in their division, and the Sox are first in theirs by several games, and to Ryan, the series feels less like an impending duel than a potential massacre. She and Nick had talked—back when they used to talk at all—about heading downtown for the matchup. They’d joked about heckling Sox fans, writing go cubs across their cars with shaving cream during the game—things they’d never actually do, but liked to imagine they might. But now, since this is clearly not about to happen, Ryan surveys the dusty furniture in the basement, thinking wistfully of Dad’s old version of the room.

  “Sure you don’t want to watch up here?” Mom calls from the top of the stairs, and Ryan can hear Emily and a friend of hers running through the kitchen, their footsteps heavy on the ceiling. “Kevin won’t be back from golf for a while.”

  “I’m fine,” Ryan says, shoving a few boxes off the old couch.

  By the time the pregame show begins, she’s carried down a bowl of peanuts and pulled a score sheet from an old book of Dad’s. When she was younger, he used to insist they use red or blue markers to chart the game, and if the Cubs won, they tacked the sheets up on the unfinished plaster wall beneath the basement stairs. Most of them are still there, yellow and brittle, with Ryan’s bubbly grade-school handwriting scrawled across them. When Mom uses the washer and dryer on the other side of the wall, they tremble and flutter like flags.

  She finds a pencil to use now on the clean sheet of paper, no longer sure of herself. The couch sighs a small cloud of dust when she sits down, and the room has a vacant feel to it, neglected and abandoned. When the game begins, Ryan feels flustered and unprepared. She moves the bowl of peanuts to a different corner of the table. She runs back upstairs for a can of pop. She pushes the couch back a few inches, then changes her mind and shoves it forward once more. After the first two pitches, her pencil still hangs in the air uncertainly. She balls the score sheet in her fist and stuffs it between the couch cushions.

  Emily pounds down the stairs sometime during the third inning, pulling her friend Annie along behind her. The Cubs are down five to nothing already, and Ryan sits with her arms folded, frowning at the screen from beneath the rim of her cap.

  “Annie saw your hat from the stairs and thought I had a brother,” Emily announces, and Ryan flicks her eyes toward them briefly before returning to the game. “I told her you’re not a boy, it’s just that you really like sports.”

  “My mom watches tennis a lot,” Annie offers.

  Ryan sighs. “You guys can only hang out down here if you want to watch the game,” she says. “This isn’t a tea party.”

  Emily hesitates, and for a moment, Ryan’s surprised to find how much she wishes they would stay. The basement feels dim and gray, not at all as she’d remembered it, and the Cubs are limping through the game one inning at a time. She thinks she might be able to stand some company, even if it’s only her little sister and her friend.

  “I’d rather watch golf,” Emily says, giggling, and Annie laughs, too. Ryan knows she’s only joking, but the statement is probably somewhat true. She wonders for the thousandth time—the millionth, the trillionth—how things would be different if Dad were still around, but then the White Sox hit a home run and Emily and her friend skip up the stairs, and Ryan is once again left alone in the basement with her floundering team.

  By the seventh inning, she’s started to grow restless. The Cubs have managed to fumble through each of the last two innings in quick succession: three batters up, three batters out. And then, just for good measure, they begin the seventh with an astounding display of Cubness, in which the team’s left fielder loses sight of an easy pop fly against the sun-laced clouds, letting it bounce off the top of his cap before it lands in the outfield grass with an embarrassing thud.

  “Aw, don’t do that,” the television announcer cries involuntarily, before righting himself with some quick statistics on errors for the day.

  Ryan pulls a pillow over her face and groans.

  They’re down ten to nothing.

  She stands up and looks around the basement. There’s a commercial on now, and Ryan uses the time to shake loose the dust from the pillows, sneezing as she claps them together loudly. After that, it seems only logical to keep going, and so she grabs a few dishrags from the laundry pile and sets about mopping at the thick layer of grime coating the framed photographs on the walls. The coffee table has only three good legs, propped unsteadily by a cracked coaster with a picture of an old Cubs player on one side. It had once been angled in a different direction so that they could put their feet up during the games, and she shoves at it now until it finally gives way, then moves the last few boxes of Kevin’s stuff into a corner near the washing machine.

  On the screen, the seventh-inning stretch has begun, and some clownish, middle-aged movie star is leaning over the edge of the press box in a painful rendition of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” But Ryan’s too busy to notice, dusting and shuffling and cleaning and organizing. And when she’s finally done, she steps back to admire her work. She knows that no amount of rearranging can restore things to the way they’d once been, but it still feels nice to have created a room of her own, a place both comfortably familiar and entirely new. The basement feels sunnier already, less dingy, and when Mom comes down to change a load of laundry, she pauses at the bottom of the stairs with the basket propped against her hip.

  “Wow,” she says. “It looks great down here.”

  “It really needed it,” Ryan says, remembering Saturday afternoons spent helping Dad clean up, how he used to use the broom as a microphone, mouthing the words to whatever song was on the ancient radio still tucked in the corner.

  Mom circles the basement, running a hand across a photograph of Ryan and Dad at the stadium. When she turns back, her eyes are bright. “Well, you did good.”

  Ryan smiles as she sits down on the newly arranged couch. “I didn’t do anything Dad hadn’t already done,” she says, and Mom kisses her on top of her head before heading back upstairs again.

  She’s only been gone a minute or two when the Cubs hit a double. Two men score, and Ryan leans forward in her seat.

  Even the most disillusioned of fans can sense when a rally is starting.

  As stadiums go, Wrigley Field is a moody one. It sits tight against the breezes from nearby Lake Michigan, prone to shifting energies and ever-changing weather in the windiest of cities. From where the batter stands, looking out past the whipping pennants and the dated scoreboard to where the ballhawks pace along Waveland Avenue, the wind can carry you or kill you. On certain days at Wrigley, there’s no such thing as a pop fly: there are only the foul balls with their unintended curves or the long-sailing home runs, products of luck as much as skill.

  Even from the basement, down below where only a few shafts of light angle their way in through the shallow windows, Ryan can feel the winds shift.

  It happens in quick succession after that: a single, then a triple, followed by a two-run homer. On the screen, the crowd is on their feet, their fists pumping the air, their mouths open in mingled cheers. Ryan sits on her hands so she won’t bite her fingernails. The announcer’s voice echoes around the empty basement with barely disguised surprise.

  “Sox leading ten to six,” he says, stifling a small, giddy laugh. “No outs in the bottom of the seventh, and it looks like we have ourselves a ball game.”

  The color commentator can’t help himself. “At least by Cubs standards.”

  But there’s a sense of rolling energy now, a momentum like a stor
m, and each time the Cubs step to the plate to stare down the scowling pitcher, they seem surprised by their luck, half-hopping the bases as the shortstop hits a two-run homer, followed by a single shot far over the ivy-covered wall by the catcher. They are one run away with no outs, and much to Ryan’s frustration, she finds she isn’t thinking about who’s up next. She’s wondering what it’s like outside of Wrigley right now, imagining she’s there with Nick as if it were more than simply pretending. As if it were a wish.

  Playing it safe, the Sox pitcher walks the next man up, the big first baseman for the Cubs, who steals second shortly after, then stands tapping his foot and eyeing home plate like he’s running late for an appointment there. The next two hitters strike out, and then there’s only one out left, and Ryan claps her hands over her eyes.

  It’s only the seventh inning, she reminds herself. Nine innings is a lifetime, Dad would have said back. And there are at least two left to go.

  She takes a deep breath.

  If they win this series, she thinks, I’ll stop moping this summer.

  I’ll try to make new friends.

  I’ll try to be normal.

  If they just win.

  If they could only just win.

  “What an inning,” the announcer says, stalling as they wait for the Sox coach to have a word with his pitcher, who looks relieved when they replace him with someone else, someone younger and with a fresher arm.

  But it doesn’t matter. His first pitch is hit wide and long, a ball with no chance but what its intention had been: a home run to put the Cubs ahead by one.

  Ryan falls back against the couch cushions and sighs happily, scanning the room once more with pride. Upstairs, she can hear Kevin coming in through the back door, and a moment later, his heavy footsteps on the basement stairs.

  “Hey,” he says, maneuvering a golf bag through the narrow space. “Looks like you did some work down here.”