The Comeback Season

by Jennifer E. Smith

  “There’s a difference between walking away from a fight, and walking away in general,” Nick says. “It’s the difference between being smart and being scared.”

  Ryan considers this for a moment. “How do you know I’m not scared?”

  “Because,” he says, his green eyes bright as he watches her across the driveway. He stops walking and twists his mouth up at the corners. “Because you didn’t get scared off when I told you about the cancer.”

  Ryan’s face softens, and she smiles at him from across the driveway—a grateful, watery smile—before crossing the space between them and circling her arms around his waist. She can feel his chin against the top of her head, and when she looks up, he brings his face low so that their foreheads are touching.

  “I’m sorry for making us leave,” she says, apologizing for what feels like the thousandth time tonight. “I know you were having fun.”

  “I’m having fun with you,” Nick says, then swallows back a laugh. “Besides, that was the funniest thing I’ve seen in a while.”

  Ryan manages a weak grin. “Not from where I was standing.”

  “I’m sorry,” he says, though she can feel his ribs shaking with laughter. “It’s just that seeing you knock over that cup …”

  “Okay,” she says, stepping back and rolling her eyes at him. “Now would be a good time for that poker face of yours.”

  Without looking back, Ryan turns to make her way down the darkened driveway, away from the party and the evening’s fading disasters. When she reaches the sidewalk, she rounds the corner, moving through the web of shadows and light made by the trees and the stars and the streetlamps.

  She doesn’t check to see whether Nick is following.

  She already knows he’ll be there.

  Chapter Nineteen

  * * *

  THEY TAKE A SHORTCUT HOME, MEANDERING THROUGH the neighborhood across a chain of linked backyards. Neither speaks, and this reminds Ryan of their first meeting outside the stadium, the way they’d walked so purposefully together without really having any idea where it might lead them. The bluish grass tickles her feet as they pass beneath a large brick house, the lawn spread wide and flat beyond the reach of the patio lights.

  Nick pauses to kick at a baseball lying half-hidden in the grass, and Ryan stands waiting a few feet ahead, looking on as he bends to pick it up. The ball is a dull gray, streaked with grass stains visible even in the darkness, and the seams are coming out on one side. He runs his fingers over it, his face unreadable, then tosses her the ball.

  Ryan, caught off guard, just barely snags it. “I sort of have a feeling this belongs to the dog,” she says, wiping her palms on her jeans after throwing it back to him. The ball finds Nick’s hands with a bright smacking sound, the sound of summer, of backyards and dirt fields and dugouts.

  “I could never really play baseball as a kid,” he says, winding up with the exaggerated motion of a pitcher on the mound. “I was always getting hurt or breaking something. It took forever to figure out why, and then once we did, I was always in the middle of some treatment or another.”

  This is the most she’s heard him talk about his past since he first told her about it, and Ryan wishes she could see his face. They fall into a rhythm with the ball, the back-and-forth motion like something choreographed.

  “Little League’s overrated anyway,” she says, reaching out to catch a wild throw. “I only did it one year, and on the second day, I went to field an easy ground ball and it hit a divot in the dirt and popped up.”

  “Black eye?”

  “Bloody nose,” she says. “That was pretty much it for me.”

  Each time he throws the ball back, Ryan waits for it to emerge from the darkness as if from nowhere.

  “It’s never really been about the sport anyway,” she says. “I never liked wearing cleats and sweaty caps and getting dusty. It was never baseball that was the thing.”

  “It was the Cubs,” Nick says.

  Ryan nods, and then, as if they were one and the same, she says, “It was my dad.”

  He waits for her to continue, but how to begin something like this? It’s a bit rusty, this story. Years ago, she’d learned how not to tell it, creating instead a sad and silent fiction all of her own. Talking about him felt like a betrayal of some kind. How else, but through silence, can you prevent memories from turning into memorials?

  But to her surprise, the words well up inside her now. “It’s hardest in the summer,” she says. “Not having him around.”

  She lowers the ball in her hand, feeling desperately out of practice. For five years, there had sometimes been friends and sometimes not. There had been Mom and Emily and Kevin, but Ryan herself had been absent in some ways, and now she feels like something inside of her is waking up again, something raw and watchful, a hole she’d thought too big to fill.

  “When he died …” she begins, then hesitates. Her knees are wobbly, and she sinks down onto the cool of the grass without even realizing she’s doing it, the forgotten ball rolling to a stop near her foot. “He loved baseball, but not in the way most people do,” she says, her voice breaking. “Not the scores or the standings, but just the game itself.”

  Nick approaches slowly to join her, unfolding himself onto the ground too, and they lie on their backs listening to the low, mournful whistle of a distant train.

  “I know it must sound ridiculous, in a way,” Ryan says, “only talking about baseball. Because he loved other things too: me and my sister and my mom and our dog, and he loved burnt bacon and new socks and mint toothpaste and cleaning out the garage and planning trips.” Here, she trails off, afraid to go on, because what lies ahead is the accident; the scene to be set is a winding river, white-capped waves, rocks like mines in a narrow blue field. And to venture there might be to cry, and to cry would be to let go.

  “I bet I would have liked him,” Nick says. Above them, the sky is fuzzy and gray, a colorless curtain draped low over the neighborhood so that no stars can be seen. The lights in the house go off, and Ryan stares out into this new shade of darkness.

  “Do you believe everything happens for a reason?” she asks Nick, who raises his head and props himself on one elbow to look at her.

  “I’d like to think so,” he says truthfully.

  “But?”

  “But what reason could there be for all this?” He waves his hand in the air, and Ryan knows exactly what he’s talking about: the long stretches of time he’d spent in the hospital, her father being gone too soon, the breathlessness of being so close to something so final.

  She leans back again, the grass tickling her neck. Dad would have had an answer for him, some philosophy about fate or destiny, some profound notion about the strengthening of character through hardship and loss.

  “It would be nice,” Nick offers, “to have something like that to believe in.”

  “But you don’t?”

  He turns away, and after a minute, she becomes certain he won’t answer, but then because he’s so close and because the night has grown quiet around them, she can hear a soft click in his throat, and he’s facing her once more.

  “It’s like the Cubs,” he says. “We say ‘wait till next year’ so much that it almost doesn’t mean anything at all. I mean, do you really think they’ll win it this year? Or next year, or the year after that?”

  “I do,” she whispers. “I want them to.”

  Nick shakes his head. “There’s a difference between wanting something and believing something.”

  Ryan understands this, but to her, the distinction feels murky, the lines blurred.

  “There’s just as good a chance that they’ll never win at all,” he says.

  This is not a possibility that had ever occurred to her: not when she’d once seen them lose twenty-one to three, not when they traded her favorite player last season, not even when they’d lost eight in a row at Wrigley. About the Cubs, her dad had instilled in her the kind of unshakable faith that doesn’t
leave room for doubt, a brand of hope known only to romantics and gamblers. And if this had failed her elsewhere, then Wrigley Field was the one place it remained true, this firm understanding that everything would work out in the end.

  Nick is looking at her now through such rational eyes, the logic behind them heavy and old, and she fishes through her memory, wishing she had something to offer him right now. But without Dad here, the only words she can think to say are hollow, nothing more than a loose collection of floating letters, impossible to pin down without his help.

  “You can’t ever count on a win until the final score is posted,” Nick says, and realizing they’re no longer talking about baseball, Ryan searches for his hand, then slips hers inside once she finds it. “Believing, having faith, all that stuff—it would be nice, but you can’t depend on it.”

  “I do,” Ryan says quietly, a little less sure of herself. But what else is there, if not that? Dad had offered her nudges in the form of wisdom, propelled her with words, and this is how she’d learned to move forward. When he died and her world cracked in half, she’d tried her best not to doubt him—to believe that the good things would outweigh the bad in the end—but still it was there sometimes. This tiny, sparking doubt: like a trick candle at a birthday party, flickering on and off with alarming persistence. She’s found that the best you can do is hope for it not to flare up at the wrong times.

  Nick runs a finger over the back of her hand, and she scoots closer, resting the top of her head against his arm. They both lay still, wide-eyed at the starless sky above, listening to the drone of the crickets and the far-off sounds of a car engine.

  A few blocks away, their classmates are finishing up a card game, worrying over their shoes, wondering what to do once the beer runs out. It seems unfair to Ryan that she and Nick are the ones left to carry such burdens on their own. Maybe it’s meant to make them stronger—as her dad would have said—but what if it doesn’t? What if, instead of surviving and enduring and carrying on, they simply sink beneath the weight of it all?

  “I wish …” Ryan begins, then trails off, feeling silly.

  “What do you wish?”

  But she doesn’t answer. A few scattered lightning bugs wink at them across the yard, and the moon has now emerged above the clouds. It’s nearly midnight, and another day is fast approaching. She isn’t sure how long they sit there like this, too tired to wonder any further. When they stand, finally, Nick takes her hand, and they walk the rest of the way to Ryan’s house in silence. At her front door, he leans in to kiss her once more, and it seems so natural this time, so wonderfully fitting, that it’s all she can do to keep from smiling again.

  His face is half-lit by the porch lights when he leans back, and Ryan tilts her head to look up at him. “Hey,” she says softly, so as not to wake her sleeping family. “If you’d been able to play baseball …”

  He grins. “I would have been good.”

  “Yeah,” she says. “I bet you would have been great.”

  Ryan was nine when their dog—a funny-looking white terrier with a penchant for cream puffs and vanilla ice cream cones—died quite suddenly. He was already old at that point, in the creaky, lumbering way that good dogs grow old. But he wasn’t yet ancient. He sometimes had trouble making it up onto the couch he wasn’t technically allowed on anyway, and he had developed a habit of putting himself to bed before everyone else, but he was small and wiry with years of begging left in him.

  She’d been the one to come down that night, negotiating the noisy floorboards of the stairs after everyone else had gone to bed. Once she’d filled her water glass, Ryan tiptoed over to where Addison always slept, his compact body made smaller in sleep, tucked in upon himself, nose to tail, with twitching paws and a quivering nose. But even in the darkness, she could tell he wasn’t in his bed, and when she flipped on the light in the kitchen, she saw him in the front hallway. Ryan set down her water glass and approached the dog where he sat with his nose just inches from the wall, his whole body rigid and focused as if there were something beyond it that required his attention.

  “Addison,” she called softly, but the dog didn’t move, didn’t flick an ear or wag his tail. She dropped to her knees beside him and placed a hand on his head, and he whined softly—a sound long and low—but remained still, his dark eyes boring a hole in the wallpaper. “Addy,” she tried again, and this time, he thumped his tail softly against the floor, but didn’t alter his watchdog pose.

  Later that night, they took him to the vet, an emergency clinic with fluorescent lights and an empty waiting room. Mom stayed behind with Emily, who had been asleep while they watched Dad lift the dog from the spot in the hallway. Once in his arms, Addison had relaxed, and Ryan wrapped him in a blanket, and they took him out to the car together. She sat with him in the backseat—the dog on one side, and she on the other—while Dad took the back roads to avoid the traffic lights, his mouth set in a straight line. At one point, Addison lifted his head and then dragged himself across the seat to rest his chin in Ryan’s lap. For the rest of the ride, he lay still.

  When the vet came outside the clinic to help bring him in, her face went grim. Once they’d taken him in the back, Ryan pressed herself into Dad’s jeans and cried with great heaving sobs, hiccupping and sniffling and choking on her tears, because it was hard just then to imagine anything sadder in the world than losing something as purely good as her dog.

  “We didn’t even know,” she wailed, tucked, egglike, with her hands clasped around her knees on one of the waiting room chairs, as if she might make herself small enough for it all to go away. “We didn’t even know he was hurting.”

  Dad looped a long arm across her shoulders and drew her toward him, and Ryan buried her face in his shirt until the vet came out to give them the sort of option that really isn’t an option at all.

  “Do you understand what she means by ‘put to sleep’?” Dad asked Ryan, who nodded wordlessly. She didn’t, in fact, have any idea what it meant before that moment, but it is moments like this one that reveal themselves with an understanding deeper than words, a sort of reluctant intuition, and so she knew. She knew.

  Dad held her hand when they went to say good-bye. Addison lay very still on a shiny metal table, watching them through dull eyes, and when she leaned in close to one spiky ear, Ryan found she couldn’t speak. She thought I’ll miss you and she thought don’t go and she thought please. But what she finally said was simply “Thank you.”

  Afterward, Dad paused in the parking lot and then stooped down so they were at eye level. “I know this is hard to understand now,” he said, his face near hers. “But he was a good dog, and everyone will lose a good thing sometime in their lives.”

  Ryan wiped the back of her hand across her nose and looked at her feet. Her throat hurt and her eyes stung and she was having trouble catching her breath.

  Dad smiled. “Remember the time we came home and found Addy with shreds of toilet paper spread all over the house?”

  “It looked like confetti,” she said, with a small, wet laugh.

  “Well, see?” he said, a hand on each of her shoulders. “You still have a whole collection of memories just like that one.”

  They walked the rest of the way to the car, and Ryan focused her blurry gaze on him while he fumbled with the car keys. “What do you think he was seeing?” she asked, and Dad turned around. “When he was staring at the wall like that?”

  He bent down again, a hand on each knee. When he crooked his finger, Ryan took a step closer, and when she was near enough for him to whisper in her ear, he said, “I think maybe he was dreaming.”

  “Daydreaming?”

  “Exactly,” Dad said, nodding.

  “Of what?”

  “Of what comes next.” He smiled. “Sometimes what seems like the end is really only the beginning.”

  The roads felt different on the drive home, the streets blue and disquieting, the trees haunting in their shapelessness. Ryan stretched across the ba
ckseat, her head where Addison had been only an hour before.

  Dad flicked his eyes up to the rearview mirror. “Hey,” he said, reaching a hand back to squeeze her ankle. “It’s important for you to remember this night, okay?”

  Ryan looked out the back window, as if she might still catch a glimpse of the grayish building where they’d left her dog, and sniffled. This didn’t seem a thing that could be shaken loose, not with tears or time or anything else. Remembering didn’t feel like a choice so much as a curse.

  “It’s how we hold on to things,” he said. “Even as we move on.”

  Later, there would be other things. Promise me you’ll remember this, he’d say, and wherever they were—the beach or the ballpark, the fire-lit living room or the cool shade of the backyard—Ryan would close her eyes. She filed these moments away like precious documents, wore them smooth with memory, collected them like bits of prayers.

  After a while, she began to use her eyes as cameras too. There a leaf-covered footpath and there a man playing the saxophone and there a cloud like a duck. But they piled up too fast and started to slip away, a few at a time, until the worthiest moments, the ones she most hoped to keep close, began to fall away with all the others, the everyday and the ordinary.

  When she told him, Dad laughed. “It’s not to remember everything,” he said. “You should save room for the ones that are really important.”

  “But how do I know which they are?”

  “You just do,” he told her. “You know them when they find you, and then you just squeeze your eyes shut and hold on to them tight.”

  “What’s your favorite one of all?” she asked.

  “This one right now is up there,” he said, zipping his suitcase.

  She bounced a little on the bed, looking around her parents’ room. Dad disappeared into the bathroom for a moment and emerged with his toothbrush.