“How come?” she inquired. “We’re just talking.”
“Exactly,” he said. “Talking to you is one of my favorite things to do.”
“Top ten?” she asked, handing him his waterproof camera.
“Top five at least,” he said with a wink.
“Then it is for me, too,” Ryan said, and when he’d finished packing, she took his hand to walk him to the door, to wish him a good trip, and to say good-bye.
Chapter Twenty
* * *
THE DREAM COMES IN THE MANNER OF MOST DREAMS, A wispy illusion that should undoubtedly have been forgotten the moment she opened her eyes. But there’s a lingering quality to it, and for Ryan, who lies in bed the next morning recapturing it piece by piece, it feels a lot like losing something.
It began with a baseball diamond—grass the color of a green crayon, a sky vast and blue as the lake—and though it could have been anywhere, Ryan knows it was Wrigley Field. Where else would she slip off to at night? What other place has left imprints so deep?
She and Nick were alone on the field, the two of them balanced on the gentle slope of the pitcher’s mound, the whole of the stadium opening up before them. Ryan held a ball in her hand—dirty and gray and familiar, with loose seams and various scratches—and she tossed it straight up and down like an experiment in gravity. Nick crouched low beside her as if preparing for a race, and when the ball landed in her hand for the third time, Ryan let it go. It arched through the air at an unnatural pace, sluggish and unhurried. From above, it might have looked like a balloon, the way it coasted so leisurely toward the back wall. From above, it might have looked like the boy running below it was made of speed alone.
They reached the back wall at the same time—the boy and the ball—and Ryan, alone on the mound, watched one fall and the other rise to meet it. But in the brief seconds before the collision, before the ball could hit his hand and his shoulder could hit the wall, something unexpected happened. His left arm—braced to make contact with the ivy, shouldered against the remarkable catch—began to swell. And as if grounded by the weight of it, he fell fast, landing roughly in the grass a few feet short of the back wall. His arm, now nearly twice its normal size, lay at an awkward angle beside him, and the ball—having returned to its original form, all lightness gone, all magic lost—disappeared into the depths of the ivy, only to be forgotten.
It stays with her all the next day. It’s there when she helps Mom pick out curtains for the baby’s room and when she and Emily set the table for dinner. It becomes duller as the day wears on, fading until it is no longer a memory. It’s the memory of a memory, the faintest tracing of a dream.
But still, it is there.
Nick shows up, as planned, at six on the dot. When Ryan meets him at the door, everything in her that had been unsettled melts away. He’s wearing a red polo shirt and khaki pants, carrying a plate of cookies his mother baked, and he looks suitably eager for the dinner ahead. Before letting him in, she leans forward to kiss him on the cheek. Nick, looking pleased, gives her a goofy grin.
“You must be Nick,” Kevin says, striding through the entryway as though late for a business meeting. “We’ve heard a lot about you.”
Ryan’s cheeks color slightly, but Nick gives her arm a squeeze as he steps inside. “And I’ve heard a lot about you, sir,” he delivers his line. “All good things.”
In the kitchen, Mom’s stirring a pot of rice, and she pulls off her oven mitt to greet him when they walk in. Emily gives him a long look from where she’s already sitting at the table, waiting with a fork in one hand and a knife in the other as if she hasn’t had a meal in weeks.
Ryan knows this isn’t entirely fair. Dinner the night before had been only the two of them, sitting low in wicker chairs out on Nick’s back deck, the smoke from the barbecue coloring the dusky sky. They’d eaten burgers off paper plates, talking about school and baseball, nothing and everything, until his parents joined them for ice cream sandwiches as the sun fell behind the trees in the backyard.
When she’d suggested he come over tonight to have dinner and watch the Cubs game, she’d been thinking of ordering a pizza and disappearing into the basement. But in Ryan’s house, bringing home a friend qualifies as a rare and special occasion, and so here they are: the egg timer announcing the meatloaf is done and the mashed potatoes burning on the stove.
Nick makes himself useful, shuttling glasses of water from the kitchen counter to the table, and Kevin gives Ryan a thumbs-up behind his back. She rubs her forehead and stifles a groan. By the time they all sit down, Mom has already covered the basic territory with startling efficiency: where Nick grew up, what his parents do, things Ryan never really thought to ask. She realizes that theirs has been a relationship of foggy detail and rough approximations. But it would have been like backtracking, in a way, for them to muse about favorite colors or ice cream flavors as if these things mattered. Instead, they’d gone right to the heart of things and never looked back.
Nick sits across from her at the kitchen table beside Emily, and he watches with interest as she separates the foods on her plate into neat quarters.
“So what brought your family down here?” Mom asks, lowering her fork.
Ryan stares at the bread basket in the center of the table.
“My dad got a new job,” Nick explains.
“And do you like it so far?”
“I do,” he says, his eyes on Ryan. “Everyone’s been really nice.”
Emily tucks her knees up beneath her and leans forward on the table. “Do you like Ryan?” she asks Nick, and Mom’s eyes go wide. Kevin chokes a little on his water. Mortified, Ryan looks away, holding her breath.
Nick turns to Emily, and with mock seriousness, leans down to consult with her. “Do you like Ryan?”
Emily considers this a moment, tapping a finger against her lips in thought. “I guess most of the time,” she says finally. “I guess she’s okay.”
“Then I think so too,” he says, turning back to the rest of the table. He winks at Ryan. “We’ve decided you’re okay.”
She breathes out. “I can live with that.”
Nick turns out to be a master dishwasher, and though Mom tries to shoo them away, they finish in no time, and she sends them down to the basement with bowls of ice cream. Nick pauses at the bottom of the stairs, scanning the room appraisingly.
“It’s where my dad and I used to watch,” Ryan tells him, though she knows she doesn’t have to. “It’s a little dusty.”
“No,” he says, flopping down on the couch. “It’s perfect.”
She joins him and turns on the game, where they see that the Cubs are already up one to nothing in the top of the third. The sky above Wrigley is a faded purple, and the rows of spotlights make the field glow in the gathering dark. Nick finishes his ice cream and sets the bowl on the table, and Ryan leans back against him.
“I like your family,” he says, then gives her arm a little poke. “And I think you’re okay.”
She laughs. “Gee, thanks.”
Beside her, she can feel each breath he draws. How is it possible to be so close to a person and still not know what you are to each other? With baseball, it’s simple. There’s no mystery to what happens on the field, because everything has a label—full count, earned run, perfect game—and there’s a certain amount of comfort in this terminology. There’s no room for confusion, and Ryan wishes now that everything could be so straightforward. But then Nick pulls her closer, and she rests her head on his chest, and nothing seems more important than this right here.
“You do realize they’re only four games back now?” he asks, his jaw moving against the top of her head. “I mean, we actually have a shot at the wild card spot.”
“Let’s not talk about it,” Ryan says. “I don’t want to jinx it.”
“You don’t really believe in that kind of thing.”
She swivels to face him. “Have you not been paying attention to the last hundred years of
Cubs history?”
“I know,” he says. “Curses, goats, bad luck.”
“You don’t believe in that stuff either?”
“I guess I believe in bad luck.”
“But not good luck?”
He shakes his head, and Ryan frowns.
“You can’t believe in one without the other.”
The noise from the crowd onscreen surges, and they both fall silent as they watch first one Cubs player, then a second, round home plate. Nick shifts, pulling his hand from Ryan’s shoulder to rub absently at his other arm.
She turns to him so abruptly that he actually flinches, dropping his hand into his lap. Her dream from the night before crackles now inside her head, a kind of electricity in its recollection. Ryan stares at his shoulder, at the arm by his side.
“Nick,” she says, the word leaping out before she has a chance to stop it.
He looks amused by her expression. “What’s wrong?”
She points. “Does your arm hurt?”
“A little,” he says, then stops. “Why?”
Ryan’s thoughts pinball from the previous night’s dream to Nick’s warning, the awful prediction that came when he broke his arm. She thinks of the dream, of the swollen limb, a thing frightening in its weightiness.
“I’m fine,” he says, when he sees her face. “It’s just a little sore.”
Still, she just looks at him, her stomach wound tight.
“Seriously,” he says. “You can’t panic every time I have an itch or something. That’s not gonna work.” He lowers his face so that it’s level with hers. “Trust me,” he says. “I’m fine.”
He gives his hand a little shake as if to prove his point, then tucks Ryan beneath the other arm again, his eyes returning to the game. She tries to focus too, but it’s now nearly impossible. The players move from infield to dugout with mechanized precision, swapping places between innings, and the score creeps up in the Cubs’ favor. The rest of her ice cream is melting in the bowl on the table, and she watches Nick’s feet bob nervously beside it as the pitcher attempts to close out an inning.
But Ryan isn’t thinking of any of that. She’s remembering—suddenly, and with a sharp stab of regret—the bargain she made that day when she walked out of Nick’s bedroom. It had been impulsive and unplanned, a knee-jerk reaction, a deep-rooted instinct to wish away what she’d been most afraid of. But just because she’d forgotten it, doesn’t make it any less real. And just because she’d convinced herself he’d be okay doesn’t mean it’s true.
Nick sits up abruptly, jabbing a fist into the air as the Cubs make a double play, then wiggles his arm unconsciously as if working out a sore joint. His eyes are locked on the screen, his body rigid with focus. Ryan turns back to the game, feeling numb. She tries to remember the exact wording she’d used that day, frantic and confused, desperate to strike some kind of bargain with the world at large.
It’s okay if the Cubs never win, she’d said. As long as he’s okay.
She turns back to the television, where the Cubs have pulled ahead by four. The players trot off the field, their pinstripes fuzzy on the screen.
“I guess they have been sort of lucky,” Nick says. “At least lately.”
Ryan stiffens. What does luck mean, with such terrible consequences? It’s her fault, this seesaw of a bargain, and now there’s the possibility that it could tilt the wrong way. The Cubs, so dependably hopeless, are coasting through the second half of the season with a playoff spot in their sights.
There’s a commercial on now, and Nick’s gaze travels around the basement, landing on the wall cluttered with old score sheets. He stands to take a closer look, pinching the edges of papers dating back ten years.
“You and your dad?” he asks, looking up.
Ryan nods.
“Well, if they win tonight,” he says, “we’ll have to put another one up there.”
If the Cubs win, Ryan thinks.
Nick spots the scorebook on the table beside the washing machine, then pulls a new page from it and heads back to the couch. “I’ve already picked out my spot,” he says, pointing to the top left corner of the wall, where an old sheet must have fallen off, leaving a bare patch of paint. He bends his head over the page. “But only if they win.”
Ryan closes her eyes. If the Cubs win, she thinks, then what?
Chapter Twenty-One
* * *
THEY SIT ON THE LEDGE AT THE BEACH ONE EVENING, the sun already down, leaving behind a streaky mess of pink and orange. It’s the end of August, the last week of summer vacation, and though she has a history of reluctance at this time of year, Ryan is secretly pleased. She’s seen Nick nearly every day for the past several weeks, but still, there’s something about the regularity of the upcoming school year that makes her happy. She’s ahead of herself by days, months, even semesters as she thinks of what the year might bring. Not only will she have someone to eat lunch with, someone to stand by her locker while she grabs her books, someone to wait for at the end of the day, but that someone is Nick. A small and fluttery hope blooms in the center of her chest at the thought of this. She wonders if this is what luck is, finally: nothing more than a haphazard and unexpected swerve in fortune.
Beside her, Nick kicks his feet against the wall. “We should go down for one more game,” he says. “Before school starts.”
Ryan hesitates, wondering how she could possibly go to a game now, when this ill-conceived bargain of hers might have sealed Nick’s fate with theirs. How can she root for the Cubs when the cause and effect of it all might be at his expense? Or perhaps worse, how can she go and cheer against them, the look on her face failing to hide all her worries? She’s either the world’s worst Cubs fan or the world’s worst friend. She’s not yet entirely sure which.
“Okay,” she says eventually, and the word sounds like something broken.
Nick looks pleased. “Let’s go tomorrow,” he says. “Dodgers?”
“Brewers.”
“Know what we could do?” he asks, his face suddenly lit with possibility. “We could go down in the morning, get there really early, and try to get bleacher seats.”
Ryan frowns. “They’re really hard to get.”
“Well, if not, then maybe standing room,” he insists. “I mean, worst-case scenario, we hang out at Wrigley for a few extra hours and then sit outside for the game.”
“Okay,” she says, mustering a small smile. “I’m in.”
“I sort of guessed you might be.” Nick laughs, and right there, right then, and still somewhat to Ryan’s amazement, he leans over to kiss her.
On the way home, they pause at the corner where they part ways, each heading to their own separate home for dinner. Nick promises to come by in the morning to pick her up, and then he’s gone again, waving as he rounds the corner, and Ryan hugs her arms and watches him go.
She takes a winding route through the neighborhood, reluctant to return home just yet. There are a few people still out prolonging the day, tossing baseballs or frisbees in their yards. A couple of kids ride past on bicycles, the ticking of the spokes loud against the quiet street.
Ryan finds herself wandering through the nicer part of the neighborhood, where the houses are a bit statelier, the yards well-groomed and endless, the driveways long and curving. She looks ahead to where she knows Lucy lives, a towering brick house that seems straight from the pages of a magazine. What little she knows of the Barrett family is obvious to anyone. It’s not hard to gather from Lucy’s constant supply of gifts from her father and the quality of the house itself that they’re fairly well to do.
She’s surprised to hear Lucy’s voice beyond the prickly bushes that line the front drive, and she pauses almost instinctively on the sidewalk to listen.
“I thought we were all going together,” Lucy’s saying, and the superior tone so familiar to Ryan is utterly absent from her voice. “All three of us.”
She hears the soft swish of a golf club as it whisks the grass, an
d then a hollow plunking sound. Through the bushes, Ryan can see Lucy’s father lift his club and walk across the small putting green in their side yard to retrieve the ball. Lucy stands with her hands on her hips, watching him with a look of clear disappointment.
“They’re great seats, honey,” her dad says, twisting to assess the lay of a second ball. “You can take some friends. Drinks and snacks on me.”
Lucy frowns and folds her arms. “I don’t care about the stupid tickets,” she says, her voice softer now, a pleading tone to it that makes Ryan look guiltily at her feet. “We don’t do anything as a family anymore.”
Ryan takes a step back then hurries down the sidewalk, past the driveway and around the corner, away from the Barrett’s house. She hadn’t meant to eavesdrop, but even as she’s spent so much energy resenting Lucy, there’s always been a part of her that’s been curious, too. She realizes now that she should know better than to assume that girls like Lucy—girls who are pretty and wealthy and whom everyone adores—coast through life with such effortless ease. Even that kind of existence comes with its own set of problems.
When Ryan gets home, her own family is waiting for her to start dinner. Emily is wiggling around in her chair impatiently, Kevin makes a stupid joke about sending out a search party, and Mom looks pointedly at her watch. But Ryan doesn’t mind. She slides into her seat at the table, grateful to be among them: this version of her family not quite as she’d imagined it, off-kilter and imperfect, yet somehow—despite all this or perhaps because of it—happy all the same.
They arrive at the ‘L’ station early the next morning, still yawning as they wait on the platform, but nevertheless determined in their mission. The ticket window opens at nine, though the game doesn’t begin until four hours after that. And even though this is nothing but an ordinary day at Wrigley—though, in truth, what game isn’t a kind of spectacle?—they know the line will be long.
The train is quieter than usual for the trip downtown, filled with morning commuters rather than rowdy Cubs fans. Ryan and Nick stand gripping a metal pole, rocking back and forth with the rest of the car, the snap and rustle of newspapers loud in their ears. As they near their destination, Ryan has a sudden urge to keep going, to stay fastened to the train as it snakes its way along Lake Michigan and into the heart of the city, the buildings that rise like great railroad spikes on either side of the tracks, the green-blue river that cuts across it all. She has a swift, ominous feeling about the day ahead, unfounded yet persistent. But they’re already coming to a squealing halt at the Addison Street stop, and Nick rests a hand on her back to shepherd her out the door ahead of him.
The Comeback Season Page 15
