The Ninth Inning

by A. J. Stewart

  “Can I ask, how old are you?”

  “I’m thirty. Why?”

  “Thirty-ish?”

  She sat up. “No, not thirty-ish. I’m thirty. The big three-oh. Why?”

  “Because what you told me wasn’t completely accurate.”

  “How is it not accurate? I was there.”

  “I understand that. But I asked you if it was assault, and you said no.”

  “That’s right, I said no. Because it wasn’t. Look, maybe it wasn’t like today, things are different now. Maybe consent wasn’t totally explicit, like a contract or something. But I know what happened, and I chose to go with him. Yes, into the bathroom. I chose to go. He didn’t drag me.”

  “I understand that. That’s not the problem. It’s not a question of consent. The math is wrong. You’re thirty, you say? That makes you, what, three years younger than Anita?”

  “How do you know that? I thought you said you didn’t know Anita?”

  “I don’t. But she was graduating high school. You weren’t. You were younger. If you’re thirty now, that means on that night, you were fifteen. So it’s not a question of consent. You can’t give consent as a minor. It’s statutory rape. It’s assault, whether you like it or not.”

  Monica turned her eyes once again to the table and brought her hands to her downturned mouth. She looked sad. I’m sure there was a lot of flowery language for the expression she wore, but no word nailed it quite like sad.

  “You didn’t know all that?” I said.

  “I understand the law,” she said. “But not all fifteen-year-olds are the same.”

  “I agree. Some people are stable and mature beyond their years, and some people never grow up. But the thing is, for most people, they don’t know what they don’t know, sometimes until much later, and sometimes never at all. The law is there so they don’t have to make that decision at such a young age.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “How can it not matter?”

  “Legally, I mean. The statute of limitations has passed.” She waved toward the library outside the door. “I work in a library, trust me, I know. Statutory rape has to be brought to light within ten years of coming-of-age. That was twenty-eight. Come and gone.”

  “You sure know a lot about that law.”

  “You think that I haven’t thought about it over the years? About the right and wrong? Because the thing is, I did get older. And as I did, I decided that it wasn’t life-changing. I’m not saying that what happened was right, but it is what it is. Look, do I think a professional baseball guy should be partying with high school students? No, I don’t. We thought it was pretty cool at the time, and I understand that’s what you’re getting at with the law. But the thing is, it happened, and there’s nothing I can do about that. I made my choice. I’m not massively traumatized or anything, you understand that? No, it’s not a romance-novel first time. But it wasn’t the end of the world, either. I understand that might not be the case for every girl, and that’s why the law exists. But for me, the downside of coming out about it was too great, and the upside almost nil. I didn’t harbor Ricky any ill will, and I didn’t see the need for his children to see their daddy carted off to jail, or anything like that. I was perfectly happy to just let it go.”

  We sat in silence for a long time. I wanted to say something wise and fatherly, but the well was dry. It seemed that Monica had made her peace, had come to terms with things as well as she ever would, until some knucklehead came around dredging up old times again. I thought about the moral obligation of a woman to bring a charge against someone like Ricky Spence in order to prevent the same thing happening to someone else. I had no conclusion to draw on that point. As hard as I might try, there were some things in this world that I could never truly understand. I could certainly have empathy on the subject, but to presume any kind of knowledge about what Monica had gone through or what she should have done about it was a level of arrogance that even an old professional baseball pitcher didn’t possess. I wondered if in the end, Monica might have been better off in Lily Barkin’s shoes, not remembering a damn thing. Which was a thought that set off another spark in my feeble brain.

  “How did you get home?” I asked.

  “Huh?”

  “From the club that night. How did you get home? Did you leave straight after?”

  “No. I think I spent some time sitting in a big chair at one side of the main room. It could have been a long time. I don’t really remember. I just recall some kind of commotion at the front of the place, and Anita came and grabbed me and said we were going to leave.”

  “Do you know if Lily Barkin was with you?”

  “She was one of my sister’s friends, wasn’t she?”

  “Yes. She may have passed out.”

  Monica nodded. “Yes, I remember. She came home with us. She was lying across us on the back seat of the car. I remember because she woke up, sort of, and she was going to be sick. The guy who owned the car—I think it was his dad’s because he pitched a fit—he pulled over, and Anita’s friend, Lily, threw up on the side of the road.” Monica kept nodding to herself as if she were replaying the night in her mind. “I remember all the girls thought it was kind of funny, because she was vomiting and she had to pee at the same time.”

  “They thought it was funny she was vomiting and urinating at the same time?”

  “Yeah, I know. We were young, and we were drunk, and we were silly. But this I remember. It had the girls in stitches. Because after we took off, Lily suddenly blurted out that she’d forgotten her panties. She’d left her underwear on the side of the road.”

  I said nothing. I tried to think about what else I could ask and what more I could tell. I didn’t think there was anything more that I could learn about that night. I had scratched the itch, and Monica had paid the price. I felt like any condolences or advice would be hollow and pointless and thoroughly unwarranted.

  I wondered about telling her the true nature of Ricky Spence. Letting her know that even back when he was having his way with her in the bathroom, he was a married man. That somehow adding adultery to statutory rape would make him worse. I didn’t think attempting to repaint her memory would benefit her in any way. I tried not to think about the young girl she had been, that young girl in the bathroom with Ricky Spence. But my mind wouldn’t let it go.

  My mind’s eye was filled with the sight of Ricky Spence laughing and laughing, like a maniacal villain, even though I wasn’t there and that probably wasn’t how it went down. I thought about the mob guys from the club taking Ricky away to set him up with a hooker. I wished in that moment that they’d laid their trap a half hour earlier, that I hadn’t pulled him out the window in time.

  I wondered if it would make any difference to Monica to know that Ricky was the kind of man who could get set up with a hooker by mob guys. I didn’t think it would help. I couldn’t see any upside to it. So I did the thing that all cowards tell themselves is noble, and I thanked her for her time, apologized for being a bother, and I walked out of the library, leaving her alone.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  By the time I got onto the jet to take off from Modesto City-County Airport, I was ready to hurt someone. I couldn’t make up my mind about who I wanted to do the most damage to: Ricky Spence or John Cashman or Zed Graham. Or even myself. By the time we landed back in Phoenix, it was early evening and I had come down, but only a touch. I still very much wanted to speak my mind to John Cashman and throw a fastball directly at the body of Ricky Spence. But both of them would have to wait. I had something more important to do.

  I got a rideshare back to the hotel and to Danielle. The happy hour thing didn’t seem to happen on Sundays, either, so the lobby was empty. I didn’t find Danielle in our room or in the courtyard out back, so I wandered over to the hospice.

  The lobby in the hospice was even quieter than the hotel. Nurse Gabriela was standing near the reception desk like a permanent fixture. She said that Danielle and
Jane had left an hour or so earlier.

  “How is her dad?”

  She shook her head. “Not so great. He didn’t have a good day.”

  “Did Danielle talk to him?”

  “I don’t know. He was in and out of consciousness today. His breathing is becoming more and more difficult.”

  “We’ve missed the window, haven’t we?”

  “There’s always hope,” she said.

  I imagined that a nurse working in a hospice operated on a great deal of hope.

  “He is going downhill, though,” she said. “Physically more than mentally, but it is possible that his mind won’t come back to us. It’s possible he’s gone for good.”

  I nodded but said nothing.

  “He’s sleeping right now,” she said. “But you can pop in for a moment.”

  “I don’t think so. I don’t want to disturb.”

  “I can assure you, you won’t disturb. And he might like to hear your voice.”

  “Even if he’s asleep?”

  “We don’t fully comprehend what the human brain can and cannot do. Even at the end. You should stop in, just for a moment.”

  She stepped away to the duty desk with her paperwork, and I stood in the vacant lobby for a moment, second-guessing myself. I wasn’t sure if she wanted me to visit with Ryan for his benefit or for mine. She knew a lot more about this stuff than I did, though, so I followed her suggestion and headed down the corridor and into Ryan’s room.

  It was quiet. There were no machines beeping, just the rhythmic hiss of oxygen and the repetitive wheezing of a man trying to breathe. I stood in the semidarkness of the room and watched him sleep for a moment.

  I had been told by friends and acquaintances who had children that they sometimes like to watch their kids while they slept. They always joked that it was the only time the kids were ever quiet, but the throwaway line in their words was never matched by the look in their eyes. Their eyes told of an emotion that I was unfamiliar with. I had lain in bed on the odd occasion, looking at Danielle sleep. But I knew that was a different thing entirely. My feelings for Danielle were always mixed up with a sense of lust for such a beautiful woman. The parents who spoke of their sleeping children had no such conflict. What they were feeling as they looked at sleeping babes was something altogether more pure.

  Perhaps hope, of a life yet to be lived. When we’re young, everything is possible. We don’t learn that there are things we cannot do until we are told that is the case. I watched Danielle’s father sleep in a way that I’d never looked at another human being before. I’d never watched my own parents sleeping, not that I could recall. And now what I saw felt like the kindling that slowly burned to life under a pile of wood that could remain nothing but fallen branches, or it could burst into fire and become something truly great. I looked at the man before me, his body broken, his mind cast adrift, and all I saw was myself. All I felt was the weight of the regrets that Ryan Castle had about his own life. I felt a sudden longing, a desperation, to be something more than I was. To not waste a moment. To fly back to Modesto and take back all that I had asked of Monica the librarian.

  As my eyes drifted from Ryan’s face, I noticed the table beside his bed had been cleaned. I looked around and found his books had been moved over to the chest of drawers, left in haphazard piles. I stepped over and selected a book from the middle of the pile, and then I sat close to Ryan Castle’s bed and opened the book.

  I looked at the words written by Walt Whitman a century before I was born, words that seemed to mean so much to Dr. Ryan Castle. Words that felt largely unintelligible to me. I had taken one semester of it to impress a girl. I remembered fleeting expressions that resonated, surrounded by pages and pages of verse that I was told was brilliance but barely spoke to me.

  As I flicked through the pages, I noted that Ryan had highlighted certain passages and lines within passages. Some pages had two lines highlighted, many pages had none. On each highlighted page he scribbled a number, one or two digits. Perhaps they were his favorites, the lines that spoke to him, listed in order, the way people like to list their top five records or top ten movies. As I flipped through the pages from number one to number two to number three, I felt like they were connected, as if it were a code, as if he had pulled from the body of work a secret poem. His own little secret poem. But as I read the highlighted lines, a cool shiver eased across my skin and goose pimples formed.

  The lines didn’t feel like Ryan Castle’s favorites. He was a man who understood the work as a whole. He saw things in it that I could not. The lines I was reading looked like a message from him, pulling Whitman’s words together in a fashion that perhaps even I could understand.

  I looked up from the book at the man sleeping before me. The goose pimples didn’t leave. I flipped back to the page marked in his scrawl as number one, and I began reading out loud to him, as a father might to a child, just the lines he had highlighted, in the order he noted.

  I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable.

  I am as bad as the worst, but, thank God, I am as good as the best.

  Be curious, not judgmental.

  These are the days that must happen to you.

  Stand up for the Crazy and Stupid.

  Henceforth I ask not good fortune. I myself am good fortune.

  I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself become the wounded person.

  Give me the splendid, silent sun with all his beams full-dazzling.

  Nothing can happen more beautiful than death.

  I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

  The powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse.

  Happiness, knowledge, not in another place, but this place . . not for another hour, but this hour.

  I have perceived that to be with those I like is enough.

  When I was done, Ryan Castle said nothing. He didn’t move, he didn’t blink. The oxygen kept hissing and his lungs kept wheezing, but something in my gut told me that he had heard every word.

  I placed the book back on his bedside table, and without looking back, I wandered out of the room.

  When I got back to the hotel, Danielle and Jane were returning from a run. They were both wearing bright-colored T-shirts and yoga pants, and I had no idea how far they’d run, but they both looked like they could do it all over again. While the women took showers, I bought a bottle of wine from the little store in the hotel lobby, and the woman behind the checkout desk ordered a pizza to be delivered.

  Danielle, Jane, and I sat out in the courtyard of the hotel, overlooking the pool, with our pizza and wine. The kids with the antifreeze in their veins were rejecting calls for them to get out of the pool and come and eat some dinner.

  I wondered about sharing my visit with their father, but something held me back, and I decided to keep the moment for myself. Instead, I asked Danielle how her visit had gone.

  “He was in and out,” she said. “He didn’t really know who was who, or even where he was.”

  “There’s a lot going on,” said Jane. “It’s not just the dementia. They’re giving him meds for the ALS. It’s starting to cause distress. The meds just seem to make the dementia worse.”

  “So you didn’t get a chance to speak with him?” I asked.

  Danielle sipped her wine and glanced at Jane, and then back at her wine glass. “No, I did. I did speak with him.” She sipped her wine again. “He didn’t know, of course. He was sleeping. I thought about trying to say something when he was awake, but it just seemed so cruel. To talk about things with him that he clearly couldn’t remember. So Jane left me alone, and we had a chat. A one-sided chat.”

  I didn’t ask her what she said. It wasn’t important to me; it wasn’t my business. Just like the moment that I had had, maybe she wanted to keep it for herself.

  “How do you feel now?” I asked.

  “It felt good, I guess, to say some stuff out loud that I’d been holding in. But it doesn’t chan
ge the past. It doesn’t suddenly make me think that our childhood was all roses.”

  “It never will,” said Jane. “It never can. Because it wasn’t like that. It wasn’t roses. Like you said before, though, it wasn’t all bad. It was just far from perfect. People whose parents stay together, who live until a ripe old age, they don’t really know how lucky they’ve got it. But that’s the way it’s supposed to be. People can only deal with their own reality, their own version of normal. So it doesn’t do us any good to look at our family like it should have been Mayberry.”

  “Didn’t the mother die in Mayberry?” I asked.

  Jane slapped my shoulder. “That’s not the point.”

  I smiled and shrugged like the dunce I was. “Quite right.”

  “But I think it was worth doing,” Jane said to Danielle. “Even if it didn’t change the world. One day it might be important to you, to have at least said the words.”

  “What about you?” I asked Jane.

  Now she sipped her wine. It was an excellent delaying tactic. “I’ve said my piece as well.”

  She didn’t add anything to that, so I did the done thing and sipped my wine and stayed quiet.

  We nibbled on pizza for a while, and then Danielle asked me how things had gone in Modesto. I gave her the executive summary of my visit to the old Victorian mansion and the mob guys, and Regina Foster and the pedicure.

  “You got a pedicure?” she asked.

  I nodded.

  “Let me see.”

  “They’re not painted or anything,” I said. “The woman wasn’t a magician.”

  Danielle laughed and shook her head at the idea of me getting my feet tended to. I was glad that she found some joy in it. It was nice to hear her laugh. I had a sneaking suspicion that it wasn’t the last time she was going to get a giggle out of me getting a pedicure.