by Mike Lupica
“You’re sure it’s the same man?” Nick’s dad said.
“It’s like I told you on the way home,” Nick said. “He was wearing a cap when he arrested that man the other night, and it was pulled down over his eyes a little bit. But I’d bet anything it’s the same man.”
Victor’s mouth was a hard line.
“But what would make him come to your game if he wasn’t going to do anything?” Amelia asked, trying to puzzle it out.
Their parents shared a look across the table, hoping one would have a good answer.
“It makes no sense,” Graciela said. “If he knows who we are, where we live, and even where Nick plays baseball, why wouldn’t he just come knock on our door?”
A horrible feeling washed over Nick. What if he was wrong? If none of the facts were adding up, was it possible he was mistaken? No. It had to have been the ICE Man. Who else would have a reason for stalking Nick this way?
Nick’s mom looked around the table, her eyes suddenly big and wide and rimmed in red. Nick didn’t want her to cry. He hated it when she cried.
“I just want this to be over,” she said, her voice full of hurt.
Victor put an arm around his wife. “But you know it may not be for a long time, and that’s only if we are blessed with good fortune,” Victor García said. “We have to put our trust in God until my beautiful daughter turns twenty-one.”
By now Nick knew that Amelia’s twenty-first birthday could be a kind of finish line for his parents. At that point, she’d have the opportunity to sponsor their parents for green cards, which would keep them in the country permanently, despite her father’s arrest record. At least that’s what Victor García’s last lawyer had told him. It made no sense to Nick that his parents’ fate hinged on his sister reaching the age of majority, but apparently that was the law.
Nick sat in silence. Amelia wouldn’t turn twenty-one for another eight years. Nick would be twenty by then, his teen years well behind him. What would his life be like then? Would he be in college? Would he still be playing baseball?
Michael Arroyo was pitching for the Yankees by the time he was twenty. Carlos Arroyo, Michael’s brother, was already his agent and manager.
“Eight years is almost as long as I’ve been alive,” Nick said.
“We just have to keep believing we can get there,” his dad said. “Together.”
Victor García’s strong hands were clasped on the table in front of him. Nick’s mom put one hand over them now.
“Nick was right to point out the man as soon as he saw him,” Victor said, “even if he doesn’t turn out to be a threat. You know what they say on the subway, ‘See something, say something’? That rule applies in our family as well.”
With that, Nick and Amelia cleared away the last of the pizza and their mom brought out the chocolate cake.
“For the rest of the night,” she said, “we’re only going to talk about happy things.”
“Like what?” Nick said.
“Oh, I don’t know. Like the way my son pitched tonight?”
“We better start with the second inning,” said Nick.
“No,” his dad said. “It was the first inning that made the night special.”
“You sound like Coach,” Nick said.
“That’s because your first pitching coach is sitting right here,” Victor García said.
“And still my best.”
Amelia rolled her eyes. “Could you be more of a kiss-up?”
Nick kicked her under the table. “Easily!”
The Garcías laughed, and it was the best sound Nick had heard all night.
* * *
• • •
The Yankees were playing again. Once the season started, they had a game practically every other day until October. By habit Nick asked Amelia if there was anything she wanted to watch on TV tonight.
“Next time, don’t ask, because I will take you up on it.”
Victor García clapped his hands together. “Let’s go,” he said, “before she changes her mind.”
“I’ll meet you in there in a sec,” Nick called over his shoulder as he walked toward his bedroom. “Just gotta do one thing.”
He found Amelia smirking at him from the hallway.
“The pitcher wants to write, doesn’t he?” she said.
“How did you know?” Nick said.
“It’s written all over your face.”
It was no big secret to either friends or family how much Nick loved to write. Sometimes he thought it was the only way he felt comfortable talking about himself, revealing what was truly in his heart.
His favorite parts of English class were the writing assignments, especially the ones where he could write about a subject of his own choosing. Writing was a safe space. A release. A way for Nick to clear his brain by ejecting thoughts onto the screen of his laptop. Nick was a natural worrier, an overthinker, which could easily lead to mental exhaustion, and often did.
His dad called out from the living room that the game was in the top of the fifth. So there was a long way to go.
Nick opened his laptop and began typing with no particular plan in mind. These entries weren’t like keeping a journal. He didn’t build on them, or even write every day, and he often deleted them as soon as he was through. This time, he decided to write in letter format to no one special. He wrote about his dreams, for himself and Amelia, and their family. He wrote about how being afraid of so many different things had become a routine, and how wrong he thought it was for good people like his parents to suffer. Nick wrote about the unfairness and hostility his father endured for making one minor mistake in his youth, a risk he took in an effort to establish a better future for his family, even if the only family he had at the time was his wife.
Through his writing, Nick begged for just one of his prayers to be answered.
Tonight, the words flowed quickly, spilling out of him in a rush. When he was finished, or nearly finished, he reviewed what he’d written, fixing things, finding spelling mistakes, revising sentences. Nick’s English teacher, Mr. Doherty, always told the class that good writing was rewriting.
“You can’t take a bad pitch back,” Mr. Doherty said. “But you can go back and fix a bad sentence.”
He heard his dad calling him then. The Yankees were behind, 5–0, but now had a rally going. They’d cut the lead to 5–2 with the bases loaded.
“On my way,” Nick yelled back.
He took one last brief look at the document on-screen before closing the laptop. Maybe, Nick thought, if he wrote stories like this often enough, he could figure out a way to write the happy ending Mrs. Gurriel was always talking about.
Before he left the room to join his dad, Nick walked over to his window and looked down at the street.
This time nobody was there staring back at him.
20
Ben suggested that they have one of their three-man practices after lunch the next day, and told Nick to meet him at his building. They’d grab Diego on the way.
Nick felt better now after having unloaded his thoughts in writing. Lighter. Like a weight was lifted off his shoulders.
As he made the short walk to Ben’s building, Nick thought about what it would be like to show Marisol his writing someday. But that would mean revealing what he’d been purposely hiding from her. His recent entries covered subjects she knew nothing about. Nick debated calling them secrets, because they weren’t really. Perhaps they were just things she didn’t know yet. Yes, that’s precisely what they were. Secrets yet to be revealed to her.
Nick saw Ben up ahead now, waiting on the sidewalk in front of his building—bat over his shoulder, catcher’s mitt on his left hand, Blazers cap tipped back on his head.
Nick was still a block away when he heard Ben shout, “Hey, pitcher . . . catch!”
Then a
ball was suddenly soaring through the air, a long, accurate throw that Nick reached up easily and caught without breaking stride.
* * *
• • •
Just the sound of the ball meeting the pocket of his glove gave Nick the feeling that the best part of his day was just beginning.
“I’d like to make an announcement,” Nick said after the three of them did some stretching and light throwing.
“You sound like Diego,” Ben said. “But go ahead.”
“I’m shutting off my brain today,” Nick said, like this was a decision he’d come to after months of deliberating.
“Okay,” Ben said, “but you have to be careful when you do that. Diego turned off his brain one time and obviously never remembered to turn it back on.”
“You know what’s funny, Kelly?” Diego said. “You trying to be funny.”
After they’d all taken some batting practice, Ben hit fly balls to Nick and Diego in the outfield. Then Diego hit grounders to Nick and Ben in the infield. Finally, Nick tried his luck by telling Ben he didn’t see how it could possibly hurt if he did a little pitching today, just to stretch out his arm. Ben told him to forget it; his next throw day wasn’t until their game on Saturday.
“I don’t know who’s stricter,” Nick said to Ben, “you or Coach.”
“Probably a tie,” Ben said.
“My arm’s fine,” Nick argued.
“And that’s the way we plan to keep it.”
“You sound like you’re guarding it.”
“So you noticed?”
They finished up with Nick hitting fly balls to Diego in center field, and Diego unleashing one strong throw after another to Ben at the plate. He was throwing so well today that Nick finally yelled out, “For all the talk about guarding my arm, sometimes I wonder if mine’s only third-best on my own team.”
“Now that,” Diego shouted back, “is funny.”
They called it a little earlier than usual today because Ben had a dentist appointment and Diego’s mom wanted to take him shopping for school clothes over at the Bronx Terminal Market.
“Wait,” Ben said to Diego. “School doesn’t start up for another month.”
Diego reached into the back pocket of his shorts and pulled out his cell phone, holding it out to Ben.
“Why don’t you call my mom and tell her that,” Diego said.
“I would rather take a foul ball off my mask,” Ben said. “Or my fingers, for that matter.”
“Thought so,” Diego said.
They started walking toward 161st Street. Ben and Diego made a right turn in the direction of home, but Nick stopped and said he was going to hang around the Stadium for a while.
“The Yankees aren’t playing until tonight,” Ben said. “It’s probably way too early for any of the players to be showing up.”
“I like to walk around outside even when nothing’s going on,” Nick said.
“Waiting for some of those Yankee ghosts to show up?” Ben said. “Not sure the team’s been over here long enough to have any good ones.”
“Hey,” Nick said. “Mariano Rivera pitched in this Stadium. And Derek Jeter played his last home game here.”
“Well,” Diego said, “if you happen to run into Jeter’s ghost, tell him I said hi.”
Nick checked his phone. It was two thirty in the afternoon. He had no real plan, no place he needed to be in the next hour or so. It wouldn’t be accurate to say he didn’t have a care in the world, even on a day like today. But at least for a little while, he’d been able to tune his brain to another channel, and that was something. It had a lot to do with being with Ben and Diego. They always knew how to put things in perspective for Nick.
He walked up the steps at Babe Ruth Plaza and then over to the left, near the newly planted trees. He strolled past the media entrance and then under the huge blue letters that said GATE 4 and kept going. He may have convinced himself he didn’t have a plan, but somewhere in his subconscious, Nick knew exactly where he was going: the players’ parking lot behind the Stadium, on River Avenue.
It always surprised Nick how big the Stadium really was. When you walked around the perimeter, it was the equivalent of walking three city blocks. Maybe more.
Nick was hoping some of the Yankees might show up early today. He, Ben, and Diego had been out here plenty of times before, waiting to see if one of the players would stop his car in the short driveway leading to the garage. It was a long shot, but worth a try for an autograph. They had seen it happen a few times, but were never lucky enough to get one. Even Diego, who could usually charm his way through anything, hadn’t managed to score a signed ball.
But Nick had stuck a permanent marker in his back pocket this morning, and a Michael Arroyo baseball card he carried with him sometimes, thinking today might be the day.
Nick wasn’t as keen on autographs as Diego was, but one from Michael Arroyo would be different. So he waited out there with a few other kids, and some men he knew were professional autograph collectors. These were the guys who only wanted players’ autographs so they could go off and sell them.
A black SUV pulled up suddenly, with tinted windows, so it was impossible to see who the driver was. Could that be Michael’s car? Of all the things Nick knew about Michael, the kind of car he drove was not among them. But it didn’t matter, because the car was barely slowing, and before he knew it, the gate was opening and the SUV was gone. Then, a couple minutes later, another black SUV came up the drive. It appeared to be the same model, a Lincoln Navigator. But it, too, didn’t slow before pulling into the garage.
Could Michael Arroyo have been one of the drivers? Nick wasn’t sure. But he reasoned that Michael would be the kind of player who would stop, especially if he saw kids waiting for him.
Michael had been one of those kids not so long ago.
He had been me, Nick thought.
Nick didn’t need an autograph on a baseball card to have the kind of connection he felt with Michael Arroyo. In his heart, that bond was already as strong as it could possibly be, because of baseball, because of pitching, because of the Bronx, because of the Yankees. He didn’t need Michael’s signature on all that. All he needed was to remember that if Michael could overcome his obstacles, then so could Nick. Michael had made it here, to Yankee Stadium, first from Cuba and then from the Bronx, despite everything that stood in his way. Nick wanted to believe that seeing Michael Arroyo pitch was like getting a glimpse of his own future.
He started walking home, bat over his shoulder, glove hanging from it, permanent marker jammed in his pocket along with the unsigned baseball card. All in all, it had been a pretty good day. Maybe he would text Marisol when he got home and see if she wanted to hang out. That would make a good day even better.
He walked past Joyce Kilmer Park, where he and Ben and Diego would play catch when all the fields were taken at Macombs Dam Park. It was a beautiful park that stretched for blocks on the other side of the Grand Concourse across from Nick’s building.
Briefly glancing up from the sidewalk, Nick stopped dead in his tracks. He had to be hallucinating.
It couldn’t be, but yet there he was, plain as day, standing at one of the park gates.
The ICE Man, handing out flyers to people walking in and out of the park, smiling, and looking as friendly as could be.
Nick knew better.
But when he turned to run this time, the ICE Man ran after him.
21
“Wait!” the ICE Man said.
Nick ran as fast as his legs would carry him. Not sure where, just back in the direction from which he’d come.
“Hey!” The man was yelling now. “Hey . . . stop!”
Nick looked back over his shoulder. The man was short of breath and slowing his pace, but smiling nonetheless.
“C’mon,” the man called out again. “I
just want to talk to you. You’re the one carrying a baseball bat.”
Nick stopped running, against his better judgment, his hackles up, ready to dodge if the situation escalated.
As the ICE Man approached, Nick bristled and said sharply, “I’m not supposed to talk to strangers, least of all you.”
They were just a few feet apart now. The man clutched the stack of flyers in his hand, but Nick couldn’t tell what they were for.
“Who do you think I am?” the man asked, breathing hard from the run.
“Why were you watching my game the other day?” Nick said instead.
“That’s not an answer.”
“Neither is that,” Nick said pointedly.
“Okay,” the man said, realizing he was the adult here. “I’ll go first. I like baseball and stopped to watch on my way home from work.”
“I saw you taking notes,” Nick said.
The ICE Man was standing right in front of him now on the street.
I shouldn’t be talking to this guy.
But there was something about this man—Nick couldn’t put his finger on it. He’d been afraid of him for so long, but for some unknown reason, he didn’t feel that way now.
“The notes? That was just work stuff. When I remember things, I write them down before I can forget. It’s why I always carry a small notebook with me,” he said, pulling said notebook out of his back pocket. “Sometimes things make more sense to me when I write them down.”
Nick was compelled to tell the man he was the exact same way, but held his tongue. He wasn’t looking to make a new friend.
“Now it’s your turn,” the man said. “Who do you think I am? And why did you run?”
“That’s two questions,” Nick said.
The man grinned. “Neither one of them is much of a brain buster.”
“You’re with ICE,” Nick said, with an accusatory glare. “I saw you and your guys raid that house across the street the other night.”
The man’s eyes were saucers, and he startled Nick right then by letting out a hearty laugh.