by Linda Holmes
She didn’t answer him. She was looking at Andy, who seemed to be getting the same whispered advice in his ear from Monica that Dean was trying to give to Evvie.
“We’re going to take off,” Monica said. “Long night. I have a big to-do list tomorrow.” It was hard to say precisely who was the target of this politeness, under the circumstances, and who was supposed to be getting cover, but Monica pulled Andy up by the elbow. “Come on. Come on, we’re going.”
As Andy got up, he turned to Eveleth, pointed one finger at her, and said, “You’re crazy.”
Now Dean stood up, looked at the friend he’d had since elementary school, and held up one hand. “Goddammit, you are both drunk. Enough. Go the fuck home and I will talk to you tomorrow.”
But Monica at his elbow and Dean across the table weren’t enough to move Andy. He stayed where he was and he looked down at Eveleth, who was now refusing to meet anyone’s eyes at all, and he said, “Glad you found a project. If you decide to break up with this one and take off in the middle of the night, let me know this time. I’ll water the plants.”
“Go fuck yourself,” Evvie said, finally looking at him.
“Fucking crazy,” he muttered again as he pushed his chair out of the way and followed Monica through the side yard toward the car.
Evvie was sitting with her forehead resting on her hand, and Dean blew out the candle, then leaned down to her. “I’m going to go say good night to Monica, okay?” She muttered her agreement.
Dean found Monica putting Andy in the passenger side of her car, going so far as to lean over to buckle him up. “Hey,” he said to her. “You all right?”
She closed Andy’s door and came around to the driver’s side. “Not the most fun I ever had.”
“You know she didn’t mean that,” he said. “You know that was just the biggest bomb she could think of to throw.”
“Oh, I know that,” Monica said. She opened the door. “Make sure she falls asleep on her side and get her to drink some water, okay?” She shrugged. “I was an RA in college.”
Dean nodded. From the front seat, Andy declared that he wanted to go home, so Dean put his hand on Monica’s shoulder, and she smiled, and Dean returned to the backyard, where Evvie had now put her head down on the table. While she slept, or cried, or whatever was happening in there, he took the bottles and the glasses inside. He pulled her up gently, scooting the heavy metal chair, which screeched across the stone. “Okay, come on. I’ve got you, come on.” They walked a few steps before he decided it wasn’t worth the trouble of trying to get her to walk, and he picked her up and carried her up the back steps and into the house, through the kitchen, up the stairs, and into her bedroom. He brought her a glass of water. “Hey. Drink this, okay? Evvie? Drink this and then you can go to sleep.”
He took off her shoes, got her to wriggle out of her dress, and coaxed her into a T-shirt. He put the plastic trash can from the bathroom right next to the bed. “Evvie, if you feel sick, this is right here, okay?” She gave him a noncommittal “mm,” but figuring it was about the best he was going to do, he maneuvered her under the covers, made sure she was lying on her side, and pulled the sheet and the blanket up over her.
Dean stripped to his boxers and folded up the rest of his clothes on the chair by the closet door, then he slid into bed next to her. There was an imposing mess waiting in the kitchen downstairs for the morning. Food that would be bad, wine that would be stale, dishes with everything dried onto them, and everything smelling like garlic and drenched in leftover booze, none of which was going to be good for Evvie if she woke up feeling the way he suspected she would.
Just as he shut off the light next to the bed on his side and adjusted the pillow under his head, he heard her voice, still slurred but easy to make out. She chuckled sort of lazily, slowly, and then she said, “I knew I should never have tried to be happy.”
* * *
—
When Evvie woke up in the morning, she could hear Dean downstairs cleaning up in the kitchen. It took a minute for her to reconstruct her evening. There was this great dinner, there was this friendly chat, then they went out onto the patio and, and, and…it would have been one thing if she didn’t remember it. But she remembered pieces of it. She remembered Andy looking shocked, like she’d punched him in the eye. She knew she’d said “Go fuck yourself,” and when she’d been awake for about five minutes, her mouth sour and dry and her head swimming every time she moved even a little, she remembered Andy sticking his finger out at her and saying, “You’re crazy.” She couldn’t remember how it started. She was pretty sure she’d announced to him that he was secretly in love with her. In front of his girlfriend. As hard as she searched her memory for a full-length video, she could find only a little stack of photos and a few snippets of sound.
Evvie sat up in bed as slowly as she could, and it took a minute for everything to stabilize, and for her stomach to make the first of several unsettling writhes. Realizing Dean couldn’t have known he was putting her in an old shirt of Tim’s (a perfect capping-off of that particular evening, she thought), she stripped it off in the bathroom and stepped into the shower with toothpaste and a toothbrush in one hand. Under the hot water, she brushed her teeth and set the brush in a cup, then she stood and let the water hammer her. Nothing felt good; she just wanted something to feel different.
When she started to cry, the upside was as it always was: the shower cry takes the logistics out of it. Crying has to be dealt with—it makes a mess, it swells up your face, it creates a little pile of tissues that are a tell. But the shower cry is the superspy’s cry, Evvie had always thought. It was between you and the tile walls, and everything that hurt turned into water, and the water went away.
FOUR DAYS LATER, DEAN PUT his duffel bag into the truck and came back into the living room, where Evvie was curled up on the couch, flipping through The New York Times on her tablet. “Okay, I’m taking off,” he said.
She went over to him and put her arms around his waist. “Text me when you get there?”
“I will. Like I said, I think I’ll be back Monday night. They might keep me pretty busy, so don’t worry if you don’t hear much for a couple days.”
“You worry about showing all those guys your stuff, don’t worry about me.”
He looked down at her and hesitated a little, then he said, “I still think you should call him.”
She dropped her arms to her sides but stayed where she was and groaned. “I know.”
“Somebody has to pick up the phone.”
“Maybe it can be him.”
“Maybe it can be you.”
She sighed. “I told you, you can call him yourself. Have lunch, play Madden, do whatever. I promise, I don’t mind at all. I’m not ready to get into it.”
“Okay. Up to you. Either way, I have to get going, so I’ll talk to you soon.” He kissed her and whispered, “But call him.”
She smiled and rolled her eyes. “Goodbye,” she said as he pulled back and turned to go.
* * *
—
Evvie finished her reading with her feet tucked up under her on the couch, sipping iced tea and listening to what sounded like a very spirited argument between two birds outside the living room window. One bird, she fantasized, had taken a prized fluff of cotton that the other one really wanted for her nest. She made herself laugh squawking their dialogue into her empty house: “ ‘You take everything, Florence! You got the stick, you got the yarn…’ ‘Fuck you, Maurice, I already told you that Horace has that yarn!’ ”
She wandered into Dean’s apartment, where she’d been sleeping maybe half the time for close to a month now, and she lay down on the bed. He made it up every day, which he told her was a habit his mother had instilled in her boys that he’d never abandoned. Even when traveling with the team, he told her, even though he stayed in high-end hotels and w
as fussed over by eager managers and officious liaisons of all kinds, he made his bed before housekeeping could do it.
Down here, she slept on the opposite side from the one she slept on upstairs. She kept a water glass beside the bed, and her spare phone charger was plugged in with the cord dangling over the corner of the table. On Dean’s side was a book about Lyndon Johnson that he’d been reading, with a receipt from a coffee shop holding his place. She had learned that he took a long time to fall asleep, but once he was out, it took a lot to rouse him. She’d learned that they had roughly equivalently murderous breath in the morning, so sometimes they’d wake up and pick a couple of mints out of a tin first thing, sometimes not. He slept in soft flannel pants unless it was hot, and then he slept in boxers. She liked it a little bit cooler at night than he did, so sometimes she stuck her bare feet out from under the covers, and sometimes he put on a long-sleeved shirt.
While she was lying on the bed, she noticed that on top of his dresser, Dean had set the trophy that he’d taken home when Calcasset High baseball came in second in the regional tournament. She got up and went over to look at it. Cheaply made with glue and plastic, with the etched plate stuck on crooked and the baseball player alarmingly loosely attached, it said, COACH, CALCASSET HIGH, SECOND PLACE. And right beside it was his World Series ring. Well, his first World Series ring. Right now, he was on his way to what some tickle in her mind told her was going to be another.
She lay down on the floor, staring at the ceiling. She could call Andy. But he hadn’t called her. If she called, what would she say? She couldn’t just say she was sorry, the way she had when she closed his fingers in the door of her car. Because as sorry as she felt, she couldn’t stop remembering You’re crazy, and even more, the way she eventually remembered he’d thrown it in her face that she’d tried to leave. Every time she had thought about calling, texting, maybe showing up at his door, she’d remembered him saying crazy, and she’d frozen.
Monica had texted her once, two days after the dinner: Are you OK? She had responded: Yes, OK. Thanks for checking. And she’d added a smiley face, which was almost as ridiculous as Monica herself claiming she was dragging Andy away because she had things to do in the morning. Evvie didn’t even know who the smile was for, or who might be convinced by it. It seemed like the thing to do. Or at least like a thing to do.
She hated to admit it, but it still meant everything to be able to close her eyes and picture the moment when Dean’s first pitch thunked into Marco’s mitt. She’d felt it in the crowd—their surprise, their relief. It meant hope, like it had meant hope for her. It was possible for things to get better when it felt like they couldn’t. It was possible for things that seemed doomed to be revived. This was why people kept rooting for the Red Sox and the Cubs until they finally won. It was why people who didn’t care about speed skating knew about Dan Jansen, who fell at the Calgary Olympics after he found out his sister had died. People rooted for him until he won a gold medal six years later, simply because they wanted to believe there was hope.
She could see Dean in her mind right now, and she could imagine what he’d be like later at what she imagined this meetup with coaches might look like. She knew how he’d pace at the hotel where they were putting him up, rubbing his shoulder. Would he think about her? Maybe. In case he did, she closed her eyes and focused as hard as she could on the words You can do it, you can do it. This was a thing she did not believe in at all, as she would admit if she were pressed. But the feel of it was wonderful—the feeling that she could package her feelings and put them to use, wrapping them up, and no, of course she didn’t believe in telepathy, but what was “best wishes” on a birthday card, after all, except the idea that your good thoughts might matter?
She breathed in and out in the quiet, ignoring the rumble of her stomach. The room felt so different with someone living in it: his book by the bed, his shoes by the door, his peculiar collection of nutritional supplements that he sometimes made into what she called Hulk Smoothies (“They make you strong and they’re unnaturally green,” as she’d told him) lined up on the kitchenette counter next to the blender. She had more room on her countertop in the big kitchen, she thought, than he had in here. He could move the whole smoothie operation for as long as he decided to stay. And she had room in the living room where her TV was to set up his Xbox. Maybe her bedroom upstairs could be the guest room. Maybe they could build a big walk-in closet out of part of the apartment. Maybe the pinball machine would go in the living room if they moved the sofa in here. If he decided not to leave.
Of course, she thought, if he went back to pitching, he’d travel a lot. He’d be gone all the time. All over the country, different places, big chunks of the year. Could he be based here? If he wanted to be? Did other people travel with the team? Did wives? Did…whatever she was right now? What if it turned out that he pitched better with her there, the way he had at the Spring Dance when they’d made sure he knew she was in the stands. Maybe it depended on what team. If he spent time in the minors, she supposed that might wind up being anywhere. She didn’t know. But they’d talk. They’d figure it out. If he decided not to leave.
* * *
—
Evvie didn’t hear much from Dean during the trip, but then, he’d warned her about that. She texted him Good luck! and a red heart on the first full day he was gone, and he texted back, Thanks, Minnesota. Keep things warm while I’m gone. She had laughed at this and blushed, but she had taken the request seriously, sleeping in his bed in the apartment the whole time.
After that one message, she heard nothing at all until Monday morning, when he texted, Should be there by six tonight. Lots to talk about. See you soon.
It was a slow day, hot and lazy, which Evvie spent at the grocery store and the bakery and a little shop where she bought herself a necklace with a white and red enamel baseball charm hanging from it. She kept looking at her phone to see what time it was, to see if he’d texted. He’d been gone three days, but she’d quickly gotten spoiled on the utterly entitled feeling it gave her to know she could reach out whenever she wanted and put her hand on his back, or her arms around his waist, or she could kiss him and pull him into the apartment and get him half naked in seven seconds.
As six o’clock passed, she walked around the kitchen, sat down again, got up, sat down in the living room, got up, went back to the kitchen, poured a glass of water, went into the bathroom and brushed her hair, and wound up back at the kitchen table. And at about twenty minutes past six, she heard the truck pull in and stop. She wondered whether to run out the door, or open the door, or stand up, but she sat where she was until the side door opened and he stood there with his bag over his shoulder and his keys in his hand. “Hey,” he said. He dropped the keys on the table.
“Hey.” Now she stood, went over to him, and slid her arms around him. “I’m happy to see you.” She reached up and kissed him.
“I’m happy to see you, too.” He kissed her again, this time on the forehead. “What did I miss?”
“Nothing big, I don’t think. I mostly hung out here. It’s been hot. I had lunch with Kell one day.” Why, she wondered, are we talking about this? Why isn’t he saying anything? “How did it go?”
They stepped back from each other, and he slid off his jacket and put it on a hook by the door. He turned back to her and crossed his arms. He shook his head. “I threw it into the stands, Ev.”
She felt it in her chest. “What do you mean?” She held up one hand. “Sit down and tell me. I’ll get you a drink.” She went to the refrigerator and got him a bottle of beer.
“I threw it into the stands. I threw it two feet wide, I threw it a foot high, I threw it all over the fuckin’ place. That was Friday, so we tried it again on Saturday, and I hit the poor kid they had standing in the batter’s box. Clocked him right on the fuckin’ elbow. They’d brought a specialist—or another specialist, a new specialist—and I ta
lked to him for quite a while yesterday. And by the afternoon, we’d all agreed that it was a nice chance to catch up, but that was about it.” He drank from the bottle and shrugged. “I’m sorry.”
“Why are you apologizing?” she said.
He sighed like he was trying to blow out a candle with it. “I don’t know. I don’t know why I thought this was going to be different. It was like the shittiest practice any of us ever went to. I threw a couple that were not quite where I wanted them, and he was like, ‘Form looks good, looks good, stay loose.’ But I knew. I can tell.”
“What do you think happened?”
He looked down at the table. “The same thing that happened for two years before I came up here, which is I don’t have a fucking clue what happened.” He didn’t even say this unkindly. He said it as if he were telling her what happened, as if he were saying, Well, the flange needed tightening, and they were using the wrong washer. “The specialist asked me a lot of questions, had me do a bunch of exercises. I passed everything. They did a couple of MRIs, and other than the fact that my shoulder and my elbow both basically look like they got weedwacked from the inside out, there’s nothing wrong.”
“You don’t have the thing where your arm falls off?”
He smiled. “Not falls off. Comes apart in the middle.”
“That’s not a lot better.”
“Well, I don’t have that, no. But I don’t have anything. I’m still a fucking head case, so nothing’s changed. Apparently, a year is about how long it takes me to forget that I already tried everything, most things five or six times, and it’s time to stop fucking embarrassing myself.”