I lower my window, suddenly needing to smell the ocean, to know where the hell I am. But the ocean is not to be located. What I get instead, crossing the 101, is the vehicular exhaust of other capsuled, weary dreamers shooting up and down the coast, their passage sounding to my estranged ears like blood rushing through a tunnel.
Five minutes later, I pull into my driveway and cut the engine.
“Work tomorrow,” I say. “Might as well turn in early.”
Sam doesn’t respond. We enter the house and I go to the kitchen for a glass of water. I can feel a headache coming on. When I come out, he’s already in his room with the door closed. I sit down on a chair facing the TV. But I don’t turn the set on, or drink the water, or do anything but think about the fact that, as my son so clearly registered—though admirably didn’t say aloud to a third party—I have never really seen him play ball. For three years, while he was between the ages of seven and a half and ten and a half, we occasionally played catch together on my rented lawn in Box Corner. Which at the time meant a lot to me; I won’t say it didn’t. My sense of things then was of an extended warm-up between two teammates old and young, the sweet early innings of what would eventually become a long, meaningful game stretching through the afternoon hours and into the starlit evening of our lives. A game whose memory we would both always cherish.
Of course, for many reasons, things did not turn out that way.
RUTH
WHEN THE CALL COMES, late afternoon on a Friday in May, she is sitting at the upright piano in her living room, a mug of steaming green tea on a coaster, playing a song that Sam loved as a baby, before he ever had language. Her memory not so much the proverbial sieve as an increasingly rusty grater, shredding little shards and slivers from the original whole. Sometimes you can tell where a piece came from, but often not. Giggling at dust in a sunbeam? A suddenly curled fist? A squeak like a rubbed balloon? Sam’s infant joy might have shown in anything. In lieu of being certain, she can just sit here and play the song, an American classic older than her grandparents, that gives rise, for her, to nostalgic images of wheat fields and haystacks, clean rivers and log fires. All of which, without lyrics to accompany the notes, maybe makes no sense, yet isn’t meaningless. It doesn’t matter that she never grew up with any of these iconic things herself. A loss of memory she can live with, but not a loss of feeling.
She plays three successive chords and breathes. She plays three more. She begins to hum, remembering her baby in her own way.
The cordless phone rings, and she reaches for it.
On the line, an official-sounding man introduces himself as Sam’s dean.
Correction. What he actually says is:
“Mrs. Wheldon, my name is Chas Burris. I’m dean of students at the University of Connecticut. Is Sam there?”
“No, Sam’s not here.”
Her voice eminently reasonable, she believes. But her hands have already fled the piano keys, become fists in her lap. She scrapes the bench away from the instrument, distancing herself: there is hot tea there to be spilled, there is music.
“Do you know where he is, Mrs. Wheldon? It’s very important that I speak with him.”
“Has something happened?”
“Mrs. Wheldon, do you have a cellphone number for your son? Any way of reaching him immediately?”
The man’s insistent use of her name, she understands, is the most dangerous thing about him.
“Not until you tell me what this is about.”
“Mrs. Wheldon, we would have contacted you sooner, but the facts were slow in reaching my office. Your son’s roommate has not been cooperative.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Mrs. Wheldon, your son, Sam Arno, has officially been expelled from the University of Connecticut. He won’t be receiving his diploma, now or ever. In fact, that may be the least of his problems.”
Ruth tries to speak, but fear constricts her throat.
“There was a violent incident in a bar off campus. You may know about that already. Immediately afterward Sam seems to have disappeared from campus, leaving behind many of his belongings. He’s been absent from his classes for nine days. You may be aware of that, too. Unfortunately, as I’ve said, the cumulative facts were slow to reach me. So I must ask you again, Mrs. Wheldon, with urgency: Do you know where your son is at this time?”
“No, I do not.”
“Very well. But, Mrs. Wheldon, you should be aware that the situation has progressed. As we speak, a young man is lying in the hospital in very critical condition. Legally, your son is an adult. It’s important that you and your family understand this and prepare accordingly. I imagine you’ll want to hire a lawyer, if you haven’t already. And wherever Sam is now, he should remain in the state of Connecticut.”
“Legally?”
She can hear herself, faintly, over the phone, in the empty house, holding their lives together with a single question mark; but it is borrowed dialogue. The whole day, suddenly, cut off from the time within it. The music dead. The wheat fields burned.
DWIGHT
I’LL SAY HERE STRAIGHT OUT that I believe there’s a legitimate case to be made for softball as the true American pastime. The dowdy, smaller-than-regulation, always a little unkempt plots of dirt and sparse grass tucked away in city parks and derelict sandlot zones all across this land of ours: these are the fields of dreams for your average citizen.
Dirty-faced kids wearing their older brothers’ hand-me-downs; divorced dads with abdominal six-packs more pale ale than muscle. The ball swollen yet embarrassingly unhefty; the bat light as a wand yet boasting an extra-large aluminum sweet spot. The pitching tends to be fat city, a perpetual home-run derby set up to make the hoi polloi feel like Barry Bonds. You gaze at that huge ball arcing toward you, tossed by friend or colleague or crazy-ass uncle, and it can only seem like the best moment of your week.
My son, quite naturally, doesn’t see it this way. When Sunday rolls around and I venture into his cave den—covered in dirty sweats and T-shirts and jeans, the guest bedroom has become a rogue state in the act of seceding from the rest of the house—to wake him at nine, he expresses in foul terms his disinclination to join me. It’s only when I explain that in all likelihood he’ll get his ass fired if he doesn’t play ball—he’s only worked three days so far, earning a whopping $146 after taxes—that he grudgingly pulls on some rank UConn athletic clothing and an old pair of sneakers, sucks down the mug of coffee I stick in his hand, and follows me out to the car.
Most of the assembled twenty-odd people who show up at Arenas Municipal Recreation Park this morning are either SoCal employees or Lopez blood relations, or both. Mostly male bodies in various states of gravitational and pharmacological crisis. Uniforms homegrown and haphazard. Coolers of Powerade, Red Bull, and Tecate thoughtfully set out behind home plate for constant rehydration, revivification, and general watercooler-like conviviality. I greet the others with clunky fist bumps and even, here and there, quick backslappy hugs, and introduce Sam all around. The weather is typically fine, the grass in our relatively prosperous township green and neatly trimmed, the recently rolled lines gleaming like fresh deck paint. Beyond the fenceless outfield ringed by half a dozen tall, lithely swaying palm trees are two municipal tennis courts, and in between our jovial beer-infused chants of “No batter!” and “He’s a chump!” and “You call that a swing?!” (and we haven’t even started playing yet) can be heard the distant hollow thwock of tennis balls being struck, which for some reason my ears always interpret as hauntingly inverse, like echoes before sound.
To all this Tony brings a high seriousness that might be comical if it weren’t underwritten by native competitive menace. One need only study his high-school sports trophies displayed in the window of the store to know that he’s a man used to winning and who, beyond that, hates to lose. When Tony takes the field against you, he wants to grind you into the dirt and, for good measure, kick you in the back of the head and steal your teeth.
This is one of the reasons, I suppose, that I feel comfortable around him. The fact that we aren’t really a softball league, more a loose federation of Roman slaves gathered to fight the lions under the gaze of the emperor, doesn’t in any way diminish his vision of the game as a microcosm of everything we’re meant to achieve on behalf of his business interests. Teams are chosen the good old feudal way, which is to say that Tony acts as one captain and I, technically the next man down the SoCal totem pole, stand in as the other. Tony, of course, Big Chief and Grand Pooh-Bah, picks first from the pool of assembled talent—which on certain weekends, depending on attendance, can seem as pointless as picking dead horseflies out of a swimming pool with a long, droopy net.
With Sam added to the mix for the first time, however, a new level of excitement is palpable as we divvy up players. Rumors of his prowess on the college diamonds of the East Coast have already spread through SoCal and the large extended Lopez clan, and now, as Tony nods proprietarily at my son, drafting him first, a murmur of baseball-fantasy appreciation rises from those still waiting to be noticed. Like all true athletes, Sam seems to accept this awareness of his talents as his due, indeed to grow more relaxed amid the incipient admiration, unbuckling his shoulders and easing himself loose-limbed across the invisible line into Tony’s stable, like the prize thoroughbred he is.
My turn next, I pick Derek, who, bong habit and lack of social affect notwithstanding, actually hits for decent average and plays a nice, tight second base. And so the process goes, ending only with my final pick of Sandra to play catcher. We break huddle and I lead my gang over to the chain-link backstop to ready ourselves for our first at-bats. Overall, despite having lost Sam to the competition, I’m feeling reasonably satisfied with my roster. We’ve gained some small but decided advantages. Sandra’s lower-back tattoo of a naked angel that peeks into view whenever she crouches down behind the plate or swings gustily for the palms, for example, makes her presence on our team an unequivocal plus for morale, if not necessarily for the virtue of old men.
Batting in the third with two men on, Sam slugs a ball so high and far it clears the forty-foot-tall palms at the back of the outfield and lands on the farthest of the two tennis courts, about a yard from a bald dentist just making his approach to the net. The dentist gives a shout of alarm that can be heard in every corner of the park, and the falling meteor, propelled by its contact with the hard earth, takes flight again, eventually coming to rest in a sandbox some twenty yards distant. Thankfully the sandbox is empty and no one gets hurt. Save for my son, who can be seen humbly rounding the bases, the entire park appears to have come to a standstill, in a state of communal awe. The dentist is leaning on the net, too unnerved to continue.
Tony is first in line to greet the hero at home plate. The Captain is beaming, left fist pumping the air in unbridled joy, eyes wide with did-you-fucking-see-that? wonderment, right hand reaching to clasp Sam’s hand in a vertical amigo handshake, thumbs up and palms cupped, the grip that ends naturally in a kind of chest-bump hug—reserved, in Tony’s unwritten book of code, for family and superstars.
I myself am thrilled for Sam for my own reasons, and profoundly impressed with his physical abilities (that body that in part came from me, even if I can’t at present perceive the connection), standing at first base oohing along with the rest of the crowd. There’s only one thing I genuinely need at this moment, and that is to make eye contact with my son. Just a glance, a privately enacted moment between us. Though I can’t but be aware that this is a selfish and sentimental impulse, not in fact a passing of the paternal torch (I’m no Athenian) but rather a childish yearning to bask in the warmth of his brightly burning flame as he runs by on his way to some other, more glorious Olympics. Maybe it should come as no surprise, then, that my look never lands and my glance goes unmet, but the surprise is there anyway (as it always will be on the parental end), along with a sting that’s slow to bloom and long in fading. And then the next batter’s coming up and it’s time to get back in position.
And that, more or less, is all I’m conscious of till the seventh, when once again Sam strides to the plate, this time with nobody on and his team ahead by a good five runs. A game situation without interest whatever if not for the young god at the plate, who, with one epic swing and a couple of nifty plays in the field, has already made groupies of us all, including his old man.
Now we watch him let the first three pitches go by, none of them quite right. The pitcher—Tony’s accountant and “numbers guy,” Brew Donadio, relegated to light field duty by an arthritic hip—finally turns up his palms in mock frustration, as if to say, Whaddya want? And someone on the sidelines starts chanting, “Lo-ser batter!,” drawing ironic chuckles from the crowd, though Sam himself remains unsmiling at the plate, calm as a sniper. Then the next pitch is on its way, underhanded and right down the pipe, and Sam steps into it with a long stride of his left leg and swings smoothly from his hips, rifling the ball on the fly into the gap between right (Tony’s cousin Chuckie) and center (Chang Sook Oh). As soon as I see the ball’s flight—a classic inside-the-parker—I start jogging for home to back up Sandra at catcher. Sam, reaching full speed after just a couple of strides, flies by me heading for first. He’s rounding second when the ball strikes one of the outfield palms and ricochets back onto the field, allowing Chang to scoop it up rabbit-quick and fire to the cutoff man Derek, who turns and hurls a strike to me at the plate, bypassing Sandra, who’s stepped out of the way.
The ball smacks into my glove with Sam just a few strides past third and coming hard. I look up the line at my son pounding toward me and grin at him—as if to say, all in good fun, Hey, look what just landed in my mitt! I’m going to tag you out, sport! I stand and wait, glove and ball on prominent display, for him to concede, downshift his headlong sprint for glory into a trot acknowledging that I’ve got him dead to rights.
But he does not slow down. If anything, he runs harder. I watch him with a kind of numb astonishment. And then, a moment before impact, I see him lower his shoulder.
Of the actual collision at the plate I remember nothing. I am a relatively big man, heavy-chested, bearing a certain amount of muscled bulk. And my son, too, is good-sized, though sleeker and faster than me, befitting his mother’s more refined genes. What Sam possesses, though, and of which maybe I’ve never had enough, is sheer will. He wants to make it safely home, and, maybe more than anything, he wants to run through me to get there. It is, in a sense, not complicated at all.
Someone helps me to my feet. I don’t remember who. I don’t remember anything about those seconds but the ball lying off to the side, where it’s rolled after being violently dislodged from my glove. And the dust on my tongue. And the pain in the center of my chest where his shoulder struck me. And my tall, beautiful son, having picked himself off the ground and been called safe at home, standing among his new teammates and receiving their shouts of congratulation, their wild slaps on the back, looking every minute as if he hates his own guts.
PART TWO
RUTH
HER FLIGHT LANDS in Los Angeles at two-thirty. She rents a car and drives two hours up the coast, following directions printed off Google. Even in the middle of the afternoon the freeway traffic confounding, claustrophobic: briefly it speeds up, only to come inexplicably to a slamming halt. She keeps her windows closed and the air-conditioning on high, taking small sips from a bottle of water she cadged on the plane.
After an hour of stop-and-go riding in her chilled little econobox, she begins to shiver. She turns off the air-conditioning but keeps the windows closed. Her body is still unnaturally thin; maybe it always will be. Although she has recently vowed to herself to give up the word always, because it is fraudulent. There is only now; there is only this. She drives toward her son, eyes darting between the small, carefully positioned mirrors and seeing nothing but other cars, behind and around and in front of her, more and more of them, as if no one in this strange, disconnected country ever finds where they�
��re going.
She didn’t want to tell Dwight the full news about Sam over the phone; she would prefer, in fact, to tell him as little as possible about the situation. She doesn’t trust him not to take the bad news and immediately make things even worse. She needs to be there in person to intervene between father and son, mediate, lead, regroup. A plan that struck her as sound enough while she was on the plane, when it was still just thoughts in her head.
But turning into the parking lot of the sporting-goods store now and seeing her ex-husband waiting for her, brooding over a cigarette, comes as an old-time shock: solid as a New England drystone wall, a little gray dusting his short brown hair, the masculine and unrepentant physicality of him looming as something more than the mere representation of her former life. Which instantly makes her angry in some way—with him, with herself; but then so, too, does the way he’s staring at her, that critically clueless expression of the arrogant cook at the farmers’ market holding up the scrawny wartime chicken and demanding to know why it isn’t the glorious pheasant of the salad days. She thinks she won’t deign to remind him, because he knows it perfectly well, that there weren’t any salad days. The promises they once made to each other were hastily scribbled IOUs, and the two faintly familiar bodies standing here, for better and mostly worse, are undeniably honest products of their times.
He drops the cigarette, grinding it out with the toe of his age-inappropriate sneakers.
“Well.” He dips his large, lived-in head—almost humbly, she thinks—then tries on a half smile and spreads his arms to embrace his mock kingdom. “Welcome to California, Ruth.”
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