by Mike Lupica
Would Brad have wanted him to quit?
Or blame himself for what happened that night?
Would his big brother have wanted Jack to wear that?
He sat at the desk for a long time until his mom walked in so quietly she made him jump.
“You scared me,” he said.
“You weren’t in your room,” she said. “I wondered if you might have gone for a walk or something without telling us.”
“I wouldn’t do that at night.”
“What are you doing in here?” she said. “You told me you don’t like being in here.”
“Thinking.”
“Always a good thing.”
She sat down at the end of the bed and patted it as a way of telling him to come sit next to her. When he did, she put her arm around him.
They sat there, neither one of them saying anything, in this room that always seemed more empty and quiet than any other place in the house. After a few minutes his mom said, “I want you to tell me what you haven’t told me.”
And he did.
Finally he did.
• • •
Jack told her all of it, not rushing, telling it at his own pace, trying not to leave anything out.
When he finished, he put his head onto her shoulder and cried. His mom pulled him closer and, as she did, yelled down for his dad to come upstairs.
When he came into the room, Jack’s mom said, “Tell your father what you just told me.”
It was easier this time, no tears, his dad sitting on the other side of him.
His dad turned Jack so they were facing each other. Jack saw that his dad’s eyes were red.
“You have carried this around all this time?” Tim Callahan said, sounding like he might cry.
Jack nodded.
“I am going to say this one time, son, and then I am never going to say it again,” his dad said. “What happened wasn’t your fault, isn’t your fault. If it was anybody, it was me. And your mom. You think we haven’t asked ourselves and each other a thousand times why we didn’t make him stop the things he was doing?”
“But I was the one who should have tried to stop him that night,” Jack said. “I was the one who knew he was going.”
“You would have betrayed his trust,” his dad said. “He trusted you to the end.”
“He was who he was, your brother,” his mom said. “You are who you are. He wouldn’t have loved you as completely as he did if he couldn’t have trusted you with his secrets. Because those secrets, honey? They were part of who he was too.”
“Cassie said I’ve kept secrets long enough,” Jack said. “Mine and Brad’s.”
“She’s right,” his dad said. “It’s time to let them go.”
They sat there on the end of the bed, Brad’s room quiet again except for their breathing, until his mom got up and told Jack she had something to show him.
EIGHTEEN
It was a small box, badly wrapped.
Jack knew that Brad had done the wrapping; it had always been a family joke. He was the guy who loved rap music but was such a bad wrapper of presents. But Brad still insisted on doing his own wrapping himself.
It was why when they looked under the tree on Christmas morning, they could spot Brad’s gifts immediately.
The way Jack could now.
“I found this when I was going through his things,” his mom said. “I didn’t know what it was or who it was for, so I opened it. When I found out it was for you, I taped the paper back together.”
She smiled at him. But now she was the one starting to cry. It made Jack feel as if they were all watching the same sad movie together.
“There’s a note inside,” she said. “Also for you. You’ll see when you read the note. It was supposed to be your birthday present last fall. But then it seemed . . . I couldn’t bring myself . . .” She shook her head. “I just thought it would all still be too sad for you.”
She started crying again. Jack’s dad said, “Then we decided we would save it and give it to you on opening day of the baseball season.” He lifted his shoulders and dropped them. “But then there was no opening day, and so we didn’t know what to do with it.”
“Your brother always said that opening day of the season was more like Christmas for you than Christmas,” his mom said.
Jack said, “He said to me one time it was even more than that, like Christmas and New Year’s wrapped up into one holiday. He told me that as far as I was concerned, that ball they drop in New York on New Year’s Eve ought to be a baseball.”
His mom said, “I’ve been waiting for just the right time. Your dad and I both. And after everything you’ve told us tonight and everything we’ve talked about, now seemed right.”
The box was in Jack’s lap. And if it had been Christmas, he would have torn right into it. Not now. He carefully pulled off the wrapping, bit by bit, like it was part of the present.
When he opened the box, he saw the baseball, sitting in a plastic stand. When Jack picked up the ball, he saw this:
To Jack: Never give up. Your friend, Dustin Pedroia.
“Is this . . . ?”
“Real?” his dad said. “It is.”
Jack rolled the ball around in his hand, feeling the seams. Then he held it up in front of him again, still not believing his eyes, and looked at Pedroia’s signature.
“How?” he said.
“We’ve been trying to figure that out since your mother found it,” his dad said. “But you know what your brother was like.”
“One more secret,” Jack said.
“You know what he was like,” his dad said. “Go big or go home. How many times did we hear that? Somehow he got to Pedroia. Or he knew somebody who could get to Pedroia and get this done.”
“He never said anything about it?”
His dad shook his head. “He must have gotten it sometime before . . . sometime last summer. He was obviously going to surprise us all with it.”
His mom said, “Now read the note.”
It was in a small envelope, underneath where the stand for the ball had been. Little Bro was scrawled in Brad’s terrible, little-boy handwriting on the outside.
But the note had been printed out.
Hey, he’d written. I’m writing this late at night, which I read in a book once is the time when guys tell each other the truth. So this is the truth, little bro, even though it sounds a little lame now that I’m gonna write it down. It’ll probably never see the light of day when I give you the ball.
But just in case I change my mind, I wanted you to know something that an older brother never tells his younger brother, which is this:
You’re my hero.
Jack saw the paper shaking a little in his hands, but he kept reading.
I wanted to get you a baseball present that would mean something to you. Maybe because I know I’ve never been as good at anything as you are at baseball. Or loved anything other than you and Mom and Dad the way you love baseball.
(Man, this is starting to feel longer than a paper for school!)
You know what I always tell you, how slow I think baseball is. Hated playing it. Still hate watching it on TV. But here’s one more secret, me to you:
I love watching you play. Always have, always will. I know that someday I’ll be watching you play at Fenway Park or Yankee Stadium. Maybe by then I’ll have found something to be as good at as you are pitching or hitting or running the bases.
But I’ll still be watching you. Proudly, little bro. Who knows? Maybe this ball will be some kind of good luck charm for you next season, on your way to the LL World Series. Or maybe you don’t need luck.
Anyway, if you ever see this, happy birthday.
I love you.
Brad.
He didn’t cry when he finished. He felt himself smiling, the letter in his right hand now, the ball in his left.
All along, he’d wanted his brother back, even if it was just for one more day.
And now he was.
NINETE
EN
After church the next morning Jack’s dad said, “You’re going to need to talk to Coach Leonard, you know.”
“I need to talk to Gus first,” Jack said.
He had thought about calling him last night before bed, after he’d talked to Cassie and told her what he’d done, told her about the ball, Brad’s letter, everything. But by then all he wanted to do was sleep.
And he decided against calling now. Jack thought it had been so long since he’d picked up the phone and just called Gus, or texted him, or Facebooked him that it would feel weird.
What was he going to say in a message?
COULDN’T WAIT TO TELL U. CHANGED MIND, WANT TO BE YOUR TEAMMATE AGAIN AFTER ALL, NO WORRIES!
No, this was a conversation he needed to have with Gus Morales in person.
He knew Gus and Angela and their parents usually went to church at nine. So they would be home by now, Mrs. Morales cooking up her huge lunch for them, always big enough to feed a small army.
Jack changed out of his own church clothes and put on jeans and a T-shirt and sneakers. His mom asked if he wanted her to drive him over. Jack said no. He’d do that on his own too.
“I got myself into this, I’ll get myself out of it,” Jack said. “I never look for help when I’m the one who loaded the bases.”
He went out and opened the garage door and wheeled out his bike. It wasn’t a fancy speed bike; the farthest he ever took it was to Gus’s house, about a mile and a half away. So he didn’t need what his dad called bells and whistles. He didn’t need hand brakes or any of the other things you saw on faster, sleeker bikes. His bike, which Gus loved making fun of, was so old-fashioned it even had a basket attached to the handlebars.
“Go ahead and crush me if you want,” Jack had told Gus one time. “I’m even old-school with bikes.”
And Gus had said, “Yeah, I think guys used to try to get away from dinosaurs on bikes like yours.”
Jack was all the way to the street when he stopped. He put down the kickstand, left the bike near the mailbox, ran back into the house and up to his room, went under his bed, and took his glove and ball out of his bat bag.
Then he went into his closet, reached up on the top shelf, and pulled down the Rays cap that Coach Leonard said he could keep when his mom called about taking back his uniform.
Gus lived in the opposite direction from Cassie’s house, heading out of Walton, almost to the Lewisboro line. Before Jack left, he’d given one more quick thought about calling, just to make sure he wasn’t wasting a long ride over there. But he wanted this to be a surprise. He hoped Gus would be okay with him wanting to come back to the Rays, and he hoped Gus wasn’t still blaming him for the team’s 1–3 start, and the hole they’d put themselves in.
Maybe Gus thought it was too big a hole for them to climb out of. The Rays were sitting in next-to-last place, and three other teams in the league had started out at 4–0. But Jack wanted to play, if his friends would let him.
It was a perfect day, Jack thought, for baseball or anything else. There were no clouds in the sky, hardly any breeze. On the way over he thought about how many times in his life he’d taken this same ride to Gus’s house after church on a Sunday morning. Somehow, though, this felt like the first time.
“A new beginning.” That was what his mom had talked about the night before.
She made it clear that just because Jack had told them his own secret and just because he wanted to start playing baseball again, that didn’t change what had happened with Brad. Nothing ever could. Jack playing baseball was never about that. But this was another way, a good way, for all of them to move forward.
It was different with Gus. At least with him, Jack could make things the way they used to be.
As he came around the corner of Smith Ridge Lane, he saw Mr. Morales’s blue van parked in the driveway. It meant they were home.
Mrs. Morales answered the door. She was wearing her apron, wiping her hands on it. The smell of the food she was cooking—probably her usual feast of rice and beans and pasta and chicken or steak or both—made Jack feel as if he’d come back to what had always been his other home.
“Jack Callahan!” Maria Morales said, gathering him into her arms. “What a wonderful surprise!”
“Nice to see you, Mrs. Morales,” he said, wondering if she could even hear him with his face pressed into her shoulder.
“We have missed you so much,” she said. “Does Gustavo know you were coming?”
“He doesn’t.”
She stepped back now from Jack and yelled up the front stairs to Gus that there was somebody to see him. Then she pulled Jack into the house as if she was afraid he might jump on his bike and ride away.
“Gustavo Morales!” she yelled again. “Can you not hear your mother calling to you?”
Gus came walking out of his room. “I was on the phone, Mama.”
When he saw Jack, he stopped.
Jack could see the surprise on Gus’s face. But all he said was, “Hey,” like Jack being there was no big deal.
“Hey,” Jack said.
“I’m sorry,” Maria Morales said, “is this talking, or texting?”
She motioned for her son to get down here.
He was wearing one of his favorite T-shirts. BIG PAPI was written over an image of David Ortiz, one of the great Dominican players of all time. That alone would have been enough for Gus to love him as a player. But Jack knew it was more than that. David Ortiz was one of the great World Series players of all time, from any country.
To someone who dreamed as hard as Gus did of making the Little League World Series, what Ortiz had done in his three trips to the Series for the Red Sox was pure magic.
Gus came down the steps and stood in front of Jack. Both of them sensed how awkward they felt in the front hall. They didn’t bump fists. They didn’t give each other a quick high five. They didn’t lean in with their shoulders.
They just stood there.
Finally Jack said, “I need to talk to you about something.”
“So talk,” Gus said.
“Gustavo Alberto Morales!” his mom said.
“What?”
“I am going to leave you alone to talk to your friend Jack now and also pray to the Lord that you remember your manners while you do.”
She walked back toward the kitchen. When she was out of earshot, Gus said, “So what did you want to talk about that we couldn’t talk about on the phone?”
“Everything,” Jack said.
• • •
They went and sat where they had sat a lot in their lives, after Sunday lunch and after school and after games, on the front porch of the Morales house, five steps up from the walk to the door. They had always called it “the front stoop,” just because Gus’s dad always had.
“It was a stoop in Santo Domingo,” he’d explained to Jack once, “and it’s still a stoop in America.”
Jack talked for a long time. Gus listened. He didn’t say a word the whole time, until he finally said to Jack, “You finished?”
“Pretty much.”
“I’m your best friend,” Gus said. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
He wasn’t talking to Jack about baseball, or what him coming back would mean to the team. He wanted to talk about their friendship. He made it sound as if this were another way that Jack had let him down, in a bigger way than just leaving the team.
“I just tried to explain,” Jack said. “I didn’t tell anybody.”
“But when you did, you told Cassie and Teddy before you told me.”
Gus was staring past Jack’s bike, out at the street.
“I didn’t plan that,” Jack said.
Gus shook his head. “We always told each other everything,” he said. “We told each other we’d always tell each other everything.”
“I messed up,” Jack said. “I messed up not telling my parents where Brad was going, and I’ve been messing up ever since.”
“You just sat there and
let me call you out the way I did in the cafeteria,” Gus said. “I never would’ve done that if I’d known.”
“I know,” Jack said.
They sat there in silence. This wasn’t going the way Jack had thought it would on his way over. More than anything, he’d thought Gus would be happy that he wanted to play for the Rays again. He’d just assumed Gus would focus on what this meant for the team and for him, because of how important baseball was in his life.
Jack should have known him better. Should have known that friendship and loyalty mattered even more to him.
“It’s like you didn’t trust me enough,” Gus said.
“It wasn’t about that!” Jack said. “It’s what I’m trying to tell you now. I thought I’d worked it out right in my head, but I worked it out all wrong. Because you were my best friend, you would have tried as hard as my parents to talk me out of doing what I was doing.”
“You think with me it would’ve been all about the team.”
“If I ever did think that,” Jack said, “I know better now.”
It was almost as if Gus wasn’t listening now, as if it was almost more important to him to get things off his chest.
“I would have wanted what was best for you whether you decided to play ball or not.”
“That’s something else I know now.”
“But you always should have known.”
“You’re right,” Jack said. He smiled, trying to somehow break through the wall he still felt was between them. “This may be the most you’ve ever been right at one time.”
He looked at Gus and said, “Right?”
Gus wasn’t smiling back. “So what do we do now?”
“First thing, I have to talk to Coach, see if he even wants me back on the team.”
“Okay, now you do sound like an idiot,” Gus said.
“I never even asked you if he’d filled my spot.”
“He tried, with Justin Horton,” Gus said. “But you know how good Justin is at lacrosse, and his coach told him he didn’t want him to play both, even though the town allows it. So Coach just decided we’d go with what we have. He said it would mean more playing time for everybody.”
Jack said, “I thought I’d call him after I talked to you, maybe go over from here and talk to him if he’s home.”