Vote Then Read: Volume III

by Aleatha Romig

  “Have fun. Not that you won’t,” she says with a wink. “You’re living on a whole different plane of existence from the rest of us.”

  As I walk to the staircase, slipping my arms into my sweater, it hits me how true that is. I zip up the cardigan and square my shoulders, pasting on a smile.

  The game opens just as I reach the suite, and all the men are lined up in their tall stools at a long counter, facing the glass wall. The room smells like freshly-popped popcorn and a burnt-sugar scent. A quick glance at the counter reveals the source of that.

  Caramel corn.

  Andrew pats an empty chair next to him, on the end, with no one else next to me. “Saved you a seat.” There’s no trace of his earlier anger, which is a huge relief. As I settle in, he hands me a small cone of popcorn and we face the field.

  Play ball.

  As I look over the crowd at Fenway Park, an uneasy familiarity creeps over my skin. Andrew’s hand is on my knee and he’s avidly watching as the players get ready for the pitcher, the first inning about to open. Loud organ music pounds through the air, muted in here.

  I’ve been here.

  Not in this suite, but I’ve been here. At Fenway Park.

  When Andrew asked me to this game, he questioned whether I’d attended a baseball game before. Other than once, in high school, I told him I had a vague memory of my mom bringing me to a game when I was really little. Or maybe my grandpa? I couldn’t remember.

  Suddenly, an image of myself as a tiny girl and the faint olfactory memory of peanuts transports me back two decades. My hand is in the warm clasp of a man’s callused palm, the back of his hand covered with black hair. He puts a baseball cap on my head and it’s too big.

  His laughter rumbles and he’s hugging me, the vibration of his chest against my ear so loud. His breath is sour against my cheek. I look up to find his face surrounded by a halo of bright sunshine. I have to squint hard to see his face.

  Crack!

  One of the pitches hits the bat and the shortstop makes a long throw to first base, barely beating the runner. Everyone’s on their feet, cheering.

  The roar of the crowd.

  A flash of sunlight and I’m blinded, except there is no sun outside right now. It’s a partly cloudy day, with no chance of rain, and no bright orb in the sky.

  What am I remembering?

  “You okay?” Andrew asks, concern in his eyes as I drop my cone of popcorn, the pieces spilling over my leg. Except my leg is tiny, and I’m wearing a gingham dress. It’s my favorite. It’s the one I wore for my kindergarten school picture, with tiny pink flowers against a chocolate backdrop, and brown piping along the hem.

  I look at Andrew and see my father’s face.

  “Mandy?” he says.

  Except Andrew actually says, “Amanda.”

  No one has called me Mandy since I was five. Since my dad disappeared. That was my father’s nickname for me. My dad, though, never brought me to a baseball game.

  I stand abruptly, shaking my head fast. “Uh, excuse me.”

  “Amanda,” Andrew repeats. “What’s going on? Are you sick?” He follows me to the doorway, his hand on my elbow. The gesture is protective and genuine. I’m worrying him.

  I’m worrying me.

  “I, um...can we just go for a walk?” I beg. The room closes in on me, even with the expansive view. The billboard flashes with numbers and videos. I can’t blink hard enough to get clarity.

  “Now?” If I were in a better frame of mind I would see the fear in his eyes. Not anger. Not disappointment.

  Fear.

  “Yeah. I’m having this weird memory about Fenway Park.”

  “From high school?”

  I start to breathe through my nose in short little spurts. “No. Earlier.”

  He cocks his head and bends down. I can smell the popcorn he’s been eating. “I thought you said you were maybe here with your mom or grandpa once.”

  “I thought so, too. But now I’m remembering coming here with my dad.”

  Shock registers in the way he moves. “Your father? But he abandoned you.”

  “Right. This memory...I don’t know. I just need to go for a walk. I need fresh air. Please, Andrew? Please?”

  Adrenaline pours through me like an overflowing bucket under a full-throttle faucet. I am nothing but one big, nauseated cell.

  He looks over my head and outside, where the game is underway. His eyes scan the entire perimeter of the glass that faces the park.

  Then he looks down at me.

  Back up at the wall.

  Down at me.

  His face hardens. “I can’t. This is an important client meeting. And besides,” he adds, “you, um...photographers might be out there.”

  “Photographers?” What is he talking about? Who cares about my picture being taken?

  My breathing quickens. If I don’t get out of here, I’m going to pass out. Or vomit. Or just plain old die as my dad’s face takes over, the backs of his hands covering his face, his sobs cutting through me like a razor blade as I pat him on the back and ask Daddy for more ice cream.

  “Right,” Andrew says quickly, his rapid-fire speech an anomaly, his eyes nervously bouncing across sights outside. “You know. Boston Magazine, media outlets. You don’t really want—”

  Wrenching my elbow away from him, I walk as fast as I can down the stairs, pounding down them until I find a door I can burst through, the scent of the outdoor air sickening as I find myself next to a short man with a beard, making balloon hats for a crowd of children.

  Rushing past them, I round a corner and find myself on the sidewalk behind the park, where street vendors offer me Cuban sandwiches and Italian sausage.

  Deep breath. Deep breath. Deep breath.

  How can I have a memory of something that never actually happened?

  Only one way to find out.

  I call my mom.

  As her phone rings, I look toward the building, praying Andrew will follow. Yes, I ran away. Yes, I broke contact. But I need someone right now, because I am about as out of my own head and body as a person can get, and this feels suspiciously like I’m going a little—or a lot—insane.

  “Hello?”

  “Mom?”

  “What’s wrong, Amanda?” she asks with alarm.

  It’s that obvious, huh?

  “Did my dad ever bring me to a baseball game at Fenway Park when I was little?” My words come out in gasps and half-chokes, cracked in two like an egg just before the whites spit on the griddle in bubbling oil.

  “What?” she gasps. “What?”

  I find a tiny patch of grass next to the curb and sink to the ground, my forehead pressing into my knee.

  “Mom? I’m here at a game with Andrew and I keep seeing my dad. In my mind. Like we were in the stands watching a game. He put a baseball cap on my head.”

  “Oh, sweetie,” she says through a voice so thick it feels like it’s coming across twenty years of pain. “Oh, Amanda. I thought you’d forgotten.”

  “Forgotten? I really was here once with him?” A blast of relief counteracts all my fear. I’m not crazy. I’m not unraveling. I’m not insane.

  I look down the street toward the back of the building.

  Still no Andrew.

  “Mom?” She’s gone silent.

  “Yes, sweetie,” she says reluctantly. “You were.”

  “Oh,” I say, the sound coming out in waves, like it’s seven syllables, the same on repeat. “Oh, thank God. I’m not crazy. This is a real memory.”

  “It is.” She’s breathing slowly. Too slowly. Mom defaults to deep breaths when she has to control her pain. I hope I haven’t triggered any.

  “Why don’t I remember it all?” I ask. “Just bits and pieces.”

  “Do you remember anything more than the game?”

  I close my eyes and try. All I see is a void.

  “No.”

  “Okay.” She lets out a long sigh.

  “Why? What else happe
ned?”

  My phone buzzes. I’m sure it’s a text from Andrew, who is probably trying to figure out where the hell I am.

  “Can you hop the Green Line? Come home now? Or grab a cab?”

  “I can do any of those, but I’m here with Andrew and he’s going to wonder.”

  “Is he still entertaining clients?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then text him. Tell him you need a couple hours. Then go back to him. We need to talk.”

  I just blink as I stare across the street at the graffiti.

  “Talk?”

  “Honey, you’re remembering the very last day you ever saw your dad. Let’s just say it was the worst day of my life, and probably one of the worst of yours, even if you don’t remember everything.”

  I look around wildly. Where is Andrew? Why didn’t he follow?

  “Okay.”

  “I’d feel better if we talked in person. I can come get you.”

  “No, I can get a ride. I’ll be home soon, Mom.”

  I end the call and pull up a ride share app. Estimated time for pick up: two minutes.

  Then I check my texts, expecting one from Andrew. Instead, it’s a text from Marie:

  Chuckles doesn’t have balls, so no worries about lotion for him.

  I click out of the text function and stand, then turn the text feature back on as the driver appears. I climb in. He has my address from the app and we speed off. I look back one last time.

  No Andrew.

  As a courtesy I type out a short text to him.

  Got sick. Went home. Talk later.

  I press Send and then turn off my phone completely.

  When I arrive at home, Mom’s in the door, hovering behind the screen. The shadow of her body shows her shoulders tight, her eyebrows high, face a mask of pain and despair.

  I hate knowing that I’ve triggered her pain.

  “You want coffee?” We walk into the kitchen, her arm around my waist. I’m taller than her, and ever since her car accident this is how it is. She can’t reach up very high without pinching a nerve in her neck. I’m grateful for the affection and take what I can get, leaning into the half-hug.

  On the counter there is a tray of Cheeto marshmallow treats. I look at her fingernails.

  They’re stained orange.

  My eyes fill to the point of near blindness. “Mom? What’s going on?”

  “Where’s Andrew?”

  Half an answer suffices for most people. It’s startling how much you can get away with when you learn this. “He’s back at Fenway, entertaining his investors still.”

  “Oh.” Her eyes bounce from the tray of treats to the coffee she just poured to me. “Okay.”

  I grab milk from the fridge, my eyes blurred by hands acting from physical memory, and prepare my coffee. She takes a splash of milk as well.

  “Tell me,” I ask. It’s not an order.

  “I don’t want to make it bigger than it is, Man—Amanda.”

  “You haven’t called me Mandy in years, Mom. That’s what Dad called me.”

  “I know.” Her voice is contrite. Why?

  “Make what bigger?”

  “The day your father abandoned you.”

  “Why would you make it bigger?”

  She sighs and uses a spatula to dig out two pieces of Cheeto treat, munching on one as she hands me mine. I take a relieved bite, the familiar salty-sweet taste so comforting.

  “Do you remember the police station?” she whispers, the question stripped down to such a basic handful of words that it dawns on me: Mom knows the trick of giving half the information needed, too.

  “Police station?” I lower my brow, trying to understand what she means. Stuffing my face with another bite, I mumble around the mouthful. “What police station?”

  “The one you found that day. In South Boston.” She’s handing out pieces of information like I’m—

  And then wham! The entire memory floods me at once, like torn pieces of a watercolor all whirling together in a wind tunnel, my fingers grasping and reaching to gather them all until the wind dies down and I can assemble the whole.

  I inhale so sharply that a piece of the treat lodges in the back of my throat, making me choke. I cough it up immediately, but the ragged edge leaves a stinging scrape along my tonsil. Mom hands me my coffee, which is just cool enough to gulp, helping to quell the pain.

  My mind, meanwhile, is like a memory factory, taking pieces along an assembly line and playing Tetris.

  “I do remember being in a police station,” I say. “The police officer gave me a Dr. Pepper. I remember because you never let me have soda and he asked me if I wanted something from the machine. I thought I was being very naughty, but you also taught me that police officers were good people, so I decided it was okay.”

  She makes a barking sound like laughter and tears competing to emerge from her throat.

  “You remember that,” she gasps. “You were drinking it when you arrived.”

  “Did this have something to do with Dad? Did that all happen on the same...” My voice trails off as I remember long walks on the sidewalk. Feeling buried in the shadows of tall buildings. Being thirsty. Needing to pee. Tripping and skinning my knee.

  Being alone.

  “Same day.” She reaches for my hand. “Yes.”

  “The same day.” I haven’t forgotten any of it. The word forget doesn’t describe it. It’s more like all the details have been stored in different shelves in my brain, disparate places that don’t feel connected to each other.

  “I went to the baseball game with my dad?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was that the day he left for good?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “What happened, Mom?”

  Her face crumples, hand covering her mouth. The long, thin veins on the back of her hand stand out in stark relief, making her seem so much older. Like grandma.

  “He took you to the ball game. He had just been laid off. Drinking on the job. But he had tickets from some raffle he won at a bar, and he was determined to take you. Against my better judgment, I let him. We didn’t have money to buy a third ticket, and you were so excited.”

  An eerie calm descends over the kitchen. I stop chewing. It sounds cavernous in the silence.

  “We didn’t have cell phones back then. I mean, some people did, but we sure didn’t.” She makes a scoffing sound. “Your father drank away all the extra we had.”

  “He was a good man, Mandy.” My skin crawls with her use of the old nickname. “He tried. But he had his own demons, and after seven years together I think they just ate him up alive.”

  She’s rambling, and I let her, because this is the most I’ve ever heard about my father from her. My grandma has pieced together some of it for me, but when every third word out of her mouth is bastard, it’s kind of hard to get a sense of anything beyond the worst.

  “He got drunk at the game. Leo probably got drunk before he even left with you,” she says in a bitter tone I don’t often hear. “But at the game I’ll bet he was a big spender. Bought you anything you wanted.”

  I remember popcorn. The baseball hat. An ice cream.

  “I guess?”

  “Here’s what we reconstructed from you, the police, and the short time Leo was here,” Mom starts.

  Reconstructed?

  “Your dad got drunk. You left the game. Some time between the game ending and the time we found you—”

  Found me?

  “—your father got in the car without you, drove home drunk, and got into a crash.”

  I can’t breathe.

  “I got a call from a state trooper. That call. The one no one ever wants. Leo came out of the crash with a few scratches. The car was totaled. And when I asked about you—” Her voice just halts, the sob turning into a high-pitched sound that makes my mouth fill with the acrid taste of her buried fear.

  “Mom?”

  “Oh, that poor state trooper. When I asked about my little girl
he screamed. Screamed. He was at the scene with Leo and all those men, all those firefighters and paramedics ran back to the scene and started combing the long grasses by the side of the road and roamed into the woods, searching.”

  “For me?”

  Her eyes meet mine, red and wet, filled with the haunting of memory. “For your little body.”

  “My body?”

  “Leo was too drunk to be coherent and I just cried and prayed into the phone. I thought you were with him. We didn’t know that you weren’t. Those poor men. They spent hours looking for you. Hours, expecting to find a little girl thrown from the car from the crash’s impact.”

  The full horror of what she’s saying hits me like I’ve been kicked in the chest.

  “Oh, Mom.” Her words sink in. “But I wasn’t with Dad?”

  She shakes her head, her eyes glassy. “No. Sweet Jesus, no. Thank God, Mandy. We don’t know how, but we think Leo just left you at Fenway Park. Maybe you went to tinkle, maybe you wandered off to get an ice cream. Maybe he walked away to get a beer for the road...we don’t know. We just know that after hours of trying, those responders never found you. And then....”

  “You—” She’s clinging to the kitchen island with those hands, her fingertips white with pressure. “You had walked all the way from Fenway Park to some police station in South Boston. Hell of a distance. Back then, it wasn’t safe. Southie was no place for a little kid alone. You had to cross that enormous bridge. The cop told us you walked into the station and sweetly asked for help calling your mom. That you had lost your dad. You knew our phone number and he called and called, but it was busy.”

  “Busy?”

  She sniffs and snorts and makes a funny laugh. “Yeah. Busy. Back then we didn’t have call waiting for two lines and Leo and I sold the answering machine at a yard sale, so...yeah. Busy. The cop spent the next hour calling.”

  I’m remembering the nice police officer with the ginger hair and the wide brown eyes. His eyelashes were the color of my peach crayons in my box at school. His name tag flashes through my mind.

  “Murphy. Officer Murphy.”

  She jumps like I shocked her.

  “Holy shit. You do remember. I still send that man a Christmas card every year.”