by Jj Rossum
Surprisingly no! They just took the lead. And it looks like Marco might be coming in soon.
That is a surprise. I will have to turn it on. Maybe the kids will want to see their dad.
The inning ended and Marco jogged out onto the field to pitch the eighth inning. I ended my conversation with April by putting my phone back into my pocket.
Can’t keep talking to the woman I am going to be pre-breaking up with.
The inning started and Marco looked off right away. His first two pitches weren’t even close to the strike zone, and the next pitch was hit hard right back up the middle for a single. I wondered if the brief suspension he had received had been weighing on his mind at all. Who knows what went through the head of a crazy man?
Pitchers sometimes attempt a pickoff move when they think the runner on first base is going to try stealing second base. That means they will make it seem like they are going to pitch the ball to the batter, but will instead make a quick throw to the first baseman. The runner is allowed to be off the base, but if he is tagged before he gets back, he would be out.
In this particular situation, with the Rays up three, it didn’t make much sense for Marco to try picking the runner off, but that’s exactly what he did. He lifted his leg up and made a quick throw over to the first baseman. Only the ball bounced into the dirt to the first-baseman’s right side, and skipped away from him and into the outfield. The runner took off for second base and made it there easily.
Marco looked tense, but he seemed to be attempting to keep his composure. Knowing him, he was probably blaming the first baseman for the bad throw.
The next batter came to the plate and Marco threw four straight balls, walking the batter so that there were now two runners on base. The tying run came to the plate and the crowd started murmuring and mumbling and a few of them even started to boo.
Maybe since he had thrown so many balls to the previous batter, he decided to throw one down the middle just to get a strike, but the batter hit it into right field, down the line. The ball rolled all the way to the wall in front of me, and the two runners who were already on base scored easily and the speedy batter ended up on third base with a triple. The score was 9-8.
Now the boos were more noticeable and I heard a few “Marco, you’re a bum!” chants being yelled across the stadium along with other colorful phrases that would probably have made mothers cover the ears of their children.
Marco was now obviously upset, but he had no one to blame but himself. He needed to get the next few guys out if he wanted to get out of the jam. But, on the next pitch he hit the batter in the head with a fastball, and after the sickening thud, the batter dropped straight to the ground. Gasps shot up from people around the stadium and everyone stood up to see if the batter was going to be okay. The coaches from Baltimore came running out to check on the player. Marco just stood there on the mound, watching, making no sign that he was in the slightest bit concerned.
My phone vibrated in my pocket. It was a text from April.
Oh my god was what it said.
Please tell me the kids weren’t watching...
No, they didn’t see it.
The manager of the Rays walked out to check on the batter, who had been lying motionless for a few minutes and was finally starting to stir. After the manager was sure the player was okay, he walked out to the mound to talk to Marco, who still hadn’t moved or shown any remorse or worry about the player’s wellbeing. The conversation between the two looked pretty heated, but because no one had been warming up in the bullpen when Marco hit him, there was no one to bring in. Someone had begun to throw, but probably wouldn’t be ready in time to face the next batter.
The crowd clapped when the batter finally got to his feet with the help of the trainers and was led to the dugout. A different player came off the bench to run the bases for him, and the next batter came to the plate, now with runners on first and third base.
There were still no outs and I could tell Marco was fuming. He checked both of the runners, and then seemed to come out of his body with the pitch, throwing it as hard as his angry body would let him. If it had been a few years before, a fastball from Marco thrown with that much effort probably would have blown right by the batter. But, he was older, and his pitches were slower, so when the batter saw the fastball coming, he swung mightily. The crack of the ball hitting the bat was the sound every batter wanted to hear when they came up to hit. Everyone on the field turned and watched as the ball sailed deep into the bleachers for a three-run home run. It was one of the furthest balls I had ever seen hit, and the Rays were now losing 11-9. Marco had allowed five runs without getting a single out.
The manager came out quickly and gestured toward the bullpen for the next pitcher to come in. The boos were deafening now as Marco walked off the field. I was surprised such a small crowd could make such a loud noise. He took his glove off his right hand, chucked it into the crowd, and then with both hands flipped off the people in attendance. It wasn’t a quick flip either. He stood there for five to ten seconds just saluting the crowd that was now somehow booing him even more loudly. A couple of the Rays’ players bounced out of the dugout and practically pushed Marco down the steps, and when he was out of sight, the boos finally began to die down.
April was married to this piece of shit. In my head I hoped that things would be okay for her, but I knew in my heart a woman like her couldn’t survive long in a marriage to a person like this. There was a difference between being fiery and competitive, and just being an awful person with deep-rooted issues. Marco was beyond awful.
I texted April.
I hope your kids didn’t get to see that either...
See what? she quickly replied.
You mean you didn’t see what just happened?
No. They went to commercial.
Oh, god.
Luke, what happened?
I’m sure you’ll hear about it.
Fuck. Luke, what happened?
No sense in not telling her.
He gave the crowd a two-handed, one finger salute.
He what??
Yeah...flipped off the crowd. For like ten seconds.
Oh my god, she replied. Then she said, He humiliates himself, his family, and he doesn’t care.
I’m sorry April...
I didn’t need to stay for the end of the game, nor did I care to. I had only come with the hopes of seeing Marco get hit around, but I hadn’t expected anything like this.
I felt sick to my stomach as I drove home.
Maybe the reason West was in April’s classroom today was so that you couldn’t have the talk with her that you had planned, I thought to myself. Maybe some powers outside of your control kept you from doing it because you are the one who can rescue her from the hell she lives in.
I think I had stopped believing in fate, in destiny, in anything after I found out Carrie only had a few months left to live. I felt so strongly when I was younger that we were high-school sweethearts who were going to live life together, always be happy and never have anything go wrong. People are naive when they are young, and I knew I had been the epitome of that. But, still part of me had sat and considered all the things that had happened to even bring Carrie and me into each other’s lives, and then I felt like it had to be fate.
Hearing that the woman you thought you were destined for was going to die before you had turned twenty-five basically fucked up my thoughts and proved to me that life is random and chaotic. Nothing happened for a reason. People you loved got sick, they died, and none of it ever made any goddamn sense. That was the conclusion I had come to after she died.
But, now my thoughts were jumbled again and I wasn’t sure what I believed. Why had Robin died so quickly? Why was April the one they got to fill in for the time Robin was out? Why had her husband been traded to Tampa Bay in the first place, when no one else seemed to want anything to do with him? Why was April making me rethink everything about fate, about life, and about love?
>
I wanted to protect her. I knew that more than I knew I wanted to tell her we couldn’t hang out with each other, couldn’t see each other anymore. I wanted to take her away from Marco and never look back. I hadn’t met her children, but deep down I knew I didn’t want them growing up in a home with a father like Marco. Being around her, I felt like I had known her forever, as cliché as that sounded, even though I barely knew her at all. God, what a mess.
Before I knew it, I was home. Sometimes it would scare me when I would reach a destination I had been driving to and I couldn’t even remember driving there. That had happened a lot since the invention of texting. But, this drive had been distracted by my thoughts and not my phone.
I got home at around ten o’clock and sat on my couch with a toothpick in my mouth, watching the Marco story continue to unfold on SportsCenter. I wanted to text April again, but I had no idea whether or not Marco was home yet, and I sure wasn’t going to be texting her when I knew he could be home. Psychos were not to be trifled with. And here I was thinking about the psycho’s wife.
I felt myself growing tired. It had been a long week. Holly would be coming over in four hours, and I wanted to take a nap. Sex with her wasn’t something I really wanted to do anymore, at least not now, but I couldn’t explain that to her. So, I turned the volume on my phone up, set my alarm, and laid down on the couch to try to squeeze in a couple hours of rest before she got there. Maybe with a little rest I could fake it.
I awoke to a loud ringing and rolled over toward my phone, which was lying on the floor. At first, I didn’t have a clue where I was; it was one of those moments where you wake up and think you overslept when you needed to be somewhere important. I went to turn off the alarm, when I realized it wasn’t the alarm at all. It was a phone call from April.
I shot straight up on the couch. It was almost midnight.
“Hello,” I said, hoping to sound much more awake and coherent than I felt.
I could hear April crying. The sound was slightly muffled, but it woke me up immediately. She wasn’t saying anything, only sobbing.
“April, what’s wrong?” I said, standing up. I began pacing around as she continued to cry. I asked her once more what was wrong, and I could tell she was trying to get words out.
“He...hit...me,” she said, and then repeated herself, seeming bewildered.
Oh god. That bastard.
“April, where are you? Are you okay?”
I could tell she was driving, and the sound seemed muffled because she was probably talking to me through her car’s speakers.
“Yeah. I’m...okay,” she said.
“Where are you, April?” I asked, walking circles around my living room.
“I’m just driving,” she replied. “I’m not even sure where I am.”
I immediately thought of getting in my car and going to find her. But then what did I plan on doing? Just hang out with her next to each other’s cars? No.
“April, come over to my house,” I finally said. I didn’t give myself time to question what I was saying, or rethink it. I just said it.
“What?” she said, still in a daze.
“Drive to me. You can just stay with me until you’re okay.”
“Are you...I mean, are you sure?”
“Yes. I’m insisting. Come over now. You don’t need to be driving around like this.”
I didn’t know where she was, so I asked her if she could make it to the school from where she was. She said yes, she probably could, so I gave her the simple directions from the school to my house.
“Okay, I think I can do that,” she said.
I heard a loud beeping sound on her end.
“Marco is calling,” she said, and her voice went up and filled with tears again.
“Don’t answer it,” I said.
“What?”
“Don’t answer him. Drive over here. You aren’t going to talk to him like this. You can use a little time to cool off, breathe, think. Then, if you want to call him or answer his calls, you can.”
“Okay,” she replied.
I heard the beeping again. And she started sobbing.
“April, you are going to be okay. Just get to me. Everything is going to be fine. He can’t hit you if you are with me.”
“Okay,” she said again, as if trying to will herself to believe it.
I made her tell me where she was, and what she was seeing, and I directed her accordingly. I had no intention of hanging up until she was in my driveway.
When she got into my neighborhood, I walked outside so I could wave her down when she neared my house. I had fallen asleep in my Rays’ shirt and had forgotten to change it.
I saw her headlights as she turned onto my street. I tossed my third toothpick of the night into the bushes and stuck my hands in my pockets. She’s not yours. Don’t touch her.
She parked, got out of the car, and I saw the swelling under her eye immediately. He really did hit her. That motherfucker had dared to lay hands on April. If I didn’t hate him before, I did with every fiber of my being now. I had half a mind to tell him to come over here, take on someone his own size. I had been worried he would beat the shit out of me if he ambushed me while I was at his home. But, in a fair fight without the element of surprise, I knew I could kick his ass. And I wanted to.
“Oh my god,” I said. “Come here.”
I reached my arms toward her, and she fell into them. I could feel the tears soaking my shirt right away, and her body trembled and shook with fear or anger or sadness. Or all of the above. I wasn’t sure, but it didn’t matter. Because she was safe now. In my arms.
We stood like that for a few minutes. I just held her while she cried. You have those moments where you feel like you need to say something, reassure a person, but no words come. And it was usually during those times that I have found that words wouldn’t suffice anyway. Silence was sometimes the best option, and so I held her quietly and listened to her cry.
Her head was buried into my neck, and my hands rubbed her shoulders and arms in a continual motion. The more I did it, the calmer she seemed to get and the sobs lessened.
“Let’s get you inside,” I said.
We turned toward the house and I walked her in, my arms still around her. It had been a long time since I had my arms wrapped around a woman like this, but it felt good with April, despite the circumstances. It felt natural.
She sat down on the couch and I went to the freezer to find something to put on her cheek, underneath her eye. I wanted the swelling to go down. Thankfully, I had a plethora of ice packs in my freezer that I had used for the various sports injuries I sustained during softball, baseball, tennis, and all the other sports I recreationally participated in. I always joked with myself that you could tell how old a person was by the number of ice packs they had in their freezer.
I brought one back, and knelt down in front of her. Her head was in her hands, so I gently took hold of them and pulled them away. She leaned her head back and saw the ice pack, wincing almost involuntarily.
“It’ll help,” I said, and then softly pressed it against her cheek. Her hand fell over mine, holding it against the ice pack against her cheek. The sensation was bizarre because her hand, her body heat, was pouring through her touch, and the cold of the other side was a stark contrast.
I got up and sat next to her, putting my right arm around her and pulling her toward me. My left hand was still holding the ice pack and being held by her right hand. She rested the left side of her head on my right shoulder, and we sat there in silence.
Her phone vibrated in her lap and she flinched. I could see that Marco was calling again.
“Turn the sound and vibration off,” I said.
She lowered her left hand from my hand and did what I had instructed.
“Now throw your phone over there,” I said, gesturing to a stack of pillows near the couch.
She quickly obeyed.
Her tears had stopped, as had her shaking, and I coul
d tell she was regaining control over her emotions. Now, I could ask what had made him hit her.
“What happened?” I said.
Her head didn’t move from my shoulder when she spoke.
“He came home and was mad. I could hear him in the kitchen clanging bottles around. I think he was already drunk when he got home.”
“What did you say to him? Anything?”
“I went downstairs and stood in the kitchen, watching him. He said, ‘What the fuck are you looking at, bitch?’ and I told him to keep his voice down because the kids were sleeping.”
He had called his wife a bitch. There wasn’t a word I hated more in the English language than bitch, and I hated anyone who used it when talking to a woman.
“Then what happened?”
“He threw a bottle of rum at me. It hit the floor by my feet.”
She was wearing sandals and lifted her feet up. I could see where the glass had cut her. They weren’t deep cuts, and the blood had already dried.
“April—” I said, rubbing a hand over my face. I was trying hard not to lose it.
“I yelled at him. And then he told me to keep my voice down. Then I got angry.”
“What did you do?”
“I asked him what the hell his problem was. Then I asked him why he was such an asshole.”
“I imagine he didn’t take that well,” I said.
She breathed in deeply.
“No. He said I was stupid and didn’t know what I was talking about. Said I didn’t have a fucking clue what he was going through. I told him I saw what he did, and I was tired of him embarrassing his family like that, told him he was just a kid throwing a tantrum every time things didn’t go his way.”
“Is that when he hit you?”
“No. He told me to shut the fuck up. And I antagonized him. I shouldn’t have, but I did. I asked him if he was going to throw a baseball at my head like he did to the guy from Baltimore. Or if he was going to pick up a water cooler and throw it at me like he did to the manager.”
“God.”
“Then he told me if I knew what was best for me I would shut up, or he would make sure I shut up.”