“Not just any baseball game.” Nicole marched through the crowd like a pilgrim on the way to Mecca. “We’re going to a Cubs game.”
Claire struggled to keep up with Nicole’s city pace as they took the stairs out of the station. Claire had been struggling to keep up with Nicole in a lot of ways since they retrieved Jenna’s car from the Iowa mechanic. Nicole spent all her nondriving time on her cell phone, making calls, answering texts, reserving hotel rooms, buying tickets, breaking out in laughter now and again, in a manic way that gave Claire pause. Claire’s offer to head straight-arrow to Pine Lake had knocked Nicole back into her über-efficient mode, but the effects were making Claire breathless.
“So,” she said, tugging on the hem of Nicole’s faded Cubs T-shirt in an effort to slow her down, “you’re telling me we drove seven hours to watch a bunch of millionaires throw a ball around?”
“Claire, when we were in Salt Lake City, did we visit Temple Square?”
“No, we saw Jin.”
“When we were in Wyoming, did we stop to see the Devils Tower?”
“No, but—”
“When we passed through Iowa, did we pull over to visit the future birthplace of Captain James T. Kirk?”
Claire didn’t respond. She’d been particularly scornful of that suggestion, as she had been of most tourist traps.
“Listen,” Nicole said, “I’ve got nothing against roadside pool halls, tacky museums, and friends’ pull-out couches. And hauling out to Kansas to chase a ghost pretty much convinced me that you’re a back-roads kind of traveler. But it’d be a crime if we continued to blow on past some of the country’s high points, especially if they’re right on route.” Nicole paused at a kiosk to peruse the regalia. “So, today, we’re doing something touristy.”
“Must we?”
“Baseball is America’s quintessential pastime.”
“You read that on the back of a Cracker Jack box.”
“You’re such a heathen.” Nicole grinned as she tried to catch the vendor’s attention. “You realize that we’re here because of you, right?”
“How did I screw up?”
“Back in Iowa, you reminded me that baseball makes me happy.” Nicole swept her gaze over the blue-shirted crowd of fans, and the hawkers of hats, bats, and little shirted bears, to the sight of the curved wall of the stadium. “You should think up something that’ll make you just as happy. Something that you won’t be able to do when you’re finally home in your thirty-acre wood.”
Claire frowned. She had been doing what made her happy—poking about the countryside, meeting up with old friends—right up to the moment Jenna went back to Seattle and Karma completely shifted.
Not going there. “Don’t change the subject, Nic. You lured me to Chicago under the pretense that you wanted to do something specific, something you’ve never done before.”
“I did say that.”
“But you’ve been to Wrigley Field before.”
“A hundred times, and each time better than the last.” Nicole directed the vendor to what she wanted and then she dug out cash. “Claire, just take a good look around you. Look at all the folks here who are excited to watch a bunch of millionaires throw a ball around.”
Claire did glance around to view the river of humanity heading toward the gates of Wrigley Field, but her gaze didn’t catch on the clusters of bros and the college girls in team T-shirts or the fathers lifting their toddlers so they could better see the red sign that said “Wrigley Field, Home of the Chicago Cubs.” What snagged her attention were the same sights and sounds she’d been assaulted with since they’d first driven into the city: an odd, plinking music that reminded her of the hollow wooden ping of a Thai ranat but turned out to be an unshaven man making music with rubber bands stretched on a wooden frame. And a rattling of metal that turned out to be a homeless man, thin and stumbling, making the rounds shaking a paper coffee cup.
Sometimes, among her friends, she felt like the little boy in the movie The Sixth Sense, seeing the ghosts that others couldn’t.
Nicole plopped a Cubs baseball hat on Claire’s head and gave her a look, the kind of look you give a kid when offering a lollipop before a vaccination.
Claire tugged on the bill to settle the hat on her head. “So this is it, then? There’s nothing else on your agenda for Chicago?”
“Patience, little Buddha.” Nicole’s grin was that of a sixteen-year-old pitcher confident she could close the game. “That other thing has to wait until dark.”
Claire fell into Nicole’s wake as she headed for the will-call booth. Nicole retrieved the tickets then waved them under her nose, bouncing on her toes in excitement. Then she turned and led her through the gray bowels of the place.
“Popcorn and peanuts.” Nicole savored a deep breath as they approached the entrance to their section. “This is the perfume of my coming-of-age.”
Claire thought it smelled like urine and beer, or like a circus just after the elephants had left, but she kept quiet so as not to shatter Nicole’s reverie. They climbed up the concrete ramp into the early evening light. The lawn, bottle-green, was scattered with players. An usher checked their stubs, and they followed his directions up the gum-sticky, stained concrete steps into the shade under the upper deck. Peanut shells crackled under their feet as they sidled past a group of skinny young guys with their hair gelled up into blue mohawks.
A shout of dismay rose up around them as something happened on the field. “You’re going to have to guide me through this.” Claire squinted at the field to watch a player run. “I went to your high school softball games to hear the gospel of Nicole, not to watch the scoreboard.”
Nicole perched on the edge of the seat. “And here I thought you wore that T-shirt on purpose.”
Claire glanced down. She was wearing a shirt from a hospital walk-a-thon, swag she’d earned in a fund-raiser while Melana was still alive.
“Saint Jude,” Nicole explained, gesturing to the emblem on the front. “You know, the patron saint of lost causes?”
Claire gave her T-shirt another rueful look. “If I’d known there was a Catholic saint designated just for me, I might have converted years ago.”
But it was true that Claire knew a lot about lost causes. In her opinion, big cities like Chicago concentrated all the lost causes of the world. As she and Nicole had driven through the city earlier, Nicole had shown her the redbricked, copper-roofed public library, the rusting steel supports of the overhead trains, and the slate-blue stretch of Lake Michigan. Claire could barely raise her gaze above the streets. She’d glimpsed a tattered woman lying in the Gothic doorway of a church and felt a piercing guilt for the bag of pretzels that lay open, half-eaten, on her lap. She’d wanted to stop the car and donate one of her growing collection of hats to the man standing in the open sun, his bald head gleaming, while he dug through the garbage for soda cans. She couldn’t even appreciate the Egyptian cotton sheets and the Jacuzzi in the pricey room Nicole had insisted on, the one where they’d left Lucky with a doggy sitter. It’s hard to enjoy a luxury hotel when she could see, just outside her window, a young man holding up a sign to cars: Will work for food.
Nicole leaned forward to hail a peanut vendor. “There’s a lot of praying to Saint Jude that goes on here. The Cubs are Saint Jude’s most hopeless cause.”
“Jenna’s mom always said it was the Red Sox who were hopeless.”
“The Red Sox killed that curse by winning the World Series after eighty-six years. The Cubs have it worse. It’s been more than a century since they won.”
Nicole handed her a bag of peanuts. Between cracking and chewing, Nicole told her the whole history, from the Curse of the Goat in 1945 to the time in the 1969 World Series when a black cat came out on the field and stared down some guy in the batter’s box. Nicole told her about 1984 when a ground ball went through another player’s legs. She told her about 2003 and some guy named Steve Bartman.
“Holy bad Karma,” Claire muttered when Ni
cole had finished. “So they’ve never won once?”
“Not since nineteen oh eight. No one alive has ever seen these lovable losers win.”
“Maybe this is why I don’t understand sports.” Claire stirred her bag of peanuts and tried not to think about the hungry men panhandling outside. “Wouldn’t it be more fun to follow a winning team?”
“Yeah, I suppose it would.” Nicole paused with a handful of peanuts halfway to her mouth. “But it’s not always about winning. Well, maybe it is for the guys on the field. And the ones in the back office.” Nicole rattled the peanuts in the palm of her hand. “But if you’re going to condemn yourself to root for a team like the Cubs, you have to do it for reasons other than winning.”
Claire waited for an explanation as Nicole ate her peanuts and then pulled unshelled ones out of the oil-stained bag. She watched Nicole dig the edge of her fingernail into another seam, crack out the two peanuts, toss the shells onto the floor, and then eat the nuts, still chewing as she reached for more. Nicole’s rhythmic concentration reminded Claire of saffron-covered Buddhist monks clicking their prayer beads as they counted a mantra.
Nicole said, “You know when you work really hard for something? When you spend a lot of time and effort and money in an attempt to be really, really good—only to discover that you’re hopelessly bad at it?”
“Story of my life.”
“It’s like when I’m coaching a pee wee baseball team and that boy arrives.” Nicole cracked open another peanut. “I can always tell which boy it is by the way he shoves himself in the middle of the huddle. This is the kid who sleeps wearing his batting helmet. He shows up an hour early for every game. He stands on the bench yelling encouragement to his teammates. Yet he can barely run a straight line without tripping over his own sneakers.” Nicole gestured to the team spread out on the field. “That boy is the Cubs. Clumsy, overpaid, underperforming strivers. For the whole season, the fans hold their collective breath hoping the team will just this once—just this once—make it to the postseason. And if ever they win the World Series”—Nicole’s eyelids fluttered closed, her chest rising and falling in a sigh of imagined ecstasy—“it’s almost too much to consider. It’s the triumph of hope over good sense.”
The crack of a bat echoed through the stadium. A tremendous cry rose up around them as the crowd leapt to its feet. Claire winced at the screaming as thousands of eyes followed the trajectory of the ball against the pale sky until that ball—launched by a Cubs player, Claire surmised—cleared the ivy-covered wall. The roar turned to the thunder of approval and stomping and applause.
Nicole settled back in the seat, still clapping. “There’s a tradition here I should warn you about. If one of the Phillies hits a home run into the stands, we can’t keep the ball as a souvenir. We have to throw it back onto the field.”
Claire eyed Nicole’s flushed face, brighter than she’d seen it the whole trip. “You really love this.”
“These are my people. I love the ball hawks on Sheffield Avenue scrambling after baseballs hit out of the stadium during batting practice. I love the rickshaw cyclists who line up after a game to pedal all these suburban fans back to the far parking lots. And I love these peanuts.” Nicole stopped to bury her nose in the bag. “I don’t even care that they get stuck between my teeth, or that for the rest of the night my breath is going to smell like sixth grade.” Nicole leaned back and pointed to the overhang above them. “Somewhere up there is a peanut-free zone, but I can’t imagine coming to Wrigley without grabbing a bag of these and eating them here, one by one, tossing the shells. It’s a tradition. It’s part of the whole Wrigley Field ritual that keeps all of us masochistic saps coming back.”
“I don’t remember you following the Cubs in high school,” Claire said. “How long have you been a fan?”
“Since freshman year in college.” Nicole patted the wooden arm of the chair between them. “This place we’re sitting in is like the temple of my youth.”
“And here I thought the temple of your youth was Pine Lake.”
Nicole’s phone suddenly rang. She fumbled for it and glanced at the face. “I have to take this. Watch the field for me and tell me what I missed.” She stood up and shuffled past the mohawk twins. “I’ll be right back.”
As Nicole left, Claire gazed over the emerald field, the ivy-covered walls, the rickety seats, the engaged crowd, in that moment sensing the history of the place in the echoes of the rafters. Wrigley Field must look and sound much the same now as it had a hundred years ago. For Nicole and all the rabid fans, Claire supposed nothing much had changed here since their very first game.
It was funny how the constructs of youth persisted. Sometimes, in the late hours when none of them could sleep, Nicole would rhapsodize about returning to Pine Lake. Nicole’s Pine Lake was an Eden of pine-scented backyard parties and cold-lake swims, of endless campfires, of tense softball games played out on dusty mounds as the mountain sun beat on her head. Claire’s memories were a little earthier, except for one. Sometimes when Claire thought about returning home, she found herself imagining arriving at her old deep-woods house to find her sisters—all her sisters, laughing and lively—helping her mother put dinner on the table.
For a moment that image fluttered in her mind like the enormous luna moths that emerged at night in Thailand, when she would awaken to find flocks batting the air around her like ghosts in the darkness.
She remembered that Jenna would talk about Pine Lake, too, during those restless evenings. Jenna returned every year, so she’d kept tabs on the place. She’d mentioned that the grove by Bay Roberts had been chopped down and the public fire pit removed for insurance reasons. That a Starbucks had popped up on Main Street right down the street from Ricky’s Roast. And she’d mentioned that her daughter, Zoe, had once ridden her bike on Nicole’s old softball field, which had been relandscaped in favor of a soccer field.
Claire supposed no place stayed the same forever.
She felt a shudder of uneasiness. She’d chosen her Pine Lake goal on a whim—but Karma was never random, was it? Deep down, she had a reason for returning home. Her heart yearned to return to the place where friends once surrounded her, where they remembered her as someone strong and determined, someone worthy, someone who could change the world. Her heart wanted to return to that moment of infinite possibilities. Her heart ached to return to a time when her family was still whole.
She wanted to travel back in time.
“Sorry about that.” Nicole slipped back into her seat. “Lars likes to call me in the car on the way home from work. Did I miss anything?”
Her throat was tight as she shook her head. She stared past the banks of lights to the slowly dimming sky, willing Nicole not to see that her eyes were full of tears. She couldn’t believe it had taken her thousands of miles to figure this out. All along she’d been running back toward a moment when she felt young and healthy and safe, a time that had long gone. She would never find that when she arrived in Pine Lake.
And once again, that wave of sinking dread subsumed her, as it had after Jenna went back to Seattle and their triumvirate crumbled, when Paulina arrived from the past, when the car broke down, when she stood in the Laundromat in Nevada, Iowa, with those cloudy skies pressing down upon her, feeling this same sucking darkness.
Claire ran a hand up her right arm. She probed under her short sleeve for the ridge of the scar that extended to her bicep. Her sister Melana had felt the first tightening of the skin around her upper arm only six weeks after her double mastectomy. Claire had forced her to do everything the nurse had advised, elevating the limb, using compression bandages, concerned when the nurse brushed away Claire’s suggestion that the swelling might be an infection so long after the operation. Then one day, Claire had woken up to find Melana moaning. Her swollen arm was streaked mauve and hot to the touch, permanent tissue damage from the lymphedema already done.
Claire squeezed her own arm until it felt sore. She could tell Nicole a
ny medical excuse she wanted. The C card was Claire’s ace in the hole, the one card she could play so that even Nicole would agree it was time to turn away from their hometown. Maybe that would be for the best. With just the two of them bouncing around an altered Pine Lake, their arrival couldn’t help but be a disappointment.
Nicole suddenly jerked straight in her seat. “Well, well, Claire. Look who the cat dragged in.”
Claire glanced up to see a woman sidling down the row toward them. A woman edging closer in a halting, awkward, uneven gait. A woman with a tousled blonde head of upswept hair, hiding behind a huge pair of sunglasses.
“Yup, it’s just me, the soon-to-be-merry divorcee.” Jenna shoved her sunglasses atop her head. “So, did either one of you road warriors save me a beer?”
Chapter Sixteen
Chicago, Illinois
Jenna said, “Can we get arrested for this?”
Nicole rolled her eyes as she dropped onto the sand of Pratt Beach, leaning back as she tried to untie her knotted shoelaces. “I suppose Chicago has laws about public nudity. But that won’t matter as long as we don’t get caught.”
“For the love of Buddha.”
Nicole could see Claire’s frown by the glow of the distant streetlights. Claire still hadn’t risen completely out of the black mood she’d been in since Iowa, although Jenna’s arrival had taken the edge off it, thank God. Nicole was just about out of tricks to keep her friend motivated and on track.
“Claire, baby,” Nicole said, “you should have had a few more beers at the Cubby Bear.”
“Maybe you should have had a few less.”
“Three beers,” Nicole retorted, “over the entire evening. You don’t think an ex-jock can handle that?” She stuck her index finger in the back of her sneaker and yanked until she set one foot free. “Besides, I don’t have to be drunk to consider taking a swim in the nude.”
“Employment applications,” Jenna muttered. “They have all those pesky questions about arrests.”
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