by Unknown
Jerome tried to slow this tornado of thoughts; he was getting swept away by their negativity.
Consider the possibilities, he told himself. Even if he played only one season, it would be worth millions of dollars. That would set his father and sister up for life. His father could finally stop worrying about money and his sister could go to any college she wanted, instead of the community college their dad always talked about.
And his mother …
He hadn’t seen her since she left ten years ago, but she’d been an even bigger baseball fan than his father. That’s where his parents had met, the baseball stadium; she was sitting near third base, his father was making extra cash by working the radar gun behind home plate. He’d abandoned his position and talked to her for two full innings before realizing how much time had passed and how much trouble he was going to be in.
His father had lost the job, but he’d always said it was worth it.
Maybe if Jerome played professionally, she might come to see him. Maybe he could arrange for his dad and sister to be there that day, too. Just, you know … coincidentally.
Yeah, right. And all he had to do was find a way to live through the next ten years, every day knowing that a fastball was going to turn him into a vegetable. Jerome wished he could be that noble, but he was too human to embrace such a fate. He was a fifteen-year-old kid, for cripes sake, not Captain America. He could imagine himself too vividly as a drooling, vacant-eyed thing, shuffling down the hall of some white-painted, semi-sterile institution, surrounded by other patients who were as likely to walk face-first into a wall as they were to find and operate a doorknob.
God, what an image. And now that he’d thought it, he couldn’t get it out of his mind.
No! This wasn’t fair! And he wouldn’t believe it! He couldn’t. It was a defective card made with defective nanites spewed out by a defective printer, telling him about a defective pitcher for a defective team that hadn’t won a World Series since 1986. Nineteen freakin’ eighty-six! Even the Cubs had finally won a World Series. But the Mets? The Amazingly Futile Mets? Two-thirds of a century of nothing.
No, Jerome would not accept this.
He walked out of his room and was partway down the worn linoleum-lined hallway when his father came in the front door with their pizza. “Kids! Dinner.”
With that pronouncement, his eleven-year-old sister, Eliza, exploded from her room. She ran past him, rounding the corner and flying into the living room just ahead of their pizza-bearing father. She launched herself into his decrepit recliner with glee, shouting, “Mine!”
It was their weekly Saturday-night ritual, the one thing they still did from before mom had left them. The rest of the year they ate hot dogs and spaghetti and frozen lasagnas, but during baseball season, Saturday night meant pizza and baseball. Eliza in dad’s chair. Dad cross-legged, leaning against the couch, slice in hand, grousing about losing his chair in a voice that no one could take seriously. For just a few hours things almost felt normal again, even if mom wasn’t pacing back and forth behind the chair, coaching the game in perpetual motion.
But Jerome couldn’t embrace the moment. He couldn’t get this beanball madness out of his head, and now that his wheels were turning, there were other things clamoring for attention as well.
“Dad?” Jerome said. “Why did mom leave? Why don’t we see her anymore?”
Dad paused, slice halfway to his mouth.
He lowered the slice.
Then he raised it again and took a large bite—like he did every time one of his children asked that question. He would chew that mouthful of pizza until it was cheese-flavored paste before he so much as acknowledged the issue. The look of sadness on his father’s face was unmistakable, but it changed nothing. It never did.
“I’m not feeling so good,” Jerome announced sharply. “I’m gonna go to my room and lay down.”
Jerome stalked back down the hall, fuming, but not to his room; to his father’s. Forget him. If he couldn’t answer one simple question, Jerome wasn’t going to worry about pinching pennies. He was going to print another set of baseball cards and find out what happened in the future. Jerome couldn’t say why, but every instinct told him that was the key: finding another card that could tell him more about what had happened. Or was going to happen. Or … whatever.
Inside his father’s room, he closed the door and went straight to the printer, hitting the power button. It hummed and whirred. He heard the familiar zzt-tik-zzt of the priming nanite-cartridge. He heard the nozzle emerge from its housing and center itself over top of the print zone.
He heard the doorknob of the bedroom door slowly turning.
Crap!
He dove for the power button, praying it would shut down quieter and faster than it powered up, knowing full well that wasn’t how it worked.
The printer’s digital voice spoke, even as his father entered the room.
“Cancelling print operation. Are you sure? Press enter to confirm.”
“Yeah,” said his father. “You sure?” His tone was calm, even, and measured—which meant he was really pissed. “I came to check on you, to see if you were alright. I guess I won’t need to take your temperature.”
“Dad,” Jerome said. “Let me explain.”
“Not interested.”
“But dad, this is really important.”
“I’m sure it is. And you can tell me all about it next week, but until then you’re going to be in your room. If you’re not at school, you’ll be sitting at your desk pondering the meaning of words like ‘privacy’ and ‘respect.’”
“But dad—”
“Your room. Now. Not another word.” He pointed down the hall. “Unless you want to make it two weeks.”
“But dad!”
His father stepped forward. “Two weeks it is, then.” He never raised his voice; he just grabbed Jerome with one hand by the collar and with the other by the back of the belt. Jerome stood nearly six feet tall and weighed 175 pounds. His ex-Navy father hoisted him like an inflatable doll and dragged him bodily down the hall, his stockinged feet scraping the floor all the way.
Standing him up in the bedroom’s doorway, his father patted him on the head. “See you in two weeks, kiddo.”
Jerome bit his tongue and stepped across the threshold, closing the door behind him. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt so disrespected, so like a child. But he wasn’t a child; he was fifteen, nearly a man. A man who was going to play professional baseball—if only for one season.
He leaned against the door, listening as his father walked away. He wanted to rage, to tantrum, to scream at the injustice. But if his father heard so much as a peep, he’d be stuck in this room for the rest of his life.
He strode across the room, a hurricane building inside of him. Two weeks!
As he neared his desk, his first impulse was to grab the chair and throw it against the wall.
Too noisy. He’d get into even more trouble.
He prowled to one side of the room, then the other, then back to the desk again.
He looked at the lamp, immediately rejecting the idea of hitting it. That’s when his eye fell on the tall, neat stack of cards under the lamp. The neatness offended him, and with a sidearm swing he launched them into the air. They fluttered up and out like a flock of pigeons.
It wasn’t as satisfying as smashing the chair, but it was something.
But the relative silence lasted only a second or two. As the cards hit the wall, then the floor, the nanites activated, and one by one, baseball cards flared to life, holograms popping up, baseball players swinging at pitches and throwing them, fielding grounders and diving into the stands after pop-ups.
And one card, somewhere amongst them all—one card in an army of holographic baseball players—glitched, sending up a miniature fireworks display of square blue sparks and white static.
But before Jerome could identify which one, the fireworks ended.
His eyes flashed in
stantly to his desk, but the Ryan card sat precisely where he’d left it. Unmoved. Unglitched. Unsparked.
On the floor, hundreds of voice-over announcers yammered over each other, demanding his attention, describing deeds heroic and mundane. Then just as quickly as it began, the cards fell silent again.
The room lingered in suspended tension.
Something in the back of Jerome’s mind told him he should be worried about his father hearing the racket the cards had made, but a larger piece of him focused on the place where the cards had fallen. He had no way of knowing which one had sparked, but his eyes locked onto the general area where the lightshow had come from. It might take a few minutes to find the right card, but it was only a matter of time.
He went to the spot, to the pile, to the cards scattered at the base of the wall. Picked a fistful of them up and threw one down.
Normal.
He threw another.
Not yet. Jerome remained calm and focused.
Finally, the thirteenth card—that was the one. Lucky thirteen.
He hadn’t bothered to look at what was pictured on the front; he’d just flung it. Of all things, it turned out to be a team card. The Baltimore Orioles. Under normal circumstances Jerome skipped the team cards; they were useless and uninteresting.
When this card hit the floor, a hologram of Orioles Park at New Camden Yards came to life before his eyes—literally; it was a time-lapse holo-vid of the construction of the team’s new stadium. But before it was half-completed, the now familiar display of glitch-static-squarespark occurred. It ended with a transition to an interior shot of the stadium, focused at home plate.
The faces of the trio holding court there were instantly recognizable, but they weren’t baseball players. It was his family.
His sister Eliza, grown and beautiful. She was standing on the left. His father, as imposing as ever, stood on the right. And in the center was a figure he knew instantly from grandfather’s holo-vids: his mother.
She sat in a wheel chair, her torso entombed in some kind of awkward-looking metal and plastic brace.
Dad and Eliza flanked her, each with one hand on her shoulder, and there was a baseball nestled in her lap. The three of them had the oddest expression on their faces, as if they’d been simultaneously laughing and crying from their very core.
The voice-announcer began: “After the tragic loss of the popular young first baseman Jerome ‘Cal’ Howard in a freak accident on Opening Day, the Orioles dedicated the remainder of the 2059 season to his memory, winning the World Series in his honor. The notoriously divided, argumentative team came together in swift and unexpected fashion, and, defying all pre-season predictions, ended up winning 120 games against only 64 losses and sweeping all four rounds of the playoffs. In a moving, impromptu ceremony, Howard’s family was brought onto the field immediately following the game’s final out, with the game ball passed around among teammates who took turns inscribing it to the family.”
Jerome … was stunned.
He didn’t know what to think.
He picked up the team card and studied it. It looked and felt exactly like the rest of the cards, including the Frank Ryan card which had set this whole nightmare in motion.
He considered throwing it down again, watching it again, but he didn’t need to. The whole thing was emblazoned in his memory as thoroughly as if he’d watched it a thousand times; as thoroughly as the holo-vid his grandfather had taken of his second birthday party.
Jerome went to the door of his bedroom and opened it. He walked down the hall to where his father and Eliza were still watching the game.
The minute his father saw him, irritation flooded the man’s face like Noah’s worst nightmare. He popped to his feet, pizza falling upside-down onto the carpet, words ready to fly from his mouth like hornets. But Jerome spoke first, softly, just barely audible over the game on the wall.
“How bad is it?” he said. “Is it just her legs or is it full paralysis?”
The flames dimmed in his father’s eyes for the briefest of seconds, and Jerome knew the answer.
“Was she in a wheelchair when she left?” Jerome continued. “Or did that come later? I bet it was later. I think I would’ve remembered.”
And like a Frank Ryan fastball down the middle of the plate, the pieces grooved into place for Jerome. His mother’s absence. His father’s tight-fistedness with money. His father simultaneously clinging to their Saturday night pizza-and-baseball ritual, yet steadfastly refusing to talk about their mother.
Suddenly it all made sense.
“She’s in a home someplace, isn’t she? She’s embarrassed to see us, and you’re letting her hide.”
“She’s not hiding!” his father snapped, finally breaking his silence. “She’s … she’s …”
“Are you secretly visiting her?” Jerome took a sudden, angry step into the living room, closing the distance and jabbing a finger into his father’s immense chest. “Are you seeing her without us?”
His father exploded, backhanding Jerome across his face, shouting, “She won’t let me!”
As if in slow motion, Jerome felt his body lift up, off the floor and drift backward. And as he fell, the oddest thought crossed his mind. I wonder if this is what it will feel like when that baseball gets me …
He hit the ground, but it wasn’t so bad. It hurt—but he could handle it.
Eliza sprang from the recliner. “Daddy, no!” She threw herself over top of Jerome, shielding his body with her own.
Their father stepped back, horrified at what he’d done, yet barely able to contain the torrent of emotions that coursed through him. He put his hand over his mouth, unblinking, lost in thought. “It’s what she wants,” he said. “She wants to be left alone.”
Jerome rolled onto his back. Blood ran down his nose as Eliza climbed off him.
“Does she always get what she wants?” Jerome asked. He put a tentative finger to his bloody nose, then blotted it with his sleeve.
“Yes. Yes, she does.”
“Well, at least someone does.”
Jerome bolted down the hall to his room, but before he could get through the doorway Eliza materialized right behind him.
“It’s not dad’s fault,” she said gently.
Jerome stepped back, startled. “What?”
Eliza pushed him into his room, looking over her shoulder for their father. “You’re supposed to be in your room,” she said. “Two weeks. Remember?” Jerome always grew uncomfortable with how quickly she became protective over him. He was supposed to be the big brother, not the other way around. Yet here she was, looking out for him. Again.
Eliza said, “It’s not dad’s fault that mom’s gone.”
“Who said anything about fault? I just want to know what happened.”
His sister shook her head. “If you’re going to be mad at anybody, be mad at me. It’s probably my fault.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Think about it; she left right after I was born. Something must have gone wrong with the pregnancy. A complication or something.”
Jerome was taken aback. “How long have you been thinking this? I can’t believe you’re blaming yourself …”
Eliza rolled her eyes. “Doofus. I only found out five minutes ago that she’s in a wheelchair. How did you figure that out, anyway?”
Jerome didn’t know what to say, but before he could even think, Eliza went surprisingly quickly to a dark, brooding place.
“Still, mom did leave right after I was born.”
“So you have been blaming yourself.”
Eliza’s gaze wandered the room, looking at everything except her brother. She shrugged a tiny shrug. “Who else could it be?”
Jerome didn’t know. But that was kind of the point; they couldn’t know.
Except in this case, he did. He knew. Not how it began, but how he could make it end well. End right for Eliza.
He embraced it. It was time for him to be the big brother
that he should have been all along. He owed it to her.
Jerome hugged his sister. “It’s going to be okay,” he said. “I promise.”
Eliza squeezed him back. She didn’t say a word, but somehow, the longer she squeezed, the more it felt as if her hug were saying, If you say so.
Jerome took a deep breath, let go of his sister, and went to his closet. He got out his two favorite bats, one wooden and one carbon-fiber composite; then he put on his Orioles cap, the one his father gave him for Christmas two years ago but he’d never worn.
And he walked out of his bedroom.
Down the hall.
Through the living room and up to the apartment’s main door.
And as he put his left hand on the door knob, two bats propped on his right shoulder, his father barked, “Where the devil do you think you’re going? You’re so grounded that a dozen Harrier drones couldn’t get you off the flight deck. Do not even think about opening that door.”
Jerome stopped. After tonight he’d probably be grounded for more like two months than two weeks, but at this moment he had to act. If he didn’t take this first step, right now, he might still chicken out.
He looked back.
“I need you to trust me, dad,” he said. “You can ground me for the rest of the year if you want, but for just this one night you need to trust me. There’s an indoor batting cage that’s open late, and I have to practice. I’ve got a lot of work to do.”
Jerome looked hopefully at his dad, feeling the tightness from the dried blood around his nostril and upper lip even as he tried to put on his bravest smile.
Dad studied him: his new O’s cap, his resolute eyes, his bloodied nose. And he softened. “You’ve never defied me before. Not like this.”
“Nothing has ever been this important.”
“Nothing?”
Jerome shook his head.
“And someday you’ll tell me what this is all about?”
Jerome shrugged, and the baseball bats rose and fell with his shoulders. He said, “I think someday, when the time is right, you’ll know. You’ll look back on tonight and it’ll be like a fastball down the center of the plate. When that happens, hit a home run for me, okay? One perfect shot that brings everybody home again.”