The Second Season

by The Second Season (epub)

  “What happened?” Darius echoes.

  It’s a weird question, Ruth thinks. It’s a question for a regular season game, or a question for the losing team. Why return to a discouraging moment? The writer must be angling for a specific response, trying to coax Darius into saying something dismissive about Cheng.

  “I don’t know if I remember exactly what happened. My mind is all over the place right now.” And yet he chooses his words so carefully, like a man whose mind is grounded. Darius scans the rows of reporters. “RD would know.” He looks at her. “Ruth, you remember anything about the Sonics going on a seven-point run?”

  Ruth should not have drunk half of Florent Bandolo’s beer. Because when Darius says, “Get up here,” beckoning her with a curl of his fingers, she goes willingly.

  “Okay.” She slides into place behind a second mic. Among the camera flashes and the young men in their gingham dress shirts and sticky hairdos, she locates Phillip leaning against the back wall. His stance is wide, arms crossed. Ruth sustains eye contact with her producer, not to make a point, she doesn’t think, but rather to steady herself. “With the first possession of the second quarter, Cats ran Sonics down to three on the shot clock. Kasey Powell missed a jump shot. Peter Cheng grabbed the rebound, got a dunk. Cincy came back down, ran a set for Darius”—she side-eyes him—“but you missed it, unfortunately.”

  He shrugs.

  “Cheng got the rebound. You stopped him on the defensive end but pushed it out of bounds. The ref took it on the sideline. Powell got the ball, threw it to Cheng in the corner, step-back three. Swish. Back down the court and Cincy missed another shot. Cheng got it, went ninety-three feet, shocked us all with a pretty euro step and made a right-hand layup. Seven points. Blue tongue. Time out.”

  She exhales.

  There’s silence before the laughter, which simmers, warm and celebratory. Folding chairs groan as people shift to get a better view of the MVP smacking Ruth on the back. In the last row, his face the manifestation of hashtag blessed, Phillip brings his hands together in a slow clap. His applause is a joke, sure, but it’s a joke Ruth is in on.

  Her nausea returns. In protest of the beer, or her joy.

  Lester was right. She gets so sad when it’s all over.

  In the depths of Ruth’s backpack is a pregnancy test. She bought it last night, or maybe two nights ago. Before calling a cab to take her back to the Juniper, Ruth retreats to the same deserted dressing room where Angie did her hair and makeup hours earlier. She locks herself inside a stall and tears open the box. The packaging is pink and cumbersome. Paranoia prevents her from throwing it away; instead, she flattens the box and buries it in the debris of her bag, beneath the water bottles and battered notebooks and protein bar wrappers. Peeing on the stick is not a problem; she has needed to pee all night. No stage fright there. As she watches her urine seep across the plastic windowpane, her heart climbs toward her throat. A negative result, she knows, will leave her hollow and stunned. Not for conventional reasons but because knowing her own body is integral to Ruth’s sense of herself. A negative result will suggest that the wires of her intuition have gotten crossed.

  The first line darkens immediately, then the second catches up. Her pulse races before it slows.

  All her life she has wanted babies. Staring at the positive test, the vibrations of the arena’s ancient plumbing palpable beneath her feet, Ruth imagines her belly huge and taut, her whole body warm and abuzz with extra blood. She imagines the newborn’s mouth on her breast, that electric twinge. She imagines her youth protracted, the thrill of newness, a brand-new person who could be anyone, rendering Ruth unfinished too. And then the fantasy cuts out.

  Did the wires get crossed, or did they snap? Has she been poisoned by underground air and too much acrid coffee from the caterer’s thermos? By asbestos in hotel ceilings? The radiation of airport security?

  All her life she wanted babies.

  She takes a picture of the test with her phone, compelled to send it to someone for instant acknowledgment. Concern or congratulations.

  Her thumb hovers over the screen for a long time before she sends the picture to Lester.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  In another three years, Ruth will be invited onto 60 Minutes to be interviewed by a journalist more famous than herself. The segment will open with shots of Ruth in the booth—iconic headset framing her face, lips moving fast—before cutting to Ruth and the journalist sitting opposite each other, both women the age people are compelled to describe as “older,” meaning slightly younger than “old.” With studio lights vanquishing every shadow on her face, fresh blond highlights, and a new pair of glasses, Ruth will look luminous.

  Cut to Ruth in a pencil skirt dribbling a basketball behind her back.

  The journalist, narrating: If you’ve tuned into a basketball game in the last decade, then you might recognize the sound of Ruth Devon’s voice. Cut to Ruth huddled in the tunnel with her crew before a game. With more than twenty years of experience in sports broadcasting, Devon is the first woman to call NBA games on national television. Her extensive knowledge of basketball, unparalleled composure, and ability to connect with her subjects has earned her the respect of sports fans, coaches, her fellow announcers and, most importantly, the players themselves. Cut to a shot of Ruth and Emory Turner embracing at Emory’s first game following his injury. But call her a breaker of glass ceilings or a trailblazer for women in sports broadcasting, and she just might push back.

  Ruth: Am I the first woman to fill this particular role? Yes. Am I the first woman to achieve a certain status in the eyes of the culture? Maybe. But listen, there were women walking into locker rooms, microphone in hand, long before me. In baseball, football, you name it. And some of those women had doors slammed in their faces. Some of them, like Patricia O’Connor with the New York Yankees, heard things like “I’m not talking until that (bleep) leaves the room.” Nothing like that ever happened to me. I feel extremely privileged.

  Journalist: Tell us about the day you got the call.

  Ruth: I was—I was alone in my car. My daughter had just graduated from high school, and I was on my way to meet her and her dad—

  Journalist: Retired coach and broadcaster Lester Devon.

  Ruth: Right. That guy. I was on my way to meet them for dinner. Earlier, at the ceremony, Lester had intimated that I might be receiving good news by the end of the day. He was still at the network back then, so he was in the know. As you can imagine, it was already a big day for me. I was happy, but suddenly I’m on edge. I’m sitting in my car, reading on my phone about Emory Turner’s injury. This was right after he broke his leg in Game Four and Seattle lost the championship.

  The journalist smiles blankly.

  Ruth: Everyone was talking about how the injury would affect his free-agency options. It was June, and free-agency begins in July, so there was a lot of speculation in the media. Turner had been seen dining out at some fairly upscale establishments with Darius Lake, who was at that time the star player in Cincinnati. Rumor was, Turner was thinking of signing with the Wildcats.

  Ruth realizes too late that the journalist is not a basketball fan. She supposes the past minute will end up on the cutting room floor. Whatever. At least they’re not live.

  Ruth: Then a call comes in. It’s my producer.

  The journalist’s lips curl into a controlled smile, designed not to wrinkle her face.

  Journalist: So he offers you the job. How did you respond?

  Ruth: I cried.

  Cut to footage of Ruth and the journalist strolling across Ruth’s freshly mown lawn in Potomac Falls. Ruth is wearing an Elena Delle Donne sweatshirt, throwing a tennis ball for her mother’s dog.

  Journalist: Before you were a full-time analyst, you were a sideline reporter.

  Ruth: For twenty years.

  Journalist: During the finals, the network still
sends you back to the sideline.

  Ruth: Yes, for five to seven games at the end of the postseason, I go back to the sideline.

  Journalist: Is that disappointing?

  Ruth: First of all, I believe I’ll get my chance to call the finals if that’s something I want to do. It may not be this upcoming season or the one after that, but it will happen. Secondly, the sideline reporter’s job is to be there on the floor and at practice and in locker rooms connecting with players on a personal level. The sideline reporter gives fans insights they can’t get from watching the game or listening to the announcers. I think the network is being honest with me when they say, “Look, it’s an important job, and we don’t have anyone else of your caliber to do it.” Now, am I supposed to take offense? Am I supposed to sulk because I haven’t quite earned the legendary status of the men in the booth on those particular nights? Those men are my colleagues. I have nothing but respect and admiration for them. It’s not required of me, as a woman, to feel aggrieved or undervalued when what I feel is grateful.

  Cut to footage of Ruth in her kitchen holding a cocktail and a bowl of popcorn, trying to move past her daughter who appears concerned with the arrangement of her mother’s bangs.

  Journalist: I want to ask you a question I probably wouldn’t ask a man.

  Ruth: Okay.

  Journalist: Earlier in the year you were quoted in The New Yorker saying, “I never saw any of this coming. What I wanted was to be a stay-at-home mom.”

  Ruth: That’s the truth.

  Journalist: You have one daughter. (Long pause.) She’s twenty-one now. (Longer pause.) How often were you home when she was growing up?

  Ruth: In reality? About half the time. But it felt like never.

  Journalist: Being a mom, staying home, packing school lunches, driving the kids to soccer practice and dance class: Are you glad you avoided it?

  Ruth: Not at all. Those were the things I sacrificed! I wanted it both ways—and if I’m being completely honest with you, I still want it both ways. I would love to see how an alternate version of my life plays out, one where I stay married and have five kids and drive a big ol’ SUV around the suburbs of Virginia. When I think about the siblings my daughter doesn’t have, all the nights I spent in the underground of an arena instead of putting her to bed . . . It kills me to know I can’t get those years back.

  Journalist: You were also quoted in The New Yorker saying basketball is “the great love of your life.”

  Ruth: Yeah.

  Journalist (with Sunday night seriousness): Was it worth it?

  Ruth: You would have to ask my daughter.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Ruth gets to the football field early but not as early as Lester. As she makes her way down a grassy aisle between rows of wedding-white folding chairs, other moms watch her from the corners of their eyes; college-age brothers nudge their fathers, some of whom lift a palm and say, “Hi, Ruth.” Strangers, as far as she knows. Sliding into the seat Lester has saved her, three rows back from the stage erected over the end zone, Ruth knows the two of them together is more of a spectacle than either alone. Still, Lester’s is the only company into which she can recede, forgetting the onlookers entirely. She greets him with: “Think they sell popcorn at this thing?”

  “No refreshments, I already checked. We’re lucky they put up a tent. It’s sweltering.” The way Lester is fanning himself with the program makes him appear, to Ruth, adorably yet irredeemably old.

  “Where’s Joel?” he asks. It’s new, Lester referring to Joel by his first name instead of calling him Fernandez or Ruth’s paramour. It’s overdue.

  “His flight was delayed, landed about an hour ago. He’ll be here.” She rests her purse on the empty chair beside her.

  Three nights ago, when Ruth returned to her hotel room after Game Five, the pregnancy test in her bag as heavy as a gun or a wad of hundred-dollar bills, Joel was waiting for her. “It’s over!” he shouted, arms flung wide in celebration. He meant the NBA finals, but Ruth felt no satisfaction. She felt gutted and shortchanged, as if evacuated from the coast halfway through vacation, or dismissed from the table before dinner was over. The summer months without basketball have always felt surreal. She never fully shakes the impulse to turn on the game and check the score. The idea of teams disbanding, dispersing among hometowns and vacation hot spots, disorients her. Without the ever-building narrative of the season and the playoffs, she lives half in the past and half in prognostications about next season.

  Leaning into Joel’s embrace, all she could think was: no more basketball. What would she watch? What would she read? What would distract her from Ariana’s Instagram or the cold dread of her own mortality?

  The terror would subside; in another day she would reacquaint herself with her overgrown backyard and bleach-white towels and sleek, smiling daughter. She would make an appointment with her doctor and spend the ensuing hour lying across her bed with her hands on her lower abdomen, cementing the decision in her mind again and again, gut twisting, heart thudding. She didn’t believe she would or would not regret it. She believed she would never know what she ought to have done—and that she could live, not knowing.

  Lester puts his arm around the back of her chair. “So did you tell him?”

  She shakes her head. If she gets into it, she will cry, and she would sooner let Lester see her naked than see her cry.

  There’s a silence before Lester says, “I have to admit, I didn’t like imagining you having a kid with someone else. I’ve accepted that you’re not my wife, but you’ve always been the mother of my daughter. You being the mother of some other guy’s daughter? Not to be melodramatic, but huge betrayal.”

  Willfully, Ruth dodges Lester’s point. “The baby could have been a boy.”

  He ignores her. “Is that how you’d have felt if I’d knocked up someone else?”

  “Rumor is you got snipped.”

  “But what if I hadn’t?”

  “I would have worried that your new baby would replace your first baby. Like you’d love Ariana less, or think of her less, or look out for her less because you’d have a new child with a woman you’d, presumably, love. I would have been jealous and cagey and a little bit heartbroken for Ariana’s sake, but not my own.”

  Lester, impressed: “You thought about this.”

  “Often.”

  “I never thought about you having another guy’s kid until I caught you puking your guts out in Cincinnati.”

  “I know,” Ruth says.

  Ruth twists in her seat to see the football field filling with families. Among the mid-Atlantic grandmas in their Easter dresses, the bored little sisters and anxious moms, Joel moves down the aisle alone. He has traveled in a blue suit, a shabby leather duffel bag smacking against his left hip. Apologies drip charmingly from his lips as he turns into the third row, sidestepping between knees and chair-backs. Throwing himself beside Ruth, he smells like stress-sweat and spiced cologne.

  “Sorry I’m late,” he says, taking Ruth’s face in his hands and kissing her. The kiss is not nonproprietary, which she appreciates and also doesn’t. “You look beautiful. It’s so hot here. Hi, Lester.”

  Lester nods at Joel. “You’re moist. You’re a sentient swamp.”

  “Thanks, man.”

  The school principal mounts the stage with her coiffed blond bob and black robe billowing. Audience members sink, unhurried and still chatting, into chairs. The principal asks them to please silence their phones. As Ruth gropes blindly in the depths of her purse, endeavoring to ignore the tension radiating from the men on either side of her, Lester whispers in her ear: “The moment the ceremony’s over, I want you to turn your ringer back on.”

  His breath is warm and farm-scented. She looks at him. It’s fair to say her life flashes before her eyes.

  There’s no denying Lester loves her. When they were marr
ied, he protected her and tended to her—icing her bad knee after workouts, paying off her credit card debt, throwing surprise parties on her birthday. After she gave birth to their daughter, he, cradling the newborn like a football, looked Ruth in the eye and said, “I can never pay you back for this. Don’t let me forget.”

  But within a few years, Ruth had discovered her husband was incapable of rooting for her.

  “With the volume on loud,” Lester adds.

  She feels nothing, and then she feels airborne. She would divorce him a thousand times if signing the papers guaranteed this moment. “Really?” Her voice comes out helium-high. Nostrils flaring as she struggles to keep it together: “Oh, shit.”

  Joel is staring straight ahead as high schoolers fill the stage. He’s the first to lift an arm and wave at Ariana, flashing her two thumbs-up and an unrestrained grin.

  “Shit,” Lester agrees.

  After the kids have flipped their tassels and tossed their hats—all the girls running prompt, precise fingers through their hair—and Ruth has wept a little more than she planned on weeping, pride compounded by hormones and anticipation, she checks her phone.

  No missed calls.

  On the football field Ari breaks away from a cluster of friends and comes flying, all speed and heedlessness, at her mother. Ruth savors the collision, the uninhibited violence of it. She remembers when her daughter thrashed inside of her, and she remembers when she tore her way out, and Ruth stops feeling the way she usually does—as if she’s lived several lives since then. Up close, Ruth can count Ariana’s pimples, see the sunlight trapped in her halo of frizzy hair, lament the seven-thousand-dollar Invisalign the girl refuses to wear.