The Comeback Season

by Jennifer E. Smith

  Ryan shrugs, her eyes on the TV. “Just some rearranging.” Kevin hefts the golf bag into a corner and then raises his eyebrows. “Don’t sell yourself short,” he says. “I’d say it’s more like rebuilding.”

  “Rebuilding,” she repeats, then smiles. “I guess so.”

  The White Sox score once more in the ninth to tie it up, and the game limps along, scoreless, into extra innings. The afternoon sun comes through the basement windows at a slant now, and Ryan hugs her legs to her chest, watching the game over the tops of her knees. They move from the tenth inning to the eleventh, then twelfth, and it isn’t until the bottom of the thirteenth that the Cubs finally hit a solo shot far into left field, sending the long-suffering crowd into a flurry of noise.

  Ryan smiles as the game ends and the fans file out of the stadium. The Cubs’ manager is being interviewed on television, scratching his head as he attempts to explain the strange momentum that had grabbed hold of his team.

  “I think the winds were just in our favor today,” he says, smiling into the microphone. “And that last home run was what really counted.”

  But Ryan knows better. It wasn’t the extra innings or the weather or the long shot to left field to end the game. It wasn’t even the final score. It was, she knows, the possibility of a comeback. That last reservoir of hope, when what may or may not be out of reach suddenly seems so very reachable.

  Ryan turns off the TV and eyes the crumpled score sheet, wedged between the couch cushions. She pulls it back out, then spreads it on the table, smoothing the angry creases with the flat of her hand. She considers the pencil on the table, but changes her mind and finds a blue marker in an old box of art supplies, and then—though the progression of the game is lost to her now, and though she feels a bit like she’s cheating—Ryan marks down the win in big letters at the top of the page. When she’s done, she tacks it up on the wall beneath the stairs, where it hangs—wrinkled and incomplete, but somehow important nonetheless—beside all the others.

  “Ryan,” Mom calls from upstairs. “Dinner will be ready in twenty minutes, okay?”

  “Okay,” she yells, her eyes still on the wall. “I’ll be up in a minute.”

  “Did they win?”

  Ryan grins. “Yup.”

  “Imagine that,” Mom says, laughing.

  Imagine that, Ryan echoes, and the importance of the game, that one magical inning, balloons up inside her. Imagine that.

  She runs into Emily at the top of the stairs, who points at the kitchen. “Your turn to set the table.”

  Ryan looks at her watch, then at the front door. “Tell you what,” she says. “I’ll be back in ten minutes. I’ll do it then.”

  “Where are you going?” Emily asks, but Ryan’s already out the door, walking fast down the front path and then unable to help breaking into a run as she rounds the corner of their block. An older man is out watering his flowers, and he swivels as she sprints by, weaving around a few kids making chalk drawings on the gum-stained sidewalk.

  Ryan isn’t sure what she’s doing. She only knows that the Cubs won, and the importance of this, the enormous significance, is dampened only by the fact that she has no one to share it with, no one who understands in the same way she does how much this game had meant.

  They won, she thinks—is all she can think—as she runs the streets between their houses. They won, they won, they won. And if they won this, they can win anything. If they won this, they can win it all.

  Her sandaled feet slap the ground as she jogs around the final corner toward Nick’s house, her breath jagged now. At the end of the driveway, Ryan stops, resting her hands on her knees and breathing hard. The sun has slipped behind the houses now, and the evening light is soft and pink. She hears someone call their kids into dinner, and the neighbor’s dog throws his head back and barks. Nick’s house looks quiet, dark except for a few lights on near the front door, and Ryan takes a step backward, rethinking her impulsive decision.

  What if he’s not even there? He could be up in Wisconsin or out to dinner with his parents. He could be out with his friends, or even with Lucy. Ryan is suddenly embarrassed to be so terrifically exposed, standing alone out on the sidewalk in front of his house. But then she sees the flicker of a television set in the window of Nick’s bedroom, and she’s sure he’s been watching the game too. She breathes in, partly angry, partly hurt that just blocks away, he’d been seeing what she had seen—the impossible rally, the unexpected comeback—and hadn’t been moved to call her, hadn’t come running over to find her the same way she’d been compelled to come here.

  She takes a few steps up the front path, her eyes fixed on the wavering light in Nick’s window, and Ryan feels her anger loosen its grip. They had won, and she’d come here to share that with him. If there was ever a time to mend things between them, it would be now. If there was ever a person who would understand that, it would be Nick.

  The front door of the house is propped open, swung back to let the summer breezes in through the screen. Ryan stares at the pinecone wreath in the entryway. She can hear Nick’s parents in the kitchen, the low sizzle of something on the stove and the bright sounds of silverware, a reminder that she needs to be home soon. She shifts from foot to foot, her mouth set in a straight line. When she finally raises a hand to knock, she bites her lip with indecision and then lowers it again.

  If she were to have to chat with his parents right now—endure pleasantries and invitations to stay for dinner, polite questions about life and school—Ryan knows she’d lose her nerve. She feels impatient and surprisingly bold, made brave by the events of the day behind her—the rediscovered basement and the astounding comeback—which have all conspired to propel her forward. Even as she reaches to turn the knob on the screen door, she’s surprised by her actions, as if watching herself from afar. But the door opens easily, and she tiptoes inside, pressing it closed behind her with a click. The eyes of a dozen cows follow her as she climbs the carpeted stairs, her heart thrumming hard in her chest, her hands shaky on the banister.

  The door to Nick’s room is open just a crack, and Ryan stands before it for a moment, trying to collect herself before knocking. When he doesn’t answer, she knocks again and calls his name softly.

  It occurs to her to leave. To turn around, steal back down the stairs, and slip out the front door as if this had never happened. But she’s already here, and she can hear the muffled sounds of the postgame show on the television in his room, and so without thinking anymore, she pushes open the door to peer through.

  “Nick,” she whispers, blinking into the dim room. The curtains are all open, letting in the pale evening light, and the TV casts an uneven glow around the stillness of the room. “Nick?”

  On his dresser, she can make out a tray with a small cluster of orange pill bottles arranged beside a water glass. Ryan keeps a hand on the doorknob but leans in farther, and she sees that Nick is curled up in bed, napping, with his face turned away from her, his legs pulled up beneath the covers. He shifts restlessly, the sheets rustling in the quiet room, and Ryan’s stomach tightens. She begins to back away, embarrassed to have found him asleep, mortified at having come here at all, when the postgame show ends and the nightly news begins with a too-bright display of graphics and loud music. Ryan feels disoriented and confused, eager to get home.

  “And here are our top stories for tonight,” the announcer booms with a plastic smile. “More tension in the Middle East: what the government doesn’t want you to know.”

  “And later,” says his coanchor, beaming at Ryan from across Nick’s bedroom, “have scientists found a way to slow cancer cells in mice?”

  Ryan freezes, her breath caught in her throat. She looks once more to the pill bottles on the dresser, the horrible order of the arrangement, then back to Nick, who coughs and then sighs in his sleep.

  She closes her eyes and takes a step backward.

  Please be okay, she thinks as she hurries back down the stairs.

  Plea
se let it not be that, she says without saying it, closing the front door behind her and picking up a run just outside the house. The air is now cool, the skies in the neighborhood hurrying toward night. Ryan runs hard, her legs numb, her arms strangely limp.

  “Please let him be okay,” she whispers to no one in particular, to the sidewalk spread before her, to the last bits of light in the western sky. She tells herself not to jump to conclusions, and she tells herself to quit being dramatic. She tries to stop over-thinking, but her mind keeps returning to the worrying stillness of his bedroom.

  And in the end, without fact or knowledge, without certainty or assurance, there is only one stubborn thought that emerges from all the rest. She walks home with her head lowered, repeating it over and over like a mantra, childish and ageless all at once, the worst bargain of all.

  It’s okay if the Cubs never win again, she thinks, if only he would just be okay.

  Chapter Fourteen

  * * *

  SOME MAY CALL IT SUPERSTITION—THIS FERVOR THAT all Cubs fans inflict upon themselves—while others see it as a necessary bowing to whatever illogical spirits may still preside over the sport of baseball. But whatever its root and whatever its outcome, the fact remains that it all began because of a goat.

  The history of the Cubs is rich with curses, hexes, and spells of all kinds, but the worst and most enduring of these was born in October of 1945, on a cool autumn day at Wrigley Field. The Cubs were leading the Tigers two games to one in the fourth game of the World Series—the last, as it turns out, they’d see—when William “Billy Goat” Sianis showed up outside the stadium.

  The owner of the local Billy Goat Tavern had brought along his pet goat, Murphy, as a good luck charm for his favorite team, and though they allowed him through the gates, he was galled by their attempts to stop him from taking his seat once inside. After a heated argument—he had two tickets, after all: one for himself and the other for the goat—the owner of the Cubs, P. K. Wrigley himself, was summoned.

  When he decided that Billy would be allowed in as long as he left his goat behind, Sianis grew upset. “Why not the goat?” he asked, and Wrigley shrugged.

  “Because the goat stinks,” he said.

  Furious, Sianis stormed away, goat in tow, but not before placing a curse over the Cubs: They would never win a National League pennant or play in a World Series game so long as the goat was not allowed in Wrigley Field.

  That night, the Cubs lost game four, and as predicted, went on to lose the rest of the Series in a similar fashion. Billy Goat Sianis sent P. K. Wrigley a telegram the following day. All it said was “Who stinks now?”

  And so began the curse.

  Over two long decades later, in 1969, the Cubs took the lead in their division, and it seemed possible that this might finally be their year. But during the second game of a crucial series against the Mets, a black cat darted out onto the field, briefly eyeing Ron Santo—the Cubs’ beloved third baseman—before disappearing into the stands.

  On the heels of so many losing seasons, there was a growing suspicion in Chicago that their baseball team might be haunted.

  The first time a goat was allowed back inside Wrigley Field was during the Cubs home opener in 1984, when the owners—in an act of sheer desperation—invited Sianis’ nephew, Sam, along with a floppy-eared, head-butting descendant of Murphy named Socrates. The pair walked out onto the infield and, lifting his hat, Sam proclaimed the curse to be over. The city of Chicago held its breath, hardly daring to hope as the team romped through the regular season and into September, having won their first Eastern Division title ever. But two games into the National League Championship series, a ground ball slipped between the first baseman’s legs, and the Cubs crumbled from there.

  On the heels of so many losing seasons, there was a growing suspicion in the city of Chicago that their baseball team might be haunted.

  They were closest in 2003—just five outs away from their first World Series appearance in 58 years—when they began to unravel. Heading into the eighth inning, the Cubs were up three to nothing. The fans stood, hands clasped together, throats tight with emotion. It was October at Wrigley Field, a thing rarely seen, and the ivy was tipped with red against the back wall. But as the winds shifted, there was a general feeling of helplessness, a spiraling sense of doom. The Florida Marlins made play after play, racking up eight runs in a single inning. When a Chicago fan reached out for a foul ball, skimming the glove of the Cubs’ left fielder so that they both ended up grasping nothing but air, something seemed to snap. There was a palpable sinking of spirits as the fans glared across the stands, their eyes flicking back and forth to the giant green scoreboard, the white floating numbers that had somehow tipped off balance.

  But there was no such luck.

  In 2007, after clawing and scrabbling their way into the postseason, the team was cast aside neatly and efficiently by the Arizona Diamondbacks, swept away in three uninspiring games, a Cubbie-style collapse to go down in history beside all the many others. It seemed the worst joke in all of sports—this 99th season of futility—but to Cubs fans, it was just the newest addition to a long chain of gut-wrenching losses. And so once again, they did the only thing they could: they shook their heads and lowered their chins, they muttered and prayed and cursed and wished. They settled in for the long winter.

  They waited for next year.

  There is no surprise ending to this story. That night, the Cubs lost the game, and the following night, their chance at the World Series. A few months later, the foul ball was blown to pieces in the hopes that curses might be so easily destroyed.

  A storm sweeps through the following day, and Ryan watches from her bedroom window as the rain flattens the flowers lining the stone path up to the house. She flips onto her back and stares at the ceiling, having spent most of the night in a similar position. After her trip to Nick’s house, Ryan had endured dinner silently, eager to retreat to her bedroom.

  “I thought the Cubs won,” Kevin said, watching her pick at her food.

  “They did,” Ryan told him as she stood to drop her plate in the sink. “I’m just tired.”

  But the truth is, she isn’t sure why she’s so shaken. The more she recalls it, the less she finds odd with the scene in Nick’s bedroom. It’s entirely possible that he was just tired and took a midafternoon nap. But still, there is something deeper—a nagging instinct—that worries her. And she can’t seem to shake it.

  By game time, the rain hasn’t let up, though it’s lightened to a steady sprinkle. Ryan watches on the basement television as the groundskeepers roll back the giant blue tarp that covers the field, and the game begins beneath a hazy veil of rain. The players squint and blink into the spray of it, wiping their eyes against the pelting drizzle.

  Whatever spark they’d had yesterday seems to have disappeared, and the Cubs plod through the game as though afraid of the rain. By the ninth inning, they’re down six to two, and they still look half-asleep, losing predictably and comfortably, as if eager to return to normal after yesterday’s fluke of a win. When the last batter strikes out to end the inning, Ryan switches off the TV and heads back up to her room.

  The following morning, it’s still raining, and she wakes to the dull pulse of water against the gutter outside her window. It’s Sunday, and the final game of the tied series, but Ryan isn’t much in the mood for baseball. She considers skipping the game entirely, though there isn’t much else to do, and so she dwindles away the morning helping Emily with her art project—a charcoal drawing of their house—while she waits for the game to start.

  Kevin paces the kitchen restlessly, annoyed over his canceled golf outing, and Mom is upstairs napping. Emily smudges a blackened finger against her forehead while she tries to remember the details of the house: how many windows there are, whether there are three front steps or four.

  “This would be easier if we had a picture,” Ryan says.

  “It’s not raining that hard anymore,” Kevi
n says, peering through the blinds in the next room, “if you want to go out and check.”

  Emily crinkles her nose.

  “I’ll go,” Ryan says, pulling up the hood of her sweatshirt.

  Outside, the rain has turned soft and scattered. Ryan closes the door behind her, then half-jogs down the path, the stones cool and damp against her bare feet. At the end of the walkway, she turns and looks back at the house: perfectly proportioned, small and square and brick, with mint green shutters and two round windows on either side of the door that look a bit like eyes. Ryan is amazed at how you can see something every day for fifteen years and still not be able to recall the littlest thing about it from memory. She makes a mental note of the rest of its features, her eyes running over the slant of the roof, the tree that bends near Emily’s window, the lightpost near the front door.

  She’s still standing there, barefoot and wet, when she hears Nick call her name.

  “What’re you doing?” he asks as she whirls to face him. He’s wearing a blue slicker, but the hood is down and his wet hair has fallen in his eyes. He looks just as pale as always, and somehow younger without his baseball cap, but he holds his shoulders straight and his chin high as he regards her with amusement.

  Ryan looks down at her feet. “I’m helping my sister with her art project.”

  “Performance art?”

  “Not exactly,” she says with a sheepish grin. “Do you want to come in?”

  He shakes his head, but takes a few steps closer.

  “How are you?” she asks.

  “There’s a game today,” he says, without answering her question. “Tiebreaker.”

  Ryan sucks in a breath. “I know,” she says. “I’ve been watching.”

  “So,” he says, lifting his shoulders. “Should we go?”

  “Downtown?” She stares at him to see if he’s kidding, but despite the smallest hint of a smile, she can tell he’s completely serious. “I’m sure it’ll be rained out.”