A thin layer of dust has settled along the top, and Ryan curls her lips into a small o and blows until its original color has more or less returned, a comforting shade of blue. She traces the stitching, running a finger along the curve of the red C that stands out so boldly in front, already feeling somewhat better. Just having it close to her again after so many years is heartening, and she suspects this is how most kids must feel about blankets and teddy bears. Before tucking it into her backpack, she curves the brim into a half-moon shape, the way her dad had once taught her.
But by the time she gets to school, Ryan still feels overwhelmed and unprepared for the day ahead of her, weaving toward her locker with her head down, shaky from the previous night’s revelations. In the faces of her classmates, she notices a few creased brows, a handful of worried looks, and the occasional slow and knowing tilt of the head. This, she tells herself, could mean anything. But by lunchtime, she has no doubt that some version of the news about Nick has made the rounds.
As she makes her way to the cafeteria, Ryan has the sense that things are moving too fast, and she wishes for something steady to hold on to. When they see her, Kate and Sydney wave her over to their table, and Ryan breathes out, relieved not to have to worry over seating arrangements today. Lucy looks up from her salad and flashes a distracted smile before turning her attention to a bottle of dressing. It’s the same table as yesterday, long and rectangular, with two rows of normally unfriendly girls who now direct sympathetic looks at Ryan as she slides in between Sydney and Kate.
An uneven hush falls over the table as, one by one, people begin to notice her, nudging one another with their elbows. Ryan lowers her face, flustered by this type of attention, suddenly visible for all the wrong reasons. She wishes that Nick were beside her, then remembers with a start that his absence is the cause of it all: the whispering and sympathetic looks, the sidelong glances and bent heads.
One of the girls sitting across the table clears her throat. “I’m sorry about—” she begins, but Sydney doesn’t give her a chance to finish.
“April!” she says sharply, widening her eyes at her.
Looking surprised, April leans back in her seat. “I didn’t mean to—”
Sydney shakes her head, and the other girl falls silent. The table is quiet but for the sounds of the lunchroom around them, the rustle of paper, the clattering of trays, a distant ripple of laughter. Ryan looks gratefully at Sydney, and on her other side, Kate reaches out to give her hand a squeeze.
It’s true they’d abandoned her before, but isn’t that part of moving on too? Forgiving those who find their way back? Now, when she needs them again, when it counts the most, they’re here, sitting on either side of her like a couple of security guards, backs straight and eyes sharp. It had been this way after her dad died, too, when the playground had begun to seem a dangerous place, filled with difficult questions and undisguised staring. Ryan had preferred to stay inside at recess, and even when the teacher insisted they go out with the others, Sydney and Kate had been adamant about staying behind to keep her company. Some days they drew pictures, some days they talked, and others they just sat quietly, the three of them together.
Too much else has happened to Ryan for her to hold a grudge. There have been too many other things she’s had to worry about surviving, and long ago she’d stopped seeing friendship as anything more than a simple expression of patience, rising and falling like the seasons, circling back on itself in the most surprising of ways.
For the remainder of lunch, the other girls at the table discuss homework and teachers, upcoming parties and weekend plans. But Ryan remains quiet. For the moment, at least, her worries have slowed, lightened by the presence of her friends beside her. And all the motion—the spinning and spiraling of all that’s passed and all that’s yet ahead of her—has, for the time being, grown mercifully still.
Later, when she can’t take any more talk of rocks and minerals, Ryan slips out of science class with the bathroom pass and takes her time crossing through the now-empty hallways. When she opens the door to the bathroom, she sees Lucy in front of one of the sinks, studying herself in the mirror. She’s standing absolutely still, not combing her hair, not fixing her lipstick, not even washing her hands, which are balanced on either side of the sink so that her whole body is pitched forward, her nose near the silver glass of the mirror. Ryan hovers uncertainly, one foot in the bathroom, the other still out in the hallway. She considers backing away, gently closing the door behind her and returning to class. But right now, Lucy looks the way Ryan feels—pale and quiet and faraway—and so instead, she lets the door fall shut behind her and clears her throat. Lucy turns around, then takes a step back from the sink, looking vaguely suspicious.
“Listen,” Ryan says. “About what happened at the game the other day—”
“Don’t worry about it,” Lucy says shortly, and when Ryan opens her mouth to continue, she whirls around. “Seriously, we don’t have to talk about it.”
Ryan nods, unsure what to do now. All of a sudden, she wants to talk about it. Because if they were to hash it out right now—a fight so completely and wholly trivial compared to all that’s happened since then—it might make everything else seem just a little bit less scary. All day, people have been talking around her in great funnels of words, and now, when she least expects it, she has something to say. Right here in the bathroom, surrounded by the murky blue tiles and the faint smell of disinfectant, Ryan feels like talking. And to Lucy Barrett, of all people.
But before she has a chance to say anything, Lucy reaches into her back pocket and pulls out a tissue, then simply stares at it as if working out a difficult puzzle. There’s something about the way her shoulders are curved that suggests a sort of mounting sadness, and perhaps because Ryan herself is so terribly and utterly sad—better versed in the uneven terrain of such sorrow—she recognizes it before even Lucy does, and she’s beside her when she starts to cry. Ryan reaches out instinctively to put an arm around her shoulders, because what else is there to do when a girl dissolves into tears in a bathroom? What else can you do but the very thing you’d want if it were you?
“I’m sorry,” Lucy says, her hands cupped over her face as if this might make her invisible. “I know you’ve got much bigger things going on right now.”
Ryan takes a step back, trying not to look so astonished at seeing Lucy go to pieces. “What’s wrong?” she asks, her voice low and echoing in the empty bathroom.
Lucy, realizing she’s still holding the tissue, blows her nose noisily. “I can’t believe I’m crying,” she says, looking at Ryan as if only just now registering her presence here, the unlikely scenario they’d somehow stumbled into. “This is so stupid. I never cry.”
Ryan smiles. “It happens.”
“My parents are getting divorced,” Lucy says with a small shrug. “I guess it sort of feels like they’ve been on their way there for most of my life, but they only just told me last night.”
“I’m sorry,” Ryan says, remembering that day in her yard, Lucy’s father brushing her off as he concentrated on his next putt.
“Oh, please,” Lucy says, but not unkindly. “I’m sure this is the last thing you need to be worrying about today.”
Ryan shuffles her feet a bit, but can’t think of anything to say to this. Outside, they hear footsteps, and then the door to the boys’ bathroom opens and closes. Lucy balls up her tissue and tosses it into the garbage can, and Ryan assumes that whatever this had been is now over.
“You know,” Lucy says. “In a weird way, I used to be jealous of you.”
“Of me?” Ryan chokes.
Lucy doesn’t laugh. “I know this sounds awful,” she continues, “but I was jealous that your father died, because it meant he wasn’t around anymore to disappoint you. All you had left were these great memories, all the things you did with him as a kid, when dads are at their best.”
Ryan is too surprised to speak.
“There was never real
ly a chance for him to let you down, you know?”
But he did, she almost says, thinking of that last April morning when they’d walked out to the car together. He’d bent down to cup her chin in his hand. “I’ll be back soon,” he had told her.
“Not for Opening Day,” Ryan pointed out.
“No, that’s true,” he said. “But Mom will take you.”
“It’s not the same.”
He struggled to keep from smiling. “I know,” he said. “But we’ll go the following weekend, okay?”
Ryan considered this. “You promise?”
Dad pulled her into a hug, then straightened. “I promise,” he said, crossing his heart with two fingers, then giving the bill of her cap a little tug. She stood on the edge of the curb, her toes pointed out in the direction he’d driven, and even after he was gone, she didn’t move until Mom called her back inside.
Now, Ryan looks at Lucy. “It’s too much to ask of anyone,” she finally says. “Not to ever let you down. That’s all everything is. Just a whole series of disappointments.”
“Well, that’s cheery,” Lucy says, and in spite of herself, Ryan laughs.
“I guess I mean that even with the best intentions, things can sometimes backfire,” she says, thinking not only of broken promises, but also of the bargain she’d made that day this summer, when she’d walked into Nick’s bedroom and had a feeling and managed to curse them all.
The bell rings, tinny and metallic by the time it reaches the bathroom, but neither one of them moves. Lucy looks at the door, and Ryan can tell she’s also reluctant to return to the world beyond it. She tries—as she so often does—to think of something meaningful to say, some token of wisdom from her father, but her mind is now on Nick, and the words are caught in her throat.
“Have you ever heard of small ball?” Ryan finds herself asking. The color rises in her cheeks when Lucy wrinkles her brow, but she pushes on anyway. “In baseball, it means instead of trying to hit every ball out of the park, you try to collect a bunch of smaller plays to move the runners forward and score.”
They can hear their classmates out in the hallway, the scuffling of shoes, the muddled voices just beyond the door. Lucy looks unsure whether to stay or go, but Ryan rushes on before she has a chance to say anything.
“It doesn’t mean you don’t want to win,” she says. “It only means it’s sometimes easier to do it a little bit at a time.”
She realizes suddenly—and with a small start—that for all his talk about not buying into any unfounded optimism or superstition, Nick is not, in the end, that unlike her father. Because for all his balking, for all his reluctance to give in to faith—to allow himself to hope—Nick is still a believer in small ball. And even if you have a hard time counting on the big win, even if you won’t stake anything on the chance of a game-winning home run, there still must be a part of you that is open to the smaller possibilities. Even the tiniest hits can sometimes carry you home.
Lucy is watching her now with something like confusion, and Ryan struggles to find her way back to the conversation. But she knows, suddenly, where she should be. And she knows exactly what she needs to say.
“All I mean is that things can sometimes get better a little piece at a time,” she explains, thinking of Nick.
“Well, they can’t get much worse,” Lucy says, and they both smile. The bathroom door opens and a few older girls walk inside, and Ryan can feel the moment flickering. She hands Lucy another tissue.
“Good luck with everything,” she says, as if they’d been talking about a math test.
“You too,” Lucy says, nodding gravely, and then Ryan hurries out into the hallway, around the corner, and out of the building.
Chapter Twenty-Six
* * *
BY THE TIME RYAN APPEARS IN THE DOORWAY OF NICK’S room after the seemingly endless trip downtown, everything else has fallen away. When he sees her standing there—flushed and anxious—he looks first surprised, then confused, glancing at his watch to confirm that it’s only two o’clock: not quite the end of the school day and hours still before the start of the game. Ryan doesn’t say anything as she walks over to his bed, then sits beside him and puts her hand on his.
“Yesterday was my fault,” she says. “I’m sorry.”
Nick swings his legs over the side of the bed to sit up beside her. He’s wearing an old Cubs shirt and sweatpants instead of a gown, and looks better today: the color has returned to his cheeks, and the bandage on his upper arm’s been changed to one that is smaller and considerably less frightening.
“Can we just skip this part?”
Ryan stares at him. “What?”
“This.” He points at her, then back at himself. “Apologizing, explaining. We shouldn’t have to go through the motions like that. We understand each other a lot better than all this.”
It would be easy, now, for her to agree. To rest her head on his shoulder and pass the afternoon in this way, lingering until the game begins, forcing everything else to wait. But Ryan came here for a reason, and so she shakes her head and takes a deep breath.
“Please,” she says, when he starts to speak again. She shakes her head and a few pieces of hair come loose from her ponytail; already, she can feel herself coming undone. “I really need to explain something, okay?”
He nods, waiting for her to continue.
“My dad and I used to make these bargains,” Ryan begins. “About the Cubs, mostly. Just stupid things like if they hit a home run, I’d have to be nice to Emily for a week. Or if they won a game, he’d come home early from work one night.”
She ventures a look at Nick, whose face is unchanged in the harsh hospital lighting. Out in the hallway, a nurse is lecturing someone on submitting paperwork, and on the other side of the curtain that splits the room, another patient is softly snoring. Ryan pauses to listen, half-hoping someone might knock, but nobody does.
“They didn’t mean anything,” she continues, then feels immediately terrible, because they had, of course, meant something. To her and her dad, they’d meant everything.
She closes her eyes, then starts again.
“That first game of the White Sox series,” she says, choosing her words carefully. “They won, remember? And after the game, I ran over to your house to see if you’d been watching.” She glances down at her hands, embarrassed. “The front door was open, so I just went upstairs, but you were asleep with the TV on.”
Nick looks somewhat amused, but says nothing.
“I didn’t know then, not for sure,” Ryan says, waving her hand around the hospital room. “It was just a feeling, I guess, that maybe you were sick, and I just …”
“What?” he asks, when she trails off.
“I made a bargain that it was okay if the Cubs never won again,” she says. “As long as you’d be okay.”
The floor of the hospital is a patchwork of linoleum squares, and Ryan traces her foot along the width of one of these as she waits for Nick to register this information.
When he finally speaks, his words are slow and deliberate. “So you think this is your fault?” he asks, his face unreadable. “That I’m back in the hospital now because the Cubs are winning, and it’s your fault?”
“Sort of,” Ryan says, nodding feebly.
“Which is why you’ve been so weird about the Cubs lately,” Nick says, then laughs. “Are you really that superstitious?”
She shakes her head. “Not anymore.”
“Good,” Nick says. “Because even if it were possible to curse someone by accident, I’d sort of hope that fate has bigger things to worry about than me and the Cubs.”
Ryan leans into him as he puts an arm around her. “Nothing seems more important than you and the Cubs,” she says quietly. “But I realized that you were right about all of it, anyway.”
“All of what?”
“Curses, bargains, all that stuff,” she says. “And about small ball, too.”
“What did I say about small ball
?”
“It’s not so much something you said,” Ryan tells him. “It’s just that you believe in it at all. You might not believe in good luck, but you do believe in something.”
She can feel him smiling against the top of her head. “So?”
“So, it’s hopeful,” she says. “It makes me think things will be okay.”
Nick leans away, and when Ryan turns to him, his face is serious. “You asked me yesterday why I bother cheering for them if I don’t believe they’ll ever win,” he says. “But there’s a difference between not believing and not caring.”
She waits for him to go on. His eyes are on the blue square of the window, where the clouds are bottoming out over the lake, and he looks energized again, his back straight and his hands busy as he speaks. “It’s not about winning or losing, really,” he’s saying. “It’s just the showing up every day. It’s stepping up to the plate and whiffing, and then doing it over and over again, whether you get a hit or not. It’s getting up every morning and failing and being disappointed and getting beat up and being let down, and then doing it all over again the next day.”
“I get that,” Ryan says. “Any Cubs fan gets that. But you still want them to win, and you still have to believe they can do it. Or else what’s the point?”
Nick shakes his head. “Being a championship team, winning the World Series,” he says. “Those aren’t the kinds of things that give you shape or substance. I’d rather cheer for a team with a hundred losing seasons than one that wins every year. That gets boring. Losing never does.”
“Because there’s always a chance they’ll win,” she says, but she realizes as she does that this isn’t the answer Nick is looking for. It’s clear to her now that although he lives and dies with the Cubs each summer, though he memorizes the lineups and checks the standings in the papers and rarely misses a game, a part of him—whether he realizes it or not—likes the fact that they never win. There’s something in him that has come to appreciate them for what they represent, and he depends on them for the very things that disappoint so many others. It is, in a twisted way, the ultimate form of hope. He doesn’t love them despite their losing streak. He loves them because of it.
The Comeback Season Page 19