The Comeback Season

by Jennifer E. Smith

  “But how can it be both?” she asks him. “How can you cheer for them so hard without believing they’ll ever actually win?”

  “You just can,” he says. “It’s like anything else. Not everything is so black and white. It’s okay to have doubts, even as you hope. You don’t have to choose. You can be both things at once.”

  Ryan lowers her eyes. Just last night, Mom had tried to tell her the same thing. When Dad said to be brave, she’d told Ryan, he didn’t mean you can’t ever be scared.

  She understands now what she, in all her worry, had forgotten. That even as she hesitates and wavers, even as she thinks too much and moves too cautiously, she doesn’t always have to get it right. It’s okay to look back, even as you move forward.

  It’s okay to have doubts, even as you hope, Nick had said.

  It’s okay to be scared, said her mom.

  Ryan spreads her hands over the blanket on Nick’s bed, then sits in the chair beside it, and lays her head down on the covers. She feels a swift rush of weariness, and Nick, too, is yawning, blinking away the last of the afternoon light in the window. He runs a hand through her hair and kisses her forehead, then scoots down so that their faces are close.

  They’re both tired: tired of thinking, tired of worrying, tired of wishing. Nick falls asleep first, and Ryan can feel her breathing matching up to his, the faint rise and fall of his chest, the occasional twitch of his fingers near her neck. She buries her nose in the fabric of the sheets, feeling like she’s ten years old again, on the day before the day the world ended, on the day before a new baseball season began, and a different kind of season drew to a close.

  And so they sleep.

  Hours later, when they finally wake—first Nick, then Ryan—their hands are braided together, and Nick untangles his fingers from hers and then nudges her gently.

  “Hey,” he says, as she finds her way back. “The game’ll be on soon.”

  The lights are still off in the room, though they can see that the nurses have been by to draw the curtain over the window, which glows in its efforts to hide the moon.

  “I guess now I can cheer for them again,” Ryan says ruefully, rubbing her eyes and stretching. “Since you don’t believe in curses.”

  “I believe in some curses,” Nick says, and she looks at him sideways. “That’s why it’s so easy for people to love the Cubs. Everyone loses sometimes. Everyone is a little bit cursed.”

  “Especially us,” she murmurs, looking around the darkened hospital room.

  “Not us,” he says. “We’re lucky.”

  On the way home, Ryan steps off the train at Addison Street almost without thinking, slipping out just before the doors snap shut. She stands with her hands on her head, breathing hard as she watches the train rattle around the corner and then disappear entirely. She’d promised Mom she’d come straight home after the game, but she’s suddenly gripped by a need to be alone, to walk or be still, to think hard about all that’s happening or perhaps briefly forget it. All she wants is a small wedge of time in which to collect herself.

  The streets around Wrigley Field are now mostly empty. Ryan and Nick had watched earlier as the Cubs beat the Cardinals, evening up the wild card race in one breathless game. Though there’s still a month left of the regular season, a win tomorrow night would put them in the lead. And even in something as uncertain as baseball, even with a team as uncertain as the Cubs, something like that might just be enough to carry them forward into the playoffs.

  But now, the fans have gone home and the stadium sits low beneath a star-strewn sky. Ryan passes the main entrance, the metal grates pulled down to hide the turnstiles and ticket booths. A few pieces of litter tumble up the street—plastic bags and empty soda cans, ticket stubs and crumpled programs—but otherwise, the world is still.

  She crosses to the corner of Waveland Avenue, then pauses. The narrow brownstone is tucked shoulder-to-shoulder among its neighbors, dark and silent as the street surrounding it, and Ryan starts up the path without thinking. She puts a hand on the cool stones of the building, then lowers herself onto the porch. The lights around the stadium flicker and buzz, casting shadows across the empty shell of the field.

  Ryan tucks her chin into her jacket, feeling strangely distant from the scene before her, as if part of her had been left behind in the hospital room up the road. She closes her eyes—just briefly—and then opens them again, thinking of her dad and the last game they’d gone to here together, of the time he caught the foul ball and the time the Cubs won a doubleheader in the sweltering heat and a thousand other games on a thousand other days.

  Promise me you’ll remember this, he’d always said.

  But it was never a question of remembering. How could she possibly forget?

  Since he died, Ryan has learned to read silences like a map, to study them for the spaces in between, predicting and forecasting the gaps. Because it’s within these moments of quiet that she can almost hear him, a sound like a whisper, like the last murmurings before sleep. She knows he’s always with her, but never more so than in those dips between words. It’s a feeling like falling, though not in a scary way. It’s like hoping for hope itself.

  She digs through her backpack for the hat he’d once given her, holding it carefully between stiff and chilly fingers. A siren calls from somewhere beyond the stadium, and the lights color the sky momentarily red before disappearing again. She looks out across the street, then closes her eyes, and the stadium is wrenched from view.

  It’s how we hold on to things, her dad had once said, even as we move on.

  She lets her eyes flutter open again, then sets the cap down on the porch beside her. When the wind picks up, it nudges it along the stone floor, past the spot where Nick had once sat—where they’d talked and not talked, where they’d shouted and whispered and feared and dreamed—and after a little while, it goes skidding off the end of the porch entirely, cartwheeling down the steps toward the stadium like an offering of some kind.

  Ryan blinks out into the gathering darkness. Before her, the world carries on as it always does. There are cars and trucks and taxis, a handful of people out for an evening stroll, all beneath the pale lights of the stadium, which looms like a monument in the bluish sky above. But Ryan sits unnoticed—a stolen moment as night falls over the street—huddled in a corner of the porch as if searching for shelter from a storm.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  * * *

  RYAN’S POKING HOLES IN A SHEET OF GRAPH PAPER THE following morning when her math teacher pauses to ask, for the second time, that the boys in the back of the room remove their caps during class. When she twists to look, Ryan sees that they’re all wearing Cubs hats, which they now doff with great formality, making little bows to one another before tucking them under their desks.

  The teacher shakes his head. “This is getting ridiculous,” he says with a grin. “The whole city’s practically hysterical.”

  This pronouncement is met with scattered claps and deep cheering, a flurry of anticipation over tonight’s big game. Once the noise from the back has died down, the discussion returns to slopes and coordinates. But when the teacher looks back over his shoulder for an answer to the question on the chalkboard, his eyes land on Ryan, who has gone white at the reminder.

  She hadn’t planned to come to school today. Even Mom and Kevin had agreed it might be better to be at home when the call came, but Ryan had promised Nick she’d pick up his homework, and it felt important to carry on as usual, to not appear overly concerned. Optimism seemed as promising as anything else today, on a day when they’d learn whether the cancer was back, and whether or not it had spread beyond his arm.

  But the mention of the Cubs triggers something in Ryan beyond just the memory of last night’s win or the excitement about today’s all-important game. There’s an odd prickling in the tips of her fingers, and her mouth has gone chalky and dry.

  “Ryan?” the teacher says, making his way between the desks to more clo
sely examine his suddenly pale student. “Are you okay?”

  Ryan nods, though she isn’t at all certain. She takes a few breaths, trying to steady herself. “Can I go to the water fountain?”

  “Maybe it would be better if you saw the nurse,” he says. “Do you want someone to take you there?”

  She shakes her head and accepts the hall pass with wavering hands. Once outside the classroom, she walks a little ways, then pauses to lean her forehead against the cool of a metal locker, breathing hard. Ryan’s rarely ever sick, and though she knows this has to do with more than just sweaty palms and a churning stomach, she’s still surprised by the power of her worry.

  When she feels sturdy enough, she continues downstairs and through the long front corridor to the nurse’s office. She’s made it a point to avoid this place since the fourth grade, wary of the starched white cot and jars of cotton balls and bandages. But now she sits obediently, feeling too weak-kneed to protest as the nurse shoves an oversized wooden popsicle stick into her mouth. Ryan gags and coughs until she pulls it back out to make a few notes on a pink chart.

  “Have you been feeling dizzy or faint at all lately?” the nurse asks, the lines in her face collapsing into a frown when Ryan only gives her head a mournful little shake. “Nauseous?” she asks, trying again. “Queasy? Shaky?”

  The answer to all these remains no, and the nurse sighs and clicks her pen, then brings a hand to her forehead. Ryan wiggles her eyebrows unhelpfully and looks around at the room, the Q-tips and Band-Aids and wispy pieces of gauze, the posters for various illnesses and support groups and hotlines, and she thinks of the last time she was in an office like this one. It had been during those endless, hourlike minutes when she’d sat wondering about the particulars of the accident, trying unsuccessfully to nudge the clock back to the exact moment when her father died, wishing she could have somehow known, wondering what it meant, all those lost seconds when they should have already been missing him.

  And she realizes now—with a sense of desperation that wrenches her up from the paper-covered cot—that this must be a similar kind of moment. What else could this have sprung from—this sudden wooziness, this curious spinning of her throbbing head—if not that? Those leaden moments of time that pass in such terrible ignorance before the unexpected arrival of bad news.

  The nurse calls after her as Ryan slips out the door of her office, but she doesn’t turn around. Her head is bent when she returns to the brittle stillness of the empty hallway, where she isn’t the least bit surprised to see the figure of her mother standing just outside the principal’s office.

  Ryan doesn’t need to ask what she’s doing here. She doesn’t even think to question whether the phone call from the Crowleys had been good news or bad, whether the cancer is back or not, whether it’s finally—quietly, stealthily—made its way to Nick’s lungs. And she doesn’t, when she crosses the space to her mother, ask when the news had come, because they must surely have learned of it during those dizzying moments when Ryan groped her way along the rows of lockers to the nurse’s office, the sight of disappointments past and present.

  When she reaches the end of the hallway, Mom draws her into a hug, and Ryan buries her face in her sweater and lets herself be held. She presses her lips together and closes her eyes, and she doesn’t ask, because she already knows.

  Though it’s not quite September, the leaves have already started to lose their grip on the trees lining the road downtown, and one by one they skitter across the pavement, drifting alongside the breezes from the lake. Ryan leans back from the car window to look over at Mom, whose belly is by now nearly too big to fit beneath the steering wheel, and who’s driving toward the hospital with a look of such concern it makes Ryan want to hug her all over again.

  There’s a lull in the music on the radio, and the DJ mentions the event on the minds of all his listeners: this afternoon’s game against the St. Louis Cardinals, the deciding factor as to which team will take the lead in the wild-card race.

  “Pretty big game,” Mom says, flicking her eyes from the road to look over at Ryan, who nods. “You guys must be excited.”

  “We are,” she says, but the words sound empty, and they both go quiet again as they pull off onto the exit for the hospital.

  “Mrs. Crowley said she can drive you home later if you want to stay for the game,” Mom says when they pause at a red light. “But if you don’t want to stick around here that long, everyone would understand.”

  Ryan shakes her head. “I should stay,” she says. “I want to stay.”

  “I thought so,” Mom says, reaching across the car to put a hand over Ryan’s.

  Once she drops her off, Ryan stands outside the hospital for a moment before going inside. Behind the sliding doors, the waiting room is filled with people, faces drawn and hands clasped. There’s a woman holding a bouquet of daisies, a man worrying a handkerchief between his fingers, two little girls playing musical chairs. There’s a boy who looks too young to be in a wheelchair, and a moment later, a man seemingly too old in the same kind, his robe trailing behind as a nurse pushes him through the busy room. Ryan takes a deep breath before walking inside, toward the now-familiar nurse’s station and the bank of elevators that lead to Nick’s floor.

  Upstairs, she looks around for his parents, but doesn’t see them, and so she knocks once on the open door to Nick’s room. A woman brushes by with a balloon for another patient, and Ryan wishes she had thought of something like that, something to lift his spirits on such an otherwise miserable day. But when Nick calls her inside, she finds him looking exactly as he had the day before—sitting up in bed, watery-eyed and so obviously pleased to see her—and she relaxes.

  “Hey,” he says, waving her over, and Ryan stands at the side of his bed and leans to kiss him. The small television set in the corner of the ceiling is already tuned to the pregame show, and Nick scoots over to make room for Ryan to lie down beside him. He puts an arm around her shoulders, and she can feel him breathing beside her, a movement so steady and natural that it’s almost hard to believe anything could be wrong with him.

  They don’t talk about the prognosis or the test results or the course of chemotherapy he’ll soon be starting. They don’t say anything about his lungs or his arm or that terrifying word—cancer—that hovers and looms and threatens to make itself felt in even the most remote conversations. They simply don’t talk about it. Even when the nurse comes in and hands him two large pills and a glass of water. Even when his parents return and then, noticing Ryan’s arrival, announce they’ll be back later on. An orderly delivers a blanket, and outside, instructions are related and pages are turned as one shift of nurses gives way to another. But Ryan and Nick aren’t listening. They are somewhere else entirely.

  Ryan presses herself closer to him on the bed, and they whisper about the day’s starting lineup, their voices lowered as if it were a great secret between them. They sit up a little when the first pitch is thrown, and duck their heads when the Cubs make an early error in the outfield. They grip each other’s hands when they gain a shaky lead over the Cardinals, and then clap until their palms are sore when they widen it with a two-run homer. At the end of the third inning, they make toasts to the Cubs with Styrofoam coffee cups of lukewarm water, and then turn up the volume until a nurse asks them to please lower it again. Nick takes a get-well-soon card from the table beside his bed and writes go cubs across the back of it with a blue pen, which Ryan tapes along one side of it with some Band-Aids to create a flag, and they take turns waving it each time their team scores.

  And they do, often.

  The Cubs play so beautifully it almost hurts. Ryan finds she’s digging her nails into Nick’s hand as the game progresses, as the runs pile up and the other team starts to crumble against the team that invented crumbling, the lovable losers, the hundred-year choke artists. On the screen, the sun is setting behind home plate, and the ivy on the back wall of Wrigley Field looks gold in the autumn light, the tips already b
eginning to turn an impossible shade of red. The crowd is on their feet—on their tiptoes, even!—as each inning comes and goes and the unlikely leaders of the game continue to pull away from their opponents. They are playing now with a kind of perfection, a flawless state where later doesn’t matter and before is nothing more than a memory. There is only now, this game, this dusky evening at Wrigley, and nothing else can possibly exist until the last pitch is thrown. It’s the kind of game that makes your forget about everything else—yesterday and tomorrow, the world around you and your place within it—everything but the endless green field and the dusty bases and the red-laced ball as it cuts through the air.

  The sky out the window of the hospital room matches the one on the television screen—a blurry confusion of red and orange—and Nick brings his mouth low to Ryan’s ear. “If the Cubs win …” he says quietly, then trails off without finishing.

  It seems too big an if to ever end the sentence.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  * * *

  A FEW WEEKS LATER, RYAN’S BETWEEN CLASSES WHEN she once again sees a familiar figure in the hallway just outside the principal’s office. But this time, it’s Kevin, looking uncharacteristically flustered, and when he sees her, he practically lopes down the hall.

  “It’s time,” he says, his eyes wide and his face flushed. “Your mom and sister are in the car, and it’s almost time!”

  Ryan stares at him, trying to work out the date. “She’s not due for two more weeks,” she says, and Kevin puts a hand on her back to hurry her along, the two of them skidding down the corridor of the high school and toward the front door. Ryan looks up at him, her throat tight. “Is she okay?”