The Comeback Season

by Jennifer E. Smith

  Kevin slows down and smiles. “She’s fine,” he says, patting her shoulder. “They’re both fine. Just early.”

  Ryan breathes out, relieved. The car’s still running where Kevin had parked it just outside the entrance, and Mom gives Ryan a reassuring wave from the window. Emily throws open the back door and crawls across the seat to announce, in case Ryan hadn’t yet gathered it, that the baby is now on his way.

  The drive downtown isn’t all that different from others they’ve taken as a family, with Kevin sitting stiffly at the wheel, navigating the highways with the care of someone transporting valuable goods. Mom takes deep breaths in the front seat and explains to Ryan and Emily that it might take hours for the baby to come, and that they’re to behave themselves in the waiting room, since Kevin will be inside with her.

  “We can’t watch?” Emily asks, her lower lip already jutted out.

  “We’ll be fine, Mom,” Ryan says, feeling suddenly very much older. “You don’t need to worry about us.”

  The maternity ward of the hospital is just a few blocks away from the oncology building that she’s come to know so well. Ryan runs in ahead of Kevin, who’s busy helping Mom out of the car, and asks someone to bring a wheelchair outside, and then she and Emily trail behind as they check in. Mom gives them each a hug before disappearing down a long hallway with a nurse, and Kevin hands them a few dollars for the vending machines before trotting after her.

  “Is it bad that it’s early?” Emily asks as they take a seat in the waiting room.

  “Nah,” Ryan says. “Maybe the new baby’s just impatient.”

  “Like you,” she says.

  “Like you,” Ryan shoots back, smiling.

  Every now and then, Kevin returns to give them an update, and in between visits, Ryan and Emily pass the time by trading thoughts about the baby, what they might name him, what he’ll be like when he’s older.

  “Will we have to change diapers?” Emily asks, wrinkling her nose.

  “Maybe,” Ryan says. “It would be a big help to Mom.”

  “Did you help with my diapers when I was a baby?”

  Ryan shakes her head. “Dad did a lot of that stuff.”

  “Kevin will, too,” Emily says, and Ryan’s surprised by the force of her voice.

  “Of course he will,” she assures her. “He’ll be a great dad.”

  “He already is,” Emily says.

  Ryan puts an arm around her little sister, and Emily looks up at her, surprised.

  “What’s that for?”

  “Nothing,” she answers truthfully. “Just everything.”

  They keep an eye on the clock above the nurse’s station as the first hour passes, and then the second. Emily flips through the various magazines on the table before them, and Ryan picks up the sports section of a newspaper, leafing through it idly. There’s an article warning of all the Cubs are up against in the coming series as they attempt to buck a century of history and tradition, and Ryan’s glancing over it—all the many milestones of failure, the numerous reminders of defeat—when she hears a man talking to his young daughter across the room.

  “This is no small thing,” he’s saying. “For them to have gotten the wild-card spot, to even be going to the playoffs at all, well … it’s just not something that happens every day.”

  He’s wearing a Cubs hat, which he takes from his head and twirls on his finger. The girl leans against his shoulder to watch, smiling when he places it on her head.

  “One hundred years,” he says, and she lifts her chin to look out from under the brim of the too-large cap. He laughs, a sound of sheer amazement. “What’s one hundred years, anyway?”

  Ryan smiles and sets down the newspaper. Someday, when the Cubs finally do win—this year or next year, or one of the many more to come—people will say it had to happen at some point. That eventually has to have a finite ending. That every if must find its pair in a then.

  But Ryan knows differently.

  There aren’t just two kinds of endings. It’s not as simple as winning or losing. There’s a space in between, and this is where most of us tend to live.

  Soon the playoffs will begin, and Wrigleyville will come alive in October. The sportscasters will be laughing and the gamblers scratching their heads, but either way, the streets around the stadium will be thick with crowds, an ocean of blue caps and raised fists, a great and noisy mob of fans stunned by such good luck.

  And just a few miles farther down the lakeshore, Ryan and Nick will watch from his hospital room, each thinking of the first day of this strange and incredible season, when they had wandered those very streets together, pushing their way among vendors and fans, straining to hear the first stirrings of music from the press boxes and waiting for something to cheer about on the kind of spring afternoon that only Opening Day can provide.

  Already Ryan is thinking about slipping out of the hospital later, walking the three blocks between buildings, tracing a familiar path to Nick’s room. They’ll sit together—as they will for the weeks to come—and watch the light changing in the window, the patterns shifting across the floor.

  Soon enough the days will become muddled by medication and blurred by tears. Ryan will begin to wonder whether her hand ever existed outside of Nick’s, so long does she sit by his side, their fingers knotted together on top of the covers. Sometimes, they’ll talk, but mostly not. The silences contain all they’ll ever need to know about each other, a fluency born of trial and trust.

  And when the time finally comes to say good-bye, she’ll swallow hard against the tightness of her throat and the weight of her heart. She’ll think I’ll miss you and she’ll think don’t go and she’ll think please. But what she’ll finally say is simply thank you, and it will mean all of these things—everything promised and remembered, everything wordless and spoken and understood—and so much more.

  But all that is still to come.

  For now, Ryan’s thoughts are on new beginnings. And when she looks up, Kevin has appeared in the waiting room once more, this time wearing a hospital gown and plastic booties pulled over his shoes, his face lit by an enormous grin.

  “Want to come meet your new brother?” he asks, and Ryan and Emily spring to their feet to follow him down the hallway.

  When she sees the baby in her mother’s arms, Ryan hesitates. What had for months been little more than an idea or a promise now appeared in the world as a howling pink baby, his fingers working through the air as if already desperate to be a part of things. None of them says a word—each overwhelmed by this new member of their family—until Emily steps forward to run a finger across the back of his tiny hand. Kevin leans to kiss the top of Mom’s head, and from where she’s still standing by the door, Ryan is overcome by a wish to be a part of it too.

  She walks over to the bed and Mom reaches out to squeeze her hand. Kevin puts an arm around her shoulder, and Emily laughs as the baby wiggles his nose and then opens his mouth in a miniature yawn. There’s a certain joy to all this that Ryan hadn’t expected, not just for the new baby, but also for the way he’s brought them all here, the five of them together in perfect stillness, in mute and wondrous awe.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  * * *

  MONTHS LATER, ON A FROZEN NIGHT JUST BEFORE Christmas, Ryan wakes to hear the baby crying. She lies still for a few minutes, listening to the sound of his wailing, the heartrending sobs that echo throughout the upstairs hallway. The moon is bright through her curtains, reflecting off the steep drifts of snow in the front yard. Ryan rubs her eyes and sits up, resting one foot tentatively on the cold wooden floor as if testing the water.

  Out in the hall, Mom’s door opens at the same time, and they smile at each other, both tiptoeing in the direction of the baby’s room, where the crying has grown louder, a series of howls punctuated by the occasional hiccup.

  “I can get him,” Ryan whispers, and Mom—bleary-eyed and rumpled from the last few times she was up tonight—squeezes her hand gratefully and
makes her way quietly back to her room.

  Ryan peers over the edge of the crib at her little brother, whose face is red and blotchy. He thrusts his fists in the air and kicks a few times before she reaches over to pick him up. His small body is warm against her pajamas, and she holds him close and makes a few slow circles around the room, moving in and out of the shadows. Outside, the snow has begun to fall again in large, unhurried flakes, and they stand at the window, looking out over the pale and muffled world. The baby twists and sniffles in her arms, his eyes wide and alert.

  “You’re not tired either, huh?” Ryan whispers, rocking him back and forth as she walks him out into the hallway. The floorboards are old, but she knows which stairs creak and which can be trusted. Downstairs, the snow is banked up against the windows of the family room, and Ryan takes a seat on the couch, holding the baby close and switching on the television.

  One of the sports networks is replaying classic baseball games, and Ryan leans back and smiles, seeing the pinstriped uniforms she knows so well. Though the picture is fuzzy and the game’s nearly ten years old, she still flicks her eyes up to the corner of the screen, anxious to see the score. The catcher for the Cubs is arguing with the umpire over a questionable call, and Ryan realizes with a start that she’d been there that day.

  “Look,” she says softly, holding the baby up to see. “We were at this game.”

  He makes a gurgling noise and blinks at her as the previous decade’s Chicago Cubs finish off the inning. Ryan’s eyes fill with tears when the camera follows the players into the dugout, moving just below the seats on the third base line where they’d been sitting that day, and on so many others.

  She remembers that the Cubs had been losing badly in the eighth inning. The whole stadium was pulsing with heat, restless beneath a blistering sun, and she’d been tired and sweaty and faint. But when she’d tugged on Dad’s hand to ask whether they could go, he looked at her sideways.

  “It’s not over,” he said, lifting her so that she was standing on the seat beside him. Ryan had leaned an elbow on his shoulder and sighed mightily.

  “But we’re losing by so much.”

  “That’s the fun of it,” Dad said. “You never know when there might be a comeback.”

  Later, after a series of batters had failed to do anything to remedy the declining situation, Ryan had tapped him on the shoulder. “We’re still losing,” she pointed out.

  “True,” Dad said, smiling. “But there’s an art to losing. It’s just as important to know how to do that as anything else.”

  “How come?”

  “Because that’s how you learn,” he’d said, cupping her chin in his hand. He studied her with pale gray eyes. “It’s how we learn to keep going. It’s how we survive.”

  On the field below, the Cubs hit a double, and Ryan began to cheer in earnest, hopping up and down on the seat and clapping for her team. Dad put an arm around her waist, and she could tell he was proud of her. It took a certain kind of person to love the Cubs, he always said, and Ryan was happy to be one of them.

  And in the end, he was right, of course. It took four extra innings, but there’d been a comeback after all.

  Now, as the Cubs begin their rally on screen—an echo across the years, a distant and welcome memory—Ryan’s brother curls his tiny hand around her finger.

  “Don’t worry,” she says to him. “I’ll take you too, someday.”

  She watches for a while with the volume turned low, the baby dozing on and off, his eyelashes fluttering against her arm as he shifts in his sleep. Sometime in the eleventh inning, the sound of the game is suddenly muted by a series of bright beeps. This is followed by a scrolling ticker that runs along the bottom of the screen like a ribbon, a warning about the worsening weather outside. Ryan looks to the window, where the flurries are coming down hard and fast now. The windowsills are caked with snow, and when the wind picks up, a row of icicles falls from the roof with a sound like a dozen tiny bells going off at once.

  The lights flicker, once and then again, and the room goes suddenly dark. The television screen fades to black, and Ryan sits very still, bathed in the ghostly light of the snow outside. The silence that follows is charged, almost electric, and the baby stirs, letting out a few hesitant cries. Ryan holds him tighter, closing her eyes and waiting in the deep hush of this blue-cold night. Her heart is loud in her ears, and she thinks of Nick, a memory so powerful it almost feels real, as if he were right here beside her, his socked feet propped on the table, his arm slung lightly over her shoulders.

  “This is it,” he’d be saying, half-trying to rile her as the Cubs struggled to finish out the game. “It’s all up to chance now. Nothing left but jinxes and curses.”

  “And …” she’d say, prompting him.

  “And bargains,” he’d tease.

  Ryan would shake her head in mock exasperation. “And hope.”

  And then Nick, smiling that familiar smile of his, would have pulled her a bit closer. “Okay,” he’d have said, relenting. “Hope, too.”