Angels Walking

  There were a dozen incentives built in—which was what caught Tyler’s eye. If he pitched half as well as he’d pitched in high school, he’d make six figures every year. Even before he reached the pros.

  What happened next was the closest thing to war Tyler had ever known. He couldn’t think about it, couldn’t run through those details now. No pain pills were strong enough to dull the memories of what happened next, the fighting and fallout.

  Tyler brought the train of memories to a halt. Enough. As he drifted off to sleep in his car to the sounds of the tide and the Blue Wahoos announcer calling another winning game, Tyler was no longer behind the wheel of his Dodge Charger. He wasn’t broken or homeless or out of money. He had no regrets, no sullied past, no failed dreams.

  Rather, he was seventeen and sitting on the roof of a mansion in Northern California, the summer stars close enough to touch.

  And Sami Dawson at his side.

  Not until he woke up the next morning, the summer sun burning through the windshield and sweat dripping down his face, did Tyler realize the whole thing had been a dream. His arm screamed for relief and he cursed himself for letting his heart go back in time. He didn’t need Sami Dawson. He needed a job and a place to live and shoulder surgery. And he needed Oxycodone in a hurry.

  That most of all.

  10

  SAMI WAS SORTING THROUGH her closet, looking for proof that she’d ever dated Tyler Ames at all, when the doorbell rang. Mary Catherine was cleaning the kitchen. “I’ll get it!” When she was in a hurry Mary Catherine talked loud and fast, like a song. This was one of those times.

  Sami backed out of her closet, stood, and stretched. “Who is it?” She wasn’t expecting Arnie. He had a legal conference all day. The girls had decided to tackle the apartment in the morning and later walk to the Farmer’s Market on Third Street.

  “It’s for you!” Mary Catherine held out the last part of the word “you” with more sing-song than usual. “Come here.”

  Sami dusted her hands on her jeans and wiped her hair back from her face. “Coming.” The doorbell was a reminder. She shouldn’t be going through her closet reminiscing. She had a bathroom to clean and sheets to wash. As soon as she rounded the corner she gasped. “What in the—”

  “Beautiful, right?” The flowers took over the counter and stretched halfway to the ceiling. Three dozen red roses at least. Mary Catherine dug her nose in the arrangement and grinned. “Who are they from?”

  “Very funny.” Sami walked over and snatched the card from the center of the bouquet. They were from Arnie, of course. They had to be. Still, her heart fluttered just a little as she opened the card. Her eyes darted to the bottom. “See? They’re from Arnie.” She raised her brow at her roommate. “He’s wonderful. I keep telling you.”

  “Hmmm.” Mary Catherine hopped up on the counter and stared at Sami over the flowers. “What did he do wrong?”

  “He didn’t do anything wrong!” Indignation filled Sami’s tone, but even so she started to laugh. “You always pick on poor Arnie. How come?”

  “Someone has to.” She jumped down and hurried to the computer. “Proof of Your Love” by For King and Country was on. “I love this song.” She turned up the volume. “If I sing but don’t have love . . .”

  Mary Catherine couldn’t carry a tune to save her life. But that didn’t stop her. She grabbed the feather duster from the kitchen closet and sashayed around the room singing every word. Sami smelled the flowers. They were lovely. She looked at the card again.

  These are a week late. I should’ve sent them after dinner the other night. I was so focused on my good news I didn’t ask about your client. Forgive me. The future is ours, Samantha. Love, Arnie.

  She smiled at the message just as Mary Catherine jumped on the living room sofa and held the feather duster to her mouth like a microphone. “Let my life be the proof, the proof of Your love.” She closed her eyes, fully committed. “Let my love look like You and what You’re made of . . .”

  “I’m going back to my room.” Sami held up her card. “Thanks for dusting.”

  Mary Catherine danced to the computer and turned the volume almost all the way down. “What’s the card say?”

  “It’s not important.” She couldn’t keep a straight face around her roommate. The girl exuded pure joy.

  “Come on!” Mary Catherine hurried back to the flowers and sat on the counter again, swinging her freckled legs, her eyes on Sami. “Tell me.”

  “He said he should’ve listened better last week when we had dinner.” Sami smiled sweetly. “He just talked about the future. That sort of thing.”

  “So he did do something wrong.”

  “No, he just . . .” Sami looked at the card again and suddenly realized Mary Catherine was right. Something about that made Sami lose interest in the conversation. Enough about Arnie.

  Meanwhile, Mary Catherine kept singing off-key—which made Sami start laughing. She tried to stifle her giggles at first, preserving some sense of dignity for her friend’s lack of talent. But she couldn’t stop herself, and after another minute, Sami fell on the couch laughing.

  At first Mary Catherine looked offended. But then her voice cracked and she started laughing, too. “Okay, so I’ll skip Fifteen Minutes.”

  “Definitely.”

  When the song ended and they’d both caught their breath, Mary Catherine went to Sami and took the card from her fingers. After she read it she crinkled her nose. “Yuck.”

  “What?” Sami should’ve been angry with her friend for dissing Arnie, but she was laughing too hard.

  “ ‘Love, Arnie’?” She handed the card back to Sami. “That’s it?” She jumped on the coffee table and struck a dramatic pose. “Mary Catherine,” she said in a baritone voice, “my darling, my everything, I will love you with all I am until my dying breath.” She grinned at Sami as she jumped down from the table. “When it’s my turn, I want that or nothing at all.”

  The thing was, Mary Catherine would get it. Never mind that she wasn’t particularly striking. She had so many freckles she called them her partial tan. But that didn’t matter. She was the most beautiful person Sami knew. The whole city couldn’t contain her joy for life, and her love for helping others. She would find her guy yet, because she believed God would bring Him. That was the other thing.

  No one could touch Mary Catherine’s faith.

  “Anyway.” Mary Catherine smiled and twirled across the room with the feather duster. “If you want Arnie, you can have him.” She stopped and for the first time since the flowers had arrived she settled down and her eyes grew soft. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean it.”

  “Yes, you do.” Sami stood, her sides sore from laughing. “It’s okay. Arnie can take it.”

  Mary Catherine was still breathing fast from dancing and dusting and singing. “I just wish I’d known you before. When you dated that other guy. The baseball player.”

  “I was a kid.” Sami walked back to the flowers and studied them. “He grew up and changed.”

  “But he called you Sami.” Her eyes sparkled again. “Right?”

  “He did.” She uttered a tired laugh. “I need to get back to work.”

  How did she do that? Sami asked herself as she walked back to her bedroom, back to the old box in the closet. The one she hadn’t looked at in years. It was as if Mary Catherine could read her heart. She couldn’t have known Sami had been digging around her closet looking for proof of Tyler’s long ago fingerprints on her heart. But still, Sami thought, after Arnie sends the biggest bunch of roses ever—she asks about Tyler Ames.

  Sami understood why Mary Catherine didn’t click with Arnie. He was too safe for her, too predictable. When she found her guy, he wouldn’t be neat and tidy with a well-planned future. She’d probably meet him on a mission field in China or serving soup in a homeless shelter.

  Sami sat on the edge of her bed and read the card from Arnie again. True, he didn’t actually come out and say he loved her. But
by now that much was obvious, right? He talked about their future. What more could she ask? Sami set the card on her bed and returned to the closet.

  So much of her childhood was stuffed in the box. Not until she reached the bottom did she find the photo album. She’d made two identical books the month they graduated from high school. One she gave to Tyler. The other she kept. She felt the corduroy cover and her heart soared. This was what she’d been looking for.

  Easing it up between old papers and framed photographs that once hung in her room, Sami pulled the book free. Then slowly, like she was walking back in time, she sat on the edge of her bed again and stared at the cover. If someone had asked her back then how she pictured things ending with Tyler Ames, she would’ve had one answer.

  She would marry him. She had no doubts.

  But seeing his name in the news the other day made her wonder if she’d ever really known him. And if she had, then what changed him? Sami smiled at the photo book. The handmade cover, the carefully stitched words. The green fabric looked sort of ugly now, but not at the time.

  She opened the book and smiled at the first two-page layout. Tyler in his Jackson High uniform holding a baseball with one word written across the front in Sharpie: Prom?

  Opposite that was a picture of Sami in his embrace, her arms around his neck moments after telling him yes. Of course she would go to his prom. One of Tyler’s teammates took the picture. By then their families frowned on their relationship. Tyler’s parents were convinced she took away from his intensity on the mound, and her grandparents worried that he was reckless.

  “Much as we like baseball, your grandfather and I never saw you dating a ballplayer,” her grandmother had told her a number of times that year. “Boys like Tyler have lots of girls. They . . . expect things.”

  Sami laughed again at the memory. Tyler never expected anything from her. They would kiss good night, nothing more. Once in a while he would linger before he left for the evening and something in his eyes would change. He would whisper to her, “I don’t ever want this to end, Sami.” Or “Someday we won’t have to say good night.”

  Sami turned the page of the scrapbook. Next was a picture of her and Tyler swinging over the edge of Castaic Lake on an old tire, both of them clinging to the rope. The picture was taken a second before they fell in the shallow water. Sami had bruises on her arms for weeks, but it didn’t matter.

  At least she had the memory of a rope swing. Something she wouldn’t have if Tyler hadn’t been in her life.

  The photos took her back. Sami and Tyler, barefoot in the rain one January night. He had come to her house to take her for a walk, but then the clouds came. She could still hear herself. “We should take an umbrella. My grandma will worry I’ll catch a cold.”

  Tyler only laughed. “That’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard. Being cold is good for you.” He took her hand.

  “How’s that?” She glanced at the angry sky overhead.

  He grinned, pulling her slowly to his side. “It makes you walk closer to me.”

  She tried to include only the best pictures, the ones that showed them doing something she never would’ve done otherwise. Roller skating at Venice Beach, sitting in the back of his friend’s pick-up at the last drive-in theater known to man. Sami ran her finger over the photo. She and Tyler had snuggled under a blanket. She couldn’t remember the movie they watched that night, but she remembered everything else. The other couple had made out the entire movie.

  Not Sami and Tyler. He kept a running commentary going, making her laugh for reasons that wouldn’t have been funny without him. She turned the pages, reliving one memory after another. The last picture was the saddest. A photo that had only made its way into her copy of the album. It was taken by a stranger minutes before Tyler stepped on the bus.

  His bus to Billings was in the background.

  Sami looked into the past and she could see it all again. Feel it. Hear their voices as they said good-bye. “You have to come home whenever you have a chance.” She had put her hands on either side of his face. “I’ll miss you too much.”

  “Baby, I won’t be in Billings for long. I promise. It’s just a stop on the way to the Bigs.” He kissed her lips and then looked long into her eyes.

  “I believe in you.”

  “I know.” His smile had started in his eyes. “That’s why I’m so sure I’ll make it.”

  Sami remembered feeling helpless. The way she’d felt when her parents didn’t come back home after their accident. Everyone disagreed with Tyler’s decision to go with the draft. Her grandparents and his parents. His coaches. But she had wanted to believe in him. If anyone could make it through the minor leagues to the majors, it was Tyler.

  But by the time he was ready to climb on the bus, he and his parents were on rocky terms. Also by then, her grandparents had unequivocally decided he wasn’t the guy for her. Even the local media thought Tyler was crazy to pass up a scholarship to UCLA.

  “I’ll prove them all wrong,” he told her before climbing on the bus. “I’ll call you.”

  And like that, Tyler had backed away from her. He waited until the last second to turn and jog up the steps onto the bus. He took a seat by the window so he could see her, and their eyes held until the bus was too far down the road for them to see each other.

  Sami could still remember how it felt, standing there in a cloud of exhaust, the summer sun beating on her shoulders and Tyler Ames moving farther away with every heartbeat. She had told him the truth. No one believed in him more than she did. He called her that night from Idaho and again when he reached Billings. He texted her all the time at first.

  “Billings is great,” he told her. “Nothing to do but play ball.”

  Tyler started out with a run of success. They worked him into the pitching rotation after a week of training and conditioning, and the wins piled up. No matter how busy, he called Sami every night. Like he said he would. Always the conversation was the same. Tyler missed her. She missed him. But life was moving faster than one of his famed pitches. Sami moved into her dorm at UCLA and suddenly they really did seem worlds away from each other. Something else happened.

  For the first time since meeting a year earlier, they had nothing in common.

  Sami turned the last page in the photo album. Tucked in the back was the article from the Simi Valley Enterprise. She opened it up, careful with the yellowed newsprint. The headline spanned the entire sports page: Tyler Ames Makes Good on Promise. The reporter quoted Tyler saying that only a few special people believed in him when he took the draft over the scholarship. “My game is showing them all. I’m out to prove everyone wrong,” he said. “And I’ll do it. I will.”

  Sami scanned the text to the place where the Billings coach had shared a few words. “This kid is a winner. He’s unstoppable. He’ll make it to the Big Leagues in record time at this rate.”

  The more interest baseball executives took in Tyler’s pitching, the busier he became. Sami enrolled in eighteen units at UCLA and joined an intramural volleyball team. Pretty soon the calls from Tyler came only a few times a week and then only on the weekends. He had no vacation time, no time to visit her.

  When the season ended, the Reds moved Tyler to Dayton, Ohio—the club’s single A team. In the media, most local sports reporters saw the move as a good thing. “If Tyler Ames keeps pitching this way, he’ll be in Pensacola in a hurry,” his newest coach said at a press conference.

  Sami held onto every positive word. She would leave the articles out on the kitchen counter on the weekends when she visited her grandparents. Every chance she had she would tell them how Tyler was doing well and making a name for himself.

  Her grandparents didn’t care. A man without a college education was not one she could consider marrying. Conversation closed. “Samantha, there are a thousand handsome, intelligent boys on the campus of UCLA,” her grandfather told her one weekend that spring. “Have an open mind at least.”

  “My mind’s mad
e up.” Sami smiled at him. “I love Tyler Ames.”

  “Well.” Her grandfather nodded slowly. “We’ll see about that.”

  Those were always his words: We’ll see about that. As if he could look into the future and somehow know things weren’t going to work out.

  “People are watching,” Tyler told her when they talked at the end of spring training in Florida. “I keep thinking they might just send me over to the Blue Wahoos. Skip single A altogether.”

  Sami hoped for him and believed in him and once in a while she even prayed for him. But instead of giving Tyler a promotion, the Dayton Dragons kept him in Ohio and, almost overnight, things began to unravel. It turned out Dayton had a lot more to do than Billings, and since the media had loved Tyler since he was a twelve-year-old national champion, they were always on hand to capture his victories.

  And his mistakes.

  “I’m bored,” he told Sami a few weeks after he arrived back in Dayton. “I need more of a challenge.” Almost as an afterthought he added, “I miss you. I can’t believe it’s almost been a year.”

  No one in Sami’s life could believe it either. Her roommates were constantly asking her about the mystery boyfriend, the guy who was never around. Each of them had a UCLA guy they wanted her to meet, someone she could actually date and hang out with. Always she would politely tell them she wasn’t interested.

  But all that changed one night when Sami typed his name in the Google search line and found a headline she would never forget: Tyler Ames Arrested for Public Drunkenness—Underage Pitching Phenom Takes a Downturn. She read the article top to bottom five times before the truth set in.

  Tyler had gone to a bar with a group of fans—mostly girls. The picture told the story. He and one of the girls had been dancing on the table at a Dayton bar when someone snapped a photo. The owner of the bar had asked Tyler to stop, but he refused. Police were called and Tyler was arrested. Minor in possession of alcohol. Public drunkenness. He was released on his own recognizance and fined a thousand dollars. The team fined him three times that.