“It might,” he says. “But it might not.”
She looks back toward the house, then wipes the water from her face and takes a few steps toward him, realizing they’ve been yelling over the rain. She’s beginning to grow cold, and can tell he is too, by the way his jaw is set. “I don’t know,” she says, hugging her arms to her chest. “I don’t think it’s a very good idea.”
They are close now, and there’s something in his eyes that makes her go quiet.
“It is,” he says, then lowers his voice. “Please.”
Ryan opens her mouth, then closes it. She pulls her eyes from his and looks around the yard, the rain falling steadily on the slabs of stone, the grass wet and curling. She wiggles her toes against the ground and shivers.
“Okay,” she says after a moment. “Let me just grab a coat.”
Chapter Fifteen
* * *
BY THE TIME THEY GET DOWNTOWN, THE RAIN shower has turned into a thunderstorm. Ryan pulls her hands into the sleeves of her raincoat and ducks her head as they get off the ‘L’, looking to Nick. But if she’d expected him to suggest going home, to hop back on the next northbound train, she’d been wrong. They’d ridden the whole way in silence, and something about the look on his face kept Ryan from trying to start up a conversation. There’s something purposeful about his manner as they stand now beneath the dripping overhang of the Addison train stop, the sky around them curdled and blackened, the thunder trembling in their ears.
The game is undoubtedly delayed, if not canceled entirely, and the area around the stadium is quiet. A homeless man in a brown garbage bag approaches them, and Ryan digs in her pockets for a dollar. When he shuffles away, they are once again alone, and it takes everything in her not to ask Nick what he plans to do next.
“Let’s go find a spot,” he says, jerking his head toward the stadium. “I bet this’ll pass.”
Ryan stares at him as another fit of thunder shakes the platform around them. A spike of lightning splits the sky, and she pulls her hood tight around her face. “There’s no way this is passing anytime soon.”
“It’s just a summer storm,” he says. “C’mon.”
She has no choice but to follow him as he makes his way down the stairs and out toward the stadium, which looks dreary and forlorn beneath the spitting rain. Ryan wipes the water from her nose and lowers her head, trying her best to avoid the puddles as Nick leads them past the entrance and alongside the ballpark toward Waveland Avenue. There are a few vendors trying to untangle plastic tarps to cover their merchandise, but other than that, the street is nearly empty. Even the old fire station at the corner is shuttered against the storm. Ryan stops walking, and Nick turns around when he realizes she’s no longer behind him.
“What’s wrong?” he calls out.
“This is crazy,” she says. “Let’s go find a coffee shop or something.”
He tips his head back and squints at the sky. Ryan jumps at an explosion of thunder, then stamps her feet against the chill. A car rounds the corner, passing between them on the street and throwing up small waves of water. Ryan takes another step back and shakes her head.
“This is not passing,” she says.
Nick motions to the rows of brownstone homes lining the street. The nearest one has a small front porch with a stone overhang. “C’mon,” he yells, and Ryan follows him reluctantly, climbing the stairs and keeping an eye on the front door.
“What if someone comes out?”
Nick shrugs as he slides down onto the stoop. “Then we’ll move.”
The overhang doesn’t provide much shelter, and the rain comes in at them sideways, stinging Ryan’s face. She sits down across from him and gathers the ends of her jeans in her hands, doing her best to wring them out.
“What exactly are we doing here?”
“Waiting,” he says.
“For the apocalypse?”
He smiles as he shakes the water from his hair. There’s a steady drip from the ceiling that collects in a small pool between them. She presses herself closer to the door, moving away from the storm. The sky above the stadium is leaden and heavy, a grayish mess of clouds and rain. Ryan peers out, shuddering. When she turns back to Nick, hunched in the opposite corner of the small vestibule, she finds him watching her.
“I’m sorry I haven’t called,” he says, his green eyes intent. “It was a dumb thing to do.”
Ryan settles back against the wall. “What?” she asks. “Disappearing?”
“I didn’t disappear.”
She knows. She may have only seen him once, may have only stumbled upon an afternoon nap, may not really understand any of this at all, but even so, the tiniest part of her knows that something is wrong.
Nick folds his hands together and looks out at the rain. Ryan can feel what’s coming next, something unnamed and foreboding, the kind of thing that divides time into a before and an after. She has a sudden childish impulse to clap her hands over her ears, but instead, she stands abruptly and steps from beneath the overhang.
“What’re you doing?” Nick asks.
Ryan lets the rain slide down her nose. “Let’s go get something to eat,” she says. “There’s a diner around the corner.”
Nick doesn’t move.
“Come on,” she says, a desperate tinge to her voice. “We can still salvage the day.”
“I don’t know,” he says, with a small smile. “This doesn’t look like it’s passing.”
The wind picks up, lifting the rain in great sheets of water, but Ryan stands her ground. Nick gets up and follows her out into the open, settling down on the lowest step. He looks somehow small against the weather.
Relenting, she walks over and sits beside him, folding her arms across her knees. “So,” she says again, her voice softer now. “What are we doing here?”
“What are we doing here,” he repeats, throwing his head back to catch the rain. “You should know this is the last thing I want to be talking about right now.”
Ryan understands this is her cue to ask what, but she can’t bring herself to voice the question.
“I didn’t tell you at first, because it didn’t feel important,” he continues. His eyes are hard now, bright behind the curtain of rain between them. “But it’s starting to feel like lying—not talking about it—and so here we are.”
“I know,” Ryan says, her voice flat. “You’re sick.” She blinks at him, surprised by the statement, which had come without warning, though she realizes now that she must have known this for some time, maybe since she first met him.
Nick’s face doesn’t change. “I was,” he says. “And could be again.”
“I know,” Ryan says again, without really knowing anything at all.
“We didn’t just move here because of my dad’s job,” he says. “The only reason he ever looked for work here in the first place was because of me. Because of the doctors here.”
The rain is softer now, and the few people passing by on the sidewalk lower their umbrellas and peer up at the sky. Ryan holds out a flattened palm and watches the slow drops fall on her hand, working out how to ask her next question. When she can’t come up with anything gentler, she decides to be straightforward. “What’s wrong with you?”
He surprises her by laughing. “I’m sorry,” he says, holding up his hands. “But you look so serious right now.”
She makes a face and punches him lightly on the shoulder, then draws back, a new thought occurring to her. “It’s the broken arm, isn’t it?”
“One of a few, actually,” he says.
“But why?”
“Bad luck?” he says with a grin. “Clumsiness?”
Ryan isn’t sure whether to laugh or not. She feels horribly slow right now, her mind churning to no effect. There are a million questions that need answering, and she’s fairly certain this is not how a conversation of this sort is supposed to go. Bad news, to Ryan, has always been like being thumped on the head by something heavy. It comes all at once, with
out shades or degrees. The world goes from white to black in an instant.
But this is different.
Nick, seeing that she hasn’t spoken, takes the opportunity to kick at a puddle between them, splashing water onto Ryan’s already soaked-through rain jacket.
“But what’s—”
“What’s wrong with me?” he asks, and he holds out one hand, spreading his fingers wide. As he talks, he ticks them off one by one, and Ryan holds her breath. “It’s called osteosarcoma, which is a type of bone cancer that kids get.” He raises his arm. “This is the third time I’ve broken this one. We didn’t know why until they found the first tumor a couple years ago. I went through surgery and chemo, both last year, to take care of this guy”—and here, he pulls up his sleeve to point at a scar on his shoulder that Ryan had never seen—“and missed practically the whole school year, which is what landed me in your math class.”
When he’s finished, he tugs his sleeve back down, then shrugs. There are a thousand questions Ryan wants to ask, a thousand worries caught inside her. She rests her forehead in her hand, feeling dizzy, then realizes the pose might seem too defeatist, and straightens up, trying her best to look upbeat. But her face refuses to cooperate, and her mouth twitches with the effort, falling at the corners. She takes a deep breath—the first half of a sigh—then remembers herself and holds it, worried that he’ll notice.
Ryan has experience with this kind of business. She, of all people, understands that worry can look an awful lot like pity if you’re not careful.
“I finished treatments about six months ago,” he says. “I’m okay for now.”
She shifts around on the wet stoop, her hair sticking to her face, her toes clammy and cold, trying to assemble the different strands of information. She wishes Nick would tell the whole story at once, from Point A to Point B, from back-then to here-and-now, without sidebars or detours, just pure chronology, methodical order. Later, she will worry. Later, she will bury her face in her pillow. Later, she will stomp through her backyard and kick at the ground as if it were the grass’s fault. There will be time to be irrational and upset and inconsolable, if that’s what is to come. But now, she understands, should be for collecting facts. It is a simple matter of staring down the next few waterlogged minutes, the uneven conversation that will—that must—follow. Ryan feels it’s up to her to find out just what it is they’re up against.
“If you’re okay now,” she asks, “how come you still had to move here?”
“My dad applied for the job back when I was really sick,” Nick says. “But he didn’t find out he got it until right after I broke my arm a few months ago.”
“And so you moved anyway.”
He flicks his eyes away, but doesn’t answer. The rain has mostly stopped now, the last drops filtering through the trees, though the sky is still a deep, gunmetal gray. The traffic has picked up around the stadium and people have begun circling tentatively, watching and wondering and waiting to see if the game might be played after all.
“Don’t look at me like that,” he says with a wry smile. “It could be worse.”
“How?” she asks mechanically.
He tilts his head back, mouth open. “The game could get rained out.”
Ryan shakes her head. “Nick.”
“I’m sorry,” he says. “It’s just strange having this conversation with you. Sometimes, I feel like talking to you is the same as talking to myself. Like you already know all there is to know, so there’s no point in explaining.”
“But I don’t,” Ryan admits, trying to keep her voice from wobbling. “I just …”
“Just want to know whether I’ll be okay.”
She manages to nod.
“I don’t know,” he says.
She wants to be nearer to him, to close the gap between them, but she suspects that to move would be to upset the fragile balance of the conversation. And so she sits very still, cutting her eyes out across the street to where the fans are once again emerging onto the abandoned pavement, shielding their eyes against the still-trickling sky.
“This is much easier without the rain,” Nick says, and Ryan ventures a sideways look to see that he’s smiling. “Bad weather’s a little melodramatic, don’t you think?”
His eyelashes are still wet, and he looks genuinely content right now, his eyes busy with the awakening world around the ballpark. She knows somehow that this is how she’ll always think of him: sitting here on the stoop of someone’s brownstone, soaking wet, the two of them like a pair of beggars.
“I guess you were right,” she says. “About the storm passing.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before,” he says, standing up. He stretches a little, then shakes the water from his sneakers. They make slushy noises as he steps down onto the sidewalk. He offers a hand, and Ryan pauses before grabbing it, and then he pulls her up too. When he lets go again, she feels very far away.
“So,” he says. “Any other questions, or can we get on to more important things?”
Ryan glances over at the stadium, which looks a pale yellow in the breaking light. A few people are dragging chairs out onto the lawns around them, and the street is suddenly crowded, as if there had never been a storm at all, as if they had only ever imagined it.
Her next question, which is for now to be her last, is the hardest. She lowers her eyes. “Why now?” she asks. “Why are you telling me all this now?”
He glances down at his left arm, still pale from where the cast had been for so many months. “In cases like mine,” he says quietly, “there’s a better chance of another tumor growing when the bone’s broken.”
Ryan hesitates for only a moment, then takes his hand. “Let’s go,” she says, and together, they make their way out onto the street. They move wordlessly toward the stadium—past the ticket booths and the scalpers and all the many gatekeepers to the game—and then continue beyond to find a spot on the outskirts of it all. Even once the rain starts up again, she keeps her hand in his, unwilling to let go.
A short time later, the storm stops almost as swiftly as it had begun, but by then, Ryan and Nick have already given up on the day. And the Cubs—even once they find a patch of sky long enough and clear enough to play—manage to lose anyway, slouching and slinking through each inning as if losing were nothing but a way of surviving until tomorrow, when another game can be played.
Chapter Sixteen
* * *
NICK HAS PLANS TO GO UP TO WISCONSIN WITH his family for the Fourth of July, and then spend the rest of the month at his grandparents’ lake house, swimming and sailing and barbecuing. None of this should come as a surprise to Ryan, but somehow, the idea that they could be up there carrying on as if nothing were wrong is deeply perplexing.
She’d had a similar feeling after her dad died, a sense of astonishment that the world could still hum along at exactly the same pace, that such a great loss could hardly cause any interruption. But this is different: Nick is still here. And while he spends the month sitting on the edge of a pier, all they can do is hold their breath and wait and hope that another tumor won’t show up on his arm. Ryan feels nearly mad with frustration that there’s nothing that can be done to prevent it, this possible cancer, this potential disaster.
That afternoon, Nick had walked her home from the train station in silence after the ride north from Wrigleyville, neither willing to be the first to speak, to break the quiet between them that felt somehow safer than words. After she’d taken a hot shower and put her wet clothes in the laundry, Ryan spent a few hours circulating her house like some sort of distressed ghost, until Mom finally pointed to a chair.
“Sit,” she said. “Talk.”
This struck Ryan as a good idea, though she realized it wasn’t Mom who she needed to talk to, but Nick. She backpedaled out of the family room—away from the troubling normalcy of the scene before her, where Mom and Kevin and Emily sat around the television unaware that anything had changed today—and left for Nick’s
house.
His mother answered the door, and though Ryan attempted a greeting, her tongue was thick in her mouth. “He’s upstairs, honey,” Mrs. Crowley said, and Ryan thanked her, then hurried up and knocked on the door to his bedroom.
“I have a few more questions,” she told him when he appeared in the doorway.
He stepped back to let her in. “I sort of thought you might.”
They spent the evening sitting on the floor of his room. There were no more jokes, no more long pauses. He answered her questions dutifully, as distantly as if he were talking about someone else.
“What are the chances it will come back?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “It either will or it won’t.”
“But if it does?”
“If it does, it would depend on how bad it is,” he said evenly, his words measured in the quiet room. “And whether it’s self-contained or not.”
“What happens if it is?”
“Same thing as before, probably.”
“Surgery?”
“And chemo.”
“But if it’s worse?”
“It could spread to the rest of the bone or my lungs,” he said, and this was the first time Ryan thought she could detect a hint of alarm in his eyes. Or, at the very least, the first time he’d failed to hide it.
“But this is all just a big maybe,” she said. “Right?”
He nodded. “Hopefully the worst of it’s behind me.”
Ryan pulled her legs beneath her and watched him, unsure what more to ask, afraid to unsettle the frail architecture of trust between them.
“Would it be weird if I asked you not to mention this to anyone?” Nick asked.
“Not at all,” she said, smiling dolefully. “It’s not exactly like I have a lot of people to tell anyhow.”
“It’s just been nice,” he said. “Not having anyone here know.”
As they talked, the square of sky in Nick’s bedroom window fell dark, and Ryan noticed this with surprise. It could have been seven o’clock as easily as ten; she felt somewhere beyond time right now, firmly outside the mundane constraints of dinner hour and curfew.