Ready.
The Heat shoots me a nasty grin. It says, I've got a little something I've been saving for you, asshat.
And he does. The first pitch isn't just fast—it's invisible. Even my eyes, trained to watch for the fastball, can't track it. There's just a white blur, a blink, and then the horrible sound of the ball slapping the catcher's glove leather. The catcher mutters, "Ow! Damn!" under his breath. I don't think anyone here has a radar gun, but I know that ball had to be traveling over a hundred miles an hour. It's not impossible—a bunch of guys have thrown heat over a hundred miles an hour: Ryan, Wohlers, Benitez, Jenks, Johnson...
The Heat goes into his wind-up. Breaking ball this time, I'm sure.
I'm right. He cuts the corner of the plate. I resist the urge to swing, reminding myself that Ted Williams was a great hitter and a great not-hitter.
The ump calls it a ball. I'm one and one.
The Heat brings his fastball again. Not sure what fraction of the speed of light this one is, but it's definitely slower than the first—not that that's saying much. But I think he did his shoulder in with that first one. That's why he went to the breaking ball for the second pitch.
I let this one go by. It looks a little outside to me, and I'm right—the ump calls it ball two.
The Heat winds up and hurls a burner at me. This time I know he's slowing down. I can see this one. I swing at it and foul it off for strike two. On the mound, the Heat looks a little worried for the first time.
Yeah, that's right. You better panic, you little piss-ant. Thought you could psych me out with that first pitch, huh? Get me freaked out and scared? Doesn't work, pal. I've been threatened by cops and judges. I've had an insane husband hold me down and beat the shit out of me. I'm not scared of some skinny kid from Texas, even if his arm does come straight from God himself.
I foul off the next pitch, too. Staying alive. I've got his range now. It's only a matter of time. And he knows it. He shakes off the first two pitches his catcher suggests before nodding to the third one.
Curve ball. A beautiful thing, snapping left at the last possible instant. I should let it go. I should let it be ball three, but I can't resist. I poke it over the third baseman's head and into foul territory. The count's still two and two.
On first base, Pat's dancing about six or seven feet away from the bag, ready to dart either way depending on what I do. How long can I string along the Heat until he delivers the pitch I want, the pitch I need? The pitch I can take over the fences, like Zik did, the pitch that wins the game.
Another pitch. This makes seven, the most pitches he's thrown to any single hitter today. There's anger and frustration in it, and his shoulder's gonna regret it later, but it's a hot, fast one. I have no choice—I swing and get a piece of it, sending the ball spinning down the first base line on the foul side.
The Heat stomps his foot like a little kid who's been told to go to bed.
Pat cups his hands over his mouth: "That's it, Josh, baby! You got him! You got him! Send me home!"
Josh, baby? Pat barely even talks to me. Who the hell is he to call me "Josh, baby"?
Another pitch, and this one's almost too easy. It's a strike, but nothing I can take to the cleaners. Still, I have to swing at it, so I manage to foul it off behind the plate. Still alive.
"Bring me home, Josh!"
The crowd starts chanting "Bring him home! Bring him home!" Over on the Brookdale bench, the team's stomping in rhythm on the ground. Zik's on his feet, his eyes alight with joy. He's clapping his hands in time to everyone else, chanting along with them.
Everyone's
Looking
At
Me
New pitch. I foul it into the stands near third base, where a mad scramble ensues to grab it as it rolls around on the bleachers. He's slowing down, but he's not throwing anything I can shoot into a hole or over the wall. I have to be patient. Have to remember Ted Williams. You don't swing at any pitch. You swing at the ones you can hit.
Coach is practically peeing in his pants. He's hopping up and down, ecstatic. Anyone who knows anything about baseball knows at this point that I've got the Heat's number. That it's just a matter of time. Now it's me and the Heat. One of us will blink. One of us will screw up, because we're both human (yes, even the Heat), and when that happens, the other one will be forgotten. It's just a matter of odds as to which one of us breaks first. It's a matter of math.
I take a quick time-out to step out of the batter's box and catch my breath. Coach gestures frantically for me to stop stalling and get back in the box.
Pick it up, Mendel.
And I realize: it wasn't just desperation and anxiety in Coach's eyes and sweat—it was greed and lust, too. His whole life changes when I hit this ball, when we tie it up. The scout came to see the Heat blow us away and instead—even if we lose in extra innings—he sees a team that made the Heat work harder than he should have. A team run by Coach Kaltenbach. A team he'll watch from now on, including visits and dinners for Coach and press attention and—
I foul away another pitch.
—and I'm starting to wonder why the hell am I going to give him everything he wants? This guy has tormented me for my entire high school ball career. Why am I going to make his life easy? Do I really think he's gonna say anything good about me to Graves? There's nothing I can do about it, after all. Like Kaltenbach's really going to forget that I punched him, that I humiliated him in front of the entire team. Yeah, right.
Another pitch. Another foul ball. Coach is going insane. The entire bench is up and cheering for me, something they've never done at any other moment in my life. Zik is screaming himself hoarse, veins standing out in his neck. The whole field is alive, a single living, sonic thing that wraps around me.
At first base, Pat dances back and forth, ready to dash for second.
The Heat shakes off the catcher, then nods. I dig in. Turn my bat a quarter-turn in my grip.
The wind-up. Watching that left leg. It's straight as a base line. No breaking ball this time.
It's a perfect strike, or it will be, when it reaches the plate. A laser doesn't move in a line this straight.
It's going to cross right over the center of plate and right at my letters. Irresistible. Impossible not to swing at it.
And it's slow. Relatively speaking, of course. Slower than his other fastballs.
You have two-tenths of a second to react. Two-tenths of a second for the quad-A cocktail.
I do what I've trained my whole life to do. I watch the ball. I keep my eye on the ball. I never stop watching.
I watch it as it sails past me and lands in the catcher's mitt, a perfect and glorious strike three.
Chapter 22
Aftermath (The Worst Day)
Well.
OK.
It didn't feel as good or as liberating as I thought it would.
For the first time in my life, I let the ball go by.
Wow. So this is what that feels like.
It's weird. I let down the team, but you know what? There are a million other times when I didn't let down the team, when I was right there for the team, when I saved the team's ass. We let each other down every day of our lives—all of us. Whether it's Dad freezing for those crucial seconds before jumping in to stop George Sherman from kicking the shit out of me, or whether it's me ignoring Rachel for five years because I let my own guilt overwhelm my common sense and judgment.
At least, that's what I tell myself in the moment it takes for the ump to call strike three. I don't feel much better about it, though.
The crowd, both benches, the players on the field—everyone catches their breath at the same moment. Then the Heat pumps his fist in the air as if he's just won the World Series, never mind that he's got two more outs to score before he can go home a winner.
The Brookdale crowd groans as one. On the Canterstown side, a cheer goes up.
I shrug and sling my bat over my shoulder as I amble back to the bench. Chri
s Weintraub walks past me, glaring at me as if I just goosed him.
"What was that, Mendel? What the fuck was that?" Coach hisses. He grabs me and pulls me to him as I near the bench. He doesn't care who can hear him—he just starts bawling me out in front of the team. And most of 'em look like they'd like to join him. "What the fuck were you thinking?"
I grab Kaltenbach by his shirt and pull him toward me.
"Fuck you, Coach," I whisper, just loud enough for him to hear. "You don't own me. You don't control me. I'm in charge, got it? Got it?"
I push him away from me and, trembling, make my way to the Gatorade. At the plate, Chris pops up to the second baseman. Two outs.
No one speaks. No one looks at me as I pour some Gatorade and chug it down. My heart's pounding and my stomach's a wreck.
Zik pushes past a couple of guys to catch up to me. "What the hell did you do, J? You could have hit that one!"
I can't look at him. I just can't.
"Tell me you couldn't." He's pleading. He grabs my sleeve and tugs. "Come on, man. Tell me you couldn't have hit it. Tell me you didn't just—"
A cry goes up from the crowd at the same time as a cheer: Ash Heggelman just line-drived to first. The game's over.
"Oh, Christ," Zik says, looking over at the field as the Sledgehammers jump all over each other in celebration. "Christ, man! This was it!"
I can't bear to tell Zik that I could have hit the ball. I drink my Gatorade.
"You ruined it!" He's near tears. I can't believe he cares this much about the stupid game. He hit a home run, for Christ's sake! He ought to be happy about that.
"You ruined it all!" And he shoves me once, then spins and runs away from me, from everyone.
The rest of the team files past me without looking, heading for the locker room. I realize that this is the end of my high school career. My final career numbers are a .502 batting average, an on-base percentage of .575, a slugging average of .876, and a .373 IPA. Can't be too upset with those numbers. And if Stanford's Graves is too afraid of me because of what Coach tells him or doesn't want me because I don't play defense ... Well, fine.
But I'll always keep a mental asterisk next to those numbers because I know that, yeah, I could have hit that ball. I could have knocked it out of the park.
The locker room is ... uncomfortable, to say the least. The place falls silent as I walk in, the last player to do so. Guys in towels, guys in the shower, guys getting dressed—they all stop whatever they're doing, whatever they're saying, and stare at me.
They don't know for sure. They can't know for sure. But they're pretty damn sure that I could have hit that pitch.
I don't say anything. I don't change or shower. I just grab my stuff from my locker and head back outside, all of those eyes pushing and pressing at my back as I go.
Rachel's waiting outside. She knows, better than anyone, maybe even better than Zik, that I could have hit that ball. And she can't understand why I didn't.
The hell of it is, I'm not sure I can explain it to her.
She hugs herself as if cold. "Josh."
"Yeah?"
She exhales, blowing her bangs around. "Nothing."
"Go ahead, Rache. Ask. Ask me." And I want her to. I'm angry. Not at her, but she's the only one around, the only one who'll talk to me, so there you go—she gets to be the recipient.
But she shakes her head. "Michelle's going to drive Zik to school for the next week or so."
A "week or so" takes us right up to graduation. "So that's it, then. End of the Four Musketeers? Again. I'm sure you'll be very happy with Zik and Michelle." I push past her and head for my car.
"Hey! Hey, asshole!" she yells, chasing after me. She's fast and unencumbered—it's no great feat for her to catch me. I don't stop walking.
She falls in beside me. "Stop being a dick, Josh. This isn't Michelle and Zik and me against you."
"Oh?"
"Zik's not going to Stanford," Rachel says. She takes my hands and gently turns me from the car, forcing me to look into her eyes. "No matter what school he goes to, it's going to be half an hour from here. He won't even live on campus—he'll have to commute. But if he could get into the league..."
I pull my hands back. "It's not my fault, Rache. I can't be responsible for everyone."
"No one's asking you to be."
"But everyone wants to know why I didn't hit that ball, don't they?"
She says nothing.
"Everyone wants to know. Everyone wants to know why Josh didn't take the South Brook Bobcats up on his shoulders one more time and run past the finish line, don't they? Well, tough shit. I'm through explaining myself."
She says something so quietly that I don't quite catch it. "What?" She shakes her head. "Come on, Rache. Tell me. What did you say?"
She shakes her hair out of her face and looks me dead in the eye. "I said that you're through explaining yourself because you've never been able to explain yourself in the first place."
Now I'm the one who says nothing. Because I'm afraid of what I might say.
"You'd rather wallow in your own guilt than figure out why you feel guilty, Josh. You'd rather assume everyone hates you or fears you than come right out and ask them and find out for sure. You can't handle confrontation. At all. You can't even—" She breaks off and chokes, looks away. She hugs herself and can't look up at me. "You can't even..." she whispers, "...can't even touch me without hating yourself. And me."
A flicker hits me, strong and powerful: I'm in Eve's apartment, staring at her wedding photo.
And then I'm back. I don't know which is worse—Rachel being wrong or Rachel being right.
I've found my keys. "Goodbye, Rachel."
I leave her there in the parking lot, her arms wrapped around herself, staring down at the pavement.
I park in the driveway and sit in the car for a minute or so, taking deep breaths and telling myself that I wasn't out of line with Rachel, that I didn't do anything wrong. I'm not sure I believe it, but I say it to myself enough that it starts to sound OK.
The house is quiet. I close the door slowly and silently, looking forward to ... I don't know. Lying in a dark, quiet room. By myself.
Mom and Dad don't even ask how the game went. Maybe they've forgotten about it. I don't know. Just to make the day absolutely perfect, they sit me down and—
We wanted to wait until you went off to college, but we felt that we had to...
—tell me that they're getting divorced.
I sort of sit there in shock. I don't know why—the writing's been on the wall for a million years. It shouldn't be that big a——and you should know that I've been—
And it gets better.
Mom's moving out next week.
Because.
Jesus.
Because she's been..."seeing someone."
"Seeing someone." That is, having an affair.
I should have guessed. I should have known. All those "trips to the mall." With "the girls." God, lies like Eve and I used to tell. I should have known.
"I can't believe you two."
"Josh," Mom says, "I know you're upset, but—"
"Shut your fucking mouth," I say to my mother, calmly, like I say it all the time, and I can't believe I've said it, but I have, and I can't believe that she actually does, but she does, and she and Dad just sit there, shocked and silent and watching me like I could explode like a suicide bomber, and you know what? I probably could. I probably could.
"I thought you..." I stop. The calm has all run out of me—it's all gone now, and all that's left is a cold flame of rage. "I thought you two loved each other! What the hell are you doing?"
"Sometimes—"
"Shut up, Dad! And you!" I turn to Mom, who's gone pale and frozen. "I told you I loved her!" I scream it and lean in and Mom jumps back, terrified, and I don't blame her. "I told you I loved her and you said that I didn't know what love was!" I'm crying now, but I don't care. "You guys made me tell the police everything. You ru
ined everything and what the hell do you know about love?"
Mom finds her voice. "Josh, please, honey—"
"Don't call me 'honey'! She called me 'honey'!"
And my vocabulary, my tongue, they just get overwhelmed and they can't keep up with my heart and my thoughts and my rage and I'm just blubbering, collapsing to the floor.
Chapter 23
The Abyss
I'm ruined. It's in my blood—I'm broken. I'm fragmented. The flickers are proof of it. Who else goes through that? Zik can't escape his DNA ... and neither can I. I'm the child of a cheater and a loser. What am I supposed to expect from myself?
It's late. I'm lying in bed, the phone unplugged, the door shut. I don't want to talk to anyone. I don't want to hear from anyone. What I really want, deep down, is to open my door and see nothing but a black void there, a deathless, endless abyss. And I'll know then that the world has gone away and that I'll never have to worry about it or puzzle over it or deal with it again.
Lying here, I've figured out what the flickers are. They're my punishment. It's no coincidence that they started that day that I stood in Eve's bedroom, taking my first steps toward her, toward my sin, my downfall. The flickers are my past, constantly reignited, hammering at me from below and beneath and behind.
I went to Eve. After the Happy Trio incident, she wanted to end it, but I begged her to take me back; I allowed it all to happen. I encouraged it all to happen. And I am damned for that. Eternally shattered, trapped in a world that is neither earth nor afterlife. I'm surrounded and penetrated by the ghosts of my own culpability.
I've kept a few secrets from Dr. Kennedy. Just a few. I've never told him about the flickers, for example. I've never told anyone about the flickers. I don't want to be hooked up to machines and pumped full of drugs while a million doctors try to figure out what the hell is wrong with me. I've just learned how to live with them.
It's late—almost ten o'clock. I sit up in bed, restless. The house is silent. I flirt with the fantasy that the abyss is right outside my door, but I know that it's not true. I'm not that lucky.