One True Outcome, page 17
“You weren’t going to say anything?”
“Most of the talk was about throwing Miller in the Atlantic. I think they just hate each other, and we’re getting caught in the crossfire. But it could have gone worse.”
And Jamie’s therapist—and his dad—are always on him about recognizing when things go better than they could have. “I guess that’s the best possible outcome.”
“He also thinks you’re gonna be one of those guys he can say he played with when you’re a superstar.”
“He did not say superstar.” Though Jamie knows he’s turning a deep, pleased pink at that.
“I keep telling you, you’ve got all the tools. I’m just the guy who finally got you to stop doing that leg kick during at-bats.”
Jamie looks around at their condo, with its walls full of dazzling art. With more and more of his stuff that he brings over each day, the slow twining of their lives together. “You’ve done slightly more than that.”
Mack kisses the top of his head then holds up his phone. “Can I post this or what?”
“Sure.”
And Mack apparently has every kind of notification turned on because his phone starts vibrating immediately. Jamie takes it from him, setting it down on the coffee table, then winds his arms around Mack’s neck. They stand like that for a while, foreheads together, breathing each other’s air, while the room fills with the world’s buzzing approval.
Games Seven and Six
Jamie floats through the next two games. Having been eliminated from contention, the team stops trying to win, which has the strange effect of making them play better baseball. Management also slashes ticket prices from low to almost free. Buses of school kids and community groups roll in. For once, Swordfish Park doesn’t feel so rattlingly empty. So they play for nothing more than the joy of a delighted audience and the feel of their spikes in the dirt as they sail down the basepaths.
Game Five
Mack’s shoulder gets progressively worse. Even he’s stopped denying it. Their teammates notice, and elbow each other, and whisper things like, He looking a little stiff to you?
Higgins notices too, hauling Mack into his bookshelved office before game five. The ensuing argument is loud.
Mack emerges in a rainstorm of a temper. He throws things around his stall for a minute. And it’s hard not to notice his size normally but he looks massive as a thunderhead as he hails stuff onto the clubhouse floor.
Jamie should intercede. But what he’d say at home—that Mack’s in pain, that Mack should rest, that it’s only a handful more games—would sound wrong here. So he doesn’t plead, and he doesn’t cajole. He just goes up to Mack and places a hand carefully on the wing of his shoulder blade, the way he might a pitcher having a midgame outburst. He expects to be shaken off. Maybe yelled—not at, exactly, but in the vicinity of.
Mack goes very very still.
The clubhouse around them is quiet. A few other players—Miller among them—are hanging out at the other end of it, not bothering to pretend that they’re doing anything but gawking. Their stares creep up the back of Jamie’s neck.
Jamie doesn’t move his hand and doesn’t tighten his grip. He has a full vocabulary of relaxation techniques, a bunch of soothing self-speak, none of which he uses. “Sit down,” he says, finally.
Mack blinks at him a few times in rapid succession.
Jamie doesn’t ask again, hoping his long silence is authoritative, not awkward. Mack’s chair has migrated a few feet from his stall. Jamie sticks a foot out, encouraging it over by its wheels.
Mack looks at it like he hasn’t spent most of the season lounging in it, playing cards, talking about hitting approaches, icing his inflamed shoulder. Looks at it but doesn’t sit, still too spun up with temper.
Jamie peels his hand off his back and places two fingers on the swell of Mack’s shoulder, fingers braced at his clavicle, whisper-light, then presses down.
Mack sits.
Jamie expects a felled huff, a deflation where he kicks at the flooring. Instead he gets Mack’s stare up at him, eyes shining, perhaps from pain in his shoulder. He’s lost some of his vibrating intensity. His shoulders curl inward. Mack talks about himself as impossibly old by baseball standards, but he looks young in that moment. Like he’s realizing the game has one more way to disappoint him.
Jamie walks away from him, listening for objection. For amplification. For a teammate to catcall some barb. He looks over at the group of them. “I’m going to get one of the trainers,” he says, not bothering to lower his voice against eavesdroppers.
The clubhouse has a particular kind of stretched silence, like a piece of paper right before it tears. Jamie quickens his pace to the short hallway where the training rooms are. He finds one of the physical therapists, who hefts an ice pack the size of a pillowcase out of the freezer. “Tell Mackenzie it’s easier to do this here.”
When Jamie returns to the changing area, Mack’s out of his chair, picking up the things he discarded onto the floor. No one is giving him shit for it. There’s the feeling of having walked in five seconds after an argument; disagreement hangs like cordite in the air.
Mack reaches for something—a discarded set of socks. He pauses like the effort of getting up is unbearable.
“Here”—Jamie ducks down, retrieving a sock—“I got this.”
Mack rolls up slowly, testingly. He rotates his arm in his shoulder socket and grimaces.
“You’re sitting tonight,” Jamie says. Not a question.
Mack doesn’t nod so much as lower his chin.
“Go ice it. Maybe you just tweaked something.” Said loudly, as if he can convince Higgins through the closed door of his office. Jamie braces himself for an argument, but Mack goes, walking carefully, the crossbeam of his shoulders held stiff.
He didn’t finish picking up his stuff, so Jamie occupies himself with setting things to rights. He pairs Mack’s cleats, folds his socks the way Mack’s laundry service does, reunites batting gloves with their partners. Behind him, there’s the murmur and rustle of other players going about their business.
He’s almost finished when Miller comes over. Jamie’s shoulders tense. He digs his nails into the base of his palm, bracing for whatever Miller’s about to say.
“Is he, uh, all right?” Miller asks. He doesn’t specify who.
Jamie swallows the urge to bite out a Mack’s fine or more simply tell Miller to fuck all the way off. “End of the season. You know how it is.”
Miller grinds his toe into the clubhouse floor. “I grew up watching him. Shame to go out like that.”
And Jamie searches that for a barb, for sarcasm, for anything but what it is. “Yeah, it sucks.”
“I kinda got the sense you think I’m an asshole.”
Jamie almost steps back at that but doesn’t want to cede territory, even if it’s a few inches of clubhouse floor. “Mostly it’s ‘cause you act like one.”
Whatever reaction he was expecting from Miller, laughter certainly isn’t it. “Wow, DeLuca, you got a pair. I would’ve quit saying stuff if I knew it bothered you that much.”
Jamie rolls his eyes. “You said it to be an asshole. Either stop acting like one or stop crying about it.”
And Miller looks at him, in faint surprise, and mumbles something approximating a “sorry” before slinking away.
It doesn’t take much longer to get Mack’s stuff squared away, leaving Jamie with nothing to do but get his work in. He should go hit off a tee and take batting practice and game plan and throw and read through scouting reports. He should do all those things, if only for the kind of showy effort players call eyewash.
Instead he grabs his tablet and heads to the training rooms.
Mack’s lying face down on a trainer’s table, an ice pack sheeted across his back. His eyes are closed. He must hear Jamie come in. “They gave me something.” He says it heavily, drifting, the kind of slurred speech that precludes walking much less driving himself home. “Don’t know if I’ll be good company.”
Jamie drags in a chair that migrated into the hallway and sits, studying his scouting reports, listening to Mack’s even, un-pained breaths.
After a while, a trainer ducks in. “Just checking on him.” He nods toward where Mack is sleeping. “Must be bad if he’s admitting it. Let me know if he needs anything.”
Mack stirs when Jamie gets up to leave an hour later. Stretches, groggily, shifting the heavy drape of the ice pack.
“Here, let me get that.” Jamie keeps his voice low, peeling the ice pack up and putting it on the counter. “You feeling better?”
Mack gives a weary-looking nod. “Did the other guys say anything?”
Because of course they’re probably the subject of clubhouse gossip since anything unusual is worth endless, breathless discussion. A meltdown at the end of a season is about as interesting as things can get. “I’ve mostly been in here.”
Mack’s lips curve up in a smile. The door is shut, the shades drawn down over the window into the hallway.
Jamie sets his hand at the edge of the table. An admission, if anyone walks in, especially when Mack brushes the callused surface of his palm against Jamie’s knuckles.
“I probably couldn’t have played.” Mack’s voice is thick.
“No, probably not.”
“I wanted to, so I could, I don’t know, show people I was going out on my terms. Hear them yell my name again. Something.”
“Maybe you’ll feel better tomorrow.”
Mack smiles at that. “Don’t think it’s gonna work out that way. Sometimes things don’t, I guess. I was probably gonna stay in here for the game. Not sure I have it in me to go out there.” His eyes are wet. He scrubs a palm over one, then accepts a Kleenex Jamie plucks from a box and dabs his face. “Don’t you have to…” He nods to the door, to the world outside the room.
“Yeah, I should go.” Though Jamie’s rooted to the floor, unable to assemble the right words. He settles for gripping Mack’s fingers, for pressing a kiss to his mouth. A kiss that deepens with the heavy fold of Mack’s arms around him.
Eventually Mack pulls away. “It’s better.”
“Your shoulder?”
“Knowing that it’s over. I’ve been putting it off so long that I was terrified of finding myself here. But I guess I’ll live.”
“You guess?” Jamie teases.
“Go easy on me, DeLuca. They gave me enough of whatever that was to knock out a horse.” He taps Jamie on the ass, an attaboy swat that doubles as a dismissal.
“You sure you want me to go?”
Mack nods. “One of us should go play ball. I’ll be all right. Really.”
The Swordfish list Mack as day-to-day; there’s a ripple of discussion when he’s not in the dugout for the game, his absence as telling as if he called a press conference. Most guys avoid Jamie, but Womack claps him on the shoulder and gives him bumper-sticker encouragement that would be condescending if he didn’t look slightly shaken.
Somehow, they play. Jamie puts down signs and their pitchers throw. Everything is going fine until Miller’s called in to pitch the eighth.
Jamie puts down two fingers, the sign for a sinker. Miller shakes his head. The same thing happens again: sign, headshake. The ump behind Jamie makes a get on with it noise. Jamie calls time, walking—not bothering to jog—out to the mound.
“Sinker,” Jamie says by way of greeting.
“Look, I know I’m on your shit list or whatever, but this dude kills sinkers. Mostly mine.”
And Jamie mentally flicks back to the prep materials he reviewed before the game. “Didn’t see that on the scouting reports.”
Miller shrugs. “Some stuff’s not on there. Just trust me, okay? I know you like to steamroll guys, but I know what I’m talking about.”
Around them, the umpires are getting restless, the Swordfish fielders edging in like they might join the meeting. “Fine,” Jamie says. “What do you want to throw instead?”
Jamie jogs back to home plate, squatting and putting down a confirmatory sign for a slider. Miller tosses one. The hitter hits a soft liner to first for an easy out.
And when the next batter’s up, Jamie puts down a sign for a sinker. Miller rolls his neck, then does as he’s told.
At the inning break, Anderson comes over to Jamie in the dugout. They spend some time talking about ballplayers’ favorite subject—food—before Anderson asks, “You holding up?” Like it’s Jamie who’s hurt.
“I’m good.” Though the park feels lifeless, the crowd in the stands half-distracted. Even with the roof closed, there’s the heavy press of September humidity. He tries to picture his own tenure ending this way: without so much as a polite ovation. “Just got some stuff on my mind.”
Anderson nods. “You know, back in the day, I used to collect comic books. Like, in plastic sleeves. I was living in the basement apartment. One day when I was at the ballpark, a pipe burst. Flooded the whole place. There went my comic books in their little plastic sleeves.”
And Jamie can guess where this story is going. “You didn’t try to salvage them?”
“I spent about a week trying to blow dry them, but that just made it worse. I was pissed as hell for a long time about that—at my shitty landlord and whoever installed the pipes and myself for not keeping them somewhere other than the floor. Took a long time to realize that just ‘cause that happened, I didn’t need to pin it on anyone.”
“This is a little different.”
Anderson tips his head from side to side, not quite a disagreement. “Eventually, I got over it. Felt grateful I wouldn’t have to haul ‘em around when I moved. But that ‘eventually’ took a while.”
“Yeah, I hear you.” Jamie considers the conversation out on the mound. “Do guys on the pitching staff think I’m steamrolling them?”
Anderson gives him one of those paternal looks. “Maybe a little.”
“Shit, why didn’t anyone say anything?”
Another look. “We kind of did.”
“Well, fuck.”
Anderson laughs.
“I guess that’s something to work on for next year.”
“You know, kid”—he ruffles Jamie’s hair and does it more when Jamie objects—“you’re gonna be fine.”
20
Game Four
Higgins doesn’t let Mack play the next game, but he takes his word that he’s fine to at least hang around the dugout. Mack sprawls on the bench, a tablet full of scouting reports in one hand and a mouth full of advice that some guys bristle at and some guys take. After, when he’s collapsing into the passenger seat of his truck, he says, “That wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be.”
Jamie turns the engine on and pulls out of their parking space. Even this late in the season, with the team out of playoff contention, fans wait by the entrance to the players’ lot. He slows the truck as they approach the gate, tightening his hands on the grip of the steering wheel. “I can just drive past ‘em if you want.”
Mack looks about as tense as Jamie feels. “We can sign a couple things.”
Sure enough, as soon as the truck’s through the arm gate, the knot of people tightens around them—a few families with kids, as well as the usual autograph hunters and ballhawks hoping to add a player’s signature to a league-authenticated ball to boost its price.
Mack fishes around the glove compartment for Sharpies, one of which he hands to Jamie, then rolls down the window.
A flurry of noise greets them: Childish excitement, autograph requests. One very loud, “Oh, it’s just Mackenzie.”
Mack doesn’t even flinch. That might be the worst part of it. There’s a cute little kid on Jamie’s side of the truck. He leans as much as possible while her parents try to compose a picture that will likely be titled, Awkward Ballplayer and Toddler.
Mack isn’t so lucky.
An autograph hunter, a middle-aged man in a faded ball cap, shoves a set of index cards through the window. Mack signs them, one after another, shuffling through carefully like Jamie would flashcards. Mack hands them back to the guy. “Thanks for being a fan.”
The guy doesn’t so much as say thank you in return.
The family with the toddler shakes Jamie’s hand, the toddler offering a miniature fist bump, which Jamie returns. Next to him, Mack’s still signing away.
Mack waves a hand distractedly as he accepts a game-used ball bearing a shiny authentication sticker. “Just a couple more things.”
Jamie waits, hands back on the wheel, feeling like a chauffeur. Annoyance creeps up: At the ballhawks for being ballhawks. At Mack for not telling them to go away. At himself for just not saying, “Gotta go, guys,” and rolling up the window.
The group finally tires itself out. Mack raises the tinted window, shading them from the Miami night. No other trucks appear behind them; the cluster of fans disperses, leaving them sitting there.
“You could have told them to fuck off,” Jamie says. “All that stuff’s just gonna go on eBay.”
“I know.”
“They weren’t fans. Just opportunists.”
“Soon I won’t even have that.” Mack lifts and lowers his good shoulder. “Really, it’s fine. Maybe someone will get a souvenir they want.”
“If you’re sure.”
“You know that bakery we always go to?”
Jamie nods. It’s a block from their condo, and Mack has apparently dedicated himself to trying one of everything on the menu, bringing back mystery bags that he leaves next to the moka pot by the time Jamie crawls out of bed.
“The first time I was in there, the lady behind the counter asked for my name for the order.”
“Wow, getting treated like a commoner, Mackenzie?”
Mack rolls his eyes, though it’s mostly fond. “That’s kinda my point. Sometimes in Baltimore I just wanted everyone to leave me the hell alone. Felt like I couldn’t pump gas without getting an opinion. I guess I got what I wanted.”
“If it helps, she doesn’t know who I am either.”
