The Only Game Page 7

  He wanted this to be over.

  More than that, he wanted to take back what he’d just said. But he couldn’t.

  He saw Teddy staring at him, eyes wide, like he was afraid to say anything. Or even move.

  When he did speak, he said to Jack in a quiet voice, “Dude, why don’t you try to drink some Gatorade?”

  Jack did that now, coughing a little as he tried to drink too much, still not able to get enough air. Still feeling like he might cry if he wasn’t careful.

  “Sorry,” he said finally.

  “No need to apologize.”

  They sat there in silence until Teddy said, “What just happened?”

  “Got a little carried away, is all,” Jack said.

  Teddy said, “What did you mean just now? About your brother needing to be saved?”

  “I didn’t mean anything.”

  “I’m not slow about everything, Jack,” Teddy said. “Didn’t you just say we were friends?”

  Jack nodded.

  “Well, now let me help you,” Teddy said. “Be your friend. What are you telling me about your brother?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Well, guess what, you just did,” Teddy said. “I’m just thinking you didn’t finish what you need to say.”

  Jack didn’t say anything. He just picked up the ball lying next to him in the grass, stood up, and walked a few feet away from Teddy, back out to the mound. Then he faced home plate and threw the ball as hard as he could and maybe as hard as he’d ever thrown a ball. Like he wanted to burn a hole in the screen.

  Like he was letting more than the ball go.

  He came back and sat down next to Teddy. He wasn’t sure why, but he trusted him. It was time to tell somebody his secret.

  “I could have saved him,” Jack said. “My brother.”

  He paused before adding, “It was my fault that he died.”

  THIRTEEN

  They had basically moved the baseball field at Walton Middle the year before so they could build new tennis courts, but the one thing they’d managed to keep was an old-fashioned dugout on the third-base side of the field.

  Jack pointed to it now and said, “Can we go sit over there?”

  It wasn’t like he wanted to walk down the old cement steps and hide in the dugout. It was too late to hide, too much already out in the open now. Or about to be.

  Somehow it just seemed more private over there.

  “Whatever you want,” Teddy said.

  The guy who always had something to say looked like he was afraid to say anything right now.

  They left their baseball stuff in the grass and walked across the infield, Teddy carrying both bottles of Gatorade. When they got into the shade of the dugout, they sat at the far end.

  It was Jack who spoke first.

  “I’m trusting you,” he said.

  “I know.”

  “I haven’t told this to anybody,” Jack said. “I’m not even sure why I’m doing it now.”

  Teddy said, “It just sounded to me like one of those things you couldn’t hold in anymore.” He gave Jack a quick, nervous smile and said, “But what do I know? I’m pretty much an idiot.”

  “No, you’re not,” Jack said. “Or I wouldn’t still be here.”

  He stopped now and looked down at his baseball shoes.

  Then Teddy was the one taking a big deep breath, saying, “You said you could have saved your brother. But that’s crazy, right? Everybody knows it was an accident.”

  “It’s like they say. Brad was the accident, just waiting to happen.”

  He started to feel the tears coming again but squeezed his eyes shut, telling himself that he wasn’t going to let it happen, that he’d come as close as he was going to come. Truth was, he’d thought before today that he was cried out about his big brother.

  “I didn’t know him,” Teddy said. “But everybody in town knew what a wild man he was.”

  “Nobody knew better than me,” Jack said. “But he never listened to me about stuff, when it wasn’t stuff about baseball.”

  “Hey, you were his little brother.”

  “But that’s not really what I was talking about.”

  “I don’t get what you meant when you said he needed help,” Teddy said, “or saving.”

  “From himself,” Jack said. “Every time he’d get away with something wild, he’d already be thinking about the next thing.”

  Teddy said, “I remember seeing him one time, riding his skateboard, holding on to a school bus. I mean, how nuts is that? Waving at everybody as he went by. He had this look on his face like what he was doing was the greatest thing in the world.”

  “He finally did it one too many times, and the police ended up bringing him home,” Jack said. “He told my mom and dad he’d learned his lesson, until the next time he hauled off and did it. When he let go of the bus, he went flying into a parked car and cut his forehead and ended up needing six stitches. But he told Mom and Dad it had happened at the skateboard park. Made me swear not to tell the truth.”

  “And you didn’t.”

  “I thought I was being the brother he wanted me to be,” Jack said. “He used to tell me all the time he knew his secrets were safe with me, that he trusted me more than anybody.”

  Teddy handed him the Gatorade bottle, and he drank what was left in there. When he finished, he patted his back pocket for his phone before he realized he’d left it on the other side of the field. He wasn’t sure what time it was, but he didn’t think he and Teddy had been talking long enough that he was going to be late meeting Cassie.

  Teddy shrugged. “I only want to know if you want to tell me.”

  “Trying to,” Jack said. He took a shaky, deep breath and told Teddy about the night Brad had come home and charged into Jack’s room, all excited. He’d closed the door behind him, keeping his voice down as he told Jack that his friend Nick, who was already sixteen, had let him drive his dad’s car on one of the country roads outside town.

  “I couldn’t believe what I was hearing,” Jack said. “Brad was still, like, three months away from turning sixteen himself. He didn’t even have a learner’s permit. He just laughed at me and said that the only way to learn was by doing.”

  About three nights before he died, Brad came back from dirt-biking and showed Jack this huge scrape on his chest. “He said that he’d been going too fast racing the other guys. He’d gotten thrown and said it was like he’d gone sliding headfirst into third base.”

  Teddy smiled a little at the phrase.

  “That time he didn’t even have to make up a lie,” Jack said. “He just made sure my parents didn’t see him without a T-shirt on for a few days. So he didn’t have to lie and I didn’t have to feel like I was telling one either.”

  “But it was like you said, he trusted you.”

  “He trusted me so much that I’m here and he’s gone,” Jack said. “Because I went along and never said anything.”

  Now the tears started to come, and he couldn’t stop them. He just tried to wipe them away with the back of his hand.

  “All I had to do that night was say something to my parents,” Jack said. “I knew where he was going. I knew what he was doing. I knew it was dangerous. He’d just fallen off that stupid bike three nights before.”

  “You can’t blame yourself for that.”

  “Yes, I can.”

  Teddy said, “But you said it yourself, he was always looking to take the next chance.”

  “But I could have stopped him this time.”

  “And you never said anything to your mom and dad?”

  Jack shook his head. “They would have told me what you just did, that I shouldn’t blame myself, that it wasn’t my fault that my brother got taken away from me. But they would have been wrong.”

  In a quiet voice Teddy said, “You’re wrong, Jack.”

  Jack shook his head and said, “And no way they would have understood why I had to find a way to pay for that.�
��

  A voice from behind them said, “That’s why you did it, isn’t it?”

  It was Cassie.

  Jack and Teddy both looked up and saw her standing above them at the corner of the dugout. She was staring at Jack.

  “That’s why you quit baseball.”

  Jack was full-on crying now. He just nodded.

  FOURTEEN

  The boys got the Little League fields at Highland Park on Saturday mornings, and the girls played their softball games in the afternoon.

  This was the second weekend of the season, and Cassie’s team was already 3–0. They were on the same schedule as the boys, one game under the lights during the week, another game on Saturdays, all the way until the play-offs at the end of the school year.

  Jack was still an assistant coach with the Orioles, and he was liking the job more and more. He actually felt as if he was helping some of the girls on the team get better. Mr. Bennett kept telling him that if he saw something one of the girls—including Cassie—was doing wrong, to show them how they could do it better, whatever it was, hitting or catching or throwing or running the bases.

  “I can see now why people always talked about you having a gift for baseball,” Mr. Bennett had said to Jack one night at practice. “Right now you’re doing a thing called paying it forward.”

  And Jack had kept working with Teddy the past couple of weeks, coaching him, too. He wondered if Teddy agreed because he was afraid to turn him down. He wondered if Teddy was worried about upsetting him. Whatever his reason, Teddy stopped complaining and threw himself into the practices.

  Jack and Teddy hadn’t talked about Brad since that day at the field. And Jack made Teddy and Cassie promise they wouldn’t tell anybody.

  Teddy agreed and didn’t bring it up at all. But of course it was different with Cassie. She was Cassie, and she was different from anybody else Jack knew. It was no shocker that she thought there were different rules for her.

  “Just because you and Teddy don’t talk about this doesn’t mean we’re not,” she said when they were walking to Highland Park one morning. “Guys are dumb that way. Totally. But girls talk about stuff.”

  “Okay,” Jack said. “But now that you know everything, I don’t know what else there is to say.”

  “Oh, there’s still a lot to say.”

  “I know you want me to tell my parents,” Jack said. “But that’s not happening, no matter how much pressure you put on me.”

  “Having an opinion is not pressure.”

  “With you it is.”

  Cassie said, “You do remember that I’m the one who told you not to play if you didn’t want to play, right? But that doesn’t mean I’m not allowed to think your reason for not playing is messed up.”

  “I get that, okay? I think even people in outer space get that by now.”

  “I just think they could talk some sense into you even if I can’t,” Cassie said.

  “My parents or people in outer space?”

  “Both!”

  “Just let me coach,” Jack said. “I’m having fun being a coach. Isn’t that enough for you?”

  “I just don’t think it’s enough for you,” Cassie said.

  Jack looked over and saw her smiling. Her Orioles cap was turned backward on her head, even though she never did that when she was on the field. She was old-school about baseball the way Jack was, another reason why he liked her as much as he did.

  “You want me to drop this now?” she said.

  “Whatever gave you that idea?”

  They walked the rest of the way to the field in silence, even though he knew she wanted to say more, because she always had more to say, about everything. And there were things he wanted to say to her sometimes—like now—about how he wondered all the time whether being around the game, even if it was a girls’ softball team, made him miss playing even more.

  Because no matter how much he liked helping these girls, and helping Teddy, Cassie was right. Coaching baseball didn’t come close to playing baseball. He saw this interview one time with John Elway, who he knew had been one of the great quarterbacks of all time with the Broncos, talking about what it was like to run the Broncos team now. Elway was the guy who’d signed Peyton Manning. He said how helpless he felt watching somebody else try to make the throws and plays he used to make to win the game.

  Maybe the thing that made Jack feel most helpless now was that the Rays, which he felt was his old team, had gotten off to such a lousy start without him. They’d lost two of their first three games.

  Gus would always come and watch his sister play. Today he was sitting on the Orioles’ bench, still in his Rays uniform, when Jack and Cassie arrived at the back field. The front of Gus’s uniform was full of dirt, and his head was down.

  Jack walked over to his best friend—his former best friend—and asked the question, already knowing what the answer was going to be.

  “How’d you guys do today?”

  “Lost,” Gus said. “To the White Sox. We were ahead, but then Andre came in to pitch the last two innings and walked the whole world. We went from winning 6–4 to losing 9–6.”

  “That stinks.”

  “Tell me,” Gus said. “We should be unbeaten, and we’re 1–3 instead.”

  “You guys will figure it out,” Jack said. “The team’s too good for you not to figure it out. I read that the Yankees—the real ones—started out 1–3 in 1998 and ended up winning a hundred fourteen games and then the World Series.”

  Gus said, “I’m not worried about that World Series, just the one in Williamsport.”

  He started to say something else but didn’t, just got up and walked out to where Angela Morales was warming up with Katie Cummings down the rightfield line. Jack watched him go and thought, At least we’re not fighting anymore.

  They were talking. He felt good about that, even though he felt horrible about the Rays’ record, knowing that Gus and everybody else on the team must still feel as if he were letting them all down.

  Cassie came and sat down where Gus had been. “How’s he doing?”

  “They lost again, that’s how he’s doing.”

  “Yeah, I heard,” she said. “Did he try to blame it on you?”

  “No, but he probably wanted to. He probably still wants to be yelling at me, but maybe he finally figured out it just ends up making both of us feel lousy.”

  She said, “You guys will be friends again.”

  Jack said, “Not if he feels like I’m the one who cost him a chance to make it to the Little League World Series.”

  “What about your chance?” Cassie said.

  “It means more to him.”

  “You keep telling yourself that,” she said, and then asked him to warm her up.

  Mr. Bennett coached third base for the Orioles, while Jack had become the regular first-base coach. Mr. Bennett had even given him his own orange Orioles cap, with the bird on the front.

  There wasn’t really a lot to do coaching first. You just reminded base runners to go halfway on a ball hit in the air to the outfield and told them to run hard with two outs as soon as the batter put the ball in play. Stuff like that. Cassie’s first time up she ripped a ball down the leftfield line. When she was halfway to first, Jack was already waving his arm, telling her to keep going to second. He could see she was going to have an easy double.

  A moment like that made him feel like he was part of the action, or as close to the action as he was going to get unless he caught a foul ball hit in his direction.

  The Orioles won, 7–1, the other team getting their only run long after Cassie had stopped pitching. She had gone the first three innings today, striking out six batters. Jack watched her after every one, saw how cool she was about it. He hoped he looked that cool when he was pitching—never showing up the batter, never pumping a fist, just waiting for the infielders to throw the ball around.

  Jack would never tell her this, just because her head was so big already he was afraid it might expl
ode if he paid her one more compliment about her baseball ability. But he loved watching her pitch.

  Truth was, he just loved watching her play.

  More than anybody, more than Gus or any guy he knew, Cassie reminded him how happy playing ball could make you feel, especially if you could play the way she could.

  She went to shortstop after finishing her three innings on the mound. She made the last out of the game by picking up a slow roller a few feet to the right of the pitcher’s mound, fielding the ball cleanly, and snapping off a sidearm throw to Katie at first. Only then did she allow herself a fist pump.

  While the Orioles players celebrated their victory between the mound and first base, Jack looked into the bleachers to where Gus had been sitting. He thought he might ask Gus to hang out, the way they used to hang out on Saturday afternoons.

  But Gus was gone.

  • • •

  Jack was in town with Cassie and Teddy after Cassie’s game—he always thought of them as hers, never his own—and the three of them were sharing a pizza when he remembered he hadn’t turned his phone on after the game ended.

  When he turned it back on, he knew he’d messed up. He hadn’t even told his mom he was going into town for lunch.

  There were three missed calls that said HOME.

  The same number of text messages, asking him where he was.

  “Oh man,” he said, staring at the phone in his hand. “I am going to be in huge trouble.”

  Teddy, mouth full of pizza, said, “You don’t get into trouble, you’re Jack Callahan. I’m the one who gets into trouble.”

  Jack told them what had happened, and Cassie said, “Go outside and call her right now.”

  He walked out of the restaurant and speed-dialed his mom. When she answered, he said, “Mom, I know what you’re going to say. I am so sorry.”

  “Where are you?”

  He told her.

  “You didn’t tell me you were going for pizza.”

  “I know,” he said.

  “I don’t know why I kept leaving messages. I could tell the phone was off.”

  All he could do was apologize to her again.

  “We had a deal,” she said.

  “I know.”