Boy Toy (9 page)

I try to imagine the conversation Zik and Michelle are having as he gets into the car. Michelle waves to me from the dri-ver's-side window and I wave back. What's he telling her? What's
she
telling
him?
No way to know.

Meet me at SAMMPark?

Well, what else do I have to do?

SAMMPark was built a few years back. Some old shoddy buildings were torn down and the whole area was resodded and landscaped. It all started around the same time as Eve's trial; for a while there, it was like dueling headlines in the
Times,
with one crowding out the other on occasion but nothing else interfering with the front page.

They originally would shut the whole thing down at eleven, but some local religious group wanted to hold a midnight prayer vigil there and then the ACLU got involved and eventually it was just easier to leave the park open, with a Rent-A-Cop stationed at the main gate. Hell, Zik and I had been hopping the fence on the east side of the park to play midnight baseball anyway, and judging by the scattering of Coke cans, beer bottles, used condoms, and burger wrappers, we weren't the only ones in violation.

I wait in my car by the gate. It's cool out, so I roll down the window to catch the breeze and lean out the window. I look up at the sky.

Ursa Major and Ursa Minor are both really bright tonight. I pick out Venus, twinkling away like a star ... to the uninitiated eye. Venus, 67.2 million miles away from the sun, is technically the closest planet to Earth, but it's usually on the
other side
of the sun, so for all intents and purposes it's much farther away than you'd think. You couldn't send a manned mission there—the pressure from the superhumid atmosphere would kill any astronauts, assuming that the 900-degree heat didn't do it first. Still, spacecraft have been sent there, and I like to imagine that someday we'll figure out a way to put a person there, in a protected environment. I like to think I'll help work that one out.

I love the stars. Love them for
how
they are almost as much as for
what
they are. Stars are just mathematical equations, when you get right down to it. Precise ratios of helium and hydrogen, heated and lit just the right way, all of it balanced and perfect for billions of years as they slowly churn their way toward iron, toward entropy. Space is one big mathematical construct. It's just figuring out gravity and electromagnetism and thrust and lift and BOOM you're off the earth, you're walking the moon like Neil Armstrong in those old, old videos.

Just when I figure Rachel has either stood me up, died in a car accident, or never planned to come here after all, I hear tires crunch the parking lot gravel and catch headlights in my rearview.

I get out as she pulls up next to me. She's wearing a gray South Brook Bobcats cap, a yellow shirt, and a pair of green shorts. The shirt is cut loose, the shorts tight.

"Sorry I'm late," she says, waving to me as she goes around back to her trunk. "I had to change from work."

"That's OK."

She digs into her trunk. "Get your bat."

"My
bat?
"

She slams down the trunk; she has a glove in one hand and a softball in the other. It looks like a pumpkin compared to the balls I'm used to hitting.

"Yeah, your bat. Time to measure up, big guy."

You're kidding me. She wants to
pitch
to me?

"Rachel, I don't—"

"I know you keep a bat in your trunk. Come on." She doesn't even wait for me to finish—she just heads off toward the gate.

I pop the trunk and grab my bat and glove, then hustle to catch up to her. No need to run, though—turns out she's waiting just inside the park entrance, near the nurse statue and the big bronze plaque that reads "Susan Ann Marchetti Memorial Park." Spotlights shine up from the ground, shrouding the statue's upper half in shadows.

"Hey, Rache, can we talk?"

"You ever think about her?"

Shit. She's not even looking at me but at the statue of the nurse. On the way here, I sort of decided that I was coming for one reason and one reason only—to apologize. To look her in the eye and say, in no uncertain terms, that I'm sorry for what I did all those years ago. But now she's got me toting baseball gear and looking at statues.

But I figure it's her game and her rules. For now, at least.

"Not really, Rache." I take a good long look at the statue. It's just a chunk of stone. Marble, maybe. I don't know. I've walked past it a million times.

"You ever read the plaque?"

"Just her name."

She sighs and offers me an exasperated frown. "God, Josh. How many times have you walked through this park or played in this park, and you never wondered about the woman they named it after?"

"I just said I read her name!"

"Read the rest of it."

So I read it:
Dedicated and built in her name by the man who gave her life and the man who gave her death.

"Whoa!"

Rachel smiles smugly. "See?"

"What does
that
mean?"

"What do you
think
it means?"

"I don't know." I think about it for a second. "I mean, the 'man who gave her life' would have to be her father, right?"

She nods. "Yeah, that's what I always figured."

"But the 'man who gave her death'...Does that mean the same guy? Or is it another guy?"

Rachel shrugs. "I don't know. There was a whole big story about it when they first built it, but there was, y'know, another story that sort of overshadowed it at the time."

My face burns. It's now or never.

"Rachel, look, this isn't easy for me..."

She cocks her head to one side like a curious dog.

"Rachel, I'm just gonna say it." My heart, interestingly, has decided to switch into calm mode, reliably thudding along and doing little else. My pulse can't be more than seventy-five bpm. I resist the urge to check.

"I'm sorry, Rache." As soon as the words are out, my heart starts up, kicking up a storm, blasting out a panic serenade. I can barely hear myself speak for the rushing thrum of blood in my ears. "I'm so sorry. I'm just so, so sorry." I can't stop saying it, and I can't even summon up any sort of variation on the theme. I just keep blabbing "I'm sorry" over and over again, like some kind of deranged parrot.

She regards me, impassive, saying nothing, not even moving until I somehow ramble to a stop in the middle of the word "sorry," like a car drifting onto sand.

"You done?" she asks.

I'm out of breath. My heart has settled down, but my lungs are protesting. She just stares at me.

"Yeah." I gasp it, as though I'm rounding third and heading for home and the ball is sailing
right overhead
and the catcher looks
really
confident.

She slams the ball into her glove. "Good. Let's go."

The SAMMPark baseball diamond isn't lit at night unless there's an official game and someone's paying for the juice, but it's a clear night and the moon and the stars and the big billboard that faces the highway offer plenty of light.

"Let's warm up." Rachel jogs out to the mound, spins around, and tosses the ball to me at the plate, overhand. I snag it with my glove—not. What
really
happens is that I snap at it with the glove and knock it out of the air, missing my chance to catch it because I misjudged its size.

"Good catch," she calls out.

If Zik made a comment like that, I would know he was just kidding and I would probably call him a douchebag, but I don't know if she's just busting on me or being mean, so I say nothing as I retrieve the ball and toss it back to her, adding a little more heat than is strictly necessary. She catches it effortlessly, barely looking at it, her glove darting out to one side.

She fires it back, overhand again, and

I don't know why I'm so surprised by that—they only
pitch
underhanded in softball. For fielding and everything else, it's just like in baseball, except the ball's the size of a goddamn grapefruit.

I get used to it quickly and manage to keep my glove open wide enough to avoid embarrassing myself further. She starts tossing some deliberately off to the left or right, making me chase them, and I return the favor, and soon we're running all over the infield, firing the ball back and forth, running it down until we're loosened up and I'm sweating a little bit.

I'm standing on second, waiting for her to throw the ball from third, when she stops.

"Here's the deal, Josh. I heard you before. OK?" She waits.

"OK?"

"Yeah." This is the part where she tells me to shove my apology up my ass.

"I heard you," she says again. "But we don't talk about it until
I
say. Got it?"

I don't know about that. On the one hand, I guess it's her right. On the other hand, though, I don't want to be standing here all night with spin-the-bottle and the closet hanging between us like dense fog.

"I said, 'Got it?'" And she fires the ball at me, hard. It stings my palm when it lands in the glove.

"I got it." I throw it back. "It's just that—"

"Jesus!" She jumps a little to catch it—I threw it high. "What part of this don't you understand?"

"I understand all of it, Rache, but I can't just stand here and play catch with you when there's all of this other shit between us."

She hurls the ball again, this time so hard she goes wild and I have to run into center field for it. "God, Josh, you don't get it, do you? We were friends, remember? Good friends."

Yeah, I remember. Our mothers thought it was so cute, a boy and a girl being such good friends like that. They teased us sometimes, said we'd end up married. "I know. But then I—"

"Will you stop talking about that time in the closet? That's all you think about. What about what happened
afterward?
"

Afterward? I don't get it. "What do you mean?
Nothing
happened. Not with us, at least."

"That's my point, you jackass! You disappeared on me! You stopped talking to me, you wouldn't come around anymore—"

"Your parents wouldn't let me near you! And I don't even blame them."

"Shit, that lasted all of a year. Once the truth came out, once the trial started, they felt sorry for you. But me, I lost one of my best friends in the world. All because you were so damn worried about what you did that you never stopped for a minute to think about what I needed or wanted. Throw the goddamn ball!"

I realize I've been standing in shallow center, holding the ball, staring at her. I hop into the base path and toss it to her. She grabs it out of the air, savagely.

"You never tried to call me!" She fires the ball back.
Hard.
"You never look at me in school! You never talk to me. You won't talk to Michelle or Zik about me or go anywhere you think I'll be. God!"

I just stand there holding the ball. She starts pacing, flinging her arms out to punctuate her points. "It was like being exiled or something! And I couldn't figure out why. My parents would watch the news and see Mrs. Sherman and they'd say, 'That poor boy,' and ask if I'd talked to you, and I would always have to say no. I got so sick and tired of hearing about her, about you. It's like you died, but people wouldn't stop talking about you, wouldn't stop bringing you up, so I couldn't even..." She plants her feet. "Throw the goddamn ball!"

I toss it weakly. She grabs it and fires it back, almost clipping my head before I duck out of the way and knock it down with my glove.

"I couldn't even
mourn
you!" she says. "I couldn't even forget you."

I retrieve the ball. She's not even watching me now. She's wandering around home plate, facing the backstop. If this were Zik, I'd pitch it right over his shoulder and rattle the backstop to scare the shit out of him.

Instead, I tuck it into my glove and walk over to her. She turns when I'm about halfway there and I expect her to tell me to back off and keep playing extreme catch. But instead, she just slumps her shoulders and watches me.

I hand her the ball. "Are we at the part where I can apologize now?"

She shakes her head, but she's chuckling. "Sorry about all that. It's been building up for a long time. I had to get it all out."

"You don't have anything to apologize for."

"You caught me off-guard back then. I wasn't expecting you to tear my panties—"

"I said I'm sorry, Rachel. I swear to God."

"I mean, we were thirteen! And it's not like no one goes to third or hits a homer at thirteen, but it's usually not so aggressive."

"Look, it's what I was used to. It's what ... It's what she—" God, I don't think I can talk about it. Here I have my chance, at last, to make amends, and I can't even talk about it.

"I understand. I didn't know that then, though. And I'm sorry too."

I blink. "For what?"

"For freaking out the way I did. For starting the whole thing. If I hadn't gone screaming out of the basement—"