The Might Have Been (11 page)

The “down” arrow lit and the signal
dinged
. Julie stepped toward the door, waiting for it to open.

“Julie,” he said, pushing himself to stand.

“Leave me alone.” The doors slid open. The elevator was crowded. A family of seven stood waiting, a mother, father and five young children, all holding suitcases. They squeezed together to allow Julie room to step onto the elevator. “I’m pregnant,” she said as the doors started to close. “I wasn’t going to tell you but—”

The doors closed, swallowing her words. Through the crack between
them, he watched the light in the shaft change as the car descended. After a moment, he heard a muffled
ding
, signaling that the elevator was stopping at the floor below. He punched the “down” button, certain he would reach the lobby too late: she’d be gone by the time he got there. His knee throbbed and he could feel his pulse thrumming in his ears. That she could be pregnant had never occurred to him. She was on the pill, he was certain. Once while she was in Montreal, she’d taken the plastic disk of them out of her purse while they were in a restaurant, snapped it open, plucked one from its slot, popped it into her mouth and taken a swallow of water. “Baby-proofing,” she said, giving him a wink and then slipping them back into her purse, blushing, just as the waitress brought their plates of waffles and sausage.

The other elevator arrived and he staggered onto it. A bellhop with a luggage cart nudged it toward the back of the elevator and the only other passenger, a withered woman who supported herself with a cane topped by a silver lion’s head, inched her way deeper into the car as well. When the doors slid closed and the elevator began to fall, she wobbled and put a bony hand onto his elbow to steady herself, giving him a small smile of gratitude.

When he reached the lobby, he looked for Julie. A line of guests stood at the desk, keys and credit cards in hand. At the head of the queue, Estelle’s Frank leaned against the desk, holding his bill close to his face, squinting at it. Through the glass doors leading to the street, Edward Everett spotted Julie at the curb, beside a taxi, waiting while a tall man in a lime green leisure suit counted bills into the cabdriver’s hand. Edward Everett limped toward the doors, wincing with every step. He knew what he was doing might set his recovery back by weeks, but he was determined to catch her before the cab pulled away. Just as he reached the doors, the cabdriver took Julie’s luggage from her and laid it into the trunk as she got into the backseat.

“Julie,” he called, pushing against the revolving door, struggling to find the strength to move it. She glanced back at him, pulled the cab door closed and settled into the seat. He hobbled outside. Walking was even more difficult now, as he was able to do little more than
take a step with his left foot and then drag his right, weighted by the cast, after it. “Julie,” he said again. Getting into the driver’s seat, the cabdriver glanced back at him. He saw himself through the man’s eyes: he must seem mad, unshaven, in jeans and a sleeveless T-shirt, barefoot, his hair as wild as if he hadn’t combed it in weeks. “Wait a minute,” he said to the driver. The man looked uncertain and glanced at Julie; she didn’t move but he could hear her say, quietly, “Just go.” The driver gave Edward Everett a shrug and ducked his head, climbing into the car. Edward Everett had reached the cab by then. He bent, knocking on the window beside Julie. “Please,” he said to her.

The driver shifted the cab into gear and began to edge away from the curb, but Julie said, “Wait,” and he stopped. She rolled down her window.

“I’m—” he said, trying to figure out how to explain the crazy woman he had encountered, her sad, sad story and how he had felt sorry for her. It was nearly true—or was a kernel in a much more complicated truth. But she cut him off.

“I am going to say this and then I want you to never call me again.” She raised her hands, palms up as if she were pushing something away from herself. “I have been through hell ever since I found out. I wasn’t going to call. I wasn’t going to call. Then I called. And called. And you never called back. Not fucking once. I was just going to decide on my own. End it? Keep it?

“My dad. I will never forget telling him. Waiting in our living room for him to come home, knowing what I had to tell him. I was his little girl and I was going to disappoint him.” She paused. Edward Everett realized the cab’s meter was running. Through the open window, he could hear it ticking off the fare. He glanced at it. Eighty-five cents, ninety-five. “He said you had a right to know before I—” She shrugged. “I was going to send you a letter but I thought, I had no idea when you would get it. My dad gave me plane fare. He—” She shook her head, fighting tears. “ ‘It’s okay,’ you were going to say. All the way here, that’s what I heard you say. ‘It will be okay.’ ” She shook her head. “I’m going to leave now and I don’t want you to call me or try to see me.”

“What are you—”

“Going to do?”

He nodded.

“I don’t know yet.”

“Can’t you at least tell me when—”

“No,” she said. “You don’t get to know. Not anymore.” She tapped the headrest of the seat in front of her and made a gesture to the driver:
Go on
.

“Wait,” Edward Everett said, but there was an opening in the flow of traffic and the cab pulled away from the curb.

He became aware that people had been watching: the family of seven, the woman with the lion’s-head cane, the attendant at the valet parking podium. He hobbled back toward the hotel, where a bellhop held the door for him, giving him a curt nod.

Upstairs, the door to his room was locked and he realized that he had left the key on the dresser. He knocked. “Estelle?” he called, but there was no answer. “Estelle,” he said louder, but she still didn’t answer. He hobbled to the hall where the elevators were. Someone had propped the broken table against the wall, where it leaned unsteadily on its three remaining legs. The courtesy phone sat on the floor beside it. He picked up the receiver and dialed “0” and asked the person who answered to please send someone up to his room. He’d locked himself out.

When the bellhop let him in and then left, he could see that Estelle was gone. She had made up the bed and his suitcase sat beside it, snapped closed, none of his clothing in evidence. On the table beside the bed, he found a piece of hotel stationery with the single word scrawled on it: “Sorry.”

He sat on the bed for a moment, trying to think what to do. When he got to the airport, he had intended to buy a ticket to fly on to Columbus. He thought:
I should fly to Springfield instead, find Julie, tell her the entire story of sad sad sad Estelle. Bring her flowers. Every day. Court her
. He remembered the afternoon they’d sat in the church when Julie had pushed him through the throngs just after the Olympics left town. She’d done so much for him, both when she came to Montreal and when they were seeing each other in Springfield. Once, as he was about to leave on a road trip, he’d told her that he hated the
long bus rides and she’d brought him a gift at the ballpark just before the team shoved off. It was four-fifteen in the morning and he had been surprised to see her standing beside the team bus, holding a grocery sack. The rest of the team had chided him. “No broads on the bus,” someone said. “Are you going to share?” someone else said. Julie had blushed and handed him the bag. He gave her a quick kiss and didn’t open the bag until the bus was under way. In it, he found a paperback murder mystery, a box of snack crackers and a package of salted peanuts. Sitting in his hotel in Montreal, he realized he had forgotten to acknowledge the gift. And now she was pregnant. With his son or daughter. He picked up the phone, dialed the desk and asked for a bellhop to come to his room to help him with his bag.

When he stood to limp across the room to retrieve his crutches, his right leg went out from under him. He had used up whatever strength he had in it chasing after Julie. He sat on the floor until the bellhop knocked.

“You’ll need to unlock it,” he shouted, not sure the bellhop could hear him through the door. “You’ll have to—” But the bellhop had heard and opened the door.

“Can you …” Edward Everett said, nodding toward his crutches leaning in the corner near the door.

At the airport, when the taxi let him out, he asked a baggage checker at the curb for a wheelchair. He couldn’t go to Springfield like this, he knew. How could he? He couldn’t even get around on his own; he needed physical therapy. He took his ticket out of his breast pocket and consulted it. “Gate 22-B,” he said to the baggage checker.

He’d go home, get healthy. Spring training was nearly half a year off—time to heal, to learn to walk again, to run without pain, to get in shape. He would heal and then he would go to Springfield, find Julie—right after Christmas, he promised himself. Soon after the first of the year at the latest. She would be large with the baby then.

If she kept it, he realized. If she kept it.

T
he next June, he drove to an Indians tryout camp in Cleveland, booking a room in a Holiday Inn a few blocks from the stadium. It was an extravagance. He had less than six hundred dollars to his name and the three days and two nights in the city would consume a third of it. But he knew the less expensive places would be near the highway and the constant thrum of traffic would keep him awake. He saw this as a last chance: if they gave him a contract, it wouldn’t be for the majors, but no worse than double-A, six hundred a month and within shouting distance of the big club if he played well and found some luck—an injury up the line, a trade, a manager who wanted to shake things up.

He had hoped his room would have a view of the stadium but it didn’t; it was on the second floor, overlooking the littered roof of the parking garage. A convention of optometrists was in town and nearly every room within a mile radius of the city center was booked; he was able to get the one he did only because the hotel had a cancellation. “It’s a sad story,” the clerk said, taking his reservation two days earlier. “They were coming for their sixtieth anniversary but the gentleman was hospitalized.”

“For what?” Edward Everett asked.

“I’m not certain,” the clerk said. “Is that Y-E-A-T-S?”

Although the anniversary couple had canceled their reservation, guest services clearly hadn’t gotten the word. When Edward Everett checked in, three vases holding five dozen roses sat on the bureau, a card stuck among the flowers:
To my Gloria, all my love, Jasper
. Beside them, a bottle of 1961 Grand Dom champagne chilled in an ice bucket. He considered calling the clerk, letting her know it was there, but didn’t. If he got a contract, he could take it home, celebrate. It struck him: if he didn’t get a contract, he might just drink it to toast the end of his days in baseball.

He left a six a.m. call. The tryouts began at nine but he wanted to get to the stadium early; show them that he was willing to do whatever it took to get back into the game. When the desk clerk phoned to wake him, he ordered a bagel and grapefruit and gave the bellhop who brought it a five-dollar tip on a two-and-a-half-dollar expense. He was not much more than a kid: short, skinny, wearing an ill-fitting uniform, the jacket cuffs swallowing half his palms. Edward Everett thought he’d be surprised by the tip, appreciative, but he only glanced at the bill and left without a word.
No matter
, Edward Everett thought. It was about aligning the stars in his favor.

When he arrived at the stadium shortly after eight, already a dozen or fifteen players were running sprints across the right field grass or playing toss. In the right field bullpen, two pitchers warmed up, their throws smacking the catchers’ mitts with a sharp
snap
.

In the shade of the home dugout, a stout older man in a Cleveland Indians polo shirt sat in a folding chair behind a card table, and Edward Everett went over to register. As he filled out his form, he glanced at those from the other players, lying loose on the table. So many were younger than he was, he realized with a sinking heart: eighteen, seventeen, twenty-one. He considered shaving five years but didn’t. If they signed him, they’d find out his true age soon enough. He handed the form back to the man, who gave it a quick glance, flicking his finger against the box that Edward Everett had checked: “Professional experience.”

“Release?” the man said, snapping his fingers and holding out his hand without even bothering to look up. Edward Everett felt color
rising in his neck and unzipped his equipment bag where he’d stowed his wallet, fished it out and found the letter he’d folded into it: the notice the Cardinals had sent him saying they were letting him go, that he was no longer their property. It was an absurd document, he thought, as he passed it to the man: less than a quarter of a page, a single-typed sentence:

“The St. Louis Cardinals National Baseball Club hereby grants Edward E. Yates his full and unconditional release.”

His name was not even typed, but scrawled in ink above a blank line in the text, in handwriting that appeared to be that of someone in a hurry, his first name rendered as a capital “E,” a lowercase “d,” and then a squiggled line. The signature of whoever sent the letter was not even an actual signature but rubber-stamped and smeared.