The Might Have Been (34 page)

“I really, really wanted it, you know, there at the end,” Sandford said, zipping his equipment bag. “I told Rauschy it was okay but I lied. I’m trying real hard not to let it matter but I just keep seeing the ball drop out of his glove.”

“You’re an amazing pitcher,” Edward Everett said. “But here’s the thing, you can only control what you can control.” He shuffled
through the game log cards until he found Sandford’s and pointed at the line for the game. Eighty-nine pitches, sixty-four of them for strikes, a good balance of fastballs, curves and changeups, seven strikeouts, only five fly balls to the outfield. “You cannot do any better than this,” he said. “It’s a team game, but all you need to focus on is what you do.”

Sandford nodded but Edward Everett could tell he wasn’t convinced. He was only twenty-one, just a few months past being able to buy beer legally, and again Edward Everett thought,
He’s still a boy
. “You’ll pitch a long time and eventually you’ll figure out that when one game is over, it’s over, and all that matters is, what did you learn out there that will make you a better pitcher the next time you take the mound?”

Sandford nodded again but Edward Everett knew he was only trying to end the conversation, be able to go home, and so he said, “Have a good night.”

When Sandford left, Edward Everett was alone in the locker room. From the shower room, water dripped and something
pinged
in the pipes. It really was a terrible place, he thought, the concrete pockmarked, graffiti scrawled on some of the lockers, no place for a professional baseball team. Someone with Sandford’s gift deserved better; Collier’s easy answer for their home for the rest of the season—a solution that Edward Everett knew rose out of his desire to spend as little of his money as possible on the team, just so his silly wife could buy more drapes, more dresses from Macy’s—it was an insult to all of them but especially to someone as rare as Sandford.

He looked again at Sandford’s game log card, the row of numbers that Marc Johansen, MS, MBA, believed in so fiercely. As he studied it, he could see Sandford on the mound, the man who for more than two hours lived and breathed in an alternate universe from everyone else there, who could only watch him from the outside and get a glimpse of a world that transcended the rusted fence, the cracked home plate—but only a glimpse. Yet when Marc Johansen, MS, MBA, looked at the numbers after Edward Everett uploaded them, they’d be merely elements in an equation, digits on a screen.

His cellphone startled him, Elton John’s “Your Song,” his ring tone for Renee.

“The most amazing thing happened,” he started to say, but she interrupted him.

“I know you’re probably not fond of me right now,” she said, “but I need to ask you for a favor.”

“Sure,” he said, thinking she was going to say,
Will you water my plants? My car is going in the shop tomorrow, can you pick me up and give me a ride to work?
Thinking, here was the chink in her resistance, the pastries maybe having done the trick, although they sat, the box still full, on his kitchen counter.

But she said, “Please leave my parents alone.”

“I don’t—” he began.

“Whatever you think of me, my parents are upset enough already—my dad especially. Please don’t try to use them to make me change my mind.”

“I wasn’t doing that,” he said.

She sighed. “Those pastries?”

“I was just doing something nice for your folks,” he said.

“Please,” she said. “We may not be together now but we were together long enough that I know a little about how your mind works.”

“The last time—”

“I was stupid the last time. Stupid and weak.” She sighed. “I wanted to keep this simple, as much for you as for me,” she said. “I’m seeing my lawyer tomorrow. I really should have done it sooner. It wasn’t fair to you for me to draw things out for as long as I did.”

He wasn’t aware she had drawn things out. How long ago had she left? Wasn’t she gone for just as long between last Thanksgiving and Christmas?

She went on, “You don’t even have to hire your own lawyer if you don’t want; I’m not asking for anything from you.”

“Can we meet and talk about this?” he said. “I really have no idea why—”

“There’s no point,” she said, then added, her voice quieter, “I’ve moved on.”

“What do you mean, you’ve ‘moved on’?”

From where she was he thought he heard another voice but it was indistinct; it could have been interference. “No, I don’t need you to do that,” Renee said quietly.

“You don’t need me to do what?” he asked.

Renee sighed. “Ed, some relationships are like a car on a lake.” It sounded like another sentence she would have taken from a book. “There’s nothing wrong with being a car and nothing wrong with being a lake but the two aren’t meant to be together. That’s all.”

“A car and a lake?” he asked. Which one was he? Then he understood the meaning of her remark that she had “moved on.” He laughed.

“What’s so funny?” she said, her voice tight.

“You’ve
moved on
,” he said. “There’s someone else.”

Renee did not respond. She had hung up. He looked at the phone for a minute as the illuminated screen eventually went black, thinking about calling her back, but packed up his scorebook and game log cards and went home to what seemed even more like an empty house. Two days later, as she had promised, a courier delivered the divorce papers.

O
nce, between the first time she left him and the second, Renee came home from work and told him a story: she was setting up a PowerPoint display to show a redesign of the bank’s logo to a focus group and while she was plugging the projector into her laptop, one of the women there was telling everyone about her mother, who was in the hospital after a stroke, on a respirator, expected to die. Among them was a new assistant manager, a freshly minted MBA from Marquette, and when the woman finished her story, he had shaken his head and said, “What is she? Sixty? She’s had a good life. Let her go.” Edward Everett and Renee laughed about the story. “You’ve had a good life,” she would say when he complained about feeling stiff on waking in the morning, when, before the season started, he sometimes said that he was ready for bed as early as nine p.m., when he asked her to repeat something she had said.

For the days that remained of the home stand after he received the divorce papers, the joke came back to him often but it was no longer funny. Until now, sixty was another generation, not his. Even when he had turned sixty, it hadn’t seemed anything more than a number he would write on a form that asked “age.”
Sixty
was his mother when he lived with her after his injury in Montreal, his
mother counting out blood pressure and cholesterol pills at the breakfast table.
Sixty
was his uncle dying of a heart attack four years after Edward Everett stopped working with him, too many steaks and cigarettes.

But now, with his wife gone and as he waited for the “Organizational Changes” email with his name in it, he felt the full brunt of sixty:
sixty
and no idea of how he’d arrived there so quickly;
sixty
and no notion of where he would be next year.
You’ve had a good life. You’ve had a good life
.

At the ballpark—
not quite a ballpark
—he went through the motions, twenty years of managing making it like riding a bike, still saying the right things, making the right moves, knowing when to pull a pitcher, when to pinch-hit, when to shift the fielders in a situation where a hitter would be more likely to hit the other way, effective enough that they went on a winning streak, the home stand nine wins and two losses.

Then, after the games, he cleared out quickly, often even before all of his players had gone home. Two nights after Sandford’s gem of a game, alone in the damp locker room, the dripping showerheads leaking water even more rapidly, the pipes developing a whine, it struck him that his father had hung himself in such a place, bitter over the fateful “no” he had said to the man who became one of the greatest football coaches in college history. What had sent him over the edge? he wondered. Did suicide sit in the body like a cancer gene, waiting, inevitable? Was it festering in him?

But at home, things were no better. He began over and over the steps he knew he needed to take. He studied the financial form attached to the divorce agreement—assets, debts, property—but every time he set out to make progress on it, it seemed daunting. How much
was
his car worth? How much
could
he sell his house for? As for his bank statements, they were all a jumble, stacked in a drawer, still in their envelopes and in no particular order: May 2007 on top of January 2003 on top of March 2006. How had he let it get to such a state? He put the financial disclosure aside, still blank, and went down to his basement, regarding the boxes that filled so much of the space there, so many things he had no need to hold on to, thinking he
should haul them to the curb, take them to the Goodwill, but it all seemed so overwhelming and so he went back upstairs, closing the door on the chaos.

Renee haunted the house—the bedroom, yes, where he lay awake at night, seeing her with whoever represented her “moving on,” a man younger than he was, faceless, propping himself above Renee on his elbows, driving into her, Renee’s face fixed in a way he remembered too well, her eyes squeezed shut, her lips parted slightly, on the very edge of coming. They were in the living room, on the sofa, on the floor. In the kitchen, as he shook dog food out of the bag into Grizzly’s bowl, they were with him at the table, Renee leaning across toward her faceless “moving on,” a foot nudging his foot. (
I have an idea
, the two stumbling toward the bedroom.) He wondered if the man had been there when he’d been on the road, and stripped the bed, looking for proof, knowing at the same time it was ludicrous, the ghost of stains mottling the mattress pad offering him evidence of nothing.

To avoid seeing them, the hours away from the ballpark became a wasteland of television and junk food; he wallowed in nostalgia (But then, wasn’t that the purpose of nostalgia, the wallowing?), watching especially game shows from the late 1960s and the 1970s, the time he had come to think of as his prime, Edward Everett, the invincible athletic stud:
Let’s Make a Deal
,
The Match Game
,
The Newlywed Game
, studying the contestants in their thirty-year-old fashions and hairstyles, the men in broad-lapeled jackets and wide ties, the women jumping up and down in polyester slacks and blouses, beehive hairdos and perfect perms. He wondered if they sometimes stumbled upon their younger selves when they, too, sleepless, were flipping channels, and sat thinking,
How did I become who I am now?
How many of the contestants were still alive, how many of the couples laughing about their ignorance of each other were still together, still preferred the morning when they made whoopee, still called each other “babycakes”?

In the early morning hours, when the game shows disappeared and the infomercials moved in, magic vitamins and foolproof investment
schemes, he went through his boxes of game log cards, counting his players who had left the game long ago, smarter men than he, players who saw their years in the minor leagues as an interesting diversion on their way to practicing law or opening a pharmacy or becoming, as one of them had, a professional fishing guide in Montana. He found Christmas cards they’d sent with small notes letting him know how far they had moved away from the game he could never seem to let go: “Here’s me and the missus at the lake.” “Here’s the kids with Santa.” More recently, the cards from some of them contained snapshots of grandchildren, fat-cheeked infants with oversized baseball caps sitting cockeyed on their heads. He realized they had seen the open door to the world outside the locker room as an invitation and not banishment; baseball was just an interesting visa stamp in the passport of their lives, while he had gotten stuck at the border, unable to cross.

One day, going through boxes, he found the snapshots that Julie had sent him.

He spread them across the kitchen table, arranging them chronologically by the dates on the postmarks: two dozen images of the boy lined up, looking back at him, the father he had never met: the father, it struck Edward Everett, he may never have known he had. He wondered if the boy had ever thought to look for him; maybe he had trailed him up until Lexington, where Edward Everett lived before Perabo City, and then had given up one address short, just missing the connection.

One by one, Edward Everett picked up the photographs, looking closely into the face. The boy’s eyes were brown, he realized—his color, not Julie’s—but the child’s face more closely resembled hers, was round where his was more angular, and yet the chin was his, not Julie’s: while hers came to a slight point—he had once called her his little elf—the boy’s chin was square. How odd, he thought, to have pieces of himself out there, somewhere, eyes, chin, hair. He tried to envision what the boy would look like by now, the grown man he would have turned into, thirty-two, thirty-three, maybe a father himself.
I promise you, son, I won’t abandon you the way my own father did
.

Sitting in the kitchen, trying not to acknowledge the ghost of Renee and her new man who tugged at his consciousness (
I have an idea
, hand extended, stumbling toward the bedroom), he realized that the photographs revealed nearly nothing about the life the boy was living. It occurred to him that Julie must have chosen the photographs in the same spirit that caused her to refuse to give him a return address or to write a note giving him news of herself or the boy. There was never another person in any of the photographs, only fragments of them: the forearm and shoulder of whoever held the boy outside the church at his baptism; a disembodied upraised beefy hand of a man holding a glass aloft, joining the boy in the toast he was making; the edge of a white dress worn by the girl standing beside him on the altar at his First Communion; the shadow of whoever snapped the last photograph, the boy on his bike, the shadow spilling across the sidewalk, submerging the bike’s rear tire.