Curveball : The Year I Lost My Grip (9780545393119) (7 page)

“I can't believe you never told me what a super-star pitcher you are, Peter!” she said.

Were
, I thought.

“Adam told me all about how you and he pitched a no-hitter together in the championship game two years ago. That must have been amazing! He even brought me a copy of the newspaper article. And he told me all about how you played hurt last year, and you were too brave to tell anybody.”

Brave or moronic
, I thought.

“He told me not to say anything about this, but he said you were training really hard to get back into playing condition for this spring, even though the doctors said you might not be able to play yet.”

Kill me
, I thought.

“So, umm, I had this idea that maybe I should take your picture holding the baseball. What do you think?”

I had no idea what to think.

“I mean, my mom said she thought it was a sexist idea for a photo shoot: Man with Tools. She said you didn't pose me with, like, a Betty Crocker baking set. But I wasn't trying to be like that. I just thought the baseball would show something deeper about who you are … that is, if you don't mind … Peter, would you please talk to me?”

I started to talk, but there was a catch in my throat. I cleared it, and tried again: “Gimme the ball.”

“Really? You don't mind?”

I shook my head and held out my hand.

Angelika gave me the ball. I turned it over in my fingers, and a huge lump grew in my throat. Suddenly, in my own head, I was back on that field, two years before. We had been playing in Emmaus, Pennsylvania, in a big park, and there were train tracks passing maybe a hundred feet away, parallel to the third base line. As a pitcher, the line of sight was pretty strange, too, because there was a parking lot directly behind the backstop. It was a blindingly sunny, baking-hot day, and a horrible glare was coming off this one
white SUV parked right over the umpire's left shoulder.

The grass had just been cut, and the whole place smelled a little bit like onions.

When I came back to reality, I realized Angelika had been clicking away. Also, that she had stopped. “Oh, my God, Pete,” she said. “Are you crying?”

It wasn't long after that when I got the first of Grampa's scary phone calls. I was on my way home from school when my cell started vibrating. I assumed it would be AJ, or my mom. Or Angelika. Nobody else ever called me. I made a guess that I was talking to AJ, so I answered, “Sup!”

The phone clicked, and the line went dead. That was a little unusual, but not so crazy. Our town is kind of hilly, so we get a lot of dead spots. I shoved my phone back in my pocket and kept walking. About ten steps later, I felt the buzz again. This time I just said, “Hello?”

There was a long enough pause that I almost hung up. Then I heard Grampa groaning, followed by, “Peter? Peter?”

“Grampa? What's wrong? Are you OK?”

“I … I … can you come over here?”

Grampa only lived about a mile from our house. “Why? What happened?”

“I fell.”

Oh, geez. “Grampa, are you hurt? Let me hang up and call 9-1-1.”

“No! I'm not dying. I just fell.”

“Let me call my mom. She can get there much faster than —”

“Peter, please — don't tell your mother. Just come over here. Please?”

Grampa never said “please.” Twice in one breath had to mean that things were pretty bad. But what was I supposed to do? It's not like they train you for this in Grandparent First Aid 101. “OK, I'm coming,” I said. “But it's going to take a while. I'm about a mile and a half from you, and I'm walking.”

“Just … please … hurry.”

“Grampa?” I said. But he had already hung up. I started running.

If you ever find yourself a mile and a half away from an emergency, carrying a backpack full of heavy textbooks and camera equipment, that's probably
not going to be a good time for you to realize that for the first time in your life, you are woefully out of shape. Within a couple of blocks, I was gasping for air, and my bad arm was throbbing. Every step felt like an eternity, like I was running through Jell-O. The only part of me that was racing successfully was my train of thought. I was in a complete panic. What would I find at my grandfather's house? Was he in a heap at the bottom of his basement stairs? Did he have broken bones? Was he lying in a pool of blood?

I know it couldn't have taken more than fifteen minutes for me to get over there, but I also had time to worry about all the things that could happen in fifteen minutes. Plus, of course, the whole way there I kept thinking,
Call Mom. You have to call Mom. You're a kid. This is too deep for a kid!

But I never, ever disobeyed Grampa. I kept running.

I didn't know whether my grandfather could make it to the front door, so I went charging around to his back porch, where he had always kept a key hidden under a ceramic planter full of long-dead flowers. My hands were trembling, but I got the key into the door and pushed my way in.

“Grampa?” I shouted.

Nothing.

“GRAMPA?”

Still nothing.

I looked around the whole kitchen, then the living and dining rooms. By this point, I wasn't running. In fact, I was tiptoeing, even though that made no sense. I mean, I knew it was urgent for me to find my grandfather, but I was also terrified of what I would see.

Grampa had to be near a telephone, so I tried to think of where all the extensions were in the house. I realized then that, before my grandmother's death when I was in fifth grade, she had convinced my grandfather to get a phone installed next to the toilet. He had put up a big fight (“Why do we need a special toilet phone? Who do we know that needs an update from
there
?”), but eventually the line had gone in.

I crept up the hallway toward the bathroom, and stuck my head around the doorframe. Grampa was sitting on the floor, with his eyes shut and his back against the wall. There was no blood, which might
have been a good sign. Plus, he was breathing — loudly. If I could hear his breathing over all of the gasping and heart pounding that was coming from me, you knew it had to be loud.

I knelt in front of him, put my good hand on his shoulder, and said, “Gramp?” I hadn't called him that since I was little, but somehow the time seemed right for it. His eyes opened, and for a moment, I got the feeling he wasn't seeing me at all. Then they sort of snapped back to life, and he said, “Peter, can you help me?”

Not “Can you help me up?” Just “Can you help me?”

This was deeply, deeply not good. How was I supposed to know what to do? I asked if he could move, and he said, “I think so.” With what looked like a lot of effort, he braced each hand against the floor, then pulled his legs in so that if he straightened them, he would be standing up. He added, “I don't know what happened, but nothing hurts. Can I stand up? I want to get up.” I asked him to lock forearms with me, and together we managed to get him leaning upright
against the cold tile of the bathroom wall. After a pause there, he was able to walk out, down the hallway, and into his kitchen, where he slumped down in a chair.

I got him a drink — I don't know what a drink was supposed to do, but it seemed like something one might do in a grandfather-rescue-type situation. He gulped it down and asked for a refill, so score one for Peter Friedman, Boy Untrained Paramedic. Then he locked eyes with me and said, “Pete. Don't get old. Don't ever get old.”

“Sure,” I said. “I'll be sure to step in front of a bus on my sixty-fifth birthday.”

He let out a little snort-laugh, and then we just sat there for a while. Eventually, I got myself a water, too; I couldn't believe how wiped out I was just from getting over to Grampa's house. I was really going to have to do something about my fitness in a hurry. Then I asked my grandfather how he had ended up on the floor, and he said, “Slipped.”

Yeah, I hadn't really needed a detailed memo to figure that one out. “No,” I said, “I mean, why did
you slip? Is something” — and here I felt that same stupid lump building up in my throat, just like when I had held the baseball for Angelika — “really wrong with you?”

He sipped some water, and then said, “Peter, sometimes people fall. I'm fine.” Then he winced, and added, “Except now my back hurts. Can you go get me some aspirin from the bathroom?”

When I came back with the pills, Grampa's head was slumped forward and his eyes were closed. I put my hand on his shoulder, and he jumped. His head whipped around, and then he said, “Pete — wha — I mean, thanks.” He took the aspirin bottle, opened it without fumbling around, got out two tablets, and swallowed them with no problem. But for a moment there, I could have sworn he had been someplace else again.

“Don't look at me like that, Pete. I know how to fall. I fell out of a helicopter under fire in Vietnam — this is nothing. I'm fine.”

Was I supposed to believe that? Did
he
believe it?

“And just like I said before, you can't tell your mother about this. She'll just worry, and she has
enough on her mind, with bills, and taxes, and jobs, and your sister's college …”

“B-but,” I stammered, “if there's a problem, you have to tell her. I mean, you
will
tell her, right?”

“I'll make you a deal, Big Man. I promise I'll tell her if I think I'm in any danger, OK?”

I figured that was about as good as it was going to get, so I nodded. I made sure my grandfather didn't need anything else, told him I'd be calling to check on him later, and left. All the way home, I kept thinking how ironic it was that my grandfather, who said he wasn't worried, had begged me not to tell my mom he had fallen. Meanwhile, Mom actually wasn't worried. And me? I was basically having a cow over this.

I remembered something Grampa had said a few days after my grandmother's funeral. We were back at my house, sitting shivah, which is this Jewish ritual where you sit around for a week and everybody comes over to tell you how sorry they are for your loss. By the middle of the week, you aren't really in a total sorrow crisis anymore, and people sort of start chatting normally. Anyway, Samantha and I had been
sitting with Grampa, snacking on deli food, and she had asked him if there was anything we could do for him.

“Eat a knish, Sammie.”

“No, I mean, can't we do anything to help you?”

He had sighed, rubbed the bridge of his nose, and said, “Sammie, Petey, remember this: There are going to be times in your life when you can't really do anything for anybody. So you might as well eat a knish.”

He paused and took a bite of his pastrami on rye sandwich. “What? It's just going to get thrown out.”

I guess what I'm trying to say is that Grampa has never been a big fan of accepting help.

When I got home, I felt like a million hours had passed since Grampa's call to my cell phone, but neither of my parents were even home from work yet. I ran upstairs and took a shower, feeling that maybe, just maybe, I could scrub the evidence of what I had seen off my face before dinner. As if my mom would ask. Or believe.

Still, I felt sick all evening. I kept seeing Grampa sitting hunched over on the floor. My legs felt a little
weak, and I don't think it was just from the unexpected afternoon sprint. Plus, my elbow was throbbing pretty hard — so hard, I almost popped one of the super-strong postsurgical pain pills I still had in our bathroom cabinet.

So much for joining the track team.

After my parents went to bed, I got online and read up on Alzheimer's disease. The more I read, the more I felt like Angelika had been right. Every single one of the early symptoms matched up with something I'd seen Grampa do. Even though it was late, I called Angelika.

Thankfully, she answered. If I had faced an interrogation from her mom at that point, I think I would have cracked completely. “Angelika?” I said.

“Pete? Hey, hi! I'm so excited! I was just mounting you. I mean, your portrait — you know, with the baseball? I can't wait to hand it in tomorrow. It's really powerful stuff, thanks to you and Adam. I am
so
going to get an A on this now. The technical values are all there, definitely. Plus, Mr. Marsh is going to fuh-reak over the concept. He was right; once you get that
going on, it completely brings a portrait to life. Anyway, I think I really … whoa, wait a minute. Am I babbling? I mean,
you
called
me
, right? What's going on?”

I had meant to tell her all about my scary afternoon. Somehow, though, that wasn't what came out of my mouth. “You know, in those pictures … I meant to tell you something. I, uh, I wasn't really crying. I mean, I had tears. But, um, I just kind of … I guess I had a thing. For a minute.”

If I had super-hearing, I'm pretty sure I would have been able to hear Angelika's eyebrow arching upward. “Oh, that's fine, then. What a relief. I thought you were totally crying. But if you just had … a thing … that saves me a lot of trouble.”

“Trouble? What do you mean, trouble?”

“See, I've always said I wish I would meet a guy who could actually cry. Because I cry all the time. Remember a few years ago, when President Obama's daughters got their dog? I cried. I cried when my goldfish died — an hour after we bought it. I cry for no reason. I cry for freaking fun! I cry like Lady Gaga
changes outfits. So anyway, I swore that if I ever found a crying boy …”

“Yeah?”

“Never mind, it doesn't matter. I mean, unless you were actually crying. But you already said it was just a thing. Right?”

“Uh, I might have been crying. A little, tiny bit. One lone, manly tear. So what did you swear you would do?”

“Gee, I'll have to put some thought into this. I promised myself if I met a boy who could totally cry, I'd, like, jump his bones. Smother him in passion. Make him my own. But for one lone, manly tear … maybe you should ask me out quick, Peter. You might at least get a kiss out if this, or something.”

Holy cow. Ask her out? I had the feeling, like I always did, that she was laughing at me a little. Possibly even toying with me. But she was so pretty. And so smart, and funny, and quick, and my photo partner — this
had
to be my moment.

At these crucial times, some people say, “Carpe diem! Seize the day!” Then they leap right in there
and get the girl. Others try to seize the day, but blurt out the worst, most buzz-killing words imaginable. Sadly, I once again proved my knack for being one of the great blurters of the world: “Angelika … how did you know your grandmother had Alzheimer's?”

Angelika really was incredible. She changed gears so fast, there wasn't even a pause before she answered. “Oh, boy. Is this why you really called? And here I was, shamelessly flirting with you. What happened today, Pete?”

Dang it
, I thought.
What's my problem? Shameless flirting good. Weepy grampa-talk bad.
But I had to keep talking about the situation now that I had brought it up. “My grandfather fell today. He called me and I went running over to his house. When I got there, he seemed kind of disoriented, on and off. But he made me swear I wouldn't tell my parents about it. Now I'm reading all the symptoms online, and he's done, like, half of the things it says to watch for. On the other hand, this one website said that most old people have some of the symptoms, some of the time. So how did you know for sure?”

“Well, first of all, you can't know for sure. Eventually, somebody is going to have to get him to a doctor. And that's really hard. When my grandma got sick, she refused and refused to go.”

“Until?”

“Uh, one day, she got in her car and tried to drive to her childhood house. Which was knocked down thirty years ago when they built the old middle school. So she kept driving into the school parking lot, going in circles, then driving back out. Eventually, security noticed, and the police came and stopped her. It was awful. Apparently, she just kept saying, ‘Somebody took my house. Why are you arresting me? Why aren't you going after the house thieves?'”