“I think he means us,” said Ivan.
“I must be Dee,” Ryan said. “Which makes you Dum.”
Bedford rolled his eyes. “I don’t know why, but I’m gonna miss you guys. Please, just don’t blow it tonight, all right?”
Ryan couldn’t wait to share the news with Chelsea. As soon as the team finished practice and hit the clubhouse showers, he grabbed his cell phone from his locker and hit speed dial number one. The call went to her voice mail. He was about to leave a message, but he’d already pressured her enough. More than anything, he wanted her to
want
to come tonight.
He put the phone away, hoping not to be disappointed.
Chelsea James was having a bad day.
The Boston area was well known for its prep schools—Phillips, Milton, Roxbury Latin, Groton, and Winsor, to name a few—but for the one-stop option of “pre-K through 12,” Brookline Academy, where Chelsea taught, was of singular distinction. The upper grades had a separate facility to accommodate boarding students. Preteens attended classes on the original campus, where the ivy-clad halls were among the finest examples of neo-Gothic architecture outside Europe, inspired by the British Houses of Parliament. Ninety-five percent of the faculty had a postgraduate degree, and no class was larger than twelve students. Annual tuition was roughly the cost of a luxury sedan. To families that didn’t qualify for financial aid, it was nothing compared to what their children would be asked to donate after they graduated. An alumni roster that read like “Who’s Who in America” funded an eight-figure endowment.
Chelsea’s trouble began at her 7:45
A.M.
meeting with the headmaster to discuss the all-important fund-raising auction at the school’s upcoming gala, which she had volunteered to help organize. Chelsea thought it would be nice if students in the lower grades worked with their teachers to create quilts as one of the marquee items.
“I’m excited about these quilts,” said Chelsea.
The headmaster was smiling, but that was not necessarily a good sign. Arguments were not allowed at the academy, only “discussions”—by edict and by example of the headmaster, a consummate administrator and gifted peacemaker who had the ability to smile through the worst of circumstances, whether she was telling you that your house was on fire or, far worse, that your child wasn’t going to be in the math honors program. She reminded Chelsea of Margaret Thatcher with a New England accent.
“Anything wrong?” said Chelsea.
The headmaster folded her hands atop the antique mahogany desk that had served her for the past twenty-nine years, and every head before her.
“Chelsea, I like you very much. But do you have any idea how much our annual auction raises for the school?”
“A lot of money.”
“
A lot
of money,” she said. “Now, why don’t you try thinking more along the lines of an annual pass to Canyon Ranch or lunch with Baryshnikov? Starting now.”
For a moment, Chelsea thought she was serious, but then they shared a genuine smile. As the headmaster escorted her out of her office, she tossed enough bones of praise to keep Chelsea from feeling completely shot down. The quilts were dead, but Chelsea reminded herself that a woman didn’t get to be the Margaret Thatcher of Brookline Academy by thinking small. This was a great school, and Chelsea hoped that in a year Ainsley would enroll as a three-year-old in the preschool program. Every institution had its bureaucratic land mines.
But why did Chelsea seem to be stepping on every single one of them
today
?
At 4:00
P.M.
the entire faculty was summoned to the upper-grade campus for “a very important meeting.” Getting to Ryan’s game on time was going to be next to impossible, and Chelsea was already starting to feel it.
Guilt.
With a two-year-old daughter who saw her mother so little that she sometimes called her grandmother Mama, her heart had no more room for it.
She made a quick stop in the faculty restroom and checked herself in the mirror. Chelsea had the heart-shaped face of a classic beauty, but late nights with the law books had turned her into a real fan of concealer. She fixed her makeup and gave her hair ten seconds of attention. At her job interview a year ago it had been long and blond, but on the headmaster’s advice, she never wore it down on campus, and she’d colored it a slightly darker honey shade. Ryan said he liked it, but she still wasn’t sure.
She entered the conference room two minutes early and took the seat nearest the door. She was leaving at four-thirty, not a minute later. Only the truly important meetings at the academy were convened with no advance notice of the time or topic, no chance for the faculty to shape its collective thought into any form of meaningful opposition. But at this point, she didn’t care if the meeting was about the closing of the school. She couldn’t let Ryan down. Not again—and definitely not at the last ball game of the season. She was determined to get there on time.
Even if it killed her.
SEVEN-THIRTY WAS GAME TIME IN PAWTUCKET
.
The final home game of the PawSox season was a sellout, but the seats behind home plate that Ryan had scored for Chelsea and Ainsley were empty.
“Play ball!” cried the home-plate umpire.
The crowd cheered the PawSox players onto the field. Ivan was all business as he climbed atop the mound and started his warm-up pitches. Ryan and the other infielders scooped up practice ground balls and fired them to first base. The PawSox manager paced nervously in the dugout, chomping on his plug of chewing tobacco while checking his crumpled roster card. The sun had set, the lights were up, and the National Anthem had been sung. It was sixty-two degrees, with not a cloud in the raven sky, and a light breeze was blowing out over the left-field wall. The night was perfect for a ball game.
Where the heck are you, Chelsea?
Ryan thought as he settled into position. The PA system crackled with the introduction of the Mud Hens’ first batter. A wiry young man from Puerto Rico stepped up to the plate, crossed himself, kissed his gold crucifix, tugged at his crotch, spit in the dirt, and then glared at Ivan with contempt. Ivan wiped his brow into his sleeve and looked over at Ryan, who gave him a little nod for encouragement. The first two pitches popped like gunshots in the catcher’s mitt. A rumble of approval emerged from the crowd, and on the third pitch the batter chased after a knuckle curveball that he couldn’t have hit with a tennis racket. Gone in sixty seconds. The PawSox faithful cheered, and one of Ivan’s fans started the strikeout count by hanging a card with the letter
K
on the fence by the bullpen.
Ivan was unbeatable when he started out this strong. If Chelsea didn’t arrive soon, she’d miss the entire first inning.
Keep your head in the game, James
, Ryan told himself. But it was hugely disappointing. The final game of the season. The principal owner of the Red Sox in attendance. Ryan could feel the electricity in the air, the excitement of the fans. Ten thousand people had managed to arrive on time. How many of them were married to a player on the field who had dreamed of baseball since he was five years old and was now on the short list for the major leagues?
At the crack of the bat, a screaming line drive sizzled down the third-base line. Ryan went completely horizontal, diving to his right, and snagged it for the out.
“Attaboy, Ryan!” his manager shouted from the dugout.
Ryan dusted himself off and fired the ball off to the second baseman. Ivan gave him a look that said
Thanks for saving my ass
. Half the crowd gave him a standing ovation. The play was a defensive gem worthy of the ESPN highlight reel.
And Chelsea had missed it.
Two outs. The Mud Hens sent their third hitter to the plate, a big left-hander who rarely hit the ball to the left side of the field. Ryan shifted a few steps closer to the shortstop, then glanced over to the dugout to make sure the manager was happy with the defensive adjustment. The manager wasn’t looking at him and was instead talking on the telephone, which was odd. He used the phone only to communicate with the bullpen, which usually meant a change of pitchers. Surely they weren’t thinking of taking Ivan out of the game.
Ryan checked the seats behind home plate one more time. No Chelsea.
He glanced again into the dugout on the third-base side. The manager was still on the telephone. He was pacing now, but it wasn’t the thinking man’s long, deliberative walk from one end of the dugout to the other. These were spasmodic bursts, no more than two or three steps in one direction before he turned and marched back the other way. Clearly he was upset.
Ivan hurled the first pitch to the new batter. Ryan heard the pop but didn’t see the ball hit the mitt. His focus was elsewhere, his gaze shifting back and forth from the empty seats behind home plate to the PawSox dugout. His fingers tingled with a strange numbness. The familiar game noises—the jabbering of fans, the hawking of vendors, the stadium music—suddenly sounded foreign to him. Things didn’t seem to be moving at the right speed. He was picking up a very bad vibe.
The manager was still on the phone.
Chelsea’s and Ainsley’s seats were still empty.
Ryan knew his manager’s mannerisms well, and the old man didn’t appear to be upset. He seemed distraught. Finally, the phone call ended. The manager signaled the umpire for a time-out and called a player off the bench. After a moment of surprise, the kid, just two weeks out of Double-A ball, jumped up, grabbed his cap and mitt, and ran out of the dugout. He went straight to Ryan.
“Coach needs to see you,” he said, not looking Ryan in the eye.
Ryan knew this was no routine substitution, not with the owner of the Red Sox in the stadium to watch Ryan and the other players on his short list. Ivan stepped off the mound, confused. Ryan’s teammates on the field looked at one another and shrugged, and the wave of speculation carried over with equal force to the opposing team’s dugout. The fans, too, seemed baffled, and a few started booing the decision to pull Ryan from the game. The umpire behind home plate removed his mask and planted his hands on his hips, as if to say that someone owed him an explanation.
Ryan jogged to the dugout, slowly at first, then faster, reeled in by his manager’s seeming refusal—no, inability—to look at him. Finally, his gaze met Ryan’s, and the expression on his face was unlike any Ryan had ever seen before. His lips moved, but it was as if no words would come, and when this big bear of a man could hardly find the strength to put his arm around Ryan, it was painfully obvious that something terrible had happened.
“It’s bad, son,” was all the old man could bring himself to say.
RYAN RODE SHOTGUN AS THE TEAM CAR SPED TOWARD MEMORIAL
Hospital, the major trauma center in the area. There hadn’t even been time for him to retrieve his own phone and car keys from his locker. One of the PawSox trainers drove while Ryan tried to gather information on the cell phone he’d borrowed from him.
“Faster, you gotta go faster,” said Ryan.
They were already doing seventy in a forty-mile-per-hour zone. The trainer edged it up past seventy-five.
“Let me call you back,” Ryan told his father-in-law on the line. “I want to check with the hospital again.”
The only thing he knew for certain was that there had been an automobile accident, a serious one. Both Chelsea and Ainsley had been in the car, and both were alive when the ambulance had arrived at the hospital. The ER nurse had shared all this information in the previous phone conversation with Ryan just minutes earlier, and she had nothing new for him when he got her on the line again. She could only confirm what he already knew. He closed the flip phone.
“How much farther?” Ryan asked.
“Two minutes.”
“Make it one.”
Ninety seconds later the car screeched to a halt at Memorial’s emergency entrance. Ryan jumped out, the pneumatic doors parted, and he ran straight into ER pandemonium. A drug addict paced across the waiting area, arguing with the television set. An old man with an icepack on his head was mumbling about some kid who’d gotten away with his dog and his wallet. A homeless woman with mouth agape, and no teeth, slept in the chair beside him. Pawtucket wasn’t Newport, and while violent crime no longer riddled neighborhoods like Pleasant View and Woodlawn the way it had in the 1980s and ’90s, 30 percent of families with young kids here lived below the poverty line. The crowded ER waiting room was graphic testimony of the city’s continuing problems with crime, drugs, and general hard living.
Ryan threw a quick glance at the mob scene around the registration desk and kept running. He’d visited this same ER last year for his shoulder, so he didn’t need directions to the examination bays down the hall and just beyond the double set of doors.
“Sir!”
He tried to keep going, but the intake nurse practically tackled him.
“I need to see my wife and daughter! Where are they?”
The PawSox uniform left no doubt as to his identity. The nurse checked her clipboard. “Your wife is in surgery right now.”
“How’s Ainsley?”
“Your daughter is going to be fine,” she said in a voice that tried to calm him.
“I didn’t ask how she’s going to be. I said how
is
she.”
“Fortunately, your daughter was in the rear seat in a child safety restraint. Her injuries are minor.”
“Thank God.” Never before had Ryan felt such relief and terror simultaneously; he was afraid to ask the next question. “What happened to Chelsea?”
“Right now I think you need to be with your daughter.”
“What
happened
to Chelsea?” he said, completely unaware that he was shouting.
The nurse didn’t flinch. She was a pro. “Her injuries were more serious. As soon as we have any news from the OR, I will let you know.”
“I need to be with her,” he said as he tried to push past.
She took his elbow. “You can’t.”
“Which way is it?”
“Please, Mr. James. It’s a sterile environment.”
Ryan’s uniform was covered in red clay from his diving catch at third base. “I can scrub.”
“And then do what?” she said. “She’s anesthetized. Your wife won’t know you’re there.”
Ryan was torn, and for a moment he couldn’t move.
“Come see your little girl,” she said. “She’s getting the best of care, but I’m sure she’s scared. I can take you to her.”
The nurse was pushing all the right buttons, and Ryan decided to trust her. It was a maze of hallways to the pediatric ER, which gave Ryan a chance to call his father-in-law. Chelsea’s parents were still five minutes away. Ryan didn’t ask, but he presumed that difficulties with Babes—either in bringing him to the hospital or in trying to leave him behind—were slowing them down.
The sound of his baseball cleats on the tile floor pushed the moment into the surreal. An hour earlier he’d had nothing on his mind but PawSox and Mud Hens in the big game. Two hours from now he and Ivan might well have received a personal “welcome to the Red Sox” from the team’s principal owner. Sandwiched between those bookends were some very painful chapters, a few still being written: the way he’d doubted Chelsea’s promise to come, his anger at her for being late, and the crash he still knew nothing about, except that it had left his twenty-six-year-old wife fighting for her life on an operating table.
“Dada!”
Even though Ainsley had only a few dozen words in her still-growing vocabulary, that particular one always lifted Ryan’s spirits. She was standing at the bed rail as Ryan entered the room, her arms reaching for him from beneath a green hospital gown. He went to her and gathered her up, a little bundle in his arms.
She looked perfectly fine, and the pediatrician walked in and confirmed as much. The plan was to keep her in the hospital overnight just to make sure the crash hadn’t given her a concussion. It looked as though Ryan would be there at least that long for Chelsea anyway. The pediatrician excused herself and moved on to the next patient, making way for a nurse who came in to put fresh paper on the examination table. Ryan was seated in the rocking chair in the corner and holding Ainsley in his arms when a doctor wearing surgical scrubs appeared in the doorway.
“Mr. James?” he said.
Ryan looked up. “Yes?”
“I’m Dr. Weinstein. I’m the hospital’s chief surgeon.”
The chief surgeon. Ryan wasn’t sure if that was a good sign or a bad one. “Do you have any…is Chelsea going to be okay?”
He glanced at the nurse, then back at Ryan. “Could we talk alone?”
It was suddenly hard to breathe.
The nurse lifted Ainsley from Ryan’s arms, and he reluctantly let her go. Ainsley screamed as she was carried from the room, and the nurse made such a point of closing the door on the way out that Ryan wanted to shout right along with his little girl—
No, no, no!
The news was all over the surgeon’s face.
“I’m sorry,” the doctor said. “There was nothing we could do. She passed away on the operating table. I’m really very, very sorry.”
Ryan was listening, but it was as if his mind could process only a few words—
nothing…do…passed…sorry
—until a tsunami of emotional devastation washed over him, and he launched himself from the chair. His scream could only be described as primal, and in a blind fury he kicked the chair across the room. The doctor grabbed him. Ryan nearly collapsed in his arms; the tears came immediately.
“It’s all right,” said Dr. Weinstein. “It’s good to let it go. But you’re going to have to pull yourself together here. Not just for yourself.”
Ryan glanced through the little diamond-shaped window in the door. Ainsley was pummeling the nurse outside the room, trying to break free and get back to Dada. He stepped away from Dr. Weinstein and collected himself.
“When can I see Chelsea?”
“I recommend you give that a few minutes. When you’re ready.”
Ryan nodded. The door opened and Ainsley ran into the room, the nurse finally having lost control of her. The kid had her father’s strength and athleticism.
Ryan did a quick change of face and scooped her up. “There’s my big girl!”
She laid her head on his shoulder, threw her arms around his neck, and in a gesture that she had learned from Chelsea, gently patted Ryan on the back.
The doctor and nurse left the room.
“I wan’ Mama,” said Ainsley, her face buried in his big shoulder.
Ryan struggled to hold it together. He knew he would somehow have to find a way to live without Chelsea. But as he stood there alone in the quiet hospital room, clutching his daughter, trying not to let her see the tears streaming down his face, he wasn’t at all sure he could.
“Me, too,” he whispered.