RYAN PICKED UP AINSLEY AFTER SCHOOL AND TOOK HER TO SEE
the Emerald Necklace. At least that was the promise.
“We’re here,” said Ryan.
“Where’s the necklace?” said Ainsley.
“You’re standing on it.”
Boston’s Emerald Necklace consists of an eleven-hundred-acre chain of nine parks linked by parkways and waterways. Considered a shining (green) example of Frederick Law Olmsted’s genius, it was designed to connect Boston Common, scene of everything from Colonial era hangings to hourly duck crossings, to Olmsted’s crown jewel “in the country,” Franklin Park.
Ainsley wasn’t impressed by Ryan’s history lesson in landscape architecture.
“You owe me a green necklace, Daddy.”
Ryan smiled. Good thing he hadn’t promised to show her the Green Monster. He’d owe her a ballpark.
The Public Garden was across the street from the Common, and together they formed the northern terminus of the seven-mile chain of parks in the necklace. The area west of Charles Street was once a salt marsh, so the nation’s first botanical garden came with tons of fill and an equal amount of planning. The manicured look didn’t exactly conjure up memories of Texas rodeos and dusty cattle drives on the plains, but it was still one of Ryan’s favorite places. The summer before Chelsea died they had brought Ainsley here, and Ryan would never forget the way their little girl giggled herself silly on the famous swan-boat ride.
It was also convenient to the Ritz-Carlton Residences, where the newest Red Sox star enjoyed the penthouse lifestyle.
“Uncle Ivan!” Ainsley shouted as soon as she spotted him, running over.
Ivan scooped her up and whirled her around. “How you doin’, munchkin?”
“I can’t believe you’re here!” she squealed.
Ryan gave him a quick wink to keep the game going. Ryan had set up the “chance” encounter, but he wanted it to be a surprise for Ainsley.
“What luck,” said Ivan. “How weird is this?”
Ivan’s wife and young son were with him, and Ryan greeted them warmly. Ivan had been a true ladies’ man when he and Ryan had played ball together, but he had settled down with a Boston Brahmin who astounded her blue-blooded family by marrying a first-generation Hispanic American to become Jacqueline Ward Lopez.
Jacqueline said, “I’m going to take the kids to see the swans.”
Before Ryan could say, “I’ll come with you,” Ivan said, “You go ahead.”
Ivan seemed determined to get his best friend alone, so Ryan braced himself for a lecture as the two men continued their walk around the pond.
“I got a call from your housekeeper,” said Ivan. “She tells me she found you passed out drunk in the living room.”
“I wasn’t drunk. I took a sleeping pill at four
A.M.
”
“If you’re going to take the meds, take them at bedtime, fool.”
“I know. I tell myself that I can beat this stupid insomnia without drugs, and then before I know it, it’s one o’clock in the morning and too late to take a pill. Then it’s four o’clock, and I can’t stand it anymore, so I take one. Then I’m screwed.”
At the bend in the path, they stopped at the concession cart for frozen lemonade. September weather in Boston could mean cold drinks or hot chocolate. Today was one of those in-between days when you could go either way.
“Here’s something for your radio show,” said Ivan. “My agent brought me another six-figure offer this week.”
“For what?”
“Advertising. On my crotch.”
“Right,” said Ryan, scoffing.
Ivan swallowed a heaping spoonful of the slushy lemonade. “It’s totally legit, dude. You remember George Brett?”
“Only one of the greatest third basemen to play the game.”
“Good-looking guy, too, which is why a market research group decided to show his photo to a group of women. They focused on his face. Then they showed the same picture to a group of men. Guess what they focused on.”
“The group of women?”
“No. The men actually split their time between his face and his crotch.”
“So naturally your agent put your crotch up for sale.”
“Well, we got an offer.”
“But do you really want a bunch of men looking at your crotch?”
“That’s the thing: it’s got nothing to do with me. The same study showed that the male crotch fixation was just as strong with pictures from the American Kennel Club as it was with the
Sports Illustrated
swimsuit issue. Men just can’t help it.”
A woman jogged past them with her golden retriever on a leash. Ryan averted his eyes, fearful of putting Ivan’s crotch theory to the test.
They crossed Charles Street and entered the historic Common, where everything seemed to be marked by a plaque—trees, benches, flower beds, statues, monuments, walkways. Bostonians sure loved signs. Ryan’s favorite was just up Beacon Street, right in front of the state legislature:
GENERAL HOOKER ENTRANCE
. Ryan thought that every state capitol should have one; politicians got into so much trouble whenever they were too specific about that sort of thing.
“Sorry, dude!” shouted a passing skateboarder, who barely missed Ryan.
A line of death-defying teenagers was surfing on wheels down the paved hill at the very southern end of Beacon Hill. Ivan led Ryan out of harm’s way toward the baseball diamonds, and they stopped at the chain-link fence behind home plate. A man was on the field with his teenage daughter, and Ryan suddenly felt an undeniable pang. The man was on the pitcher’s mound wearing a Red Sox jersey with Ivan’s number on the back. A five-gallon bucket of baseballs was right behind him. His daughter stood strong in the batter’s box, smacking everything that came close to the strike zone.
“Pretty good hitter,” said Ivan.
Ryan didn’t answer. He had a bad feeling about the direction of this conversation.
Ivan said, “How about I throw you a few pitches?”
“I don’t think so,” said Ryan.
As if on cue, Ivan’s wife showed up with the kids.
“Are you and Uncle Ivan going to play baseball?” asked Ainsley. She had an ice-cream cone in her hand and chocolate smeared all over her lips.
“Not today,” Ryan told her.
She licked her ice cream. “Why not?”
“Yeah,” said Ivan, “why not?”
Ainsley put her head against Ryan’s hip. “Daddy, I’ve never seen you play baseball.”
That hit Ryan hard. It wasn’t technically true—Ainsley had seen him play. She just didn’t remember the old Ryan James, from before Chelsea died. Thankfully, she also had no memory of the horrible year afterward, which had marked the end of his career.
Ivan’s wife chimed in. “Come on, Ryan. What can it hurt?”
“Please
, Daddy?”
He couldn’t say no to Ainsley.
“You’re lucky I don’t kick you in the advertising,” he told Ivan. “Let’s get this over with.”
Ivan smiled and walked out to the mound. The girl’s father immediately recognized the newest Red Sox star, to whom he was more than happy to lend his equipment in exchange for Ivan’s signature on a ball, a bat, a mitt, and a cap.
“Batter up,” said Ivan.
Ryan stepped into the box, tapped the plate with his bat, and assumed his stance. Ivan went into his windup and threw the first pitch at batting-practice speed. Ryan whiffed.
“That was ugly, dude,” said Ivan.
“The bat’s too small.”
The girl’s father had a bigger bat in his equipment bag. It was the one Ivan had signed, but he lent it to Ryan in exchange for a signed jersey to be delivered later.
“No more excuses,” said Ivan.
He hurled another pitch. Ryan connected, and Ivan had to hop over a hot ground ball that sizzled past his ankles.
“Base hit,” said Ryan, and it actually felt good.
“No more Mr. Nice Guy,” said Ivan.
His next pitch was a legitimate major-league fastball. Ryan fouled it off. He readied for the next pitch, and out of the corner of his eye he noticed that a crowd was starting to gather. Obviously word was spreading throughout the park that Ivan Lopez, the Boston Red Sox sensation, was pitching to “some guy” over on the north diamond. Ryan foul-tipped another fastball.
“Come on, Daddy. You can do it!”
Ryan dug in. Up against a major-league pitcher, his daughter cheering him on—he was almost standing too close to an evaporated dream. Ivan went into his windup. Ryan guessed curveball. And he was right.
A screaming line drive went deep into the gap in left center field.
“Double,” said Ryan.
Ivan smiled, then pointed at Ryan as if to warn him. He went back to the fastball, and Ryan creamed it. Dead center field.
“Shit, man,” said someone behind the batting cage. “That one was all the way into the bleachers in Fenway.”
The crowd of onlookers was growing. A group of kids started a chant: “Ivan, Ivan!” The Red Sox ace reared back and threw some serious heat.
The crack of the bat silenced the Ivan fans. Ryan sent the ball on a towering ride to left field. Ivan turned to watch it go—and go, and go.
“Wow!” said Ainsley.
“That one would have cleared the Green Monster,” Ryan heard someone say.
Ivan was no longer smiling. Ryan knew that his friend was too much of a competitor not to be angry. This only spurred Ryan on. Ivan dug another ball out of the bucket, and then another, hurling pitch after pitch at his old teammate. Kids lined up in the outfield to flag fly balls, but Ryan was hitting them well over their heads. One kid was beyond the left field fence, all the way in the Central Burial Ground, the historic old cemetery on the Boylston Street side of the Common. Ivan was working up a sweat, and Ryan continued to knock the cover off the ball. They kept at it until the bucket of balls was empty.
Ivan stood on the mound with his hands on his hips. “That’s it, man.”
For the first time in a long time, Ryan had a baseball bat in his hands and a huge smile on his face.
Kids swarmed onto the field. Ivan took a few minutes to sign hats, T-shirts, arms, legs, and tennis shoes. Ryan gave the bat back to its owner and went over to Ainsley. She leaped into his arms and hugged him around his neck.
“You should play baseball like Uncle Ivan,” she said.
“Nah, that’s not what I do.” Ryan turned to give her a little twirl in the air, but he almost stepped on a little boy who had come up behind him.
The boy looked up and said, “Can I have your autograph?”
Ryan put Ainsley down. “You can,” he told the boy. “But I’m not a baseball player.”
“Yes, you are,” said Ivan, joining them.
Ryan turned to disagree, but Ivan’s dead-serious expression silenced him.
Ivan said, “You need to get back in the game.”
“Yeah, Daddy. You’re good!”
Ryan drew a breath. This whole thing was beginning to feel like an ambush. “We need to go. Your Uncle Ivan has a game tonight.”
“I’m in no hurry. I don’t pitch again till Saturday.”
“Well, we have to go,” said Ryan.
“Why?” said Ainsley.
“Yeah, why?” said Ivan.
“Because we
have
to,” said Ryan. He picked up Ainsley and started to walk away, but Ivan stepped in his path.
“I want you to think about coming back.”
Ryan suddenly felt the weight of the week’s events—the three-year anniversary, the anonymous tip, the relapse into insomnia. Swinging a bat for the first time in years was tough enough, and watching the deepest home run roll all the way to a cemetery hadn’t helped matters. It was all too claustrophobic.
“You need to get out of my way,” said Ryan.
“Just think about it.”
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because I
can’t
. Now will you get out of the way?” he said, his tone harsh.
Ivan stood there, his expression showing confusion, anger, and disappointment. “Fine. Go.”
With Ainsley in his arms, Ryan made a beeline for the path toward Frog Pond.
“Why do we have to go?” said Ainsley.
“We’ll talk about it later.”
They were almost home free when he heard someone in the crowd ask, “Who is that guy?”
Ivan answered in a voice loud enough for Ryan to hear: “That, ladies and gentlemen, is a major-league Hall of Fame quitter.”
Ryan stopped cold. The inner voice of reason told him to keep going, but he was overpowered by a sudden surge of painful memories and a strange mix of emotions, not the least of which was anger. He put Ainsley down on the jogging path and told her to wait there. Then he walked back to Ivan, invaded his personal space, and looked him squarely in the eye.
“Don’t you ever call me that again. Not in front of my daughter.”
“What’re you gonna do about it?”
The anger swelled, and only the fact that they were surrounded by children prevented Ryan’s fist from flying. He turned and went back to Ainsley.
“Are you and Uncle Ivan fighting?” she said as he picked her up again.
“Let’s go,” he said.
As they started down the path, he heard Ivan call to him.
“I wasn’t holding back,” said Ivan.
Ryan kept walking.
Ivan shouted louder. “That was a ninety-mile-an-hour fastball I threw, and you hit it four hundred feet.”
Ryan didn’t answer.
“You still got it, man. You hear me? You still got it.”
Ryan tried not to listen. The urge to get away was overwhelming. He walked faster, almost running now. Mercifully, Ainsley somehow sensed that this was not the time to talk. The anger was giving way to regret and confusion. Maybe Ivan was right; maybe he did still have it. But that didn’t matter, he told himself. Irrational as it was, baseball was at the core of Ryan’s guilt over Chelsea’s death.
“Daddy, you’re hurting me.”
“What?” he asked, still hurrying down the path.
“You’re holding me too tight.”
“Sorry, sweetheart.”
He eased up—but only a tiny bit, because Ryan’s heart and mind were in complete accord: it was impossible to hold on to Ainsley too tight.
EMMA ARRIVED AT TOLL GATE HIGH SCHOOL IN WARWICK AROUND
seven o’clock that evening. All two hundred seats for the first of five Senate debates were reserved, but Emma had enough pull to snag one at the last minute. The fact that Brandon Lomax was her old boss had plenty to do with it, and it seemed all the more meaningful that Warwick was just a few miles from Block Island Sound, where she and Jenny had spent countless weekends on the Lomax family sailing boat.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” said the moderator, his voice filling the auditorium, “welcome to the first televised debate between the candidates for the United States Senate. To my right is the incumbent, Senator Shelby Broadhouse. To my left is Mr. Brandon Lomax…”
Emma’s gaze tracked the shift of the television cameras. The lights were up, the audience was utterly silent, and the tension was palpable. Two candidates dressed in dark blue suits stood at wooden lecterns, the image of the U.S. Capitol projected on the blue backdrop behind them with an American flag at each side of the stage.
Silver-haired and movie-star handsome, Rhode Island’s two-term former attorney general stood tall—a man on the rise. The most recent WPRI-TV poll showed Lomax in the lead, but it was only September, and things can change quickly in politics. As the candidates readied to square off in their first debate, Emma realized how potentially explosive the latest anonymous tip was. Public outcry to find the man who’d run Chelsea James off the road had long ago subsided, but it wouldn’t take much for the press to whip up a new frenzy about the front-running Senate candidate who got drunk and killed the star baseball player’s pretty wife while she was driving to the big game.
Talk about breathing life into a cold case.
The first forty minutes went the way of most political debates, with the exchanges between candidates slowly but steadily devolving from intelligent discussion of the issues toward the more tried-and-true tactics of mutual assured destruction through all-out mudslinging. Then came the bomb—or at least the fireworks.
“I do not raise this issue lightly,” said Broadhouse, as if character assassination were an issue. “But any man who uses his power and influence to avoid a DUI charge is simply not fit to be an elected senator from the state of Rhode Island.”
Emma went cold. She thought that she alone knew that the tipster had named Brandon Lomax. She had no intention of hiding any legitimate lead in the investigation, but it would have been irresponsible to go public with an anonymous tip before the attorney general’s office determined that it was indeed legitimate and not merely a vicious campaign smear tactic.
Lomax kept his composure, and Emma watched his expression closely as he spoke.
“Senator, I believe the incident you are mischaracterizing occurred some twenty-two years ago.”
Twenty-two?
Emma was even more confused.
Lomax continued, “I was cited for drinking a beer on the beach in Florida. Through some computer glitch it ended up on my Rhode Island record as driving while intoxicated. I did not pull any favors. I simply pursued my rights to clear my name and eliminate a bureaucratic mistake from my record. End of story.”
Emma felt relief—until the moderator interjected: “Having said that, you
have
spoken publicly about a time in your life when alcohol became a problem.”
“Yes,” said Lomax. “I’m not proud of that, but I am proud of the support I received from my family and friends who helped to put that chapter behind me many years ago. Senator Broadhouse knows what I’ve overcome. He knows the truth. The truth is that I have not had a drink stronger than root beer in over fifteen years. Coincidentally, it has been at least that long since Senator Broadhouse was honest with the people of Rhode Island.”
The rules prohibited applause, but Lomax’s barb drew a standing ovation. It was way overdone, a well-choreographed stunt by his supporters. Emma didn’t join in, but she did rise up from her seat. As the noise swelled, she squeezed her way out to the side aisle and broke for the exit.
Emma had gone to the debate intending to talk with the candidate afterward, but that would have to wait. Now she felt the need to get out, to get away. Getting a tip naming Lomax as the drunk driver was distressing enough. Watching the senator dredge up his past battle with alcoholism doubled the pain. But what had pushed her over the edge was Lomax himself. She had heard him say that he hadn’t had a drink in over fifteen years. And she knew that was a lie. A barefaced lie.
Emma had firsthand knowledge of his brief but dangerous relapse, and it had nothing to do with the recent anonymous tip. Or maybe it had
everything
to do with it. Emma had smelled alcohol on his breath at the office. On more than one occasion.
Three years ago.