Authors: Kristen Kehoe
“What’s that?” I ask and she smiles, reaching a finger out to touch my chin.
“Acceptance.”
I think of Jake and understand exactly what she’s talking about. The ache for him is so deep I feel like it’s a permanent part of who I am, and still it gets a little lighter when I think of him following his dream and becoming the man he’s always wanted to be. Standing with my arm around Sassy, watching my mother lying in her bed, I realize that life isn’t always fair and it isn’t always kind, but Jake gave me a glimpse of both of those every time he loved me, playfully, passionately, quietly. Those memories show me exactly what my mother can’t see, the reason my father wants to take her to dinner, the reason he’s always chosen her, right or wrong. And then I understand that love doesn’t always work the way it should, but when it does, it’s really quite beautiful.
Chapter Thirty-One
Jake
I grew up poor, living in a rundown trailer, hand me downs and five dollar repurposed clothing the only things that graced my closet. I got to play baseball because I threw hard enough and well enough that a teammate’s parents were always coming up with money for me to travel. When I got to ASU, I still remembered what it was like to be poor, I just wasn’t poor anymore and it eventually became that I got used to eating well, living well, and having my rent paid.
After a month in the minors, I can’t help but make the correlation between where I am now and my time before college, the bad food you eat because it’s cheaper and filling and you don’t have the time or money for anything more, not to mention anywhere to keep it. The few outfits you wash and carry with you are rolled into your duffel bag, the shady parts of town you find yourself in when you’re on the road because the team can’t afford anything more than the hourly rate hotel.
In college, my body was pushed and exercised and treated like that of a god. Trainers stretched and worked me, coaches spent one-on-one time with me every day, sometimes for an hour, sometimes for two or more, and my per diem or scholarship check covered enough that I had actual food, cooked in an actual kitchen, or at least purchased from a restaurant whose menu wasn’t pasted on the wall above the kitchen with the most expensive thing being a six-dollar-burger.
The minors are like growing up in the trailer park — everything just gets dustier and grimier the longer you’re there. The only difference with the minors is that even though we make a little over a thousand dollars a month, and some of us sleep two or three or four in a two room apartment, we’re all still happy, because we’re all still chasing rainbows and praying the pot of gold at the end really does exist. Hope’s a fucking bitch when she latches on to you and refuses to let you go.
I’ve learned to adapt in my twenty-two years, and the past two months have been no different, as I’ve gone from being a pampered scholarship athlete, back to a grunt worker that’s just trying to make a name for himself. I’m in Spokane, Washington, drafted by the Texas Rangers and now wearing the affiliate jersey for the Short A team, the Spokane Indians. Like the rest of the college players, my season will now only go June to September, while the rookie league and double and triple A leagues have been playing for months already.
Murph was drafted by the New York-Penn league and is playing somewhere in Maryland for the affiliate team to the Baltimore Os. We don’t get to play against each other, but I follow his stats on his team’s homepage and Twitter, and I assume his does the same as I get a text every now and then congratulating me on my strikeout count, which continues to rise.
Internet stalking appears to be the only thing second to baseball that I’m excelling at, as I’ve sunken low enough in my desire to see Blue that I’ve searched the media tirelessly, trying to find even the smallest glimpse of her. Like her ever disappearing keys, she’s hard to find, as she doesn’t have any of the regular Instagram, Facebook or Twitter accounts, but I did find relief after I found her salon’s Instagram, and then her friend A.J.’s, both affording me tiny glances of Cora. For a starving man, those small glimpses were like appetizers, teasing the taste on my tongue but never offering me enough sustenance to alleviate the gnawing hunger I feel. It’s been just shy of three months since I’ve seen her, and I’ve completely stopped trying to block the memory of her out like I did at the beginning.
After that night with Mia when I spilled everything, I stopped mentioning Cora and so did she. Whether she told Ryan to leave it alone or whether he sensed that was the best way to handle it I don’t know, but he never asked about her and I never offered any information. From then, my life was baseball, and so I threw myself into training with the gusto of a man whose life depended on every pitch. When the draft came Murph and I waited together, as he and the boys were knocked out in the regional qualifiers and ended their season before June. He went higher than I did by quite a few rounds, which wasn’t a shock as I wasn’t really on the front of anyone’s radar and had only simulated statistics to back up my performance, not seasonal ones. Murph was also awarded a signing bonus for going in the first round, whereas I was lucky to go at all.
But I went.
Sitting there, Murph on my left, Mia on the floor at his feet, I saw my phone ring at the same time that my name was called and for a second I couldn’t move. Murph’s none-too-gentle shove broke me out of my trance and I answered my agent, barely hearing a word. When it was all said and done, the first person I wanted to call was Blue, so I got shitfaced and passed out instead.
That was the first and last time I’ve been drunk, as once I started my training with the team I was too fucking tired to do more than go to training or a game and go home. Now, I’m in the second month of the season and I’m learning more than I ever thought possible. The Rangers’ organization was taken over by the great Nolan Ryan and he’s changing the way we view baseball from the bottom up. Unlike most teams, I pitch a live batting practice in between starts. I do a shit ton of short and long toss, and I run every day, since the captain of our ship is determined that we should have over a two hundred inning season, and so he’s giving us the stamina to do so. Since my elbow feels better than ever, and my strikeout count is starting to earn me some credit, I’m not complaining.
It appears the only thing training isn’t making better is the ache inside of me, the one that tells me something’s missing, and it’s nothing baseball is ever going to give me.
While I had actively avoided remembering anything about Cora and our time together after that first night in Arizona, it had taken only one night out with my teammates and countless offers from girls for me to crack and start searching the Internet one night.
I was four beers in and ready to call it a night when a redhead had set her sights on me. I’ve never been one to discriminate before — red, brown, blonde, purple, short, tall, skinny, curvy, small breasts, stacked — women were always appreciated for being women, never because of their hair color or one dimensional shape, yet, one look at the smoke show in front of me with pale skin, electric green eyes that could have been real or fake, and candy apple red hair that was most definitely enhanced, I couldn’t work up an ounce of attraction.
Being a man, and therefore an idiot, I had engaged with her longer than was wise, to prove to myself and everyone else that I still had it, that I could still feel, that I wasn’t going to be the guy who lost his shit because the love of his life wasn’t his anymore. Only, then she moved faster than me and her lips were on mine and her hands were tugging at my hair and after the initial shock that had frozen me, I came back to life and felt nothing. No spark, no twitch below the waist, no interest beyond getting the fuck out of there.
And when I did remove myself and set the startled viper aside, I had walked back to my shitty hotel room and started my metaphoric cutting; I Googled Cora Whitley. I got a notice about deactivation of accounts, but the need was too great to give up, and so I searched deeper, clicking on the images link until pictures of different Cora Whitleys filled the screen. I had scrolled for a little longer, and then I found them.
Old photos came up, ones that had my breath catching as I scrolled through them, ones where her hair was nearly white, her eyes clouded and dark and… vacant. I studied each of these photos in detail, looking at her clothes, her skin, her face, her posture, and in all of them I saw nothing of the strength and determination I had found in my siren. Instead, I saw moments on end of sadness and discontent, and it was almost enough to break me. But then the shots stopped, and I knew it must be around the time when she had deactivated her accounts and went into building a new version of herself. At odds, still craving the sight of her, I had tried another avenue and Googled her friends. When I finally found A.J.’s Instagram with a current shot of Cora, it was like a vise around my chest was released and I was able to breathe easily for the first time.
Her hair was down, free to spill over her shoulders, and her skin was golden, so I knew she’d been in the sun, most likely running, from the way her legs looked in the form fitting mini dress she was rocking. But it wasn’t just her gorgeous face and impressive legs that caught me — it was her expression. She was smiling at A.J., a sassy look as she worked at her station, cleaning up or setting up, but it wasn’t quite the smile she’d had when I last saw her. It was less, bright but not full, and in seeing it I pressed my hand to the screen and wondered if maybe my siren ached as much as me.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Cora
“Vascular Dementia. What’s that?”
I’m sitting with my father and the doctor as we discuss my mother’s prognosis and all of the possible side-effects and outcomes of the stroke she suffered. My father is mute, as silent today as he was yesterday and has been since he sank into the chair and cried. I’m taking point with the doctor, throwing my father small glances every now and then to see if he’s all right.
Understanding, Doctor Quo addresses me. “It’s what your mother was originally diagnosed with. Two years ago during a routine physical exam, it was discovered there were lapses in your mother’s memory. Further tests drew the conclusion that she had suffered what we call a TIA or mini stroke — a temporary clot that keeps oxygen from getting to certain parts of the brain. How many she suffered and over what period of time was never conclusively determined, but the best estimate was somewhere between five and eight in a one year period, which ultimately led to several larger ones in the past year.”
I’m silent and my breathing is rapid because I had no idea. I knew my mother had memory problems, but all research I’ve done has been for early onset dementia and Alzheimer’s because that’s what my father made it sound like. He never mentioned strokes, never mentioned the fact that these strokes were the precursor to everything she’s going through now. I listen as the doctor continues, the heavy feeling getting worse as he explains that stressful situations exacerbate the dementia and increase the possibility of a stroke because they spike the blood pressure and anxiety.
I think back over the past few months, all the way back to the day I turned fourteen and my mother found me rolling around on the couch with one of her country club waiters, after which I promptly did it again the next night because she’d thrown a tantrum and embarrassed me as she screamed at the man, who was really no more than a boy, to get out. Other moments in our relationship crash into me until I’m buried under bad memories and hateful choices, early ones which were made in the hopes of getting her attention and then later on, the choices that were made in order to prove I didn’t need her attention or anything else she had to offer. All the way up to January, when I started visiting her once a week, demanding in my own way that she forgive me and let me try and make a relationship with her.
And then to yesterday, when I demanded that she listen to me, hear me when I told her that she wasn’t a burden, that Dad loved her more than anything, that the only thing that hurt worse than her disease was her lack of desire to live, to love anymore. To the moment when I told her to think of him if she couldn’t think of herself, to think of him and everything he would do and had done for her just to keep her with him. I demanded she let him take care of her, and I demanded she show she loved him as much as he loved her by trying to live again, and then her brain malfunctioned and she seized and fell and all I could do was demand she wake up and stay with me. Always fucking demanding.
The doctor finishes, handing me a pamphlet and some instructions for further check-ups and briefly explains what will happen as she wakes up, what they’re doing now as they monitor her heart and brain waves, but I barely hear him as I stand and walk out, so lost in my own pain and grief and regret that I have to pause and sit down in the chairs a few feet outside of his door. When I feel someone sit next to me, I look up into the eyes of my father, eyes that are finally alive for the first time since we got here. He must understand what I’m thinking, must know exactly what’s going through my head, because he grabs my hand and holds it, squeezing so tightly that I want to wince in pain. But I don’t, I just stare at him and wonder if I can really take the blame for my mother lying in the next room, unconscious and hooked up to tubes.
“It’s not your fault,” he says and I just continue to stare, my heart raging, my breath heaving. “It’s not your fault,” he says again. “She wanted you here. She
needed
you here. We all did.”
“Did you?” I ask him. “Or did I need more from her than she had to give, like always? Did I push her here, Dad? Did I do this to her?”
He shakes his head and brings me into his chest without hesitation for the first time in years, and somehow that makes the pain worse. “No, Cora, you didn’t bring her here. You brought us back together, for just a little bit. And it’s been wonderful.”
Tears gather but I don’t shed them. Instead, I let my father hug me and try to think of my prayer again, but the words don’t come. Instead, all I can feel is grief, and it’s consuming.
~
They call it a trigger moment because it’s a loaded gun waiting to go off. It doesn’t matter what it is — the national debt, a hang nail, a bad manicure, a really bad fucking day — anything can set an addict off and spiraling toward relapse, and though I’ve fought long and hard to not be a part of that group, when I leave the hospital after almost seventy-two hours by my mother’s side watching her sleep and then wake up disoriented and devastated, I don’t fucking care about being an addict or a recovering addict or a goddamn statistic. I care that it motherfucking hurts way down deep, an ache so strong and poignant that all I can think about is making it go away.
I stop by my apartment, but one step inside shows me that it’s not the peaceful safe haven I want it to be. It’s full of memories and feelings, full of things I don’t want or need when I’m already so filled with everything else, so instead of changing and going for a run like I wanted to ten minutes ago, I do the only thing I can think of to stop feeling: I pull out my sexiest outfit, a short pencil skirt in black sequins and a barely-there top, and I shower and primp, deleting anything from my brain that goes beyond what I look like. Soon, the familiar buzz of going out is pumping through my veins, the feeling intense enough that I pause and grab my phone, texting A.J. and letting her know where I’ll be. She texts me back, and then she calls when I don’t answer her, but I ignore her.
Somewhere deep inside I know I’m asking her for help at the same time I’m pushing her away, but I can’t concentrate on that or anything else right now. Instead, all I can do is focus on my lashes and my hair, my outfit that is anything but pure, and the feel of freedom that comes with checking out.