What Hearts (9 page)

She thought, liked it, nodded. “Okay.” She smiled. “I'm your defensive coach. What do I do?”

He had a feeling she could be taught to toss the ball up and hit grounders to him, certainly more easily than she could be taught to pitch. He was right. In a few minutes she had learned to toss it, grip the bat, wait for the ball to come down, and chop at it with a short stroke. He moved out to the shortstop spot, and for almost an hour she pounded it at him, slow, high-bouncing balls sprayed all over the infield. It was actually wonderful: after a dozen grounders he was breathless and sweaty and fully stretched. It was plainly wonderful
for his mother, too, though she had apparently decided to play it cool. She was all business as she hit the ball, dropped the bat, crouched with her hands apart in front of her, and clapped them over the soft rollers he sent back to her after making his catch. There was no more “Hooray!” and self-celebration: she made it clear this was a natural thing now, no big deal. Nevertheless, it was just as clear they were supposed' to be having fun and they were. The next day he did not wait for her to come to his room; he got the equipment and stood at her bedroom door while she tied her sneakers.

Within a few days she was able to pop little line drives at him. From there she moved easily into short fly balls. Before long, he was getting all the defensive work he could wish for. She had a good instinct for mixing up her hits, moving him around, making him go back to his left and then drawing him into a charge to his right. Her grounders got trickier; she could smash them on a lower trajectory now, or squib them with English so they trickled away from him if he got lazy and waited on one knee
instead of running forward. The better she got, the less serious she pretended to be; the more she yanked him around, the more she chattered and laughed. He laughed too, even, sometimes, in the middle of a lunging catch that required all his reach and concentration. Every ball she hit had wit behind it. He got the joke as he made the play.

The tryouts approached; soon they arrived at the Friday before the Sunday when he would report, alone, to the municipal park at eight in the morning. Two more days! He was excited; he leaned toward the date with confidence that his chance to show something unexpected was at hand. Two days! Still, he tried to focus on the remaining practices. His workouts with his mother had gotten longer, so the two of them took breaks in the middle and sat for ten minutes by a creek that ran along one side of the field. On this Friday the weather was hot. Before sitting, he took off his shirt.

Squinting at the water, he saw his mother stare at him, look away, then stare again. He looked at her. Her eyes were on his torso. He looked down. There, in the ribs beneath his
left arm, was the baseball-sized bruise he had carried for two weeks. It was an old bruise by now, greenish and blotchy, with one weird feature: the raised stitches of the ball had left two perfect curved marks of a deeper bruise, exact in their replication of the tiny bird-feet pattern, purple and geometric. The mark held no horror for Asa; indeed, he had quickly come to regard it as a fascinating study in the quirkiness of skin tissue, noting each change in color and texture. He checked it coolly each morning, then forgot about it. Following his mother's eyes now, he realized it was an ugly thing. He pretended to shiver, said, “Actually, it's a little breezy,” and put his shirt back on.

His mother was looking him in the eye now. He did not know what to say, so he shrugged. She did not let him off with that. He said, “No big deal, you know?”

“Oh sure,” she said. “Of course not.” She held his eyes for a moment longer; he had to say something, so he said, “It's, like, just something guys don't mind.” He grinned, gave himself a smack right on the bruise. She winced but he didn't. “See?” he said. “Doesn't hurt.”
He chuckled, shook his head, smiled at the creek. In his peripheral vision he saw her continue to stare at him. It was unnerving. So, without really intending to, he began to talk. He had thought he might just say a couple of reassuring things about his relationship with Dave, but before he knew it, he had drifted into deeper waters. He found himself defending his stepfather rather cleverly, though his mother had not charged him with anything. It must be
very
difficult being a stepfather, he said; especially if you married the woman you had loved long ago and now here she was at last—but this time she had a
kid
with her! Asa joked about the terrible inconvenience of this—how the kid must get in the way, change everything; he did a cute job of imitating the frustration of the adults, He chuckled at; his own wit; his mother looked at the creek.

As he listened to himself chatter, Asa knew he was not pleading a trumped-up defense of Dave just to soothe his mother's anguish. He was pleading because he knew that despite Dave's roughness, the man was mostly trying to do strong, decent, difficult things with his
stepson and his wife. Especially his wife. Asa was aware that
he
was not the main challenge in Dave's life: He had witnessed this marriage for years now. His head whirled sometimes with a sense of the history of these two people, fading back into the past, beyond his conscious understanding. But he did understand a great deal, really; at certain moments he knew he was in the presence of something big. It was true that much of the time this big, sweet force couldn't be easily perceived beneath the shadows of Dave's tyranny and his mother's torment. But sometimes it did shine, even from Dave. Asa had watched Dave coax her, without a trace of impatience, out of several of the fits of despair to which she so often seemed doomed—fits that, left unchecked, took over her life in a matter of hours. Twice in the previous year she had spun so quickly into her own darkness that Dave had handed her over to the state hospital at Butner, for nearly a month each time. Coaxing her out early was work that required a strength and self-assurance Asa knew he could not approach—but he could readily admire it in Dave. At other times he
had watched Dave gently, teasingly build long, slow jokes from sly references to this and that old business from their life, as they drove along in the car for hours—jokes that accumulated power as they tickled deeper and deeper, drawing her up through perfectly paced stages of amusement and laughter until she reached a reckless, weeping hilarity that left her spread-eagled over the car seat shaking, sniffling, wailing. During these crescendos Dave simply watched the road and smiled.

So now, filled with this urgent sympathy, Asa went on babbling to his mom about how difficult being a stepfather must be. And it wasn't just difficult being a stepfather in general. It must be
really
tough being
his
stepfather—Asa's. He was, he knew, a very weird kid. He said this lightly, with a wry shake of the head and a rueful smile,
Oh, that Asa
. It was an expression he had often inspired—with a less kindly humor to it—in his stepfather.

His mother surprised him by wheeling around in a sudden fury. “What is this?” she sputtered. “What is supposed to be so weird about
you
, Asa?”

Her flare burned off his pretense of light-heartedness. But he had started something, so he plugged on, without playacting now. “Well,” he said, “you know. I'm
—different
. I mean—here we are in the South and Dave has this big family and all the kids are normal Southern kids. They go to church all the time, they take it very easy, they don't worry about much.
Great
sense of humor—tease a lot, but it's because they like you, you know. That's the way Dave was when he was a kid, I know, and that's the way he
likes
kids. That's what kids
are
, to him. But I'm different. I care too much about things they don't even notice. Stupid things I know don't really matter, really. Like, I mind that they crease my comic books. When they come over, they come in, all friendly, and I really like them, I like my cousins—I wish
I
was that friendly all the time—and they plop down and yank out a bunch of my comics. That's okay. I can put them back in order. But they
fold
them, fold the covers back, sometimes they wad them up and put them in their back pockets to go down and eat. It's dumb to care so much about it, I
know, but—I try to keep them land of neat. I take care of them, is all. But I know it doesn't matter. What matters is that we are all cousins, we are all family. You're not supposed to let junk like that—like stupid comic books—come in the way of your love of your family. But I can't help it—before the love comes on, I start worrying about my comics, and I hate doing it, and Dave is right.”

“Right? What does he say that is right?”

Asa had not planned on this, but now he was nervous and upset and he couldn't seem to stop. He tried to back off. “Oh, nothing. I mean, he's
right
. He's just trying to help me.”

“What does he say?”

“He lets me know I'm being sort of a nervous finicky guy. Like maybe I like
things
better than
people
, you know? And that's wrong, I know it is. So I ought to be different. It
is
better to be land of loose and easy about stuff.”

“Oh yes,” she said. “Like Dave. He's very loose and easy about stuff, isn't he? That's probably how you got that bruise.”

Asa shut up and plucked grass. His mother
watched him for a minute, then stared back out across the creek. He snuck a look at her; she wasn't crying or anything, at least. After a few minutes he asked if they could resume their practice.

She was grave for the rest of their workout. On the way home, silence waited between them. Then she said, “I'm very sorry, Asa.”

He pretended not to know what she was talking about. A few minutes later she added, “It's no good.”

“No, don't,” he said. He had to say
something
. “It's fine.” He gave her a pretty good smile. Then he took her hand, and they held hands all the way home.

 

In the middle of the night he woke up to find Dave shaking him. He smelled coffee, but it was too dark for morning and he could feel he hadn't been asleep long enough.

“Wake up,” said Dave. “I need your help. We have to get some coffee in her.” Then he ran from the room. Asa pushed his covers away and followed him downstairs.

Dave, in pajama bottoms, was in the
kitchen pouring coffee into a mug. “Too hot,” he said. “Ice.” He yanked open the freezer and pulled out an ice tray and smacked it very hard against the edge of the counter. Chips of ice sprayed all over. He picked a few off the counter and put them in the coffee, then said, “Come on,” and walked past Asa, leaving the freezer door open.

They went into the bedroom. The light was on. His mother lay diagonally across their bed, her arms at her sides; to Asa she looked strangely heavy and still, like a slab of wet clay. His throat went cold. “Is she—”

“She's—asleep,” said Dave, giving him a quick look. He was on the far side of the bed, at her head. “Come here. We've got to get some coffee in her.” He was flustered; it gave him an odd gentleness. “Do you want to hold her head or pour?”

“I'll hold her head.” Asa went around and lifted his mother behind the neck. Dave held the mug up to her mouth and poured some coffee in. A little ran out of the corners of her mouth onto the sheets; the rest seemed to vanish until she coughed and spewed it.

“More,” said Dave. This time her throat executed a kind of swallow.

Asa's arms were trembling; he was glad, actually. He knew he was in the middle of something that ought to be making him frantic, and instead he felt all cool and easy. The trembling showed he felt
something
, he guessed. “Why is she so asleep?” he asked.

Most of the coffee was in. Dave looked down into her throat, frowning. “Okay,” he said. “Lie her back down.”

Asa resisted the temptation to correct Dave's
lie
to
lay
; instead he said, “Maybe we should sit her up.”

Dave looked at him. “Right,” he said. He jammed pillows against the headboard of the bed, and they pushed her against them. Her head fell forward, and Dave pushed it back until the pillows held it up. Her head didn't seem to care. She was out. The only thing about her that moved was her lower lip, which pulled in a bit whenever she sucked a raggedy breath.

“Why is she so asleep?” Asa asked again.

Dave ran his fingers through his hair. “You want some coffee too? I got to have some too.”

Asa followed him into the kitchen. “If you don't tell me, I'm calling an ambulance,” he said.

Dave was pouring coffee into the same mug. He turned as he poured. “No,” he said, far more reasonably than Asa expected. “I mean, we don't need the ambulance. She's all right. Really. Just sleepy.” He slurped some of the coffee and winced at the heat.

“Why is she so sleepy? Why do we have to wake her?”

Dave watched him over the edge of the mug as he took another, longer swallow. “Well, Sport,” he said, with a tone almost cheery, “she kind of goofed. She had a headache, and she went into the bathroom in the middle of the night, and she took what she thought was an aspirin. But it was a sleeping pill. They look the same.” He shrugged and lifted the mug.

“One sleeping pill?” Asa said.

Dave paused and considered, the mug an inch from his mouth. “Two,” he said, and drank.

Asa went back into his mother's room. She had slumped sideways. The friction of the skin of her left cheek against the wooden headboard
was all that held her up from lying down again; the pressure pulled her lip up above her gum on that side and opened her left eye. Asa looked at the eye. Nothing but white was showing.

He straightened her, and went into the bathroom. In the medicine cabinet there was nothing but shaving stuff and toothpaste. He looked under the sink. The wastebasket was on its side and a few wads of tissue lay near it. There was a brown prescription bottle upright on the floor there. Asa picked it up and read the name of the medicine: Seconal. Inside he found a single red, oval pill. There was no aspirin or aspirin bottle anywhere.