CHAPTER 48
“You didn’t have to stay for me, Mattie.” My mom rests beside me with her legs elevated to prevent swelling.
I’ve always been proud of my sister for going back and finishing school after Leila was born, but I’ve never been so grateful for my sister the nurse. I resist the temptation to ask my mom if she’s comfortable for what would probably be the ten thousandth time and lean in to squeeze her hand instead.
“And miss watching this game with you? Never.”
“And miss watching Sierra for three hours straight, is more like it,” my sister says from the loveseat she shares with Oliver.
He gives me an odd look; I wonder whether I’ve lost my ability to read him or never could read him half so well as I thought. I shrug because it doesn’t matter. Not anymore.
Whatever’s happening on my face makes his expression soften. He dips his chin and shrugs, and I’m not sure what any of it means, except that it’s time for us to finally be friends.
“Don’t mess things up with her, Tito.” My niece joins in the ribbing. As much as I miss Sierra, I love being with my family. I love being here instead of worrying about being a bad uncle, a bad brother, a bad son. “Do you have any idea how cool I’ll be if I get to go to college telling people about my tita, Sierra freaking Ramirez?”
“Language!” my mother and sister say in unison.
“Uh, almost as cool as telling people about your tito, Mateo freaking Reyes?” I retort, acting affronted at being dismissed for someone shiny and new.
I don’t correct the other part though. The part about Sierra becoming a part of our family.
“You’re lucky I can’t reach my slippers like this,” my mother tells me with all the threat she can manage when she’s high on alternative pain management in the form of my sister’s brownies.
The seventh inning stretch always goes long in this stadium. Usually, I don’t care because I’m not watching other games at all unless it’s to analyze the competition. Usually, I’m not watching the woman I’m falling for so quickly it’s terrifying pitch the game of her life against the very team that made her doubt herself so badly in the first place. Thankfully my family has been entrenched in baseball long enough not to say anything about the fact that my Sierra is going into her seventh inning, and … I don’t even want to think the rest. I am not going to be the one to screw up her streak.
I’m pretty sure I start holding my breath the second Sierra makes her seventh trip out to the mound. Something is off. I don’t know what, and I don’t know how I know, but something isn’t right as she chalks up and waits for Williams to make the pitch call. She doesn’t shake her head. Doesn’t acknowledge his call in any way, which is uncommon but not entirely a surprise for the two of them. My family leans in, everyone glued to the screen. Ramirez winds up–
And nails her old first baseman right in the thigh with a fast ball gone wild. At least, I have to assume it was wild, even when the commentators start throwing around the word beanball and postulating that the error was both intentional and rooted in old team drama.
For the first time in this game, a batter makes it on base.
Ramirez doesn’t seem remotely shaken, which should be a good thing. I’m proud of her for shaking it off and keeping her focus, but something is still wrong. Part of me swears I can see her vibrating with tension; mostly I can’t shake the feeling that she is too still.
The next pitch goes wild again. She leaves Williams scrambling toward the backstop while her old teammate steals his way to second base. Her third pitch lands in the dirt between Williams’ knees, and the commentators aren’t the only ones wondering if she’s too tired to continue, or if she’s fallen to the pressure of throwing a no-hitter.
Her old teammate tries to take advantage of her weakness. He goes for third with a smirk on his face, and that’s when those wild pitches make sense.
Sierra is ready for him to press his false sense of security. She launches the ball to the third baseman and is already running toward the baseline when her old teammate recognizes the trouble he’s in. Dante gets the ball with the opportunity to tag the man out, but he must see something in Sierra, too. He tosses her the ball and gives her the pleasure of tagging out her old teammate.
An old teammate who does not take the out well. The man who towers over her, with five inches and twenty pounds of muscle on me, gets in her face, and I almost lose my temper from nearly two thousand miles away.
My blood temperature rises, but Sierra doesn’t back down. She stands at the baseline, staring up at him with the ball in her glove and her other hand on her hip. None of us can make out what he’s shouting, but it’s obvious she’s yelling back. His face grows increasingly red each time she responds.
“She’s such a badass,” Leila says with an awe in her voice that should probably concern my sister more than her language.
Dante is the first one there when the man puts his hands on Sierra, but the rest of our team isn’t far behind. Even Williams comes racing forward with the rest of the men on the field, which would earn him a point in my book if I weren’t focused on all of the men in royal blue rushing from the dugout.
Umpires and coaches break things up before they can escalate. The other teammate is sent to his dugout with a warning for the remaining innings. To my surprise, Sierra makes her way back to the mound.
She takes a deep breath and squares up before the next pitch.
And throws six perfect strikes to end the inning.
One and a half innings remain to clinch a spot in the wild card series. We’ve come so far as a team this season. Clawed our way back from the beginning of the season when too many key players on the injured list led to one loss after another to teams that we should have been able to beat easily.
A few off games aside, we have played the best ball of our lives the past six weeks, but no one has come as far as Sierra. The biggest surprise of all, is that I honestly care more about what she has accomplished this season than about the fact that my Series ring is beginning to look like a very real possibility.
Her walk to the mound is rigid and stilted. Between athlete superstition and muscle memory, she goes through all of her usual motions.
The umpire calls a strike; a breaking ball right at the edge of the strike zone catches the batter looking. As off as she seems to me, she’s about to close out the game with a record so few have accomplished.
“She’s going to do it. Holy sh–she’s going to do it!” Leila shrieks. My niece hops up and down in the small living room with such excitement that I’m worried she’s going to jostle my mom and aggravate her healing hip. “One more batter, Tito! She’s gonna do it!”
I’m in my seat but hanging on right to the edge. The stadium is torn between stunned silence and raucous distractions. With a five-run lead, this out isn’t crucial to the team, but that’s impossible to tell from the waving signs in the stands, the chattering commentators, and our teammates all hanging over the fence.
She throws a ball. It’s nothing wild, right outside the zone, and I’m sure that if I were the one behind the plate instead of Williams, I could have framed it to get the call. Leila is pacing around the living room repeating, “It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay,” under her breath.
The next two pitches could not have been more perfect if it were just the two of us practicing on an empty field.
I watch Yamada and Castillo dump ice water on her back–both of them smart enough to avoid her hair and face–while the rest of the team closes in around them, and I feel almost as guilty about not being there as I would have felt if I’d left my mom here to rush back for the game. I love that Ramirez just proved definitively, once and for all, without a shadow of a doubt that she doesn’t need me for her talent to shine, but I hate that I’m not the one handing her the game ball or lifting her in celebration.
The post-game interviews have a near singular focus: Ramirez and her no-hitter.
She is a sight to be seen in front of the cameras. Her skin glistens with sweat, and even with the hint of dust clinging to her, she looks dewy and glowing from within. A waterfall of black hair falls over one shoulder to keep it out of the sticky mess on her back. Fire shines in her eyes, but the thrill of her no-hitter is tempered by a swirl of emotions I can’t read from this side of the television screen.
“There’s been a lot of talk about you and Mateo Reyes this season,” one of the reporters asks from the front row. “For a while there, many of us thought you two had some sort of strange magic. What can you say about winning so decisively here tonight, without him here?”
It’s the worst sort of question. A backhanded compliment combined with that pry into her personal business, searching for any scrap of reality to the tabloid rumors about us.
“Reyes has been a fantastic captain in my time here. He’s the sort of player who leads by example and takes rookies under his wing. We win or lose as a team–a fact he reminds all of us on the regular. We all hope his mother’s recovery is swift and painless and wish the best for both of them.”
Her choice of words is strange. The closed-off expression on her face is even stranger. One of her greatest weaknesses as a pitcher is how expressive her face is–all the time, about everything–yet, now, her face may as well be made of marble–beautiful but cold, perfectly sculpted but distant.
“You say you wish the best for him–” the same reporter continues, “but have you considered what it would be like to face the team from the Bay in the play-offs with him at the plate instead of behind it?”
My entire body turns to ice as I wonder how he knows.