Chapter 22 Luca
THEN
The Marlins are not a real baseball team. I have been making this case for twenty minutes and Wes will not concede.
"They have a stadium," he says. "They have a roster. They have two World Series titles."
"They have two titles and nobody in this city can name a current starting pitcher. I went to a game in April. The section behind home plate was half empty. Half empty, Wes. Behind home plate."
"You're comparing them to European football crowds, and that's not a fair comparison."
"I am comparing them to having a pulse. A stadium should feel alive. That stadium felt like a waiting room with a diamond." I add "The Twins are worse."
"Don't start."
"The Twins are the Marlins with snow. Same attendance energy. Colder parking lot."
"The Twins have a loyal fan base."
"The Twins have your mother. That is one person. That is not a base. "
"My mother is worth fifty thousand fans. She has not missed an opening day since 1981."
"Your mother is a statistical outlier in Minneapolis, and you cannot build a franchise on a single outlier."
He laughs. The real one. His shoulders drop and his head turns toward the water and for a second the evening is perfect.
My phone buzzes on the table behind us. I reach back without turning my head.
Kyle.
"Chapin," I say. I put it on speaker because there is no reason not to. Kyle calls about contract language, roster logistics, schedule notes. "Hey, Kyle. You're on speaker. Wes is here."
"Good." A beat. "Good that he's there."
I look at Wes. His forearms are still on the railing. His head has turned toward the phone in my hand.
"Luca, I got a call from Atlanta's front office about an hour ago. The expansion draft selections came through this afternoon."
"Okay." The word is out before the meaning behind why he is calling me hits.
"They selected you. Atlanta took you off the Tempest's unprotected list."
The sentence is in the air between us and I am waiting for my brain to do what it does, to rate the sentence, to build a category for it, to find a column where it fits. There is no column. The sentence does not fit in any column I have ever built or planned for.
Wes straightens off the railing. I see it from somewhere outside myself. His forearms come up, his hands go flat on the rail, and he is standing fully upright with his jaw set and his shoulders squared.
"Kyle." Wes's voice. Not mine. "What happened? You didn’t think either of us would be drafted."
"The Tempest's list came in different than what we projected. Atlanta wanted a young forward with upside and his contract value was right for them. I'm sorry, Wes. I'm telling you what they told me."
"When is this effective?"
"It's done. The selection is official. Atlanta's GM is going to call Luca in the next few minutes. His name is Alex Grayson. He's going to welcome him to the franchise." A pause. "Luca needs to take the call."
"Kyle." My voice. The only word I can find. "I know." His voice is careful and steady. "I'll call you both tomorrow. We'll work through the logistics. But I wanted you to hear it from me first."
The call ends. The screen goes dark. Wes takes the phone from my hand and sets it on the table. I did not feel him take it. I did not feel my fingers open.
I am standing on a balcony I have stood on a thousand times. The ocean sounds the way the ocean always sounds, the low steady push of water against the seawall fourteen floors below, and I am hearing it like I have never heard it before. Like it belongs to a different building.
Wes is next to me. His breathing is steady. His hands are flat on the railing. He is upright and I am aware of the fact that he is upright because I am not sure my legs are doing the same thing.
I don't know how long we stand there. The light shifts on the water. A bird crosses the balcony line and keeps going and I watch it the way you watch anything when your brain has stopped processing and your eyes are just open.
Wes turns his head. He looks at me. I see him looking at me and I see him take in whatever is on my face. "Sit down if you need to," he says.
"I'm fine." I am not fine. I am standing on this balcony and the word fine is a word that belongs to the person I was ten minutes ago and I am using it because it is the only word I can find.
The phone rings on the table.
A number I don't recognize. Atlanta area code. The screen is lit and the number is just numbers and I do not move.
"That's Grayson," Wes says. His voice is even. The voice he uses with coaches, with trainers. "You need to answer, Luca."
I pick up the phone.
"Hello?"
"Luca Berger? This is Alex Grayson, general manager of the Atlanta Firebirds. I wanted to call personally to welcome you to our organization."
His voice is warm. He is happy. He is a man building a franchise from nothing and calling to invite me into it, and the voice that answers him is mine except it is running without me.
The performance has turned itself on. I can hear it in my own mouth, the polite, the grateful, the professional, and somewhere behind it I am standing on a balcony watching a bird I already forgot cross a sky that used to be mine.
"Thank you," I say. "That means a lot."
"We've had our eye on you for a while. Your skating, your anticipation, the way you read the ice. You're exactly who we want building this thing with us. Training camp is September. My office will be in touch with your agent on the logistics, but I wanted you to hear it from me."
"I appreciate that, Alex."
"We're going to do something special in Atlanta. I'm glad you're part of it."
"Thank you."
The call ends. The phone is in my hand. Wes reaches over and takes it from me again, gently, and sets it face down on the table.
"Come inside," he says.
"Not yet."
"Okay."
He stays with me. He leans his forearms back on the railing and he waits, the way he waits for everything, the way he has waited for me since the day I moved into his guest room and didn't call my realtor. The sun is almost down. The ocean is going gray at the edges.
"I have to start over."
"Luca," he says quietly.
"I have three months. I need to find an apartment. I need to learn the city, the facility, the roster. I need to figure out how to do all of it from scratch."
"You're not doing it from scratch."
"I am doing it from scratch, Wes. I am going to a city where I don't know anyone, to play for a team that doesn't exist yet, and I am going to be in a hotel room by myself figuring out where the grocery store is."
"We'll figure it out together."
"You keep saying that but you won’t be there.
" I can feel it building. "You’ll be here.
In this apartment. With Kevin and Austin and Grant.
With the restaurant on Galiano and the gelato place and the water you photograph every morning.
You are going to wake up here and I am going to wake up in Atlanta. "
He steps toward me.
"Don't." I hold my hand up. "If you hold me right now I will not be able to do this."
"Do what?"
"Leave."
The word is on the balcony between us. The ocean is underneath and neither of us is listening to it.
"You don't have to do this tonight," he says.
"I know I don't have to do it tonight. But tonight is when it happened and tomorrow I am going to wake up in this apartment and start packing and I need to be ready for that."
"Luca, this doesn't change what we are."
"It changes where we are. And where we are is everything. Where we are is the balcony and the couch and the kitchen and the bedroom. Where we are is how we work. Take that away and tell me what's left."
"Us, Luca," he says. "What's left is us."
I look at him. He is standing in the doorway of the balcony with the apartment behind him, the kitchen, the counter where we filled in the spreadsheet, the couch where we kissed, all of it framed behind his shoulders in the low light.
He is saying what's left is us and I want to believe him but I don’t think I can.
We go inside. We do not talk about it again that night.
We sit on the couch and the laptop is closed and the spreadsheet is not open and his hand is on my knee and my head is against his shoulder and the apartment is quiet around us the way it is quiet every night except tonight the quiet holds a different weight.
I pack over the next two months. Not all at once. A shelf, a drawer, a closet. The suitcase from Seattle goes on the guest room bed.
The spreadsheet has not been updated since the night Kyle called.
The last entry is a taco place in Wynwood.
Seven-three for the carnitas, six-eight for the salsa verde.
My column and his column. The weighted average sitting in the formula bar where it has sat since the night we built it on this couch.
The morning I leave, I stand on the balcony.
The light is early. The water is doing the thing Wes photographs every morning, the color shift half a mile out where the green ends and the blue begins.
I hold up my phone and take the picture.
The railing, the ocean, the palms. The view I have been waking up to for two years from the apartment where I learned to cook and argued about bread and fell in love with a man who remembered my gelato order.
I set it as my wallpaper.
Wes drives me to the airport. His hand is on the wheel and my bag is in the back seat and neither of us speaks until the terminal appears through the windshield.
"Call me when you land," he says.
"Yeah."
"Every night, Luca. We’ll talk every night."
"Every night."
I reach for the door. His hand closes on my forearm. His fingers press into the muscle and hold. I close my eyes. I wait for him to say the thing. He doesn't say the thing. He holds on for five seconds and then lets go and his hand goes back to the wheel.
I pick up my bag. I close the door. I walk toward the terminal and I do not turn around.
The flight is three hours. Window seat. The Gulf underneath and then the green of northern Florida and then Georgia, wide and flat, spreading out below me in a hundred miles of trees and highway.
The city appears through the clouds. Atlanta.
A skyline I do not recognize surrounded by green I have never seen from above.
The hotel room is cold. The air conditioning is running and the bed is made and the dresser is empty and the curtains are closed. I sit on the edge of the bed with my phone in my hand. The wallpaper is the balcony. The ocean, the railing, the palms. The view from the place I used to live.
I look at it for a long time. The room is quiet. Atlanta is outside the window. Everything I need to become is waiting for me in a locker room that was just built, on a team that has never played a game, in a city where nobody knows my name.
I put the phone on the nightstand. Screen down.
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