Chapter 6 #2
Silas glanced over at his sister, who stayed assiduously concealed behind another mystery book. The cover showed a man with a bullet hole and blood. “I was busy with other stuff.” He mouthed a word to me: “Trouble.” Then he raised his voice again. “You ready, slugger? This is coming faster.”
For someone who hadn’t played sports, he had good control.
I bet he could have thrown with a lot of velocity if he’d been shown how to do it.
“Here, watch,” I said, and put down the bat to jog over to him.
“I wasn’t a pitcher, but my dad taught me some things.
” I was demonstrating how to hold the ball differently when we both heard a very angry voice.
“Don’t tell Silas what to do!”
We looked over at Lyra. “It’s ok,” he started to say, but she slammed down her book and stood up.
“You think you know everything!” she yelled, and I was able to grasp that she wasn’t only talking about softball pitches.
“You can’t even hit it far! You suck,” she told me. “You suck!”
I walked back to my bat and snatched it off the ground. “Throw it,” I ordered him. “As hard as you can. Go.”
“I don’t…ok,” he agreed. He looked over at his sister and then at me, and then he let the ball fly.
I launched it. I heard the sound I’d loved when I’d been in the batter’s box as a kid, the sharp thwak that meant a home run. Silas spun around and watched the yellow sphere travel, heading somewhere outside of the park. I hadn’t meant to hit it quite so hard, but anger had driven my swing.
“Holy shit,” he said softly. “Lyra, she knows what she’s doing.”
“I do,” I told them both. “I know how to play. That ball’s gone.”
“It sure is,” he said, and he started to laugh. “I think we might find it over in Wisconsin.”
Lyra spoke again. “That’s another state. It didn’t go that far.” But she sounded a lot less confident.
“I started playing when I was around your age and it took a long time to hit like that. But you could start learning,” I offered. “Do you want to try? I can show you how I do it.” When she didn’t answer, I turned back to Silas. “Ok, let’s play.”
“I’ll try.” She walked over and I handed her the bat, and she grasped it awkwardly. I showed her how to hold it and how to swing. Then I grabbed the bag of stuff I’d bought at the sporting goods store and took out the batting tee.
“You can hit off this. It’s how almost everybody starts,” I explained.
“Did you?”
“Well, no, and I started with baseballs. My dad had pitched in high school and he and I used to play together. For hours,” I said. “I loved it.” I had really gotten into sports, but the best thing was getting to spend so much time together.
We spent a good amount of time in the park today, too, because Lyra got into it.
She pushed out her lower lip and focused just like she did when she wrote one of her stories or read something exciting.
After a while, I put my hat on her head to shade her face, and we also worked on fielding.
Silas had sat under the tree, and he’d picked up her book but he didn’t seem to be reading it.
I saw him napping for a while, since he was tired as usual.
His work hours were awful and he was able to conk out in the blink of an eye.
But he must have roused at one point. “It’s getting close to dinner time,” he called, and I looked over in surprise.
“It is?” Lyra and I both asked, and I smiled at her.
“I’m hungry,” I said. “We should go back and start cooking.” We gathered up her sports equipment and I thought about collecting all of mine when I visited my parents. That weekend was approaching soon.
“Do you have to go to work tonight?” she asked her brother, and he said that he did.
“Sorry,” he told her. “What if we play again tomorrow? There’s a twenty percent chance of rain, but only in the morning.”
We all thought that sounded promising. “I’ll carry that,” Lyra said, and she reached for the bat. She took a few practice swings and I told her they looked good.
“I bet there are teams around here that she could join,” I said, as she ran ahead down the block. It was nice to see her being active. I was glad that she liked to read and do her writing so much, but a kid needed to be outside, too.
“I should look into it.”
“Or I could, since I was so into softball,” I suggested. “I might catch some red flags.”
“Red flags about a team for seven-year-olds?” He snorted. “Yeah, sure.”
“There are coaches who are red flags, parents who…who’s that kid?”
A boy had come out of the house catty corner to ours, where Mrs. Alford lived.
“That’s her grandson, Boris,” Silas said.
“He and Ly always fight.” The kid looked to be slightly older than her, maybe eight or nine.
I heard him say something, but I could only catch the sound and not actual words.
She stopped dead and answered, then he pointed and said something else.
She yelled back at him, and those words I heard clearly: “No, shut up! Fuck you!”
“Oh, no!” I took off running but Silas was faster, and it was a good thing. He grabbed the bat as she was still in her backswing and the kid ran to Mrs. Alford’s porch, hollering at the top of his voice that Lyra was trying to kill him.
“You’re fine,” Silas yelled back, but this situation was not fine. His sister struggled to get away from him, probably so that she could try to attack that boy again. I rushed to unlock our front door, and the moment Lyra was inside, she ran up the stairs. I heard her bedroom door slam.
“Jesus Christ on a cracker,” he sighed. “We were having such a good day.”
“She tried to hit the other child with a bat!” I gasped. “She could have killed him.”
“That’s a little dramatic.”
“No, it’s not. It was really dangerous!” I said. I couldn’t sign her up for a team if there was a possibility that she would get mad and try to hit another girl. “Silas, that was shocking. You don’t think so?”
He hesitated. “I got into a lot worse fights when I was a kid,” he told me.
I shook my head back at him. “You’re excusing—"
“Silas?”
We had been too loud to hear Lyra coming back downstairs. “Yeah, what’s up, Ly?” he asked.
“I’m sorry,” she said, and her face crumpled. “I’m sorry I did that.”
“Come here,” he told her, and when she ran to him, he picked her up. “What did he say to you?”
I heard her mumble something against her brother’s neck, but I couldn’t make out the words.
“You know that’s not true. You know that’s wrong, because I love you,” he said back. “I love you so much. Your mom and dad do, too, but they’re not smart about how they act. They’re not smart about how they show it.”
She said something else and I also heard her sniffle.
“I know,” he answered. “But I’m here and I promise that I won’t go away. I won’t, not ever. I promise.”
I snuck up the stairs to give them a moment alone, and also so that Lyra wouldn’t see that I was crying, too. I remembered that feeling, the one that she had at this moment. I remembered my mom promising the same things and how, gradually, I’d started to believe her.
I knew that Silas had to leave for work and I wasn’t sure how to help Lyra.
She didn’t need me, the interloper woman who was only good at showing her how to swing a bat…
and I probably shouldn’t have done that.
I shouldn’t have given her a deadly weapon when she was this angry, but I didn’t know that it had been wrong.
I did know who to call for advice about her now, though.
“Mom?” I said when she answered. “I have to tell you something.”
I heard her catch her breath. “Did you take him back?”
“No, it’s not about Dax.” In fact, since Silas had told me that he’d “taken care” of the issue, things had been very quiet, and Rashelle and Munir had reported that no one ever played the song anymore—the song that they knew wasn’t really about me, they had both clarified.
I had been to the doctor and the first tests had shown me to be free of any diseases that my ex might have passed on, and I was hopeful about the next set of results, too.
I realized that I hadn’t thought about him at all while we were out at the park, and that had felt good.
Now I had to reassure my mother that I really, really wasn’t getting back together with him.
I also had some important news that I’d been keeping from her: my new living situation.
I hadn’t wanted my parents to come visit me at my former apartment, for several reasons.
They would have been appalled at the conditions on that street and they would have struggled with climbing the three flights without a working elevator, and I wanted to spare them from all of that.
But I also hadn’t told them that I’d moved here, mostly because…
Because I knew it had been a bad decision. It was just stupid. And again, I heard my professor’s voice in my mind: who was to blame? I was quite clear about that, but my sweet mom was a lot more forgiving when I poured out the whole story of my latest poor choice.
“That poor little girl. Of course you should help her, Cammie. She needs someone.” She also had doubts, though. “As far as living in their house…”
“It’s just temporary,” I said quickly, although the closest I’d gotten to going somewhere else was when I’d done a quick search of available apartments one day at lunch.
“I’m trying to help but I don’t know how to deal with Lyra.
She doesn’t want to listen. The only thing she’s learned from me so far is how to properly shampoo her hair and how to find a comfortable batting stance. ”