Chapter 13
Asher
The pitch comes in low and away, and I let it go.
Ball three. The count runs full, and the crowd starts its rising hum, forty thousand people leaning the same direction at once. Bases loaded. Two out. Bottom of the ninth, and we're down by three. I'm zero for four with a strikeout I'm going to see behind my eyes for a week.
It's been like this for weeks. The ball looks fine coming in, and then it isn't where I thought it would be. My hands are a half-beat late at the plate and a half-beat too slow in the field.
In the top of the fourth, Knox was on the mound and an opposing guy chopped a routine two-hopper to short, right at me, the kind I field in my sleep.
And I booted it. The runner from second scored easily.
Knox didn't say a word. Just took the ball back off the rubber and got the next guy, raising an eyebrow at me after.
And now I'm standing in the box with the game tightening down to this one pitch, and I'm not even thinking about it.
I'm thinking about a house in Millbrook.
I step out. Knock the dirt off my cleats I don't need to knock off. Down the line, I can see Coach Collins in the dugout with his arms crossed, eyes directed at the dirt, but I know he's looking at me.
He pulled me aside two days ago after batting practice.
Didn't ask what was wrong. Just watched me hit for a while and said, "Your hands are early because your head's somewhere else.
Bring your head back and the hands'll follow.
" Then he walked off. He never asks. He just sees you and hands you two lines like a scary-as-fuck psychic and leaves.
Bring your head back.
I step in.
The pitcher comes set. Fastball guy, has been all night, ninety-six and a slider he doesn't trust with the bases full. He's not going to walk in a run. He's going to challenge me.
He winds.
I see it the way I used to see everything. The seams. The angle off his hand. Belt high, inner third, the exact pitch I've been late on all night, except this time my head's right here and my hands are there with it.
I swing.
The sound of it goes through the whole stadium before I've finished the turn. That crack. You feel it in your wrists before you hear it. The give of clean contact, the ball jumping off the barrel like it wanted to leave.
I know. The second it's gone, I know.
I take one step out of the box and watch it. Everybody does. The left fielder doesn't even turn, just drifts back and stops at the track to look up. The ball clears the wall by a whole ten feet and lands in the seats. And the place comes apart, fans losing their shit.
A grand slam.
We win by one.
I drop the bat. Start the trot. Round first into the wall of sound, forty thousand people on their feet, and the runners are scoring ahead of me, the guy from third already crossing, Nate stomping on home plate with both feet and pointing back up the line at me.
The dugout's emptied out. They're stacked up at the plate waiting, hats off, gloves thrown down, Knox out front with both arms already up.
I come around third, down the line, and they swarm me.
Somebody dumps a helmet full of sunflower seeds over my head.
Declan grabs the back of my neck with one big catcher's hand and shakes me, grinning that rare grin he saves for about four things a season, yelling something I can't hear over the rest of it.
The whole pile of them, jumping, hammering my shoulders, my back, my chest where that ridiculous star once sat.
This is the moment. The big one. Walk-off slam, down to your last out, the kind of swing they run on the highlight reel for a decade. Eight-year-old me dreamed about this exact thing in the backyard with a wiffle ball, narrating it to myself. Bases loaded, full count, here's the pitch.
I'm waiting for the feeling.
The roar's still going. Nate's got both hands on my face, yelling right into it, pure joy, and I'm grinning back because my face knows what to do. But underneath the grin, I'm standing still in the middle of all of it, waiting for the feeling to hit.
There’s hands everywhere, gloves slamming into my shoulders, somebody yelling directly into my ear.
And underneath all of it, this strange, hollow quiet.
The feeling never arrives.
It's good. Don't get me wrong. The adrenaline's there, the win is real. But it's smaller than it should be. It's a flat, bright, distant good, like a photo of a feeling instead of the feeling itself. And somewhere under the pile of my teammates, I have the strangest urge, sharp and specific.
I want to call her.
I want to find a phone and tell her.
Doll face, I hit one tonight, the kind you only get a couple of in a career. And the whole place lost its mind.
I can already hear her laugh.
Or maybe she'd go soft and quiet the way she does when she's proud of me.
But I can't call her, can’t text her. There's no thread for that. She sends me a time, and I confirm. I sneak in and sneak out before dawn. That's the whole shape of it. When I try to make it something more, she puts the wall up.
I can't call the most important person in my life to tell her the best thing that happened to me tonight because she wants to keep this contained to a bedroom an hour away. And I don't think it's about control. It's coming from a place of fear.
Knox is screaming in my ear, and I scream back. We did it. We won.
I let them carry me off the field, feeling it and not feeling it, all at once.
The locker room empties out the way it always does, in waves.
The young guys go first, loud, already heading towards a late night on the town.
Then the married ones, quieter, talking to their families over the phone and heading for the lot.
The reporters come and go in their little scrum, and I give them the answers they want like I've always done.
Just tried to put a good swing on it. Knox kept us in it all night. Great team win.
One of the reporters grins on his way out.
"You disappear on us, Calloway?"
"What?"
"No bar photos. No mystery women. You're making everybody nervous."
I smile.
"Just keeping everyone on their toes.”
The whole room laughs like that's the funniest thing I've said all night.
The slam plays on the TV over the showers four separate times while I'm peeling off tape, and each time somebody points at it and whoops.
By the time I'm dressed, it's mostly just me, the equipment guys, and the hum of the lights. I told the gang to go ahead of me, that I'll meet them at The Quack. They don't know I don't intend to follow. I'm not in the mood.
I sit on the bench in front of my locker, hair still wet, bag at my feet. The high's gone now, and what's left is just exhaustion, the deep kind that sleep doesn't fix.
I sling the bag over my shoulder and head for the tunnel.
It's quiet back here. Concrete and pipe and the buzz of a light that needs changing, the long gray throat of the place that takes you from the clubhouse out to the lot.
My cleats are in the bag and my sneakers are silent on the floor.
I'm most of the way to the door, head down—somewhere in the suburbs in my mind—when I see him.
My father.
He's leaning against the cinder-block wall with his hands in the pockets of slacks that cost more than some guys in that clubhouse make in a month, suit jacket open, no tie.
Edward Calloway does not lean against things.
The man has perfect posture in his sleep.
But he's leaning here, in the tunnel, waiting, and the sight of him stops me flat.
"Dad."
"There he is." He pushes off the wall. "The man of the hour."
"What are you—" I look past him toward the lot, like there might be an explanation parked out there. "You didn't say you were coming."
"I didn't decide until this afternoon." He shrugs one shoulder, and there's something almost sheepish in it, which isn't something my father does either. "Cleared the calendar to drive up. I wanted to watch you play."
He drove up. An hour each way, on a weeknight with no notice, to sit in a stadium by himself and watch his son. He's been to a handful of my games in eight years. He calls them a hobby when he's being generous and a phase when he isn't. And he got in the car this afternoon and drove up to watch.
"You picked a good one," I say.
"I did." His mouth does something that's almost a smile. "Good last swing."
"I got lucky."
"No." He says it flat, certain, the way he says things in a courtroom, and it lands harder than a compliment usually would.
"You let three pitches go that you wanted to chase.
I could see you wanted to. And you waited anyway until he gave you the one.
" He nods, slow. "That's not luck. That's patience.
You always had it, even as a boy. You'd wait everybody else out. "
I don't know what to do with that, so I do what I always do. Reach for something easy. "Careful. That almost sounded like you're proud."
"I am proud." There's no hesitation. He says it like a fact entered into evidence. "I'm aware I don't always lead with it... but it's there."
The light buzzes. Somewhere out in the lot a car door slams and an engine turns over, and the two of us stand in the tunnel not quite knowing what to do with each other, the way we've stood for about fifteen years.
He looks at me.
Really looks.
I watch him do it, watch his eyes move over my face the way they move over a contract, taking the details, and I feel that thing I always do when my father actually focuses on me. The urge to stand up straighter. To be worth the attention.
Then his face changes, just slightly. The pride banks down into something quieter.
"You look tired, Asher."
"It was a long game."
"No." Again that flat certainty, gentle this time. "You looked tired in the third inning, before you'd done anything. You've looked tired for a while." He pauses. "Are you taking care of yourself?"
And here's the thing.
I have the whole answer right there. It's been sitting at the front of my mouth for weeks.
No, Dad. I'm not. I'm driving an hour south to sneak into a house and leave before anybody sees me.
I'm exhausted because the best thing in my life happens behind a locked door, and I'm not allowed to tell a single living soul about it, including you.
Especially you. I hit a ball into the seats tonight, and the first thing I wanted to do was call a woman who doesn't have my number saved under my real name. That's why I look tired. Not the games.
My mouth opens before I can stop it.
Nothing comes out.
I try to recover. "I appreciate it, Dad." The smile comes up, easy, automatic, the one that's gotten me out of every situation I've ever wanted out of. "I'm fine."
He doesn't believe me.
I can see that he doesn't. He reads people too—where do you think I got it—and he stands there for a beat longer than the question warrants, looking at his son lie to him in a tunnel. I watch him decide not to push.
"All right." He reaches out and puts a hand on my shoulder. Squeezes once. His hand is heavier than I remember. "Get some sleep, son. You earned it tonight."
"Drive safe."
"Always do." He pats the shoulder twice and lets go, turns, and walks down the tunnel toward the lot, posture back to perfect, a tall man in good slacks disappearing into the gray.
I stand there after he's gone.
The light still buzzes. I listen to his footsteps get smaller. Then a door opens at the far end, and the night air rushes in, cool, smelling like rain that hasn't started, and the door swings shut, taking him with it.
The drive home is mostly empty road and lonely headlights.
I take the long way without deciding to, the route along the lake, the water black on my right and the city lights smeared across it.
The slam keeps replaying in one part of my head: the crack of it, the way the place came up off its feet, Nate's hands on my face.
The best night of my season living in one space.
And in the other, there's my father in the tunnel.
You look tired.
I keep coming back to it. He drove an hour on no notice to sit alone in a crowd and watch me, and then he stood in a concrete tunnel and saw straight through me.
And the one thing that finally got him to look at me, really look, after more than a decade of calling my career a phase, was that I'm not okay.
After all this time, that's what it took.
He sees me because I'm breaking, and the crack is the most honest thing I've shown him in years.
I don't know what to do with that.
My old man can read me from across a tunnel, and I can't tell him why.
The single biggest thing in my life, and I have to stand there feeding him the press answer like he's a guy with a recorder.
I've spent my entire life being seen wrong: the cover, the charm, the easy Calloway who wouldn't go to law school.
And the one person who finally saw something true tonight, I lied to.
Because I had to. Because that's the deal.
I'm so tired of the deal.
I sit with it for a mile. The lake slides by. And it's true, but it's not the whole shape of it. I've got a head that won't let me leave a thing half-said, so I turn it over once more and find the bottom of it.
She hides me. The car around the corner, the number with no name, the man who goes down the trellis before the sister gets to the stairs.
I'm the thing nobody's allowed to see. I've spent my whole life being a surface for people—the magazine version, the locker-room version—and I finally found one person who looked past all of it and saw the actual man.
Then I agreed to let her keep him in the fucking dark.
Language.
I run a hand down my face.
Jesus Christ...
The headlights eat the white lines. The city gets closer across the water.
I know what it is. It settles into me, and I know, with the same certainty my father reads a jury, that I'm not going to be able to live inside this much longer.
I want her in the light.
And I'm running out of patience for anything else.