Rock Bottom
A week after the wedding, after Dani broke up with her, after she apologized to Mick and paid the catering company for the damages, Abby decided she was going to win a gold medal.
She was twenty-seven, still in her prime, minus the injury and the addiction she was in denial of.
But she needed the game. She needed it in a new, bigger way, and the Olympics promised just that.
She had two years to get herself right, to rehab her knee, to make the team as starting shortstop. She wouldn’t play for Puerto Rico. While she adored the team and island, they weren’t as competitive, might not even make the cut for Stockholm, so she set her sights on Team USA.
As if in answer to her ambitions, a new league started in America.
Six teams on the West Coast. Abby conveniently landed in Los Angeles, but inconveniently, with the league in its infancy, teams relied on local college fields and facilities.
It brought her back to UCLA. The same school that kicked her out for partying months after her mother’s death.
She swore she heard her whispers in the stands, swore she saw her in the corner of her vision at practice. Of course, that might’ve been the pills. In between physical therapy, strength training, and traveling for games, Abby subsisted on vice, barely ate, only slept if induced by drugs and booze.
Every week she told herself she’d stop, but then the pain came.
The pain with every twist of her knee in the batter’s box.
The pain in her chest too, since losing Kate.
It didn’t help her game. She was slower to the ball, got caught on her heels, couldn’t keep up with the younger players.
She started striking out. The worst batting average of her career, when she needed it most. She couldn’t remember the last time she knocked one out of the park.
She slowly plummeted in the lineup, from fourth to sixth to ninth.
Every time the umpire called strike three, she gritted her teeth, smacked her bat in the dirt, chucked her helmet into the wall.
In the field, she tripped, strained her knee further, reacted instead of surrendering.
When Mick called a few months later, she considered letting it go to voicemail, but after the wedding, she owed her.
“Hey,” she answered from her couch, a bag of ice on her knee, sweat rolling down her temple. She’d gone almost an entire day without a pain pill, but her skin crawled. “Is it the catering company? I’ve paid them twice now. I think they’re scamming me.”
“She’s getting married,” Mick said.
Abby sat up as her heart launched into her throat. “Who?”
“Who do you think?”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“I’m telling you so you can do something.”
“Do something?” She thought her chest might explode. Thought her head might explode too. Her ears whooshed with that awful ring. The ring of losing. The ring of everything falling apart. “She clearly made her choice.”
“You know it’s bullshit!”
“Of course it is!” Abby shouted. “But who are you to tell me what to do about it?”
“I’m your friend. I’m your family. Someone has to tell you that you’re being a coward. That it’s time for you to get your shit together and go after her or you’re going to lose her forever!”
“Fuck you!” She launched up from the couch. “Stay out of my life! Stay out of my business!”
“I’m trying to help!”
“Help? Why would I ever turn to you for help? I should’ve never listened to you five years ago! I should’ve gone after her then, before everything turned to shit!”
“Abby—”
“I don’t need your help, Mick! You’re not my family, okay? So, fuck off and stay fucked. I don’t want to hear about Kate, and I don’t want to hear from you!”
She hung up and hurled the phone into the couch cushions. The room spun. Sweat soaked her clothes, and her heart thundered so hard she thought she might have to call an ambulance.
She stumbled into the bathroom, snatched the last pill bottle from the medicine cabinet, and poured its contents into her palm.
For a terrifying flash, she considered taking them all at once.
The ringing roared. Put her mother in the mirror across from her.
She was just like her. Longing, sick, dying for a love she couldn’t have.
Abby chucked the pills into the toilet. She told herself she didn’t need them, but then she dropped to her knees and fished out a handful. She popped one in her mouth, slunk against the tub, and buried her head into her hands.
It still wasn’t bottom.
Bottom came a few days later at another poorly attended home game.
She drank too much the night before at a party with T.K.
’s friends. She assuaged the hangover with a few cocktails and an oxy that she swiped from the host’s bathroom.
It was, shamefully, the reason she didn’t completely cut herself off from T.K.
as she did the others. Her real estate and Hollywood friends often had plenty to spare.
As she stumbled into the dugout for warm-ups, she heard the words swirl around her teammates. Stockholm. Canceled.
“What?” she asked them.
“They’re cutting softball again this year.”
Abby went rigid. “They can’t do that.”
“Apparently, they can. I mean, they’ve done it before. It’s up to the host city and the Olympic committee.”
“That’s bullshit!”
Something snapped inside. Something deafening. This ringing wouldn’t stop. It drilled into her skull and sent her hands over her ears. Her teammates moved around her, wide-eyed, their mouths moving to ask if she was okay before she squeezed her eyes shut.
It was over. Everything she had done that horrible summer meant nothing. The pain, the pills, the loss. And of course it happened here, at UCLA. Her mother not in the stands but in her. Every horrible thing kicked up a storm as she grabbed her bat bag.
“Fuck this,” she said.
“Where are you going?” one of her teammates asked.
She stomped for the parking lot, determined to run. She didn’t care where, as long as it promised a drink and a dark place.
It took her several clumsy minutes to fish her car keys out of her bag, and when she finally got them, another person’s hand swiped in. “Hey, I don’t think you’re good to drive,” her coach said.
Abby jerked back. “I’m fine.”
He snatched the keys from her. “Not like this. Why don’t you come back and sit for a minute?”
Abby reached for the keys. A few of her teammates circled around, offering their support, but this wasn’t her team. This wasn’t Coach Whitley or the Eagles. This wasn’t Mick or Jill or T.K. And it certainly wasn’t Kate.
“Give them to me!”
She lunged, and the team boxed her out. Abby pushed them away. She couldn’t make out what they said in the ringing. She barely made out shapes or colors as she lost her breath. Except for her bat. The one thing she knew how to do.
Abby swiped it like a sword and, with nothing left to take aim at, she cracked her own windshield.
If they wouldn’t let her meet the end she desired, then she’d create another.
She smashed the headlights, her mother whispering in each one of them.
The breaking and crunching metal of the same crash that took her life.
And the ringing roared—of that phone call, of the horn honking from her mother’s head slumped on the wheel, of her scream in the morgue.
She wouldn’t know the other snippets until the police report.
Fortunately, even when the team tried to stop her, she didn’t swing at or hurt anyone.
But she hurt their cars. She took all her drunk, high rage out on the entire parking lot, bashing a dozen until the police finally came.
It wasn’t until the cuffs snapped on her wrists that she could see again.
Three hours later, Abby sat in a downtown Los Angeles precinct. They’d taken her prints, snapped her photo, locked up her belongings. She shook in a cell, surrounded by a dozen others who scowled or cried or shuddered just as violently as she did.
“Cruz,” an officer said. “You can have your call now.”
Abby’s teeth chattered as she followed them to a phone bank. “I think I’m in withdrawal,” she said. “I need something.”
The officer didn’t look at her. “Make your call.”
Abby knew two numbers by heart. While she should call Isla, she only wanted one person. One person if this was her end. And with how shitty she felt, she thought it just might be.
Her fingers shook as she dialed Kate. Tears filled her eyes, and she gritted her teeth.
The ring was back. Not her mother’s call, ruining the life she knew, but her own call, ruining what she recovered in the wreckage.
She gulped, imagining Kate on the other end, learning the news in the middle of the night.
“This is a prepaid call from an inmate at the Los Angeles County Corrections Facility.”
There was no answer, and she was grateful. The voicemail recording sounded, a brief glimmer of Kate that made her throat contract. She clutched onto the wall, knees almost buckling as dizziness threatened to take her down.
“Hey, it’s me.” Her voice broke, and she did her best to cough away the accompanying rasp.
“I know I shouldn’t call, but I thought I’d cash in on that free legal advice.
” Another unbearable tremor hit her. “I uh, I guess I really did it this time. Withdrawal’s a bitch but I don’t know if I’m going to come back from this one.
I’ve just never really been this scared.
” Abby pressed her forehead to the wall.
Someone shrieked behind her. More people getting booked and shouting for their phone calls.
“I wanted to call in case this is it and I wanted to let you know I love you. I love you and I want you to be happy. I want you to have the life you want. All of it.” She stopped and pulled the phone away for a tiny whimper.
“I’m so sorry for always pulling you down with me.
I don’t mean for this to be another case of that, but I just don’t know.
I don’t know what’s going to happen, so I wanted to tell you that.
” Abby sniffled. “I’m sorry for all of it.
You were always right about me. I don’t want you to worry.
I’m going to call Isla next, but I needed to tell you first.” She didn’t know how to finish it, so she blurted out the end before she wept. “Okay. Bye, Kate.”
She spent the night in jail, twisting and turning on a thin mattress in the holding room.
She threw up more than once, pissing off her cellmates.
The officers weren’t impressed, never sent medics for her, even though she was sure she was on the verge of seizing.
She bargained with God, prayed that if she lived, if she got out, she’d turn everything around.
God or no God, she promised herself she would.
“Cruz, someone posted bail.”
Abby limped out behind the officer, reeking, shaking, exhausted. As she rounded the corner, expecting Isla, she came upon a few officers laughing as they posed for a picture with someone. That someone being Audie.
“Dad?” Abby whispered.
He opened his arms, and she collapsed into them. “Are you okay?”
“No,” she whimpered. “No, I’m so far from okay.”
“I know.” Audie rubbed her back.
“Why am I like this?” She sniffled into his shirt before pulling back.
Audie cupped the side of her head, his copper eyes melting. “You’re not like this,” he said. “This is just the bottom. This is when your new life starts, yes?”
Abby sniffled, tears streaking her cheeks. The next four words built in her like a second chance, like a revelation, like a prayer. The key to a new life. The one she’d denied since her mother’s death. “Will you help me?”
“Always,” he said.
As she walked out of the precinct, leaning into Audie for help, the ringing stopped. It was an end. Just not the one she expected.