After the Hurricane #2
Her eyes prickled with tears, but she didn’t let them fall.
Not as she encountered so many who’d had homes and jobs and running water and electricity and kids to take to school, and then lost it all in the unjust flash of a storm.
When they passed out hot meals, she could barely take the whimpering children on mothers’ hips and the elderly, shuffling along without anyone to care for them.
That night as they slept on cots in a tent, she wondered how it could ever get better. She wondered how much suffering she’d been oblivious to while she chose her own torment. When the tears quietly rolled to her pillow that night, she found solace in not crying for herself.
It would take months for the electricity to come back on.
Years to rebuild everything lost. Abby grew accustomed to sleeping on floors, in aid vehicles, and under tarps.
During that trip and the several that followed, she learned to patch roofs, lay foundation, and run pipes for plumbing.
She was tired every night but every day felt a little lighter.
She wasn’t just rebuilding a community, but something in her too.
In between shifts, she explored with Audie. He took her to the shuttered factory where he once worked, the same one he quit for a life-changing tryout with the Padres. He showed her his childhood home too, or at least where it once stood. It was mud and a few pieces of plywood now.
“My father—your grandfather—was nasty when he drank.” Audie kicked a rock while they wandered through the washed-out streets.
A few people recognized him and waved, but it was no longer because of his baseball career.
It was from his humanitarian work there.
“I always told myself I’d never be like him, but then I was. ”
“A curse,” Abby whispered.
“Tal vez.” They stopped on the side of the road to peer out at the ocean. Wind hushed up from the water and passed over them. “It never really leaves you.”
She didn’t ask what. She just nodded. “I know.”
Audie frowned. “She would have been proud of you.”
Abby drew back, unprepared for the subject. Unprepared for the ache that split through her chest. “Of what?” She scoffed and continued ahead of him. “I got arrested and went to rehab.”
“Especially of that.”
He laughed, and she laughed too, relieved to lighten the mood.
As he walked alongside her, with the same stride, the same swing of his arms, she felt the warmth of childhood.
Of the days when she’d longed to be just like him and chose to wear his number for Little League.
Of the days when her mother smiled and the three of them went to the beach or baseball field.
She realized that while she’d avoided all the bad, she’d kept herself from the good memories too.
She’d worked through her issues in every kind of therapy and group setting imaginable, but this was what held her back.
“They had me write her a letter in treatment,” she said.
“Did it help?”
Abby shrugged. “I told her I understood, maybe better now, but also that I didn’t.
It’s weird because I hate her more now, but I love her more too and there’s nowhere for it to go.
” Her throat knotted as they turned into another destroyed neighborhood.
“Some days I look in the mirror and really feel it—how much I’m like her—and then I hate myself too. ”
“No.” Audie’s eyes flashed with anger, but not the kind that she knew from childhood.
A broken, moral anger like he’d plucked it straight from the surrounding ruins.
“Don’t hate yourself. Don’t hate her. She was beautiful, funny, smart—just like you, mija.
” He bit his lip. “But there was sadness there. You know she ran away when she was young. She had a hard life, and I never knew how to help her. I couldn’t get out of my own way long enough to. ”
“Well, now she’s given me a hard life too.
” She kicked at debris. “Maybe not like this, but she made shit really hard, you know?” The tears loosened in her throat and she let them go.
“And I still want her back because she was my mom. Because she made everything so much better too. Sometimes I wonder who I would be if she was still here.” Abby wiped her eyes.
“Why couldn’t she hold on and we get to? ”
“We don’t get to know,” he whispered.
Audie didn’t hug her, probably because she kept walking, and maybe because it wasn’t their way. He just didn’t stop walking alongside her.
“I still forgave her.” Abby sniffled.
He squeezed her shoulder. “And yourself?”
She didn’t answer.
He invited her to join him at work that spring.
It was the first time she had stepped on the field since her arrest, and that too healed something inside.
And it wasn’t just any baseball diamond.
It was the one with her father’s number flapping on a flag in the outfield.
The dirt she had once tottered on as a toddler.
It was San Diego’s team, but it was also her family history. Another sliver of home.
She watched batting practice with him along the first-base line, soothed by the rhythm of hits echoing through the empty stadium. Abby nudged him as a rookie dinged bloopers to right field. “He’s off-balance,” she said.
Audie’s eyes widened. “What?”
“On the breaking ball.” She spit a few sunflower seeds over her shoulder. “I mean, he’s making contact, but it’s weak. He should shorten his swing.”
“And how do you know?”
Abby furrowed her eyebrows. “Because I can hear it. Can’t you?”
A week later, the Padres organization sent her to scout school.
While she cringed at the clear nepotism, she also couldn’t deny it was a perfect fit—she spoke multiple languages, had lived and played in various countries, and most importantly, she could hear it.
The game struck again. She could almost feel it.
Those first few months on the road presented new challenges.
Missing flights, renting cars, adjusting to little sleep and shitty meals.
The temptation of bars or a drink at the airport nearly broke her more than once, but she called her sponsor, found a meeting, muttered the Serenity Prayer with her teeth gritted.
And each time she made it through another day, another game, another city, she proved something to herself.
That she could be steady, that she could be patient, that she could be more.
“My name is Abby and I’m an alcoholic and addict.
” She stood at the head of her AA group when she accepted her one-year chip.
“For a long time, I used to believe that I was cursed. Maybe it’s the ballplayer in me, but I wore it, carried that shame like a fucked-up badge of honor.
Because there’s something secretly glorious about curses.
I’m sure the Red Sox and Cubs are happy about their World Series rings, but I think sometimes they miss the curse.
That splintered, broken, unlucky part that becomes who you are.
It’s a lot easier to blame your mistakes or a poor performance on a curse.
To say it’s out of your hands. But it’s not. It’s in my hands now. It always was.”
A year later, when she spotted Kayson Cannon, Abby knew it was time. He played like his entire heart lived in it, the same love she recognized in Kate. One she hadn’t seen since. She just didn’t know if she was ready.
So like the many other instances when she didn’t know what to do, Abby picked up a bat.
She tested its weight in her hands, took a practice swing, gazed out at the immaculate grass where so many greats had taken the field.
She hadn’t hit in two years. Not since she smashed a dozen cars, landed in jail, and didn’t know if she’d ever pick a bat up again.
If she’d ever feel it in her chest. But as she sauntered onto the dirt where Audie was wrapping up with a player, it surged in her.
“Hey, Dad, you got time for one more?”
He snapped his head to her, eyes stretched wide. She hadn’t called him that since he picked her up from the precinct and before then, not since she was a little girl.
“Claro que sí,” he said with a smile. He tossed her a few balls, and she smacked each one. Not as powerful as before, but her body fell back into the old ways, no longer numb or empty.
“You are hitting lefty now?”
“Easier on the knee,” Abby said between swings. “There’s a kid out of Insley.”
“He good?”
“I think so.” She sliced another ball with a grunt. “I don’t know if I should go back though. If I’m ready. Maybe they should send someone else.” She paused. “What do you think?”
He smirked as he rotated a baseball in his hands. “I think we go where the game calls us.”
Audie tossed her a dozen more pitches, and she wondered how many times they had missed this chance. But as the stadium lights droned, as the players filed out, as everything fell quiet except her breath, except the ball, she thought perhaps it was because the game hadn’t called them back yet.
The bucket of balls emptied.
“A few more?” he asked her.
She adjusted the bat and nodded. “Yeah,” she said. And it felt like forgiveness. For her and for him. And for the first time in a long time, she knew exactly what came next.