CHRIS STOPPED THREE TIMES on the way to the Children’s Home. The first time was when Jeff asked him to pull off the freeway so he could get a better look at a dry, cracked lake bed and the gaunt cows feeding on the barely existent grass at its rim. Then, as they were about to get back onto the freeway, Jeff spotted a stalled car on the ramp and ordered Chris to pull up behind it.
Chris watched while Jeff calmed the panicky teenaged boy at the wheel, peered under the hood and worked his usual magic on whatever he found there. In minutes, he had the car purring.
The third stop—the only one they had planned—was at an auto parts store in a strip mall on the northern outskirts of San Diego. The store was the closest outlet for some specialized equipment Jeff needed in the warehouse. Chris had suggested they drive to San Diego together, as long as Jeff didn’t mind waiting while he paid his usual Saturday visit to Dustin.
Once in the parking lot of the strip mall, Jeff eyed the customers walking in and out of the auto parts store and shook his head.
“Would you mind going in for me?” he asked. He pulled a pen from the pocket of his red-and-brown Hawaiian print shirt and a scrap of paper from his briefcase. “I’ll write down what I need. It’s sort of an unconventional assortment of goods. I’d rather not have to deal with anyone’s questions.”
“Fine.” Chris watched him make out the list, which covered both sides of the paper. Jeff handed it to him, and Chris shook his head as he read it. “If it hadn’t been for that experiment, Cabrio, I’d think you were off your rocker.” The list ranged from racing spark plugs and oil coolers to a hubcap.
“I’ll be in there.” Jeff pointed halfway down the strip to Caprice and Company, a chain of stores known for their silky and sexy lingerie. There was a time when Chris had depended on that store—he knew he could buy Carmen anything within its walls, and she would love it.
But Jeff in Caprice and Company? Something for Mia, no doubt.
It took him half an hour and a few glib explanations to the sales people before Chris managed to collect the items Jeff had requested. By the time he emerged from the store, Jeff was already in the car. He opened the back door to put in his three bags of purchases and saw the gift box wrapped in green paper lying on the seat.
“How’d it go?” Jeff asked.
“Got it all.”
“Great.” Jeff sounded relieved.
Chris got in behind the wheel. “The check-out guy thought I was pretty strange, but other than that it was no problem.”
“Thanks for taking care of it.”
Chris turned the key in the ignition and pointed into the back seat. “For Mia?” he asked.
Jeff smiled. “Who else?”
Chris didn’t know what more to say on that subject. He had been surprised at first to realize that Jeff and Mia were something more than friends. Yet after he thought about it—and after spending some time with them, singing and laughing on his cottage porch at Sugarbush—he knew their attraction to one another made sense. Both of them were creative and imaginative, both of them saw people in a way others didn’t. He could picture them together easily now, and he envied their closeness.
When they were a mile or so from the Children’s Home, Chris began wondering if he should ask Jeff to wait outside while he saw Dustin.
After a few minutes of silence, Jeff said, “Why don’t you tell me about your son?”
Chris feigned a look of surprise, as though he hadn’t been thinking of his son at all. How did Jeff always seem to know what was going on in his head? “Would you like to meet him?” he asked.
“Of course.”
“Okay. But… I guess I’d better prepare you.” He rubbed his palms on the steering wheel. “It might shock you to see him.” He glanced at Jeff, then drew in a breath and blew it out. “He got really sick shortly after he was born,” he said. “They expected him to die. He didn’t, but he was left with severe brain damage, as well as a lot of other physical problems. He’s deaf and blind. He can’t speak and he doesn’t have much control over any part of his body.”
Silence filled the car again, and Chris felt his description of his son hanging in the air between himself and Jeff.
Finally, Jeff spoke. “This may be way too personal a question,” he said, “but Rick said that Carmen never visits him. I thought maybe Dustin was your son from a previous marriage or—”
“No, no,” Chris interrupted. “Dustin is definitely Carmen’s son.”
Jeff shook his head. “No offense, Chris, but I can’t picture Carmen as a mother to anyone.”
Chris chewed his lower lip as he took the exit to the Children’s Home. He understood Jeff’s lack of sympathy toward Carmen. Still, he felt compelled to try to soften his reaction to her. “You’ve got Carmen figured wrong,” he said.
Jeff made a sharp sound of disgust. “Why are you always so quick to defend her? From what I’ve heard, she treated you pretty shabbily.”
“What do you mean?”
“Rick said she wanted a divorce as soon as she found out you couldn’t play ball any longer.”
Chris bristled. “Rick Smythe doesn’t know shit about my life.” He pulled into the parking lot of the Children’s Home and turned off the ignition. The air in the car quickly heated. He looked toward the small, park-like side yard of the home and pointed to a bench. “Let’s sit there a while,” he said. “I’d rather you heard the facts from me than a bunch of crap from people who don’t know what they’re talking about.”
Jeff stared at him. “You don’t owe me any explanations.”
Chris opened his car door. “I know that,” he said, “but it’s time. It’s way past time for me to talk about it.”
The heat of the day weighed heavily on him as he walked across the parking lot with Jeff at his side. He had told no one, save Carmen’s psychiatrist and Dustin’s primary physician, what he was about to tell Jeff, and he knew it was more than a desire to defend Carmen that made him want to pour out the story now.
They sat at opposite ends of the bench, and Chris was grateful for the shade provided by the fig tree behind them.
He started slowly, not looking at Jeff, but keeping his eyes locked on the other side of Mission Valley, far in the distance. He told him about injuring his arm. “I had trouble accepting… I just couldn’t accept how serious it was, that it might mean the end of my career. Baseball was my life. It was all I ever wanted to do, and I was flying high back then. I was really peaking.”
“I remember.”
“Carmen was on top, too, although it had been a struggle for her to get there. It was more than the usual climb up the career ladder.” He described how Carmen’s Mexican parents had sent her to live with her aunt and uncle in California, how the aunt and uncle had raised her to be a good wife and mother, despite Carmen’s academic excellence and desire for a career. “It caused nothing but conflict in her family, and her relatives eventually wrote her off because of it.”
“That’s what she meant by loss, I guess,” Jeff said.
“What?” Chris looked at him, not following.
“Nothing. Go on.”
“Well, anyhow, Carmen wanted a career, but she also wanted a family. We both wanted kids. She could have pulled it off, too, I think, having both motherhood and a demanding career.” Chris was quiet a moment, remembering Carmen’s indefatigable energy and drive.
“But?…” Jeff prompted.
“We’d been married a couple of years when she got pregnant,” Chris continued. “Everything seemed great, and she announced it on her show and to the press. In the fourth month, though, she miscarried and sank into this all-consuming depression. It was hormonal, her doctor said. Postpartum depression, she called it, even though Carmen had only been pregnant a few months.” Chris closed his eyes at the memory of his suddenly unreachable wife. “I’d never seen anything like it. She’d spend hours staring into space. She wouldn’t eat. Wouldn’t talk to me. She finally snapped out of it, but it took months. She wanted to try again, which we did. I figured it couldn’t happen twice. Anyway, she got pregnant pretty quickly. She was supposed to take it real easy—no stress, no exertion. Then my father died. He and Carmen were close. She miscarried again, this time after five months.”
“And she got depressed again?”
“Big time.” Chris sighed. “It was terrible, and frustrating as hell because there was nothing I could do to pull her out of it. Even medication didn’t help, and she couldn’t work for a few months.”
A woman pushing a stroller walked past their bench. The child in the stroller was probably Dustin’s age, four or five, but his arms and legs were withered, and his neck was bent at such an awkward angle that Chris couldn’t see his face at all. The woman smiled at them. Chris waited until she was out of earshot before he began speaking again.
“So, she eventually got better. I was ready to forget about having kids at that point, but once she was back on her feet, she started talking about it again. She was constantly visiting her friends who had children. She loved kids.” He looked at Jeff. “It’s a side to her you haven’t seen.”
“You’re right.” Jeff sounded unmoved and somewhat disbelieving. “I haven’t.”
“Then she got pregnant with Dustin.”
“Was he born prematurely? Was that the problem?”
Chris drew another long breath. “No. And Carmen was good as gold. She followed her doctor’s orders to a T, and Dustin was born one day shy of his due date.” He pictured Dustin inside the home behind them, alone in his room, alone as he always was and always would be, no matter how many people were around him. “No,” he said, “the blame for what’s wrong with him lies entirely on my shoulders.”
“What do you mean?” Jeff asked.
Chris struggled with where to begin. “You know, I was pretty wild before I met Carmen.”
“Well, yeah, you had a bit of a reputation.”
“But once I met Carmen, I put all of that behind me. She always came first. I was faithful to her, on the road and off.”
Jeff nodded.
“But the arm thing got me down. I couldn’t let anyone know how bad it was. I didn’t want to be told I couldn’t play, and I didn’t want to worry Carmen. I was thirty-five years old, for Christ’s sake. Ancient. Other guys my age were already rolling along in their careers. I had a degree in physical education, but I couldn’t imagine teaching after what I’d been used to. I was really down, but I pretended everything was fine for Carmen’s sake. Her doctor was saying, ‘no stress,’ and my career was turning to garbage.” Chris rubbed a hand over his forehead. Even in the shade, it was too damn hot. “So anyhow,” he continued, “early that season I went on a road trip. It was obvious to everyone that I was having trouble, but I still wouldn’t give in. I worked with a physical therapist, and I got out there on the mound even though my shoulder felt like it had a hatchet in it. We hit a major losing streak, and it looked like I was the cause of it, which”—he laughed, without mirth—”in retrospect, I know I was. I’d get booed when I’d go out to pitch. That had never happened to me before.”
“I remember reading about that in the papers.”
“I was hoping Carmen wasn’t following the news. I’d call her from the road and tell her I was fine. I’d fabricate all kinds of reasons for why we were losing. She was about seven months along and doing well, but she was on bed rest, and her doctor had told her to read only books with happy endings and to watch nothing but sit-coms on TV.”
Jeff laughed.
“The final blow came when we got back to San Diego, and I got booed at a home game. They even threw stuff at me.” Chris’s hands tightened into fists at the memory. “I was used to respect—God, I was used to adulation—and suddenly they were treating me like a pile of manure.” He shook his head. “I can see now that I just didn’t know when it was time to bow out gracefully, to call it a day and walk away with some dignity left. Anyhow, that was one of the shittiest nights of my life. Even my buddies wouldn’t talk to me. All I could think about was how much I wanted to talk to Carmen, but I knew I couldn’t lay my problems on her without risking another miscarriage. I got as far as calling her from a phone booth in the stadium, but in the end… well, you know how it is. I kept it to myself and felt even worse when I hung up the phone.” He paused, his hands clenching the edge of the wooden bench. “There was this woman waiting for me,” he said. “I knew her. Actually, about two thirds of the team knew her better than I did, if you know what I mean.” He glanced at Jeff, who nodded, his face sober.
“She used to follow us around during the season,” he continued. “She always seemed to have a thing for me, but I had no interest whatsoever in her. Until that night, anyhow.”
Jeff studied him for a moment. “You slept with her?”
Chris nodded. “When I left the phone booth, she put her arm through mine and said, ‘They’re never going to be able to replace you, Chris,’ and I thought… well, I guess I didn’t think at all. I just took what she was offering as a way to make myself feel better. The next morning, it was all over the papers about my miserable final performance in the stadium. And Carmen was great.” She had told him to hold his head high, that she didn’t care if he played pro ball or pumped gas, and those words had meant more to him than he’d been able to express. “She didn’t know what I’d done, though, and—I swear this is the truth—I put it out of my mind. I felt like I’d been given a second chance. We forgot about baseball for a while and focused on the baby and the future. In a way, those last two months of her pregnancy were some of the best times of our marriage.”
Jeff was quiet, but as Chris kept his eyes riveted on the other side of Mission Valley, he felt acceptance rather than condemnation in the silence.
Finally, he drew in a breath and turned to Jeff. “Did you know you could have herpes but not have any symptoms?”
Jeff frowned. “Yeah, I’ve heard that, but… Oh, no.” He literally recoiled, leaning away from Chris on the bench.
“Oh, yes. One of my teammates who knew I’d slept with Cory—that was the woman’s name—told me he thought he’d gotten herpes from her the previous year. I was worried at first, but when I didn’t develop any symptoms, I thought I’d lucked out. But I did have it, and I passed it on to Carmen, who also had no symptoms, and she passed it on to Dustin. If we’d known she was infected, she could have had a C-section and Dustin would have been all right. Or at least he could have been treated right after he was born. But we didn’t know until his symptoms started, and then it was too late.”
Jeff hesitated. “God, Chris… I’m sorry,” he said, his voice subdued. Chris could barely hear him.
“Carmen was already slipping into that postpartum depression again, but at least this time she had a beautiful baby to think about. Once Dusty was diagnosed, though, and my part in his condition was out in the open, she completely shut down. She told me to leave the house; she couldn’t stand the sight of me. I got an apartment and called one of her cousins to come stay with her.” Chris groaned. “That was a mistake. The cousin took decent care of her physically—at that point Carmen wasn’t even eating or getting dressed in the morning, and the cousin was a drill sergeant. But she’d tell Carmen that Dustin’s condition was her punishment for going against her role as a female.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Wish I were. That’s the way her entire family thought. As far as I know, Carmen never told any of them the truth.”
“What about psychiatric help?”
Chris shrugged. “I tried getting her to go, but she wouldn’t listen to anything I said. One day, her cousin called me to say that Carmen had locked herself in the bathroom and wouldn’t come out. I went flying over there and had to take the door off the hinges. She was unconscious, in the tub, blood everywhere.”
Jeff’s eyes widened. “She cut her wrists?”
He nodded. “And one ankle. I think she would have opened every vein in her body if she hadn’t lost consciousness first.”
“Jesus.”
Carmen would be furious, Chris thought, if she knew he was recounting this story to Jeff. Yet he knew of no other way to make Jeff understand. “They hospitalized her for a long time. She wouldn’t see me. She essentially pretended Dustin had never been born. Had never been conceived. They didn’t want to release her but finally had to because she was no longer considered a suicidal risk. That’s because she was so doped up on antidepressants she didn’t have the energy to hurt herself. She went back to Sugarbush alone. The very first night back, she was so woozy from the drugs that she fell and broke her arm. They gave her painkillers for the arm and she became addicted to them.”
“Good God.”
“Anyhow,” Chris went on, “she was such a mess by then that I didn’t have much trouble getting her into a rehab program.” Carmen had gone into the program without a hint of protest. She had no fight left in her by then. “She was in rehab for months, slowly getting better. I could see the gradual change in her each time I’d visit. She’d never talk to me, though. I was supposed to go in for these ‘conjoint’ sessions, but I was the only one doing the talking. Then finally, during one of the sessions, she started screaming at me, saying she hated me, she wished I’d die.” Chris smiled ruefully. “They said that was the turning point for her, that after she started yelling at me, she got better. Shortly after that, she filed for divorce.”
Jeff was quiet. In the silence, Chris became aware of his own exhaustion. He was drained. Drained and very sad.
Finally, Jeff shifted on the bench, leaning forward, his forearms across the top of his thighs. He shook his head slowly. “Well, if you’d asked me to fabricate the worst possible explanation of why Carmen is the way she is, I couldn’t even have come close. God, what a nightmare.”
Chris leaned toward him. “Do you see why Carmen’s feistiness now pleases me so much? I did speak to her about leaving you alone, but she’s going to do what she thinks she has to do. And I have to admit, my loyalties are divided. It’s so good to see her going after a story again. It’s a sign she’s getting better. This past year she’s been free of all drugs—she doesn’t even drink. She’s been getting some exercise. She’s even trying to get her garden growing again. Going back to work was the final step, and she was devastated to find out they weren’t waiting with baited breath for her to get there.” He thought back to her phone call the other day, when she’d asked him questions about Dustin. “I’m worried about her. She’s still shaky. She’s just trying to keep her head above water. Maybe she’s not going about it exactly the right way, but it’s the only way she knows how, and it’s working for her. I only wish it wasn’t at your expense.”
Jeff sighed and stood up, shaking his head with a sad half-smile. “Come on,” he said. “I want to meet your son.”
The air conditioning inside the Children’s Home was cool and welcoming.
“I’m sorry, Chris,” Tina said, when she met them at the nurses’ station. “We were hoping to get him quieted down before you got here, but he’s been inconsolable today. We’ve tried everything.”
Chris nodded, and held the hall door open for Jeff to pass through ahead of him.
“What is she talking about?” Jeff asked, as they walked down the long corridor.
“Crying. Sometimes he cries, and no matter what you do, he won’t stop. You change him, hold him, sit him in his bean bag chair, sing to him, and nothing makes a difference.”
Three doors from Dustin’s room, they could already hear the little boy’s sobs.
Dustin was propped up in his bed, arms tight to his sides, chin lowered to his chest. His whole body shook with his crying, and his blue T-shirt had two dark, wet patches down his chest from his tears.
Chris pulled a chair close to the bed and leaned forward to hug Dustin’s unresponsive body. “What’s the problem, Dusty?” he asked.
Jeff stood at the head of the bed. “If I’d waited until I’d seen him, I wouldn’t have needed to ask if Carmen was his mother, would I?” He ran one hand over Dustin’s thick, dark hair. “He’s a gorgeous kid,” he said. “Can he see anything at all?” He held his hand in front of Dustin’s face. “Shadows? Light?”
Chris shook his head.
“Can he hear anything? Certain tones? Can he be startled by sound?”
“No.”
Jeff moved to the side of the bed and lifted Dustin’s small, well-formed hand and placed it palm down on his own. “Touch,” he said. “That’s all he has.”
Chris watched as Jeff slowly reached up to cup Dustin’s face with his hands. Dustin looked surprised. The crying stopped, as Jeff smoothly, methodically, wiped the tears from the little boy’s cheeks with his thumbs. Chris held his breath, and for the first time in over four years, felt a quickening of hope. This was a man who could work magic, a man who could work miracles. He leaned away from Jeff and his son. Leaned away and watched, but as suddenly as Dustin’s tears had stopped, they started again, spilling over Jeff’s thumbs, over the back of his hands. Jeff lowered his hands to the boy’s shoulders, let them slip down the rigid little arms. He cupped Dustin’s hands in his own, squeezed them, stroked them, and then finally let go.
“There are some things,” he said, “that can never be made right.”
Chris said nothing. His disappointment was intense, although he knew the nameless stab of hope he’d felt had been unrealistic and unfounded. He stood up, bending over to lift his son into his arms, and settled down in the rocker. Shutting his eyes, he drew Dustin’s head to his chin and began to sing. “Tell me why the stars do shine. Tell me why the ivy twine.”
He finished the song, and only then, only when Dustin began his grunting verbal protests to make him start again, did he realize the little boy had stopped crying. Chris opened his eyes and looked at Jeff, who was sitting on the floor, his back against the wall, smiling.
Chris hugged Dustin close to him, ignoring the wired rigidity in the little body. “Can we stay a while longer?” he asked Jeff. “Do you mind?”
Jeff shook his head. “We can stay all day if you like.”
THEY WERE NEARLY BACK to Sugarbush when Chris began thinking about the ease with which Jeff had touched Dustin.
“Do you have any children?” he asked.
Jeff turned his head to look out the window as if Chris hadn’t spoken, and Chris wished he could take the question back. He’d broken the cardinal rule Jeff had set in place between them.
Neither of them spoke as Chris drove into the parking area next to the adobe. They got out of the car, and he opened the back door.
Jeff lifted the bags of supplies into his arms, but made no move to leave. “I need to ask you something… awkward,” he said.
Chris looked at him in surprise. He couldn’t imagine anything more awkward to discuss than the story he had told Jeff that afternoon. “Shoot,” he said.
Jeff shifted the bags in his arms. “How did you live with yourself?” he asked, then added quickly. “I’m not trying to be flip. I really need to know how you got up every morning without wanting to run away.”
Chris knew he was being complimented. He had done something this remarkable man didn’t see himself capable of doing.
“I did want to run away,” he answered honestly, then smiled, thinking of how he longed for the mayoral election in November. “Sometimes I still do.”
“Well.” Jeff didn’t look satisfied with the answer, but he seemed disinclined to press for more. “Thanks for the ride,” he said.
“Right,” Chris said. “Glad you came with me.”
Jeff started toward the cottages, but turned before he reached the edge of the parking area.
“Chris?”
Chris closed the car door and shaded his eyes to look at him.
“I had three children,” Jeff said. “Perfectly healthy, whole children. But I lost them all.” He turned away again, and as he walked toward the cottages, Chris saw for the first time the laborious world-weary set of his gait.