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The dusty taffeta drapes proved no match for the sunlight streaming through the living room window in Edsell’s second-floor apartment. Though the clock had yet to strike six, the room was as bright as midday. Del nuzzled deeper into the back of the couch, tenting the sheet over his face in a futile attempt to fend off the approaching day. This was his second night on the sofa, which had been offered up on the journey back from Allentown, Pa., where he had caught up with the Red Wings the day after his world split apart. He’d ride it out until the next homestand. If he wasn’t back up with the Twins by then, he’d find more suitable lodging.
Outside the window, in a twisted chokecherry tree, a robin chirped and screeched its dawn song. Del pressed the sheet to his ear to muffle the jerky tune, but the concentration required to block out the onrushing morning made sleep impossible. At last he gave up. Cocooned in sky-blue bed linen he sat up and retrieved his cell phone from the end table. There were two text messages waiting for him.
The first had come in at 1:38 that morning. It was from Edsell and said only, “SORRY BOUT THAT.” Del chuckled, recalling the trombone blast of a fart that had echoed through the apartment shortly after he’d laid his head on his pillow. The second, from Milo, came in at 5:14. “Just landed at O’Hare. s/b on time into ROC.”
This was to have been the weekend Del returned to Seattle for a three-game set at Safeco Field. With that homecoming derailed, Milo had decided instead to come to him, kicking off a four-day visit with a cross-country red-eye.
Del typed a short reply, saying only “see u at the airport,” shed the sheet, pulled on a pair of shorts, and laced up his running shoes. Latching the front door softly behind him, he descended the steps and sat down on the sidewalk, where the sun warmed him as he went through his stretching routine. He began his jog at a slow pace, turning up Oxford Street, lined on both sides by gentrified and yet-to-be gentrified homes. Many of the houses had been subdivided into apartments like Edsell’s, with three or even four units contained in what once were large single-family homes. Del crossed Park Avenue and continued up to East, where he turned right and increased his tempo. Though he had run thousands of miles in laps around warning tracks in ballparks all across the country, jogging was something he had never enjoyed. Today marked his fourth consecutive morning run. Ginny Lupin had suggested it in a flurry of emails Friday afternoon as he waited at the airport for his flight out of Minneapolis. She was the one person who had reached out to him that day without outrage, pity, or condescension.
She’d trained that spring for a 5K race in honor of a sorority sister battling leukemia, and soon found both peace and strength on her solitary runs. Del ran the first morning just to be able to honestly report he’d done it. Forty minutes later he understood what she meant. His mind was free to wander or blank itself out. As long as he kept taking right turns he’d wind up back where he started. As he ran he thought about Gilchrist, he thought about Dana, he thought about being more aggressive on the first pitch, he thought about what the grand jury would ask, and he thought about quitting. This morning he pictured himself at home, waking up in his own bed, next to his wife. Going out to dinner tomorrow after the game.
Entire city blocks disappeared as he thought of Dana, swallowed in long strides while his mind was three time zones away. They’d spoken four times since he’d been sent down. Not once had he sensed the warmth and life that had punctuated their conversations last summer as they counted down to the wedding. Her impending ovulation window, though never directly referenced, dominated their calls in the form of awkward silence. She still wanted—needed—him to comfort her, something he wasn’t yet capable of doing, and maybe never would be.
He borrowed Edsell’s Grand Cherokee and arrived at the airport just after nine. From behind the security checkpoint he watched Milo approach, towing his wheeled carry-on bag behind him, his left leg gobbling ground in long strides as his right fought to keep up.
“How are you holding up?” Milo asked when they separated from a silent, but fortifying, hug.
Del shrugged and shook his head while he searched for his voice. The words got stuck halfway up and all that came out was a low hum. Without attempting to clarify, he grabbed the handle of Milo’s suitcase and rolled it toward the escalator. Milo caught up to him on the moving stairs. “Pardon my French, but you look like shit.”
“I know.” Del’s voice was barely audible over the dull droning of the escalator.
“Still not sleeping well?”
“No.”
“I could have gotten a cab. You should have said something. I would have let you sleep in.”
Del forced a smile. “I was up. Already went for a run, actually.”
“You eat yet?”
Del shook his head.
“Let’s get some breakfast. That diner across the street still there?”
With a left out of the airport and a quick right into the restaurant, Del was transported back nearly two years, to a summer morning much like this one. He was still ascendant then, when he and Milo had stopped in the diner, which he couldn’t say he’d thought about once since. As he held the door for his father, the view rushed into alignment with the forgotten image stored in the corner of his brain where thousands of fast-food joints and family eateries lingered, most never to be drawn out again. The same large-breasted woman in the same black-knit sweater with the same reading glasses dangling from the same chain around her neck welcomed them from behind the same glass counter housing quite possibly the same pies. She greeted them as if she remembered them, which seemed impossible, though he somehow remembered her. She led them to a window booth and left them to ponder their menus as she retreated to her station at the register. Del scanned his quickly, then set it on the table and took a long sip of ice water.
“You know what you want?” his father asked.
“Tall stack, two sausages, fresh fruit.”
“At least your appetite is still there.”
“Most of the time, yeah. Gotta keep my strength up just in case I ever hit the ball again.”
“You can’t think like that.”
“I can’t help it sometimes.” Del dropped his head into his right hand and lightly massaged his forehead. “I actually felt kind of good a couple nights ago, but there were some calls that just totally threw me. I’m talking balls a good six inches outside. I don’t know if the guy was trying to screw me or what. I looked back at him, and he just stared at me like he was daring me to say something. After that I just swung at anything close. Another oh-fer.”
“Well, that’s going to happen, I guess. Some guys get their jollies by kicking folks when they’re down.”
“I just wanted ...” Del shook his head. “So bad, I just wanted to come down here and show them they made a mistake, you know. But, God ... another week like this and they’ll drop me back to New Britain.”
Milo reached across the table and planted his hand on the back of Del’s. “That’s not going to happen. It all starts tonight.” His glistening eyes and wan smile were unconvincing. They made Del feel worse, if anything. As if his own father pitied him.
A younger version of the woman at the front counter, minus the glasses, appeared at their table and took their order. The white of her bra showed through in spots where it strained against her sweater. Del felt guilty for noticing, especially when she smiled at him.
“You talk to Dana?” Milo asked when the waitress had left.
“Yeah. I called her last night.”
“What’d she have to say?”
Del shrugged. “Not a lot. She seems almost angry with me. Like somehow it was my fault I didn’t get to come home this weekend.”
“That’s not very sympathetic.”
Staring blankly at nothing in particular, Del nibbled on the tip of his thumbnail and nodded. “It’s complicated.”
“Life is complicated.” The wrinkles angling in under Milo’s glasses deepened as he smiled. “I was naïve enough to think once upon a time that I could shield you from some of that. What a dreamer. I feel sometimes I’m no wiser than I was the day you were born. I sit up there in my tower worrying about you just the same as I did when you got decked by the Martin boy on the playground in second grade. I feel like I should have answers for you, and I don’t.”
“It’s not your fault, Milo. I’m the one that dug this hole.”
“I could have helped you keep it from getting so deep. I should have said something when I first started to wonder about it all. I wanted to give you your space, trust you. But my job didn’t end when you went off to college. Remember Baggiono?”
“Joey Donuts?”
“Yup,” Milo chuckled. “Joey Donuts. That crazy chunk of saturated fat gave me the best piece of advice I ever got from anyone on parenting. And he never even had kids. He told me if I wanted to know what was going on in your head, just ask. That was the day after you shot that crow. Remember?”
Del nodded. He could still see the bird falling, glancing off branches as it tumbled from the top of a towering pine in the back corner of the yard. It had taken him eight shots to nail it with the BB gun he’d received two weeks earlier from Gwen for his tenth birthday, the crow’s screeching growing louder after each miss, as if it were taunting him.
“I was so upset. I started looking for signs I’d missed of a cruel streak. I was afraid you might be one of those disturbed kids who killed animals for fun. I’d never seen that before in you.” Milo took a sip of his water and crunched a chunk of ice for a moment before resuming. “Then come to find out you did it because it had been harassing Anderson’s poodle. I was too afraid of the answer to ask. I’m still learning the same lessons over and over.”
“What would you have said if I’d told you I was on testosterone?”
“I don’t know. Maybe that’s why I never asked. Even though it was wrong, I don’t think I would have tried to talk you out of it. But maybe just having someone to share that with would have made things easier on you somehow.”
Or maybe it would have only made him feel worse. Del had talked himself into believing no one was wise to his sudden transformation. He had fooled them all. How many others had known, even that first spring when he and his new physique reported to camp? And what would he have said had Milo asked? Inviting him into the secret would have required owning up to it and all its ramifications. He couldn’t chalk such a stupid decision up to youthful indiscretion once he’d used his father to help legitimize it.
“I had Edsell.”
“True. But he was just as burdened as you. I could maybe have helped lighten that. Or maybe I just flatter myself to think so.”
“No, it helps. It’s hard never being able to talk about it. I can’t really talk to anyone outside of Edsell, and we don’t even talk about it much. It’s just kind of this secret we share that we bring up every so often and usually laugh off. In some ways he’s got it easier now. He already paid for it. It’s in his past. I can’t seem to put it in mine.”
“What if you could?”
“How?”
“This might sound a little counterintuitive.” Milo lifted his glasses off his face and rubbed the bridge of his nose where the frames had left impressions in his skin. “But have you ever thought about giving an interview and just getting it all off your chest? Once it’s out there, anytime anyone brings it up you can honestly say you’ve already answered those questions. It will be old news. Time to move on.”
“Every day. I wish ...” Del paused. “If I could go back in time and do it over, I’d have done it in November. Maybe with that annoying Sam Nightengale. Maybe ... whoever. Wouldn’t matter who, I guess, just that it would all be over. I’d be free.”
“You still can.”
“I don’t think so. Isn’t there some kind of rule against it, with the grand jury and everything?”
“Leave him out of it. That’s not about you, it’s about him, right? Jesus? So leave him out. Just tell your story and get out from under this. Because every day closer you get to Florida, this will weigh on you a little more. I can barely recognize your voice sometimes now when we talk on the phone.”
“So, what? Just hold some kind of press conference and say, ‘I did it’?”
“In a sense,” Milo shrugged. “I mean, it’s just a thought. If it terrifies you ... I know how you get sometimes talking to reporters.”
Terrified wasn’t the right word. Defensive, or even fed up, would be more accurate. But maybe it would be better to meet them on his terms, here in Rochester. The local guy wasn’t so bad. Certainly less of a dick than Matt Friday. Or whoever he might find lurking down in Fort Myers. And there was no way his testimony would stay secret for long. His subpoena had gone viral within hours. Why would the grand jury be any different? When it all leaked out he’d be right back where he started. Or worse.