Page 50 of Heavy Hitter

“You need to leave through the garage,” he reminds her quietly. “There’s press outside.”

Lacey laughs out loud, sharp and ringing. “No shit, Jimmy.” Both of them stand in silence as she waits for the elevator, her heels echoing as she steps inside. She waits until the doors whoosh shut behind her before she crouches on the floor, makes herself as small as humanly possible, and lets herself start to cry.

Chapter Twenty

Jimmy

JIMMY SITS ON THE COUCH FOR A LONG TIME AFTER LACEY LEAVES, staring blankly out the window at the city. He wants another drink, badly. He wants another drink, or he wants his brother, or he wants to hit something over and over until his knuckles are shredded and bloody. Instead he gets up and runs seven miles on the treadmill even though it’s twelve thirty a.m. and he just caught nine innings, even though he just pounded two fingers of Basil Hayden. It hurts like all hell, which is what he was after. The pain feels like something he deserves.

When he’s finished he collapses into bed and sleeps for four hours, then gets up and drives over to the clubhouse, the sun dripping up orange and pink and yellow in the rearview as he cruises through the city toward the park. They don’t need to catch the bus to the airport for another couple of hours, but Jimmy likes being the only one here in the morning: the bleachy, mineral smell of the tunnels, the grounds team and the maintenance guys all going about their days. It’s peaceful—or it usually is, anyway. This morning when he gets into the locker room he finds Tuck is already waiting for him, sitting in a rolling chair with his ankles crossed on one of the benches and an enormous Starbucks cup in each hand.

“Thought you might show,” he says, reaching forward and handing one over. “You all right?”

“I’m fine,” Jimmy promises him gratefully, tossing his bag in his locker before sitting down and taking a sip. It’s still hot enough to burn through some of the hangover fog in his brain. “I’m good.”

“Bullshit.” Tuck raises an eyebrow. “You look like a fucking untoasted bagel. You want to go play catch?”

Jimmy barks a laugh, then reconsiders, looking at Tuck for a moment. “Yeah,” he says. “That would be good.”

So they go outside and drink their coffee and toss the ball back and forth for a while, not saying much, just breathing in the fresh clean air and the smell of the grass and watching the sky turn full morning. Jimmy’s head has almost stopped throbbing by the time Jonesy shows up. “If you guys were looking for someplace to be alone to practice French kissing, you could have picked a more private venue,” he calls, strolling out of the tunnel with his sunglasses perched on the brim of his ballcap.

“We were waiting for you to give us some tips, actually,” Tuck shoots back. “Hodges keeps coming in too hot with his tongue.”

Hugo turns up before Jonesy can answer, the rest of the guys trickling out onto the field one after another, all of them in their practice uniforms, quietly warming up. They’re all early, Jimmy realizes—they must have planned it—and for a second he loves them all so fucking much and so fucking deeply he almost needs to turn around and walk off the field so he doesn’t fall down.

He clears his throat instead, swallowing down the strange lump that’s settled there, swiping as surreptitiously as he can at his cheekbone behind his sunglasses. “What?” he says, when he catches Ray looking at him. “I got something on my face?”

“Little bit of jizz, yeah,” Jonesy pipes up helpfully, motioning to the side of his own mouth.

Jimmy snorts. “Fuck you,” he says, but he’s laughing, which he knows was the point.

But Ray shakes his head. “I was just, uh. Waiting for your speech, is all.”

Jimmy rubs a hand over his chin and looks back at him for a moment, at this kid whose entire career in the majors is still in front of him like a carpet, like the fucking yellow brick road. Then he takes a breath and gets to work.

“Some of you guys know I got into baseball in the first place because of my brother,” he begins, jamming his hands into his pockets and rocking back on the heels of his cleats. “He was older than me, and he was my hero, and he loved this game more than anything. And I stood around and watched while the world crept in and took that from him and stole his focus and made him less than what could have been. Less than what he was.” Jimmy clears his throat. “Anyway,” he continues, “I promised myself that for his sake I was never going to let that happen to me, and you know what? I mostly haven’t. No matter what shit was going on in my personal life, no matter what the media was saying about me—about us—I always tried to check it at the door. The last couple weeks, though...” He shakes his head. “Look, you fucks have been here the last couple weeks. You know what it’s been like. And I owe you all an apology for that.”

“Aw, Cap,” Jonesy says, “it hasn’t been so bad.”

“Are you kidding?” Hugo cuffs him gently on the side of the head. “You’ve been complaining louder than anyone, you grouchy little pissant.”

“No, he’s been right to complain,” Jimmy says. “It’s been a shitshow, and we can’t afford it. But in the end there’s nothing more important to me than baseball, and I’m not about to let anything fuck it up. So let’s go to Boston and let’s play our fucking faces off, and let’s bring this thing back to Baltimore, all right?”

Tuck claps first, God love him. The rest of them join in a moment later until the sound of it is almost loud enough to fill the chasm in Jimmy’s chest. And if it still feels a little like the fucking wind is whistling through his ribs in there every time he thinks about what happened with Lacey, well, this is for the best, Jimmy reminds himself firmly. He’s exactly where he’s supposed to be.

“Come on,” he says, slinging his arm around Ray’s shoulders and steering the kid back across the ballfield, the sun high and bright in the sky. “Let’s get out of here, huh? We’ve got a fuckin’ flight to catch.”

***

THEY PULL IT TOGETHER, THANK FUCK. THEY MORE THAN PULL IT together, actually: they win Game 5 against Boston and they win the first three games against the Astros in the League Championship Series the following week, the Texas air thick and hot and still. They lose two in a row after that, but they don’t even feel like losses, exactly; they feel like stopovers, like breaks before they win again. They make mistakes and fix them. They identify their problems and they correct. And sure, the press keeps right on asking him about Lacey at every available opportunity, but Jimmy’s got no problem telling them he’s got nothing to say about that, because he does in fact have nothing to say about it. He wanted to concentrate, and he’s concentrating. He wanted to win, and here they are.

The problem, of course, is that he feels like absolute shit.

It’s not that he’s lonely, exactly. After all, he’s never fucking alone. He’s either playing baseball, preparing to play baseball, or sleeping, calling pitches all through his dreams. Still, he wakes up every morning with a stiffness in his joints and a heaviness in his shoulders, a gnawing uneasiness he can’t shake. He remembers this from after his divorce, the feeling of having perpetually just misplaced something. He tells himself, sternly, that it will pass.

It... does not so much seem to be passing.

Still, one thing about Jimmy is that he’s a goddamn Hall of Famer when it comes to ignoring pain and discomfort, so he grits his teeth and pushes through it as much as humanly possible. He takes his fucking fish oil. He ices his swollen knees. This is it, he reminds himself every single morning in the mirror. This is the moment he’s been waiting for his entire fucking career.

---