Page 79 of Unwritten Rules
Days go by. The closer the series against the Gothams gets, the slower time seems to go. Zach goes to the ballpark, works out, hits off a tee, hits in the cages, does fielding drills, lifts. He rides the bench for a third of their games, maybe getting one pinch-hit appearance in the late innings or maybe just standing at the dugout railing and spitting.
He hasn’t texted Eugenio, and Eugenio hasn’t texted him, but it wasn’t unusual before the All-Star Classic for them to go months without sending anything.
One night, after a game against the Millers, he sits in bed, squinting at the glare of his phone screen in his otherwise dark bedroom and reading through their text thread with one another. The thread itself only goes back two years, a total of fewer than twenty messages, though that’s mostly because Zach purged them on his road trip from Oakland to Miami. He sat in various hotel rooms that dotted long stretches of highway, scrolling through them, screenshotting a couple before deleting the rest.
He pulls up the screenshots now. A lot of them are hotel room numbers for when they were on road trips together, Eugenio coming to Zach’s room to “discuss game-planning,” the entirety of their relationship in a set of three-digit numbers and thumbs-up responses.
Now the thread is mostly a string of texts from Eugenio followed bySorry wrong person,and then the number from Zach’s Cincinnati hotel room. Dots appear while Zach has the thread open, Eugenio typing, and Zach sits and stares at them until they disappear again.
He considers what he could write, as if it could be distilled into a text message. That he’s alone, floating, in a city barely above sea level. That he might not have the guts to say anything to Eugenio during their upcoming series. That Eugenio could fly back to New York with nothing different between them, and that Zach might let him. The thought of it makes him ache.
It’s possible Eugenio is sitting in whatever New York loft he probably lives in thinking the same thing. Or he could have accidentally opened the text thread and typed a message intended for someone else before catching himself. It’s possible he’s moved on, leaving Zach adrift.
Zach looks at the thread, at the dots that have disappeared, and then at the walls of his bedroom. The shelves in front of him are scattered with the detritus of his playing career: dated game balls, his baseball card encased in clear polymer, a picture of the Elephants clinching a postseason berth, everyone radiantly happy and soaked in champagne. Looks at them, and the spaces between them, now gathering dust.
He opens up a search tab on his phone browser, pausing for a second before typing intherapists.And then revising it totherapists coming out Miami, not expecting much to appear. The top search result is advice for therapists on how to help their patients, but the next leads to a set of names and numbers, a few reviews from clients willing to put their names—or at least their user handles—to them.
He could call. It’s late, and any office is liable to be closed. He could leave a voice mail, asking them to call him back.
And risk getting a return call at the ballpark the next day, telling Womack or Pinelli or any of their bullpen pitchers that it’s a call from a doctor, not a team doctor, and that he’ll be back in a second. Hoping the walls are thick in whatever room he ducks into, that his phone for once interfaces correctly with his hearing aid. Asking if they do appointments by video so he doesn’t have to go to a building with their name listed on a letter board in the lobby. Of beginning the session and having the therapist go, “Hey, aren’t you that guy who plays for the Swordfish?” Thinking about it puts a metallic taste on the back of his tongue, an invisible compressive loop around his chest, restricting his breath.
He doesn’t call. But he clicks the phone number associated with one of the therapists, a clean-cut guy who looks like he does triathlons in his spare time and has rave reviews. He lets his phone dial the number and cancels the call, then saves it to his contact list as the guy’s name before revising it to Todd Miami.
He reopens his texts to the thread with Eugenio, types and hits Send before he has a chance to stop himself.See you soon.
He’s about to close the thread, silence notifications, go to sleep, when his phone flashes an alert, a text that just says,Wrong person?
No,Zach replies. A pause, three dots appearing and then disappearing, before Eugenio responds.
Looking forward to seeing...And there’s delay, Eugenio typing. Another message comes through ...Miami pitching.
And Zach laughs loudly, echoing off the walls of his apartment, sound filling in all the empty spaces before it fades.
Chapter Twenty-Three
October, Two Years Ago
They return to the familiar beach house in Cambria the next year, three days after their Wild Card game loss. Eugenio drives, arm propped on the door frame, music playing from his phone that makes it hard to talk.
Zach doesn’t much feel like talking anyway, still physically and mentally sore from the season, which ended in a single-game elimination. He slept for almost eighteen hours after, the blackout curtains drawn, Eugenio restless on the couch, flipping TV channels, unsleeping when Zach got up to get himself a glass of water. And Zach feels like he hasn’t slept now, hip aching, head against the window of Eugenio’s truck, vaguely watching the highway roll past.
It’s midafternoon when they get in. Last year, the house felt luxurious even compared with their normal big-league accommodations. Not that they used most of it, going from living room to deck to bedroom, spending most of their time lying around or eating.
Now it feels both unaired and cavernous when Zach steps in, like he’s expecting to see dust motes hanging in shafts of light, even if the whole place smells like lemons and disinfectant. The kind of place most players rent in groups, not just the two of them rattling around in a house where their footfalls echo against the high ceilings.
“Which bedroom?” Eugenio asks, because there are three of them. He pointedly doesn’t roll his eyes when Zach shrugs a response. He hauls in their suitcases, dropping them in the bedroom Zach would probably have picked anyway. “You gonna be like this the whole time?”
“Give me a day.”
“Yeah, all right.”
They go swimming; it’s cold enough that Zach doesn’t last in the water for long, even in a wetsuit, but it’s good, bracing, the kind of water Zach swam in when his parents decided to take a trip to Rhode Island one summer. Enough to shock him out of his bad mood, abraded by sand and the bottle of bourbon Eugenio pulled from a bag and handed him before they headed down to the beach.
Eugenio is lying in a beach chair, pretending to read, but mostly just sitting there with his eyes closed. He’s wrapped in one of Zach’s hoodies, complaining about the chill, sleeves pulled down past his wrists.
“Hey,” Zach says, and he checks to make sure they’re the only people on this particular stretch of beach, before leaning to kiss him, “where do you want to go for dinner?”
They eat out that night, go hiking the next day, get day drunk at a winery the following one. Sleep late. Swim. There’s baseball on—they both get periodic alerts on their phones that neither mentions—other teams playing in the division series, then for the pennant.
