Page 24 of Diamond Ring
“Don’t really know how connected they want to stay with me.”
“You did win them a league championship pennant.” She says it a little sharply, though Jake probably deserves it. “Here’s my idea. We produce your ‘recovery diaries.’ Everyone loves a comeback story.”
Assuming I come back.“Can I think about it?” He summons a media smile but must look truly miserable because her eyes soften.
“Think it over. If there are other players who might be in it too, we can include them.” She doesn’t sayAlexbut it hangs there.
“Mostly I think I’m gonna stay with my parents. They’re doing the surgery at Hopkins, and I can rehab here.” Something he told team staff but no one else. Certainly not Alex, though it feels like news he should hear from Jake directly.
He contemplates it after they get off the call. That he’s going to be stuck moping around suburban Maryland. The REM song got it right. No one should go back to Rockville, especially for a whole fucking year.
“You could take classes,” his mom says, when she’s looking over proposals on her clunky government-issued laptop, the screen glare turning her hair more red than brown.
“Rehab’s gonna take a lot of time.”
She tilts her head from side to side, the way she does when she’s acknowledging what he said but disagrees. “You might need something else to focus on.” A suggestion with the implication ofbackup plan.
“Eighty-five percent of pitchers are back on the mound within a year of surgery.” Something he’s googled, more than once, like repeatedly searching will change the answer to one hundred.
“You may have mentioned. Just remember you have options other than baseball.”
Like what?Jake doesn’t say. His grades were good because his parents wouldn’t have let him play otherwise. He can’t imagine rolling into a community college course with people he went to high school with, like he’s admitting defeat.
“If you got drafted out of college...” his mother adds. An old argument that aches like his arm. She’s probably right. Baseball is fleeting and degrees aren’t.
Nothing he wants to examine right now. Instead he offers to buy her a new laptop after the third time she curses her computer’s operating system. “Keep your money.” She waves a dismissive hand. “Who knows, you might need it someday.”
They schedule his surgery for two weeks before Christmas. He goes under anesthesia and comes out with the doctor reporting good results. “Nothing for it but time,” the doctor says and gives Jake information on post-operative care, a prescription for drugs that leave him woozy, and instructions to rest.
Days bleed into one another. The team hasn’t announced he’ll be out for the season, even if the free agency rumors are that they’re shopping for another starting pitcher, prompting speculation that Braxton has a less-than-ideal prognosis.
Five days after surgery, Jake emerges from his haze to realize two things: his elbow is probably going to ache for a long while and he missed Matt’s yahrzeit.
He can’t steer with his arm in its hard plastic brace, so his mom drives him out to the cemetery. An overcast winter day, the sky like goose feathers leaking from his winter jacket. Matt isn’t—wasn’t—Jewish. The Christian cemetery is full of ostentatious headstones and flowers that people leave in dedicated holders.
Jake brings only himself, hands stuffed in his pockets, and a set of smooth flat rocks he finds nearby. He lays one on Matt’s headstone. The span of dates seems impossibly smaller with every passing year. How Matt never got a learner’s permit or to go to prom. How he worried about a bad report card or an awkward conversation. How he carried his anxieties as heavy things, though they were objectively as small as the stones Jake sets at his gravesite.
Jake doesn’t know what to say, so he stands, the treads of his boots sinking into the soft winter soil. His arm aches, because it’s damp out and because less than a week ago, someone cut into him and replaced his elbow ligament with a cadaver’s, a dull ache that throbs in time with his pulse.
To say a mourner’s kaddish, you need a minyan, a group of ten Jewish adults. There’s no one around him but a stand of leafless oak trees. So Jake recites the words he knows, ones he learned so long ago he has no memory of learning them, a part of him that sits close to his bones—the thing he knows how to say when all other words fail him. If he’s crying when he gets back to the car, his mom just pulls a set of tissues from the travel pack in the glove box and offers to get him a milkshake at the drive-thru if he remembered his Lactaid.
His days are defined bycan’ts. He can’t run and can’t lift. Can’t release the energy humming under his skin that’s the entire reason he plays in the first place—all those hours he spent in the small paradise of their backyard running, and hitting, and throwing, throwing, throwing, and hecan’tdo any of that now.
Rest doesn’t settle him. Knocking things around in his room in an attempt to rearrange them doesn’t provide much relief. In a fit of desperation, he goes out for a walk with his mother, a morning stroll that’s mostly an excuse to trade gossip with their neighbors, some of whom offer sympathy about the Elephants’ loss and their daughters’ phone numbers.
The day after Christmas his mom suggests, gently but firmly, that he should perhaps do something other than eat leftover Chinese food and annoy her. She hands him a skein of yarn that’s gotten gnarled when they’re sitting at the kitchen table. “If you’re that desperate for something to do.”
It’s slow going, one-handed, satisfying in its difficulty. He unloops tangles and works his way backward from the terminus of knots to their sources.
“You know,” his mom says, when he’s picking apart a particularly difficult patch, “I haven’t heard Alex’s name in a while.”
Jake’s face goes warm under the incandescent kitchen lights. He puts the yarn down on the table’s scarred surface. It’s familiar, battered in places, comforting. He remembers, viscerally, thinking the same things about Alex’s hands when they gripped the fabric of his shirt the night he’s started thinking of asThat Nightin blinking capital letters.
He hasn’t answered her. She’s wearing the same expression she got when he mentioned that he was going to a high school dance with a guy from his history class—then clarified that he wasjusta friend.
“We might have ended the season on a disagreement,” he says. It feels juvenile, like he and Alex got in a schoolyard tussle. Not that Jake had, ever, since he hit his present height in tenth grade and needed to avoid other kids picking fights with him to prove something.
She doesn’t say anything for a minute. Alex once mentioned that silence was his aunt’s most effective tool at tarot card readings—that she could get other people to tell their own fortunes just by giving them the space to do so.
