Page 82 of Breakout Year
Mark: He decided?
Akiva: He knew from the start this was temporary.
Mark: So you’re going with him?
Akiva: I live here. My job is here.
Mark: Yeah and?
Akiva: What if it doesn’t work out?
Mark: What if it does??
A question Akiva certainly wouldn’t answer. Things didn’t work out: that was sort of the prevailing theme of his life. Things didn’t work out and you made the best of them. Taking giant leaps just led you to faceplant at the bottom of a cliff.
Akiva tossed his phone aside, opened his draft again, typed sentences without seeing them. Some days, writing felt like art and some days it felt like clocking in at the word factory. Today was definitely the latter.
He wrote until the game was over. The Cosmos won; the Blossoms lost. This feed included a postgame show, the commentators breathless over Eitan Rivkin’s Hometown Reunion happening on Friday. Was it even a reunion if they kicked you out? Akiva supposed it was, even if some part of this felt like Eitan was being cast as the disgraced son about to crash a dinner party at his family’s country estate. Akiva made a note of that in his writing journal—bad son returns home, interrupts dinner, symbolically overturns soup tureen onto family portrait. Then, after a moment, he drew a line through bad. Eitan wasn’t the problem in all of this.
Still, Eitan would be asked to bear all this himself, in a city that should love him and didn’t. How could anyone not? Akiva certainly?—
Opened his email. Went to the ticket Eitan had forwarded him. A less than two-hour flight leaving from Newark at the civilized time of eleven thirty in the morning. Akiva couldn’t go. He had a series bible to update, a million emails to slog through, Sue’s notes to transform into a story, though this iteration was less notes and more vague suggestions. Along with those, he had Mark’s question that he couldn’t escape: what if something worked out for once?
32
Eitan
u/longlive86: Rivkin looks like he’d rather be anywhere else.
u/eerie_erie: We let him know we don’t want him.
u/longlive86: I often antagonize my franchise’s best player over some dumb bullshit. That works out well.
u/eerie_erie: You’re a drama queen and so is he.
u/longlive86: Better than a crybaby like you.
* * *
Eitan stood at the edge of Crooks Field, watching the groundskeepers as they put the last touches on the sidelines. He called to a few by name, and they looked up and waved, but didn’t come over. They were busy. It was reasonable to be busy. They had to tamp down the dirt and lay the chalk lines. Doing those instead of saying hi had nothing to do with Eitan or anything about him. It was possible they just loved grass and didn’t follow baseball at all.
He’d been like this all day—jittery. His mom had mentioned it in between cursing out the New York media in a variety of languages and attempting to feed him every corn and egg product in the Midwest. His father hadn’t mentioned it at all. He didn’t say much generally, just drank his tea and let Eitan’s mom have most of the conversation. Today, though, he clapped Eitan on the shoulder a few more times than usual, as if he was trying to either settle Eitan or reassure him.
Williams had taken the much more direct route of threatening to pour electrolyte water on Eitan until he chilled the hell out. Now Eitan was half-tempted to go looking for him, just for the distraction. Earlier this year he’d been desperate to play in Cleveland for as long as possible. Now he was making a list of what he needed to get through before he could go—not home, New York wasn’t home—but someplace other than here. Back to Akiva for one last day.
Right now, he just needed to survive workouts and batting practice. On-field warmups. The game. The inevitable postgame scrum, and a night in a hotel room, alone. His parents went to bed early, but he’d see them tomorrow before the next game. It was fine. He could get through a few games in Cleveland. Surely, there were much worse things in the world.
In theory, each team had a designated time for workouts and various warm-ups. In practice, there was always a jumble of players from both teams around. Eitan wasn’t going to let the presence of his former teammates stop him from taking his customary jog around the outfield. And if he chose to run outside today so no one could accuse him of hiding, so what?
Being on the field meant he actually had to get onto the field. He’d been standing by the foul line long enough. He jumped over it, entering on the third-base side rather than the more familiar first-base one when he played for the Crooks. The dirt still felt like dirt. The grass still felt like grass. Downtown Cleveland still stood just beyond the scoreboard, though compared with Manhattan, it looked like a city in miniature.
Crooks players emerged from the other dugout. He hadn’t texted anyone before the game. They knew he was coming as surely as he knew he would be here. It was possible they were running through the same mental checklist as he was, counting the time until he was gone. It was possible they weren’t thinking about him at all.
Still, he wanted to go running, so he went running, a jog that traced its way around the edge of left field, then by the warning track. It felt good to move. His ankle was strong, his lungs capable as he took in cool afternoon air. His heart…
He’d only texted Akiva a few times. Normal stuff: pictures of his breakfast that involved a staggering number of eggs; his neighbor’s cat who he’d seen sitting in a window that morning. Akiva hadn’t responded. He was probably busy. Eitan didn’t know how many simultaneous denials he was capable of telling himself, but if he didn’t acknowledge they were denials, then they didn’t count.
He kept jogging around the outfield, closer and closer to a group of Cleveland players. He’d seen most of them less than two months ago. They’d been his teammates, his friends. A few texted when he first got traded: condolences and well wishes and telling him to go get paid. After the press conference…well, he’d apparently been booted from the group chat and so hadn’t heard much else.
