Page 85 of Breakout Year
So Akiva would not think about Sunday or the end of Eitan’s lease or what would happen when Eitan left New York for good. He would not think about this ache in his chest, one not attributable to getting up early—because Akiva was one of those people who liked to be at a flight two hours early, even if he wasn’t checking a bag—or about what that ache might mean. He would not think about Eitan whispering, You’re who I was waiting for amid the rattle of a train. And Akiva would certainly not think about the lightness he’d felt, as if he’d put down something heavy he’d been carrying for a long time, as he’d said it back.
He would go in and eat and cheer when the announcer called Eitan’s name. Eitan deserved that.
It was just late enough in the afternoon that the gates were open. Akiva submitted his ticket to be scanned, his body to a cursory metal detection and wanding.
“Rivkin fan, huh?” the ticket taker said, indicating Akiva’s sweatshirt. “Guy’s kind of a?—”
And Akiva was about to object: to cut him off, to solve this through a glare, possibly a stern word and the implication that he shouldn’t say something like that to someone of Akiva’s size, even if Akiva had never so much as thrown a punch, when the man continued.
“—a heel.”
A heel. Someone who played hard within the context of the game, who you didn’t like, unless he was on your team. Akiva could live with that. “He does love a big moment.”
“Too bad about how that trade shook out,” the man said.
Akiva smiled. “Agree to disagree.” Then he pushed his way through the turnstile into the ballpark.
Two hours later, Akiva stood at his section entrance as the usher greeted ticket holders by name and slowly admitted them to their seats. The worst social crime one could commit in New York was to make other people late. Ohio moved a little slower, it turned out.
Still, he was grateful for the momentary reprieve—Eitan’s parents were probably already here, which would mean questions, the first of which would likely be, Who are you to Eitan? Something Akiva didn’t know the answer to. He’d spent the afternoon milling around the ballpark with a certain aimlessness that felt inherent to baseball. He’d nursed a beer, browsed the team store, asked where the Rivkin merchandise was before he’d been pointed to a sales rack.
Crooks Stadium was older than the one where the Cosmos played, but it felt newer or perhaps was just slightly cleaner without everyone trekking in subway dirt and car exhaust. A nice place to play, really, if Akiva was being generous, which he absolutely wasn’t.
The line moved up. The usher inspected his ticket, gave him the eye over his ballcap and sweatshirt. “We had him first,” she teased.
But I have him now. A thought Akiva turned over as he thanked her and walked down the concrete steps to his seat.
Eitan’s parents were in fact there. They looked like they did in the picture on Eitan’s nightstand, a recognition that felt intensely personal. Helpfully, they were also holding a large poster-board sign—now wrinkled from age and storage—advertising Eitan’s draft rank.
Akiva said his excuse me’s as he navigated down the row, finally ending in a seat next to theirs. He considered what to say, beginning with hi and ending with, I really like your son.
Eitan’s mother turned, gave him an appraising look. They’d met once, very briefly, seven years ago. Hardly more than a wave to one another in an Arizona parking lot. “You’re the boy from Instagram,” she said.
Whatever Akiva had been expecting her to say, it wasn’t that. “I’m Eitan’s friend, Akiva.”
She sniffed at the word friend, then seized both of Akiva’s hands in her own. She was stronger than she looked. “You came from New York to see him play?”
“He got me a ticket and?—”
Akiva didn’t finish that sentence, mostly because he was being hugged and impressed upon to call her by her first name, which was Irene. Over Irene’s shoulder, Eitan’s father was studying them with the look of a man used to being next to public outbursts. He shrugged, then extended his hand and shook Akiva’s once he’d been released.
“Eitan is not calling as much as he used to.” Irene said it in carefully enunciated English, with only a hint of an accent lingering in its vowels. She was in her late fifties at most, with a few lines around her eyes like her face was accustomed to smiling. “He’s been busy in New York?”
Akiva pushed down the urge to apologize to her for whatever was about to happen between him and Eitan. “New York is a busy city.”
“Good. I want him to be happy.”
Akiva didn’t think busy was necessarily a substitute for happy, but hopefully Eitan had been both. “Me too.”
“Especially with this team of—” She gestured to the field and said a word in Russian that Akiva didn’t know but could translate based on her tone. “He should be in a place that loves him.”
He is. A thought Akiva couldn’t interrogate with Eitan’s mother studying him as if place meant something else entirely. “Yes,” Akiva said finally. “Yes, he should.”
Akiva was saved from having any more feelings in public by the anthem. He stripped off his ballcap, stood out of some sense of ritual rather than conviction. Next to him, Irene was grumbling, words he could only make out the very edges of but one sounded a lot like mandatory. Still, she rose from her seat, removed her hat, then immediately shaded her forehead with her hand. Remained that way for the duration of the anthem, then finally wiped her eyes. “The sun,” she said, even though the sky was darkening and the stadium faced east.
Cleveland took the field to a reasonable number of cheers, muted perhaps by the end of the season, which would go down in the books as yet another bad one. Eitan loves things even when they’re futile. Akiva decided he was done with melodramatic thoughts for the day and so flagged down a vendor and offered to buy Irene a beer.
The scoreboard lineup declared that Eitan was hitting third. Akiva waited as the first Cosmos player went down on strikes, then watched as Eitan came to the on-deck circle and prepared for his at-bat. Something in the brace of Eitan’s shoulders made him seem wary. Un-Eitan-like. Look up. Eitan should know he wasn’t doing this alone.
