Caden and Kyle are setting up Ellie’s crib in Kyle’s spare room. The futon is still in there, but they had to move a desk and a chair into Kyle’s bedroom to make room. I’m busy feeding Ellie her dinner at the kitchen table where her highchair now sits at one end.
I look around the apartment that is now riddled with our stuff, and I smile. His place looks better with Ellie’s things scattered about. It was too clean. Too clinical. But maybe that comes from his being a doctor.
I don’t know how long we’ll be here. But what I do know is that baseball season is about to be in full swing and Kyle doesn’t want me staying with Caden when he’s on the road so much. Plus, there is the whole Grant wanting to break his arms and legs thing.
That gives me about six months to get Kyle to come around. Seven if the Nighthawks make it all the way to the World Series.
I turn back to Ellie. “More?” I sign.
She opens her mouth big in answer.
“What was that you just did?” Kyle asks me, coming into the kitchen. “It looked like you were clapping with your fingertips. Is that the sign for ‘eat’?”
“No, that’s the sign for ‘more.’ The sign for ‘eat’ is this—” I bring my thumb and fingers together and make it look like I’m bringing food to my lips.
He copies my movements, doing both the signs for ‘more’ and ‘eat.’
Ellie squeals.
“I think she likes that,” I say. “She doesn’t see many people signing. And especially not words she knows.”
He smiles down on her, her chin orange from drooling carrots. Then he brings his thumb to his chin, doing the sign for ‘mother.’
“Mommy,” he says, signing again and then touching my shoulder. He does it three more times since he has Ellie’s undivided attention.
This man. Does he work hard to be this charming, or does it come naturally?
“Thank you,” I say. “Nobody has ever done that for her before. I’m the only one who ever signs to her.”
He looks at me in disbelief. “Not anymore,” he says. “I know I work a lot, but on my days off, I’d love for you to teach me.”
“You want to learn ASL?” I ask, surprised.
“Of course. It won’t really be fair to Ellie if you have to tell her everything I say, now will it?”
“Uh, no, but—”
“Good. Then it’s settled. I have a thirty-six-hour shift and then I have a night off on Tuesday. We’ll start then.”
The doorbell rings and ends our conversation. I’m teeming with excitement. He wants to learn sign language. He thinks we’ll be here long enough for him to need to communicate with her.
Caden comes out of the spare room—my room—and heads to the refrigerator to get a few beers. “The crib’s all done. Want a beer, Lexi?”
I haven’t had a lick of alcohol since the moment I found out I was pregnant. I look at Ellie and then over at Kyle.
“One beer is fine,” he says. “Doctor’s orders. You need to relax.”
“Okay,” I say, holding out my hand to accept it.
Kyle places a giant bag of Sal’s take-out on the table in front of me.
“Oh, my God. You remembered?” I ask, smiling from ear to ear.
He laughs. “How could I forget? I’m a bit surprised you didn’t name your daughter Sal.”
I sneer at him. “I’m not that obsessed with it.”
“Oh, but you are. Sal’s Chinese food and Hawks baseball.”
Caden pats me on the back. “That’s my sis.”
“You should have seen her, Caden,” Kyle says. “She wouldn’t even let anyone speak if you were at bat. Or behind the plate. Or even on a highlight reel—especially then.”
“I wasn’t that bad,” I say, reaching in the bag to get the boxes out and spread them around the table.
Kyle raises his eyebrows in objection. “Eliz—sorry—Lexi, you were. At first it was endearing, a woman so into baseball. But then as time went on, I became aware that it wasn’t baseball in general, it was one particular baseball player. And I’m not ashamed to say I was jealous as hell.”
Caden snorts beer through his nose. “Dude, that’s just wrong. Jealous of me and my sister?”
Kyle throws a pair of chopsticks across the table at him. “I didn’t know she was your sister back then.”
He leans over me to grab his favorite egg roll, and when he catches Ellie watching him, he does the sign for ‘mother’ and puts his hand on my arm.
He has no idea what his doing that just meant to me.
I watch him take a bite of the egg roll and then wrinkle his nose at it.
“What?” I ask. “Is it not good?”
“It’s fine,” he says, putting it down on his plate. “It’s just, I’ve had a lot of them over the past several months. They may have worn out their welcome with my taste buds. I might have to move on to spring rolls or something.”
“You’ve eaten at Sal’s a lot, huh?”
“Uh, I guess once or twice,” he says, looking embarrassed.
He went there. He went there for me. It was the only place outside the hospital that he associated with me. I can’t help my triumphant smile.
“What?” he asks, annoyed with himself for revealing what he did.
“Nothing,” I reply. Then I turn to Caden. “So, are you going to keep number eight, or go back to twenty-seven?”
“I think I’ll stick with eight,” he says around his food. “It’s brought me a lot of luck. I had seven home runs last season. And now you’re back. Lucky number eight.”
“Why did you change it?” Kyle asks him. “I thought it was kind of unusual for a player to change a number.”
“It is,” Caden says. “I grew up being number twenty-seven. It was the first number they ever assigned me when I started playing T-ball at age five.”
“Every year, he just kept getting better,” I say. “He impressed his coaches. The other players. He thought it was the number. It got to the point where if he couldn’t get number twenty-seven, he wouldn’t play for a team. I remember a few travel ball teams he turned down when he was twelve just because they already had a kid with the same number.”
“Really?” Kyle asks Caden in amusement.
“It’s a superstitious sport, man. People do crazy things in baseball.”
“But you changed it halfway through your first year with the Nighthawks. What happened?”
Caden nods at me. “Lexi went missing. It was a tribute to her.”
“How was it a tribute to Lexi?”
“Alexa Octavia Kessler,” Caden says. He looks over at me and we share a nostalgic smile. “My big sister always thought I should be number eight, not number twenty-seven. She said eight was the better number and that I should listen to my big sister and if I didn’t, bad things would happen. I guess my superstition about that overrode my superstition about baseball.”
“No shit?” Kyle says. “You’d think that story would have been all over ESPN. I never heard about it.”
Caden shakes his head. “I never told anyone why I changed the number. I’m sure my teammates thought it had something to do with my sister going missing, but I kept it to myself. Lexi was the only person who needed to know why I did it.”
I reach across the table and touch my brother’s hand. “The dynamic duo,” I say.
He laughs. “The dynamic duo,” he repeats.
“It’s what we used to call ourselves when we were little,” I explain to Kyle. “Our father took off shortly after Caden was born and our mother bounced around from man to man looking for her next husband—of which she had four. Nobody had time for us. It was us against the world.”
“Darn,” Kyle says, looking overly dramatic. “You guys are a walking-talking Lifetime movie.”
Caden and I both pelt him with fortune cookies.
Kyle catches them and winks at me. “Still my favorite part,” he says, keeping one and tossing the other back to me.
“Mine too,” I tell him, ripping open the plastic to get to mine.
I can’t help but smile as we both hide our slips of paper while we eat our cookies. Caden looks between us, not understanding the private moment.
I read mine first. “You will be hungry again in thirty minutes.”
We all moan and chuckle as Caden opens his. “Made in the USA,” he reads.
“Boston!” Kyle and I shout at the same time, laughing.
“Now you,” I say nodding at Kyle.
He opens the slip of paper and reads his fortune to himself. Then he shakes his head and gets up from the table, throwing his food in the trash.
“Dude, did it say you were going to kill a patient or something?” Caden asks, laughing.
Kyle doesn’t respond to Caden’s laughter. He just keeps walking to his bedroom. We’ve reminisced a lot tonight about the month I was under his care in the hospital. But it was evident to me that the more we walked down memory lane, the more uncomfortable he became. Maybe all those good memories just reminded him of how I left him without even a word.
There is still so much he wants to know about me. Still so much I should share with him. I wish things were like they were before and I could just show up with a dozen flavors of Jell-O and two plastic spoons. How I long for those days. Before I made the biggest mistake of my life.
Kyle’s bedroom door slams shut.
Feeling a bit defeated, I walk over and look at the trashcan, the little slip of paper having fallen off his plate, coming to rest on the floor next to it. I pick it up and read it.
‘Everything happens for a reason.’