Her hand feels so soft in mine. It fits perfectly. I give her a squeeze. My eyelids are heavy, but it doesn’t matter. I don’t need to see her. Just knowing she’s here with me, touching me – is everything. God, I’ve missed this.
I hear myself moan in pain. “It’s okay, Brady,” she says, lovingly. “Everything is going to be fine.”
Brady? Natalie always calls me babe. I try to open my eyes, but I can’t. My arm hurts and I’m confused.
“Nat?” I say, squeezing her hand again as I feel myself falling into a haze.
Natalie comes up behind me, jumping onto my back, wrapping her long athletic legs around me.
“Today is the day, babe!” she squeals excitedly. “The final game in the College World Series. You made it all the way. One more game and you’ll be a champion.”
I crank my head around so I can see her. “I’m not a champion yet?” I tease.
“You’ve always been a champion to me, but now the world will see you as one, too.” She punctuates her words with a kiss on my cheek.
“If we win,” I remind her.
“Oh, please. You’ll win. The University of Nebraska has the best baseball team and everyone knows it. I’m just so glad the World Series is in Omaha and we don’t have to travel with Keet.”
She slides down my back and puts her feet on the floor just as our three-year-old son comes running through the apartment swinging a plastic bat. My instinct is always to tell him not to do that. But I’m a ball player, so it would be kind of hypocritical of me. Plus, I’m hoping he’ll follow in his old man’s footsteps.
“Are you sure your sister is okay with keeping him for the entire day? If we win, there will be all kinds of celebrations.”
“When you win, babe.” She grabs Keeton’s bat before he swings it into the television. “And Katie loves watching Keeton. All she has to do today is study for her summer class. She can call me if she needs me and I can be home in forty-five minutes. You could ride the bus back if you had to.”
I laugh when Keeton pouts for a second at the loss of the bat, but then he runs in the other room to grab his tiny glove and kid-friendly baseball.
“I’m glad Katie decided to enroll here,” I say. “She’s been a huge help.”
“She has.” Natalie swats my behind. “Now get your stuff, you have to be at the bus in thirty minutes. We’ll walk you out. I have to pick up some snacks at the store for Keeton. I’ll drive up in a few hours and be there in plenty of time for the first pitch. And don’t showboat too much, it messes up your fastball. I know all the scouts will be there, but you have nothing to prove. By this time next week, I guarantee you’ll have gone in the first round of the draft.”
I can only dare to dream she’s right. “You’re a little biased, don’t you think?” I pull her into my arms, leaning down to savor one last kiss before we walk out. Then I ruffle Keet’s hair. “Don’t drive Mommy crazy, champ. And have fun with Aunt Katie.”
“Yay!” he screams, throwing his ball in the air and then catching it in his glove. That’s my boy.
Nat grabs her purse and picks up Keeton. She heads out to the car to put him in his seat. “Don’t forget the shirt,” she says to me from the sidewalk.
“Never.” I head out the door, grabbing my bag with my lucky shirt already tucked inside. I’m smiling from ear-to-ear as I shut the door. The next time I walk through this door, everything will be different.
“Love you, babe!” Natalie calls out to me.
“Love you more!” I yell back, walking in the other direction.
We live in married student housing right on campus, which luckily is only a ten-minute walk to the stadium since we only have one car between us. We’ve lived here ever since the little white stick foretold our future and we went to the courthouse in downtown Lincoln. Having Keeton may have moved things up a few years, but we knew when we were sixteen that we’d always be together. I find I’m practically skipping the entire way to the bus. This is it. I graduated last week. And next week, we’ll find out where we’re going. I don’t even care who picks me. I just want to play ball and have Nat and Keet by my side.
I trip on the sidewalk and fall down, pain searing through my arm as a haze comes over me.
“Brady, are you in pain?” Natalie asks.
Again with the Brady. I open my eyes successfully this time to see the ceiling lined with fluorescent lights. I’m disoriented as I turn my head and look around the large room. There are many beds, machines making noises, and a lot of people in green scrubs moving about. I look at Natalie, confused because it’s not Natalie.
Then it hits me and I relive it all over again in the span of five seconds.
Natalie’s gone. Keeton’s gone. My elbow is broken and my season, if not my career, is over.
Murphy looks at me with sympathetic eyes. She always looks at me this way, but I might have called her Natalie just now, so she looks even more pained than usual over my tragic past. She has an inkling of what happened but has never been told the details. Nobody has.
I sigh, wishing I could go back into the dream. Back to the day that was supposed to be the most perfect day of my life but turned out to be the worst imaginable. Fate has a way of fucking you over when you least expect it. And the fact that I helped it along is just another nail in their coffins.
The nurse raises the head of my bed and offers me a sip of water. “The doctor will be by to check on you soon.”
I take a small drink that makes my sore throat feel a hundred times better. “Thanks,” I tell her.
“Shit,” I say to Murphy when the nurse walks away. “I forgot what happened for a little while.” I look down at my arm that is immobilized. My elbow hurts, but what really bothers me is that I can still feel a burning, numbing sensation down around my fingers.
“They told me you’d be out of it when you started to come around.”
“How’s the game going?” I ask, needing to change the subject away from all the questions lurking in her head. I’m sure she knows exactly what the score is as my team, the New York Nighthawks, plays the Chicago Cubs. In fact, I’ll bet she was watching it on her phone while she was sitting by my bed waiting for me to wake up.
“Four to three, bottom of the fourth.”
I nod, pleased that my team is winning. “Caden score?”
She smiles. “Had a double down the third base line. Sawyer drove him in and then stole his way around the bases.”
“Nice. He steal home?”
“Yup.”
“Sweet.”
Sawyer is our short stop who also holds the league record for stolen bases for two years running. He’s smaller than Caden and me, but he’s freaking scrappy. He gets to the ball fast, and he runs like the wind.
“How are we doing, Mr. Taylor?” Dr. Sorenson asks, coming to stand next to me.
He’s the orthopedic surgeon who works on a lot of athletes not only from the Nighthawks, but also from all the professional sports teams in the New York area.
“My fingers are numb and they burn.”
He nods, squeezing one of my fingers at the nail between a few of his. “The hope is, once the swelling from your injury subsides, you will regain the feeling in your fingers. But I have to be honest with you and reiterate that based on your symptoms prior to surgery, I feel you have significant nerve damage. With that comes intense pain and numbness down the thumb side of your forearm and into the first two or three digits.”
My head falls back against the pillow as I listen to the worst news an MLB pitcher will ever hear.
The doctor picks up my chart and looks it over. “The surgery on your elbow went well. We put in one pin and I would expect a full recovery where that is concerned. But as I said yesterday, your nerve was damaged from the contact of the fast-moving ball and there is just no telling when or if you will regain complete function. If you haven’t made a lot of progress in three months or so, we can consider nerve transposition surgery, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Nerve issues have been known to correct themselves over the period of a few weeks or months.”
“Or never,” I add, sullenly.
He looks at me with an empathetic smile. “It’s a wait-and-see game, Brady. Don’t go jumping to conclusions.”
I close my eyes and absorb his words again. I heard them yesterday. Those and more. I know the drill. I’ll be put on the disabled list and most likely sent to our spring training complex for intense rehab.
“But you’re not very optimistic, are you?” I ask. “You’ve seen these types of injuries before with all the athletes you work on. Give it to me straight. What are the chances I’ll pitch again? I need to know.”
“Pitch, or pitch at the level you were two days ago?”
“Come on, doc. You know anything less than how I was would be catastrophic for me.”
Dr. Sorenson mulls over my chart again. I feel like he’s stalling. I glance at Murphy and I can tell she’s thinking the same thing because she widens her eyes and moves them quickly in his direction and back.
He sighs and I feel like I’ve been stabbed in the chest. “Best guess – twenty percent chance. Maybe thirty. But I’m always conservative in my prognosis predictions, so please keep that in mind. I’d rather have you singing my praises than signing my death warrant.” He laughs at his attempt at a joke.
“I appreciate your honesty,” I tell him before he walks away.
I’m trying to hold it together when Murphy reaches over to take my hand. “How many kids grow up to be major league pitchers?”
I look sideways at her random question.
“How many?” she asks again.
I shrug and then scold myself when pain shoots down my left arm. “I don’t know, like point one of one percent?”
She shakes her head. “Less,” she says. “There are what, thirty MLB teams? And each team carries approximately five starting pitchers. That’s one hundred and fifty major league pitchers. And how many males are in the United States?”
She takes out her phone and Googles it. “About a hundred and fifty million.” Then she taps on the calculator. “That means of all the men in the country, and we’re not even including all the foreigners who come and play, the typical male has a 0.000001 chance of becoming a major league pitcher. That is one in a million, or a millionth of a percent, right?”
I laugh at her not quite genius-level math skills.
“Shut up,” she says. “You know what I mean. What I’m trying to say is that you accomplished something that a million other people couldn’t do, and you’re going to let Dr. Sorenson giving you a twenty-to-thirty percent chance bring you down? If little boys were told they had those kinds of odds of becoming a starting pitcher for the New York Nighthawks, they’d be over the moon.”
I can’t help the smile that overtakes my face. “Caden is always telling me you’re a glass-half-full girl. I think I like that about you, Murphy.” She is the most optimistic person I’ve ever met. It has me thinking about something. “I’ve been meaning to ask you, when’s the trial?”
Murphy was wronged in a major way by her ex-boyfriend. And now both Murphy and Caden have to testify to put the guy behind bars. He’s been charged with something like four felonies and five thousand misdemeanors. Five thousand. The guy should get far more time than he’s looking at, which is two to five years based on what the prosecutor says.
“The scumbag’s lawyer has already gotten two postponements, something about his client being too sick for trial. Tony is scamming him like he scams everyone. But his day will come and Karma will eat him alive.”
“I can’t wait to see it happen,” I tell her.
An orderly comes by to take me back to my room.
“Go home, Murphy. I really appreciate you being here for me when the guys are gone. Go watch the rest of the game. I’m probably going to sleep all evening anyway.”
She puts her bag over her shoulder. “Okay, but I’m coming back tomorrow to take you home. And then I’m going to help you pack for Tampa.”
“It’s not like I don’t pack for Tampa every spring, you know.”
She motions to my arm. “Not one-handed you don’t.”
“Shit.”
I’m not used to being so fucking useless.
She walks over and puts her hand on my shoulder. She looks down at me with a motherly expression, although I’m a good three years older than she is. “Take it from another person who thought her life was destroyed by a baseball – things will get better. Who knows what the future will hold, Brady.”
I nod. I don’t bother saying this is different. I don’t bother saying her injury wasn’t as critical as mine. I don’t say it because that would make me an asshole. But I think it. Because I’m an asshole.
She turns to head out. “They said you’ll probably be released around 2:00 PM. I’ll see you then. Take it easy, okay?”
“Will do. Thanks, Murphy.”
They wheel me back to my room and I immediately turn on the TV and find the game. I watch it, of course, but what I really want to do is go back to sleep and be with Natalie and Keeton.