In late March, just over six months ago now, Evan had been standing in the on-deck circle at baseball practice when a teammate hit a foul ball into his face. According to witnesses Evan had been maybe twenty-five feet from the plate, windmilling the bat around, stretching his shoulders, hooking the bat behind his back . . . the usual routine, the same old, same old. Meredith could picture this perfectly, had replayed the scene a million times, though she hadn’t been there. The windmill, the hook, the things he’d done thousands of times, tens of thousands, loving the weight of the bat in his hand, the sun in his eyes, the confidence of knowing this one central thing about himself: he was really, really good at baseball.
When he was a sophomore, the city paper had named him the starting catcher on the all-region team, which was very rare. Their region was made up of a dozen suburban high schools west of the city, each suburb nearly a city in and of itself. Players like that, he’d told Meredith, guys who made all-region as sophomores, wound up at D1 schools, sometimes with full scholarships. It had happened abruptly; for a long time he was good, and then something changed—something physical, something in his body, something he freely, cheerfully admitted he couldn’t take any credit for himself, a balance of strength and precision that elevated his skill both at and behind the plate—and suddenly he was really good. By that day in March he was nine games into his junior season and batting .470.
So there he was in the on-deck circle, thinking all these wonderful things about himself, or so Meredith imagined. (Sometimes, in her mind, she was watching from the stands; other times she stood no more than a foot or two away from him, so close she could hear the impact of ball on bone.) No one did anything wrong. No mistakes were made. Evan was wearing a helmet. He was standing in the appropriate spot. He wasn’t goofing off. There was nobody you could point to and blame, not the kid (Matt Bowman) at the plate, not the bench coach, not the coach throwing batting practice, not Evan. It was just something that happened, a fraction of a second that you couldn’t pin on anybody.
And then he was on the ground. “I never saw it coming,” he’d told her months later, abruptly, bitterly, sitting on the back patio one humid July evening between surgery three and surgery four. It was the only time he’d ever talked to her about that day. “Blindsided,” he’d said, scoffing. A mosquito had landed on his knee and he’d just sat there and watched it bite him, didn’t even try to swat it away. Never saw it. Not for one second.
The doctor said that Evan’s entire left eye socket was crushed beyond repair. A blow-out fracture, he called it. The doctor said, “Imagine stepping on an ice cream cone.” Meredith would never forget this, sitting in the hospital room, Evan sedated, she on a stiff vinyl chair looking out the window at the hospital parking lot, the doctor somberly relaying the news to her tight-lipped parents. “Imagine stepping on an ice cream cone.” Why hadn’t she been sent out of the room prior to this doctor-parent consultation? Why didn’t her parents think to say, “Hold on, doctor, give us a minute—Mer, honey, why don’t you run down to the coffee shop and get a chocolate muffin while we talk to the doctor?”
No, she was sitting on that hard, squeaky chair, wishing she could un-hear the sentence and un-see the image. The doctor said it was the worst baseball eye injury he’d ever encountered, that the best-case scenario was that Evan would regain some function (not “sight”—he plainly did not say “sight,” but “function”) in his left eye, but that he’d never play baseball competitively again.
As a catcher, Evan had been the recipient of numerous home-plate collisions, taken pitches off the shoulders and chest and knees and toes and facemask. He’d been banged up since she could remember; sometimes he seemed like one big purple bruise. Always, he recovered. But this was not like anything else.
?
More often than not they ate breakfast together, as a family, around the kitchen table in the sunny breakfast nook that looked out onto the backyard. Having breakfast together was a holdover from earlier years, when The Baseball Clock ruled the world, when Evan’s practices or games always ran right through the evening and most dinners (except in the dead of winter) were sandwiches or one-pot pasta or French bread pizza in front of the television whenever you got hungry, or a floppy hot dog from a concession stand.
Breakfast was the meal where they could actually sit together for fifteen or twenty minutes, during which her father inevitably asked everyone to set a goal for the day. They didn’t have to be serious goals—her father wasn’t that guy—but were intended, he always said, to let everyone know something about what the others were doing as they went about their day. Meredith’s stated goals were often lies having to do with academics—“I want to do well on my English test,” etc. Not that this wasn’t true, but her actual, pressing goals were almost always social in nature, and she didn’t feel like letting on to her entire family just how shallow she really was.
“I’m going to go for a walk during lunch,” her father said. Her father’s response to Evan’s injury had been to pursue an accelerated course of self-improvement in order that he might be better able to meet everyone’s needs, whatever they might be. Crushed eye socket? I got that! His goals were often exercise or nutrition related, but once during the summer Meredith looked out her bedroom window and there was her father lying on the hammock in the backyard, reading the Bible, the intolerant cat grabbing at the shoelaces that hung through the netting of the hammock, her father threatening the intolerant cat by pretending to smack it with the Bible. The Bible, which had apparently belonged to her great-grandmother but which no one in the family, as far as Meredith could tell, had so much as glanced at since her great-grandmother’s death.
“What d’ya think?” her father asked her mother now. “Care to join me?”