Out of His League Read online

  “I’ve never been more serious,” Jon said.

  “Then you’ll need to work your ass off. Unlike what you’ve been doing in your big-league career.”

  “You’ve been watching me, huh?” Jon smiled, but Coach Duffy didn’t like the joke.

  “I’m committed,” Jon said quickly. “I’m in a fight for my life.”

  The other cart pulled up beside them, and Coach stepped out to join them. At the last second, he turned to Jon. “You know that the Captains might drop you, trade you or move you to the bullpen, don’t you?”

  Don’t say that. Don’t even think it. “I’m a starting pitcher with a changeup pitch in my future.”

  Coach Duffy’s smile crinkled. “That’s the spirit.” He strolled to the back of the cart. “You could be an ace, Jon, if you let yourself have it.”

  “Does that mean you’ll do it? You’ll help me?”

  “Only if I see commitment from you. This, right now...this is just talk.”

  “I’ll start today,” Jon assured him.

  Coach Duffy selected a seven iron from his golf bag. “Meet me in my office on campus at eleven in the morning. If you’re late, it’s over.” He pointed at him with the end of the grip. “Consider it your first test.”

  Jon went home and got his gear together. Coach Duffy didn’t know it yet, but Jon wasn’t going to let anything stand in his way.

  With his good hand, he tossed in a small cooler full of ice packs. He even threw in his glove, though he didn’t know why he was bothering, because with the splint, he wouldn’t be wearing it. It just felt like the right thing to do.

  The day would probably be a session of loose stretching. Of easy, long tosses. Just getting back into a regular workout routine after the break caused by the surgery. Then, in a few days the stitches would be taken out. For now, he just wanted to get going on discussing the mechanics of the changeup pitch. He felt an urgency to begin anew.

  With the address of Coach’s campus plugged into his GPS, he swung his SUV into traffic. It was a bright autumn day in Boston, windy and warm, and there were lots of tourists on the meandering streets built over Colonial-era cow paths. One of the big universities—MIT, BU, Northeastern—must be having Parents Weekend. It made Jon smile, thinking of his own college years in Arizona. That had been the time in his life he’d been most focused on himself, selfish even. He would do best to keep that in mind.

  But he was sitting at a red light when his phone buzzed. Glancing down, he saw “Lizzy” on the screen.

  That had to be a mistake. His pretty anesthesiologist would not be calling him. Not after the parting shot she’d given him.

  It had to be a butt-dial.

  As the traffic started up, he maneuvered his SUV around an obviously lost tourist from Pennsylvania, beat the left turn on the light and then answered the phone.

  He didn’t expect her to answer him back, but he spoke into the phone anyway. “What is it, Lizzy? I’m busy ‘not helping’ people today.”

  “Jon?” Brandon’s thin, high voice cut in on the line.

  Jon snapped to attention, steering the Ford away from a Duck Tour bus and into the lane behind a delivery truck carrying beer.

  “Hey, buddy,” he said into the phone. “What’s going on?”

  “I think I’m lost.”

  “Um. Okay.” The beer truck stopped short—right before a green light—so Jon cut around the truck and made a forced merge into the left lane. A horn blared at him, but he ignored it. Get used to Boston driving, out-of-towners. “Where are you lost?”

  “If I knew where I was, then I wouldn’t be lost, would I?” Brandon said.

  Smart-ass, Jon thought. Just like his brother Bobby.

  But the good news was, Brandon didn’t sound scared. Jon’s instincts told him this was just a ploy. Get-the-attention-of-the-big-league-ballplayer. Maybe he’ll come around the neighborhood and impress your friends.

  Lizzy would not be happy when she found out.

  “Are you with your aunt?” Jon asked.

  “No.”

  So, the kid had taken it upon himself to look up the number that Jon had typed into his aunt’s phone last night? “Are you with your mom?” Jon asked.

  “No. I told you, I’m lost.”

  With a cell phone in his hand. Jon sighed. The entrance to the expressway was just ahead, beyond the lumbering Duck Tour bus, which had caught up with and then apparently bypassed him.

  As soon as the light turned green, he was out of here. He checked his watch. Thirty minutes until his appointment on the South Shore with his new pitching coach. He really didn’t have time for this.

  “Brandon,” Jon said patiently, “you need to use that phone you’re holding in your hand and, instead of calling me, you need to call your dad.”

  “I don’t have a dad,” came the plaintive reply.

  Damn. Jon was an idiot. What did he say to that—I’m sorry? Of course he was sorry...for being an idiot and bringing up the topic. But would that really help the kid if he told him so?

  What could he say to help the kid?

  “The people in my family don’t have dads,” Brandon said matter-of-factly.

  Jon felt floored. Whether Brandon knew it or not, Jon felt the pain of his reality to his solar plexus.

  The traffic light changed, cars and trucks crept forward, but Jon didn’t move fast enough for them. Horns blared.

  This time, Jon used his left-turn signal instead of just changing lanes like he normally did. Giving intelligence to the enemy, as his dad would say. A fresh barrage of horns rang out.

  “Yeah, yeah,” he said aloud, and then stepped on the accelerator.

  He was met in a standoff, the intersection blocked by a guy in a clunker with a Rhode Island license plate.

  Mr. Rhode Island wasn’t giving an inch. Interesting, considering that Jon’s SUV was three times the size of the clunker.

  Then again, it was a clunker. The woman in the passenger seat applied toenail polish, her bare foot propped against the glove compartment. Jon was lucky—she could be hanging out the window and screaming at him.

  Just another morning drive through Boston. He sighed. He needed to get out of the city and on his way.

  “Brandon, seriously, where are you?” Jon hated to do this, but... “Put your aunt on the phone. Now. Okay?”

  “I mean it. I’m really lost.” Brandon’s voice was frightened now. Was Jon imagining it, or was he hearing the sound of blaring music, as if from the open window of a car passing by the little boy? “Jon...I’m scared.” His breath sucked in, and he whimpered, “Boston is scary.”

  The only scary parts of Boston were the bad parts of Boston, and no kid should be alone in the bad parts.

  Brandon started to cry. Jon knew little-boy tears, and this wasn’t acting.

  “Tell me where you are, Brandon?” Jon said, his heart racing. “Give me a building or a street name, and I’ll come get you right away.”

  “Okay,” Brandon said, “I see a street sign....”

  Jon had sworn to stay out of Lizzy’s business, but it looked like he had no choice.

  CHAPTER SIX

  “WHY ARE WE HERE?” Elizabeth said to her sister. “We need to get going.”

  They waited in a patient/family conference room not much larger than a library study cubicle—Ashley sitting tensely on an aged, beat-up leather couch, Elizabeth standing impatiently, squeezing her hands into fists.

  “Please, Lisbeth,” Ashley begged. “Sit with me for a minute.” She patted a cushion beside her. “I have something I really need to tell you.”

  This could not be good news. Elizabeth had arrived at the alcohol abuse treatment center expecting to pick up her sister and take her home, but instead a nurse had led her upstairs—alone, without Brandon—under very hush-hush, mysterious circumstances.

  And now Ashley wanted to have a family counseling session?

  “I can’t,” Elizabeth said, backing against a wall. “Ashley, yesterday
I called in to work and changed my schedule from morning surgeries to an afternoon and all-night double shift where I’ll be sleeping in the on-call room, all so I could drive you home and then take Brandon to school. Why aren’t you packed?”

  Her sister didn’t answer. Elizabeth got a bad feeling. Ashley looked like crap. She was shivering and picking at a loose thread on her sweater. “I can’t go back,” Ashley whispered. “Not yet.”

  “I don’t understand.” Ashley loved her son. Brandon was the sun and the moon to her.

  “Do you remember how we would sit with Mom at night?” Ashley’s voice was a whisper. “Mom would be waiting for Tony to call. And she’d be drinking vodka and orange juice—mostly vodka—out of that juice glass?”

  Elizabeth sat heavily on the couch beside her sister. She didn’t remember a juice glass. She did remember waiting, however, for the Tony who never came. Their biological father. But Elizabeth was younger than Ashley and she had only that one hazy memory of Tony’s visits—the memory she’d thought of last night, during the baseball game.

  Elizabeth shook her head. “I didn’t sit up with Mom like you did.” Elizabeth was usually behind a closed door in her bedroom, reading. Ashley had been the one who’d sat up nights with Mom.

  “So...you think you’re like that?” Elizabeth asked. “Is that what this is about?”

  “I am like that. I even drink at work.” Ashley got up and paced, rubbing her arms as if she couldn’t get warm enough. “Mom is a functioning alcoholic, and I am, too.”

  “I...didn’t know. About you, I mean.”

  Ashley stopped pacing and wiped her nose. She seemed to lift herself up. That’s what Elizabeth had always admired about her older sister—she wasn’t afraid to take charge, and she had determination. “I need to talk with Brandon. The counselor is going to sit with us and help me explain to him why I need to be away from him for a while. The counselor said he’ll do it in a way that’s age appropriate.”

  Poor Brandon. Elizabeth tried to put herself in the shoes of an eight-year-old. She’d been that age once. But she couldn’t remember. Maybe she’d blocked it all out.

  Elizabeth shook her head. What she most remembered was books. The cool, welcoming public library. The peace and escape of her schoolwork. The calmness of the rich, inner world of her intellect, the life of the mind and her ordered imagination.

  Ashley had possessed none of that. Her sister was a social creature. She’d depended on the people of their neighborhood for comfort. “Ash, I am so sorry. For you and for Brandon.”

  “Do you think he’s okay?” Ashley asked in a small voice. “He seems okay. He’s so...bright. The teachers say he’s top of his class, more like you in that way. But he is extroverted.”

  “A blend of both our personalities,” Elizabeth muttered.

  “I hope I’m not screwing him up.” Ashley’s eyes were luminous and blinking. “I worry so much about him.”

  “You’re not screwing him up. He loves you.”

  Ashley blew her nose on a tissue she’d scrunched in her fist. She looked more miserable than Elizabeth had ever seen.

  “I’m sorry, Ash.”

  “I’m just glad you avoided the family illness, Lisbeth.” Ashley gave her a small smile.

  Elizabeth’s heart went out to her. She commended her sister for trying to help herself, she really did. But here? In this facility? Elizabeth glanced at the dingy furnishings. Tried not to breathe too heavily of the stale air. “Why don’t you let me research a nicer place for you to stay?”

  “I did the research,” Ashley insisted. “This place is good. My friend Sharma went here.”

  Sharma was a flake. She was also the friend who was taking care of Ashley’s dog for her—Elizabeth wasn’t sure she’d trust a dog to the woman. She simply sighed. “Who is going to watch Brandon for you? I know you don’t want to ask Mom to fly up from Florida. How about your neighbor—Caitlin, isn’t that her name—the one with all the boys? She seems responsible. And her kids go to Brandon’s school, too, so it wouldn’t be out of her way to drive him every day, right?”

  Ashley squared her shoulders. “I’m leaving Brandon with you.”

  Oh, no. No, no, no.

  “That’s impossible.” Elizabeth had barely survived the morning. His little-boy energy was simply too exuberant for her.

  “I don’t say this often enough,” Ashley said, “but you’re the best role model for him I know.”

  “Ash—”

  “I’ve been terrible with him,” Ashley whispered. “I can’t stop myself from drinking.” Her thin hand twisted and slid down her forearm. “I disgust myself, and I can’t stop it. I don’t know what else to do...”

  “Has Brandon been physically hurt?”

  “No.” Ashley shook her head wildly. Then, in a lower voice, she said, “Not yet.”

  Not yet? Did that mean it could happen? Elizabeth swallowed. This was all so upsetting and sad and confusing. She felt blindsided by it.

  Ashley paced from one end of the room to the other. She seemed lost in the past. “Do you remember that time when Mom passed out and she hit her head? There was blood everywhere and when we found her we thought...”

  Yes. Elizabeth shivered. In her mind, she still saw the scene. Ashley, the older sister, thin and pale in a big shirt, straight-legged jeans and hair pulled into a high ponytail, racing through the snow in slippers and with no coat to a neighbor’s house in order to call 9-1-1 because their phone had been turned off.

  It was in the days before cell phones, the days before laptop computers and handheld screens everywhere. And still Elizabeth had found ways to hide from her home life. Curled up under her covers in a tiny room with a flashlight, the walls painted midnight-blue because that’s how the rental unit had come from the previous tenants—and Mom hadn’t been all that interested in interior decorating.

  She had been interested in her water bottle emptied of water and filled with juice and wine, or juice and vodka. A secret she thought she successfully kept from everyone. And she had also been interested in her check that came every week like clockwork, even if Tony no longer did.

  Or maybe, by that time Tony had moved to San Diego and the checks had stopped, and Mom had been trying to clean up her act, first with a job at the hospital sweeping floors. But even those jobs didn’t last. Mom hadn’t fooled anyone with her water bottles.

  Ashley stopped pacing in her reverie. She was staring at Elizabeth, saying nothing.

  “It’s...really great you’ll be talking to someone about it,” Elizabeth said.

  “For some of the sessions they have family days. It would be good for you to come, too.”

  Elizabeth opened her mouth to retort in the negative, then thought better of it and clamped her mouth shut. This was about Ashley, not her. Whatever Ashley needed, she would support her.

  But not this. Not an entire thirty days of taking care of Ashley’s eight-year-old son.

  “I’m not the best person for him, Ash. I burned his toast this morning.”

  “He’s eight. He’s really great at making his own toast. Besides, I’ll bet you bought him his gluten-free, didn’t you? You’re a doctor, you know how important that is.”

  “My apartment is small and not at all kid-proof!” Elizabeth’s voice was sounding shrill, even to her.

  “Like I live in a mansion.” Ashley snorted.

  “I don’t have a bedroom for him,” Elizabeth insisted. “He slept in my bed last night. I slept on a cot in my office.”

  “Honey, put him in the cot! He’s a kid. Tell him it’s an adventure, like a sleepover. He’ll eat it up.”

  “But it’s not a sleepover. Brandon has school. Somebody has to drive him to school on Monday!”

  Ashley smiled and patted Elizabeth on the shoulder. She was much too calm about this. “I know with your busy schedule you might have to hire help. But you know I’m good for it. I will pay you back every cent when I get out.”

  “Ash, it’s not the mo
ney—it’s me! I’m terrible with people! I...” I’m afraid of people, was what she wanted to say, but instead she repeated, “I’m just not good with them.”

  “Well, Brandon is good with everyone,” Ashley stubbornly insisted. “He’s a people person. He’s a joy, and I don’t know what I’d do without him....” She covered her mouth with her hand. Tears were falling down her cheeks again. “Don’t you think I’d be with him if I could? All you have to do is be yourself with him. He understands you. He knows that you’re quiet and studious, and that you worked hard to become a real doctor. We talk about you, him and I. At night when he says his prayers, he prays for you, too.”

  “Ashley!” There was no way she could do this. No way. And yet, Ashley was making her cry. As siblings, they were the only two people who’d grown up in their house, who knew what went on, who shared the unique scars and the unique joys, too, because she supposed there had been those times....

  “You don’t remember this, Elizabeth, because I cleaned up the bad stuff before you saw, but sometimes, Mom would throw up on her bed. I would rinse the sheets out in the tub, and then wash them. Once in a while, I’d get a towel down in time.”

  “I didn’t know that.” Elizabeth sniffed.

  “You were so little. You had these big brown eyes. So cute. Like a little doll. I wanted to protect you. I did a good job, didn’t I?”

  Ashley had protected her in her way. Elizabeth had never realized that until now.

  Ashley smiled. “Well, maybe not so much in the teen years. I got a little rebellious. But by that time, you had your bike, and you knew the way to the library.”

  Her eyes watered. “You asked me earlier, why now? I’ll tell you why now. It’s stupid. I can’t tell anybody else, but I can tell you, because only you get it.” She turned her eyes up to Elizabeth, miserable. “Two nights ago, I threw up in my bed.”

  Elizabeth exhaled. “Because you were worried about Brandon having cancer again?”

  “No, that was just my excuse. In reality, I’m an alcoholic who thinks she’s functioning, thinks she’s keeping it from people. Like Mom.”