Ball Don't Lie (22 page)

A rattling sound coming from behind Anh-thu makes her turn around quick, but it’s only Manny shutting and locking the glass doors to the mall. He waves, and she waves back.

A group of high school guys in a red Mustang stare at Anh-thu while they wait for the light to turn green. One of them points and the rest of them laugh. It’s late and Anhthu’s starting to feel a little anxious. It’s not the guys, though. Guys like that are everywhere. It’s more the dress. For the most part, Anh-thu’s a jeans-and-sweatshirt kind of girl. But she decided to wear a dress tonight. For Sticky. She peeks down at her watch again: 9:25. Still no sign of him.

There’s a cool breeze blowing in from the ocean, and the seaweed smell makes Anh-thu feel calm. She’s always loved the smell of the ocean. The breeze kicks up a little and blows her hair into her face. She grabs a rubber band from inside her bag.

Anh-thu looks down at her watch: 9:30. Still no sign of Sticky.

After the Good

Samaritans leave, the two who found Sticky and fired off the 9-1-1 call on a cell phone, followed the ambulance to Emergency in a dinged-up Chevy Cavalier; after the cop leaves, taking his twenty-two unanswered questions with him, his breath like the bottom of a coffee mug; after the tall Indian doctor is out the door, the man who came in holding an X-ray and offering heavily accented words of encouragement, who proceeded to stick needles and tweezer out metal shards and tug and blot and stitch, who disclosed in the breathy voice of a woman that the situation would remarkably be devoid of any long-term complications because of where the bullet entered the hand (this diagnosis meaning absolutely nothing to Sticky); after Georgia hands off the necessary paperwork and runs out the door, having spent her entire fifteen-minute visit listing all the reasons she couldn’t stay, never once looking down at her foster boy laid up in a hospital bed; after three different nurses, two ladies and a dude, walk out the door, promising to check back within the hour; after everybody has fled the scene, gone on to other parts of their lives having fulfilled their role in the room, it’s just Sticky and Anh-thu left, the two of them sitting under a suffocating silence that has spread through the room like a gas.

Anh-thu sits on the edge of a chair next to Sticky’s bed. She has tears in her eyes. Puffy cheeks. A cottony mouth. Every question she could think of to ask she has asked. But Sticky’s hand is still a mystery. He’s been shot. She knows that. But why? And how? And when? The problem is, Sticky isn’t talking. He hasn’t said a word since she’s arrived. Won’t even look anybody in the eye. His face is a blank, like the simple oval outline of a face in some kid’s coloring book, precrayons.

Anh-thu is running her fingers through Sticky’s hair, but he isn’t there. He’s absent. He’s missing. He’s an empty vessel. This is his way of dealing with the hurt, she thinks. It’s not personal. This is a defense mechanism. This is shock. This is post-traumatic stress disorder. There’s a lump in her throat as she runs through terms learned in psych class, trying to make sense of it all. Today is her sixteenth birthday. It’s supposed to be a good day. A rite of passage. How did it end like this? She looks at Sticky again—sitting propped up in his hospital bed, hoop shoes still stuck to his feet, white wife-beater still wet with sweat, right hand wrapped in gauze and set in a sling above his chest—and it seems impossible to her how much she’s hurting right along with him.

It’s two in the morning. A sterile black and white clock counts the seconds. A small fan spins a subtle breeze through the room from left to right and back again. There are a couple of laminated posters above the door that warn whoever’s paying attention about the harmful effects of secondhand smoke.

Anh-thu takes Sticky’s good hand, the left one, and lays her head on his forearm. The image of Sticky being held up at gunpoint flashes through her head again, but she manages to push it away this time. No use speculating. He’ll explain it all soon enough. She wipes her eyes on Sticky’s forearm, picks her head back up and looks in his face, says:
I’ll take
care of you, Sticky. You know I will
. The words coming out thin and hollow.

When Sticky never showed up at the place they’d planned to meet, Anh-thu panicked and called everybody she could think of to call. She called Sticky’s house, her dad’s work, her brothers, the high school gym, Lincoln Rec, the police, and finally all the local hospitals. When the new UCLA hospital in Santa Monica confirmed that Sticky had indeed been brought into Emergency, she flagged a cab and told the driver to get her there as fast as he could. When they pulled up she paid the guy, rushed to the front desk, asked for Sticky’s room number, sprinted through the halls and up the stairs and around the first corner and pushed through the door, where she found Sticky lying in a hospital bed staring at the ceiling. She wrapped her arms around him and started crying and asked question after question and begged for somebody to tell her what had happened. And even after learning that he would be OK, that he was lucky, that he would make a full recovery, she still felt an overwhelming pain in her chest. She’d never seen Sticky that way. Hurt and helpless. Vulnerable. With a complete emptiness in his eyes. And she lay there on him for quite some time, squeezing his shoulders, trying to ignore the fact that he wasn’t talking.

Anh-thu stares at Sticky and recalls the earlier exchange between nurses about the basketball they’d pulled out of his bag. The guy nurse asked what
7 FLOW
stood for. And when Sticky didn’t answer, one of the lady nurses who had his file open cited the name of Sticky’s old foster care pad: Foster Living of the West. House number seven. She said it must be short for that, and the guy nurse nodded his head in agreement.

Anh-thu’s ears perked up when she heard that information. Sticky had told her it was a gift from his mom. Something he found under the Christmas tree way back when he was just a kid. And sitting here now, she wonders how well she even knows Sticky.

It’s three in the morning. The TV in the upper corner of the room is on without sound. Sticky’s right hand is a constant throbbing pain, one that crawls up his arm and into his shoulder, settles in the base of his neck. On the other side of the curtain, an old man’s snoring gets louder and louder until he almost chokes on his own breath and wakes up. The springs in his bed crunch and moan as he rolls over and starts the process again.

A nurse walks into the room and glances at Anh-thu sleeping with her head on Sticky’s bed, her hand on his thigh. She smiles at Sticky, tiptoes past his bed and around the other side of the curtain. She pulls the old man out of his snore by telling him something in a soft voice. He answers in a slur. In a few seconds she comes back around the curtain, smiles again and leaves the room.

Sticky listens to Anh-thu’s breaths get slower and deeper. Feels her heavy hand slip off his leg.

It’s four in the morning and Sticky is completely alone. The entire hospital is asleep. Anh-thu’s asleep. The old man on the other side of the curtain is asleep. The TV, having turned into bars of color, is asleep. Sticky finally looks down at his right hand. At this point he has to. Everybody else is out of the picture, and now he can try to figure things out.

He reaches up with his left hand and pokes at the gauze. He traces the outline of his right hand and presses harder. A few sparks of sharp pain shoot up through his arm. It hurts. And he can’t even move a finger when he goes to clench a fist. There’s nothing.

He looks back at the wall, his tired heart sagging in his chest, and lets his left hand drop back into his lap.

And for the first time, Sticky thinks maybe all that magic in his right-hand fingertips might be gone. Stolen away when he put his shooting hand up to the gun. And if that’s the case, maybe his whole life is gone too. Who the hell is he without basketball? He’s nobody. Without basketball maybe his life is completely meaningless.

Sticky’s head is dancing from the morphine the nurses have running into his veins. It’s tough to focus. The room is fuzzy and dark, aside from the dull shine of the overhead lightbulb. And there’s a relentless warm hum inside his head.

For a second he forgets where he is. He’s lying on a patch of grass outside Sanwa Bank, and the light above him is the moon. He’s dreaming about the guys in the gym and the letter in his bag. He’s lying on his back in the park under the sun. He can smell the fruit shampoo in Annie’s hair as they drift in and out of sleep. He’s walking home late at night and a woman in heels is asking him if he knows how to kiss a woman’s hand. He’s walking home from the gym after playing ball and it’s raining. But it feels nice, like a hundred fingertips touching soft as lips. And he’s happy because he played so well. Old-man Perkins told him it was like he was operating at a different speed than everybody else. But he said he was graceful, too, like a dancer. He’s parked in Dante’s car outside Georgia’s house saying his goodbyes and just as he’s about to get out Dante reaches for his wrist and tells him:
The only reason I come down on you so hard, Stick,
is because I care. I care about you like I do my own sons. My
own flesh and blood
. And Sticky’s nodding and slapping Dante’s hand and walking away, but all the while something’s growing inside his chest. Something meaningful, important. This strange sense of belonging that he’s spent his entire life without. He’s walking toward the house thinking about what that means: Dante caring about him. He doesn’t have to. And this makes him feel bigger. Much bigger. He’s holding himself completely upright and he feels as big as the biggest big man to ever post somebody up on a Lincoln Rec low block. But then he’s curled up along the three-point line on a piece of cardboard, starving. And there’s a throbbing pain in his hand. And the humming in his head is the sound of all the other homeless waking up beside him. They’re all mumbling street mumbles and he realizes he’s mumbling too. He’s one of them. And when he looks down at his shooting hand all of his fingers are missing. In fact, his entire hand’s been amputated. . . .

He wakes up suddenly and finds his hand in the sling. He remembers where he is. Who he is. He’s in a hospital bed cause he messed up. And he’s been hurt. And when he remembers everything that has happened his stomach drops and he has to swallow down hard on the lump growing in his throat. He has to squeeze his eyes tight to keep everything inside him locked behind closed doors.

It’s five in the morning and Sticky looks down at Anh-thu. Her eyes closed, lips barely apart. Breaths long and drawn out. Heavy. A few strands of her long black hair are in her face. He reaches out with his left hand and moves the hair away. She looks so pretty when she’s sleeping, he thinks. He studies her face and notices the contrast—her dark skin against his milky white skin.

When he feels a sharp spasm of pain rip through his right hand, he looks at the gauze and wishes he could take it all back. What he’s done. He’s made a mistake. He wishes he could go back and erase it. Do it over. He would leave the steak knife in the drawer. He would leave everybody alone. Buy Annie the bear and take her to the pier. That’s all she wanted. But when he feels the tears coming he does his best to stop thinking altogether. He swallows down hard on his hurt. Because he can’t go back. He swallows it like poison, like he always does, and he stares at the bare wall in front of him.

He has to get away from it.

But this is when all the fragile walls finally come crumbling down around Sticky. He’s lying in a hospital bed, his throbbing hand in a sling, and everything splits open. Cracks in two. Tears apart. He can no longer pretend he’s someone else. He has to give that up, shed his cool. He lets ten years’ worth of pretending he doesn’t exist come pouring out of his eyes. Streams of heavy tears rush down his face and he refuses to wipe them away. He’s been shot in the hand and he’s scared he’ll never play ball again.

And right then Annie raises her sleepy head. The second she opens her eyes, though, Sticky closes his. He pretends to be asleep. And she kisses his cheek and shifts around in her chair. When she lays her head back on the bed and falls asleep again, Sticky cries even harder. Everything he’s had stored up in his chest comes rushing out through his swollen eyes. Annie is still right here with him. He hasn’t said a word to her all night, he won’t even look at her, but she refuses to give up on him.

And then Sticky goes back to the moment his whole life changed. When he was in the window spitting into the bed of the truck and his mom was in the bathroom screaming his name.
Sticky!
Something in the way he’s crying so hard triggers the images to come flooding back.

He finally pulls himself away from the window. He walks toward the bathroom. He steps through the door and there’s his mom. She’s slumped over in the tub. Cloudy red water spilling onto the floor and still running. He cups his hands over his ears and stares. His face scrunches up and then goes normal again. It feels like he’s choking. He’s so small. He’s just a boy. He picks Baby’s head up, tries to balance it straight on her neck, only to have it slump back forward or to the side. He looks at her wrists. He turns the water off, pulls the plug and watches the red start slowly sucking down the drain. He gets up. Zips around the bathroom: to the sink, the toilet, opens the medicine cabinet and brushes all the prescription bottles off the shelves. Bangs his head against the wall. Races back to the tub and puts a hand on Baby’s shoulder. Shakes her. Nothing. Shakes her. Nothing. Shakes her. Nothing. Then he falls to a sitting position in the middle of the broken-up tile next to the tub and rocks himself. Back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth. He covers his ears with his hands and rocks himself. Back and forth and back and forth.

Two cops bust through the front door, yelling.

Sticky continues rocking himself.

The cops tear around the house, yelling:
Anybody here?
Anybody here? A neighbor reported screaming!

They find their way into the bathroom and swing open the door.
Oh, no,
one cop says under his breath. The other steps over Sticky and reaches for Baby’s arm. The water fully drained now. The bottom of the tub pink. They check her for a pulse. Check her neck. They take out special tools and check again.

Other cops show up. One scribbles things down on a pad of paper.
What’s your name, son?
he wants to know.
What’s
your name?

They pull Baby’s naked body out of the tub and lay her on a stretcher.

What’s your name, son?

There are five, ten, fifteen blue suits with badges staring down at Sticky. At Baby. They lay a blanket on top of her. They pull the blanket up over her face. They wheel her out of the bathroom. They wheel her away from him.

Sticky holds his ears tight and rocks himself. Back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth.

A cop lifts a steak knife out of the tub with two fingers and places it in a plastic bag.