Out of the Pocket (13 page)

As we took the field in front of our home crowd, I felt totally unprepared, and scared. I stood on the sidelines, adjusting my helmet strap, and felt like I wasn’t quite there, like the boisterous crowd around me was an illusion.

I walked over to the stands to give my mom and dad a hug. My mom grasped me and said, “Give ’em hell, Bobby Lee.”

My dad hugged me, but it felt like he wasn’t paying attention.

When I pulled away, I saw his eyes looked sort of hollow and unlike him.

“I’m thinking five touchdown passes,” I said, because that’s the kind of thing my dad likes to hear from me before games. But he didn’t say anything back, he nodded and smiled a weak smile and I wanted to say,
Dad, snap out of it! What’s wrong with you?

I mean, sometimes people got busy and preoccupied. Sometimes they were really tired. Did that mean they got to stop paying attention to the things that mattered to
you
?

I turned and trotted back toward my teammates.

113

It’s all wrong. The game is wrong. My coach, teammates, friends,
family, everything is wrong.

As I ran across the field, I shivered and felt tingles along my sides, like an iceberg had formed there, on the inside. No one could touch me.

The first play was supposed to be a deep pass, and I knew Rahim was too fast for any of their cornerbacks. I took the liberty of waiting an extra second for him to get a step on the defender, and just as I cocked my shoulder to throw, I was blindsided. A flying shoulder, with the weight of a two-hundred-pound linebacker behind it, pummeled me directly in the small of my back. The ball flew out of my hand and I hit the turf, face mask first. My neck absorbed some of the shock of the surprise hit, and I felt a quick jolt down my spine.

I stayed down, even as I heard the crowd roar in a way that made me guess that we’d recovered. I wondered if, when I moved, something would begin to pulse along my spinal cord. I tightened my stomach, frightened. But when I sat up, there was nothing, just a dull pain in my back where the guy had hit me. I stood up, wiped dirt and grass off my jersey, and headed back to the huddle. We had recovered the football. In the huddle, Rahim grabbed a handful of turf out of the top of my face mask. “Thanks,” I said. He nodded and cuffed me on the shoulder.

We were a little off, or at least I was. At halftime we went into the locker room down by a touchdown to an inferior team, and Coach was savage in his pep talk.

“I don’t know what’s going on out there. We’re in the hunt for a state championship,” he said, looking right past me and frowning,

“and you guys are letting a lot of meaningless shit get in your way.

It’s unprofessional. You can’t do that, you’re letting everyone down when you do that.”

I knew his comments were directed at me, but he wasn’t making 114

eye contact. I felt the block of ice shift in my stomach and reverberate into my throat, chilling me and making me wheeze.

He went on to attack our defense. I shut my eyes and tried to will myself to be more intense, more focused, but it just wasn’t working.

Something was off.

The universe had taken some strange turn and I could sense it in my bones. If something didn’t change, we were going to lose the game to Laguna Hills, a not-so-great team, on our home fi eld.

As Coach continued his rant, the door leading from the tunnel to the locker room opened and Principal Morris stepped in. Coach stopped speaking and looked at him. Morris surveyed the room and sighed, heavily, something weighing on him. His eyes darted from player to player until they settled on me.

“Bobby Framingham,” he said.

Was he going to yell at me, too? Was it against the law to have an off day? And then, as I looked at him closely and saw the pain on his face, I realized, with horror, what was about to happen. The word had gotten around.

He is going to humiliate me. He’s going to shame me in front of
my teammates. He is going to kick me off of the team, here, at halftime.

“Come with me please, Bobby,” he said. I felt my lungs sear with rage.

“No,” I said. “Just say it. Say it here. I don’t care, just get it over with.” There were some surprised murmurs throughout the room, and the boiling blood raced to the edges of my face. “Shut up,” I yelled.

He exhaled and looked at Coach. Coach shrugged. Morris looked back at me. “You need to come with me, Bobby,” he said. “It’s your father.”

115

The emergency-room waiting area was too bright. Everything was so shiny, from the bright yellow vinyl-covered couches to the TV, which was playing some stupid dating show.

Who thought to put fluorescent lighting in a waiting room? It gave the room a false cheeriness, bright and cold like a fake smile. Nobody stood in a hospital waiting room feeling cheery. They should’ve just made it real dim and gloomy—the lighting, the furniture. That way you’d feel comfortable in your misery. My head pulsed, a nasty pain behind my eyes. I couldn’t get my head around it. My dad.

Something was wrong with him.

Standing in a waiting room was never fun, but doing it on a Friday night in a football uniform was worse. I wasn’t so selfish that I wanted to leave and play football, but it made me nervous, thinking that our perfect season was on the line and we might lose because 116

I wasn’t there. I wondered which would be worse—losing, or them winning without me—and that thought made me feel awful.

My mother was sitting up very straight, her eyes not really focused on anything. Every time I looked at her I felt pressure in my chest, like a balloon expanding and ready to pop. I paced and sat, sat and paced. Sitting was hard, when you were waiting for news about your dad, who’d just fainted at your football game.

My father had fainted on the sidelines, and was out for about a minute. My mom called 911. Some other parents offered to help and sat with my mom, who was freaked. When Dad sort of came to, he was completely disoriented. They waited for the ambulance, and once it arrived, they had Principal Morris get me.

“How’re you holding up, Bobby Lee?” my mother asked me, squeezing my hand as I sat down beside her. I stroked her arm.

“Okay,” I said, my eyes on the television.

“He’s going to be fine,” she said, and I nodded, translating in my head from mom-speak to what was real. I had no idea, and I had the feeling she didn’t either.

“He’s just been so tired, and I couldn’t get him to go to the doctor. Now we’ll know why, and then we can fix it,” she said, and I knew she was basically talking to herself. I nodded and gripped my mom’s hand.

We sat in silence for a few moments.

“Mom?”

“What, honey?”

“Am I an awful person?”

She rubbed my arm. “You’re one of the best people I know. Why would you ask that?”

“He hasn’t been well, has he?” I asked.

She paused for a moment. “No, he hasn’t,” she said.

117

“I didn’t notice,” I said. “That makes me a bad person.”

My mother hugged me tight. “We didn’t want to worry you. You’re very preoccupied and you have every right to be,” she said.

I felt my jaw heat up.
They don’t want to worry me? How could
they keep something this important from me?

“We didn’t really know that much,” she said, as if reading my mind. She reached up and stroked the back of my neck. “If he’d have gone to the doctor and there was something to know, I would have told you. We would have.”

“Huh,” I said, trying to take this all in and wondering how I could be so clueless.

“Don’t ever think you’re a bad person,” she said. “Your father and I can’t believe how well you turned out.”

She kissed me hard on the head and I smiled as she mashed my face into her shoulder. “Especially given the crazy parents you have.”

I didn’t want to ever let go. My mom was one of those totally normal people who talked about how zany she was all the time. I usually got irked when she did that, but right then, I just wanted to hold on forever and never pull my face away.

At ten-fifteen, an hour and a half into our stay at Durango Medical Center, a doctor came out. My mother stood up, so I did, too.

“He’s alert and he’ll be fine to sleep at home tonight,” the doctor said, and my mother exhaled deeply. I shut my eyes and thanked God. “You can see him in a moment.”

“Do we know what this is? He hasn’t been right for months,” my mother said.

“We ran a whole battery of tests,” the doctor said. “He fainted because his blood pressure is so low. Why that happened we don’t know. Some people just run low.”

118

“He’s been so tired,” my mother repeated. “Could that be related?”

The doctor smiled. “Most definitely. We’re giving him fluids by IV right now, and we’ll want him to rest for a bit, but there’s no reason he can’t go home tonight.”

The tears streamed down my mother’s face, and I could feel the sense of relief in her body, could feel it in my shoulders and chest.

I allowed myself to breathe, and it felt good. Good like it hadn’t felt in a long time.

My dad was going to be okay.

119

I was in bed, studying calculus, when my dad appeared in my doorway, wearing a Dodgers cap, an old ragged-looking tan baseball glove hanging off his left hand.

“Knock, knock,” he said.

It was like looking at a stranger. I hadn’t seen my dad with a baseball glove in years, and he was smiling, full of life. I hadn’t seen that in a while either.

“Hey,” I said, sitting up.

“You up for a catch with your old man?” he asked.

It didn’t matter that I was still sore from the game against Laguna Hills, two days earlier. Was I up for a catch with my father? Nothing could have sounded better.

As I rifled through my closet, looking for my own glove, I could hear my dad snapping his mitt repeatedly.

“Still nice and broken in,” he muttered.

120

“I don’t think ‘broken in’ goes away, Dad,” I said. A beat-up purple Frisbee, a jump rope I hadn’t used since I was a freshman, a red dodgeball. I flung these things aside as I dug through my sporting equipment. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d used my baseball glove. My dad and I used to throw the ball around, but that was like eighth grade, maybe. Maybe once with Austin for kicks, a couple years back.

Finally I saw the black leather finger of it and pulled it out. A dingy-looking baseball dropped and rolled onto the floor. It must have been sitting inside the webbing for years. I picked it up and rubbed the palm, knelt down, and grabbed the baseball.

“You ready?” I asked, and my dad smiled, almost euphoric.

He’d been a different man since we’d gotten back from the hospital two days earlier. His eyes looked different, more like his old eyes, full of life again, and he’d gone out for a long walk the day before, Saturday, around the subdivision. He never did that.

“Is this bad for your throwing arm?” he asked as we got outside and walked to opposite ends of the front yard.

“I won’t throw that hard,” I said. “Don’t worry.”

He dropped his mitt in front of him and did windmills with his arms, which is what he always used to do when we played catch. When I was a kid, we did it every weekend before I got into football.

I watched him as he warmed up and I could see that there were changes to his body, recent changes. His arms and legs were thinner, and he had developed a little paunch in his gut, something he didn’t used to have. And the upper-body tone that he used to be so proud of was all but gone. His face was thinner, too. But then again, he was like almost fifty, so what do you expect? He bent over and picked up his glove, put his hand inside it, and slapped the glove against his leg. “Let’s do this,” he said.

121

It felt good, palming the baseball for the first time in a while. I slowly wound up and threw it to my father. The ball whistled through the air and hit his glove with a satisfying
pop
. I’d forgotten how much I used to love that sound.

My father’s eyes bulged and he dropped the glove off his hand with the ball still in the pocket. “Holy . . .” he said. “Jeez. You’re gonna kill me!”

I blushed, because I hadn’t really thrown it all that hard. Either I was a lot stronger than I was back when we used to play, or he was more brittle. Or both. “Sorry,” I said. “I’ll cool it a bit.”

He tentatively leaned down and picked up the glove. “Jeez,”

he repeated. “Maybe you should go out for the baseball team this spring. Be a pitcher. I guarantee you’d be great with that arm of yours.”

I momentarily flashed to Todd Stanhope, and felt this curious heat over my body. But I was playing catch with my dad, so I blocked that thought away.

“Great,” I said. “Because I have all this extra time these days for new activities.”

He squinted at me. “Where’s all this snarkiness coming from?”

he asked. For a moment I thought he was serious, but then I saw he was smiling and I felt like I’d met up with my best friend from many years ago.

“Jeez,” I said. “Sorry.”

“You will be,” he said, winding up exaggeratedly. And then he let one fly, a pretty decent throw that surprised me a bit with its velocity. It was high, too, and I had to jump to make the catch.

“Nice,” I said.

“Man, this feels so good,” he said, and I wanted to run over and hug my dad, hard.

“That’s great, Dad,” I said.

122

“Hell yeah,” he said.

I grinned. My dad and I used to have our best talks while throwing the ball around. This was years ago, when the topics were less intense than they would be now. Back when it was about him playing college baseball, or him advising me about how to handle a situation with a friend.

Soon he was throwing me pop-ups, like we used to do, and I was throwing back ground balls. He was bending his knees, his hands hanging down low in the correct fielding position for an infielder.

It wasn’t graceful like it used to be, but you could tell, watching him, that he used to be pretty darn good. Then he had me down in a catching position and he was trying his curveball. It used to break almost a foot, but now it just sort of spun out of his hand and otherwise went straight.