Painting the Black (2 page)

The whole thing had happened this way: My mom was six months pregnant with me. She'd had a tough time of it. She had thrown up for three months. When that stopped her legs got all swollen, and then she had shooting pains in her back.

My dad has always been a big outdoorsman. Hiking, cross-country skiing, rock climbing—that's what he loves. So when she felt better for a few weeks, he talked her into a camping trip at Crescent Lake on the Olympic Peninsula. That's across the Puget Sound from Seattle, three hours by car and ferry. He said it would be their last chance to get off on their own. She must have wanted to go too, because she's not shy about saying no. She says no to me all the time.

Anyway, the second night out the batteries to their flashlight went dead. My dad was building a fire to barbecue the trout he'd caught, so it was my mom who went to pick up new ones at a little store along the highway.

It was raining hard. My mom had driven a couple of miles when a deer ran onto the road, looked into the headlights, and froze. She slammed on the brakes, skidded, but still hit the deer. It flew onto the hood of the car and crashed through the windshield. Her car skidded off the road.

A trucker came along. He spotted her car in the ditch and the deer's body on the hood. He pulled his logging rig over, raced back, and pried open the front door. My mother was unconscious.

The trucker radioed the State Police; they called for an emergency medical helicopter; and soon she was whirring over the Puget Sound to Children's Hospital in Seattle.

I was born in that helicopter. Two minutes into my life, I stopped breathing. As the chopper was landing on the roof of the hospital, a medic was giving me CPR to bring me back from the dead.

Two pounds nine ounces. That's what I weighed. A real heavyweight. I couldn't breathe right; I couldn't suck right. Twenty years earlier I wouldn't have lived two hours. As it was, I spent my first three months in the hospital.

And it didn't end then. As a little kid I was always sick, always up crying at night, always at the doctor's office with ear and throat infections.

I was ten when I overheard my mom tell my Grandpa Kevin that she couldn't have any more children. I don't know why she couldn't. I didn't know the questions to ask then, and I'd be too embarrassed to ask them now. But I do know it has to do with the way I was born.

Once I'd finished lacing up my shoes that morning, I went back down to the kitchen and gave her a kiss on the top of her head. “What's that for?” she said, looking up.

“Nothing,” I answered, and then I was out the door.

My new neighbor was sitting cross-legged on his porch, a bottle of water next to him. As I crossed the street, I waved to him. Then I pointed my thumb in the direction of my house. “My name is Ryan Ward. I live right across from you.”

He stood, and came down the steps toward me, a smile on his face. “I'm Josh,” he said, “Josh Daniels.” He was even bigger than I'd thought, around six four and at least two hundred pounds. As we shook I was struck by the size and strength of his hand.

We stood there for an awkward twenty seconds or so. “I'm not doing anything today,” I finally said. “If you want, I'll give you a hand moving in.”

He looked at the boxes on the porch, and then at all the other boxes crowded in the truck. “To tell the truth, I need a break.” He paused. “You play baseball? 'Cause if you do, I've got all my stuff in that box right there. If there's a park around here we could play a little catch.”

His question was so unexpected it took me a while to answer. “The Community Center is just a couple of blocks away,” I finally managed.

He rummaged through the box, pulling out a catcher's mitt, a glove, and a baseball. “Let's get going before my father comes out and puts me back to work.”

As we walked down to the Community Center, he asked me if I was still in high school. “I'll be a senior,” I answered. “How about you?”

“The same. What's the school like?”

“Crown Hill High? It's okay, but I can't wait to get out.”

He nodded. “I know what you mean. High school gets old, doesn't it?”

When we reached the Community Center, his eyes widened. “Everything is so green,” he said. “And the grass is so thick. We moved up here from San Jose, and the fields there have been brown for a month.”

I laughed. “We do get a little rain up here, you know.”

He gave me the catcher's mitt. It was pretty beat-up, but we weren't throwing the ball hard, so that didn't matter. “You play on a baseball team?” he asked.

“I played in grade school. Center field. Then I broke my ankle, and it didn't heal right. Now I can't run well enough to play.”

“That's too bad. You must have been fast to play center field. How did you hit?”

In the championship game at the end of my final year in Little League, I had two doubles in my first two trips to the plate, both of them line shots into the gap in left center. When I came up in the last inning, my team was down 7–6. There were two on and two out. I got a fastball out over the plate and I swung from the heels. I caught the ball solid, the best feeling in the world. I watched it rocket toward left center, then watched it drop down out of the sky and over the fence. That had been the greatest moment of my life.

“I hit all right,” I answered. “How about you? You play on your school baseball team?”

He nodded. “And football. Quarterback and pitcher.”

I acted more surprised than I was. “Really?”

“Really.”

After that neither of us talked for a while. The baseball went back and forth, back and forth.

It was the first time I'd ever used a catcher's mitt. I thought it would feel awkward, but it felt fine, and I loved having a baseball in my hand again. I could have thrown easy like that all day, but I sensed Josh was getting edgy.

“Look, Ryan,” he finally said. “How about squatting down so I can cut loose a few fastballs? I haven't thrown hard in a while, and I miss it.”

When you've got a bad ankle, going into a catcher's crouch isn't exactly your favorite thing. If it had been anybody else I'd have said no, but from the start Josh was different.

“I'll give it a try,” I answered, squatting behind the plate. “But remember, I'm no catcher.”

After the first two pitches I wasn't worried about my ankle. I was worried about my face. Josh wasn't fast; he was FAST. The ball absolutely exploded from his hand. The palm of my left hand burned, and it was hard not to back off.

“Do you think you could handle a curve?” he asked after he'd blazed fastballs at me for fifteen minutes or so.

I almost said yes, just to get away from the fastballs, but I thought better of it. “I don't know,” I admitted. “I don't know if I've ever seen a real curve.”

He stretched his arm over his head. “You'd better not, then, not without a mask.” He looked at his watch. “I should get back anyway. Otherwise my old man will throw a fit.” He paused. “Does that offer to help still stand?”

“You got it,” I said.

Back at his house, Josh's father was standing on the porch, hands on his hips, frowning. “No more baseball until every box is inside and unpacked,” he said before heading into the house. He didn't even look at me. Not exactly a pleasant guy.

But his mother was different. She looked like Josh, tall and dark with a long face and dark eyes. When she saw me, she smiled and introduced herself. She asked me about my mother and father, and whether I had any brothers or sisters. “Josh has an older brother, Andrew, who is at UCLA on an academic scholarship. Andrew is planning on law school when he graduates.” Her voice was alive with pride. “We're hoping he'll come up to visit this summer, or maybe we'll go down over Christmas.”

From the sour expression on Josh's face, I could tell he hoped his brother would never come up.

Once the introductions were over, Josh led me to the Ryder truck, jumped inside, and handed a box down to me. He picked up another one, and I followed him up the stairs to his room. From his window he had a view of Mount Rainier. “This is a great room,” I said, putting the box down and looking out.

He shrugged. “It's okay, I guess. I liked our house in San Jose better.”

“Why did you move?”

“It wasn't my idea. My mother is the brains in this family. My mother and my famous brother Andrew. She worked for Apple, but she's afraid they're going out of business. So when she got an offer from Microsoft, she took it.”

“What about your father?” I asked.

Josh snorted. “He's a plumber. There are toilets everywhere.”

After that it was work. Up and down we went, trip after trip after trip. When the last box was out of the truck and in the house, we stopped to eat sandwiches his mother had bought at the deli on Market.

While we were sprawled out on the porch eating, Josh's father came out from the back of the truck grinning and holding up two wolf masks. “Remember all the Halloweens you and Andrew wore these? You two would howl and jump around in the front room, and your mom and I would pretend to be scared out of our wits.”

“Just throw them away, Dad.”

His father shook his head. “I'll stick them in the basement. They're not taking up any space, and you might want them someday.”

Josh looked at me and rolled his eyes.

We spent the afternoon unpacking the boxes we'd carried upstairs. Josh had a ton of sports stuff: baseballs, bats, footballs, gloves, caps, shin guards, a basketball, shoulder pads. Most of it got shoved into a hall closet right outside his room. “There's one more thing I've got to get,” he said when the last box was empty.

I followed him to the truck. Up against the back wall was a big cork bulletin board. It wasn't heavy, but maneuvering it up the staircase was tricky. Twice we had to flip it around.

Once we got the bulletin board hung up, Josh unzipped a portfolio, pulled out a stack of newspaper articles, and handed them to me. As he pinned the first one up, I flipped through the rest of them. The headlines were all alike.
Daniels Strikes Out Twelve! Four TD Passes for Daniels! Daniels Named Valley MVP!

I stared at the huge pile. “You told me you played,” I said, “but you didn't tell me you were the greatest athlete in the history of the world.”

“I'm not quite that.”

I flipped through a few more articles. “If you're half as good as these clippings say you are, you might just be the guy who can finally push Crown Hill High over the top.”

He stopped what he was doing and turned to look at me. “What does that mean?”

I shrugged. “We have good teams, really good teams, every year. But when it comes to the championship game, O'Dea High always beats us. It's been like that for as long as I can remember. They end up state champions, and we don't even make the tournament.”

“Really,” he said, and then he went back to pinning up articles. But I could tell he'd taken what I'd said and filed it away in his mind.

I got up to go. “I promised my father I'd do some yard work. I'd better get on it.”

“What about tomorrow morning?” he said. “You want to throw the ball around again?”

“Sure,” I answered. “That would be great.”

My parents were full of questions. What was he like? What were his parents like? Did I know what they did?

They liked my answers too, even the one about his father's being a plumber. My dad laughed when I told him. “That might come in handy some cold winter night.”

I did the yard work, then went upstairs and showered. The whole day had gone smooth as ice, but something was bothering me, like a tiny rock in a shoe. I dried myself off, put on clean clothes, then went to my bedroom to listen to the end of the Mariners game before dinner.

The Mariners were up by two in the ninth when Albert Belle drilled a bases-loaded double to steal the victory from them. I flicked off the radio, then found myself wondering if a guy like Belle pinned up his newspaper clippings on a bulletin board in his bedroom. I smiled at the thought of a big star like Belle with his scissors out snipping away at newspapers, but then I looked up at my own bulletin board and I stopped laughing. Suddenly I knew what had been eating at me.

My bulletin board was half the size of Josh's. Pinned to it was a note I'd written in March about a history assignment, a birthday card from my grandfather Kevin, and a calendar that still showed May. The rest of it was empty. Completely empty.

I hate people who feel sorry for themselves. It's too much like making excuses. But there are times when I can't help but wonder what my life might have been like if I hadn't broken my ankle. Maybe my name would have been in headlines, like Josh's.
Ward Drives Home Three! Ward Homer Wins Game! Ward Leads Vikings to State!

What makes it doubly hard to think about is that the accident was so stupid, so completely and utterly stupid. I was twelve when it happened. For two full years I'd been healthy. No ear infections, no bronchitis, no nothing. I'd grown six inches in those two years. I felt stronger every day, every minute. I guess I felt then like Josh felt now—that nothing could stop me, that I could do whatever I wanted, that the whole world was mine.

That was the spring when I hit the home run that won the championship. But I hit more than that one shot. I batted over .500, led the league in RBIs, and my coach told me I had the quickest wrists he had ever seen. I was going to be the next Ken Griffey, Jr. All you had to do was ask me.

July came and Little League ended. None of my baseball buddies lived nearby, and school was two months off. I was bored stiff—until Brett Youngblood moved into the house on the corner.

Brett's father was an animal. He'd yell at Brett and his brother, Jack, yell and scream and shake them so hard you'd see their heads swing back and forth like rag dolls. It was usually over nothing—a bike on the lawn, the garbage not being taken out. Little things, but he'd go berserk. He never touched me, but I was terrified of him. I stayed clear whenever he was around, which wasn't often.