Safe at Home (4 page)

He could see all this making his dad more and more disappointed with him, as angry about Nick’s study habits and his grades as he ever got about anything, especially as Nick got closer to the end of the school year and his final grades.

“We’re not going to threaten you with taking away school baseball,” Paul Crandall had said the other day. “You’ve only got so many baseball seasons to play, and we’ve only got so many to watch you play. But you have to do better in school, and not just in English. Your work in math, let’s face it, has been even worse this year.”

His mother the math teacher wasn’t there at the time, so Nick wasn’t afraid to say, “The only thing I hate more than math is math
homework.
”

Paul Crandall almost managed a smile. “Nobody except your mother loves math,” he said. “But that’s not the point. The point is that you can do better in it with some effort. Ask yourself a question,
Nick: How can you memorize all those baseball stats and figure out someone’s batting average yet
not
be able to solve simple equations?”

“I love baseball, that’s why, more than I’ll ever love school,” he said. “And that’s another thing about me that’s never going to change, no matter how hard you try.”

Saying that even though Paul and Brenda Crandall had devoted their whole lives to school.

“That’s not the point,” Paul Crandall said. “School is about results the same as baseball is. And if we don’t see some with your final grades, I’m not making any promises about summer baseball this year.”

“It’s not going to make me care more about school,” Nick said, digging in.

“Fine,” Paul Crandall said. “But your mother and I do care.”

They’d been having the conversation in Nick’s room. Paul Crandall got up then and walked out, telling him to get to work on that night’s homework.

Leaving Nick with one more thing to worry about, maybe the biggest worry he had, that maybe
neither he nor his parents had gotten exactly what they were looking for.

For now, though, at dinner, he was trying to explain to them what it meant to be moved up to varsity from the seventh grade.

“Sounds to me like quite an honor,” Paul Crandall said. “Almost as if you’ve graduated from junior varsity early. We’re proud of you, Nick.”

“Well, I haven’t actually
done
anything yet,” Nick said. “It’s more like I got called up from the minors, for the time being, anyway. Even Coach isn’t sure how long this might last.”

Brenda Crandall, wanting to join in, said, “Well, technically, aren’t all of you boys minors?”

“No, no,” Nick said. “It’s a baseball expression. In pro ball, there’s the minor leagues, where guys go when they’re first starting out, and then there’s the majors, which is where the best guys end up eventually.”

It was like this a lot at the dinner table when the conversation turned to sports. Nick acted like he was the professor and they were the students.

“Sort of like undergrads and graduate students, dear,” Paul Crandall said to his wife. “I believe there are some pro teams around Connecticut, aren’t there, Nick? Including one down in Bridgeport?”

Nick wondered if it was something he’d learned in one of his late-night baseball quizzes.

“There are,” Nick said. “Our class got to go to a game last year, remember? They’ve got this cool little ballpark near the water.”

Paul Crandall smiled and said, “The Bluefish, I believe they’re called.” Now he really was like a kid in class with the right answer, and clearly pleased with himself.

Nick reached over and offered his hand for a high five, and Paul Crandall, looking a little uncomfortable doing it, managed to give him one back.

“Way to go, Dad,” Nick said.

Brenda Crandall said to Nick, “Now you’re sure you’re all right with this move, really?”

“I guess so.”

“You don’t sound too enthusiastic.”

Nick said, “It’s just that I knew everybody on the JV team, and the only guy I know on the varsity is Jack Elmore. I was talking to him online before,
and even though he
said
he thought guys on the varsity would be cool with me playing with them, he wasn’t really sure.”

“It’s a surprise,” Brenda Crandall said, “isn’t it?”

It was as if his mom had hit the jackpot. “It’s a surprise,” Nick said.

“You know,” she said, “surprises can be good sometimes.”

It just turned out to be one more thing she didn’t know about baseball.

Coach Williams called all the varsity players around him before practice and told them that Nick was going to be their new catcher until Bobby came back and that nobody, not even Bobby’s doctors, knew when that would be.

Nick looked around at all the different faces. It wasn’t as if Coach had told them that they were all going for ice cream after practice.

“Listen, we thought we had our starting team, but injuries happen in sports,” he said. “So now the team we start the season with—and maybe play the whole season with, depending on Bobby—is the one that has Nick behind the plate.”

Nobody said anything until Gary Watson, the star pitcher for the Hayworth Tigers, said, “Bobby’s the only catcher who’s ever caught me.”

Coach Williams said, “I understand that, Gary. But I’m sure it won’t take long for you and Nick to get on the same page. And besides, even with Bobby, didn’t you basically call your own game, anyway?”

“Well, not always.”

Coach Williams grinned as if none of this was very big stuff. “And I don’t want to risk offending my ace, but it’s not as if we have to make a lot of decisions when you’ve got the ball in your hand. Fastballs in or fastballs away, am I right?”

“It’s not that simple,” Gary said.

Not letting it go.

Like he wanted to make an issue out of it.

Gary looked at Nick and then back at his coach and finally said, “He’s a seventh-grader, Coach.”

Nick thought, He makes it sound like a dirty word.

“And,” Gary continued, “look at him. He might not be small for his age, but he’s too small to catch for varsity. The first time there’s a collision at home plate, somebody on the other team is going to knock him all the way to the backstop.”

“Or through it,” somebody said from behind Nick.

Another voice that Nick didn’t recognize said, “His chest protector is almost as big as he is.”

One more voice said, “Fits him like a dress.”

There were some giggles.

“Any other equipment humor?” Coach Williams said, looking around.

It got their attention.

“Now I have something to say,” he said. “If I didn’t think this particular seventh-grader was big enough or good enough to play up and good enough to catch you and our other pitchers, he wouldn’t be here even for one game.”

Coach was still grinning as he said it. But his tone had changed. He was letting them all know who the coach was and who the players were, whether they were star players or not.

Now the biggest kid on the team raised his hand. Nick knew this was Steve Carberry, the team’s first baseman. He wasn’t just the biggest kid on the team, he was the biggest kid in the ninth grade at Hayworth.

“I used to catch in Little League,” Steve said.

Coach Williams nodded. “Apparently,” he said
to Steve, “that fact slipped your mind yesterday when I asked for volunteers to replace Bobby.”

“But, Coach, I didn’t know when you asked that—”

“Didn’t know what?”

Steve looked uncomfortable—everybody was staring at him.

At least they’ve stopped staring at me for a second, Nick thought.

“Didn’t know that you were gonna bring somebody up from JV.”

JV
, Nick thought. Another dirty word to these guys.

“And you have a problem with that?” Coach Williams said.

Steve looked down at his baseball shoes, which seemed huge to Nick, like man shoes. When he looked up again he said, “None of us got the chance to play up.”

“None of you got to play up before
I
got here,” Coach Williams said. “And if something like this had happened
after
I became the head coach here, it would have been you or Gary or
somebody else I was walking over here from the JV field.”

He looked to his left now, then his right, making it clear that he was about to address all of them at once. “We need to get to work,” he said. “But if anybody else has any other objections to Nick being our catcher—any that make sense, anyway—let’s hear them right now. Because this is the last time we’re going to have this conversation as a group.”

Nobody said anything.

Coach Williams turned to Nick. “Anything you’d like to say, Nick?” he said.

“I’ll do my best” was the best he could do at the moment, in a voice small enough to fit in the pocket of his mitt.

“That’s all we ask of anybody around here,” the coach said. “Now, Gary, you and Nick go do some throwing on the side while we start infield.”

The rest of the Hayworth Tigers went one way. Gary and Nick went another, though Nick could see Gary wasn’t any happier about that than he was with Nick being on this field with him in the first place.

While infield practice went on, Gary pitched
to Nick, not putting anything on the ball at first, gradually letting his pitches pick up steam, until by the end he was bringing it with everything he had, almost as if he was hoping he could throw one fastball hard enough to knock Nick over.

If it had been one of the JV pitchers throwing this hard and this well, Nick would have been up every few pitches, even on the side, cheering him on.

Even though Gary Watson had made it clear he didn’t want Nick here, Nick couldn’t help thinking, as he caught one hard strike after another, that Gary was the best pitcher he’d caught in his life.

But he didn’t say a word to Gary the whole time, and Gary didn’t say a word to him.

The only sound on this side of the field was the pop of the ball, exploding, the unmistakable sound of a good fastball, in Nick’s glove.

Usually a baseball field was the place where Nick felt most sure of himself, where he felt as if he was the one in control of things. When he’d get down behind home plate and look around, everybody was where they were supposed to be, things actually made sense.

Maybe not in the whole world—just the one spread out in front of him in the infield and outfield.

It had been that way from the first day he’d put on his mask and chest protector and knee pads.

Nick especially liked the mask. It wasn’t just that it made him feel a little bit like a superhero from one of his comic books. The mask made him feel as if he could hide in plain sight, looking at everybody else’s face on the field without them seeing his. After all the times when he’d worried about people looking at him, wondering if they were seeing the boy who didn’t have real parents, wondering how many people really knew he was in foster care or adopted, Nick thought a mask wasn’t such a bad thing to have handy.

Yet even his trusty mask couldn’t help him today.

It was as if he’d forgotten how to catch or throw.

At one point his buddy Jack Elmore, the backup second baseman on the team, came up and whispered, “Is this your first day of varsity baseball or just your first day of baseball
period
?”

Jack wasn’t as funny as Gracie, who seemed to Nick to have more of a grown-up sense of humor than a kid sense of humor. Still, Jack was pretty funny. Nick just didn’t need him to be funny today, mostly because Nick’s baseball was funny enough. The kid who didn’t want other kids looking at him was making it almost impossible for them to look anywhere else.

Nick whispered back to Jack, “Is that your idea of having my back?”

Jack said, “Dude, I gotta be honest with you: You need more than me today.”

Jack was right. Even before they had started scrimmaging, as Nick was trying to catch batting practice from Coach Williams, with Coach just grooving fat pitches for the hitters, the ball kept ticking off Nick’s glove when guys would swing and miss. Or low pitches would skip through his legs no matter how hard he tried to block them, as if the space between his pads was suddenly as wide as the space between first base and third.

It grew even worse from there.

Because now he couldn’t even throw.

It wasn’t that he was throwing too far, the way
he had in front of the coach yesterday, when he’d uncorked the throw that looked as if it belonged in one of those Pass, Punt and Kick contests where guys would try to heave a football as far as they could. Nick
wished
it were only that.

No.

Today he was doing the worst thing you could do in sports—he was trying to be too careful. Because he was too afraid to make a mistake. And when you did that in sports, any sport, all you
did
was make mistakes. So on his first throw down to second, trying to get the guy stealing on him, he bounced the ball about ten feet in front of Joey Johnson, their shortstop, covering the base. When the runner, Chris Galuccio, decided to steal third on the next pitch, Nick tried to snap off a throw from his crouch, and the ball sailed so wide that even somebody standing in the third-base coach’s box would have had a hard time making a play on it.

Gary Watson happened to be the batter. Now he said something loud enough for only Nick to hear, like it was just the two of them in the back of a class: “When you master throwing standing up, maybe then you can try it sitting down.”

Nick ignored him, just took a couple of steps toward third base and yelled to Conor Bell, the team’s third baseman, “My bad.”

It made Gary Watson laugh. “Bad?” he said. “Bad is when you miss the base with a throw. You missed the whole stinking
field
, dude.”

There was nothing for Nick to say back. Even if he had had Gracie there getting in his ear and telling him what to say, giving him some smart comeback, Nick knew he still wouldn’t have said anything. He had read enough about sports to know how rookies were supposed to behave, how they were supposed to know their place.

How they were supposed to keep their mouths shut.

Nick did that now. As he walked past Gary and back around home plate, he found himself looking all the way down to the other end of the upper fields at Hayworth where the JV team was. He could see Coach Leeman in the distance going into that goofy full windup of his.