The Might Have Been (28 page)

Walking to the stack of cinder blocks that functioned as the trailer’s front steps, Edward Everett sloshed through puddles, his bad knee sending jolts into his hip. He wondered if he would ever be dry again; the legs of his pants were caked with mud. At the trailer, he rapped lightly on the door, the cheap aluminum shaking.

“Ah, jeez,” Nelson said when he opened the door and saw Edward Everett.

“Come in,” Nelson’s wife said from behind her husband. “Ross. It’s pouring.”

Edward Everett hesitated, wondering if he should, indeed, go in. It was clear that Nelson already knew why he was there; a manager did not drop by for a social call. He could just turn around, get in his car, go home, take a hot shower.

“Come in,” Nelson’s wife repeated, and Edward Everett mounted the steps. “I’m Cindy,” she said. She was a round-faced girl, perhaps
not even twenty, in shorts and a man’s T-shirt that fell almost to her knees, her long dark hair pulled back with an elastic band.

“I’ll ruin your carpet,” he said and, indeed, he was dripping all over the small braided rug set just inside the trailer.

“I’ll put something down on the sofa,” Cindy said, and she disappeared around a corner and was back almost instantly with a beach towel that, when she unfolded it to lay on the sofa, bore a large screen print of a baseball sitting in the pocket of a mitt, and the words “Baseball is life. All the rest is just details.” She handed him a second towel and said, “You can dry off.” Edward Everett toweled off his hair, face and arms and Cindy took the towel back from him, disappearing around the corner again. He didn’t want to sit but his knee ached so much that he plopped down onto the towel Cindy had spread over the couch for him, sinking because the springs were bad.

“Skip—” Nelson said, sitting in a recliner chair across from him, the chair tilting to the left, creaking under his weight.

“I’m sorry,” Edward Everett said but before he could go on, Cindy was back, carrying the six-month-old and bringing the three-year-old into the room by the hand. The older one, a boy, was blond and shy, curling himself around behind his mother’s legs, poking a finger into his mouth, peeking out at Edward Everett. The infant wore a one-piece sleeper and, although her hair was wispy, there was a plastic pink bow clipped to it—perhaps to signify she was a girl.

“This is Sarah,” Cindy said, kissing the infant on the top of her head, “and Jacob,” giving the boy’s hand a gentle tug so that he emerged for a moment from behind his mother.

“They’re very cute,” he said, not wanting to know this about Nelson, not wanting to think of him in this way, someone’s daddy, someone other than a name on his roster he was deleting.

“I just thought you’d like to meet them,” she said. “They’re the apples of Ross’ eye.” She regarded him for a moment in a way he knew carried meaning and then took the children back down the short hall and Edward Everett heard a door click shut.

“Skip …” Nelson said. “I know I haven’t hit like I could. My little girl, she has colic and I don’t get the sleep I—”

“It’s not my call,” Edward Everett said, knowing he was about to say something he shouldn’t—that he was going to give Nelson hope he shouldn’t have. “You’re a helluva team player. If it was up to me …” He gave a shrug. “I’ll make a couple calls. See if we can’t find another organization.” He hated himself for the lie as soon as it was out of his mouth. What was wrong with him? he wondered. The years had made him efficient in delivering this kind of news. Maybe it was a mistake coming out here, to Nelson’s turf, where Nelson’s wife could make him feel guilty by bringing out their children as if that would change things:
You’re hitting barely two hundred but you have two kids so here’s a ticket to the major leagues
. Edward Everett couldn’t tell who made him angrier: Renz for reducing everything to a string of numbers or Nelson and his wife for reducing everything to the human factor, the yin and the yang of baseball.

He couldn’t tell but it seemed Nelson was tearing up and then he was weeping like the boy he still was—a boy-man with a wife who slept beside him and children who shared a room across the narrow passageway that served for a hall in this cramped trailer—hunched over, his face buried in his hands, and then Cindy was back beside him, sitting precariously on the left arm of the recliner, the chair cracking under the weight. She leaned into Nelson, plopping the infant onto his lap, while Jacob stood to the other side of him, patting his father on the knee. “Don’t be ’set, Daddy; don’t be ’set.”

“Maybe you should go,” Cindy said. “You’ve done whatever you came to do.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have come. It’s just that we won’t have a game.”

“We don’t care a damn about the game,” Cindy said in a measured tone, stroking her husband’s hair.

What Edward Everett had wanted to say was that he wanted to spare Nelson coming all the way down to the park in the downpour, that he thought he was doing him a favor by coming out here, but there was no point in his saying it.

At the door, he stopped and studied the family huddled together in the face of what they most likely saw as a worse storm than the
one battering their trailer, Nelson planting kisses on his daughter’s head as if she were the one who needed comforting.

Before he turned the knob of the door to go back out into the deluge, he stopped and decided to do Nelson one last act of kindness, although he might never see it that way—not even in sixty years, if he lived that long. The chances were, he would see it as one more act of cruelty. But no matter: a generous act was still a generous act even if the person receiving it could not recognize it.

“I lied,” Edward Everett said. “You should do something else with your life. Sell straw,” he said, echoing Hoppel’s last comment to him more than thirty years earlier—my God, a third of a century in the past, he thought—a remark he had heard as sarcasm but which, he realized, was the kindest thing anyone might have said to him. “Sell straw,” he said again, and let himself back out where the rain continued to pound, while behind him, Nelson, whether he knew it or not, was on his way to a better life. Before he closed the door, he glanced once more at the family. Nelson certainly had far more than he ever had.

F
or a dozen years, Julie sent him photographs of the boy, which was the only way he had of thinking about him—“the boy”—since there was never a note, nothing about what his name was. Edward, after him? A name from her father, uncle, a pop star crush: Bobby, Davey, Paul? So he remained “the boy.” The boy in someone’s arms, wearing a white christening gown with a blue cross embroidered at the neck, squeezing his eyes closed against the sun, one plump fist raised as if someone had startled him from a sleep he very much did not want to leave. The boy, still an infant, in a yellow sleeper, wearing a red-and-green felt elf cap topped with a small bell, held up by someone before a Christmas tree, torn wrapping paper scattered in the background. The boy in a high chair, his face, slightly blurred, averted from the camera, as if something had distracted his attention just at the moment the shutter clicked. The boy asleep in a dim room on a wide bed covered by coats. The boy, naked except for a diaper, squatting in the arc of a lawn sprinkler. The boy at five or six, holding a lunch box, his hair slicked back, wearing a beige windbreaker, slouching on the porch of a house. The boy at seven, in a white jacket and black slacks, on the step of an altar in a church. The boy in a suit at a table in a white-linen restaurant, raising a glass aloft as if in a toast. The boy on the banks of a river, green swim trunks
exposing skinny legs and a thin torso, reaching back to throw a stone into a lake. The boy at a kitchen table, schoolbooks before him, chewing on the eraser of a pencil, looking intently at a worksheet. The boy, seated on a bicycle, his back to the camera, head turned toward it, his right foot on a pedal, his left on the ground, as if he was about to push off, ride away.

That was the last picture he received. Until then, they came at the rate of two or three a year after the first, the Polaroid of the infant in the hospital nursery, all addressed to him in care of whatever minor league team he was with: Erie, Peoria, Raleigh, Topeka, Little Rock, Cedar Rapids, Medicine Hat, Carbondale, Sioux City, Providence, Omaha, Cumberland. Each came like the first, folded into a blank sheet of paper, in an envelope with no return address. Most carried a Chicago postmark but two were from Bloomington, Indiana, and one from St. Louis.

For a long while he looked for them, Julie and the boy without a name. In ballparks in Decatur, Springfield, Iowa City, Rockford, Peoria, he would study the crowd, looking for young women cradling infants. In Peoria, he was certain he’d found them, sitting five rows behind the visitors’ dugout, a redheaded woman in a denim jumper alone with a baby. He spotted them in the third inning as he trotted in from left field, the woman balancing the infant on her lap, holding on to its hands as it stood on her legs, bouncing up and down in an excited fashion. As he crossed the first base line, she seemed to wave. He felt a lurch in his chest and raised his hand to wave back but she seemed not to notice and was, instead, looking beyond him. When he turned around, he saw the Peoria shortstop waving back at her:
his
wife,
his
child.

Another time, in Duluth, as he sat on the bus, leaving town after a Sunday afternoon game, they stopped at a traffic signal beside a Dairy Queen. Through the plate-glass window, he was certain he saw her in one of the booths, spooning ice cream into the mouth of a child in a high chair. As the bus idled there, the woman turned to the window and squinted out into the day as the light changed and the bus pulled away. When they arrived at their next town, Oshkosh, Wisconsin, he called directory assistance for Duluth, asked for listings under her last name but there were none.

He developed a ritual: whenever they arrived in a new town, he would take the white pages from his room, carry it to a phone booth and call everyone sharing Julie’s last name, thinking:
I may not find her, but certainly a cousin, an aunt, an uncle
. He tried to remember if she had siblings. Her name was not common and, as it was in Duluth, often there were no listings, but occasionally there were. Once, in Racine, he thought he’d found her. It was during a bad stretch for him, a handful of hits in he-didn’t-want-to-think-how-many at-bats. Two days before, his manager—Mike Norman, then—had called him into his office for what he thought was going to be yet another death sentence in yet another organization but it wasn’t; he was in a professional coma, on life support: Norman was sitting him down for a few games—he’d been pressing, was too conscious of everything when he was at the plate; had his hands always been an inch from the knob of the bat or was it three-quarters? No matter where he put his feet, his stance felt off balance. It all distracted him, slowing his swing a few-hundredths of a second; even on curves that didn’t break and which he should have driven hard, he was popping meekly to the second baseman.

He had begun to think that his looking for a woman and a baby he’d never find would mean the end to his career; he vowed to give it up. She knew where he was; she kept sending him the photographs. If she wanted to see him again, she could. But, in the room, the phone book was already sitting on the desk and he flipped it open and found a listing there: “Aylesworth,” initial “J,” and thought, all right, once more, and called it. A woman answered. There was considerable noise where she was, music and voices, as if a party was going on, and the thought struck him that he could not remember when, exactly, his son had been born, and so, maybe in some grand coincidence, he had called on his birthday, when Julie and her family were celebrating.

“I’m looking for Julie Aylesworth,” he said.

“This is her,” she said, and his stomach tightened.

“This is Ed—” he began, and she interrupted him.

“Ed? We’ve been waiting for you.”

“Ed!” several voices in the background exclaimed. “Finally!”

“Are you coming?” the woman asked.

“I don’t know where you are,” he said, his heart racing. He saw himself calling a cab, giving the driver Julie’s address, being dropped at the curb, the door opening, a swarm of people, his son standing there in a paper birthday hat.

“Oh, God,” the woman said. “Are you drunk?” Then she said to someone where she was, “He’s so drunk, he doesn’t remember his way.”

“No,” he said. “I’m not drunk. I—” But where the woman was, a doorbell chimed and the woman said, “Ed! How can you be here and on the phone?”

“I think there’s a mistake,” Edward Everett said. “I guess I was looking for another Julie.”

“Who’s Julie?” the woman said. “This is Judy. Ju-dee.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, but she had hung up.

At one point, he realized that the boy would no longer be a boy but a young man. This was when he was in Montana, a bad year, a year out of baseball after the Angels organization fired him the January following his one season managing their low-A team at Missoula, too late for him to find work with another franchise. He was seeing a woman who was a photographer for the
Missoulian
, Melissa Hun-gate, the widow of a firefighter who had gotten trapped in a paper mill fire, and when Edward Everett lost his job, he took it as a sign that he should settle down and they went to Las Vegas over a weekend and married. “Second time’s a charm,” she exclaimed optimistically when he suggested it. He took a job delivering the newspaper, up at two-thirty in the morning, hurling papers out of the window of a four-wheel-drive Jeep in the dark before dawn. After his route, he and Melissa met for coffee and eggs in a diner called “Le Café” and once while he sat waiting for her, watching the snow fall outside the window, thinking it was most likely time to get out the tire chains, a kid came in—eighteen, maybe nineteen—wearing insulated coveralls and an orange hunter’s vest. He sat at the counter and something about him caught Edward Everett’s attention: the way he slung his left leg over the stool as he sat, akin to the way Edward Everett imagined
one mounted a horse; he remembered his own father had done that when he used to take Edward Everett to Tucker’s for pie after football practices when Edward Everett was a boy. He watched, a prickle raising the hair on his arms, as the kid set a stainless steel thermos onto the counter, unscrewed the cap and slid it across toward the teenaged waitress so she could fill it with coffee. When she returned it to him, the kid leaned toward her. The notion came to Edward Everett:
This is my son
, and he realized he was holding his breath, thinking,
What do I say?
The door to the outside opened, the bell above it jingling, and a middle-aged man, wearing identical insulated coveralls and an orange hunter’s vest, paused at the threshold to stomp the snow off his boots. “The deer ain’t waiting, son,” he said in a jovial manner, and the kid and waitress exchanged a brief kiss and then he was gone.