The Might Have Been (35 page)

What anger she must have carried, he thought. He couldn’t even recall the name of the woman in Montreal: Hester, Heather, something; did he ever know her last name? He couldn’t even conjure her face, what color her hair was. He saw his hand on her hip, remembered that her dress had been some slick and shiny material: silk? He remembered her stockinged feet, high heels in her hand, an orchid behind her ear, her slapping her fiancé. Nothing beyond that. She was upset and he comforted her; it was a response out of kindness, wasn’t it? It was a blip in his life; she had vanished into the vast country of the past.

He collected the photos, returned them to the envelope and then lost them again; the next night, home before midnight following a seven–three win, a complete game by Sandford, he wondered if he had perhaps missed something in them that might give him a clue about where they had been taken. But he couldn’t find them.

Searching for them, however, led him to wonder if he had done enough to try to find Julie and the boy. He remembered the phone number he had punched into his cellphone on the day Webber broke his shoulder and scrolled through the call log looking for it. On the third ring, a woman answered and he gripped the phone more tightly.

“Is this the home of Colin Aylesworth?” he said. “I’m looking for—”

“I’m sorry,” the woman said. “He’s deceased.”

His son was dead
. He sucked in his breath, his forehead suddenly clammy.

“I know this is awkward,” Edward Everett said. “But what was … how old was he?”

“He was eighty-three,” the woman said. “I was his …” She was going to say
daughter
, he knew, and it would turn out to be Julie, after all these years.
Ed?
she would say, her voice full of forgiveness. But the woman went on. “… wife. Are you a former patient of his?”

“Yes,” Edward Everett lied.

“It’s been touching how many have called to say what a wonderful doctor he was,” she said. “He was always so good with the children who came to see him.”

“Are you at all related to a Julie Aylesworth?” he asked.

“He had a sister, Julie, but she passed a long while ago, when they were just children themselves,” the woman said.

“No other?” he asked.

“I’m sorry?” she said. “I don’t know what his sister has to do—”

“I meant, I’m sorry for your loss. Your husband was a wonderful doctor.”

“Did your scars heal?” she asked.

“Scars?”

“Most of the children—the burns—but he worked so hard to make sure that their faces, at least … so they could lead normal lives. Did yours heal well?”

“Yes,” he said. “Your husband did good work. He saved my life.”

He went through boxes in his basement, hauled mildewed books and clothing to the curb and took to the Goodwill what the water in his basement hadn’t ruined, wondering:
When did I acquire this and why did I hold on to it?
—golf clubs, tennis rackets, copies of
Street & Smith’s Baseball Yearbook
from the 1960s to the 1980s. He was in one of them, he realized, and found the issue for the 1977 season that
contained the statistics for anyone who had appeared in a major league game the year before. The pages were gray and brittle, flecks of paper drifting to his living room rug, settling onto the folds in his shirt, the tips of his shoes. He found himself in the back, at the final entry of an appendix, “Players with fewer than ten official at-bats,” his last name and first initial, a single game and a string of zeros, save for the columns for batting average and slugging percentage, which read simply “—,” the equation a mathematical impossibility, zero-indivisible-by-zero. Still, that single impotent line was evidence he had been there.

He pulled out the issue and boxed the others and took them to the Goodwill, along with two boxes of his father’s clothing his mother had sent him twenty-five years earlier, when she finally got around to clearing out his father’s possessions. “You might be able to wear some of these,” she had written in a brief note, scrawled on a sheet of green paper she’d torn from a stenographer’s notebook. When they arrived, he was living in Sioux City, his second season coaching, and he had come home after midnight to find the boxes in the hall of his apartment building, blocking his door. He’d opened them, the inside of the box musty, and stared at the wrinkled, hastily folded shirts and slacks. He had no idea what his mother might have been thinking: what would he want with the clothes of a dead man? He considered throwing them away but felt a twinge of guilt: these clothes had once been something his father would have run his hands across as he flipped through the shirts, trying to decide what to put on his body that day. So he had hauled them around for nearly half his life. But, by now, certainly whatever obligation he had to them as remnants of his father had expired; they were just pieces of stitched cotton and rayon.

Out making his runs to charity, he noticed that so many of the landmarks of his life had disappeared. The jeweler’s where he found Renee’s ring was shut, the name and hours of operation painted on the glass front door nearly chipped away: how long had it been closed? The office of the physical therapist where he’d gone after surgery on what had been his good knee had vanished—the operation necessary because too many years of favoring his injured one wore the other
out as well. Now the building was missing, just a dark gap between a bowling alley and a nail-and-tanning salon. When had that happened? Gone, too, was the diner where he’d met the first woman he dated when he moved to Perabo City—Sheila? Shirley? She’d been a waitress, they’d flirted, he left her extravagant tips—five dollars for a four-dollar meal—and they’d seen each other for two months.

It was not just the ball club that was leaving town: the town was leaving town.

One night, as he watched a bearded man and his skinny wife win a new refrigerator on
The Newlywed Game
, he could hear another party next door at the Duboises’. He moved through the kitchen and out onto his deck, easing the door closed, wincing at the sharp click of the latch, and stood in the shadow, listening. On the deck next door, all he could make out were silhouettes of perhaps a dozen people, voices overlapping voices, until he heard Rhonda exclaim, “Oh, Neh Neh,” her nickname for Renee that she resurrected when she’d been drinking. He stepped farther out onto his deck, squinting into the night as if it would make the dark forms somehow distinct. Renee’s laugh came back to him, followed by a male voice: “If I’d known this, I’d never—” Never what?
Never have taken you from your husband
.

He went back inside. Grizzly lay sleeping in his corner of the kitchen and he raised his head, briefly and indifferently, and then pawed at his bedding for a moment before going back to sleep. In the living room,
The Newlywed Game
had given way to
The Dating Game
, and as the host introduced the three bachelors sitting smugly on their high stools—all wide lapels, permed hair and toothy smiles—and the bachelorette began asking them questions peppered with double entendres, Edward Everett got the itch to call women he’d known, and the next day he did. Certainly one was stuck in her own bit of stasis while everyone else rushed on into their private futures; certainly one would exclaim,
Oh. I was just thinking of you
. Anita answered the phone, breathless after dashing inside from unloading groceries from the car, she said, thinking it was her daughter calling to be picked up from dance class, and then was confused when
Edward Everett told her who he was. Magda, whom he’d met on her second day in the country after she’d emigrated from Poland, didn’t answer but her answering machine had two voices on it: “Hi, this is Roger. And Maaaagdaaaa! We’re probably out walking our Weimaraners. Leave a message.” Some had just disappeared: Sharon’s number was disconnected; Liz’s belonged to a body shop.

One was happy to hear from him, Audrey, a new-accounts clerk he’d met when he took one of his Spanish-speaking players to the bank to help him open an account. “Ed,” she said in a delighted voice when he told her who he was. “We must be on the same wavelength.” She had a confession, she said. “I called you once but didn’t have the nerve to leave a message. And now here you are. It’s kismet.” But soon, she was crying, going on about her most recent boyfriend, whom she’d learned too late was married with a baby on the way; going on about a fight she’d had with a co-worker who, she was convinced, had dinged her car in the parking lot but denied it. He remembered why he’d stopped seeing her and as soon as he could graciously do so, got off the phone, agreeing vaguely when she suggested he drive over to see her after the season ended.

On another night—after a one–nothing win, another gem for Sandford, the win coming when Mraz ended it with a ninth-inning home run arcing over the decaying green wall in left—he called directory assistance in Osterville and asked for the number for McLaughlin, Randall, and called it without hesitating because if he hesitated he would come to his senses. Even as the phone rang, he thought,
Hang up
. As it rang a second time, he thought:
Hang up
. In the middle of the third ring, Connie answered in a cheery voice and he was caught off guard.

“Hi,” he croaked out.

“Can I help you?” she asked from six hundred fifteen miles away.

“Con?” he said.

“Who is this?” she asked, and when he told her, she exclaimed, “Oh, my gosh. Ed. My Lord, it’s been … well, a lot of water under, as they say.”

“Yes,” he said. “Too long.”

“Your name came up last year, at the reunion. Forty years since
high school, if you can believe that. People started asking about people who weren’t there.”

He wondered if she was still married to McLaughlin, how he could ask. He saw them starting out slowly, phone calls every couple of weeks. When the season was over and he was at the end of baseball, he could drive over to see her. They could have dinner; maybe the Victorian tearoom where they’d had their first, awful date thirty years earlier was still open. They’d see how things went. The thought struck him: was she jowly, double-chinned, her white hair thinning? He was no prize, though: not obese, but slow, achy in the morning, his knee forever in pain.

“How’s Billy?” he asked, her son’s name pushing into his memory: the frail boy yelling “Stop” when they wanted to put the giant stuffed bear into the trunk.

She laughed. “He’s William now. Not Billy. His son, William Junior, got married last year and they’re expecting a baby. I keep saying, ‘I’m too young to be a great-grandmother.’ What about you? I’ll bet you’re married and have a whole passel of kids.”

“No,” he said. “I was. Married, I mean.” He shrugged, although she couldn’t possibly see that over the phone.

“I’m so sorry,” she said, a touch of what seemed genuine concern in her voice. He waited for her to tell him about herself, about marrying McLaughlin and divorcing him—a rebound relationship after he had gone off to Erie.

“Randy and I …”
Got divorced
, he waited for her to say, but she went on. “I guess you don’t know. I married Randy McLaughlin. It’s been thirty years.” She laughed. “I can hear you thinking,
him?
But he’s a dear, a good daddy to Billy. William, I mean. We should all get together sometime if you’re over this way.”

Edward Everett wanted the call to end after he learned that she and Randy McLaughlin were still together, but he couldn’t graciously hang up until the conversation came to some kind of ending. Finally, she said, “Oh, Randy just drove up. He would love to say hey.”

“I’d like to,” he lied, “but I have a conference call in fifteen minutes and I have to go over some game logs beforehand.”

“Conference call? This late at night?”

“The director of PD is … Well, he wants what he wants when he wants it.”

“I know the type. Now that you have my number, don’t be a stranger. And I’ve got yours off caller ID. William gave us this fancy phone package for Christmas. It’s all beyond me. Call waiting. Wireless Internet.” From the background of where she was, he heard a male voice calling, “Hello? Hon?”

“I need to get going here, Connie.”

“Sure, stay in touch.”

He started to hang up but not before, from her end, he heard her say, “You won’t believe …”

He sat in the darkness, folding the scrap of paper with her number in half, then in quarters, then eighths, until it was so small he couldn’t make any more folds in it. He pushed himself out of the chair and used the foot lever to spring open the trash can and dropped the scrap on top of the coffee filter from earlier in the day and went to bed.

Two days later, on the weekend before the All-Star break, Marc Johansen, MS, MBA, emailed to say he wanted to meet. “I’m in St. Louis for family business,” he wrote. “Am overnighting a plane ticket for Sunday. Meet Monday. Directions attached.” Short, efficient. Edward Everett wondered if Claussen’s email from Mark Johansen, MS, MBA, just before the organization had fired him had been as curt.

I
t had been years since he’d flown and it was only when his stomach gave its slight drop as the plane lifted from the tarmac in Cedar Rapids that he remembered how much he hated it, the anxious moments as the jets roared to give the plane its lift, the precarious bounce of the wing outside his window seat, making him question the integrity of bolts and welds; the mechanical grinding and bump as the wheels retracted; his ears filling, giving him the illusion that sound was traveling from another room—the muted hum of conversation, the scratch of paper from the woman beside him turning the pages of a pulp mystery novel, the nervous clicking of a ballpoint pen button by a woman across the aisle.

Before they finished their climb, rain began pelting the window beside him, the drops slithering like silver slugs across the scratched and clouded plastic. He pulled down the plastic shade and closed his eyes, his pulse thrumming in his jaw. A baby behind him wailed and the woman beside him closed her book.

“I really hate flying,” she said. She was near his age, gray-haired, wearing a peach silk blouse tucked neatly into a charcoal pencil skirt, small, heart-shaped diamond studs in her earlobes, her manicured nails polished pale pink. “Yet, here I am again.”