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Why? Why baseball?
Lately, the usual answers haven’t led to that same sense of calm and focus. I could talk about the beauty of it, or how fast my heart beats when I run onto the field, or the perfect moment when my bat connects with the ball and I know I’ve bested the pitcher. There’s the smell of the field when it’s freshly mowed, and dirtying up my uniform when I slide into home, and all the handshakes and fist bumps and inside jokes with my teammates. There’s harmony in baseball. Poetry, recited without speaking a word.
If James is a general and Cooper is a warrior, I’m an assassin, waiting for the perfect moment to strike.
“Sebastian?” she prompts.
“I think at first I loved it because my father did,” I say. “And then I loved it because it still connected me to him.”
“And now?”
I give a half-shrug. “Both of those things are still true.”
“Tell me a little more about your dad. I remember watching him play.”
“I do too.” I run my hand through my hair. “He was great. Baseball means a rough schedule, but he made the most of the time we had together. Even if he just got home from a road trip, or only had an hour before he had to head to the stadium, he was there, ready to spend time with me.”
“And your mother?”
“The best damn cook ever.” I pause as Zoe laughs. “I didn’t have any siblings, and not much family we spoke to, so it was just the two of us when my dad was on the road. It’s a good thing she loved baseball as much as him, because she was the one taking me to all the practices and games.”
I can almost see her, for a moment. Jeans and sandals, sunglasses perched atop a reddened nose, a mystery novel tucked underneath her arm. She’d steal my dad’s shirts, old practice gear, and tie them in the front. She took so many videos of me playing to send to Dad, she might’ve been a documentarian.
I wonder where those videos went. Maybe Sandra has them somewhere, along with the rest of the things I haven’t managed to look through.
“And that obviously continued after the accident,” she says, crossing one leg over the other. “Before we go into your adoption, though, the accident—do you have anything you personally want to say about it?”
The back of my neck prickles. “What do you mean?”
“Well,” she starts, flipping through her notebook. “When I did some digging, I did find… some belief that your father may have been driving under the influence at the time of the accident.”
“Bullshit,” I say.
“You were there,” she says, her voice soft. “You were in the backseat of the car. Was anything off that night, Sebastian? What do you think led to that accident?”
I stand, the chair skidding back several inches. “I’ll talk about my family, but not that. Not if you’re going to recite lies.”
She takes a deep breath. “Okay. I’m sorry. Just sit down.”
“He wasn’t drunk,” I say sharply. “I know they said that, and that he was fighting with my mother, and whatever other shit they tried to pull when the accident went public. They hated my father since the moment she met him; they would have said anything to discredit him. You interviewed them for this? I haven’t spoken to them since the funeral.”
“I was just exploring all the angles,” she says.
I stare at her for a moment longer, but eventually, I sit back down. “Don’t print that. They mean nothing to me. They’re not my fucking family.”
“You have a family,” she says, seemingly unruffled by the intensity in my voice. “The Callahans. Your father’s best friend and his wife, and their children.”
I need to rein it in. I take a deep breath, trying to loosen my shoulders. I still remember what my mother’s father whispered to her mother at the funeral; I overheard them talking over her fucking body at the viewing. A horrible thing, but at least if she had to go, so did the scumbag. All because they thought my mother could have done better, and my father sullied her by knocking her up and convincing her to run away with him.
“Yeah,” I say.
“Richard mentioned it was a pact that he made with Jacob when they were young. A promise to take care of each other’s families if anything like this happened.”
“What about it?”
“Given that, would you truly consider them your family? How has it been, growing up with the Callahans?”
I can still remember the moment Richard and Sandra told me that they’d be taking care of me from now on. It was before the funeral, which they organized. They were in Cincinnati before the hospital discharged me, handling everything because my dad didn’t have any family to do it and my mother’s family was threatening to give her a separate funeral. Sandra, who by that point was my mother’s best friend, fought tooth and nail for her to be buried with her husband.
