A Vigil Beyond Left Field

A Vigil Beyond Left Field

By Brig Berthold

I stood as the nurse pushed aside my borrowed chair. She fitted my wife with a cannula, placed an IV, and wrapped her calves in pressure cuffs. I could do these things. I’d watched them do this enough times. Why didn’t they let me help? I wanted to help.

“Honey, why don’t you see if there’s a ballgame?” Crystal asked. “I can’t remember the last time you went.”

How does she do that? Who readies themselves for a cancer procedure thinking of someone else? Crystal does.

“I need to stay here,” I said. “My place is with you. What if you need me?”

“It’s a pretty routine biopsy,” the nurse said. “But it’ll still take a couple of hours. Plus post-op and recovery.”

We’d made friends with the nurses in the last two years. I trusted them. And she was right. Biopsies haven’t ever been faster than three hours.

“You’ve done enough, sweetheart.” Crystal looked up at me. Even as her eyes drooped, the creases in her cheeks stretched wide, pulling the cannula wide around her smile.

The night before had been rough. Her temperature had risen steadily, every thirty minutes. At 102 degrees, I’d re-checked her hospital bag. By 103, I carried her to the car. She’d reached nearly 104 when they admitted her early this morning.

“Everything will be fine,” she said. “Nothing we haven’t done before, right?”

Crystal shared a giggle with the nurse. Then I watched my wife close her eyes as the sedative wrapped its arms around her.

“She’ll be fine,” the nurse whispered. “We’ll call you immediately if anything comes up.”

I hated myself for leaving.

Trees canopied Main Street. The ballpark was ten minutes from the hospital and I parked near the front gate. Greenville parking lots were usually empty at eleven a.m., even downtown.

I hadn’t been to a ballgame since my wife’s diagnosis. Despite Crystal’s suggestion, I knew there wouldn’t be a game this early in the day. I yearned to go to games and live a little of baseball’s carefree comfort. It would have been a welcome break from on-again-off-again chemo. The dangerous at-home IV treatments. Our home’s antiseptic smell from the sanitizer bottles. Cancer made attendance impossible. I couldn’t risk bringing something home that might harm her, some germ or bug sending her, again, to the hospital. Crystal and I were a team.

For years, we’d buoyed each other, taking on life together. I did anything I could to help, to try and share in her struggle, but I had been disallowed to carry my half, or more, if needed.

I slid from my car into the day’s heat and looked toward the ballpark’s locked main gate. Shoeless Joe Jackson stood atop the sloping concourse, immortalized in bronze—his bat extended, turned hips, and pivoting toes. Even in death, he’s outside baseball. How many times had he needed the game from which he was banned? How many people lay at home or in hospital beds in quiet desperation, the game withheld for one reason or another?

The Sandlot sports bar was next to the stadium and I decided to wait there.

I walked in, passing servers rolling silverware in cloth napkins the color of midnight. One of the day drinkers hollered something and laughter echoed around the mostly empty room. How can anyone laugh at a time like this? I pushed aside an inner spark of anger—skilled, by now, in quashing my feelings.

The far wall was made of floor-to-ceiling windows with an expansive view of the neighboring baseball field. I was glad nobody was in my seat as I approached the farthest end of the bar, against the window wall and far enough from anyone else to be ignored.

My pocket buzzed and I fumbled to pull out my cell phone.

“Any news?” A friend texted.

“Nope,” I typed. The one-word reply was all I cared to say.

Another single buzz came from the phone and I tossed it on the bar, ignoring what I assumed to be another text message. Phone calls weren’t one-buzz alerts.

People checking in meant well, but I began to resent the near-constant update requests and well-wishing. I should be grateful to have people who care. Crystal is loved by so many.

“What can I get you?” The bartender placed a small, square napkin on the bar beside my phone.

“Hm?” I hummed the question.

She was tall and square and she leaned over the bar with authority, her Carolinian accent rolling like a river over smooth stone.

“Can I get you something to drink? Maybe a beer?”

How long ago had the surgery started? I took a deep breath, filling my nose with the smell of fried potatoes. I could have a drink and then drive, though I shouldn’t. The surgery should be fine. My wife had great nurses and her doctor was the best. As rare as it was, I realized she didn’t need me, right now.

Leaning against my elbows I looked at the shelves against the mirror-backed bar. Bottles stood in rank and file, glass soldiers awaiting orders.

The bartender turned, following my line of sight. “One of those days, already?”

I coughed to shake the melancholy from my throat. My eyes burned, and a “Yeah” was all I could manage.

She looked at me, again—was impatience competing with her hospitality?
“Know what you want, hun? Or should I give you a minute?”

I wanted to go back to the way things were. Back to before. Before the doctors and the blood pressure cuffs and dragging my wife up and down the stairs. I wanted her laugh to sparkle when I made a terrible joke she somehow found funny. I wanted to free her smile from behind blue paper masks.

I didn’t say any of that. “Something hazy would be great.”

With a double tap of her knuckles, the bartender pressed herself away.

The day we received the diagnosis they’d called Hodgkins “The Cadillac of Cancers.”

“If you’re going to get cancer,” they’d said, “this is the one you want.”

In no time, life had abandoned reality, replaced by something counterfeit. And as much as it hurt right now, I knew this was nothing special. Chemo chairs were always full. Waiting rooms were lined with people wearing headscarves, their caregivers standing nearby, leaving seats for the patients. All types of people. Tragically, all ages. It was a distorted comfort but sometimes it was all I had. Knowing we had simply taken our positions in a larger, woven whole.

I shifted on my stool until I could look out onto the baseball field. A dark-white mark had permanently scuffed the window where a home run ball had once struck the double-paned glass. If you looked closely, you could see it. I know because I was there that day.

My wife and I were sitting in the seats just below the bar’s window. The ball came right at us and I remember leaning over her. The ball had sailed just over our heads before a thudding whack against the glass. I still have it, somewhere.

The bartender returned with a tall glass of beer.

“Thank you.”

“This one’s on me,” she said. “Let me know if you need anything else, okay?”

I nodded at her, taken aback by the kindness. For what seemed like the millionth time, someone had brushed our lives with grace. Small kindnesses, little gestures reaching through the gauze of chaos to remind us we weren’t alone. Gratitude had become familiar.

The glass was cold and the beer thick and fruity. A dull rumbling sound pulled my eyes back to the ball field as a groundskeeper began mowing the outfield grass. My mouth filled with the hops and toasted malt. I closed my eyes, drew a slow breath, allowing my mind to recreate the atmosphere. Hot dogs hissing on grills. Laughter as children weave through the crowd. The organist pressing carnival-like tunes into the air. I heard the twin bang bang as a cleat beats the ball to first base. The vision stretched out in front of me as long as memory allowed.

My wife had never been to a game. It was our first date, and I’d bought seats on the first base side. The public address crew played songs slyly poking fun at the visiting players’ names. Fans divided, not by team loyalty, but by whether, or not, they did “the wave.” We spent the first two innings with playful question and answer—about the game and each other. She learned what a double play was. I learned her middle name.

In the fourth inning, I figured out her favorite ice cream flavor, chocolate chip cookie dough, and she found out I don’t like the stuff. She still thinks I’m crazy.

In the thinning seventh-inning crowd, we stood. My arm over her shoulder, hers around my waist, we swayed together and sang “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.” I think I knew, then. And looking into her eyes, pinched almost shut from her wide smile, I think she did, too.

Brig Berthold is a US Army Veteran whose work has appeared in The Good Men Project, Military Experience & The Arts, and The Under Review. Brig is co-host of the Baseball Together podcast and a member of the IBWAA. He lives in Spartanburg, SC.

Andy Lattimer is a gay guy who lives in Southern California. He makes comics, most of which are about baseball. You can read them on his website, andylattimer.com

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