The Baseball Player Next Door

Inning 18 ★ A Promise

"Why are you watching this?" I asked through the lump in my throat. The rain continued to fall, as a reminder that life had gone on. We had gone on.

My face appeared in the video, crying after I'd fallen and scrapped my knee. Seb had been laughing at me. I wondered if he was doing the same right now as he saw us from above even though this was a way bigger booboo.

Santi swallowed down some malta. With a faraway voice he replied, "I had a dream about him last night. That the ball McCann took to the shoulder hit him instead, and I started a fight with Mayfield because how dare they hit my brother. How dare they..."

I bit my lips but I'd already started sobbing. My entire face felt hot and I had to look away from the screen, I couldn't take it. My hands were wringing each other and a teardrop fell on them. He set the food aside and grabbed my hand in his bigger and tan one. His thumb ran over my skin repeatedly, soothing. I felt worse.

"Ever since the accident I've felt very inadequate," I said, looking at the veins in his hand and up his arm. "Like my pain doesn't have a right to compete with yours."

His voice was barely a whisper when he asked, "What are you talking about?"

I looked up at him. He had sad but dry eyes. "Like I don't have a right to cry because I wasn't there."

"I'm glad you weren't," he said, with a sudden strength he hadn't had a few seconds before. "I'm glad you don't see what happened when you close your eyes every night. I'm glad you don't wonder why it was you who lived."

I hugged him.

We stayed like that even as the video played itself to the end. Santi was breathing steady, his heart beat to a solid rhythm. He was warm and smelled like he needed a shower, but he was alive and whole and the only scars left from the accident were one on his head, hidden by his hair, and the big one in his heart. I'd have been just as crushed if he'd been the one to go, but I'd have been destroyed if they both had died.

I was the one crying and he kept trying to comfort me with a caress to my head and murmurs that I was snotting all over him again. But I held fast to him as if someone would snatch him away.

"I'm glad you're alive," I managed to say. "Don't ever question that."

I felt him bury his face in my hair. "Okay."

I pulled away and looked up at his face. His cheeks were wet too, and it almost made me mad to know he'd learned to cry without making a sound. Like maybe he'd practiced crying without attracting attention. I felt like my heart was breaking all over again.

My hands reached up and wiped his face. He closed his eyes, and I wiped the moisture off his thick eyelashes too. His cheeks were rough with patches of stubble before his morning shave. He was a man and I still felt like a little girl. Santi opened his eyes, green like jewels, and they were so close that I could see myself reflected in them. I almost had a heart attack.

My hands fell to my lap and I pulled back. He stayed looking at me for a moment longer before starting a new video. It was recorded from the bleachers, and I could hear Domingo and Barbara speaking in Spanish in the background. I saw myself sitting next to Seb on our team's bench. The only way I could find us in the video was because my hair was such a bright red that even the bad quality camera caught it. The little boy walking up to the plate in a slow, relaxed pace could only be Santiago.

"You were as obnoxious then as you are now," I said, trying to lighten the mood.

He snorted. "The kettle calling the pot black."

From the corner of my eye I saw him wipe his face with his t-shirt. I extended my hand to him and he grabbed it.

A shrill voice startled a jump out of me. It was my little self screaming at Santiago to bring it home. Oh my God! This was the game when he batted the most epic homerun. Sure enough, he did. Little me jumped out of the bench at the clang and screamed at him to bring it home, and then saw in horror as Santi just dropped his bat and left the field.