Jeri Smith-Ready: This Side of Salvation

Mom gives a lilting laugh as she ruffles my hair. “That’s the spirit.”

“No team in playoff history,” John says, “ has ever come back from three games down to win.”

I watch Millar go through his routine, tightening the wrist straps on his batting gloves, then adjusting his helmet. “It could happen.”

“With Rivera on the mound?” John flicks his hand at the wallmounted wide-screen TV. “He’s invincible.”

“Not against Arizona. He blew a save to lose the World Series.”

My brother turns his head to look at me. “That was three years ago, bud. You were only four. How do you remember that?”

I shrug. I remember feeling bad for the Yankees, since something terrible happened to their city right before those playoffs, something that made my parents turn off the TV whenever Mara or me came in the room. But now I’m rooting for a Red Sox comeback. Not just so I can stay up later, but because I believe in underdogs.

On the screen in front of me, the invincible Rivera falls behind in the count. “See?” I jab John with my elbow. “It could still happen.”“It won’t. Sox’d need a miracle.”

“Miracles happen. Right, Dad?” I finally take my eyes off the screen to turn to my father, sitting up in bed behind me.

He swallows his sip of beer, then sets the empty bottle with the five others on the nightstand. “What did Yogi Berra say?”

I think for a second. Yogi Berra said a lot of funny things—like, 90 percent of baseball being half-mental. But it’s obvious which quote Dad means. “‘It ain’t over till it’s over’!”

“Good boy.” Dad offers a smile and a thumbs-up, the same he gives me when I’m on the field, winning or losing.

“Oh my goodness,” Mom says. “Look at that.”

I turn back to the TV to see Millar trotting to first base. Walked with no outs. Fenway Park starts to wake up. A group of fans in an upper level waves a sign that says, we believe in the idiots.

“This is when it happens,” I whisper. “I can feel it.”

John’s gone quiet, front teeth gnawing the knot in the string of his Phillies hoodie. The hope in his eyes is cautious. He’s afraid to believe.

I reach into the pocket of my pajama shirt and pull out my lucky frog, the one I won with the claw machine on the Atlantic City boardwalk last summer. It’s round, dull green, with stubby legs—more of a toad, really—and it’s filled with bean bag stuff, so it stays where you drop it. Its name is Plop.

“Here.” I hand John the frog. “This’ll help you believe.”

My brother nods solemnly as he sets Plop in the palm of his hand. “Thanks. You don’t need it?”

“Not as much as you do.”

The miracle happened: The Red Sox came back that night, then took three more games against their arch nemesis to win the American League pennant. Over the next five years, I made John take Plop with him to the Air Force Academy, then Undergraduate Pilot Training, and finally Afghanistan, figuring he still needed luck more than I did. After all, at twelve years old, I already had a vicious fastball that would get my team out of any jam, which meant I was pretty much master of the universe.

But John’s luck ran out fast, and I learned that off the field, miracles are scarce.

My brother’s first deployment ended before we were even used to him being gone. The night the pair of blue-uniformed men knocked on our door, there were still fortune-cookie slips stuck to the fridge, souvenirs from our farewell dinner at John’s favorite Chinese restaurant. As Mom collapsed in the foyer, screaming, “My baby boy! My baby boy!” I tried to slip the fortunes into my pocket, along with the clip-it magnet in the shape of my brother’s fighter jet. I was terrified someone would accidentally throw them away. But my hand was numb, and so, so cold. I dropped it all.

I stared at the jet lying upside-down on the scraps of papers at my feet and listened to my father sob. Then Mara slipped her own cold hand into mine. Through her tears she whispered, “It’s just us now.”

NOW

Standing at the threshold of my parents’ dark bedroom, I grope for the light switch. In the glare from the ceiling lamp, I stumble toward the bed, my spine a lightning rod of shivers. Half under the sheet and comforter, where my mother and father should be, lie their clothes: my dad’s blue-striped pajamas, a white undershirt peeking above the top of the V-neck; my mom’s pale-pink nightgown, magenta roses embroidered on the wide shoulder straps.

Matching gold crosses dangle off their pillows, in place of their absent necks. I touch my own silver cross, my fingertips cold against my collarbone.“David?” Mara’s voice comes from the doorway, but I don’t turn.

My feet feel nailed to the floor, yet my head feels far away. “See if they left a note in one of our rooms.”

“Why? Where are they?”

“Just do it! Please.”

She runs down the hall, her steps heavy and unsteady. I turn my head—partly to take in the rest of the room, but mostly to stop looking at these two-dimensional remnants of my parents.

The dresser top is tidy as usual. My mother’s two-foot-high wooden jewelry cabinet sits on one end, my father’s modest box of tie clips and cuff links on the other. Dad’s nightstand, the one nearest me, holds a study Bible with a bookmark in the middle. The nightstand on Mom’s side has a family picture from last Christmas, along with the cheesy inspirational plaque I gave her for her birthday.

From where I’m standing, I can see into the master bathroom. The faucet is dripping, as it has been for months. The shower curtain is closed, quickening my heartbeat with that old childhood fear that someone—or some thing —lurks behind it.

“No note from them.” Mara’s voice startles me. “Just this, balled up on the floor next to your bed.”

She holds out a crinkled sheet of lined paper. I recognize it as the note I left on my pillow a few hours ago, telling my parents I was going out for a while but I was okay. Which I was. And that I would be home by two thirty. Which I wasn’t.

The note wasn’t crumpled when I left it. Dad probably wanted to do that to my head when he found me missing.

The image jolts me out of my paralysis. My parents are gone, and it might be my fault.

“What the hell?” Mara takes a step toward the bed, then quickly backs away, as if the clothes will come to life and strangle her with their sleeves. “Is this a trick, to punish us for going to the party?”

“Who would do something like that?”

“Crazy people. Like our parents.”

“Wait—shh.” I put my hand out like I’m going to cover her mouth—not that I would do that and risk losing a finger. “If it’s a trick, they could be hiding,” I whisper.

She creeps toward the walk-in closet as I head to confront my bogeyman in the master bathroom.

I jerk the shower curtain aside. The bottom of the bathtub is empty except for Mom’s big purple comb, whose handle forms a hook to go around the neck of the showerhead. I leave the comb where it’s fallen and start to draw the curtain back the way it was, in case this becomes a crime scene.

I stop myself. A crime scene? Could they really have been kidnapped, or, or, or—worse? As I stare at the dry maroon tiles in front of me, my mind wrestles with two ugly, competing truths. Which is more of a nightmare, that our parents are in danger, or that they abandoned us?

Mara and I reconvene in the bedroom. “They’re not in there, obviously,” she says, leaving the closet door open and the light on. “It doesn’t seem like a lot of clothes are missing, either.”