Tom Perrotta - Nine Inches

On TV, it all looks so fast and clean — Lori gets beaned and she goes down. But on the field it was slow and jumbled, my brain lagging a beat behind the action. Before I can process the fact that the ball’s rocketing toward her head, Lori’s already said, “Ooof!” Her helmet’s in the air before I register the sickening crack of impact, and by then she’s already crumpled on the ground. On TV it looks as though I move quickly, rolling her onto her back and coming in close to check her breathing, but in my memory it’s as if I’m paralyzed, as if the world has stopped and all I can do is stare at the bareheaded girl lying motionless at my feet.

Then the quiet bursts into commotion. Tim’s right beside me, shouting, “Is she okay? Is she okay?” Ricky’s moving toward us from the mound, his glove pressed to his mouth, his eyes stricken with terror and remorse.

“Did I hurt her?” he asks. “I didn’t mean to hurt her.”

“I think you killed her,” I tell him, because as far as I can tell, Lori’s not breathing. Ricky stumbles backward, as if someone’s pushed him. He turns in the direction of his father, who’s just stepped out of the dugout.

“You shouldn’t have made me do that!” Ricky yells.

“Oh my God,” says Carl. He looks pale and panicky.

At that same moment, Happy Chang’s scaling the third-base fence and sprinting across the infield to check on his daughter’s condition. At least that’s what I think he’s doing, right up to the moment when he veers suddenly toward Carl, emitting a cry of guttural rage, and tackles him savagely to the ground.

Happy Chang is a small man, no bigger than some of our Little Leaguers, and Carl is tall and bulked up from years of religious weight lifting, but it’s no contest. Within seconds, Happy Chang’s straddling Carl’s chest and punching him repeatedly in the face, all the while shouting what must be very angry things in Chinese. Carl doesn’t even try to defend himself, not even when Happy Chang reaches for his throat.

Luckily for Carl, two of our local policemen — Officers Freylinghausen and Hughes, oddly enough the same two who’d arrested me for domestic battery — are present at the game, and before Happy Chang can finish throttling Carl, they’ve rushed onto the field and broken up the fight. They take Happy Chang into custody with a surprising amount of force — with me they were oddly polite — Freylinghausen grinding his face into the dirt while Hughes slaps on the cuffs. I’m so engrossed in the spectacle that I don’t even realize that Lori’s regained consciousness until I hear her voice.

“Daddy?” she says quietly, and for a second I think she’s talking to me.

MY WHOLE life fell apart after I broke my son’s nose. By the time I got out on bail the next morning, Jeanie had already taken the kids to her mother’s house and slapped me with a restraining order. The day after that she started divorce proceedings.

In the year that had passed since then, nothing much had changed. I had tried apologizing in a thousand different ways, but it didn’t seem to matter. As far as Jeanie was concerned, I’d crossed some unforgivable line and was beyond redemption.

I accepted the loss of my wife as fair punishment for what I’d done, but it was harder to accept the loss of my kids. I had some visiting rights, but they were severely restricted. Basically, I took my daughters — they were eleven and thirteen — to the movies or the mall every other Saturday, then to a restaurant, and then back to their grandmother’s. They weren’t allowed to stay overnight with me. It killed me to walk past their empty rooms at night, to not find them asleep and safe, and to be fairly sure I never would.

Once in a while Jason joined us on our Saturday excursions, but usually he was too busy with his plays. He had just finished his junior year in high school, capping it off with a starring role in the spring musical, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. People kept telling me how great he was, and I kept agreeing, embarrassed to confess that I hadn’t seen the show. My son had asked me not to come and I’d respected his wishes.

A year on my own had given me a lot of time to think, to come to terms with what had happened, and to accept my own responsibility for it. It also gave me a lot of time to stew in my anger, to indulge the conviction that I was a victim, too, every bit as much as my wife and son. I wrote Jeanie and my kids a lot of letters trying to outline my complicated position on these matters, but no one ever responded. It was like my side of the story had disappeared into some kind of void.

That’s why I wanted so badly for my family to watch the championship game on cable access. I had e-mailed them all separately, telling them when it would be broadcast, and asking them to please tune in. I called them the day it aired and left a message reminding them to stick it out all the way to the end.

What I wanted them to see was the top of the sixth and final inning, the amazing sequence of events that took place immediately following the beanball fiasco, after both Carl and Ricky DiSalvo had been ejected from the game, and Happy Chang had been hauled off to the police station.

Despite the fact that she’d been knocked unconscious just a few minutes earlier, Lori was back on the mound for the Ravens. She insisted that she felt fine and didn’t seem confused or otherwise impaired. She started out strong, striking out Jeb Partridge and retiring Hiro Tamanaki on an easy infield fly. But then something changed. Maybe the blow to the head had affected her more that she’d let on, or maybe she’d been traumatized by her father’s arrest. Whatever the reason, she fell apart. With only one out remaining in the game, she walked three straight batters to load the bases.

I’d always admired Lori’s regal detachment, her ability to remain calm and focused no matter what was going on, but now she just looked scared. She cast a desperate glance at the first-base dugout, silently pleading with her coach to take her out of the game, but Santelli ignored her. No matter how badly she was pitching, she was still his ace. And besides, the next batter was Mark Diedrich, the Wildcats’ pudgy right fielder, one of the weakest hitters in the league.

“Just settle down,” Santelli told her. “Strike this guy out and we can all go home.”

Lori nodded skeptically and got herself set on the mound. Mark Diedrich greeted me with a polite nod as he stepped into the batter’s box. He was a nice kid, a former preschool classmate of my youngest daughter.

“I wish I was home in bed,” he told me.

The first pitch was low. Then came a strike, the liveliest breaking ball Lori had thrown all inning, but it was followed by two outside fastballs (Ricky’s beanball had obviously done the trick; Lori wasn’t throwing anywhere near the inside corner). The next pitch, low and away, should have been ball four, but inexplicably, Mark lunged for it, barely nicking it foul.

“Oh, Jesus,” he whimpered. “Why did I do that?”

So there we were. Full count, bases loaded, two out. Championship game. A score of 1–0. The whole season narrowing down to a single pitch. If the circumstances had been a little different, it would have been a beautiful moment, an umpire’s dream.

But for me, the game barely existed. All I could think of just then was the smile on Happy Chang’s dirty face as the cops led him off the field. I was kneeling on the ground trying to comfort Lori when Happy turned in our direction and said something low and gentle in Chinese, maybe asking if she was all right or telling her not to worry. Lori said something back, maybe that she was fine or that she loved him.

“Easy now,” Santelli called from the dugout. “Right down the middle.”