This Side of Salvation

CHAPTER 2

NINE YEARS TO FOUR YEARS BEFORE THE RUSH

My family wasn’t always this unraveled disaster. When I was a kid, we were like any other Philadelphia Main Line residents—rich, rational, respectable. Suburbanites who embraced the city. Registered Republicans who voted for Democrats. We even went to an Episcopal church, where it’s said you don’t have to check your brain at the door. We were part of the modern world, because it was good to us.

And once in this house, we were five.

The whole family is camped out watching the playoffs in Mom and Dad’s bedroom, because the TV in here is the new high-definition kind. Mara’s been sprawled asleep on top of her Barbie sleeping bag since the sixth inning, when the Yankees went ahead of Boston 4–3.

Mom crouches down between me and John on the floor, smelling like that creamy stuff she washes her face with at night. “Three more outs, sweetie, and you’re off to bed.” She squeezes my shoulder.

“Unless the Red Sox tie it.” I keep my eyes glued to the screen, where Kevin Millar is approaching the batter’s box. “Then there’ll be extra innings.” It’s exactly midnight, way past my eight o’clock bedtime, which my parents are strict about except on New Year’s Eve and final games of baseball playoff series.

“Three more outs and the Yankees win the pennant.” John sighs. “Again.”

I mimic my teenage brother’s shift in position, wrapping my arms around my knees and pulling them to my chest. “Red Sox could still win.”

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.”