The Might Have Been - By Joe Schuster Page 0,10

and left; as the door closed, the player who’d complained spat out, “God damn holy roller.” Edward Everett debated for less than a second, thought about the damnable offense it was not to go, and then got off the floor and fell into the bed Turner had left, plumped the pillow, thinking Mattress! and went back to sleep.

But in the hospital in, he realized, a foreign country, with his right leg in a cast from above the knee to the middle of his shin, he longed for the comfort of the ritual and surprised himself by beginning to weep. It was the injury, he knew, as well as the effect of the painkillers and the fact that, despite the drugs, he’d slept not at all. At the same time he realized that he nonetheless felt like a child and told himself to stop what his mother called a “pity party”: Break out the hats and favors, she’d exclaim when he sulked as a boy. Pity party; can I come, too?

Sunday was the longest day he could remember. Through the window, he could see that the poor weather of the previous two days had passed and the sky was a deep blue. When the nurse had come in with his breakfast at seven o’clock, she’d pulled up the blinds and cranked open the casement window, saying something in French he couldn’t understand but which he took to mean “fresh air.” The breeze that came in was warm and every once in a while a gust pushed into the room, the blinds clanking against the window frame. All he could do was lie there, listening to the sounds of the life outside: the cathedral bell, the traffic, muted singing during one of the Masses and then, when the service was over, the rise and fall of human conversation from the street, the occasional shriek of a child.

Around noon, a nurse came in with his lunch on a tray, a different nurse this time, a slip of a girl, sixteen or seventeen. Maybe she wasn’t even a nurse, but a Canadian version of a candy striper. Setting the tray on his bedside cart and removing the plastic cover, she gave him a shy smile. Thinking noise would mute the evidence of outside life, he asked for the TV remote, but she gave him a look that made him wonder if she spoke English, and so he gestured toward the TV, repeating, “The remote, the remote,” as if she were a pet who would learn commands through repetition. She flushed but gave him the remote, holding it toward him in a way that their hands would not meet even accidentally, and fled the room.

He turned on the television and clicked through the channels; there were only two that came in with any clarity, one that showed a program that appeared to be about gardening, a white-haired woman standing behind a rosebush, shears in her hand. It was in French, and he could understand none of it. The other program, also in French, had four well-dressed men in a studio, arguing animatedly.

He turned off the television and, after deciding he didn’t want to eat, pushed the bedside cart away and tried to sleep, but he couldn’t because of the sunlight and the noise pouring in through the open window. He wondered if anyone from the team would come to see him. It was twelve-thirty, half an hour before the game, and so they would all be at Jarry Park, in the clubhouse, changing from their batting practice jerseys into their powder blue road game jerseys, going through their before-the-game rituals, he knew, after living side by side with them for only three weeks, close enough that they were living in one another’s jocks, as the joke went: checking the rawhide knots in the fingers of their gloves, some of them shaving, some taping weak ankles.

At one point, a priest came to his door and tapped on the frame. He might have been eighty or more, skinny and slightly hunched, almost entirely bald, save for thin wisps of hair over his ears and on the back of his head. He carried a small ragged black zippered leather case and Edward Everett wondered if he was also a doctor.

“May I enter?” he said in accented English, wheezing slightly. When Edward Everett told him he could, the priest pulled the room’s one armchair up to the bedside, then consulted a piece of paper he unfolded after removing it