man dying from cancer. As Edward Everett and Webber sat waiting for someone to call his name, Webber rocked in his chair, cradling his right arm, saying over and over, “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.”
When a nurse came to take Webber back to an examining room, Edward Everett followed them, lying, saying he was Webber’s father. Where she left them was not a room, exactly—merely a bed, a chair and a small table, separated from the other rooms by a drape. On the other side of it, the dying man moaned incoherently. Edward Everett could hear soft voices: a nurse explaining that she had given him something to ease the pain, the staff was doing its best to get him into a room upstairs. Edward Everett sat beside Webber and when he began weeping, Edward Everett laid his hand on his hurt shoulder. Webber reached up abruptly and grabbed his hand; at first he thought it was a response to pain but Webber was squeezing tightly, as if he was afraid Edward Everett would leave him there, alone.
By the time the doctor came to examine Webber, the dying man had been moved elsewhere and his place was taken by a small child who had pushed a piece of candy up his nose. “Don’t be mad, Mommy,” the child said. The doctor who came to see Webber was a willowy Indian woman who may have been less than thirty but was, despite her age, crisply efficient. “It would be better if you left us,” she said, already peeling back the sleeve of Webber’s hospital gown and touching his shoulder tenderly.
When Webber winced even at her delicate touch, Edward Everett started to protest but Webber snapped, “Fuck, go, go, go.”
He wandered down the hall to another waiting room farther from the admissions desk. It was quieter, only one other person there, a woman knitting. A television mounted to the ceiling played a ball game with the volume muted, the Cubs and the Cardinals, the top of the fifteenth, a one–one tie, and he sat down to watch. The Cubs’ half inning ended and the camera showed a long shot of the view from behind home plate in the new St. Louis ballpark, the one where he had played knocked down years ago by a wrecking ball. Beyond the center field wall, the city skyline rose and, at the center, the Saarinen Arch glinted. The camera panned the crowd: tens of thousands of people in red and blue, animated, raising index fingers, waving. It was all so prosperous, Major League Baseball was. He realized where he sat was roughly halfway between the two cities, but it might as well have been on another continent.
When the doctor came out to tell him that Webber was asking for him, she told him that Webber’s shoulder was broken. “A proximal humerus fracture,” she called it. Her accent made it sound like something beautiful.
“What does that mean?” he asked.
“With surgery …” She shrugged.
“He’s a ballplayer,” he said. “A good one.” One to whom someone once gave a two-million-dollar signing bonus, he thought, and who should, if he stopped letting his immaturity get in the way of his talent, make more than fifty times as much in his career.
“He can live a normal life,” she said. “But baseball …” She shook her head.
“He can’t …” He didn’t finish the sentence. Be through, he was going to say. He didn’t like Webber. He took his talent for granted, was a jerk to his teammates, shrugged whenever Edward Everett gave him advice, as if to say, You have no idea what it’s like to be able to play the game as I can. Edward Everett felt suddenly angry—at Webber, at Nelson, at the doctor. She was from a country where they didn’t play baseball. There, it was cricket: what could she know about baseball? She flinched and he realized that she could see the anger crossing his face.
“He’s so young,” he said. “He could heal, couldn’t he?” A page came over the intercom for Dr. Abadeen.
“I’m sorry,” she said, pointing in the direction of the speaker in the ceiling, and she turned, hurrying down the corridor.
On the television, one of the Cardinals players was digging around third, sweeping wide, dashing down the line toward home plate, colliding with the catcher, who took a throw from the cutoff man, the ball jarring free, bounding away, the Cardinals pouring out of the dugout to greet the runner who brought home the win.