conjure her face, what color her hair was. He saw his hand on her hip, remembered that her dress had been some slick and shiny material: silk? He remembered her stockinged feet, high heels in her hand, an orchid behind her ear, her slapping her fiancé. Nothing beyond that. She was upset and he comforted her; it was a response out of kindness, wasn’t it? It was a blip in his life; she had vanished into the vast country of the past.
He collected the photos, returned them to the envelope and then lost them again; the next night, home before midnight following a seven–three win, a complete game by Sandford, he wondered if he had perhaps missed something in them that might give him a clue about where they had been taken. But he couldn’t find them.
Searching for them, however, led him to wonder if he had done enough to try to find Julie and the boy. He remembered the phone number he had punched into his cellphone on the day Webber broke his shoulder and scrolled through the call log looking for it. On the third ring, a woman answered and he gripped the phone more tightly.
“Is this the home of Colin Aylesworth?” he said. “I’m looking for—”
“I’m sorry,” the woman said. “He’s deceased.”
His son was dead. He sucked in his breath, his forehead suddenly clammy.
“I know this is awkward,” Edward Everett said. “But what was … how old was he?”
“He was eighty-three,” the woman said. “I was his …” She was going to say daughter, he knew, and it would turn out to be Julie, after all these years. Ed? she would say, her voice full of forgiveness. But the woman went on. “… wife. Are you a former patient of his?”
“Yes,” Edward Everett lied.
“It’s been touching how many have called to say what a wonderful doctor he was,” she said. “He was always so good with the children who came to see him.”
“Are you at all related to a Julie Aylesworth?” he asked.
“He had a sister, Julie, but she passed a long while ago, when they were just children themselves,” the woman said.
“No other?” he asked.
“I’m sorry?” she said. “I don’t know what his sister has to do—”
“I meant, I’m sorry for your loss. Your husband was a wonderful doctor.”
“Did your scars heal?” she asked.
“Scars?”
“Most of the children—the burns—but he worked so hard to make sure that their faces, at least … so they could lead normal lives. Did yours heal well?”
“Yes,” he said. “Your husband did good work. He saved my life.”
He went through boxes in his basement, hauled mildewed books and clothing to the curb and took to the Goodwill what the water in his basement hadn’t ruined, wondering: When did I acquire this and why did I hold on to it?—golf clubs, tennis rackets, copies of Street & Smith’s Baseball Yearbook from the 1960s to the 1980s. He was in one of them, he realized, and found the issue for the 1977 season that contained the statistics for anyone who had appeared in a major league game the year before. The pages were gray and brittle, flecks of paper drifting to his living room rug, settling onto the folds in his shirt, the tips of his shoes. He found himself in the back, at the final entry of an appendix, “Players with fewer than ten official at-bats,” his last name and first initial, a single game and a string of zeros, save for the columns for batting average and slugging percentage, which read simply “—,” the equation a mathematical impossibility, zero-indivisible-by-zero. Still, that single impotent line was evidence he had been there.
He pulled out the issue and boxed the others and took them to the Goodwill, along with two boxes of his father’s clothing his mother had sent him twenty-five years earlier, when she finally got around to clearing out his father’s possessions. “You might be able to wear some of these,” she had written in a brief note, scrawled on a sheet of green paper she’d torn from a stenographer’s notebook. When they arrived, he was living in Sioux City, his second season coaching, and he had come home after midnight to find the boxes in the hall of his apartment building, blocking his door. He’d opened them, the inside of the box musty, and stared at the wrinkled, hastily folded shirts and slacks. He had no idea what his mother might have been thinking: what would he want with the clothes of