It’s the day of the baseball game and his mother is calling to him from the kitchen, where she’s spreading the last of the mayonnaise on two slices of crustless wheat bread while Sam’s father waits in the car with the engine running.
“Do you have your bat?” Margaret asks, wiping her hands on a dish towel and coming out into the hall to straighten Sam’s cap.
Sam holds up the Easton Black Magic, the best baseball bat on the market, the bat he employed to hit six homers in one game against the Hawthorne Pirates, setting a new record in the under-fifteen division. It’s two weeks before his fourteenth birthday, a day he expects will be the all-time greatest day of his life. September 6, 1995. Tickets to see Cal Ripken Jr. at Camden Yards, the day the Iron Man takes the field for his 2,131st consecutive game, breaking Lou Gehrig’s record. Margaret is beaming. “Now don’t come home until you get that thing signed by the man himself,” she says. “Want to go through the plan again?”
“Yes,” Sam tells her. “The line forms at the exit near section twelve. Dad and I are going to leave our seats at the top of the ninth inning to get in line.” Sam shows her the map of Camden Yards she helped him draw, a thick red Sharpie line indicating the fastest route from their seats in section 72, in left field, to the door at the opposite side of the stadium, where Ripken was rumored to appear immediately after each game, spending exactly ten minutes signing autographs. “They allow one hundred people in. I’ll be number one.”
“Sam, come on!” Ted yells from the driveway.
“Go on, your dad’s waiting for you.” Margaret’s eyes sparkle as she gives Sam a long hug, telling him to find a pay phone to call her from when they get to Baltimore, and then she hands him the brown paper bag with two ham sandwiches inside. “I put an extra Oreo in there for you,” she says.
“I don’t want to go,” he says.
She cocks her head, confused. “What do you mean, you don’t want to go? You’ve been waiting for this day your whole life.”
“I know, but this is where he’s going to meet the Talbots model, and then he’s going to leave us. Please, don’t make me go. Please!”
He opens his eyes.
It’s warm and pitch-black, except for a thin strip of light coming from under a door across the room. It smells heavily antiseptic, and his back and head are throbbing.
He’s in a hospital. St. Luke’s. The hospital where he was born; where a doctor once splinted a broken pinkie finger quick enough to get him back to the field by the sixth inning; where he sat with his mother in a private office on the fifth floor, listening to Dr. Walter Alderman diagnose her with dementia.
“Pre-senile dementia, middle stage, to be more specific,” Dr. Alderman is saying as Sam surrenders to the darkness again. “It generally hits people very young.”
“Okay, so we got a name for it,” Margaret says, straight-backed in her chair, a frozen smile on her face, as if Dr. Alderman has announced she won the blueberry pie contest at the fair again, six years running. “What does it mean?”
“It means you should expect to see more of the behaviors that prompted you to call me,” he says. “Confusion. Disinhibition. The binge eating and progressive decline in socially appropriate behaviors.” He pauses to look at Sam, the son who rented a car to be there for the appointment and is now sitting stone-faced and silent. “I think we should start planning on you getting some full-time care, Margaret.”
Sam takes his mom’s hand in the elevator, something he hasn’t done since he was little. “Oh, don’t worry,” she says, patting his arm and fighting back tears. “I’m sure he’s exaggerating. I’m not that bad.”
In the parking lot they walk silently under a cloudless sky toward her blue Corolla, where she stops, unable to remember how to open the car door. She goes to her room when they get home, and he changes into his running clothes. He’s out the door, up Leydecker Road to Albemarle, the most punishing route up the mountain. At the top, he screams out the rage, praying to anyone who will listen that he please not lose her too.
He wants to keep screaming, so loudly that Annie will open the door to this hospital room. He can feel her close by. Downstairs, near the Starbucks coffee kiosk, on her fifth cup of coffee, waiting for him to gain consciousness so she can take him home. But when the door opens, it’s not Annie, it’s the doctor again, checking the wound on his forehead and slipping more pills into his mouth, plunging him back toward a sleep devoid entirely of dreams.