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  “And then do what?” she said. “She’s anesthetized. Your wife won’t know you’re there.”

  Ryan was torn, and for a moment he couldn’t move.

  “Come see your little girl,” she said. “She’s getting the best of care, but I’m sure she’s scared. I can take you to her.”

  The nurse was pushing all the right buttons, and Ryan decided to trust her. It was a maze of hallways to the pediatric ER, which gave Ryan a chance to call his father-in-law. Chelsea’s parents were still five minutes away. Ryan didn’t ask, but he presumed that difficulties with Babes—either in bringing him to the hospital or in trying to leave him behind—were slowing them down.

  The sound of his baseball cleats on the tile floor pushed the moment into the surreal. An hour earlier he’d had nothing on his mind but PawSox and Mud Hens in the big game. Two hours from now he and Ivan might well have received a personal “welcome to the Red Sox” from the team’s principal owner. Sandwiched between those bookends were some very painful chapters, a few still being written: the way he’d doubted Chelsea’s promise to come, his anger at her for being late, and the crash he still knew nothing about, except that it had left his twenty-six-year-old wife fighting for her life on an operating table.

  “Dada!”

  Even though Ainsley had only a few dozen words in her still-growing vocabulary, that particular one always lifted Ryan’s spirits. She was standing at the bed rail as Ryan entered the room, her arms reaching for him from beneath a green hospital gown. He went to her and gathered her up, a little bundle in his arms.

  She looked perfectly fine, and the pediatrician walked in and confirmed as much. The plan was to keep her in the hospital overnight just to make sure the crash hadn’t given her a concussion. It looked as though Ryan would be there at least that long for Chelsea anyway. The pediatrician excused herself and moved on to the next patient, making way for a nurse who came in to put fresh paper on the examination table. Ryan was seated in the rocking chair in the corner and holding Ainsley in his arms when a doctor wearing surgical scrubs appeared in the doorway.

  “Mr. James?” he said.

  Ryan looked up. “Yes?”

  “I’m Dr. Weinstein. I’m the hospital’s chief surgeon.”

  The chief surgeon. Ryan wasn’t sure if that was a good sign or a bad one. “Do you have any…is Chelsea going to be okay?”

  He glanced at the nurse, then back at Ryan. “Could we talk alone?”

  It was suddenly hard to breathe.

  The nurse lifted Ainsley from Ryan’s arms, and he reluctantly let her go. Ainsley screamed as she was carried from the room, and the nurse made such a point of closing the door on the way out that Ryan wanted to shout right along with his little girl—No, no, no!

  The news was all over the surgeon’s face.

  “I’m sorry,” the doctor said. “There was nothing we could do. She passed away on the operating table. I’m really very, very sorry.”

  Ryan was listening, but it was as if his mind could process only a few words—nothing…do…passed…sorry—until a tsunami of emotional devastation washed over him, and he launched himself from the chair. His scream could only be described as primal, and in a blind fury he kicked the chair across the room. The doctor grabbed him. Ryan nearly collapsed in his arms; the tears came immediately.

  “It’s all right,” said Dr. Weinstein. “It’s good to let it go. But you’re going to have to pull yourself together here. Not just for yourself.”

  Ryan glanced through the little diamond-shaped window in the door. Ainsley was pummeling the nurse outside the room, trying to break free and get back to Dada. He stepped away from Dr. Weinstein and collected himself.

  “When can I see Chelsea?”

  “I recommend you give that a few minutes. When you’re ready.”

  Ryan nodded. The door opened and Ainsley ran into the room, the nurse finally having lost control of her. The kid had her father’s strength and athleticism.

  Ryan did a quick change of face and scooped her up. “There’s my big girl!”

  She laid her head on his shoulder, threw her arms around his neck, and in a gesture that she had learned from Chelsea, gently patted Ryan on the back.

  The doctor and nurse left the room.

  “I wan’ Mama,” said Ainsley, her face buried in his big shoulder.

  Ryan struggled to hold it together. He knew he would somehow have to find a way to live without Chelsea. But as he stood there alone in the quiet hospital room, clutching his daughter, trying not to let her see the tears streaming down his face, he wasn’t at all sure he could.

  “Me, too,” he whispered.

  THREE YEARS LATER:

  BOSTON

  4

  THIS IS JOCKS IN THE MORNING; AND YOU’RE ON THE AIR. WHAT’S UP, knucklehead?”

  It was 6:00 A.M., and Ryan James was kicking off another day in his new life as cohost of Boston’s hottest talk-radio sports show. Originally it had been just Jock in the Morning, but when the legendary Jock Grogan hit fifty, the station had brought in young blood—Ryan—to reach the key under-forty demographic. The show was nonstop jokes and jabbering, which only masked the fact that Ryan’s life had spiraled downward.

  The PawSox had overlooked the dip in Ryan’s performance the year after Chelsea’s death, but by the second season his lack of focus proved to be too much. Ryan was cut from the team and gave up on baseball. At his lowest, he was even fired from his job as assistant manager of a sporting-goods store. Life was hard enough without Chelsea. It was almost impossible without sleep—something Ryan got very little of since the accident.

  “Yeah, dis is Tony from Wattahtown,” said the caller.

  “Go ahead, Tony in Watertown.”

  “Hey, chief, I know Ivan Lopez is your good buddy, but in these last two games, does he look like the most overpaid pitcher in the major leagues or what?”

  Ivan was the newest star pitcher for the Boston Red Sox, having just signed a seven-figure contract, and he was far more than Ryan’s “buddy.” Ryan had been best man at Ivan’s wedding the year before, and to Ainsley he was Uncle Ivan.

  “Okay, Tony from Wattahtown. First off, you’re an idiot. Second, it’s not Eye-van, like Eye-talian. It’s Ivan, like—”

  “Like Trump’s ex-wife?”

  “That’s Ivana. You got too many A’s. Just like this phone call. One too many dumb-A’s.” Ryan hung up and pitched the next call to his cohost.

  Being surly and putting morons in their place was good for ratings. While Jock Grogan was particularly good at it, Ryan was raised to be polite, so insults didn’t come naturally. He had to work at getting in touch with his inner Yankee, as his Texas grandma would have put it. This morning, however, it was hard for him to work at anything, and not just because he was functioning on only one hour of sleep.

  Today, the sixth day of September, was the anniversary.

  Three years after Chelsea’s death, Ryan’s love endured. He knew she would have wanted him to move on and date, but he had declined almost everyone’s well-meaning attempts to set him up with single women. The few dates he’d agreed to weren’t total disasters, but he just didn’t feel any motivation to call any of them for a second date.

  The insomnia didn’t help.

  For the first few months after the accident, Ryan had resisted prescription sleep medications. An athlete on pills seemed wrong to him. Drugs of any sort just weren’t part of the James family culture, and Ryan didn’t believe anyone who said that sleep aids weren’t addictive. The difference between real sleep and drug-induced sleep would reveal itself anyway, Ryan figured, like the difference between making love and having sex. His daddy—a man who plowed a Texas field by day and slept like a log at night—told him to suck it up, to work through it. But the demons kept him awake, and he was showing up at the practice field exhausted every morning. When he started nodding off during team meetings, he took his doctor’s advice and tried the meds. But they soon gave him everyth
ing from diarrhea to blurred vision, and the dosage he required left him in a haze all day long. His hitting slump worsened. Rightly or wrongly, Ryan blamed the medication and quit taking it. He tried relaxation therapy instead, which helped for a while, until the nightmares took over again.

  Not long after Chelsea’s death, Ryan had watched a television news story about corpses literally piling up at the Boston area morgue. Shelves in the cadaver cooler, designed for only one body, held two or three stacked on top of one another. Others were kept in disaster-response vehicles parked outside the building. The morgue plumbing had also backed up, and the medical examiner admitted that effluent from autopsies was clogging the pipes. That was in Boston, not Pawtucket, but the mind runs wild when disturbing news breaks anywhere, and the thought of his beautiful Chelsea lying naked on a shelf and stacked beneath unidentified vagrants, of Chelsea being part of the “effluent” that was backing up in the pipes, kept Ryan awake for two days. When he did finally find sleep, the nightmare came—Chelsea surrounded by cadavers. And it kept on coming, night after night, before and after the meds, always ending with his waking up in terror.

  What made Chelsea’s death so difficult for Ryan to accept was that so many things had needed to go wrong in order for her to die. She would have been at her evening criminal law class in Boston if Ryan hadn’t forced her to drive home for his game. The collision with the tree would not have been fatal but for the low-hanging limb in exactly the wrong spot. She could have dialed 911 in her final conscious moments and probably saved her own life—but she didn’t have her cell phone with her. In fact, the phone was never found. Chelsea never went anywhere without her cell, so it was one of those flukes that cut Ryan to the core: had she not lost her cell that day of all days, Ryan would not have lost his wife.

  But the real kicker in Ryan’s emotional slide, of course, was the driver who had run Chelsea off the road—and who had never been caught by the police.

  “Ryan, what do you think?” Jock Grogan asked his cohost.

  Ryan had zoned out. Sleepless nights made for foggy days. He could tell from Jock’s tone, however, that it was time to sling an insult. Insomnia was an asset in that department. Ryan once read about a clinical study involving sleep-deprived rats. On the sixth day they all died. Ryan guessed that on the fifth they’d all become talk-radio hosts.

  “Let’s ask Tony from Wattahtown,” said Ryan in Bostonese. “He’s wicked smart.”

  Jock laughed way too loudly and kept the on-air banter going with his next call-in victim. Ryan took another swig of coffee. The doctor had told him to avoid caffeine, but after a night of little or no sleep, the only way to stay alert for a four-hour show was on the jet fuel in the station’s lounge.

  Jock said, “What do you know, sports fans? It’s Tony from Watertown, calling on his cell.”

  Ryan knew the producer had her hand on the Bleep button. Angry callbacks definitely jazzed things up, but they were always dicey.

  “Hey, I heard what you said, James. Now lemme tell you something. You are nothin’ but a washed-up wannabe who couldn’t even cut it in the minor leagues. You are a bleep-bleep-bleep loser who’s been whining all week about his dead wife. Get over it. Accidents happen. You hear me? Accidents hap—”

  “Okay,” said Jock, cutting off the call. “What do you say we take a question from one of our text-message addicts? What’s in the hopper this morning, partner?”

  Ryan was numb. Throughout the week, he’d made brief references to the third anniversary of Chelsea’s passing, mostly out of frustration that the police had never found the hit-and-run driver that had forced her off the road. Most listeners were sympathetic and supportive, but there had been some grumbling from purists who wanted sports radio to be only about sports. Maybe Tony was speaking for all of them.

  Accidents happen.

  “You with us today, buddy?” said Jock.

  Ryan checked the text-message display. The twenty-something demographic had just about overloaded the electronic inbox.

  “Yeah,” Ryan said, pulling up the first message. “Here as much as I ever am.”

  At 3:30 P.M. Ryan picked up Ainsley at school. He usually looked forward to their time together, but today’s mix of emotions was complicating matters.

  When Chelsea died, Ryan knew he couldn’t stay in Pawtucket. After leaving the PawSox, he’d considered moving back to Texas, but he couldn’t put a thousand miles between Ainsley and Chelsea’s parents. So he settled on Boston, where Ainsley would attend Brookline Academy, the school Chelsea had always wanted for their daughter.

  The South End was their neighborhood, a diverse and lively community adjacent to the utterly unaffordable Back Bay area. Ryan loved their old bowfront Victorian row house—there were more of them in the South End than anywhere else in the country—and the variety of good restaurants on Tremont Street was unbeatable. Ryan liked Boston more than he ever thought a boy from Alpine, Texas, possibly could, and his grandmother would have taken solace in the fact that he’d at least chosen a northern city that hated the Yankees with a passion.

  The verdict was still out, however, on Brookline Academy. No doubt, the education was first rate. The social component was what worried Ryan—was the school even remotely the real world? The academy was the kind of place where the nannies drove better cars than Ryan did. Families put themselves on a waiting list to pay an extra fifteen grand per year for a reserved parking space. There was a technical degree of ethnic diversity, though the lower school had lost 20 percent of its African American students when the Boston Celtics traded two star players to the Chicago Bulls in the off-season. Morning drop-off was a daily showcase of the rich and famous—the parent who was also a professional athlete, a local television anchor, a best-selling author, a college president, and on and on.

  Today of all days, Ryan had to run into Conradt Garrisen.

  “Ryan James, how’re you doing, my friend?”

  Garrisen was one of those old friends who came with emotional baggage. Losing Chelsea and then losing his shot at baseball had been devastating for Ryan. He’d let down himself, his daughter, his parents, his best friend, his teammates, and thousands of baseball fans who were pulling for him. Worst of all, he’d let down Chelsea’s parents, who never said the words, but who, Ryan knew, wanted to see him make it in the majors “for Chelsea.” The organization had given him every chance to salvage his career, and probably no one believed in him more than the owner of the PawSox, Connie Garrisen.

  Dr. Garrisen was also one of the most prominent physicians in Boston, where he was chief of staff at Massachusetts General Hospital. His specialty was plastic surgery for skin cancers, which afforded him a nice living, but the commercial development of his own line of skin care and antiaging products was what made it possible for him to own the PawSox. The word on the financial street was that he and his partners were on the verge of selling their company to a major cosmetics manufacturer for nine figures.

  For Ryan, letting down a man like Garrisen had been no small matter, as their relationship ran deeper than baseball. Not only was Garrisen married to the assistant attorney general who was overseeing Chelsea’s vehicular homicide case, but it was Garrisen, in his role as chairman of the Board of Trustees of Brookline Academy, who had gotten Chelsea her teaching job. When she died, he established a scholarship with his own money to make it possible for Ainsley to attend school there.

  “How’s that beautiful Ainsley doing?” asked Garrisen. Kindergarten was always safe ground, a way to avoid talking about topics that were no longer happy. Like everyone else, Garrisen had long ago stopped asking Ryan if he was ever going back to baseball.

  “She’s great,” said Ryan. “Really great.”

  “Good to hear,” Garrisen said.

  The polite thing would have been for Ryan to ask him about Mrs. Garrisen, but since her office’s investigation into Chelsea’s accident had gone absolutely nowhere in three years, it seemed awkward to bring her into the conversation on
the anniversary of Chelsea’s death. Ryan didn’t go there, which created an uncomfortable moment of silence.

  “Well, it was good to see you again,” said Ryan.

  “Likewise,” Garrisen said as he patted Ryan on the shoulder. “And don’t be a stranger. Call me sometime; let me know how you’re doing.”

  It was one of those things that old friends always said to Ryan, partly out of concern, but mainly because they didn’t know what else to say.

  “I will,” said Ryan, knowing that he never would.

  As Garrisen headed toward the school’s administrative offices, Ryan continued across campus to the playground, where Ainsley was in aftercare. For most of the academic year, pickup would be in the gymnasium or library, but this was one of those beautiful September days in New England that could almost make a southerner forget about the coming winter, when kids got to play beneath a cloudless blue sky until a parent or nanny came to get them. Ryan was down on one knee, gathering Anisley’s lunch box and backpack from the bottom cubby, when Ainsley sneaked up from behind and jumped on his back.

  “Guess who!” she said, covering his eyes with her little hands.

  “Uh, Beyoncé Knowles.”

  “No!”

  “SpongeBob SquarePants.”

  “Daddy!”

  He pulled her up and over his shoulders and turned her upside down until she giggled, her pigtails reaching for the ground.

  “Oh, it’s you,” he said.

  They said good-bye to the TA and held hands while walking to the parking lot. The school uniform for kindergarten girls was a plaid skirt, navy-blue knee socks, and a blue oxford-cloth shirt, but usually Ainsley was in complete violation of the dress code at day’s end, her shirttails hanging out, her socks down to her ankles, and her loafers scuffed from running and tussling with the boys on the playground. Ainsley loved school, and like her daddy, recess was her favorite subject, but Ryan always had to drag the details out of her.