Chapter 4: After the Last Out
We waited near a side entrance the staff member had pointed us toward — a plain gray door beneath a concrete overhang, nothing that looked like it led anywhere special.
There were six other people waiting too: a father with a boy in a leg brace, a grandmother holding a handwritten letter, a woman around my age with a little girl asleep against her shoulder.
Andrea stood very still beside me, which was unusual for her.
She kept smoothing the front of her jacket.
"Stop," I signed.
"You look fine."
"I look like I've been crying," she signed back.
"You have been crying."
She gave me a look that was so purely eleven years old that I almost laughed.
The gray door opened.
A different staff member — older, with a clipboard — stepped out and called a name.
The father and the boy with the leg brace went in.
Andrea watched the door close behind them.
"What if he's different in person?" she signed.
"Different how?"
She thought about it.
"What if he only did it because people were watching?"
I didn't answer right away.
It was a fair question.
She was eleven, but she had already learned the difference between someone performing kindness and someone actually feeling it.
That was not a lesson I had taught her.
That was one she had arrived at on her own.
"Then we'll know," I signed.
"And it still won't change what he did out there."
She considered that.
Then she nodded, once, the way she did when she had decided to accept something.
The door opened again.
The clipboard staff member looked at us.
"Andrea?"
She straightened up.
Smoothed her jacket one more time.
The hallway inside was narrow and fluorescent-lit, nothing like the stadium above it.
It smelled like rubber and cleaning solution.
We followed the staff member past a row of equipment carts and a bulletin board covered in printed schedules.
Then a door at the end of the hall opened, and Marcus walked out.
He was still in his uniform.
He had a towel around his neck and his hair was damp.
He looked exactly like he did on the field, except closer, which made him look more like a person and less like a poster.
He saw Andrea and stopped.
Then he raised his hands.
"You waited," he signed.
"Thank you."
Andrea's chin went up.
She signed back, carefully: "Thank you for seeing me."
He smiled.
Not a public smile.
Something quieter.
"Your sign," he signed.
"Tell me about your grandfather."
And she did.
She told him about the kitchen table and the napkin diamonds.
She told him about the arguments over bad calls.
She told him about the two years since he passed and how the games still felt like the closest thing to having him back.
Her hands moved fast when she got to the parts she loved, and slower when she got to the parts that still hurt.
Marcus didn't look away once.
When she finished, he was quiet for a moment.
Then he signed: "My brother's name is Deon.
He's fourteen.
When I got called up to the majors, the first thing he signed to me was — " he paused, and something shifted in his expression — " 'Don't forget us down here.' "
Andrea stared at him.
"I never have," he signed.
"Not once."
She looked down at her hands.
Then back up at him.
Then she signed something I hadn't seen her sign in two years.
She signed Grandpa's name.
Just his name.
The sign she and Grandpa had made up together for him, the one that was only theirs.
Marcus didn't know what it meant.
But he understood that it meant something.
He nodded like he was receiving it.
Then he turned to the staff member with the clipboard and said something out loud that I didn't catch.
The staff member disappeared back through the door.
Marcus turned back to Andrea.
"I have something for you," he signed.
"But I need to ask you something first."
She nodded.
"The woman who tore your sign," he signed.
"What do you want to happen to her?"
Andrea blinked.
It was clearly not the question she had expected.
She thought about it for a long moment — long enough that Marcus waited without filling the silence.
Then she signed: "I want her to feel what it's like to be invisible."
May you like
The staff member came back through the door.
He was carrying a sign.
