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After everything is done, all the speeches have been made, all the songs have been sung, all the addresses have been exchanged, all that’s left is Lupe, alone in her bed, staring at the ceiling and feeling for all the world like she’s the only one left awake to mourn the thing that’s taking its last rattling, dying breaths right in front of them.
She isn’t, of course, and she should’ve known that, even before she hears the rhythmic creaking coming from the hallway. There’s a floorboard out there that creaks when anyone walks across it, and when Jess wants to go out at night, she comes by and presses her weight against it once, twice, three times, which is Lupe’s signal to get dressed and sneak outside to meet her behind the garage just as soon as she can.
Lupe stills her breath, checking to see if Esti is asleep. The girl is rolled toward the wall, breathing steadily, and so Lupe begins to sit up in bed, imagines she’s in the clear. Instead, she hears from the next bed over,
“I know what that means, you know.”
Lupe startled, looks over to her.
“What?” she asks, going for innocent. It’s something she’s never been able to pull off.
“I’m not stupid. I know that when Jess makes that noise, it means the two of you are going to sneak out.”
Lupe doesn’t know what to say to that, and so she says nothing. Esti, though, is more than capable of carrying on a conversation even one-sided, and so she does.
“I didn’t tell anyone, you know. Not one person, all summer.” She rolls over then, her eyes meeting Lupe’s in the dark. She’ll miss her, Lupe thinks. She wishes she’d spent more time with Esti when she had the chance.
“Thank you,” Lupe says. She tries to sound honest, sincere. She tries to put more into it than she can say.
“You should go out,” Esti says. “Have a nice time.”
“Couldn’t sleep,” Jess admits, half sheepishly, when Lupe finds her behind the garage. She’s still a little tipsy from the end-of-season celebrations, Lupe can tell, and she’s a little wound up, too.
“Want to go for a walk?” Lupe offers, which she’s found is usually the best way to make Jess feel better, when she needs it.
“Yeah,” Jess agrees, like she was thinking it already. Lupe guessed correctly. “I want to go to the field.”
They set off, through the empty streets of Rockford, chilled by the first lazy tendrils of fall. The pavement is a little damp, and the streetlights bounce off of it in interesting ways. Lupe’s reminded of so many nights before, walking places with Jess and then walking back afterwards, and her heart clenches in longing for more, more, more.
They make it about halfway to the stadium in mostly-silence before Jess starts in on what’s become her favorite game, as of late.
“We could head up to Alaska. Pan for gold. Live off the land. Build a cabin in the woods.”
Jess has been talking like that sometimes for a while, worse and worse as the end of the season nears. Imagining things they could do, if they were going to stick together after the season. She doesn’t mean it, she’s just fooling around. Lupe knows that. She’s in on the joke.
“Sure,” Lupe agrees, to prove she knows what Jess is doing. That she’s not stupid enough to take it seriously. “You’d look real sharp with a big gold tooth, right in front, there.”
Jess preens at that. Lupe says, because she’s the type of person to worry about these things even if Jess doesn’t have to, even if they’re not really planning on doing any of it,
“Probably the wrong time of year to be standing in a river in Alaska, though.”
Jess hums thoughtfully.
“Probably. It’s almost lettuce harvest, though. You ever been to California?”
Lupe shakes her head, she has not.
“No. Have you?”
“Sure. When I was seventeen. Picked strawberries all summer.”
“How was it?” Lupe asks.
“Awful,” Jess says, and laughs. Lupe laughs, too. She didn’t have a very good summer when she was seventeen, either. Jess bumps against her shoulder and says, “Maybe lettuce is better, though.”
“Yeah, maybe,” Lupe agrees. She can almost picture it, then, her and Jess in California, picking lettuce all day long. Jess would burn in the sun, probably, worse even than she does on the baseball field, and they would rent a place together, a little one-room shack, maybe, with a kerosene lamp Jess would refill dutifully every morning. The fact that Lupe can picture it so clearly means that it’s an extra good joke, so she laughs, obligingly.
Jess doesn’t laugh back, just stares at Lupe in that intense, warm Jess-way she has that Lupe can always feel in her toes, so she tries to think of something clever to say.
“Or we could, uh. We could go peddle makeup in New York.”
“I’m in if you’re in,” Jess says, as sincerely as she’s ever said anything, as anyone has ever said anything, and so Lupe has to look away.
They’re near the stadium, now, and if Lupe can change the subject she can keep her head on straight until they get there, so she scrambles for another suggestion that won’t come to her so vividly.
“Or, we could join the Circus,” she puts out. Jess laughs.
“I’ll start growing in my beard,” she says, and throws her arm around Lupe’s neck, squeezes tightly.
When they get to the field, dark and left over, paper soda cups clustering in the gravel parking lot and their name taken down from the scoreboard, Lupe is reminded of a graveyard, something dead lurking there in it.
She shivers all down her spine to see it, and she wants nothing but to turn back, to turn away from it and flee. She means to, too, and then Jess says,
“Let’s head inside.” And so they do.
This is where it all happened. Every pitch, every practice. Every photograph, every skinned knee. Every win and every loss. The highs and the lows, and everything in between.
Lupe wasn’t sure exactly what they intended to do here, maybe the solemn, still waiting Jess liked to do sometimes, like Lupe’s imagination of a predator out for a hunt. She’s prepared to join in with Jess, even if that stillness sets her on edge, just a little, but Jess is apparently too buoyed on liquor for something so serious, so she suggests a game of catch. She’s too buoyed on liquor to have remembered to bring a ball, too, but Lupe forgives her.
They set about looking for a lost ball somewhere, tramping around in only the light of the moon. Jess finds one, finally, jammed under the bench in the visitors’ dugout, and she hollers out victoriously when she does. Jess is never short of things to celebrate about, and to make Lupe celebrate with her, too.
The two of them meander back onto the field, and start up a leisurely game of catch. For a dozen or so throws, they simply toss and catch in comfortable silence, and then finally, Jess says,
“After all that, we still fucking lost.” She’s trying to be good humored about it, Lupe can tell, but there’s still a twinge of misery to her voice. Lupe’s stomach twists to hear it.
“I’m sorry,” Lupe says back. She needs Jess to know that she means it. Jess gave her so many chances all season long, and still, Lupe couldn’t throw a strike when it really counted. She blew it.
“Lu,” Jess says reproachfully. “Are you going to be like that all next season, too?”
Lupe shrugs. She can’t, she’s not going to lie about it.
“I might.” She throws the ball to Jess.
Jess laughs a little bit. She’s the only one who’s ever been able to do that, to laugh at Lupe without making her feel like shit when she does.
“Alright,” she says, then she winds up real excessively, showboating like crazy in imitation of some kind of cartoon pitcher, lifts her leg in some strange little ballerina circle and whips the ball back to Lupe. Lupe catches it, then complains.
“Hey!” she objects, “I do not pitch like that!”
Jess cackles at this, gleeful and boyish.
“I never said it was you!”
Lupe frowns then, even if she doesn’t mean it, and tosses the ball again, this time not to Jess but straight up into the air, so when it comes back down she can catch it herself.
“Let me see you pitch,” Jess commands.
“What?” Lupe asks. “Why?”
“I like to watch you,” Jess says. “I was watching you all summer. You couldn’t tell?”
Lupe feels her face turning red, so she scrubs at it.
“I could tell,” she admits, after a long moment.
“Let’s see it, then,” Jess responds, and since Lupe can’t tell her no , now or ever, that settles it. She turns to walk to the pitcher’s mound, even as she feels Jess’s eyes boring holes in her back.
She squares up. She kicks at the dirt, even if she’s not wearing the right shoes for it. It occurs to Lupe that this might be the last time she ever does this. She wants to make it count.
She feels, rather than sees, Jess slot herself into position behind Lupe, back just a ways, a little off to the side. Waiting on the balls of her feet to throw herself, bodily, into wherever Lupe needs her to be, even if there will be no play to make, no ball to field. Not this time, not now.
Lupe winds up, and pitches a fastball. It flies hard and steady and lands just behind home plate.
“Ball one,” Jess hollers, from behind her.
That’s something else Jess can do, like no one else has ever managed before. She can call the count without making Lupe feel like she’s announcing her failures to the world, no lurch of her stomach, no burn in the back of her throat. When Jess shouts something out, she makes it sound like she’s on Lupe’s side about it, like they’re working out their next move, like they’re in it together.
This time, though, it wasn’t a ball, and they both know it. Lupe’s in on the game, though. She wants to play it.
“Are you blind?” she shouts right back, whips around and tries to make her face look like she’s angry, like she’s not having a wonderful night. “That was a strike if it was anything!”
“It wasn’t anything, then!” Jess returns. She’s worse at looking mad than Lupe, at least tonight. She’s grinning wildly. “Some arm on you!”
“Hmph,” Lupe grumbles, because she can’t think of anything more intelligent to say, not when Jess is looking at her like that.
Lupe jogs backwards to retrieve the ball, which has skittered away behind home plate. She dives for it, even though it’s already come to a stop, and then she leaps up wildly to toss it back to Jess, arm going wide.
“You wound me, García,” Jess chastises, hand over her heart. Lupe laughs and laughs and laughs.
After they’ve had their fill of playing catch, they set about walking the bases, side by side. They set a slow and meandering pace, and Jess recounts highlights from the season in a hushed, steady tone. Lupe shuts her eyes, rests her shoulder against Jess’s to guide her steps, and tries to burn the images Jess is painting into her mind forever, for good.
One trip around the bases doesn’t satiate them, so they go again, and then around the entire perimeter of the field. Lupe runs her hand along the chain link fence bordering the outfield, feels her fingertips go numb from the sensation.
“Was it everything you thought it would be?” Jess asks her. Lupe thinks.
“I didn’t think it would be anything. I didn’t think it would happen.”
“Well,” Jess says, “I’m glad it did.”
Hours pass, maybe, or no time at all before Lupe lets out her first, haggard yawn. She can think of nothing new left to do here, on their field, and she can think of a million things they’ve already done that she wants to do all over again. She rubs sleep out of her eyes, and maybe something else, and she looks to Jess.
“Let’s sleep here tonight,” Jess says. “I want to spend the night with you, on the field. In case.” She doesn’t have to say in case of what, because Lupe knows. In case they don’t come back. In case this is it.
It might be. But maybe it won’t.
“Alright, Shortie,” Lupe agrees. “I’ll back your play.”