The Comeback Season Read online

  This afternoon, in the frenzied blocks surrounding Wrigley Field, the crowds walk just a bit more cautiously and the vendors glance furtively toward the ballpark, each feeling the pressure of the new season. This year is different from all the others. In a history worthy of the most woeful tragedies, nothing has been so dreaded as the start of the 100th season since the Chicago Cubs last won a World Series pennant.

  It’s not that people aren’t hopeful, because hope is everything to a Cubs fan. But the years have wound by like the ticking of a clock, and it seems this 100th season must be a year like no other, decidedly hyperbolic, marked by either great success or miserable failure. The fans are sure of this. It is only a matter of time until they find out which.

  The Cubs have had successes, of course, since 1908. There was a World Series appearance in 1945, a winning streak in 1969, a sliver of hope in 1984, a heart-stopping run in 2003, and the briefest glimpse of October 2007. But all of these had ended in much the same way, with disappointments so great that over the past hundred years, they’ve snowballed into a sense of sheer despair. Since 1908, the Cubs have been cursed by a billy goat, embarrassed by their crosstown rivals, plagued by whispers of greatness and potential unrealized.

  In the past century, glory has found a home elsewhere. Since their last showing in 1945, every other long-established team has won a World Series. Their closest allies in campaigns of loss, the Red Sox and White Sox—both also hapless in their own ways—have wiped their slates clean with wins in 2004 and 2005 that erased the years since 1918 and 1917 respectively. In Chicago, the Bulls have made their run, and the Bears have done their shuffle. Wrigley Field, once home to the greatest team in baseball and witness to Babe Ruth’s called shot, has begun to crumble. Words like “eventually” and “next year” have become mantras.

  It is without a doubt a demoralizing business being a Cubs fan.

  But even so, the fans wait. They hope. They wish.

  And none more than Ryan Walsh, who works her way clockwise around the stadium, overwhelmed after being away for so long. It’s one thing to follow the team from afar, running a finger down the television schedule, checking the score on the radio, setting timers and recordings, reading newspapers. But here beneath the red marquee, the huge expanse of Wrigley Field bearing down on her, she’s reminded of what it is to miss something. She hadn’t realized just how much a part of her this was: the bleacher seats and the press boxes, the men selling T-shirts and hot dogs and beer.

  Today, she feels particularly stuck: her family is moving forward without her, adding new members and forgetting about the old. Her friends, too, have changed. She’s been on the outs with them since the start of school, for no other reason, it seems, than her lack of enthusiasm for passing notes and sharing gossip. This new terrain—the cold and endless maze of her high school—still feels every bit as foreboding as it had eight months ago, and she has little to show for the past year besides a newfound propensity for making herself invisible.

  And so she is here on her own.

  Getting a ticket for opening day—even in the bleachers, where the sun beats down hard and the fans grow rowdier with each inning—is practically impossible. Even days, weeks, months ahead it would have been difficult, but on game day, there’s no chance. Even so, winding her way across Clark Street, Ryan feels a simple satisfaction in having made it down here at all.

  She pauses at the corner of Addison and looks back. Above the stadium and past the waving flags, the jagged rooftops are crowded with people getting ready for the game. Up the street, the bars are filled with fans who have been drinking since early morning, the crowds flowing out onto the street in front of Murphy’s Bleachers and The Cubby Bear. Everywhere, there is blue and red, floating Cs and pinstripes.

  A man in an old Sammy Sosa jersey clicks his tongue at her, and Ryan feels a small burst of panic, but he only motions at her with a ticket. “Left field,” he says in a low voice. “One seat.”

  She takes a step closer. “How much?”

  “Hundred bucks.”

  “No way,” she says, shaking her head. “How high up?”

  “There’re no bad seats in Wrigley,” he grunts. “Everyone knows that.”

  “Forget it,” Ryan says, turning around. But she’s only a few yards away when she stops to look wistfully at the entrance, where the ticket people are handing out free baseballs at the turnstiles. Shoving her hands in her pockets as if she might miraculously come up with the money, she remembers the check her mom gave her yesterday for the spring field trip to the amusement park. Ryan had forgotten to bring home the form with the details, so it’s still blank. She fumbles through her bag and slips it out from the pages of a book, then turns back to the guy, though when she does, she sees the boy from her math class—the one with the broken arm she thought she’d seen on the ‘L’—bargaining for the ticket from beneath the brim of a worn blue Cubs hat.

  She stares, blanking on his name. He’d joined their class just a month ago—the only sophomore in freshman precalculus—and Ryan remembers thinking how hard it must be to come into a school at the very end of the year. She’s not sure whether his old school was further behind in the curriculum or whether he’s simply bad at the subject, but either way, Ryan knows she’s in no position to judge. If she doesn’t improve her own math grade soon, she could very well share a similar fate next year.

  Though she can’t remember speaking with him other than to once borrow a pencil, he’s the kind of guy you can’t help assuming is nice: tall and skinny, with pale freckles and round eyes. He’s been wearing the cast the whole time, and like every other kid in school to whom Ryan pays only passing interest, she’s come to think of him only in terms of this detail—Broken Arm Kid, Cast Boy, That Guy with the Sling—though admittedly, he seems to have already fared better than she with their classmates.

  “One-twenty?” she hears him groan. “Seriously?”

  “Not a bad seat in the house,” the scalper says, grinning.

  “Wait,” Ryan says, approaching them, and the boy looks surprised to see her.

  “You’re in my math class,” he says, adjusting his cap.

  She nods. “I’m Ryan.”

  “Hey,” he says. “I’m Nick.”

  The scalper rolls his eyes. “And I’m Don,” he says. “Do you want the goddamn seat or not?”

  Ryan turns to Nick. “What if we split it?” she asks. “Then we could switch off every couple innings or something.”

  He shoves a hand into his pocket and emerges with a handful of crumpled bills. “I’m not sure I have enough,” he says, suddenly animated. He digs around in his backpack, his broken arm held awkwardly out from his body, his other hand pawing through the bag, a look of fixed determination on his face. The scalper curses at them impatiently under his breath.

  “Here,” Nick says triumphantly, holding up a few extra bills.

  “You don’t take checks, do you?” Ryan asks, turning to the scalper, but she finds he’s moved several feet away, where he’s handing over the ticket to a man in a business suit, who tucks it into his pocket and walks off toward the entrance. The scalper, shuffling a stack of bills, lifts his shoulders when he sees them watching, then heads off too. Ryan’s eyes drift over toward Waveland Avenue, the outfield wall where the neighborhood kids gather to listen to the crowd and try to catch home runs or long fouls that may make it up and over to the street. And so—with nothing more to be done—they begin to walk over together, as if that had been the plan all along.

  Chapter Three

  * * *

  DAD LOVED TO TELL THE STORY OF HIS FIRST DATE with Mom—a Saturday game against the Mets—where he’d had to explain to her the difference between a ball and a strike. According to him, she’d sat patiently beside him through the whole game, laughing over beers and telling stories between innings, and when he asked her out again, she’d been thrilled. But when she learned that his intention for the second date—and the third and the fourth—was anothe
r ball game, she nearly ended it right then. She never fully grasped the game, and even more, his sorry love affair with the team.

  “How can you love something so much when they let you down so often?” she asked as they watched the Cubs invent new and heartbreaking ways of losing.

  “They’ll shape up soon,” he said. “Just wait till next year.”

  Though she never came to love it as he did, she did learn to live with his obsession. She didn’t mind when he named the dog Addison and the cat Clark—dubbed for the cross streets where the ballpark sits—though she did draw the line when Ryan was born, using her maiden name for their first daughter. Dad used to tease that they’d named her after Ryne Sandberg—his favorite Cubs player—but Mom messed up on the spelling.

  But Ryan’s favorite story was of the day he asked her mom to marry him at Wrigley Field. He’d made a sort of reverse bargain, he told her. “As long as she said yes,” he explained, “it was okay if the Cubs lost.”

  “And did they?” Ryan asked.

  “Nope,” he said with a small smile. “Everyone won that night.”

  The score is already one to nothing—just two outs into the game—by the time Ryan and Nick make their way around to the back of the stadium. Naturally, the Cubs are losing to the Cardinals, which is particularly painful given the long rivalry between the two teams. Though they don’t have the same sort of grudge matches as the East Coast clubs—nothing like the contention between Yankees and Red Sox—Ryan had been brought up to hate everything about the Cards: the stupid mascot, the red of their caps, the fans from St. Louis.

  Generally speaking, of course, the Cubs don’t need such rivalries. They always seem to do just fine beating themselves.

  But it’s only the start of the season, and there’s still room for optimism in Wrigleyville, where the residents of the neighborhood are out in their yards with coolers and lawn chairs, their radios tuned in to hear the play-by-play from beyond the ivy-leafed back wall. A group of boys is tossing around a dirty baseball, their ears cocked toward the stadium in case someone should hit a home run. T-shirt and souvenir vendors are lined up across the street, waving stuffed teddy bears and authentic jerseys.

  Ryan and Nick settle onto the curb—suddenly shy now that they’ve found a place to sit—and listen to the hollow sounds of the game drifting over the wall on breezes from the nearby lake. Nick leans forward on his elbows, propping his chin up with his broken arm, and Ryan winces.

  “Doesn’t that hurt?” she asks. “How’d you do it?”

  He looks out across the street with clear green eyes, crinkling his nose. “I’m getting it off pretty soon,” he says, as if that explains everything.

  The block is noisy—kids shouting, airplanes overhead, radios blasting, the uneven cheers from inside—yet the quiet between them feels somehow louder than all of this. Ryan wonders if she should ask him why he’s cutting class, what drove him down to Wrigley today without a ticket when he should be in school, but she knows he could be asking the same of her, and she’s suddenly grateful for the silence. She gets the impression that he might feel the same way—lost for words that don’t include math class or school in general—and so she clears her throat.

  “Did you know it’s the 100th year since the Cubs last won the World Series?” she asks, tipping her head back to the sky, where an airplane glides by, towing a banner advertising drink specials after the game.

  “Of course,” Nick says curtly, and Ryan feels immediately stupid for having shared this obvious fact. She’s relieved when he smiles at her. “How could we possibly forget?”

  “Maybe this’ll be the year,” she says.

  He shrugs, shifting to pull a rolled-up score sheet and stubby pencil from his pocket. Ryan looks on, running her eyes across the columns as he begins copying in the lineup from a stray program left behind on the street. When she leans in too close, he looks up. “Want me to show you how to do it?” he asks, and Ryan shakes her head and chokes out a small “no.”

  They fall silent as a noise erupts from the stadium. Nick looks over his shoulder at a large man sunk low in a plastic lawn chair, a transistor radio balanced on his lap. He shakes his head miserably and holds up two fingers.

  “Two-zip,” Nick says, tapping his fingers on the curb impatiently. The man turns up his radio for their benefit, and they wave to him gratefully. “Wish we could see what was going on.”

  “I don’t mind it, actually,” Ryan says. “It’s sort of nice just to be close by.”

  A half smile crawls across his face. “I guess so.”

  “So, have you always been a Cubs fan?” she asks, wondering where he had moved from, what circumstances had brought him to Chicago in the middle of the school year.

  “Always,” he says. “Even when we lived up in Wisconsin, my parents used to bribe me with Cubs tickets when I complained about the long car rides down here.”

  “So you’ve been here a lot?” Ryan asks, hugging her knees. “Do you have family around here or something?”

  He doesn’t answer, instead staring at the pavement, his face hidden by the shadow of his hat. “No,” he says finally. “I only meant that I never liked the Brewers for some reason. Or the White Sox. It was always the Cubs.”

  Ryan smiles. “Me too.”

  He bends his head over the score sheet once more, recording the action of the game as best he can with the benefit of half a dozen crackling radios, which tell the story in small bursts of static all around them.

  “That last one is wrong,” Ryan says, pointing to one of the small diamonds, where he’s drawn a K in the middle of the box. “He didn’t strike out swinging.”

  “You’re right,” Nick says, tackling the marking with his eraser. Once he’s corrected it, flipping the K around backward, he turns back to Ryan, surprised. “Where’d you learn to read a scorecard?”

  “My dad,” she says quietly.

  Something in her face must be giving her away, because Nick clears his throat, searching for something else to say. “That’s cool,” he says, tapping the scorecard in his lap. “I’ve never met a girl who likes baseball so much.”

  “I don’t like baseball,” Ryan says with a grin. “I like the Cubs.”

  He laughs. “Okay, then.”

  By the fifth inning, they’re down four to one, but the sun is warm on her face, and they’ve settled into a silence worth keeping. It’s as comfortable as anything Ryan has felt all day. There’s something reassuring in the way he sits beside her, the utter lack of obligation to talk about anything that matters: school, family, her father, the new baby.

  At the seventh-inning stretch, they stand, and Nick dutifully removes his blue cap. They lift their chins and mouth the words—Root, root, root for the Cubbies!—looking sideways at each other self-consciously. The blended voices from the stands mount until, at the song’s close, they dissolve into scattered shouts of Play ball! There’s a moment of quivering stillness just afterward, as the game resumes and the fans take their seats, as the halted action of the world eases back to life.

  “Actually,” Ryan says as they sit down again, “these really aren’t the worst seats ever.”

  Nick readjusts his cap and smiles at her from beneath the brim. “I don’t know,” he says. “I can think of better.”

  “Like over there?” Ryan asks jokingly, pointing to where a few kids are perched in the low branches of a tree, straining to get a view over the stadium wall.

  “Sure,” he says, laughing. “Doesn’t get better than that.”

  “No,” she agrees, leaning back on the curb. “It doesn’t.”

  After the game, they ride home together in the yellowish light of the train car, their shoulders just barely touching, their heads tipped back against the seats. They are sunburned and heavy-limbed, weary from the day behind them, but they’re also purely and simply happy. The Cubs pulled it off in the bottom of the eighth with a three-run homer, and outside the stadium, where the ball rose up and over the outfield wall�
��a blurry dot in an otherwise empty sky—the crowd surged and throbbed, shoved and shimmied, until a bald man in a Cubs visor stood tall and raised his hands high in the air: one with the game-winning ball, the other with a sweating can of beer.

  They’d both ridden their bikes from school to the train station, and so once they reach their stop, Ryan follows Nick out to where they’re propped a few feet away from each other. Her blue Schwinn looks frail beside his bulky black mountain bike. With chilly fingers, they work to unchain the locks in the growing darkness, and once they’re ready—wheels pointed in opposite directions, hands gripping the bars—they find that the silence has changed once again. Gone is the closeness of the quiet train ride; lost is the cozy hush that had settled over them during the game. Ryan hadn’t ever realized there could be so many different types of not talking, so many brands of stillness, as if the quiet itself were a third party to the conversation.

  Finally, Nick clears his throat. “So, I guess I’ll see you in school tomorrow.”

  Ryan nods, half-hidden in the fuzzy darkness. They each lift their hands and let them hang in the air for a moment like members of some long lost Indian tribe, before wheeling their bikes in separate directions, the clicking of the spokes echoing in the night.

  The game had been a long one, and by the time Ryan gets home, it’s almost dinnertime and too late for any excuses about after-school projects or last-minute plans. As soon as she coasts up the driveway, even before she reaches out to brake with her sneakers on the asphalt, Mom appears in the doorway.

  “Where have you been?” she yells, a catch in her voice. She steps out onto the front stoop, shuffling her feet on the cold bricks. “You didn’t call, and I was worried.”