Molina Page 21

  “What you got for me, mi hijo?”

  “I want you to know I got a base hit to right field, a line drive to second, and a home run to right.”

  “I never had a doubt about you. Right field is your power.”

  “I was really struggling for a while.”

  “When you’re in a slump, just think about today as the first game of a new season.”

  He could have been talking about him and me. It was a new season. All the awfulness was behind us. I finally had my father back.

  PART

  5

  I PUSHED MY phone deeper into my pocket to muffle the buzz. Nothing was going to disrupt my day at Legoland with Jamie and the girls. With the season over, I was all theirs. No baseball. No agents. No distractions. When the phone buzzed a second and third time, I yanked it out to see who was calling.

  Ramirito, my cousin.

  “Ramirito, I’m with—”

  “Your father fell and hit his head!”

  “What?”

  Before he could answer, another buzz.

  Yadier.

  I hung up on Ramirito.

  “Yadier, what’s going on? Is Pai all right?”

  I heard choked cries and yells and then a loud clap like a fist through a wall and suddenly Vitin was on the phone.

  “What’s happened?” I said, stepping out of line, my heart pounding. Fathers in baseball caps and cargo shorts pushed strollers crammed with sunburned babies and souvenir bags and half-finished bottles of water. “Where’s Pai?”

  “Bengie, your dad’s hurting pretty bad.” I could hear the effort of each word, as if he were speaking a foreign language. “You better make arrangements to come to Puerto Rico.”

  Pai had fallen at the park, he said. His Pampers League. Maybe a heart attack. Maybe his head. He was with the doctors in the emergency room.

  Jamie had already pulled the girls out of line, and when I took off toward the exit, they broke into a run to keep up, calling after me to wait. Popcorn carts. A toppled ice-cream cone. Saw-toothed edges of Lego-block characters—a chef, a pirate. EXIT. Parking lot. Where was the car?

  “Bengie!” Jamie grabbed my arm. Kyshly and Kelssy, sweating and out of breath, stared at me as if I had lost my mind.

  Another buzz. Cheo.

  “Do you know anything?” I asked. I knew he was still in New York, fresh from laser eye surgery after his season with the Yankees.

  But instead of Cheo, it was my sister-in-law, Yalicia, crying.

  “Your dad just passed away.”

  The sun kicked off the windshields and splintered into my eyes. My knees buckled. I felt the warm metal of a railing under my hand.

  “What is it?” Jamie said. “What’s happened?”

  I bent over, feeling as if I were going to vomit. What came out instead was a scream.

  “Dad!” The girls were crying. They had never seen me like this.

  “Guelo,” I said, choking out the word. “Guelo died.”

  The girls’ faces twisted as if I had slapped them. I don’t remember much else. The details—packing, checking out of the hotel, booking a flight—were swallowed up in the blur of that day and night. Jamie did everything. We arrived in San Juan late the next morning, still in our clothes from Legoland.

  It was a Sunday morning, so La Número Dos was empty. But when we made the turn into Kuilan, a police officer stood at the end of our street diverting cars. I rolled down the passenger window of our hired van.

  “Ah, Bengie,” he said, recognizing me. “Too many people going in to see your mom.”

  Cars lined both sides of the street, tires tilted up onto walkways, bumpers poking into the road. People walked in the street, and we inched alongside, stopping to accept condolences through my open window. I knew almost all of them: cousins, neighbors, old teammates, Pai’s coworkers, guys from Junior Diaz’s, parents of Pai’s players, former classmates of mine or my brothers.

  “Is this all for guelo?” Kelssy asked.

  “I think so, mama,” I said. I am in Dorado, I told myself. In Espinosa. In Kuilan. Pai has died. He couldn’t have died. We had just seen him. He had loved Jamie. We were a family again. We had plans.

  On the street in front of Mai and Pai’s house there were no cars. Instead, workers were erecting the skeleton of an enormous tent.

  Mai was slumped like a rag doll in her chair in the living room, but her face was calm and open. Her brothers and sisters, and Pai’s brothers and sisters, and a hundred other people, it seemed, filled every inch of the tiny house, the overflow spilling out to the carport and side patio and rolling into the street in both directions. It wasn’t even 10 a.m.

  Mai broke into a smile when she saw me.

  “Mai, I’m so sorry,” I said, bending to wrap my arms around her. I buried my head in her neck and sobbed.

  “Mi hijo, he’s resting right now. We have to be strong for each other. I’m okay,” she said. “You need to be okay.”

  The words sounded like a recording, almost robotic but also clear and steady. Gladys Matta was tough. She wanted everyone to think she was fine. But I knew she was destroyed. The girls threw themselves into their guela’s arms. Mai pulled them onto her lap. When she saw Jamie lingering in the doorway, she waved her in. Jamie pressed her cheek against Mai’s, enveloping my mother and my daughters in a hug.

  One after another, my aunts and uncles held me close. They cried for my father but also for my return home. I had been away for two years.

  When Yadier arrived, the sun was high enough to knife through the slats of the jalousie windows, turning Mai’s crowded house into a sweltering bath. Yadier looked like hell. His face was blotched and puffy. We hugged hard. Cheo wouldn’t be arriving until the following morning.

  “No way, Yadier,” I said. “No way! This can’t be happening!”

  Once he made the rounds, hugging everyone, he, Jamie, and I walked across to the ballpark with a friend who had been there when Pai collapsed. In the street, workers were positioning a huge rectangular air conditioner along the side of the white tent. Racks of folding chairs were being unloaded from a truck. Mai told me there had been talk of holding Pai’s wake at the funeral parlor in Vega Alta by the elementary school. But she knew it had to be right here, on the spot Pai had crossed a million times with his bag of balls and bats. This was where he had lived, in the seam between baseball and family. And this was where, Mai said, he had taken his last steps.

  He was crossing the street with new baseballs for the second game of a doubleheader with his team of nine- and ten-year-olds. Mai said she pushed open the front door and called after him.

  “Did you take your pills?”

  “Later!” he yelled back. Pai had high blood pressure.

  One of the players’ fathers was chalking the batter’s box when Pai approached the backstop fence. “You fixed the whole field,” the man said, protesting when Pai offered to take over. “Let me do this little part. Go get a beer.”

  Pai smiled and wedged the new baseballs into a bent opening in the fence where the umpire could easily retrieve them. He continued on to the cement bleachers by the first-base dugout, where parents and neighbors were settling in.

  “He was standing right here,” our friend said, leading us to the foot of the bleachers.

  I pictured him there, chatting with the parents as his kids tossed the ball around on the field behind him, waiting for the game to start.

  “Hilda,” Pai had said to one of the mothers, “how do those baselines look to you?”

  “Very pretty and well made,” she said.

  Pai turned toward the field, perhaps to watch his players, perhaps to check on the lines of the batter’s box. I pictured the parents popping open cans of soda and beer and handing dollar bills to their children for the concession stand. On the street, cars would have been ambling by, people on their way home from the laundromat or Saturday grocery shopping, slowing to holler at friends they spotted at the park.

  Everyone sai
d it had been a perfect day for baseball. Blue skies. Dry field. Slight breeze. Just like now. I looked out on Pai’s field. The highest leaves of the flamboyan and tamarind trees fluttered in the outfield like flags.

  Our friend described what happened.

  Pai suddenly clutched the fence. Then he grabbed his chest and fell backward. The back of his head hit the bottom row of the bleachers. Then he crumpled to the ground.

  People were shouting and stomping down the bleachers.

  “Benjamín!”

  Pai didn’t respond. Foam bubbled up through his lips.

  “Someone call 911!”

  “Benjamín!”

  Mai heard the shouting and hurried across the street. Her hands flew to her face when the crowd parted and she saw Pai. “Benjamín! Where’s the ambulance?”

  Someone had pulled a pickup truck to the bleachers. The decision apparently had been made to drive Pai to the hospital rather than wait for an ambulance. Former big leaguer Luis Figueroa climbed into the backseat and soon was cradling Pai’s rigid body on his lap. Mai rode in the front, her hands still pressed to her face.

  Luis could feel the thrum of Pai’s racing heart.

  “Benjamín,” Luis kept saying, “hold on. You’re going to be all right.”

  Then he heard a sound from Pai’s chest he later described as “a little snap.” Pai’s body went limp and his heart fell silent.

  Neither Yadier nor I said anything as we listened to our friend’s account. Then Yadier told us about seeing Pai that morning. It was a fluke that he was even in Puerto Rico. He and his wife had been packing up their house in St. Louis for the off-season.

  “We weren’t scheduled to fly in until today,” he said.

  But his wife’s father had fallen ill, and Yadier had been looking for an excuse to go home earlier. He couldn’t wait to show Mai and Pai their newest grandchild, Yanuell, who was just five weeks old. So they left St. Louis on Friday with the idea of surprising Mai and Pai that evening. But when they arrived at the house with the baby, Pai was at Junior Diaz’s. They waited with Mai until ten, then left to put the baby to bed. On the way home, Yadier drove by Junior Diaz’s and honked.

  Pai emerged with a big smile.

  “What are you doing here?” he said, leaning into the window to get a look at his tiny grandson in the car seat.

  “I’m surprising you!” Yadier said. “I have to get Yanuell home, but I’ll see you tomorrow, okay?”

  When Yadier returned to the house the following morning, he found Pai on the roof picking grapefruit for birthday cocktails that night with his friend Miguelito. He was between games of the doubleheader. He climbed off the roof and, as he hugged Yadier, he said, “I love you.”

  Yadier was moved and thrilled. Though Pai was more affectionate with Yadier than with José and me, he didn’t toss around “I love you”s even to him.

  “I love you, too, Pai.”

  Pai cradled and kissed Yanuell, then went into the house to fetch balls for the next game. Yadier and his family drove off to get groceries in Bayamón. He and his wife were in the supermarket when they got the call. They left the cart in the aisle and roared to the hospital in Vega Alta.

  He said a crowd was already gathering in the parking lot and lobby when he arrived. Yadier burst into the ER, where Mai sat with Vitin, both of them stricken. Through the window of an exam room, Yadier could see a doctor shocking Pai with paddles. Again and again. Then the doctor stopped.

  “You can’t stop!” Yadier yelled, pushing open the door. “You have to keep trying!”

  The doctor said he was sorry. There was nothing more he could do.

  Yadier wheeled around and punched the wall. In the hall, he flipped over a gurney. He kicked a chair. He punched the wall again. Five or six quick, hard punches.

  “Why did this happen?” Mai cried. “Why did you leave me?”

  The doctor said Pai had suffered a massive heart attack.

  Once Yadier exhausted himself, he sank into a chair next to Mai and took out his cell phone. He needed his brothers.

  EVEN AFTER YADIER told me what had happened at the hospital, and even as I watched huge easels of flowers carried into the white tent outside, I kept thinking we’d find out all this was a mistake. Pai would emerge from the kitchen, popping open a Coors Light, teasing Mai about not being able to live without him.

  “Do you believe this fuss?” he’d say. “For a bump on the head!”

  So later in the evening, when the opportunity arose to see Pai before he was transported to the tent, I took it. Tío Felo knew the undertaker and had pulled me aside to take me to the funeral home.

  La funeraria was a storefront business in downtown Vega Alta. The undertaker met us at the door, where Tío Felo then parked himself, wanting no part in seeing Pai’s body. The undertaker showed me down a short hallway to a small chapel-like room. The room was cold, or maybe I was. There were rows of chairs and, atop a metal wheeled table, an aqua-colored casket as shiny as a showroom car. The lid was up.

  I could see from where I stood Pai’s head in profile, propped on a small pillow: white hair, flat forehead, wide nose, blunt chin. He was wearing glasses. My legs turned rubbery. I gripped the back of a chair. The distance from me to him, no more than a few yards, seemed too far to walk.

  But the next thing I knew I was at the edge of the casket, looking down at my father’s soft, peaceful face. He looked as if he were deep into an afternoon nap, as if he’d grunt or knit his eyebrows in annoyance if I shook his shoulders. His leathery workingman’s hands were folded on his chest, a rosary laced between his palms. There was dirt from the field under his nails. He wore a crisp, gray collared shirt buttoned to his neck. I recognized it as one Jamie and I had bought for him at Macy’s two weeks earlier. I remembered thinking how sharp he’d look in it.

  “I’m sorry for not being here when you wanted me to be,” I said, surprised this was the first thing out of my mouth. I meant Yadier’s party.

  Then I broke down. I cried in big heaves, as if all the feelings I ever held for my father—love, guilt, regret, gratitude, pride, anger, longing—came flooding out. How could he be taken away when I finally had gotten him back? I cried until I had nothing left.

  I reached out to hold one of Pai’s hands, but they were frozen in place. So I slipped the fingers of my right hand between his palms and with my left stroked his white stubbly head. He had always liked raking his fingers through his hair.

  “Thank you for making me who I am,” I said softly as if he were sleeping. “You’re the reason I’m standing where I am in my life. Thank you for sacrificing so much for us. For teaching us baseball and respect.”

  I went on to say everything I wanted him to know.

  “You can rest,” I finally said. “Don’t worry about anything.” I promised to take care of Mai, his gorda, and his brothers and sisters the way he did.

  I kissed his forehead.

  “I love you, Pai,” I whispered.

  BACK IN MAI’S steamy living room, I found Jamie poring over the dozens and dozens of pictures that covered nearly every inch of wall space in the living room and hallway. There was Roberto Clemente on one knee in the on-deck circle. Jesus with his right hand raised in blessing. Kyshly and Kelssy as babies. But mostly the walls belonged to Yadier, Cheo, and me. Me in my Los Pobres uniform, an awkward skinny kid who had yet to hit a ball through the infield. Chubby little Yadier squatting behind the plate. Cheo in high school, serious as a priest, striking a big-league batting stance. Photos from the 2002 World Series and the 2006 World Series and from various ALCS and NLCS series. Framed magazine covers. Plaques and trophies. Bobbleheads. Publicity shots and baseball cards and signed balls in plastic cubes. Everything bearing the Molina name.

  Could Pai, who never made it to the big leagues himself, ever have dreamed this?

  Jamie and I had planned to stay at Yadier’s while the girls stayed with Mai, but as day turned to night, we made no move to leave.

  Out
side, the white tent rose to full height. Small vans arrived with tall easels of flowers shaped into crosses and hearts and even a baseball. Police arranged sawhorses and orange cones at the end of the street.

  In the kitchen, I joined Yadier, my cousin Mandy, and other cousins and friends for a toast. Pai’s Igloo coolers were still stocked with six-packs of Coors Light for Miguelito’s birthday party. We each opened a can and, into a pan from Mai’s cupboard, we poured out a little beer, the way Pai always did as a nod to the dead.

  Out in the carport, Yadier put on Pai’s favorite music, and people told stories, and we even laughed.

  At around midnight, the hearse arrived.

  The casket was wheeled into the tent and placed at the front, surrounded by enormous sprays of white lilies, birds of paradise, orchids, begonias, hibiscus. Relatives who had left earlier in the evening now reappeared as news spread that the casket had arrived. Titi Graciella took one look at Pai, screamed, and fainted into someone’s arms.

  Mai, on the other hand, didn’t react at all. She just stared. Inside the casket was a ball signed by Pai’s Little League team. Someone placed a Maceteros uniform patch by his arm. There were hats from the Giants, the Cardinals and the Yankees, and three photos from Pai’s induction into the Puerto Rican Amateur Baseball Hall of Fame. Someone attached to the casket a Kevlar balloon in the shape of a baseball.

  Mai returned to the house and stayed, receiving visitors there.

  Jamie and I sat in the white folding chairs next to the casket. After so much time away from Pai, I wasn’t going anywhere. People arrived at 2, 3, 4 a.m. Police officers worked in shifts outside, redirecting cars to side streets. When I went into Mai’s house to use the bathroom, waves of people flowed in and out with pastalillos, alcapurrias, six-packs of cold beer. Mai was asleep in her chair.

  As the sun rose Monday morning, the man who carpooled with Pai arrived at about the time he and Pai would have headed to work. He said Pai’s department at the factory had closed for the day so everyone could attend the wake.

  Cheo arrived before noon. Even with large dark glasses protecting his laser-repaired eyes, his face looked puffed and pale. After we hugged, he slumped in a chair near the casket with his head down. I had never seen him or Yadier so broken. They were both happy and outgoing by nature, always cracking jokes and having a good time. Now Cheo’s face was like an old man’s, washed out and slack.