She nodded.
“I didn’t realize just how many strands there were though, when I first started,” he continued. “It’s strange how, over a lifetime, you can lose track of —” Jim realized the woman who sat before him could not personally understand what he was talking about because her life had been cut so tragically short. How does a man who has experienced the closeness of his final days, convey the experience of a life that has almost run its full course to someone who had not even made it out of her twenties?
He changed the subject. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I didn’t mean to travel down that road.” He tried to sound cheerful, “Your turn to tell me something about yourself.”
“Well there’s not much to tell,” she said. “I come from a small town in Nevada. I majored in applied—mathematics at college. My first boyfriend’s name was Frank and I had a dog named Fido.”
“Fido?” Jim said incredulously a fork full of macaroni stalled halfway to his mouth. “Really?”
“Really,” she laughed.
“Well ten out of ten for originality… I guess?”
As the laughter subsided, a silence descended between them. Not the awkward silence that can develop between two people who have nothing more to say to each other; this was more of a warmth that filled the space between them, something that only they could feel, alleviating the need for conversation.
Rebecca broke the silence a few minutes later. “I suppose you know about my death.” Her brows crinkled and her mouth drew down on one side. “That sounds so strange. I’ve never said it that way before. Odd.”
Jim paused before replying. “Yes. I know.”
When he next spoke, his question caught her off-guard. Occasionally, someone asked whether she remembered anything about her final moments; her killer, what he looked like, was she frightened… how it felt to die. No one had ever inquired past that point, so when Jim asked her “Do you remember anything after the time you died?” she was surprised. A fleeting memory played across her mind, more an emotion than anything, but it faded before she could hold onto it.
“Have you ever woken from a dream that was so vivid it seemed too real?” she asked. “A dream that’s so intense you feel sure that you will remember every detail of it. You fall back to sleep and when you next wake up all you can remember is a sense of it? It’s not even a memory, more a feeling of how the dream made you feel.” She turned her eyes away from the empty food container and looked up at the man sitting across from her, locking her eyes with his, challenging him to laugh or contradict her, searching for any sign that he may be mocking her. “That’s what I felt when I first woke up after the Slip—like I had forgotten a wonderful dream.”
Jim reached out across the table and squeezed her hand. “I believe you,” he said matter-of-factly.
Later, as they stood at the door to Rebecca’s apartment, after they had said goodnight for the third time, Rebecca turned and kissed Jim gently on the cheek before stepping into her apartment.
Jim stood outside her door for a while unable to move, confused emotions tingling and his heart racing. Finally, he turned and made his way back to his own apartment.
Twenty-Six
The sun was liquid gold melting into the eastern horizon as Rebecca Lacey walked out onto the diamond—etched field. She headed towards the batter’s box, swinging the thirty-ounce Louisville Slugger in her right hand like a scythe.
The crowd—Mina Belkov waving a bright red pennant—went wild, while over on the pitcher’s mound, Mitchell Lorentz limbered up with some practice balls that curved and zigzagged impossibly, like sidewinder missiles to the catcher’s mitt of Horatio Mabry. The big man’s bulk cast an elongated shadow across the field, like a gigantic sundial.
In the outfield, Adrianna Drake jumped and cart wheeled excitedly, tripping and falling over a uniform that was several sizes too large for her. Catching sight of Becky, she stopped her cavorting and instead began waving excitedly at her; a smile of pure childish joy lighting up her angelic face and making the baseball cap perched jauntily on her head jiggle. Jim Baston, resplendent and dashing in a beautiful black tuxedo stood respectfully in centerfield exuding a demeanor of debonair sophistication that removed all sense of incongruity from his choice of clothing.
Kicking sand off the plate with her toes, Rebecca swung the bat once, twice, three times to stretch the muscles in her arms before very deliberately glancing both left and right.
“Batter up,” drawled Mabry.
Oddly, all the bases were empty as were both players’ benches in the home and away team dugouts. Looked like it was all up to her then!
The huge scoreboard, looming ominously in the distance was counting backwards, its home team score clacking down from ninety-nine in a painfully slow countdown to zero, like some giant timer.
None of that mattered now. It was all up to her. The fate of… something… something she could not quite put her finger on, but which she knew carried a great responsibility, hung squarely on her shoulders.
Becky fixed her steely gaze on a golden glowing Lorentz out on the pitcher’s mound as he wound up for the first pitch.
He let fly.
The horsehide covered ball sped towards her impossibly fast, curling and spiraling, a bleached white blur… and she hit it, high and steep.
Lorentz, Adrianna and Jim all began to run to the same spot in the center field, standing together in a huddle with their eyes turned skywards as they watched the ball reach its apogee before beginning its slow decent, their hands raised high in the air, ready to catch the ball as it plummeted towards the ground.
The counter on the scoreboard began speeding up as the ball fell, picking up speed as it raced toward Lorentz, Adrianna, and Jim’s outstretched hands. Numbers flew by in a blur; the whir of the scoreboard rolling by became a clatter like wind blowing through wooden wind chimes.
Their arm’s reaching high into the air, Lorentz, Adrianna and Jim waved confidently at Becky as they waited expectantly for the ball to arrive, to fall into their waiting mitts.
There was a dull thud.
Rebecca turned to see an identical ball to the one she had sent soaring into the sky roll to a stop near her feet. Another thud as another ball dropped to the ground from nowhere. Then more balls fell, seemingly from nowhere, until a path of white baseballs lay between her and the group of her colleagues who were still waiting patiently for the original ball to finish its decent. As Rebecca watched, more and more balls fell, carpeting the field. Finally, her original baseball fell straight into the waiting mitt of Mitchell Lorentz.
Jim leaped into the air, pumping his fist in victory. Lorentz grabbed Adrianna and swung her around and around as she giggled and snorted. Her baseball cap flew off, carried by a wind that swept it high into the air. The cap disappeared into a swiftly approaching darkness that had somehow crept up unseen, swallowing the horizon and now devouring the boundary of the outfield. The darkness brought with it a sense of impending disaster that began to chew and gnaw at Rebecca’s stomach.
Horatio Mabry let out an exultant whoop of joy, tossed his catcher’s mask carelessly into the air and ran past Rebecca to join his celebrating friends in the center field. But they had missed the ball. Couldn’t they see that? Why were they celebrating?