Sybil always used to tell the twins that nothing good ever happened after midnight. It was a shame, she’d think later, that she didn’t heed her own advice.
2
Night One
Zeke
Zeke Rodriguez knewthe pain in his elbow was going to rouse him even before the pain shot up his arm and through his shoulder and straight down his side, so what was the point of sleeping? He had physical therapy tomorrow, and he’d have to put in a half-ass effort if he pulled an all-nighter, but what choice did he have? Sleep for five minutes before his fucking pitching arm rebelled on him? Pop another Percocet and risk becoming a cautionary tale in the tabloids? What he did instead, instead of sleep, instead of the pain pill, was replay over and over again the moments that his major league career went out the fucking window, as if his mind were caught in the spin cycle of a washing machine.
Why had he thrown that pitch fast and low to Brian Schmidt’s sweet spot? When he saw the ball ricochet off Schmidt’s bat, why hadn’t he moved quicker, higher, lower,anythingto prevent the hundred-mile-an-hour line drive from careening right into his elbow, shattering just about every bonenearby, destroying his pitching arm, landing him on the IL right at the peak of the season, just when his team needed him? Possibly ending his career.
Zeke had watched the actual replay enough to know that he could have moved.He had time to move. But he froze. He stood there like some motherfucking third grader who was about to pee his pants in dodgeball. Now he didn’t need to watch the tape. He could simply mentally rewind the moment again and again until it was all he could think about. It was on all the time, the highlight reel in his brain. It kept him from sleeping; it nearly kept him from breathing.
The lights of Manhattan twinkled thirty stories below his bedroom window. When he landed his twenty-seven-million-a-year contract, everyone told him not to buy a place in the city.Get a compound in the suburbs, dude,his teammates had advised, as had his financial guy.You’ll be hassled everywhere you go. But they hadn’t grown up in the middle of bumfuck Oklahoma. They didn’t know that the silence of the suburbs would kill him, that pleasantries while squeezing cantaloupes at the grocery store or filling up the gas tank would bore him to the point of near oblivion. Even now, with his arm plastered and bandaged and sutured, the electric pulse of the city below made Zeke, well, happy. He pressed his forehead against the floor-to-ceiling window and stared down. That ridiculous interior designer his Realtor had hooked him up with begged him to get blinds—The primary bedroom faces east, so you’ll be woken up at the crack of dawn every day!she’d said—like Zeke wasn’t up anyway. Even before the injury and the two surgeries with one more to go, and the pain and the instant replay running through his memory, he’d been an early riser. He trained every morning before dawn, or at least he used to. Why would he install windowtreatments and miss out on the very reason he’d spent seven million on this apartment in the first place?
He’d bought a big-screen TV and an oversized couch, an extra firm mattress and called it a day. He hadn’t expected to spend all that much time here anyway, what with eighty-one games a year on the road, spring training in Arizona, the occasional visit back home to his parents and his younger sister, who still lived in the middle of goddamn nowhere.
His sister, Lani, told him that he needed a girlfriend. Like really really needed one. Tell him something he didn’t already know, he’d texted her back a few days ago. The problem was that the girls who hung around the team bus weren’t the type of girls he was interested in, and he was too famous to date someone normal. He couldn’t just, like, go on Bumble and swipe right. A celebrity, Lani had suggested then. But he wasn’t interested in a celebrity either.That shit is stupid, he’d texted her back.
So no one normal and no one not normal, she’d replied.Cool. I’m sure it will work out for you.
Zeke started to respond that he hadn’t asked her for any dating advice so why was she getting testy, but he realized he didn’t really want to fight with one of the few people outside of his physical therapist he actually had contact with these days.
Tonight, he checked the time on his phone. It was almost twoa.m. There wasn’t much point in getting back to bed now. He’d try to nap this afternoon because he had nothing better to do after physical therapy. The team had wound down the season a few weeks ago when they went out in the NL wild card round, and technically, they were mandated to stay in shape starting now through spring training in March, but Zeke couldn’t do much. Swim some boring one-armed laps with akickboard like a toddler, do some stupid excruciating exercises that pushed his pain tolerance to levels he thought were reserved for squeezing oversized baby heads out of a woman’s pelvis.
He found his laptop on the chaise of the humongous couch, reached for the remote of the equally humongous TV and fired up ESPN on mute.
He’d discovered this forum a few weeks ago when the sleeplessness had begun—The Insomniacs. His whole life he had slept like, as his mom used to say, he’d been kissed on the ass by God. Maybe he had been. Athletic, handsome with broad shoulders, an arm that threw a fastball like an artillery cannon, well-liked enough to win homecoming king. You already knew his story before you even met him. So sleep, no, that had never eluded him. Even on the team bus. Even on the team plane. Through time zone changes and after-hours parties and nightclub hopping in Ibiza and through the South of France, though Zeke rarely partook in nightclub hopping.
Zeke Rodriguez had never had a singular worry in his conscious world. Even on game day, even the night before game day.
Now it felt like this forum was a life jacket holding his head above the water before he was pulled under and drowned. Someone was always online, ready to chat like they were all old friends, like they didn’t know that the man behind the screen nameBeartownwas named Rookie of the Year, was an All-Star nine seasons in a row, was one of the top ten highest-paid players in the league. They didn’t, of course, know. Here, he was just a kid from Oklahoma who couldn’t sleep like the rest of them. He squeezed his eyes closed, reopened them, his left lid spasming from fatigue. Even if his arm were decent enough to throw right now, the rest of his body never could. The precisionrequired to hurl exactly the right spin or exactly the right placement or exactly the right velocity meant every single thing had to be in perfect working order, create a synergistic harmony. He couldn’t even control his left fucking eyelid right now, like the lid was a cry for help, a representation that the rest of his body was breaking down too.
Yeah, no fucking shit, he wanted to scream.
He pressed his fingers against his eyelid, then spotted a name he’d been chatting with the past week—Mama2Twins—and clicked on her handle.
Beartown:Mama2Twins, hey, you awake?
Mama2Twins:Totally. Wide awake. Just like always.
Zeke felt his shoulders soften. He liked her company, liked the way that they’d started chatting about Sudoku a few nights ago, which Zeke had never played before, so she sent him a link and they raced each other to see who could finish the puzzle first. Zeke had always thought Sudoku was for, like, senior citizens, so he had typed without thinking:
Beartown:do I need to join the AARP to play this?
Mama2Twins:how do you know I’m not 75? Maybe I’m a card-carrying member, you know. Is that ageism?
Zeke had turned the hue of a nuclear detonation. He wasn’t used to being judged solely by his words. Zeke Rodriguez had always been protected by the fact that he was Zeke Rodriguez.
Beartown:Shoot, good point. Are you 75? If you are, I apologize. And if it helps, I still love my grandma.
Mama2Twins:No, omg, I’m not 75. Though I’m not trying to be ageist! Of course!
Beartown:This is new for me, talking with strangers, I’m sure I’ll say something idiotic every night. So I apologize in advance.
Zeke liked that, that he was telling her that he was in this for the duration. That he was hinting at, asking her really, not to leave him stranded here.
Mama2Twins:Well, if it helps make you feel better, the AARP has started mailing me letters. Aggressively. Maybe that’s why I can’t sleep. Staring down the back half of your life seems like it could do that to a person. Maybe I should blame this all on the AARP.
