Chapter 26

Saturday mornings had a different quality from the rest of the week. Even when Focus Man had nothing particularly difficult waiting for him at work, weekdays carried an invisible momentum. There were places to be, decisions to make, people expecting answers. Saturday morning asked considerably less of him.

He had developed the habit of walking through a nearby park before the day filled itself with other things. The path wandered past open fields and a playground before passing several baseball diamonds. During Little League season the fields were usually occupied by the time he arrived, and the quiet of his walk gradually gave way to the sounds of children playing ball.

He wasn't especially interested in the games.

At least that was what he told himself.

He had played baseball as a boy, as nearly every boy he knew had. There had been gloves left on bedroom floors, baseball cards traded according to mysterious valuations understood only by children, arguments over whether someone was safe or out, and summer afternoons when a ball and two other boys were enough to occupy several hours. But he had no particular allegiance to Little League now. The games were simply part of the park, like the playground and the trees.

That morning the sun was still low enough to throw long shadows across the outfield. Parents sat in folding chairs along the foul lines, some following every pitch while others held paper cups of coffee and appeared to be waiting for the morning to become fully operational. A younger brother or sister played in the dirt behind the backstop. Someone's dog strained against a leash, deeply interested in several matters having nothing to do with baseball.

Focus Man walked past the first field and slowed near the second.

A boy stood outside the dugout with a bat resting against his shoulder. Ten, perhaps eleven. The bat looked a little too large for him, though boys that age often seemed to be growing into their equipment rather than selecting equipment that fit.

Beside him stood a man Focus Man assumed was his father.

The father wasn't one of the coaches. He had no clipboard, no team cap, no apparent authority over anything happening on the field. His hands were in his pockets. He said something to the boy, who continued watching the pitcher.

Focus Man couldn't hear the words.

The father leaned toward him and said something else.

The boy smiled.

Then the man took his hands from his pockets and made a small motion as though holding an imaginary bat. He showed the boy something about the swing—not a complete demonstration, just the movement of his hands through the hitting zone. The boy tried it with the real bat.

The father shook his head and smiled.

The boy tried again.

This time the father nodded.

There was nothing unusual about any of it. Similar conversations were probably taking place beside every baseball diamond in America that morning. Fathers had been offering unwanted batting advice to sons for as long as baseball had existed, and sons had been deciding how much of it to listen to for nearly as long.

Still, Focus Man stopped walking.

He stood some distance down the fence, far enough away that he wasn't part of the scene but close enough to watch it.

The boy's name was called.

He stepped toward the batter's box, then turned back briefly.

The glance lasted no more than a second.

Focus Man recognized it immediately.

Are you watching?

The father raised one hand.

That was all.

The boy went to the plate.

The first pitch came in and he swung hard enough to suggest that, had he connected, the ball might have reached another county. He missed completely.

The father remained where he was.

No correction.

No gesture to keep his head down or shorten the swing or whatever fathers were supposed to communicate from behind a fence.

The second pitch went foul behind the plate.

The boy stepped out of the batter's box, adjusted his grip, and looked toward the pitcher again.

Focus Man found himself watching the father instead.

The man hadn't moved.

There was something about his stillness that held Focus Man's attention. He wasn't trying to participate in the at-bat from outside the fence. He had offered whatever advice he had to offer. Now the boy was on his own.

The next pitch came.

The bat met the ball with that clean wooden—or perhaps aluminum by then—crack that caused every adult along the baseline to look up at once.

The ball went sharply into right field.

The boy ran.

It wasn't a spectacular hit. The right fielder reached it quickly enough to keep him at first base. No one would remember it after lunch except perhaps the boy himself.

He stood on first with a grin that seemed disproportionate to the accomplishment.

Then he looked back.

His father smiled.

Focus Man began walking again.

For several minutes he thought about nothing in particular. The path curved away from the ball field, and the sounds behind him gradually blended into the larger noises of the park. A coach called instructions. Children shouted. Somewhere a parent applauded something Focus Man couldn't see.

Then, without having consciously invited it, he began trying to remember his father's voice.

Not his face. That came more easily. There were photographs for faces, and the mind seemed able to preserve an image even when the person inside it had become difficult to reach.

The voice was harder.

His father had been dead for many years by then. Focus Man had been eight when his mother came into his bedroom at night and told him. Four years later there had been a wedding and a new house and a stepfather and six new siblings. Life had continued doing what life does, adding new people and new experiences until the boy's childhood became a place increasingly far behind him.

But somewhere inside those first eight years there had been an ordinary Saturday morning with his father.

Surely there had been hundreds of them.

That was the strange thing.

He could remember the night his father died because the mind preserves catastrophe with an almost cruel efficiency. He remembered the bedroom and the hallway light. He remembered lying awake afterward, listening to the ordinary sounds of the house and waiting for a sound that would never come.

But the ordinary days were harder.

Those were the ones he wanted now.

He searched for his father's voice and found pieces of it.

A laugh came first.

Or perhaps only the memory that his father had laughed.

There was a phrase Focus Man could almost hear, something his father might have said to one of the children. The words wouldn't hold still long enough for him to identify them. When he reached for them, they seemed to recede.

He kept walking.

The sadness, if that was what it was, did not arrive sharply. He had lived too many years for that. His father's death belonged to the foundation of his life now, buried beneath everything built afterward. He did not walk around mourning an eight-year-old boy's loss.

But every so often the foundation showed through.

Ahead, another Little League game was beginning. Children ran from the dugout carrying gloves that seemed nearly as large as their heads. A coach stood near home plate explaining something to a boy who was plainly more interested in whatever his friends were doing behind him.

Focus Man smiled.

He wondered what the boy at the other field would remember.

Probably not the single into right.

Perhaps not the game at all.

Years from now, if he was fortunate enough to have his father for a long time, the morning might disappear completely into thousands of other mornings. The batting advice, the raised hand, the smile from behind the fence—none of it would have any reason to become important.

Focus Man hoped that was exactly what happened.

There was a luxury in having so many ordinary days with someone that you could afford to forget most of them.

He had been given only eight years.

And now, walking through the park on an otherwise forgettable Saturday morning, he discovered himself searching among those years for something that had once been too ordinary to save.

The sound of his father's voice.

A hand raised from beside a baseball field.

Some small indication that when the boy looked back, his father had been watching.

He could not recover a particular morning.

But he could recover the feeling.

That surprised him.

The words were gone. The details had faded. Yet somewhere beneath them remained the unmistakable memory of having once been a boy whose father was there.

Focus Man continued along the path.

Behind him another bat struck another ball, followed almost immediately by the voices of parents cheering.

He didn't turn around.

He didn't need to.

He knew someone was watching.