Apology by Jon Pineda (books to read this summer .txt) 📕

The boy on the mound started his windup again. Tom watched the arm pull back like the hammer on an old-fashioned pistol. Then the wrist unlocked with a jolt as the rest of the body lunged forward. The ball flew into a bullet.

Tom watched it cross the stretch of space. But it was wild and curved.

Micah, instead of hitting the deck, had turned toward it, facing it head-on. It seemed practiced. The boy’s arms had simply dropped, pinned back, as if the weight of the bat had been too much. The ball slammed the middle of his chest.

“No!” Tom yelled, jumping off the bleachers.

He had run out onto the field without hesitation.

Micah lay collapsed at the plate. No one had moved. The players and coaches were stunned, the ump frozen.

Tom could not say anything. He didn’t care that the ump had come to life and was pleading with him not to move the boy. Tom lifted Micah into his arms. He wasn’t going to wait for an ambulance.

“Mom? Dad?” Tom said, confused, bringing the boy to his parents.

“Go,” his father said. “Just go! Run to the car!”

“Tommy, go!” his mother screamed.

On the backseat, Micah barely opened his eyes.

“Dad?” he said, crying.

“It’s okay,” Tom said.

“Dad?”

“You’re fine. Do you hear me, baby? You’re fine. You’re fine.”

Tom kept saying these words, “You’re fine,” as he sped along Hampton Boulevard, toward the downtown. He said it as if to make it so.

The trauma sustained had produced a huge contusion, as if someone had spilled jelly and smeared it under the boy’s skin.

At first, upon Micah’s arrival to the emergency room, the attending physician suggested only an ice pack and, after checking Micah’s vitals, was pleased by the apparent confirmation of his judgment. He found nothing out of the ordinary.

Boys will be boys, the young doctor told Tom and even laughed.

Then Micah fainted.

Mario was sitting by the lockers, in the dark, when he heard the call come over the intercom. His mind switched over, filled now with the light of the screens he knew were waiting for him in another room. The intense graphics swirling with colors, crushed with pixels. He could look into the space of a body and then the representation of it. He searched images for the question.

No, the statement upon which he had built his life.

You must fix everything, Mario.

After prep, he could start to breathe. It was fine. His uncle was free. So was the next breath Mario took. It was getting easier again.

When he saw the last name on the chart, his throat closed. He backed away from the entrance to the operating room and tore off his gloves and then his mask. He did not feel the door at his back, did not realize he had turned and walked into the bright hallway, the artificial light. The floor shiny as ice.

He dodged bodies, ran past those being wheeled away. In the glass wall of the gift shop, pink and blue stuffed animals were stacked in a checkered pattern, a large, plush chessboard turned onto its side.

“Hello, Dr. Guzman,” someone said as he darted through the lobby. The automatic doors were not fast enough. He banged on them until they finally slid open.

Under the entrance awning, a young father was nervously securing an infant car seat inside a new minivan. The new mother was pushing herself slowly up out of her wheelchair. She was laughing at her husband, who was laughing as well. He was telling her, “Stop, stop, you’re making me mess up.”

.  .  .  .

There, in the sun, Mario paused.

He hunched over, put his hands on his knees, and took a deep breath. A voice inside his head told him to call in Dr. Williams. She could take over. Yes, that made sense. She had more experience. Plus, he knew this family. It might affect his ability to do the best for them.

Some of the cold air from the hospital was still in his clothing. He raised up. His face was warm, his eyes wet. He realized he might cry out at any moment. Across the parking lot, the glaring windshields seemed to blink on and off. Little lights, eyes staring back at him.

There was no time to wonder where the owners of these vehicles were, if they had driven themselves here for a procedure. If they were even still alive. There was no time to think about his place among it all, where he fit in. No time for Janet. No time for Tammy. All he knew was there was a child in the building behind him who would almost certainly die if he didn’t turn around and go back.

There was no going back.

He didn’t know how much time had passed.

“Dr. Guzman?” one of the nurses said. “Are you all right?”

He looked at her covered face, her skin lit from the screen she stood next to.

Others appeared to him the same way.

He nodded.

When he was a boy, he had loved the feeling of disappearing into a day. He had loved the way he could run with the other boys from the neighborhood and play until the sky grew dark and the world was a cool blanket of air.

The world’s one job, it seemed then, was to wrap itself around you, and you tore it off, grappling. It wrapped around you each day, and again, you tore at it and tore at it until one evening the sky was no longer a covering comforting you. It was just an untouchable thing, like so many other things in your life, and the way back, once it became so, was lost. There was no looking back at the path. The path had been swept clean. The earth no different from the empty sky, all of it pressed into one indecipherable puzzle.

Often, he would sit in his room and study while he heard the familiar voices of boys racing past his house.