Chapter Thirty-Seven
Late February, 2035
As Dr. Allende and the OB had feared, Natalie’s body strained under the rigors of her pregnancy. Working feverishly, they got the bleeding to stop that night in the ER and saved Natalie’s baby, but it came with a stern warning and a new set of circumstances for Natalie. She was not to leave her apartment for the balance of the pregnancy and was ordered on full bed rest.
Suella continued to give Natalie the “vitamin shake” every day, knowing that it was among the only ways that her daughter was getting complete protein. She still made the shake using liver powder, but discovered that chocolate and malt flavor worked better in disguising it. She would alternate between the chocolate and vanilla flavors. Most days Natalie was too tired and listless to register much emotion about the flavors of her food, anyway.
David spent more time at the apartment. While he could not skip on his required classes without his grades or skills suffering, he could come home early from campus and study in the apartment instead of the library or the student center on campus. Many afternoons Suella and Natalie would watch videos or holos while David would sequester himself in the opposite side of the apartment, studying feverishly.
Natalie’s condition and the doctor’s orders meant that she couldn’t keep up with her webcasts and podcasts. Her viewership declined, and so did her income. Suella, spending more time at the apartment watching Natalie, had soon began to neglect a few of her clients, also, missing out on new opportunities. Something had to give. She soon started running her business out of Natalie’s apartment and, along with some kick-in from Nathan, started to help them financially as well.
The day she found out that her mother and father were paying almost half of the rent, she started crying. “I feel so useless,” she said, trying to sit higher on the bed pillows, as if it was an attempt to assert herself.
Suella was so moved she rushed forward to ease onto the bed and hold her daughter in her arms and let her cry into her chest, rocking her back and forth as though she were a baby. What words could she think of to help comfort Natalie? In the end, she could not think of anything. Some things were better left unsaid.
The afternoon Natalie had done all of the crying, her color improved and by the end of the day she was laughing along at a recording of the 60th anniversary show of Saturday Night Live.
A nurse from the OB office visited once a week to check on Natalie, who had not bled or felt any sharp pain since the pier incident. Suella also checked her daughter’s vitals whenever she thought of it. Everything seemed normal, but many days her blood pressure floated in the low range, with readings in the low hundreds over seventy. When she told the pretty, pleasantly round nurse, she just shrugged and said. “That’s fine, but I would keep an eye on it.”
Nathan had packed his bags for Arizona at the end of January and had been working at the instructional league. He called her every other day, either on her handset or over the screen when she returned to an empty house in the evening. She realized that it was the first Valentine’s Day they’d been apart in their entire marriage but decided against pointing that out to him.
But their time apart seemed to get to him. One night his eyes looked bloodshot, with bagginess underneath them. At first she wondered if he’d been drinking, but he was speaking too clearly for that. “I miss you, babe,” he said.
Suella felt warm inside for him. “I miss you too, hon. This big house gets lonely without you.” If there’d been any more space in Natalie’s apartment, she would have stayed there, possibly sleeping on an inflatable or portable bed.
“So come out here for a few days,” Nathan said, a boyish smile brightening his features.
“Darling, I can’t do that,”
His entire look completely changed in the next few seconds, as his whole expression metamorphosed into a frown. “Why not? I need you.”
“So does Natalie.”
“Aw, she’s fine. She’s a tough kid, and she’s got David there with her, and what…that nurse comes in now and then, doesn’t she?”
She felt her heart strings being tugged. “It’s more than just that…” she started to say, wanting to add that she wanted to be there for Natalie, after all the ways she’d wronged her during her young life.
“We can have the nurse come to her apartment every day while you’re gone,” he said. “If anything changes for the worse, she can just call you right away. She isn’t anywhere near her delivery date, is she?”
“No, it’s supposed to be about halfway through March.”
“So what do you say?” Nathan leaned toward the camera at the hotel where he was staying. He gazed at her expectantly, his head looming larger than the rest of his body because of the camera angle.
“Okay, I’ll come,” Suella told him.
The next morning, she arranged for the extra nursing visits and told Natalie. Rather than showing a defeated, crestfallen expression, her features brightened. She had to stay in the center of the bed nowadays because her stomach had grown so large it could pull her sideways and send her tumbling. “That sounds like a lot of fun for you,” she said. “And it would make Daddy so happy to see you.”
She double-taked at her daughter’s choice of words. The last time Natalie had said the word “daddy” she’d been wearing boyish rompers, her hair in pigtails.
Suella was all set to drive there, latching onto a slot for the six-hour trip, so she could get some work done. “No way doll,” Nathan said. “Go to Burbank. The team jet is going to pick you up.”
She wondered if the baseball team had access to special air space or received special consideration for the holding pattern because the whole flight took only forty minutes, from landing to touch down. As always, Phoenix looked bright and hot. Suella smiled when she thought about their first date, decades before, when he’d sent the equipment manager to pick her up and take her to the stadium.
This time, he showed up himself, wearing a huge grin when they saw each other at the gate. He took her in his arms and hugged her as though they’d been apart for months. Speaking directly into her ear as they walked arm-in-arm to the luggage carousel, he said “I’m so glad you could do this.”
They went directly from the airport to the hotel near the training complex, all the while laughed and chatted it up like giddy teenagers. Suella gave updates about the state of Natalie’s pregnancy belly: “I swear that girl looks like she’s about to pop any day now.”
Nathan turned to her and flashed one of his trademark, boyish grins. “Yeah. Can you fucking believe it? We’re going to be fucking grandparents. Grandparents!”
“I know, I know.” She reminisced about her own grandmother, who’d had six children and had lived in frumpy housecoats since Suella was a little girl.
When they stopped at the hotel and Nathan changed into his uniform, she stopped by to look at herself in the big dresser mirror. She saw no new broken blood vessels or wrinkles but still felt as if she’d aged. As her husband finished jumping into his pants legs, she slathered on an extra dollop of UV protectant. Yes, the calendar still said winter that was irrelevant in the bright, dry Arizona desert country. If she wasn’t careful she could still burn and blister like a tomato.
Nathan drove them to the baseball complex in his uniform and Suella felt a twinge of panic. She’d been out of the baseball loop for years. There would be a whole new slew of wives and she would be one of the elders. “I’m going to be at one of the aux fields,” Nathan said as they passed the sparkling little stadium. Other fields surrounding it contained only a backstop and a couple of dugout rows, just the way she remembered from Nathan’s playing days.
She quickly realized that they would spend the day on one of the smaller fields where sunlight glinted off metal bleachers while coaches barked at 18 and 19 year old men fielding grounders and hitting batting practice. Small cliques of young women sat in the bleachers wearing bi
g sunglasses and floppy hats. Even through the sun protection gear, she could see that many of them were barely out of their teens, hardly older than Natalie. She approached a circle of four women talking amongst themselves, their backs to the action in the field. “Hi, it looks like I’m going to be the mother figure,” she said, extending her hand toward one of them. The women graciously greeted her and cleared away a space in their small circle.
Through their small talk she learned that most of them were new to the whole world of professional baseball. They listened with eyebrows raised behind their sunglasses as Suella told stories of all the excitement and the glamour that awaited them at the highest levels, with the posh clubhouses and the unique sorority formed by all the wives.
A woman who’d introduced herself as Emily shrugged and wrinkled her nose. She managed to be red-haired, tanned and freckled at the same time, like Ariel from “The Little Mermaid.” Emily said “That sounds great, but I worry sometimes. What if he doesn’t make it? I’ve heard that there are lots of good pitchers who never get to the big show.”
Suella smiled for her. “Then you tell him to listen to everything that man out there says.” She pointed toward the pitching mound, where Nathan had dragged a small table out of somewhere and had set it up near home plate.
A tall, dark-haired woman named Ginger said “What the hell is he doing?”
Suella laughed. “It’s the table trick.”
They all watched as Nathan arranged the pitchers in a line near the pitching mound. One by one he placed them on the mound and told them to launch a breaking pitch toward home plate. The idea was to throw a curve ball with such a sharp break that it would hit the table flush on top, as if it had been dropped from above. The first pitcher to try threw a straight pitch that angled down and bounced off one of the table legs. He hung his head in embarrassment, looking down.
“That’s okay buddy,” Nathan said. “You’ll get it.”
Some of the guys could trhow a looping curve that hit the tabletop, causing Suella and the young women to cheer. After an hour’s worth of that Nathan wheeled out an odd-looking netted rectangle called a pitch-back and placed it behind home plate. He’d taped an outline of a black square toward the center of the netting. “Hit the black, boys!” Nathan said. “Paint the black!” One by one the pitchers fired baseballs toward the netting.
By late afternoon, Suella slumped across a couple of hard metal bleachers, all talked out and exhausted. She’d held court all day long while the other wives pumped her with questions about what they could look forward to over the next several years. She remembered that when she was had first married Nathan many of the coaches’ wives had confided in her about what life was really like. Yes, there were highs and lows, but she wouldn’t have traded it in for anything. Weren’t all marriages like that anyway?
She and Nathan discussed their day over burritos and beer at a southwestern-themed restaurant. “Yeah, I saw you playing den mommy to all those little kitty cats,” he said.
“There was one of them I really liked.” While she poked around at the beans and rice, she told him all about Emily and how much she reminded her of herself. “I think she said her husband’s name was Roger, or Rudy or something like that.”
Nathan paused to gaze up at the light fixtures and think. “Oh, you mean Rudy Denison?”
“Yeah. I think so. How did he do?”
Nathan shrugged. “Fair to middling. He might stick if he learns how to throw a knuckleball or something like that.”
Suella remembered Emily’s worried expression. “But she said in high school he went undefeated and led his league in strikeouts.”
With a smirk, Nathan finished chewing a large piece of beef before continuing. “Darling, every single boy out there today could say the same thing.”
“But isn’t it hard to throw a knuckleball?”
“Yeah. There hasn’t been a knuckleballer worth a shit since Dickey, and he retired in ’22. Sucker was almost 50 when he finally quit.”
So was Nathan, she wanted to point out, but at that moment she was more interested in talking about Rudy Denison. “So is he going to make it or what?”
“Who, Dickey? Yeah, that fucker is already in the Hall. He was a first ballot.”
“No moron. Rudy. Does he have a chance?”
Nathan shrugged again, attacking his side order of mashed potatoes. “Oh yeah. He’s going to be a 200-inning guy and an All-Star. His little wifey is going to be able to blow his money at all the best stores and they’re going to live in three different houses and he’s going to be able to buy his mommy a mansion.”
Suella grinned when she realized that Nathan was talking about himself. He’d been able to do all of those things. “You’re bullshitting.”
“Well, it’s what you want me to say, right? That girl probably reminds you of you when you were that age. And you want her to have everything you had, right?”
For a moment she could not speak. “You know me well.”
That evening they watched multi-screens, drank wine and passed the time with carefree conversation. “I’ve gone full circle,” Nathan said. “I’ll never forget my first pitching coach, Salty Weller. He had a big beer gut, chicken legs and gray hair poking out the sides of his cap. I can still see him all red and sweaty faced, screaming at me for missing a sign. And now I’m him.”
Suella patted Nathan’s soft, but trim middle. “Ain’t no beer gut here.” Shortly after that, the wine made her drowsy and she dozed off. Later, Nathan woke her up with one of his tender kisses. She said “Well hey there Mr. Salty Bones.”
In the darkness she could still see his eyes gleam as he smirked. “Yeah. And I’ve got a bone for you, too.”
After they’d made love they held each other and she drifted off into a comfortable though dreamless sleep. Hours later the first few rays of morning sunlight sliced through the gap in the drapes, waking her. Nathan had rolled away sometime during the night and now lay sprawled along the edge of the king bed. She could have made coffee but decided to let him sleep a while longer. Water was healthier anyway, she told herself as she poured herself a plastic tumbler full and gently opened the sliding glass balcony door.
For a long while she sat content in the cool morning air while she looked toward the east, at the golden dawn rays of light splash down on the distant desert landscape. Maybe Emily Denison would someday get to a place in her life like this, whether Rudy made it as a big league pitcher or not. She smiled.
Her phone then trilled into her ear, jarring her out of the stillness. She clicked in without checking a line ID. Whoever was calling her at this hour probably had something important to say,
And he did.
It was David. “I’m really sorry to bother you this early, Mrs. Worthy.”
His voice sounded so strained she hardly noticed that he was still being so needlessly formal with her. “What is it?”
“Well, she’s pale and her skin feels…you know…clammy.”
From the background, Natalie called out “I’m fine mom. Don’t worry.”
“David, honey can you link her in?”
A moment later Natalie joined the line. She sighed and said “I haven’t been out in the sun for a while. That’s why I’m pale.”
“David, is the kit there? Can you touch her temperature, please?”
“Mom! Don’t worry!”
Suella heard rustling in the apartment as David located the vitals kit. She waited patiently, picturing him finding the thermometer and touching it against Natalie somewhere. “100 point one,” he said in a gloomy voice, like the newscaster the day the dollar crashed,
Natalie persisted. “It’s nothing. I’m always like this in the morning. I’ll be fine in a couple of hours. I swear.”
“Have you been drinking the shakes I left?”
“Yeah. I had one the other day.”
Suella wondered if
she was only imagining a hint of haughty defiance in her daughter’s voice. “Anything else? Any pains or leaks?”
“No mom. God, I’d know if my water broke.”
David said “Well I’ve seen you wince and grit your teeth when you think I’m not looking.”
“Yeah? Well let’s see how you feel when you’re carrying around an eight pound baby in your stomach.”
It was all Suella needed to hear. “Stay right there, honey. I’m going to get on the next plane home.”
By then Nathan had awakened, stirred by the anxious tones of his wife’s voice. He wore just a pair of jockey shorts, and with his tousled hair and dazed expression he looked lost and boyish. “If that’s what you want to do, I won’t stop you. But the team plane leaves tomorrow. Are you sure you can’t wait until then?”
She took his hand and turned to him. “Nathan, it’s our daughter.”
He brought her to the airport after they dressed and she packed her suitcase in record time. Like a good husband, he waited around to make sure she could find a flight quickly. Fortunately, commuter jets criss-crossed between Phoenix and Los Angeles every ten minutes at not-too-scary prices.
By lunchtime Suella arrived at the parking lot for her daughter’s apartment and used her code to flash herself in. She met David at the doorway and her heart immediately went out to him. He shifted from foot to foot and his sharp eyebrows formed a “v” above his eyes.
When she saw Natalie however, she let out a loud gasp.
Natalie looked like a pregnant corpse.
“Oh my god, oh my god,” Suella kept saying as she gathered Natalie’s listless form into her arms and held her, rocking her back and forth.
“Mom, I’m okay,” Natalie said. “I swear.”
Suella noticed a concerned-looking David gazing down at the both of them. Before speaking, she choked herself back to soften her tone and her words: “How long has she been like this?”
“Just this morning.” He rocked back and forth in a childlike way before adding “and yesterday, kind of.”
“Mom, I’ll be fine,” Natalie protested once again. “I probably look worse than I feel.”
Suella lifted up from the bed, knowing that her daughter needed fast nourishment. She skipped quickly to the refrigerator and peered inside, immediately finding the two shake containers she’d left several days earlier. They’d both been filled to the brim and neither of them seemed to have been touched. The realization hit her like a cold slap in the face. Still, she inhaled, pausing for a moment to take everything in. The last thing Natalie needed now was an angry confrontation with her mother.
Still, she couldn’t let it go. Returning to the sleeping area, she took Natalie’s cool hand and said “Sweetheart, those shakes I left in there are still there.”
Natalie winced, closing her eyes tightly. “I know. I’m sorry.”
“Why didn’t you drink them? You’d feel so much better now.”
Natalie bit her lip and swallowed for a moment, looking away. “Because they have liver powder in them.”
At this point health and survival trumped political ideals and she wanted to scream at her daughter. Instead she managed to say “But I want the best for you and your baby.”
Natalie sighed, looking away for a moment thoughtfully. “And I want to have my baby my own way.”
Just then David lowered down and put his arm around her back, pulling her in and cradling her as a sign of solidarity.
“Well, we have to get you to a doctor,” Suella went on.
“Mom…”
“I want what’s best for you and your baby.”
“Mom, I feel fine. I really do! Whatever it is will pass.”
David looked up at her, his expression every bit that of a protective husband and father. At the same time his eyes held a flicker of warmth for Suella. “We can get one of the doctors on a call,” he said. “They’d probably take it right away and be able to tell us what to do next.”
Suella felt a surge of pride for him. “That’s a good idea. I’ll set it up right away.”