“Stop it!” Oscar’s father shouted. “Stop!”
But Auntie Fedelma didn’t stop. “I’m just explaining to the Other what the situation is exactly. He isn’t going to save us. He isn’t the one we’ve been waiting for.”
Save us? Oscar remembered that this was the phrase his father had used in the pizza shop, but he still didn’t know what it meant.
“He’s of no use,” Auntie Fedelma went on.
“Maybe things have changed! Maybe the person to break the Curse doesn’t have to be Born of the Curse!”
Auntie Gormley nodded vigorously in agreement.
“He should know his place!” Auntie Fedelma shouted. “He shouldn’t get ideas in his head! He’s of no use!”
And then there was a great whistle. It was loud and high. Everyone froze and turned to Auntie Gormley. Oscar hadn’t noticed the gap between her two front teeth, but there it was; and the shrill note pushed from it filled the small room. When she’d let all of the air out of her lungs, the room felt silent. Auntie Fedelma crossed her arms and closed her eyes.
Auntie Gormley then looked at Oscar. The whistle had exhausted her. She’d lost all of her air and now gasped a bit. Then she nodded at Oscar as if to say, I like you, and I hope that you stay.
Oscar nodded back. His father patted his shoulder, and Auntie Oonagh let out a nervous giggle.
Oscar looked around the cluttered room. He was in the underbelly of Fenway Park. He could barely believe it. He was here, with his father, and the Cursed Creatures. He looked up and saw a ladder sticking up into a rectangular hole in the ceiling. Where was the pitcher’s mound exactly? he wondered. Was it right overhead?
He pointed to the ladder. “What does that lead to?”
CHAPTER FIVE
Under the Pitcher’s Mound
OSCAR FOLLOWED HIS FATHER UP the rickety ladder through the hole into a small room—not much more than a crawl space, really. It wasn’t possible to stand upright. Oscar’s father was nearly bent in half. Even Oscar had to hunch. It was dusty, and at first the only light was shining up through the knotholes in the wooden floor. There was a trunk in one corner, some shelves built into one wall that were filled with neatly folded clothes, and a pallet made of thick, square, cloth-covered bases on the floor. A quilt of stitched-together Red Sox jerseys sat folded at the foot of the pallet. Oscar’s father put his duffel bag down in the corner and pulled the string on a bare bulb that was screwed into a simple fixture lodged in the wall.
That’s when Oscar noticed that the ceiling was just dirt, and he realized that this was really it: the underside of the pitcher’s mound. It was rounded outward; and at the center of the dome there was the rubber, the spot where the pitchers stood. Oscar imagined all of the greats who’d taken their places on the other side: Babe Ruth, Luis Tiant, Lefty Grove, Cy Young, Roger Clemens, Mel Parnell, Curt Schilling, and Pedro Martinez.
“This is it, isn’t it?” Oscar asked.
Oscar’s father nodded.
Oscar shuffled a few steps forward so that he was under the rubber. He touched the dirt, holding the palm of his hand flat against it. It was cool and soft.
“Is this your bedroom? Where you sleep?” he asked.
“It is,” his father said, opening the trunk. “I thought you’d sleep here, too.” He pulled out a rolled-up pallet and a quilt.
“I’d like that,” Oscar said, wondering how he would be able to fall asleep knowing he was lying just under the pitcher’s mound in Fenway Park.
Down below, Auntie Oonagh said, “It’s almost time for Radio to talk to us! Turn them up! Louder, louder!”
Auntie Fedelma shouted, “Radio, our one true voice! God bless him.”
“Who’s Radio?” Oscar asked his father.
“They mean the voices that come out of the radio, really. But mainly, most of all, the AM sports radio station.” He laid out the pallet and then shook out the quilt above it, letting it billow and then fall.
Oscar peered down on the aunties. Auntie Oonagh was snapping on each radio, all tuned to the same talk station; and with each click one voice got louder. Right now, a loud shock jock was hosting a visitor to the show: Dan Shaughnessy, a local sportswriter and the author of The Curse of the Bambino. Oscar had gotten the book out of the library, had read Shaughnessy’s columns, and had heard him on the radio before, too. Shaughnessy had lots of opinions and plenty of stats and liked to talk up the Curse; each flub in the field, each loss, each player trade seemed to lead him back to it. Oscar didn’t like him. At this very moment he was complaining about Schilling’s injured ankle, and how that was just another sign of the Curse.
Auntie Fedelma closed her eyes tight and listened fiercely. “So true, Radio! That’s right!” she’d call out. “You tell ’em, Radio!”
Oscar couldn’t stand to listen to Shaughnessy bad-mouth Schilling. He was one of the best pitchers in the whole league, and his injured ankle seemed like a cruel joke. Oscar had watched Schilling lose the first game in the series against the Yankees because he wasn’t able to plant his foot and his pitches were thrown off by the pain. It made Oscar’s heart ache in his chest.
“Why does Shaughnessy have to trash-talk the Sox all the time?” Oscar said.
“He just wants to sell books,” his father said. “I don’t take him seriously, but Auntie Fedelma worships him,” Oscar’s father said. “She isn’t that bad, down deep. You should just ignore her. And Auntie Oonagh is truly sweet and kindhearted. She can be flighty, but she means well.”
“And Auntie Gormley?” Oscar was most curious about her.
“She’s mysterious in a way but wise in her silence. You can trust her.”
Oscar looked down at her white hair, the twist of her bun. Auntie Gormley, as if sensing she was being watched, looked up. She gave a frail wave, and Oscar waved back.
“Can I ask you something?” Oscar said to his father.
“What is it?” His father took a seat on his pallet and stretched out his legs in front of him.
“How come you never brought me here before? Did you think I wouldn’t understand? Or that I wouldn’t care or something? Or that I’d get scared?”
His father looked at Oscar intently. “Here’s the thing, Oscar. We’re stuck here,” he said. “Now that you know that we exist, now that you’ve seen all of this, you’re stuck here, too,” Oscar’s father said. “It’s that way with humans when they cross over into our realm.”
“‘Realm’?” Oscar said. “What are you talking about?”
“You can go up above like I do,” Oscar’s father said. “But you can’t stay up too long or you’ll weaken. That’s why I didn’t want you to stay with me, to ever see where I lived. And then I was all muddled while waiting for your mother. I got to thinking that maybe you were, well, that you’d be the one to break the Curse, to set us free, that it was fate. But now I don’t know.” He wrung his hands and then looked at Oscar hopefully. “And I was thinking, too, that maybe you wouldn’t think it was so bad to be here with your dad. We’ve wasted so much time. I could have been a great father all along—if it weren’t for this Curse!” His father rubbed his forehead roughly. “What was I thinking? This is terrible. This is the worst mistake of my life, bringing you here!”
Oscar wasn’t sure what to say. He sat there for a minute, stunned by it all. “But what if I break the Curse?”
“Then we’d all be free, all of the Cursed Creatures,” his father said. “The Red Sox would even be able to win a World Series.”
“You mean that I could really help the Red Sox win a World Series?” Oscar asked.
“And much more than that…but it’s too much pressure to put on you. You’re just a boy.”
“I’d like to try to help,” Oscar said. “There’s nothing in the world I’d like better.”
“It’s too late. I mean, the Sox are already down two games to the Yankees in the playoffs. Too late.” His eyes were shining with tears. “This curse has been on the Red Sox for eighty-six yea
rs. Eighty-six years!”
Oscar had been wanting something from his father, a bond; and although this wasn’t the one he’d have chosen—being stuck here together—it was one nonetheless. “How did you end up here?” he asked.
His father sighed, and his voice took on a different tone, as if he were reciting a fairy tale. “It’s a long story.”
“A long, good story or a long, bad story?”
“Both.”
“Well, then, how about the part of the story where you met Mom?”
“I didn’t do it very well—balancing both lives. I met your mother here in Fenway Park. She was the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen, and we went to games together—that was the dating part. And then I asked her to marry me here in the park. And then we got a place together, not far away.” He was staring off, as if seeing it all in his head. He closed his eyes, soaking in the memory.
“And did she know all about you?” Oscar asked.
“The wings were hard to explain,” he said. And Oscar could tell that his father didn’t like that part of himself: his wings. Oscar knew what he meant. Oscar didn’t like looking different from everyone else either.
“What did you tell Mom about your wings?”
“She took them as some strange abnormality. Some people have webbed toes, you know. I wasn’t completely honest.”
“Why did you adopt me?”
“We both wanted to take in a child who didn’t have a home, and then you showed up and you were perfect. But I was sickly by then, barely able to get out of bed—fevered and weak all the time. And I thought I might die. And your mother was tired. I was a drain on her. She had to take care of a baby and me. And so I came back here.”
That was the reason he’d left? Oscar’d always thought that maybe his father had left because Oscar’s skin had turned darker, his hair kinky. But it wasn’t that at all, was it? His father had been sick. Oscar smiled. He couldn’t help it.
“What?” his father asked. “Why are you smiling?”
“Nothing,” Oscar said. He changed the subject.
“So you take care of the grounds?”
“Yep, it’s my gift.”
“What are their gifts?” Oscar asked, pointing downstairs.
“Auntie Fedelma got the gift of deep belief. But she got all the wrong beliefs to believe in.” He paused. “You know that, right? I don’t have to tell you that she’s wrong, that she’s an old fool?”
Oscar shook his head. “I know people like her,” he said, thinking of Drew Sizemore.
“Auntie Gormley got the gift of dreaming her soul elsewhere. She can dream that she’s a cat if she wants; and while her body is sleeping, she lives inside of that cat.”
“Wow,” Oscar said.
“Yes, it’s very wow; but it hasn’t ever been very useful. She calls it her parlor trick.”
“Auntie Oonagh got the gift of the future and the past. She has the Key to the Past, but she doesn’t go through the doorway anymore. She says the key was stolen from her once and the Door to the Past was broken into, which is a serious crime of trespassing.”
Oscar wasn’t sure what a Door to the Past would look like. It had to be grand, though, perhaps made of gold?
His father went on. “She locked the door after her father disappeared, as the Curse settled upon us. She told me once that she was afraid that she would slip into the past, if she let herself, and never come back out.”
“Mom talks about the past. She’s read books about how to get rid of the past.”
“Has she?” His father spoke in his broken voice, and Oscar realized he hadn’t sounded like that since they’d left Pizzeria Uno. Oscar regretted bringing up his mother.
“You’re tired, I bet,” Oscar’s father mumbled.
“You should get some rest.”
“Okay,” Oscar said.
His father pulled some pajamas off of a shelf. He looked around the little room. “I guess I’ll go downstairs to change. Give you some privacy to do the same.” His father climbed down the ladder. The radio was still on. The loud, slurry voice of a caller was rambling on, obviously inspired by what Shaughnessy had been saying about The Curse of the Bambino. “Shoulda never sold Babe Ruth,” the fan was saying. “The Bambino. 1919. That’s when we went wrong.”
Oscar had heard this before. Everybody had. Now that he was close to the Curse, he wondered if trading Babe Ruth was really tied up in it. The Curse seemed ancient. What if Oscar couldn’t break the Curse? What if his father was right and it was too big of a job?
Oscar lay back on his pallet and stared up at the dirt ceiling. He felt a million miles away from the apartment over Dependable Cleaners. He pictured it in his mind: the little, old-fashioned bell and weather vane at the top; the moist heat rising up; the smell of soiled clothes, sweat, starch, and perc—the acidic chemical that got out the stains. And then, sometimes, his mother would lift her finger in the middle of doing something ordinary—paying bills or washing dishes—and she’d say, “There it is. Do you smell that?” And Oscar would walk to wherever she was standing and inhale a waft from the bagel shop next door completely unexpected: yeasty dough and cinnamon. He missed his mother all of a sudden.
Would he really have to live here forever? It started to sink in: stuck. Hadn’t he felt stuck in his old life, too?
Oscar unzipped his suitcase to get his pajamas. He flipped open the plaid lid, and there on top of his neatly folded clothes was a small, rectangular present wrapped in blue tissue paper. A gift that his mother must have slipped in his suitcase.
Oscar picked it up.
It was thin. It only held one baseball card—he could tell. His mother had always gotten him bulk packs of cards from the dollar store that never had a great card in them. He had enough Allan Embrees and Mike Stantons to start wallpapering his room. But he’d always begged her for just one good card instead of bulk. Maybe his mother had listened this year. Maybe this was a Yaz card, finally, at last. His hands started shaking. He slipped off the ribbon and popped off the tape. And then he let out a sigh.
It was a mint-condition Ripken. But not Cal. It was Cal’s brother Billy, who’d blipped onto the scene and then off again. His mother had probably thought Ripken and just assumed she’d got the right one. The other problem, of course, was that it was the Orioles. The Baltimore Orioles. There was a little slip of paper inside with his mother’s handwriting on it. It read:
Oscar—my prince!
Happy birthday! Don’t forget about me here in Baltimore!
Love, Mom
P.S. Maybe you’ll be an Orioles fan one day!!!
And then there was a smiley face. Oscar hated the smiley face most of all.
An Orioles fan? Was she saying that he’d live in Baltimore one day when he was the Prince of Condos? Was she saying that he’d have to give up the Red Sox? Did his mother know him at all? He couldn’t ever be an Orioles fan. He was a Red Sox fan. Forever.
And now he was more than a Red Sox fan. He was one of the Cursed Creatures of Fenway Park. It almost felt good to know he was really cursed instead of just having a hunch. He shoved the card in the back of his suitcase. He didn’t want to be an Orioles fan or the future Condo Prince of Baltimore. He wanted to be the Prince of Fenway Park.
Tomorrow was his birthday, but he couldn’t imagine that it would really feel like his birthday here. Would he tour the park? He could feel it hovering above him. If he had been one of them, with fairy blood, would he have gotten a gift, a powerful gift? He closed his eyes and imagined the Red Sox playing a game in Fenway. He wondered what that would be like.
His father reappeared, and as he climbed into bed, Oscar could see the small rises on the back of his father’s pajamas—two lumps that twitched ever so slightly. His wings.
Oscar stared up at the ceiling. “I know you don’t go to the games,” he said. “But do you ever lie here during a real game?”
He looked over at Oscar and smiled. “You can hear their cleats scraping in the dirt.”
CHAPTER SIX
The First Birthday Gift
OSCAR DREAMED OF HIS MOTHER. She was dancing in the stands of Fenway Park with a man Oscar knew was Marty Glib—even though Oscar had never seen Marty Glib. Oscar was standing on the pitcher’s mound in his old Rockets’ uniform from the summer before. His father was in the dugout. “Go on,” he said. “Show ’em what you got, Oscar!”
Oscar had a ball in his hand, and suddenly there was a batter up to the plate. It was Weasel-man with the leashes of his noisily chirping weasels tied to his belt loop. The three aunties were in the stands, too. Auntie Fedelma had her hands over her eyes. Auntie Oonagh had her hands over her ears, and Auntie Gormley had her hands over her mouth.
“Go on,” his father said again. “Show ’em what you got!”
And so Oscar pitched the ball with all of his might, and it came back at him—not just one ball but many. All of the balls were on wires now, and the wires were connected to Oscar’s body. The balls were coming at him hard. He took off running away from them, ripping off each wire as each ball on it rocketed toward him.
“Go, Oscar!” his father cheered.
Oscar didn’t want to be cheered, though. He wanted everyone to realize that the game was fake, that nothing was real. He wanted help. He called out, “Mom! Mom!”
But Marty Glib and his mother were suddenly great dancers. They were leaping ten, fifteen bleachers at a time and spinning wildly up in the air. They couldn’t hear him.
The metal placards of the scoreboard kept clacking. Weasel-man was winning by ten runs, then a hundred, then a thousand. Finally, Oscar had ripped all of the wires loose. He tilted his head back to catch his breath. It started to rain. The drops pattered down on his face.