Keeping Score (18 page)

She came up to Maggie's room and sat on the bed next to her.

"Oh Maggie, I'm so sorry," Treecie said after Maggie told her about Jim and Jay-Hey. "That's awful, just awful."

Maggie blinked several times, hard. There wasn't any way to stop tears from filling your eyes once they had decided to do it. You could blink them away, but only after they were already there.

She swallowed before she spoke. "Treece, I feel so bad," she said. "I really, really wanted to help, but nothing I did—"

"That's not true," Treecie said. "You wrote to Jim all the time and you could tell how much he liked getting your letters 'cause he wrote back every time up until—well, as long as he could. And you know how much Jay liked those cards—he even learned to write English so he could thank you for them!"

"I know. But it didn't make any difference in the end."

Treecie thought for a moment, then looked Maggie right in the eye. "How do you know?"

"How do I know what?"

"How do you know it didn't make a difference?"

A little nettled now, Maggie sat up straighter. "What I mean is, this terrible thing happened, and there wasn't any way for me to stop it, and I can't even help Jim feel better about it, and nothing you say is gonna change that."

"And what
I
mean is, you don't know what's going to happen next," Treecie said, nettled right back at her. "Jim might still get better—I mean, he probably
will
get better, he talked to your dad, didn't he? I bet it was because he saw your dad after the game, and that was all your idea, to get everyone together for a game. So it isn't over yet, and you shouldn't talk like it is."

Maggie shook her head and stared down at the bedspread. "It's over for Jay," she whispered.

That shut Treecie up. Neither of them said anything for a while.

"Well," Treecie said at last, and her voice was quieter, "what are you gonna do now?"

Maggie looked at her. "I'll be fine, I just have to give it some time," she said—in a sarcastic pretend-grownup voice.

"Why do they always say that?" Treecie said, energetic again. "You don't care how you're going to feel
later,
you care about how you feel
now,
and they act like that doesn't matter."

She reached out and gave Maggie several exaggerated pats on the head. "'You're young, you'll get over it.'"

Maggie wagged her finger. "'Run along and play now.'"

Treecie stood and put her hands on her hips. "'Never mind, leave that to the grownups.'"

Maggie again: "'Forget it—you'll understand when you're older.'"

Treecie flung herself back down on the bed and spoke in her regular voice. "We understand plenty. And just because we don't understand everything doesn't mean we should forget. You won't ever forget Jay, even if you do feel a little better someday."

Then she looked at the wall and frowned. "Hey, what happened to his picture?"

Maggie bit her lip. "I put it away. To—to keep it safe."

Treecie snapped her fingers. "Hey, I know what," she said. She jumped up. "I'll be right back."

It was close to an hour before Treecie returned. She handed Maggie a brown paper bag.

"It's not your birthday present," Treecie said. "That's why I didn't wrap it. It's just a ... present-present."

Maggie reached into the bag and pulled out a picture frame.

"It'll keep Jay's picture from getting torn or anything," Treecie said. "Where is it?"

"It's around here somewhere," Maggie mumbled. "I'll find it later."

Treecie started to say something, then stopped and studied Maggie's face. "Okay," she said.

Maggie opened her bureau drawer to put the frame away. "Thanks, Treece," she said. "It's perfect. Really."

She didn't say what she was thinking: that Treecie must have spent some of her precious camera money on this gift. Maggie found herself blinking hard again as she stroked the smooth wood of the frame for a moment before she closed the drawer.

Maggie had just reached home after school when she heard loud voices down the street. It was Joey-Mick and his friend Davey.

"You're nuts!" Davey was yelling. "It was
ONE
-and-oh, not oh-and-one."

"Just you wait," Joey-Mick yelled back. "I'
M
tellin' ya—" He caught sight of her. "There she is—hey, Mags, wait up!"

Both boys ran the rest of the way, Joey-Mick's long arms and legs pumping, all elbows and knees. He beat Davey to the stoop by three steps.

"Maggie—remember the Thomson home run—" he panted.

Davey broke in. "I say the first pitch was a ball—"

"—and I say it was a strike. Branca had him oh-and-one—"

Maggie looked at Joey-Mick and then at Davey. "It was..." she paused dramatically. Neither of the boys
moved, but she felt like they were both sort of leaning toward her.

"It was a strike," she declared. "And I can prove it, too!"

"I'll get it, I'm faster," Joey-Mick said, already in the house.

"In my closet!" Maggie yelled. "At the bottom!"

A short silence. Then Davey shook his head. "What'd you do, save an old newspaper or somethin'?"

Before she could answer, Joey-Mick burst out onto the stoop and waved the scorebook at Davey.

Maggie held out her hand. "I'll find it," she said.

"No, lemme do it." Joey-Mick began paging through the book. "Look—here it is, see that little backwards'S? That's the pitch count, and backwards means strike looking. If it was a swing, she woulda made a regular'S. Oh-and-one, that's what the count was, right there in black-and-white!"

Davey took the book and studied it for a moment.

"See?" Joey-Mick said again. "You owe me an egg cream!"

"Yeah, yeah," Davey muttered ungraciously. A pause. "How come you don't got the home run written down?"

It was true. Maggie remembered how she hadn't been able to fill in the square that day. "Didn't feel like writing it in," she said. "Stupid Thomson."

"Stupid Thomson," Davey echoed, shaking his head in disgust. He turned a few more pages. "Hey, look at this one, 13–1, over the Reds." He chortled. "Look at all those runs."

Then he looked up at Maggie and raised his eyebrows. "Pretty neat, Maggie-o."

"Thanks," she said. She could feel her cheeks getting pink.

"I gotta go," Davey said. "See you after supper, maybe."

Joey-Mick didn't even say goodbye; he was busy studying the scorebook. After a few moments he glanced up.

"Know what?" he said, waving the book at her. "This book makes you probably the biggest Bums' fan in the neighborhood. And around here that's sayin' somethin'."

For the first time in weeks, Maggie felt a little warmth inside her chest.

"It's like a—a country or somethin'," Joey-Mick went on. "Baseball, I mean. A place where everybody's crazy about the same thing. But you can't play 'cause you're a girl, so you found another way to—to live there, and talk baseball and everything. I mean, you know more about baseball than most of the guys I know!"

Maggie's eyes widened. That was a pretty long speech for Joey-Mick, and his voice hadn't cracked the whole time, not once. If Treecie had been there, she would have said what's the big deal, of course girls could learn about baseball same as boys. But Maggie knew that he meant it as a compliment. She tried to cover her surprise with a shrug, and tilted her head in thanks.

Then she sighed. "I don't know," she said slowly. "I
was thinking that ... that I'm done keeping score. I'm not gonna do it anymore."

There. She had said the words out loud, and it felt even worse than thinking about it.

"Why not?"

"Well..." She looked up at him and then away. "This is going to sound really stupid, but when I was keeping score, it felt—I felt sort of like I was helping. I mean, I know I wasn't
really
helping, but..." She stopped.

Joey-Mick nodded and grinned. "One time I wore the same shirt ten days in a row 'cause they were on a winning streak."

"I remember that!" Maggie exclaimed. "Mom was really mad that you wouldn't let her wash it."

Then she lowered her head. "But none of that stuff helps, not really," she said. "So I figure it's just a big waste of time."

Joey-Mick handed her back the scorebook. "With some things, you don't know for sure."

She frowned. Hadn't Treecie said almost the same thing? "Don't know what?"

"Whether it's a waste of time or not." He shrugged. "All that time I spent playing baseball? And it turns out I'm way better at basketball." He cocked his head a little. "I'm gonna be first-string this season. Varsity. At guard. Coach told me today"

Varsity? Joey-Mick was only a sophomore. In baseball last season, he hadn't even been a starter on the
freshman
team.

Maggie had been to some of his basketball games. He was good, all right, but she didn't know much about basketball, so she hadn't realized
how
good.

"Really? Wow. Gosh, that's pretty neat, Joey- Mick."

"Yeah," he said. "So you could say all that baseball practice was a waste of time. But maybe it wasn't. Maybe it taught me stuff that'll help me in basketball, too. I don't mean skills, but you know—discipline, focus, stuff like that."

Then he grinned. "Know what they started callin' me? 'Not-So-Teeny Joe.' But that was too long, so they tried 'Not-So Joe,' but that didn't make any sense, and then one of the guys said I was a maniac on the court, so now they're callin' me 'Nutso Joe'."

"Nutso Joe.... Maybe that'll get shortened again, and you'll be plain old Nuts."

Joey-Mick made a fist and pretend-jabbed it at her. "You call me Nuts, I'll call you a taxi," he said.

Dumbest joke ever, but they both laughed anyway.

Maggie took the scorebook back to her room. All the others were on her bed, higgledy-piggledy; Joey-Mick must have thrown them there when he was looking for the right one. She picked up the books and sat down with them on her lap.

Five of them. 1951. The '51 playoffs. 1952, '53, '54.

It was always wait till next year.

Maggie opened the book on top of the pile. 1951. She leafed through it slowly. Page after page of little squares filled with tiny numbers and letters ... and every square Maggie looked at brought pictures to her mind, all vivid with the colors and sensations of having been at a game herself.

Jackie dancing on the base path.

Pee Wee going deep in the hole.

Willie in center field, running toward the wall as fast as he could.

She could almost hear Red Barber's voice on the radio. Maggie held her breath, as if those plays were happening at that very moment. Would Jackie steal second? Who would get to the ball first—Willie or the wall? The crowd roaring in the background ... and once, her own voice had been part of that crowd noise.

Her breath eased out slowly as she continued to turn the pages. Every game, every inning, every play—really, every
pitch
she had recorded in the book had been a chance to hope for something good to happen.

She shook her head and almost smiled. Dodger fans probably had more practice at hoping than fans of any other team.
The same thing over and over again, but always different.

Prayers were like that, too. Her bedtime prayers—saying almost the same thing each night, but feeling a little different sometimes, depending on what she was praying for. And the novena.... She recalled the quiet and stillness in the church, the glow of the candles both fierce and lovely, her mind full of thoughts about Jim, hoping for him to get better.

Maybe praying was another way to practice hope.

If that was true, then between the Dodgers and praying, she ought to be getting awfully good at hoping.

Maggie sighed.
What's the use of getting good at it? Hope doesn't
do
anything.

Another voice spoke up inside her head.
But hope is what gets everything started. When you make plans, it's because you hope something good is going to happen. Hope always comes first.

One by one, she picked up the scorebooks and turned their pages, pausing now and then to recall the plays and the games. As she flipped through the last notebook, something fluttered to the floor.

It was the photo of Jim and Jay. Maggie bit her lip, remembering how furious she had been when she hid the picture there. She picked it up and fingered the torn corner.

Then she rose from the bed, took the frame Treecie had given her out of the bureau drawer, and put the photo carefully into the space behind the glass. The missing corner hardly showed at all.

Maggie spent the next few minutes clearing off the top of the bureau, putting away bobby pins, books, a pencil stub, other odds and ends. She picked up the scorebooks one by one and stacked them in order of their years, 1951 on the bottom. She put the score-books on top of the bureau, and took her war notebook down from its place on the shelf and put that on the stack, too.

Finally, she placed the framed photo of Jim and Jay carefully on top.

As she left the room, she turned back for a moment and stood in the doorway.

It was just right. She would see them every time she came into the room.

December, three days before her thirteenth birthday. Maggie walked home from the bus stop after school, thinking about the celebration that had been planned. Her and Treecie's joint birthday. They would be going downtown with Mom and Mrs. Brady to see a matinee and then have tea at a fancy hotel. They would get all dressed up, too; Treecie had said she was even going to wear a hat.

Maggie had Treecie's present ready. Last week, there had been a sale at the library. Many of the books looked pretty old, but others were in perfectly good shape and Maggie couldn't understand why they were being sold. Some cost only a nickel.

Browsing through the piles on the tables, Maggie had come across a spiral-bound book with lots of photographs in it. It was called
Women at Work: A Tour Among Careers.
Several of the pictures had been taken by Margaret Bourke-White.

Maggie knew that name. Treecie's hero!