Chapter Twenty Seven

Adam's POV

He had agreed to the baseball game on a Tuesday evening in the parking lot of Eli's daycare, which was a sentence that still had the quality of an implausible dream when he replayed it.

Jules had met him there — neutral ground, her choice, which was correct — to pick Eli up, and Eli had come out of the building at full speed, as Eli always did, and had registered Adam standing beside his mother with an expression of uncomplicated delight that Adam was not prepared for and had to look away from briefly to collect himself.

"Are you coming too?" Eli demanded.

"If that's okay with your mom," Adam said.

Eli looked at Jules with the frank, assessing look of a child who had not yet learned to be subtle. Jules looked at Adam with the frank, assessing look of a woman who had.

"Saturday," she said. "He likes the Millhaven Caps. Home game at two."

"Done," Adam said.

* * *

Saturday came. Adam was outside the building at 1:15 because he had left the hotel at 12:40 out of a nervousness he had not experienced before a meeting since he was twenty-four years old. He sat in the car and looked at his phone and scrolled through nothing and then put it away and looked at the building.

Jules came out at 1:30 with Eli, who was wearing a baseball cap approximately four sizes too large that kept sliding down over his eyes. He pushed it up with one hand while walking and pushed it up again before they reached the car. He regarded Adam.

"Hello," Eli said.

"Hey. Cool hat."

"It's Gordon's hat," Eli said, as if this was self-explanatory.

"Gordon has a hat?"

Eli gave him a patient look. "Gordon is the hat."

Adam looked at Jules, who had the expression of someone suppressing a smile. "Gordon is his bear," she said. "The hat is Gordon's hat, which Eli has borrowed for the game for good luck."

"I see," Adam said. He did not fully see but he filed it for later consideration.

Jules met his eyes briefly. "I'll be home," she said. "Call me if anything—"

"Mom." Eli had already opened the back door of the car and was climbing in. "It's fine."

Jules looked at her son. Something moved across her face — the particular complicated expression of a mother letting something go for the first time. She looked at Adam.

"Two hours," she said.

"Two hours," he agreed.

She leaned into the back door. "Seatbelt, baby."

"I know, Mom."

She snapped it in herself despite his assurances, kissed the top of his head, and stood back. Adam held her gaze for a moment. She nodded once — small, precise, trusting him with the most important thing she had — and walked back to the building.

He got in the car.

"Okay," Eli said from the back seat, adjusting Gordon's hat with both hands. "Let's go."

* * *

The stadium was loud and bright and smelled like the specific combination of cut grass and hot dogs and sunscreen that Adam associated with summer in a way he couldn't quite trace, some old memory below conscious access. Eli went into it with his arms out, practically vibrating, and Adam held his hand in the crowd with a grip that was more careful than Eli probably required and which he suspected was actually for his own benefit.

They found their seats. Eli immediately stood on his. Adam sat beside him and spent the first five minutes parsing the rules of engagement — apparently the left field seats were suboptimal but Eli had decided they had character, and cotton candy was non-negotiable, and the man two rows in front of them who kept yelling the wrong name at the pitcher was, in Eli's opinion, "very confused."

"He's saying Martinez," Eli explained, in the tone of someone laying out a complex diplomatic situation. "But that's not Martinez. That's Alvarez. Martinez is number eleven."

"How do you know that?"

"I know all of them," Eli said, as if this was a minimum reasonable requirement for attendance.

"Right. Of course."

Cotton candy was procured. It was extremely blue. Eli got approximately forty percent of it on his shirt and seemed untroubled by this. Adam ate his section and thought about the last time he had sat in a stadium and decided it had been with his mother, who had liked baseball for reasons she'd never fully articulated and would drag him to games occasionally when he was small and let him eat whatever he wanted, which was the only parenting philosophy she ever fully articulated: life's short and you're at a baseball game.

He thought about that for a moment.

The Caps went ahead in the fourth. Eli made a sound like a teakettle. The confused man two rows ahead shouted Martinez's name at the correct batter for the first time all afternoon and Eli said, solemnly: "He figured it out."

"Growth," Adam agreed.

"Yes," Eli said, very seriously. "Growth."

In the seventh inning the stadium settled into the kind of comfortable late-game quiet that crowds get when the score is safe and the evening is warm. Eli had been talking for most of five innings without apparent need for response, which Adam had come to understand was not rudeness but just how Eli experienced enthusiasm — outwardly and at volume — and somewhere in the seventh, the talking stopped.

Adam looked over.

Eli was asleep.

He had simply gone — between one sentence about the shortstop and the next, he had listed sideways and settled against Adam's arm and gone entirely, completely, out. The enormous cap had slid down over one eye. He still had three blue fingers from the cotton candy.

Adam sat very still.

He was aware, in a way he had not given himself permission to be fully aware of before, of the exact weight and warmth of a small person asleep against his arm. The smallness of it. The complete unselfconsciousness of a child who had decided, without deliberation, that this was a safe place to stop.

He sat very still and did not move.

His phone buzzed. Cooper. He looked at it: Everything quiet. Sal still stationary. Enjoy the game.

He put the phone away.

The Caps scored again. The crowd did its thing. The man two rows ahead shouted the right name. Eli did not wake up.

Adam put his face briefly into the top of Eli's head — the dark curls that were his own curls reproduced in a smaller, more chaotic version — and he breathed in and then he sat back up and looked at the field and let it happen, whatever this was. Let it land on him the way things land when you stop trying to manage their impact.

He had a son.

This small, certain, funny, encyclopedic, Gordon-hat-wearing person asleep on his arm was his son.

He was going to make it right. Not fix it — you could not fix what had happened, that was a word for smaller things, for broken objects and miscommunications. He was going to do the slower, larger thing: he was going to earn his place in this, year by year, consistently, without pressure and without expectation, until Eli knew him and Jules trusted him and the space between who he had been and who he was became something narrow enough that it could be crossed.

He sat in the stadium noise with his son asleep on his shoulder.

The game ended. The crowd began to move.

Eli slept through the announcement. Slept through the exit music. Slept through the first ripple of departing crowd.

Adam sat still until Cooper texted again: Everyone else has cleared the section.

He looked down at the sleeping boy and said, very quietly, to no one: "Okay. Okay. We can go."

He gathered Eli against his shoulder without waking him, the cap held in his free hand, and carried him out of the stadium and to the car and settled him into the back seat so carefully, so precisely, with the concentration of someone handling something that mattered more than anything he had ever handled before.

He called Jules from the parking lot.

"He's asleep," he said. "Out cold. Didn't even feel the move."

He could hear the smile in her exhale. "He does that. It's sudden. It's like a light switch."

"We had a good time," Adam said. "He explained everyone's stats and I was found wanting in my baseball knowledge and there was cotton candy."

"His shirt?"

"Blue."

She laughed. "How blue?"

"Significantly."

"I have a spray for that." A pause. "Adam."

"Yeah."

"Thank you," she said. "For today."

He sat in the parking lot with Eli asleep in the back. He looked at the blue cap resting on the dashboard where he'd placed it. Gordon's hat. He thought about all the things he had not been there for — the birth, the first steps, the first word, the entire history of a person he had missed — and he thought about all the things he was going to make sure he was there for from now on.

"Thank you," he said.

He meant it.