Gone, Baby, Gone - Dennis Lehane [27]
Amanda McCready had played in this league. Signed up and brought to the games by Lionel and Beatrice, she’d been an Oriole, and her coach told us she usually played second base and could catch the ball pretty well when she wasn’t transfixed by the bird on her shirt.
“She missed a few that way.” Sonya Garabedian smiled and shook her head. “She’d be right out there where Aaron is now, and she’d be tugging at her shirt, staring at the bird, talking to it every now and then. And if a ball came her way—well, it would just have to wait until she was done looking at the pretty bird.”
The boy standing at the tee, a round and rather large kid for his age, smashed the ball into deep left, and all the outfielders and most of the infielders ran after it. As he rounded second base, the big boy decided, What the heck, he was going to try and field it too, and he ran into the outfield to join the party as the kids tackled and rolled and bounced off one another like bumper cars.
“That’s something you’d never see Amanda do,” Sonya Garabedian said.
“Hit a home run?” Angie said.
Sonya shook her head. “Well, that too. But, no, you see that pig pile out there? If we don’t get somebody to stop it, they’ll start playing King of the Mountain and forget why they came in the first place.”
As two parents walked out on the field toward the melee and kids somersaulted off the pile like circus performers, Sonya pointed to a small girl with red hair who was playing third base. She was probably five and smaller than almost anyone on either team. Her team shirt hung to her shins. She looked at the party going onto the outfield as more kids ran toward it, and then she bent to her knees and began digging in the dirt with a rock.
“That’s Kerry,” Sonya said. “No matter what happens—if an elephant walks out onto the field and starts letting all the kids play with its trunk—Kerry won’t join in. It simply wouldn’t occur to her.”
“She’s that shy?” I said.
“That’s part of it.” She nodded. “But more than that, she simply doesn’t respond to what other children predictably respond to. She’s never really sad, but she’s never really happy either. You understand?”
Kerry looked up from the dirt for a moment, her freckled face squinting as the dying sun bounced off the pitcher’s stop, and then she went back to digging.
“Amanda is like Kerry in that way,” Sonya said. “She doesn’t respond much to immediate stimulation.”
“She’s introverted,” Angie said.
“Partially, but not in a way that makes you think there’s all that much going on behind her eyes. It’s not that she’s locked in her own little world, it’s that she doesn’t see much that interests her in this world either.” She turned her face and looked up at me, and there was something sad and hard in the set of her jaw, the flatness of her gaze. “You’ve met Helene?”
“Yes.”
“What’d you think?”
I shrugged.
She smiled. “She makes people shrug, doesn’t she?”
“Did she come to games?” Angie asked.
“Once,” Sonya said. “Once, and she was drunk. She was with Dottie Mahew and they were both half in the bag, and they were very loud. I think Amanda was embarrassed. She kept asking me when the game would be over.” She shook her head. “Kids this age, they don’t grasp time the way we do. They just notice if it seems long or short. That day, the game must have seemed real long to Amanda.”
More parents and coaches had gone out to the field now, as had most of the Astros. Several kids were still bouncing in the original pile, but just as many had broken up into separate groups, playing tag, throwing their gloves at one another, or just rolling around on the grass like seals.
“Miss Garabedian,