The World Played Chess (72)

When Beau came out of the shower, I asked him how he felt the camp had gone. He told me he didn’t think the coaches even noticed him.

“I was just a number,” he said, and I marveled at how my son had become so intuitive. We talked about grabbing some dinner, but Beau, a kid never cheated out of a good time, immediately got on his computer and after a few minutes said, “The Dodgers are playing.”

I loved baseball, always had, and I’d never been to Dodger Stadium, home of the Los Angeles Dodgers. I could check it off my bucket list. And seeing a game with my son would be priceless. I only recalled attending one game with my dad, at Candlestick Park, to watch the San Francisco Giants and Willie Mays. Create memories, I heard Elizabeth say.

When we arrived at the stadium, I approached the ticket counter. Tickets ranged in price from expensive to very expensive, but you could buy bleacher seats in the outfield for just ten dollars.

“Let’s just get those,” Beau said, and I knew he meant it.

“No. We might never see another game here,” I said to Beau, though inside I had a deeper debate. I was working a job I was not passionate about. At the very least I would enjoy the opportunities the money allowed me to afford for my family.

I bought two tickets three rows behind the first base dugout. The temperature was heavenly, hovering around eighty degrees.

Neither Beau nor I had eaten, so before getting to our seats, we bought Dodger Dogs, fries, and Cokes. Beau had a big smile on his face when we reached the seats, and we asked a guy sitting behind us to take our photograph. That photograph remains on a corkboard in my home office with the ticket stub.

We settled in to watch batting practice and eat, wiping mustard from the corners of our mouths. Yasiel Puig, the Dodgers’ right fielder, launched baseballs high into the air and far over the center field wall. Each crack of his bat hitting the ball sounded like a gunshot that echoed against the stadium’s still relatively empty seats.

Vin Scully stood on the field and I was just about to point out the Dodgers’ iconic announcer when Beau said, “I don’t want to play anymore.” He turned and looked at me. Even behind the sunglasses I could tell he was fighting tears.

“What?” I said, though certain I had heard him correctly.

“I don’t want to play football anymore. These people . . . they don’t care about me, Dad. I’m just a number to them.”

And there it was. As was so often the case, Beau had reached his own conclusion, seemingly without my help. I became a parent thinking of all the things I would teach my son and my daughter. I never realized how much I would learn from them. I knew then my son would never be a piece of meat. He would never be a number.

Because that was my son.

He was not me.

He was a better version of me.

“Why are we down here then?” I asked, not because I was bitter about the time spent or the cost. I wanted to hear my son’s explanation, his rationale. “Why did we come down for these camps?”

He set his Dodger Dog in his lap, which was when I knew things were serious.

“I thought I wanted to play, you know, for Chris—because he and I talked about it so much. But Chris would be the first person to tell me to play for myself or don’t play at all. Besides, it won’t be the same without him. I won’t be making plays behind him.”

I smiled. William had been right. Beau had to have this experience to truly understand Chris would not be with him.

“Sometimes I think I was supposed to be in the car that night,” Beau said, tears rolling down his cheeks from behind his sunglasses.

“It wasn’t God’s—”

“Don’t,” Beau said softly. “Don’t tell me God has a reason for everything; there’s no reason for someone so young to die. Chris was only eighteen. He had his whole life ahead of him.”

I took a breath and thought again of William’s journal. “Did I tell you about the summer before I went to college?”

Beau shook his head.

I told Beau about William and Todd, what they had been through and how neither believed in God. “They said they stopped believing because when they needed God, he wasn’t there.”

“I feel that way now,” Beau said, wiping his tears.

“I know,” I said. “But I do believe. You know why?”

“Why?”

“Because I was there that moment you were born, and the moment your sister was born. So I know, firsthand, there has to be a God to make something so beautiful as you and your sister, to give me and your mother such incredibly precious gifts.” I paused to let that sink in. “Every time someone so young dies, Beau, like Chris, it’s a shock because it’s not just a loss of life, it’s a loss of potential—what that life could have been. The death of someone so young shatters the illusion we all have at eighteen—the illusion that we’re immortal, that we’re never going to grow old, that we’re never going to die.”

“That’s what I thought,” Beau said. “I thought Chris and I would go to the same college, work and live near each other our whole lives, that our children would play sports together. I just never thought he wouldn’t be part of my life.”

“I know,” I said. “But we don’t know God’s ways. Maybe, perhaps, God spared you a greater tragedy down the road. I’m not making excuses. I’m just saying, we don’t know.” I thought of something else, something my older sister had once said. “You know, I used to complain about all my ailments, all my worn-out joints, until one day, your auntie Susie said to me, ‘Well, the alternative to growing old is a lot worse, so count your blessings that you’re old enough to have worn out a knee or a hip or a shoulder.’ Growing old is a privilege, Beau, not a right. I thank God every day that I wake up. I thank him every day for your mom, for you, and for Mary Beth.”