Rooting for Rafael Rosales Read online

  They left through the front door and walked around to the back, Claire grabbing the pool noodle for no reason. She stopped when she saw the garden, her mouth dropping open. “Wow,” she said.

  The borage was now in full bloom, and there were too many bees to count. Maya couldn’t believe her luck. Not luck, she reminded herself. Planning. These plants were supposed to attract bees. But it was amazing when things worked exactly the way they were supposed to.

  “It’s beautiful!” said Claire. “BEE-yootiful!”

  “Ha,” said Maya. “Thanks.”

  Claire swung the pool noodle through the air. She took a step closer and did it again.

  “Don’t do that near the garden,” said Maya. “You don’t want to hurt the plants.”

  “But one of the bees is bad!” Claire said.

  “No. No. They’re all good bees.”

  “It’s a bad bee from Darth Alcerius!” Claire sliced the air again, this time sweeping the edge of the noodle through the prairie grass.

  “No it’s not,” said Maya firmly. “Now knock it off!”

  Claire kept at it, flattening some of the grass and looking like she might knock the blossoms off the borage. Maya swooped in, took the other end of the pool noodle, and stopped Claire from swinging it again. Claire made her mouth into a tiny O and let out a piercing, high-pitched shriek.

  “Come on,” said Maya. “All I did is stop you from wrecking my garden.”

  Claire still screamed, dropped her end of the noodle, and shoved her arm in Maya’s face so she could see the angry red welt forming.

  “The bad bee got me!”

  “Oh, honey, I’m sorry.”

  “I told you it was bad,” the girl said accusingly.

  “Come on, let’s go inside.”

  So they trooped back inside, this time through the back door, past her sister who was in the living room. “I’ll explain later!” she said as she hurried Claire to the bathroom. She’d read about treating bee stings on one of the gardening forums. The most important thing was to get the stinger out as soon as possible.

  Claire was crying, but at least she was still. She could have a total meltdown over getting a broken animal cracker, but in a real emergency, she was cool. Or maybe paralyzed with fear.

  Maya sat her on the toilet and worried at the sting with tweezers until she extracted the slender hair-width stinger and dropped it into the trash. Claire winced when the sliver came out but was still quiet.

  “We probably need to sterilize that,” Maya said, taking a bottle of witch hazel from above the sink.

  “It’ll hurt!” Claire pulled back her arm.

  “No, it doesn’t. I promise. It’s not alcohol.” Claire let her splash the welt with the liquid. The sore spot looked puffier and redder than before, and Maya began to worry.

  “Are you allergic to bee stings?”

  “I don’t know. I never been stung before.” Claire’s eyes were puffy now, and the lids looked heavy.

  “Can you breathe OK?” Claire’s breathing sounded rasping, but it was hard to know since she’d been crying.

  “I can breathe,” Claire said in a whisper. Now Maya was sure she looked puffy all over.

  “Oh no,” she said. “Grace!”

  Luckily, Dad had carpooled to work that day and the car was in the garage. Grace drove them to the emergency room at North Memorial Medical Center, her fingers white-knuckled on the steering wheel. Maya sat in back, holding Claire and making sure she was still drawing in air, which she did in thin, struggling gasps.

  “I’m not supposed to be driving without a licensed driver in the car,” said Grace. “Plus, it’s against the law to have a child without a car seat.” It had been her idea to drive the mile to the hospital instead of calling an ambulance, but now she was having second thoughts.

  “It’s an emergency!” Maya reminded her. “There’s no way you’d get in trouble. Plus you’re driving really good.”

  The cars behind them didn’t agree, bleating their horns in frustration and zooming past them as soon as they got the chance. One guy shook his fist at them. Grace cringed and waved her hand in apology. She turned onto the road by the hospital and started to go the wrong way on the C-shaped driveway to drop off patients, but saw her mistake and steered away before an SUV came barreling down the driveway. More horns, more hand waves and rude gestures.

  “Gee,” she said. “You would think at a hospital people would be more understanding.” She found the right turn and dropped them off at the entrance.

  “I’ll find a place to park.”

  “We need to call Rodney too,” said Maya. She had the number memorized and recited it four or five times.

  “All right. I have my phone.” Grace drove away, leaving Maya to hurry Claire in the entrance. The girl was still breathing, but it sounded even more strained now. A woman in hospital garb saw them and whisked Claire and Maya away into a little room labeled Triage. Maya answered a barrage of questions from one nurse while another peered into Claire’s eyes with a flashlight, checked her pulse, and tried to talk to her.

  “So,” the nurse said with a West African accent. “This child is having a severe allergic response to this insect sting. We must give her an immediate injection of epinephrine. Is her parent or legal guardian available?”

  “No. I’m the babysitter. My sister is trying to get hold of her dad. One of her dads.”

  The nurses talked for two seconds and decided the injection was more important than protocol. Claire’s eyes were too unfocused to notice the injector, and she barely responded when the nurse applied it to her thigh and held it in place for a few seconds. It looked more like a glue stick than a needle.

  Claire’s breathing was normal a few minutes later, but her eyes were still foggy. Maya moved a chair closer to her so Claire could lean against her shoulder.

  “She is fortunate,” said the nurse with the accent. “You got her here very quickly, and that was smart.” Maya hoped Rodney and Seth would think so. It wasn’t so smart to show a small child a garden full of bees. “Bee venom is not as strong in the spring,” said the nurse. “It’s worse in the summer, and then she might not be so lucky.”

  Maya swallowed hard. She had been gripped with fear for the past hour, but had not really believed—not deep down—that it was possible for a tiny insect to kill a person. What if this had happened later in the summer? What if Dad had driven to work and Grace didn’t have the car?

  Grace finally found them, her chest heaving because she’d been running.

  “Both dads will be here soon,” she said. “Is Claire all right?”

  “She is now,” said Maya. She wasn’t sure that Claire would be all right, and the thought of facing Claire’s parents filled Maya with cold terror. “We got her here in time.”

  Claire’s eyes were now more alert. “I got a shot,” she said, remembering what happened. “Do I get a lollipop?”

  ***

  Rodney arrived short of breath and anxious. He nodded at Maya as he swept Claire into his arms and fussed over her.

  “Thanks for waiting with her,” he said. “Why don’t you come by tomorrow and we can talk about what happened? I need to be all about Claire right now.”

  “Of course.” Maya slipped out to the lobby. Grace was sitting there and playing on her phone.

  “Claire is going to be fine,” said Maya. She gave Grace a recap of everything that had happened in the triage room. “I guess we can go home.”

  “Dad’s going to get us after work. His carpool driver will drop him off.”

  “Huh? Why does he have to drive?”

  “Because it’s not an emergency anymore,” Grace explained. “I shouldn’t drive without a license.”

  “Right.” They could have walked home, but Dad would still have to come get the car.

  Maya crossed the lobby and flipped through magazines in a rack. They were mostly news and celebrity gossip. She stopped at a sports magazine because the cover caught her eye.r />
  THE CRADLE OF SUPERSTARS: SCOUTING BASEBALL TALENT IN THE DOMINICAN REPUBLIC

  She grabbed it and paged through it until she found the cover story, starting on a two-page spread with a sepia-toned photograph of a pitcher in full windup.

  For years, hot talent has been coming from this small Caribbean country. Now it’s coming at top price. Find out why.

  The chances of Rafael being in the story were close to nil, but reading it would pass the time. Maya returned to sit next to Grace, who saw the cover and gave her a thumbs-up sign. Maya had trouble concentrating on the story at first, but in a few minutes she was completely absorbed. Her father nudged her as she was reading the last paragraph.

  “Let’s go, hon. I guess you had a rough day.”

  Maya nodded, blinking back tears, and followed her father and sister to the car.

  ***

  The next day was Saturday. Maya wheeled the wagon to Claire’s house, not caring if she looked silly dragging a wagon full of toddler toys.

  She thought about leaving it on the front path. She knew Rodney was expecting her to come in and talk, but now she was afraid to face him.

  The door opened before she could make a decision. It was Rodney.

  “Come on in, Maya,” he said.

  Maya sat in an armchair while the two dads sat on the couch, trading looks before they spoke. They’d obviously talked already about how to handle this. She’d never been in trouble with anyone besides her parents. This was a new feeling for her. Suddenly she was a problem to be solved.

  Claire was napping, so everybody whispered.

  “You’ve been really reliable, and Claire loves you,” Seth started. Maya knew there was a “but” coming.

  “And you handled the crisis yesterday really well,” said Rodney. “You didn’t take chances and got Claire to the ER, and we really appreciate that.”

  “I’m really sorry about what happened,” said Maya.

  “Anyway,” said Rodney, “given that Claire had a scary experience, I’m going to cut back on my hours for a couple of weeks.”

  “And then it’ll be summer,” Seth said. “Claire is going into an all-day summer camp. So…”

  “Am I fired?”

  The two men looked at each other again, and Maya knew the answer.

  “I wouldn’t say fired,” said Rodney. “But your services aren’t needed anymore.”

  Maya’s mom worked in human resources, so Maya knew that meant fired.

  ***

  When she was back outside, Maya stared into the backyard at the plastic slide and turtle-shaped sandbox, feeling a pang of loss. It wasn’t always fun to babysit, but it made her feel grown-up and important. She had also become fond of Claire, even with her prattling and mood swings.

  When she got home, she walked around the house and into the garden. She saw that the door to the garage was open. It was probably Dad, tinkering with something.

  She looked for bees in the garden but didn’t see any.

  She took a step closer and noticed something fuzzy lying in the grass. She stooped down and saw the tiny body of a bee. Was this the bad bee that had stung Claire? She knew bees died when they stung people. She picked it up gingerly, thought about burying it, and decided that was ridiculous. She carried its lifeless body to the garbage bins behind the detached garage, lifted the lid, and started to drop it in. There was a red canister in there, right on top of the pile. Something about it caught her eyes. She dropped the bee and removed the canister.

  MAKE YOUR HOME AND GARDEN A NO-FLY-ZONE

  KILLS OVER 200 INSECTS INCLUDING FLIES, WASPS, AND MOSQUITOES. WORKS FOR UP TO EIGHT WEEKS!

  The Alceria logo was visible in the upper left. Maya’s heart sank into her stomach.

  She walked into the garage on legs that seemed to be made of jelly.

  “What did you do?” she asked her father in a hoarse voice. He was kneeling by the mower, doing something with a wrench.

  “Huh?”

  “I found this.” She held up the plastic canister.

  “I sprayed your garden. Grace told me what happened, and I didn’t want anyone else getting stung.”

  “The garden was for the bees!” Maya said weakly.

  “Honey…what?”

  “I planted that garden for pollinators, and this kills them,” she said, tossing the container on the ground between them. “It says so right on the bottle.”

  “Most people don’t want a bunch of bees in their yard,” Dad said, confused.

  Maya didn’t have the energy to argue. She returned to the garden and started ripping up plants. The canister said the chemicals worked for eight weeks, which meant the treated flowers would go on killing bees—and butterflies and ladybugs—for months. The plants had to go. Her father started toward her, said something she didn’t hear, then walked into the house, shaking his head.

  The thistles tore her skin, and the milkweed wept on her hands. She couldn’t rip up the grass, even wrapping it around her hand and pulling. The strands dug into her skin, but the grass didn’t give. She got the shears from the garage and knelt down to do it, steadying the shears, which was hard to do with shaking hands.

  In half an hour it was all gone, the hours and hours of work, the weeks of waiting were shoved into one of the heavy compostable bags. She rolled the top of the bag and left it by the recycling bin.

  After showering off the dirt and chemicals, she closed the door to her room, lay on her grass-colored rug and looked at the sky-colored walls. This time it didn’t soothe her. It was all so fake, she thought. Fake grass, fake sky, fake clouds, fake birds.

  She tried to shut it all out by telling herself stories about Princess Bombadala, but when she remembered that she would no longer be able to tell those stories to Claire, a fresh wave of grief washed over her. Everything she had loved about her life was gone in one afternoon.

  “Do you ever want to be a pitcher?” Rafael asked Juan after school one afternoon. Over a year had passed since he started playing at the campo, and now another school year was underway. Rafael was in fifth grade. The days were long and stuffy, and Rafael got through them only by thinking about the hour or two of baseball he could squeeze in later.

  “No.” Juan glanced at his right hand. He still didn’t have the large, strong palms and long fingers of his brother. “Pitchers only play once or twice a week. I want to play every day.”

  “Good point.” Rafael hadn’t thought about that. Watching most of the games from the bull pen would be boring.

  “Plus the routine!” Juan added. “It’s too much! Hugo can barely use his arm the day after he pitches.”

  “It’s that bad?”

  “Even when he ices it right after, he has to rest it for a couple of days. That’s how it is for pitchers. He’s home today because it still hurts from Saturday.”

  “He was estupendo,” said Rafael. Hugo had pitched against batter after batter as the boys tried to get a hit off him. Toward the end of the day it was a free for all, boys jumping off the fence to take a few swings, each wanting to see if they could show up the hot pitcher. Rafael had been thinking about it all day, fantasizing about standing as tall as Hugo had that afternoon. Hitters had big moments, but only a pitcher could be the center of attention for an entire game.

  “What about you?” Juan asked. “Do you think about pitching?”

  “No,” Rafael said. Fantasies were one thing, but he had never liked pitching, not the way he loved to bat and run the bases. “I’m put on earth to punish pitchers.”

  “Matatán!” Juan laughed at his bravado.

  “Buenas tardes, muchachos!” said a voice.

  The boys looked up. A sandy-haired man was standing in front of them. “It was your brother who was pitching here Saturday the past, true?” His Spanish was heavily accented and clumsy. He was from the United States.

  “Right,” said Juan.

  “His arm is still sore,” Rafael added, wanting to cement his insider status.

 
; “Of course,” said the man. “He played very good. Tell him I’d like to talk to him.” He offered a card to Rafael, who was closer, but Juan snatched it away.

  “Thank you.” The man nodded, and Juan strode away. Rafael had to hurry to catch up.

  “What team is he from?” he asked.

  Juan spun around.

  “Cierra tu boquete!” he barked.

  “What did I do?”

  “You told a big league scout that my brother has a sore arm! Do you know nothing?”

  “Sorry.” Rafael still didn’t understand. Maybe he did know nothing. “I’ll shut my hole next time,” he promised. Juan still glared at him. Rafael had never seen him this mad.

  “I get it,” said Rafael. “You’re worried that if he knows…if he thinks that Hugo is hurt, he’ll lose interest.”

  “There are one million boys the teams can choose from,” said Juan. “A rumor is all it takes to ruin his future.”

  “Those million boys aren’t Hugo,” said Rafael.

  “It’s the truth,” said Juan. “But we don’t tell those men anything.” He put a hand on Rafael’s shoulder. “We’ll all three be pros, but Hugo’s the sure thing. When he gets signed, my family never needs to worry again. You know that.”

  “I know it.”

  “My mother won’t sew T-shirts in that factory, and my dad won’t crawl around in bathrooms.”

  “No,” said Rafael. “Sorry. I was dumb as a stone.”

  “Next time be quiet as one,” said Juan.

  ***

  Rafael couldn’t always play after school. When he went home to change his clothes, his father might ask him to help with chores or his mother would put him in charge of Iván. Rafael lived for Saturdays, when he could walk to the campo in the morning with Juan and Hugo, have lunch at their house, and run back to the campo again in the afternoon. His parents never pressured him to stay at home on Saturdays. They knew that day was sacred.

  “You shouldn’t keep eating their food,” his mother fretted one evening.

  “They barely notice,” said Rafael. At the Santos Garcia home, there were always guests on Saturdays: neighbors and friends and relatives Rafael could not keep track of.