Extra Innings

The vitamin bottle sat on her nightstand like a tiny accusation. Orange-rimmed white cap, fluorescent label promising hope in gelatin form. Sarah had been taking them for eighteen months—prenatal vitamins, fertility vitamins, vitamins with names too long to pronounce. Each morning she'd swallow them with water, and each morning I'd watch her throat work, wondering if this would be the batch that finally worked.

"Another game tonight?" she asked, not looking up from her book. The question hung between us, heavy and familiar.

"Yeah. Dodgers against Giants."

"Right. The thing."

She never called it by name anymore. Baseball had been our first date—cheap seats, cold beer, that electric crack of the bat. We'd spent seven seasons sharing season tickets, splitting garlic fries, screaming ourselves hoarse. Then came the diagnoses, the treatments, the silent evenings where baseball felt like something from a different lifetime. Something we'd been before we became this—two people orbiting around the emptiness where a child should be.

The cat appeared three weeks ago. Scrawny, one-eared, matted gray fur. I'd started leaving food on the fire escape, then a towel when it rained, then finally opened the window during that cold snap. Now it slept on the foot of our bed, purring like a small motor.

"You're going again?" Sarah asked, gesturing toward the window where the cat watched us with amber eyes.

"He's hungry."

"We agreed no pets. Not with everything—"

"With everything what? With nothing?" The words came out sharper than I intended. "Sarah, there is no everything. There's just us. And him."

She stared at me, and for the first time in months, something broke behind her eyes. She picked up the vitamin bottle, shook it. The pills rattled like dried bones.

"I stopped taking them," she whispered.

"What?"

"Two weeks ago. I can't do it anymore. The hoping. The waiting. The feeling like I'm failing at something my body is supposed to know how to do."

The cat jumped onto the bed between us, pressing against her hip. She didn't push him away.

"I thought maybe you'd leave," she said. "If we couldn't—"

"I'm not going anywhere."

"But the baseball. You still go every week. I thought you were—"

"I go because it's the only place where I can still feel us. The way we were before all this." I took her hand. "I'd trade every game forever for what we lost. But I can't lose you too."

The cat purred louder, kneading her thigh. Outside, summer darkness settled over the city. Somewhere, a baseball game was starting. Inside, something new was beginning—not what we'd planned, not what we'd expected, but maybe, just maybe, enough.