The Bottom of Everything

The hospital waiting room smelled like antiseptic and old coffee. Marcus checked his iphone for the third time in five minutes — still no messages, not that he expected any. Sarah had been in a coma for six days, and the doctors kept using words like 'minimal consciousness' and 'prepare yourselves.' He felt like a zombie moving through the world, his body performing the motions of living while something essential hollowed him out from the inside.

He'd been sitting here for hours, watching the fluorescent lights flicker, when Sarah's brother appeared in the doorway with something clutched in his hand. 'Found this in her apartment,' David said, his voice cracking. 'She wanted you to have it.'

It was a baseball — specifically, the one Marcus had caught at the game they went to last summer, back when they were just friends teetering on the edge of something more. He remembered turning to her in the seventh inning stretch, her face illuminated by the stadium lights, laughing at his terrible hot dog. He'd kissed her for the first time two innings later. The ball still had the faint smell of popcorn and summer.

'She wrote something on it,' David said. 'Look.'

Marcus turned the ball over in his hands. In silver Sharpie, Sarah had written: 'For the man who caught me.' Underneath, in smaller letters: 'I was going to tell you. I love you.'

The nurses were suddenly running past them down the hall, shouting something about monitors and emergency response. Marcus stood up, the baseball clutched so hard his knuckles turned white, and understood that sometimes the bottom of the ninth comes when you're not ready for it. Sometimes you don't get another inning. He walked toward her room, not knowing whether he was walking toward a beginning or an end, only knowing that he needed to be there, holding the proof that she had loved him back.