The Last Inning

The IV cable snaked across the hospital room like a transparent lifeline, pulsing with fluids that were supposed to save him but only seemed to prolong the dying. My father's skin had turned the color of wax, translucent enough that I could trace the blue rivers beneath. The glass vase on his bedside table held three oranges, their vibrant skins mocking the room's sterility. He hadn't touched them in days.

"They gave me another vitamin regimen," he wheezed, pointing at a counter crowded with amber bottles. "Fifty years ago, I ate spinach by the canful. Your mother made it every Tuesday. Said it'd put hair on my chest." His chest was hairless now, sunken beneath a hospital gown that hung loose on a frame that had once thrown a ninety-mile-per-hour fastball.

I sat in the vinyl chair, my suit jacket wrinkled from three days of wearing. My office had called twice—some merger that couldn't wait, some crisis that seemed trivial now. At forty-two, I'd finally made partner, but the corner office felt empty when the man who'd taught me to swing a bat lay dying.

"You remember that baseball camp?" he asked suddenly. "Summer of '86. You hit that homer off the college kid."

"I was eight, Dad. It was tee-ball."

"Same difference." He smiled, and for a moment, the years fell away.

His breathing slowed. The monitors beeped—a rhythm I'd come to hate. I thought about all the vitamins, all the spinach, all the years we'd spent trying to cheat death, only to lose anyway. The oranges on his table would rot before anyone ate them.

"Hey Dad?" I whispered.

"Yeah, slugger?"

"Next season. We're playing catch."

He closed his eyes. "You're on."

The cable continued its silent drip as the sun set, casting the room in the color of oranges, of baseball fields at dusk, of everything we'd lost and everything we'd never get back.