The Last Inning

The hospice room smelled of antiseptic and forgotten things. Marcus sat beside the bed where his father lay, eyes half-open, that terrible vacant stare that had turned the man who taught him how to hold a baseball into something unrecognizable. Something that shuffled and moaned and wore his father's face like a poorly fitted mask.

They called it dementia. Marcus called it what it was: his father becoming a zombie in slow motion, piece by piece, memory by memory, until the person he'd worshipped as a boy was gone, leaving only this hollowed-out vessel.

'You want to watch the game, Dad?' Marcus asked, though he knew no answer would come. He reached for the remote and pressed the button on the cable box, the screen flickering to life with some anonymous stadium, players small and distant.

His father had loved baseball. Had played minor league until an injury shattered his knee and forced him into the factory job that eventually broke his back too. But he'd never resented it. He'd told Marcus once, 'Sometimes you get to play the game, and sometimes you watch. Either way, you show up.'

Marcus hadn't shown up for much of anything lately. His marriage was two years gone, his career in finance gutted by the bear market that had wiped out half his clients' portfolios along with his own savings. He'd been sleepwalking through life, which was maybe why his mother had called. Said he should come say goodbye, though there was nothing left to say goodbye to.

Outside the window, a remote control helicopter hovered—some kid's toy buzzing past. It made him think of camping trips they'd taken when he was twelve, his father pointing out bear tracks, teaching him that the scariest things in the woods were usually the ones you couldn't see. That fear was natural, but courage was showing up anyway.

His father's fingers twitched. Marcus reached out and took the paper-thin hand, and for a second, just a second, those clouded eyes seemed to focus. Recognition flickered like a match in darkness, then was gone again.

But it was enough.

Marcus sat back and watched the game, his father's breathing rattling in the sudden quiet. He thought about what his father would want him to do, what the man who'd never surrendered to anything—not injury, not hardship, not the slow erosion of his own mind—would say about a son who'd stopped swinging the bat.

The baseball game went into extra innings. Marcus watched, and for the first time in a long time, he started to think about showing up again.