Page 119 of Running Home to You
Abby surveyed his gaze and knew he was serious.
“Are you sure that’s a good idea?” Isla asked. “You’re leaving tomorrow, aren’t you? And Abby, you’re only a few months—”
“What time do you leave?” she asked him.
Audie smirked. “In ten hours.”
They didn’t talk on the flight and as Abby peered out the window, she wondered if Isla had been right about it being too soon, because she’d never wanted a drink more when she saw the damage. It looked like something apocalyptic below. Mazes of dirty water and mud, houses in a thousand splinters, crushed beyond repair.
It was worse on the ground. They wore neon vests and distributed water and food, but it wasn’t enough. It was gone in seconds and there were still more empty hands. When they shoved and wept,Abby stiffened in alarm, unaccustomed to such desperate despair, but Audie was there in the fray.
“It’s okay,” he said. “I’m right here.”
Her eyes prickled with tears, but she didn’t let them fall. Not as she encountered so many who’d had homes and jobs and running water and electricity and kids to take to school, and then lost it all in the unjust flash of a storm. When they passed out hot meals, she could barely take the whimpering children on mothers’ hips and the elderly, shuffling along without anyone to care for them.
That night as they slept on cots in a tent, she wondered how it could ever get better. She wondered how much suffering she’d been oblivious to while she chose her own torment. When the tears quietly rolled to her pillow that night, she found solace in not crying for herself.
It would take months for the electricity to come back on. Years to rebuild everything lost. Abby grew accustomed to sleeping on floors, in aid vehicles, and under tarps. During that trip and the several that followed, she learned to patch roofs, lay foundation, and run pipes for plumbing. She was tired every night but every day felt a little lighter. She wasn’t just rebuilding a community, but something in her too.
In between shifts, she explored with Audie. He took her to the shuttered factory where he once worked, the same one he quit for a life-changing tryout with the Padres. He showed her his childhood home too, or at least where it once stood. It was mud and a few pieces of plywood now.
“My father—your grandfather—was nasty when he drank.” Audie kicked a rock while they wandered through the washed-out streets. A few people recognized him and waved, but it was no longer because of his baseball career. It was from his humanitarian work there. “I always told myself I’d never be like him, but then I was.”
“A curse,” Abby whispered.
“Tal vez.”They stopped on the side of the road to peer out at theocean. Wind hushed up from the water and passed over them. “It never really leaves you.”
She didn’t ask what. She just nodded. “I know.”
Audie frowned. “She would have been proud of you.”
Abby drew back, unprepared for the subject. Unprepared for the ache that split through her chest. “Of what?” She scoffed and continued ahead of him. “I got arrested and went to rehab.”
“Especially of that.”
He laughed, and she laughed too, relieved to lighten the mood. As he walked alongside her, with the same stride, the same swing of his arms, she felt the warmth of childhood. Of the days when she’d longed to be just like him and chose to wear his number for Little League. Of the days when her mother smiled and the three of them went to the beach or baseball field. She realized that while she’d avoided all the bad, she’d kept herself from the good memories too. She’d worked through her issues in every kind of therapy and group setting imaginable, but this was what held her back.
“They had me write her a letter in treatment,” she said.
“Did it help?”
Abby shrugged. “I told her I understood, maybe better now, but also that I didn’t. It’s weird because I hate her more now, but I love her more too and there’s nowhere for it to go.” Her throat knotted as they turned into another destroyed neighborhood. “Some days I look in the mirror and really feel it—how much I’m like her—and then I hate myself too.”
“No.” Audie’s eyes flashed with anger, but not the kind that she knew from childhood. A broken, moral anger like he’d plucked it straight from the surrounding ruins. “Don’t hate yourself. Don’t hate her. She was beautiful, funny, smart—just like you, mija.” He bit his lip. “But there was sadness there. You know she ran away when she was young. She had a hard life, and I never knew how to help her. I couldn’t get out of my own way long enough to.”
“Well, now she’s given me a hard life too.” She kicked at debris. “Maybe not like this, but she made shit really hard, you know?” Thetears loosened in her throat and she let them go. “And I still want her back because she was my mom. Because she made everything so much better too. Sometimes I wonder who I would be if she was still here.” Abby wiped her eyes. “Why couldn’t she hold on and we get to?”
“We don’t get to know,” he whispered.
Audie didn’t hug her, probably because she kept walking, and maybe because it wasn’t their way. He just didn’t stop walking alongside her.
“I still forgave her.” Abby sniffled.
He squeezed her shoulder. “And yourself?”
She didn’t answer.
He invited her to join him at work that spring. It was the first time she had stepped on the field since her arrest, and that too healed something inside. And it wasn’t just any baseball diamond. It was the one with her father’s number flapping on a flag in the outfield. The dirt she had once tottered on as a toddler. It was San Diego’s team, but it was also her family history. Another sliver of home.
