Caroline's First Game

(4 of 6)

Those are the thoughts of the first half-second. The second half of the second is a plunge into a cold pool of water. I am underwater now, tingling, moving away from my brother and swimming up the steps behind this man, the soundtrack of the game turned off, swimming across the top level of the stadium toward left field, floating down steps again and past a uniformed guard who tries to stop me (I can't speak and the man who summoned me says, "It's her father"), past several kids who have been told to stop playing, past kids who are looking and others who are looking away, swimming into a circle of people who are standing around and over my daughter who is crying beyond crying—who is not dead, despite the fact that a hardball has traveled more than 300 feet in the air and landed with a thud on the right side of her small head, just behind the ear. She spots me through eyes that are unopened and screams Daddy. I clutch her left hand. I'm not aware of finding her mother, my wife, but I am now hugging Luci on my left side and having my hand disengaged from Caroline's by someone, an EMT guy, who needs to secure a neck brace and, then, get Caroline into a body brace and onto a flatboard that will, shortly, be loaded into an ambulance.

(Quickly, let me say in fairness: I couldn't have written this at all if things didn't turn out all right in the end.)

I look around. Someone is crying hysterically, and I learn later from Luci that this was the woman who was handing out tickets for the rides and activities. Luci had been getting tickets from her when Caroline had been hit. Luci says she saw Caroline fall; "she went down," is her succinct description, just as you would say of a boxer. I, since I didn't see her fall, am forced to imagine it, and even as I stand numbly in the kids' area I picture Caroline's blues eyes shutting, her knees buckling in unison to the left and her little body sinking to the ground. Her mother did see this, or something much like it, and then watched for at least 20 seconds, perhaps 30, as Caroline lay unconscious. Yes, maybe, dead.

Since my thinking is incoherent, it involves vague images and weird associations. Caroline going down. Luci screaming (as she did). Cochrane. Conigliaro (whom my late Uncle Fred, a part-time security guard at Fenway, helped to carry out that night). Ray Chapman and Carl Mays and a submarine pitch that no one, least of all Chapman, ever saw. Why don't they have netting out here? Toes. ("Can you wiggle your toes, Sweetie?" She just cries as she's put in harness.) Several people will ask me in the next couple of days, "Did they give Caroline the ball?" But at this moment, I'm not thinking of or looking for the ball. I do look around. Kids at the top of the big rubber slide are standing there, peering down. That ticket-taker continues to cry. Luci is transitioning from panic to her characteristic look-let's-do-the-right-thing-right-now mode, though tears continue. EMTs are everywhere; the ambulance backs into the area; some Yankee players—their bullpen must be out here in left—come to the fence and look at Caroline solemnly, which scares me to my soul.

"Okay, honey," I say to Luci, or she says to me. "Who goes in the ambulance? Who drives to the hospital?"

Caroline screams Mommy, and Daddy. An EMT says Caroline will be taken to Saints Memorial, which I've never heard of. "Unless you have a preference."

"We're not from here," I say, though I know that in Lowell there's Lowell General, the old St. Joe's—now Health-something—and Saint John's.

"You don't know how to get there?"

"No."

A Lowell cop appears and tells me that there will be a cruiser in front of the ballpark to escort me to the hospital. "Thanks," I say. And then I have an image encoded in my memory that I will never be able to shake: the sight of my three-and-a-half-year-old daughter, in great pain and shock, being loaded into an ambulance, followed by her mother, also in great pain and shock.

I drift back to our seats, perhaps accompanied by the good man who came to get me, perhaps not. ("I was sitting near you," he told Luci after it had happened. "I know where your husband is. I'll go find him.") I hurry past another man and his daughter and hear the father say, "I feel terrible. I tried to catch that ball and nearly did." Our ball? Caroline's ball? He nearly saved my child.