If

By Rowena Zahnrei

My eyes flick wide and I gasp, an unhooked fish flung back in the river. Memories scatter like minnows and I can’t call them back. Can’t recall…

“Zack!”

“Zack? Is that your son?” A nurse stands over me, shifting my sheets, checking tubes and bags, her smile an optic-white wall of detachment. She questions without curiosity, her busy gaze always just missing mine. I smile back just the same. I still have my teeth, so why not show them off? It’s more than most other people in this place can boast about…

Is that your son?

An answer flashes then flees, another minnow lost to the murk. My eyelids fall like heavy shades…too heavy to lift. Everything is effort. Thought. Breath.

In a dimness made red by my own pulsing blood, I see images, oil-swirled, yet at times so sharp and clear I feel I’m there. Enough to hear a duck splash in a pond, savor the scent of new-mown grass. There’s a shadow, a figure in the distance. Stance wide, stooped slightly forward, as if waiting. Signaling for me to… To what…?

Voices come and go in whispers, bunched like my blanket at the foot of the bed. I hear a name. My name? The rest is just mumbles.

If I could gather the strength, I’d say speak up. You’ve got something to say, so say it. Only, don’t… Don’t leave—!

I don’t want to be alone.

The window is open and I watch the curtains billow out, then press close against the screen. Billow, swirl, press. Billow, swirl, like canvas. Like the sails of a clipper ship riding heavy on the waves, its hold straining with tea and spices and barrels of salted meat. Stationed in the crow’s nest, I sway with the main mast, high above the deck. Sea winds carry the waft of sun-warmed tar from the rigging ropes and I look to the horizon, searching the distant curve for the mist-draped contours of home—

“Dad?”

Another gasp, another school of minnows flitting from my grasp. Have I been dreaming?

There’s a shadow, a figure in the doorway. Ghostly, it lingers on the threshold, neither here nor there.

“I saw a ship,” I say and the shape slides closer, blocking the sunlight as it pulls a chair to the side of my bed. “No…no, a boat, remote controlled… My son… Zack. He set it on the pond. And the ducks, they… The ducks…”

“It’s OK, Dad. It doesn’t matter about the ducks.”

The voice I hear is low and dry, like dust. A man, dull and graying, sits with his gaze aimed down at the floor tiles, his clam-pale hand covering mine.

But this is wrong. Zack is a kid, maybe ten years old, all dressed up and ready to play baseball with his old man. His hat droops over his eyes. His glove, still too big for him, draws his posture to one side.

“Zack?”

“I’m here, Dad. I’m right here with you.”

The gray man speaks, but I won’t be tricked. I pull my hand from the stranger’s sweaty grasp and reach, reach for the boy that should be there, my breath quickening to a hitching wheeze—

Brrring!

My finger sweeps my phone’s screen and I answer, responses as involuntary as smooth muscle movements.

“Sam here,” I tell the face that appears. An office face strained by office stresses. “What’s the crisis?”

The office face speaks office words, but there’s a shadow, a figure in the doorway.

“Dad, I’m ready!” Zack pipes, adjusting his oversized glove.

My shoulders tense, my frustration aimed, not at the office for invading my home, but at Zack for interrupting the office.

“Hold on,” I tell the boy, raising a hand, a dismissive wall, between us. “I need to take this.”

Something flickers in Zack’s brown eyes. Anger? Hurt?

It’s not my priority to look.

“This isn’t fair!” Zack shouts. “You said we were gonna play catch. You promised!”

The boy’s outburst smacks of sass. A curt excuse to the office face, and my own features grow strict and stern – a reprimand in human form.

“There are more important things, Zack,” I say.

He glares. “More important than a promise?”

I open a mouth chock-full of justifications, my head too full of work concerns to factor a catch in the mix.

Then I see the scratches. Marks left by Zack’s cleats on my freshly polished cherrywood.

“Get those cleats off my floor!” I roar. “How many times have I told you: never wear those shoes in the house!”

Zach’s face clenches like a fist. His shoulders expand and shrink, but I turn my back, reaching for my phone.

By the time I finish my call and a few other vital tasks, Zack is watching his cartoons. His cap, glove and cleats are nowhere to be seen…won’t be seen again for months. As I stride from the hall to the kitchen, I see the light in his eyes has faded. Just as it’s faded from the late-evening sky…

“I’m sorry, kid,” I rasp. “It was only a call. Call after call… Go grab those cleats and we’ll head to the park. Right now.”

I hold out my hand. He takes it. Strange. His hand is so large…

My eyes focus slowly and I see Zack by my bedside, holding my hand, his dull brown gaze fixed on his polished shoes. His face is long and creased, his short hair silver-gray.

But there’s a shadow, a figure of a boy, ten years old. A ghost of the past haunting my present.

“Zack…” I call to the specter. “C’mon, kiddo, what’dya say? You ready to play some catch with your old man?”

Both Zacks smile, one with swelling excitement, the other with sad oh-so-understanding overtones.  Then graying Zack speaks…and the shadow disappears.

I wake with a gasp to minnows flitting, fleeing. There was something – someone…?

A smell… Dusty, faded scents of old leather, grassy turf.

There’s a shadow on the table. A glove.

Zack’s glove.

Worn and stiff, it calls the minnows in gleaming shoals, flipping and splashing in their rush to return. I hold its woven web to my nose and breathe in the memories…let them flicker and play in the dimness behind my eyes.

The room is dark, but I hear birds chirping. Chirping in the park where we used to play catch, Zack and I.

Where we would have played catch if we… If I…