Free Out of Left Field by Liza Ketchum

toward the pizzeria. “Frankie’s still pissed about my fake sick day last week.”
    Mom turns off the tears, as fast as twisting a faucet, and fastens her seatbelt. “That’s the least of our worries. We’re going to the cardiologist right this minute, to see if you have this—this syndrome.” She gropes in her purse for a slip of paper. I read over her shoulder. “ Ideopathic hypertrophic cardiomyopathy ,” she says, stumbling through it.
    “Sounds like a weird sea creature.”
    “Brandon, this is not a joke.” She jerks the car into reverse.
    “Mom, hold it!” I clutch her sleeve and she slams on the brake, throwing us against our seatbelts. “No offense, Mom, but you can’t drive. Switch places, or I’ll call a cab.”
    “You’re right,” she whispers, and climbs out.
    I drive the J-Way with care, taking the rotaries like a new driver. As we navigate the last one, just before the hospital, the pieces fall into place, like marbles down the chute Dad built for me in second grade. “Now I get it,” I say. “That’s why Dad—”
    “Right,” she says. “He was worried about his sons. Both of them.”
    I bite the inside of my mouth. “When was he planning to tell us?”
    She’s quiet for so long I wonder if she even hears me. She points to the hospital turn, then to the garage entrance. I pull into a space and start to get out when Mom says, “Wait. This must be why he asked me to take that day off from work—he wanted to tell me about the diagnosis.”
    “You didn’t know he’d been to the doctor?”
    “No. That’s so like him—he wouldn’t want us to worry, if it was a false alarm.” Her voice is small. “Bran—he must have been so afraid.”
    Afraid? Try scared shitless . The hospital looms above me like a prison. “What will they do to me?”
    “I don’t know—listen to your heart, maybe schedule some tests. They said they can tell, pretty quickly, if you have it or not.”
    “Or not. Let’s get this over with.”
    Bravado works until the antiseptic smell hits me. We find the office on the directory and step into the empty elevator. Mom slips her hand into mine. Who’s the kid here: Yours Truly, or Mom? Who cares. Fine with me if she needs to hold tight. That way, maybe I won’t keel over.
    Lost in the Lights
    In a tough practice after losing a meet, when Coach tells you to lay on another twenty laps; when your shoulders burn, your legs throb, and your heart pumps into your ears—the only way to go on is to enter The Zone. You shut off the sounds (flutter of Marty’s kick in the next lane; echo of voices bouncing off tiles; shrill of Coach’s whistle) and let your mind float up above the blue water into the rafters.
    “Instant death is often the first symptom of the disease,” the doctor says. Calmly. As if he’s describing a skin rash. Instant death? Those two words take you into The Zone. Your mind is like a ball Big Papi hits so hard, it’s lost in the lights high above the park. The baseball seems to float there forever, hanging in slo-mo above 35,000 screaming fans.
    You stay in The Zone for hours. As you strip to a hospital jonny. As the doc holds the stethoscope to your chest for one endless minute after another, eyes closed. As a lab tech jabs a needle into your vein and fills vial after vial with crimson blood. As they clamp cold electrodes to every vital spot on your body—including some spots that make you glad the nurse is a guy—and you wait while the needle hammers out your heart’s rhythm on paper. As they settle you onto a table and the doctor asks, in a cheery voice, if you’d like to watch your heart pumping away, live on camera. No thanks. Who wants a close-up of the organ that could kill you? Instead, you stay in The Zone.
    You’re still in The Zone when they tell you to get dressed, when you slug the OJ they force you to drink, when you follow the nurse down one corridor, then another, back to the doctor’s office. The nurse carries the