His greatest fear was that Amy would stop loving him. Not that she would want to, and not that she would even understand her own feelings, but how could anyone enjoy being touched by that maimed and disfigured hand, it would turn a person’s stomach, it would kill all desire, and little by little the revulsion would mount until she started to back away from him and eventually let him go, and if he lost Amy not only would his heart be broken but his life would be ruined forever, for what woman in her right mind could possibly be attracted to a man like him, a pitiable, mutilated creature who walked around with a claw jutting from his left arm instead of a hand? Endless sorrow, endless loneliness, endless disappointment — that would be his lot — and even as Amy sat with him in the hospital throughout the weekend and then cut school to stay with him through Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, stroking his face and telling him that everything would be exactly as it had been before, that losing a couple of fingers was a rotten blow but hardly the end of the world, that millions of people lived with far worse and forged on bravely without giving it a second thought, and even as Ferguson listened to her and watched her face as she talked to him, he wondered if he wasn’t looking at an apparition, a substitute Amy who was going through the motions of the real Amy, and if he shut his eyes for a couple of seconds, he wondered if she wouldn’t disappear before he had a chance to open them again.
His parents had left Montclair to be with him as well, and they were wonderfully kind to him, just as Amy was wonderfully kind to him, just as the doctors and nurses were wonderfully kind to him, and yet how could any of them know what he was feeling, how could they understand that contrary to what they all kept telling him, it was indeed the end of the world, at least the little part of the world that had belonged to him, and how could he open up to them about the devastation he felt whenever he thought about baseball, the dumbest game ever invented, according to the long-gone Anne-Marie Dumartin, but how deeply he still loved it, and how much he had been looking forward to the first indoor varsity practices, which were scheduled to begin in mid-February, and now the baseball part of his world had ended as well, for he would never be able to hold a bat again with those two fingers missing from his left hand, not in the proper way, not in the way he needed to hold it to swing with power, and how could he control a glove that had been designed for five fingers with only three fingers, he would be cast down into mediocrity if he tried to play with his handicap, and that would be unacceptable to him, especially now, when he had been preparing himself for the season of his life, an all-conference, all-county, all-state kind of season, causing such a stir that the pro scouts would start coming to watch the wizard at third base with the.400 batting average, which would lead to an eventual signing with a major league club, thus making him the first baseball-playing poet in the annals of American sport, winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and the Most Valuable Player Award, and because he had never dared to confess this fantastical daydream to anyone, he couldn’t begin now, not when he found himself on the brink of tears every time he thought about returning to Montclair and telling his coach he could no longer play on the team, holding up his miserable left hand to demonstrate why his career was over, at which point the terse, undemonstrative Sal Martino would nod his head in commiseration, mumbling a few short words that would come out more or less as follows: Tough break, kid. We’re going to miss you.
Amy and his father both left on Thursday morning, but his mother stayed with him until he was discharged from the hospital, sleeping in a nearby motel and traveling around in a small rented car. The extremity of her compassion was almost too much for him, the sympathetic maternal eyes that kept watching him and telling him how deeply his suffering had become her suffering, and yet, because she understood how much he disliked it when she fussed and doted, he was thankful to her for not dwelling on his injuries, for not offering any advice, for not encouraging him to buck up, for not shedding any tears. He knew what a frightful mess he was and how painful it must have been for her to look at him, not only the still healing sutures on his left hand, which were still red and raw and swollen, but also the bandages wrapped around his forearms, temporarily masking the sixty-four stitches that had closed up his gouged flesh, and the weird patches of shorn hair dotting his scalp, where more stitches had been applied to the worst cuts and gashes, but none of those future scars seemed to disturb her, the only thing that mattered was that he had come through the accident with his face intact, which again and again she called a blessing, the one lucky turn in this whole unlucky business, and while Ferguson was in no mood to count his blessings just then, he understood her point, since there was a hierarchy of destruction to be reckoned with, and living with a destroyed hand was far less terrible than living with a destroyed face.
It was hard to admit to himself how much he wanted his mother to be there with him. Every time she sat down in the chair next to his bed, things felt a little better than they were when he was alone, often vastly better, and yet he still held back from confiding in her, he couldn’t quite bring himself to tell her how afraid he was when he thought about his stunted, abysmal future, the long years of loveless desolation that stood in front of him, all the childish, self-pitying fears that would have sounded so inane if he had spoken them out loud, and so he continued to say next to nothing about himself, and his mother didn’t press him to say more. In the long run, it probably didn’t make any difference if he talked or not, since it was all but certain that she already knew what he was thinking anyway, she had always known somehow, ever since he was a small boy she had known, and why should it be any different now that he was in high school? Nevertheless, there were other things to talk about besides himself, above all Francie and the mystery of her breakdown, which they continued to discuss all through their final days in Vermont, and now that Francie had left the hospital and was checked into another hospital in New Jersey, what was going to happen to her? His mother wasn’t sure. All she knew was what Gary had told her, and she couldn’t make sense of it, nothing was clear except that the problems had apparently been growing for some time. Distress about her father — perhaps. Trouble in the marriage — perhaps. Regret over having married too young — perhaps. All of the above — or none of them. The puzzling thing was that Francie had always seemed so healthy and stable. A diamond of joyful exuberance, the light of everyone’s eye. And now this.