“What?”
“Watch the game.”
Chris laughed. “I am, buddy.”
I photographed everything.
Ethan pointed at him.
“No. You’re watching me watch it.”
Chris stopped smiling for just a second.
Then Ethan turned back toward the field as if he’d said nothing unusual.
I took another picture.
***
By halftime, Ethan was worn out but refused to leave.
“No. You’re watching me watch it.”
“Ten more minutes,” he kept bargaining.
“You said that 20 minutes ago,” Chris told him.
“That was a different ten.”
Then the camera found us.
The giant screen.
The announcement.
And Ray.
I knew Ray from the hospital.
Then the camera found us.
He worked in facilities and seemed to appear whenever Ethan needed a light fixed, a television reset, or somebody willing to argue about football.
Ethan called him “Coach Ray.”
Ray insisted his official title was “Commissioner.”
They had been having that argument for months.
Ethan called him “Coach Ray.”
Ethan also had one ridiculous rule: nobody who came into his room was allowed to watch.
If you stood near the table long enough, he assigned you a plastic player.
“Everybody plays,” he’d say.
But I had no idea why Ray was carrying Ethan’s cheap plastic football game through a professional stadium.
Nobody who came into his room was allowed to watch.
Behind him came four more people I recognized.
A nurse from Ethan’s floor.
A teenage patient named Cody.
Cody’s mother.
And a man named Leo.
Chris saw Leo and looked away.
***
Months earlier, Leo’s son had been receiving treatment on the same floor.
Chris saw Leo and looked away.
One afternoon, their family got good news.
Very good news.
Leo had laughed in the hallway.
Someone hugged him.
He started crying.
Chris had just come from a meeting where Ethan’s doctors had told us another treatment had failed.
He walked past Leo and snapped, “Could you celebrate somewhere else?”
He started crying.
The hallway went silent.
Leo apologized.
Chris regretted it almost instantly but never went back to fix it.
Ethan had seen the whole thing from his doorway.
Leo had noticed him too.
Ethan had seen the whole thing from his doorway.
The next afternoon, he’d stopped by Ethan’s room, challenged him to one game on the plastic football field, lost badly, and never once asked how he was feeling.
Ethan liked him immediately.
Now Leo was walking down the stadium steps with the others.
Ethan whispered, “Dad, don’t be weird.”
Ethan liked him immediately.
Chris looked at him.
“I’m not weird.”
“You are sometimes.”
Even with everything going on, I laughed.
Ray reached our row and held up the tabletop game.
“Captain.”
Ethan groaned. “You snitched.”
“Commissioner,” Ray corrected.
“You cheat.”
“Unproven.”
The crowd around us laughed.
“I’m not weird.”
Ray set the little football game on Ethan’s lap.
The stadium announcer spoke again.
“Ethan told our wish team that if this was going to be his football day, he wanted his hospital league to somehow be part of it too. What he didn’t know was that a few members of that league decided watching from home wasn’t good enough.”
People cheered.
“He wanted his hospital league to somehow be part of it too.”
Ethan covered his face.
“I’m never going back to the hospital.”
The nurse leaned over.
