“God loves a trinity,” Russian proverb
It was a beautiful weekend in April. The trees all had their leaves, which made our backyard into a lush paradise. This close to the Rio Grande, we hardly know we live in a desert. The flowers of spring had fallen off the trees, and despite the late snowstorm, were replaced with fruit. The tiny pears, apples, and plums were hard as rocks, but the cherries were ready to be gathered if the kids were quicker than the birds. Xenia and Justin came out there almost every day.
I had brought out the croquet set, but the thick, lush grass made a rough jungle around each wicket. The children made up their own lawn games; their favorite was three-person baseball. Thick flat rocks marked the bases. They used a tennis ball and a plastic bat when they could find one.
On the fateful day, Mike and I were inside making our weekly family pancake breakfast. Xenia and Justin went out to play. Jonah was lying in bed when he heard them outside his room. He went out to join them. They were walking around looking for flat rocks for the bases.
They found the plastic bat, but Justin said, “Hey, maybe I should get my bat.”
His ‘bat’ was a tree branch covered in duct tape. He hadn’t gotten the chance to use it in a long time, and this was the perfect opportunity.
Jonah said, “I want the first swing on it.”
He took the bat and walked to the home base rock. Justin took the tennis ball to the pitcher’s mound marker, and Xenia stood to the left of Justin and seven feet from home plate, ready to run after the ball and start chasing Jonah.
Justin threw some bad pitches, which Jonah couldn’t hit.
Jonah said, “Give me a nice one. Pitch underhand.”
He pulled the bat back and hit that easy ball as hard as his manly sixteen-year-old arms could hit. He would have hit it out of the park. It would have been a home run. Instead, it flew at a million miles an hour straight into Xenia’s left eye.
She fell to the ground. The boys panicked.
She heard them say, “What do we do? Oh no, it’s all my fault. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
She half cried, “Get Mom! Get Mom! GET MOM!”
Justin ran inside and told me, “Xenia got hit in the face with a ball by Jonah.”
I put down the tea bags I was unwrapping, and Justin led the way as we ran outside to Xenia, who was curled up on the ground with her hands over her face.
Justin kept saying he was sorry over and over again.
Jonah said, “You better stop talking to her. You’ll only make it a million times worse.”
I asked her if she could get up, and she took my hand. Xenia and I walked to her room, where she went to her sink and washed her face. I looked at her eye. There wasn’t anything for me to see, so I tucked her in bed. The breakfast was ready, so the rest of us prayed without her. I brought her a plate of pancakes with butter and syrup and some bacon to eat in her room.
When I came back to take her plate, I asked her, “How’s your eyesight, Xenia?”
“It’s a little misty on the side,” she said.
I went to the dining room and announced, “Xenia has lost her peripheral vision! We are heading over to the ER.”
After a long wait, she was examined by the doctor who said, “You have a bruised eye.”
He poked her eye with an instrument made to measure eye pressure and let the new doctor on staff give it a try too. The pressure was elevated, but not enough to require treatment before the weekend was over. We picked up some medication from the pharmacy, and Xenia slept for thirty hours over the next two days.
I was surprised and pleased when we were able to get her into an eye doctor on Tuesday. He saw inflammation in her eye and prescribed steroid eye drops. We weren’t as faithful as we should have been, but she looked better to the doctor at the next checkup and gained full eyesight back. One more week of eye drops, and we were done.
This was the first of the three.
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