Jacksonville, Florida. October, 2019.
"Aiden? You ready to go?"
"Hold on, Mom! I just gotta grab my glove."
"We're going to the base hospital, honey, not a ball field."
She knew there was no reason to say that. Her eight-year old son never went anywhere without his baseball glove, so it didn't really matter where they were going. The glove was coming along with them.
"Okay. Just please hurry!"
Seconds later, the boy came scampering down the stairs holding the glove and said he was ready to go.
"You know what?" his mom said as she tried not to smile.
"No. What?"
"I'm gonna find a doctor and see if he can remove that glove from your hand."
"Huh?" her son replied as they got in the car.
"It's surgically attached to your hand, right? So I want to find out if it can be removed."
Aiden was exceptionally bright for his age, and while most kids still wouldn't have understood, he laughed. Unfortunately, he was taller than most kids his age, not very coordinated yet, and wore thick glasses due to severe near-sightedness and astigmatism, something for which he was often teased.
"Ha-ha. Very funny, Mom!" he told her as he climbed in and buckled his seat belt.
When his mom got in and started the car, she looked over and said, "I wish I was good enough to teach you how to play."
"You're good," her son said supportively even though she couldn't hit, throw, or catch to save her life. But she tried, and that's all that mattered to her baseball-crazed son.
Tori Bell was 38, the mother of an eight-year old boy, and had been widowed for three years after her husband, a Navy SEAL, had been killed in a training accident. She hadn't been required to leave base housing as soon as she did, but after two months in which she couldn't tell up from down, she moved back home to Orange Park, Florida, where she'd grown up.
Tori met her late husband, Mike Bell, at a Jacksonville bar one night when a friend convinced her to go clubbing with her. He was the first, last, and only guy she'd ever slept with the day she met him, but she'd never regretted it for even a moment. He'd called her the next day, she saw him again that night, and every day for the rest of the two weeks he was in town coordinating with one of the squadrons on base that would take part in a joint operation Mike's team would also be involved in.
A whirlwind, distance romance took place after that, and just six months later she married the guy his buddies called 'the gentle giant'.
Mike had been to Iraq once and Afghanistan twice and never so much as suffered a scratch. But back home in Little Creek, Virginia, he and his fellow SEALs routinely participated in very realistic training, and it was during one such event that he'd been killed.
She'd heard the explanation of how he'd been accidentally shot during a nighttime, live-fire exercise several times and had no reason to believe the Navy captain, himself a SEAL for 23 years, who came to her home wasn't telling her the truth. But in the end, how, or even the reason why didn't matter. What did matter was that he was gone; and not just from her life but from her son's who'd worshipped his dad, as well.
Tori often recalled the way Aiden clung to his father, a tall, strong man who was as calm and easygoing as anyone she'd ever met. He either held his father's hand or sat in his lap or let his dad drag him around on one of his feet while Aiden clung to a leg.
Mike was quiet and also very intelligent, but most of all, he was a man who loved being married, and Tori and Aiden were everything to him. They'd both hugged him and kissed him goodbye before that fateful night, and then, in the blink of an eye, he was gone.
Mike was also a pretty decent athlete who'd played three sports in high school, baseball being one of them. He bought Aiden a tiny glove when he was just three, and the two of them would play for as long as the little boy stayed interested. Initially it was just catch with the game being more 'drop' than catch as Mike would gently toss a tennis ball underhanded from just a couple of feet away to let Aiden start learning to judge how a ball moved. Later on, Mike rolled ground balls to his son or tossed little pop flies to him.
By the time he was four, they were using a real baseball. When he turned five, Mike started throwing overhand during batting practice but the throws were very easy. Aiden had also been hitting off of a Tee for over a year, and Mike began actually pitching to him just before he died. It was still a gentle toss, but Aiden would have played all day, every day, if his dad was willing.
Tori did her best to keep the game alive, but she was like a dancer with two left feet, and that was on her good days.
"Besides," Aiden continued. "I get to play in the T-ball league."
"Yes. Yes, you do," his mother agreed as she backed out of the driveway, grateful that he had other boys and a coach to help try and fill some of the void in his life.
As she drove to the base hospital, where she still had privileges, Tori kept thinking about something her younger sister, Amanda, had said to her a couple of days earlier after mentioning she needed more Tramadol.
"I'm wondering if the base is going to continue prescribing it," Amanda mentioned.
"Why? What have you heard?"
Amanda was a registered nurse, and when it came to such things, she was almost always correct. She was also married to a fellow RN named Jeremy, a guy Tori loved like the brother she'd never had. Sadly, they were unable to have children of their own, and Aiden was the boy they loved like their own son.
"Well, they made it a 'scheduled drug' back in 2015, and with the opioid epidemic, I see problems on the horizon. Our hospital is already cracking down hard, so just be aware, okay."
"But Tramadol isn't an opioid. It's a synthetic, right?" Tori countered.
"Yes, but that won't matter when the federal government reaches out with a blanket regulation and its wide net. Tramadol, and people who actually need it, and especially Oxycodone, are going to get hit hard."
Tori had been diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis or RA not long before Mike's death. When she told him why her hands were so sore, he laughed and started teasing her about being old and falling apart. The truth was, people of any age could get RA, and Tori was one of those who got it in her 30s.
Initially, she'd taken Naproxen which seemed to work just fine. But within months it wasn't getting the job done, so her doctor prescribed Celebrex, and that had worked wonders for the next two years or so.
