He keeps saying his head feels like it’s going to explode. I call the emergency room on my cell phone along the way, and they’re waiting when we arrive. They take Jack immediately into a trauma room, and in less than ten minutes they’ve taken him to surgery. A doctor comes out to talk to us briefly. He says Jack is suffering from an acute epidural hematoma. In layman’s terms, he says, Jack’s brain is bleeding. A neurosurgeon is going to perform an emergency craniotomy to drain the blood, relieve the pressure, and repair the damage.

We wait for three agonizing hours before the neurosurgeon comes out. The waiting room is filled with Jack’s coaches and their wives, his teammates and their parents, plus dozens of his friends from school who were either at the game or heard about what happened. Everyone falls silent when the surgeon, a dark-haired, serious-looking, middle-aged man wearing scrubs, asks Caroline and me to step into a private room. My daughter, Lilly, who is a year younger than Jack and was sitting in the bleachers behind home plate when Jack was hit, grabs my hand and comes into the room with us.

“I’m told you didn’t wait for the ambulance,” the doctor says gravely as soon as the door closes behind us. “Whose idea was that?”

“Why?” I ask. “Was it a mistake?”

“Under some circumstances, it could have been. But this time, it was the right decision. If your son had bled for another ten or fifteen minutes, I don’t think he would have made it.”

“So he’s all right?”

“He’s in recovery. It’s a serious injury, but thankfully we got to it in time. We’ll keep him in intensive care for a day or two. He’s going to have a heckuva headache, but we can control the pain with medication. He’ll have to take it easy for a couple of months, but after that, he should be as good as new.”

“When can we see him?”