Home Field (10 page)

“Monica graduated.”

“I'll find a new Monica.”

“That's not going to work.”

Dean shrugged. “Maybe it will, maybe it won't.”

“
Dean
. I know what your schedule is like in the fall. You're never home. You can't get a babysitter every night. Kids need consistency, they need routine—especially now, with their mother gone.”

“You think I don't know that?”

“I'm trying to help. Tell me honestly, do you really think it's the best thing to drag them around with you?”

“Do
you
think it's the best thing to take Megan and Jenny out of school?”

“My decision to homeschool is between me and my pastor. I don't need to defend it to you.”

“And I don't need to defend my life to you.”

“Why don't you take a season off? You know you could. People would understand.”

“I don't
want
to take a season off,” Dean said.

“You know, I used to stand up for you. I used to say to Nicole, ‘He loves his job, nothing wrong with that.' But now I see that she was right, you're obsessed.”

“I
do
love my job,” Dean said. He wasn't about to explain that he
needed
to coach right now, that football was all he had left, it was the only place he felt at home. The players were like his sons, except they were better than sons because they listened to him, and he understood them—unlike his own sons, who were becoming more mysterious to him with each passing day.

“I'm not going to let you do this to my nephews,” Joelle said. “Nicole wouldn't approve. She'd be up in arms.”

“Nicole doesn't have a say anymore!” Dean was angry now.

Joelle crossed her arms. “I can take them after school. Megan's old enough to babysit.”

“You don't get it,” Dean said. “I don't want you to take them.”

“That's funny, because Nic dropped them off all the time last year.”

“Leave Nic out of it,” Dean said. “This isn't about her.”

“I think it is. I think you're still angry with me. But that's no reason to punish Robbie and Bry.”

“This has nothing to do with you, Joelle.”

“You blame me. I know you do. I never told her not to see a psychiatrist. All I ever said was that she should be careful about taking medications.”

“Look, I told you I didn't want to go down this road, and I meant it.”

“This is where every conversation is going to end up until you forgive her—and me. Not that I did anything wrong.”

“You told her she was depressed because she didn't have faith. You didn't support her.”

“You want to talk about support? You know what she told me? She said, ‘Jo, I never knew marriage could be so lonesome.' She must have called me practically every night last fall. I don't think you even knew how bad off she was. She's always been sensitive. After Sam died, she was a wreck. She couldn't even dress herself. Who do you think took care of her? Of Stephanie?
I
was the one. Not the Shanks, not Mom and Dad, and certainly not you.”

“I didn't even know Nic then.”

“That's right, you waltzed in after the dust cleared. You
think you saved her but you have no clue. I've always told her to put her trust in God because that's what I believe in. You're the one who told her she would feel better if she exercised more.”

“Exercise does make people feel better. It's scientifically proven. If you take care of your body, your mind will follow.”

“Is that what you told Nicky?”

“I told her lots of things. I told her to see a doctor, I told her to get a new job, I told her to make new friends. Maybe they weren't the best ideas. Maybe you're right, maybe I didn't understand how unhappy she was. But I don't think you did, either. Tell
me
honestly, Joelle, did you have any idea she would do this?”

“Of course not! But I'm not married to her.” Joelle turned to leave. She was tearing up. “I can't talk about this anymore. I came in here to find my kids.”

Dean stayed in the barn after she left. Whenever he talked to Joelle, he had the feeling she was trying to give Nicole's suicide back to him, like it was a mess that only he could clean up. Like it could be cleaned up. He hated the way she made everything seem so straightforward, the way she took words like
marriage
and
forgiveness
and acted as if they were transparent and uncomplicated. He couldn't believe she was actually that smug and simpleminded. She had to be pissed off to be left alone with her widowed, buzzard-loving mother. She had to be in pain, big pain. And she had to be angry about it. She just wasn't that good a person.

He was too riled up to return to the picnic and make small talk. He sat down on the bottom row of a pyramid of hay bales. But then some old instinct took over and he felt the need to climb to the top. The bales were arranged like stairs and as he
made his way up he recalled boyhood summers when he was allowed to roam through the stables where his father worked.

Now, when he visited his father, he would think of what she'd done. She must have known that, she must have known and decided she didn't care. Or maybe she thought it would be better than doing it at home. She knew how much he loved their house. Then again, maybe it had nothing to do with that. Maybe she saw the rope swing and thought,
This is my chance
. Maybe she had the swing in mind the whole time they were planning their vacation, maybe that was why she had been so eager when he suggested it. Going to his father's farm was supposed to be a kind of last hurrah for Stephanie, a chance to visit with the horses she had grown up riding. And a chance, too, for Stephanie to return to a sweeter, more girlish phase of her adolescence.

Nicole had waited until he and Stephanie were out on a trail ride together. Robbie and Bry had been swimming with their grandfather. She was supposed to go with them but had begged off. Dean remembered her saying that she needed a nap. He remembered thinking that it was nice that she had time to take a nap. That she should take more naps. He hated his innocent, optimistic thoughts. He wondered how long she had waited. She'd probably assumed he would find her, when he brought in the horses after the ride. It probably never occurred to her that Robbie and Bry would come back early, that Robbie would race ahead in his wet bathing trunks, wanting to swing on the rope she'd knotted—and where did she learn to make a slipknot? More planning that Dean didn't want to think about. He had tried so hard to understand her state of mind in those days leading up to it. She had seemed fine, even
better than fine; he had thought she was finally returning to normal. He specifically remembered the relief he felt as he watched her swim across the lily pond, the swimming hole of his teenage years, the first place he ever skinny-dipped, the first place he ever saw a girl naked. She seemed so graceful and whole in her yellow bathing suit. And then she'd performed her old trick of swimming underwater for a full minute or two, emerging unexpectedly at some random point in the pond. When the boys were little, they would stand worriedly at the water's edge, waiting for her to appear. She would burst out of the water, out of breath and exhilarated. A show of athleticism, Dean had always thought, but now he wondered if there wasn't something ominous in her performance.

Dean lay back on the straw bale, looking up at the barn's peaked roof. He was so tired of remembering that week, trying to decide if her good mood was faked or authentic. He felt doubly betrayed as he tried to calculate her motives, wondering if she'd faked her mood in order to leave them with good last memories, or if it was a way of convincing him that she was okay so he wouldn't suspect what she was plotting. And if she had the self-control, the wherewithal, to put on such a good show, then why did she not have it in her to get well? Or was it darker than that? Was she genuinely happy that week because she knew she was at the end of her life? Was the vacation actually
her
last hurrah? He hated to think of her secret thoughts; he felt almost jealous of them, as if she'd been having an affair with death. They'd had sex that week, sex like they hadn't had in months, maybe years, if he was honest. He'd made some crass joke, implying that all she had needed were a few good orgasms. He hadn't really meant it. He was just teasing her,
feeling high off her high, happy to see her appetite restored. The memory made him sick now, because he'd felt close to her and maybe it was a lie. And there was shame because if he'd known it was the last time, he wouldn't have been crude for one second. He would have memorized her, he would have told her again and again how much he loved her. Not that professing his love had ever helped. He'd tried that. He'd tried many times.

He heard the barn door swinging on its hinges and sat up. Bryan was walking down the wide center aisle, his small figure half-illuminated by the uneven light. Dean called to him, taking pleasure in his surprised smile. “Come on up!”

Bryan climbed up quickly and sat next to Dean on the bale, leaning back as if they were on a sofa. “Guess what? Robbie fell in the creek. He was trying to catch a crayfish.”

“Is he okay?”

“He's totally fine,” Bryan said, sounding like Stephanie. “He's wearing one of Uncle Ed's shirts with cow shit on it.”

“Don't say the
S
-word.”

“With cow crap on it. You should see it; it's so big that it covers his shorts. It's like he's wearing a dress.”

Dean sucked in his breath, thinking that Bryan was going to bring up the cross-dressing incident from the other day. But instead he began to talk about his mother. How she would have enjoyed going to the barbecue and what she would have brought to eat and did Dean remember the time that she made “dirt,” the dessert that was layers of chocolate pudding and crumbled Oreos and then she put gummy worms in, too? He chatted so happily, as if Nicole were not dead but just on a trip somewhere, that Dean wondered if he should say something to
bring home the reality of the situation, but then Bryan asked if Mommy was watching them from heaven, able to enjoy the barbecue from afar.

“Maybe,” Dean said. “I don't know for sure.”

Bryan frowned. “That's what Aunt Joelle said, too. She said God might have kept her out because it's cheating to kill yourself.”

“I doubt that's what she really meant,” Dean said, too shocked to come up with a counterargument. This was Joelle's version of forgiveness?

“So she's definitely in heaven?”

“I don't know. And neither does Joelle.”

“So she might not be?”

Dean paused; he didn't believe in heaven, at least not in the sense that Joelle did, and he didn't want to encourage Bryan in beliefs that were anything like Joelle's. At the same time, he didn't want to take away Bryan's fantasy of his mother living somewhere, happily.

“If there's a heaven, I'm sure your mother's in it, waiting for you.”

“I just want to know if Mommy's looking down on us,” Bry said. Tears began to pool in his brown eyes. “That's what Pastor John says.”

“Then that's who you should listen to. He's the expert.” Dean didn't know why he couldn't tell his son yes, there was a heaven, and yes, his mother was in it. He knew it was a flaw of his, this inability to give simple comfort. He was better at telling people to buck up, at getting them to push through pain.

“I didn't mean to make you mad at Aunt Joelle.” Bryan was such the peacemaker, had always been this way, starting from
when he was little and was trying to get his toddler brother to like him, giving him his baby toys and smiling guilelessly when Robbie threw them back at him.

“I'm not mad,” Dean said, taking his son's hand and leading him down the bales. “Come on, let's go find your brother.”

Outside the barn, the sun seemed unreasonably bright. It was hot and only going to get hotter, one of those days that required a late-afternoon or midnight thunderstorm to crack it open. Dean liked nighttime storms best of all, the way they awakened him for a few minutes, and the way Nicole would move closer to him in the darkness.

S
tephanie's roommate, Theresa, had long, soft brown hair and a frank, pale face—a face that could use some makeup, in Stephanie's opinion. But she seemed like the kind of girl who never wore makeup, on principle. She looked like her parents: tall, sturdy people made nervous by the fact that Stephanie had arrived at school without her family. Theresa's mother offered snacks she'd brought along “for the road,” raw almonds and a small bunch of damp green grapes wrapped in a paper towel. When Stephanie declined, Theresa's mother seemed overly concerned, as if Stephanie might be anorexic on top of being neglected. But she cheered up when she found out that Stephanie was from Maryland.

“We're from Columbia!” she said. “It's right near Baltimore.”

Stephanie knew of Columbia, but it was so distant from her experience that Theresa might as well have been from California. Likewise, Theresa and her parents were unfamiliar with Willowboro.

“It's close to the Battle of Antietam, if you know your Civil War history,” Stephanie said, aware that she sounded like a huge nerd, but not caring because it was obvious that The
resa was going to outnerd her in every area, except perhaps music. Theresa had an extensive CD collection and a really nice stereo, which she had unpacked first, arranging her CDs into a sleek rotating tower.

“Antietam sounds familiar,” Theresa's father said politely.

“It was the single bloodiest day in American history,” Stephanie said, emphasizing the word
bloodiest
. She had the perverse desire to shock these people, who seemed almost pathologically sensible with their healthy snacks and thick-soled shoes.

“Do you like the Indigo Girls?” Theresa asked Stephanie. She held up their debut CD with an expression that hoped so earnestly for approval that Stephanie felt embarrassed—for herself or Theresa, she wasn't sure. She gave a thumbs-up but then excused herself, leaving her suitcase open and half-unpacked.

The hallway was crowded with parents and younger siblings, the parents either busy or trying to seem busy. Some were beginning to depart, giving long hugs, their expressions frankly sorrowful. One girl sneezed as she was saying good-bye, and when her mother handed her a tissue, she lost it completely. Stephanie was glad her father and brothers had not accompanied her. It would have been awkward with Robbie and Bry getting bored and her father not knowing what to say. She was glad they hadn't come and yet she kept imagining her brothers playing in her dorm room, sitting cross-legged on the bare linoleum floor and flicking a paper football back and forth between them.

Outside, more families were spread across the freshman quad, the grass Crayola green, the border gardens freshly mulched, the tall oaks and elm trees casting generous shadows, perfect for
reading and contemplation, as well as for farewell conversation between parents and children. No one noticed Stephanie as she walked by. She felt like a ghost. And in the days that followed, her sense of alienation only deepened. She kept meeting people from Maryland, but they were always from Columbia or Chevy Chase or Silver Spring or some other blandly named place near a Metro stop she didn't know. Her classmates' Maryland was a suburb of D.C.: international, professional, secular, well-to-do. Her Maryland was small-town: rural, blue collar, evangelical, down-at-the-heel. Their Maryland was the Maryland that she and Mitchell fantasized about living in, a Maryland where no one would say
Where's the funeral?
if you dressed all in black. Her Maryland was their place of exile, a place she had longed to get away from. A place she now missed dearly.

She set up her e-mail account and wrote a message to Mitchell with the subject line
Nostalgia's a bitch
. He was the only person she knew with e-mail. When a couple of days passed and he hadn't written back, she thought maybe he hadn't checked his account yet. But that wasn't like Mitchell. He loved anything to do with computers. Maybe he was busy. Maybe he was already happy. Maybe he'd made new friends.

Or maybe he was out by himself, enjoying Boston, reveling in his independence, going to whatever movie he wanted, listening to whatever music he liked. Stephanie didn't know why she couldn't enjoy her freedom. She missed the rigidity of her summer. She hadn't understood how comforting it was to take care of her brothers. She had to keep reminding herself that she had earned the right to be at a school so nice, that she'd sacrificed nights and weekends to get the right grades, to participate in the right extracurricular activities. And yet
these were the same things that had pushed her away from her parents, especially her mother.

When classes started, Stephanie threw herself into the selection process, sitting in on two or three lectures a day. But that only made her feel more like a ghost as she sat in one-armed desks in crowded classrooms and took notes on subjects she doubted would end up on her schedule. The only class she knew for sure that she would take was Psych I. It was full of first-year students, and when she went to the used section of the bookstore, she was disappointed to find that secondhand copies of the required textbook had already sold out. At the same time, she was pleased to have an excuse to purchase a new copy. The pages were clean, unmarked by anyone else's highlights and underlining, a stranger's idea of what was important to remember. In the safety of her room, Stephanie turned to the chapter devoted to depression, skimming until one paragraph stopped her, forcing her to read slowly:

            
Postmortem examinations indicate that suicide victims have low levels of serotonin throughout the brain. Decreased levels of serotonin are caused by stress and increase stress, which in turn increases aggressive behavior—the “fight or flight” instinct. Suicide can be seen as an aggressive behavior against the self.

It had never occurred to Stephanie that her mother might be characterized as “aggressive.” For Stephanie, the emblematic moment of her mother's depression was a cold winter morning when she came down to breakfast to find her mother standing stock-still at the kitchen counter, staring at a lemon on the cut
ting board, staring at it like it was a Rubik's Cube. When she finally noticed Stephanie watching her, she asked Stephanie if she wouldn't mind quartering the lemon for her, because she needed to drink her black tea with lemon and honey, and it was somehow too difficult to find the right knife and to hold the lemon still and to wield the knife precisely enough to slice it into pieces. What could Stephanie do but cut the lemon? But when Stephanie drove to school, she had to pull over to the side of the road because she couldn't stop crying. She remembered the frost on the windshield that morning. It had given the window a cracked appearance. For the first time she understood that whatever was wrong with her mother was not just “in her head.” It was in her body, too.

Stephanie shut her brand-new textbook and impulsively called her father, even though it was early in the evening and the long-distance rates would be expensive.

“Stephanie! How are you, sweetheart?”

“Okay. I was just calling to say hi.”

“We're actually heading out. There's a team dinner—pizza night in the gym. You know how that goes; I have thirty pizzas showing up. But tell me how school is. Real quick. Have you picked your major yet?”

“You don't declare your major until your sophomore year.”

“Oh, right. I wouldn't know. I majored in football.”

“That's not an option here,” Stephanie said, her voice going tart. She couldn't help it; her father was being so breezy, it was as if he wasn't even sad she was gone.

“You're going to be the intellectual of the family. Listen, I have to go—”

“Wait, how are Robbie and Bry?”

“Oh, they're good, they're good. Getting more independent, which is good. They got your postcards. I told them to write back.”

“It doesn't matter, they're just kids.” Stephanie wondered what her father meant by “more independent.” He was probably leaving them on their own too much. Dragging them along to every practice. Making them babysit themselves. She knew what it was like to be the football coach's kid. But she'd always had her mother.

She hung up the phone. Never in a million years would she have guessed that college could be lonelier than high school. She couldn't stay in her room any longer; she couldn't risk running into Theresa, who would no doubt invite her to some boring, tame event for whatever boring, tame club she was thinking of joining. Stephanie gathered together her new books. She would go to the library and study. She would just be that person, the same person she was in high school, escaping into academics.

Outside, the sun was setting. It was Friday night, the first official weekend of college, with all the students now on campus, not just the first-years. The dining hall was busy and noisy. Stephanie grabbed a to-go sandwich and an apple and left without saying boo to anyone—as her grandmother Geneva would say.

To Stephanie's surprise, there were other students in the library. She had to wait to use one of the computers to check her e-mail. She sat down on a nearby sofa, one with oversized and faintly prickly cushions. She felt impatient and wondered if she should take her grandparents up on their offer to buy her a computer for her room. But the Shanks were already paying
for so much of her education. She felt guilty accepting even more. She was so tired of feeling guilty.

There was another memory of her mother she couldn't get out of her mind: One morning—after the lemon incident—Stephanie had come down to breakfast to find her mother reading the Bible. But when her mother saw her, she put it away, returning it to its spot on the kitchen counter, next to the phone book. And when Stephanie asked her mother why she was reading it, her mother had said, “Oh, it's just something I started doing in the mornings. I thought it would help.” And for some reason Stephanie had let the conversation end right there. She had not asked, “Help with what?” Even though Stephanie didn't believe in God, the idea of God slipped into her thoughts. It wasn't divinity she craved so much as an omniscient perspective, something to help her see past the speck of her ego-driven life and even past her family.

She glanced around the library at the quiet tall shelves of books that surrounded her and at the other students sitting at the long wooden tables. She felt exposed, sitting alone with her thoughts of her mother. As if everyone who passed by could see what a foolish, childish person she was.

Another girl was waiting with her on the couch. She was paging through the most recent issue of
Spin
magazine, a paper cup of tea balanced precariously on the cushion next to her. Stephanie recognized her from her brief trip into the cafeteria, in part because the girl had also avoided dining, but mainly because of the girl's clothes. She didn't wear the preppy, boxy, semi-unisex attire that dominated the campus. Instead she was dressed in a flowered minidress, shiny black tights, and purple lug-soled Mary Janes. Her short, bobbed hair was dyed red and
adorned with plastic little-girl barrettes in bright neon colors.

“I like your barrettes,” Stephanie said in a library voice.

The girl seemed startled, but then she touched her hair. “These? I got them at the drugstore.” She gazed at Stephanie, who immediately felt self-conscious in her relatively pedestrian ensemble of black jeans, white button-down shirt, and Chuck Taylors.

“Are you taking Psych I?” the girl asked.

“Yeah.” Stephanie was flattered, thinking the girl had recognized her, too, but then she realized that her textbook was visible in her tote bag.

“I haven't decided if I'm going to take it.”

“I kind of have to,” Stephanie said. “There are a lot of crazy people in my family.”

“That's a good reason.” The girl laughed and then introduced herself. She was Raquel, or at least she was trying to be Raquel, now that she was away from home. At home she was Kelly.

“I mean,
God
,” she said, making a face, “is there a worse name?”

“It's not so bad. There were a lot of Kellys in my school.”

“That's just it! There are so many Kellys. You must know how that is, as a Stephanie.”

“Yeah, I was always ‘Stephanie R.' Or ‘Steffy.'”

“Don't tell me that's your nickname!”

“Sometimes, yeah. I have a good middle name: Geneva. It's my grandmother's name.”

“I
love
that.” Raquel squinted at Stephanie. “Do you want to go out tonight? I got invited to an incredibly stupid party.”

“I was going back to my dorm.”

“Come on, please come with me. It's with a bunch of football guys. I can't go alone, I'll get raped.”

Raquel's way of exaggeration was familiar to Stephanie. It was how Mitchell talked, and it was how Stephanie used to talk with Mitchell. But lately, she hadn't felt like exaggerating. Her emotions always threatened to overwhelm; she didn't feel the need to inflate things anymore.

“Maybe another time,” Stephanie said, standing up. “I should go.”

Raquel began to apologize in a reflexive, vague, and faintly pathetic way, but Stephanie strode toward the library's front door without replying. She knew she was acting like a weirdo, and also that she was throwing something valuable away. But it felt good. It felt like a repudiation of the person she'd been in high school, a person she no longer liked, a person constructed to repudiate the person her mother was.

A person who had never really existed in the first place.

T
HE PIZZA BOXES
were smashed flat, piled high next to the trash cans. Asaro's had thrown in a few extra pies, but everything still managed to get eaten. Dean added one more grease-stained box to the tower. Out of nowhere that night Robbie had announced he was a vegetarian, picking off his pepperoni one at a time and stacking them at the edge of his paper plate. Tummy Boyer—nicknamed for his appetite—grabbed them off Robbie's plate with a cheerful “You saving those for me?” Dean was pleased to see how well his boys were getting along with his players. It was good for them to be around older boys; it strengthened them—that was what Joelle and Stephanie couldn't understand.