Home Field (16 page)

“I haven't gone back yet.”

“Well, she's not there.”

“I know,” Dean said. He returned his gaze to the sky. “She used to say I'd be happier without her.”

“She didn't mean that,” Geneva said. “But don't be afraid to prove her right.”

L
AIRD'S HOUSE WAS
furnished sparsely with rental furniture, some of it blatantly fake, like a large gray plastic television without any wires connecting it to the wall, while other items were uncanny, like a mantel of gold picture frames, all with the display photos still inside, so that the family in absentia seemed to consist of multiple wives and a dozen children. In the kitchen, a variety of cereal boxes were lined up in the cupboard,
Seinfeld
style. When they first arrived, Stephanie and Laird toured the downstairs, commenting, letting their eyes adjust to the dim light. There were no shades or curtains on the windows, and light from the waxing moon filled the rooms.

“There are even beds upstairs,” Laird said, leading her up the carpeted staircase. In his other hand was a plastic bag with two tall boys and a bag of pretzels. They'd stopped at the Sheetz on their way over.

“Why do they bring all this furniture in?”

“My dad says it helps the house sell,” Laird said. “That's what the Realtor told him. It's bad that they didn't sell it before we moved. But my dad had to start his new job. And they didn't want me to start the school year here and then move.”

“But you would have wanted to,” Stephanie said.

“I don't know anymore.” Laird reached ahead to feel where the wall was. It was darker in the upstairs hallways because there weren't as many windows. “We should have gotten a
flashlight, I guess—here, come with me.” He stopped feeling for the wall and took her hand.

They turned into the master bedroom. A queen-size four-poster bed loomed in front of them. There were windows on either side, and the moonlight gave the quilted comforter a blue tint. Laird pulled back the quilt. There weren't any sheets.

They both looked at the bare mattress. Some of the intensity of their kiss had burned off during their car ride, but it was still there, beneath their conversation.

“Let's go to my room,” Laird said. “This is too much my parents' room.”

They both laughed when they saw what had become of Laird's room: there was a crib, a child's dresser, and an airplane mobile hanging from the ceiling.

“This is actually mine,” Laird said, standing next to the little dresser, which reached his waist. “I keep one sock in each drawer.”

They had better luck in what Laird referred to as the guest room. There was a platform bed there, a desk, and two chairs. Laird pushed the chairs together and moved them in front of the window so they could sit and drink their beers. It was light beer, and it had a thin flavor that Stephanie didn't mind. She let it warm her as she looked out at Laird's backyard, an unadorned lawn bordered by a split-rail fence. Beyond the fence was an overgrown field where orange construction flags seemed to indicate future development. But there were flags like that all over Willowboro. Most of the time, they were just wishful thinking.

“It's weird to be here,” Laird said.

“I feel like we're ghosts.”

Laird laughed. “You're so morbid! You and that guy you always hung around with—Catrell.”

“You mean Mitchell?” Stephanie felt a twinge of longing. He still hadn't written back to her e-mail.

“Yeah, Mitch, that's him. You guys were like the Addams family. We'd always be, like, ‘Where's the funeral?'”

“Yeah, I
know,
” Stephanie said. “I was there.”

“Sorry, we were just kidding.” He touched the ends of her hair. “Is this your natural color?”

Stephanie shook her head. “It's blond—kind of.”

“Why did you change it?”

“I don't know. To be different, I guess.” To Stephanie's surprise, she felt tears coming on. It was as if Laird was exposing all her various costumes. He was more sure of himself than she was, she realized; he had a better sense of who he was. Where had he gotten it, she wondered—from his parents? From the football team? From her father? It seemed unfair that this boy should have been given—and guilelessly accepted—the very thing she wanted most in the world.

“Hey, don't get down,” Laird said. “You know we only said stuff because we thought you were cute.”

Before Stephanie could think of anything to reply, he took her beer out of her hand and placed it on the windowsill. Then he began to kiss her. Soon they were undressing. Stephanie's jean skirt was a hand-me-down from her mother, and as Laird pulled it down, Stephanie had a disconcerting thought: her mother might have had sex wearing this skirt. She wanted to stop everything, to tell Laird that this was all new to her, that she'd never even seen a boy naked before, but at the same time there was the voice in her saying
more, more
.

They paused to move to the bed. The cheap bedspread was scratchy on her back and she felt self-conscious about her body, but then Laird apologized for being “so hairy” and she relaxed. They figured things out. They had time, she realized, to figure things out. The silvery moonlight was forgiving, Laird was forgiving—the scratchy fake bedspread was not forgiving. They pushed it aside. Laird's hands were shaking when he went to get a condom from his wallet, and Stephanie wondered if it was his first time, too. Having sex hurt and then it didn't. She wondered if it would always be like this, a stinging feeling followed by warmth and sensation. It reminded her of swimming in cold water, that mixture of unpleasant and exhilarating.

“Oh, I am so sore and this feels so good,” Laird said, his words murmuring together.

He meant he was sore from practicing. Or maybe he was sore every day, with his muscles always tearing and repairing themselves. Maybe he was happy because his life revolved around his body. Stephanie wanted some of that happiness for herself and pulled him closer, leaning into him.

T
he boys' cross-country coach had the healthy yet grizzled look of a long-distance athlete, a body and face chiseled by extreme exercise and a lot of time spent alone. His name was Erik Philips and Dean had never talked to him at length, although he had always been impressed by his athleticism. His long legs were muscular, especially his skinny calves, which had been recently shaved for a cycling trip. He had a kind of pent-up energy about him, as if he might break into a sprint, and he spoke with intensity, a vein on his forehead bulging as he discussed the finer points of cross-country racing strategy.

“It seems easy now, right, nice and flat?” Philips pointed to the soccer field, a pristine expanse that the runners had been instructed to circle twice. “But when you get in the woods, it's uphill for a mile. One of those sneaky, slow-burning hills that doesn't seem like a hill until you're five minutes in and your legs are dying and you say to yourself, ‘Why am I so friggin' slow?'”

They were doing the course walk, a prerace ritual that Philips took seriously. Dean had hoped to convince him to take over the girls' team officially, but the first thing he said to
Dean was that he was so relieved he didn't have to coach girls anymore. He didn't know what to do with them; he worried about injuring them accidentally. “Girls have loose ligaments,” he told Dean. “It has to do with their hormones. And then their periods get synced up, that's another thing you have to keep track of.”

Philips was a true runner, a man who liked to start his day with “a six-mile jog.” On the weekends he biked, planning all-day road trips along the Potomac River where he could ride on the flat, shaded C&O Canal trail. Dean didn't even have to ask to know that he didn't have a family.

“I gotta catch up with my men,” Philips said. “There's a turn coming up that I want them to take note of. Tell the girls: it's good to catch people before a turn.”

He jogged ahead, disappearing as he passed a herd of Middletown runners. They seemed like royalty in their white-and-gold uniforms. Dean's girls were trailing behind them in faded blue singlets. Dean noticed that Jessica had dropped back and was now walking a few yards behind Aileen and Lori. (See-See, who knew the course well, had stayed behind.) He approached Jessica cautiously; there was something stern and quiet about her, with her delicate body and her neat French braid going straight down her back.

“So what do you think of the course?” he asked her.

“Oh, I love it. I love trail runs. And I think this one is one of the prettiest. But it's slow. No one's going to get a PR.”

“What's a fast time?” Dean asked. “What does a first-place runner usually get?”

“It depends on the course.” Jessica pointed to a runner
ahead of them, a girl from Middletown. “See that girl over there? The one with the high ponytail?”

“The short one?”

“That's Adrienne Fellows. She's going to win the race. She wins every race.”

“Does that mean Middletown wins every meet?”

“Usually,” Jessica said. “But not always. They have a lot of runners, but none as good as Adrienne.”

Jessica then began to explain the intricacies of cross-country scoring, which she likened to the scoring of card games. You could win a game of gin rummy even if you never won a hand, simply by playing smart and never getting stuck with a high card. Same with cross-country meets. Even if none of your runners cracked the top five, you could still win if your top five runners managed to beat the fourth and fifth runners of other teams.

Clearspring's coach, who was leading the course walk, interrupted them. “We're going to make a sharp U-turn up ahead,” he said, yelling to be heard. “Then you'll be going downhill for about a half mile, back toward the school.”

“This is my favorite part,” Jessica said.

“Seems like it would be everyone's.”

Jessica shook her head. “Some people hate going downhill. They get so afraid of falling that they slow down. And then they fall anyway.”

Dean had a vision of Nicole and Stephanie running down the hill behind the farmhouse—before it was Joelle's house, when Nicole's parents still lived there. It was summer, and Stephanie was little, maybe four years old, with squat legs and
arms that motored to keep up with her mother. Nicole was trying to run slowly, so as not to get too far ahead of Stephanie, but at some point she gave up and let gravity take hold. The joy in her body was obvious as she leaped across the last few yards of grass. Dean remembered feeling as if there was something eternal in that joy. As if it was some salient quality that would never leave his wife.

L
AIRD'S HOUSE WAS
filled with morning light; it shone unimpeded through the bare windows. Stephanie woke up in a mellow, observant daze, faintly hungover and hungry. Laird's broad back faced her, an amazing situation. She tickled the back of his neck. Then a flicker of urgent feeling prodded her to remember something about the morning.

“Shit!” she said, sitting up. “The meet.”

Laird rolled onto his back, rubbing his sleepy eyes with his big hands.

Stephanie was already getting dressed, changing out of Laird's Pearl Jam T-shirt and pulling on her skirt. She felt self-conscious changing in front of him, but when she turned away from him, she was facing the unadorned window. And there were houses nearby! Where had they come from? Last night, she and Laird had lived in their own moonlit world. She picked up their empty beer cans and tied them up in the plastic bag. She put the chairs back and rubbed the wall-to-wall carpeting with her foot, trying to erase the indentations the chairs' legs had made. Everything seemed so sordid, the rental furniture dingy. She remembered her father at the bar, sitting at some flimsy table, with that
Laura
across from him. How long had he been seeing her? Had her mother known?

She thought of her mother trying to cut the lemon in the morning light.

“What meet?” Laird asked.

“It's nothing, I have to go. We have to fix the quilt. What if the Realtor comes?”

“I can drive you,” Laird said, pulling on his boxers.

“I have to go to Clearspring. That's, like, an hour away.”

“You think I have someplace better to be?”

She felt a wave of affection for him, this boy standing in the guest room of his old house.

They stopped at Sheetz for doughnuts and coffee drinks from the cappuccino machine. The sugary brew cut through the fog of her hangover, as did Laird's music, a worn-out mixtape of hard-edged rock bands like Korn and Nine Inch Nails, bands that would normally be too aggressive for her. But that was what she wanted to hear now, as she stewed over her father's transgressions. Outside, the overcast sky was giving way to sunshine, and by the time they reached Clearspring, the place was an illustration of its name, seeming to exist in its own cloudless atmosphere.

Laird wanted to come to the meet, but Stephanie didn't want her father seeing her with him.

“I'm sorry,” she said. She gave him a frugal peck on the cheek and then impulsively kissed his neck.

“No, you're right,” he said. “I just don't want to go home.”

The starting gun went off as Laird was driving away. The noise came from the soccer fields, where a horizontal line of runners was quickly becoming vertical as they headed toward the perimeter of the field. Stephanie stood at the edge of the school's parking lot, uncertain of where to go. In the race, one
girl was already pulling ahead of the others, her gold uniform like a little light for the others to follow. Stephanie had actually run cross-country her freshman year of high school, but only for half a season. She dropped out when she realized that the satisfaction she felt at the end of a race didn't begin to make up for the pain she felt during it. And she couldn't really relate to the girls on the team, who were true athletes beneath their nerdy, skinny veneer. They actually cared whether they won or lost, whereas Stephanie had just been looking for a sport that she didn't hate. That was when she was still trying to want what her parents wanted for her, the simple things they thought would make her happy: health, popularity, routine. A wholesome ideal that would only work for someone who was already whole, who didn't have big parts of her life missing. It had taken all of high school for Stephanie to stop pretending as if pieces of her past weren't missing: her father, her grandparents, her mother's happiness. Now, as she gazed at the long line of girls running around the empty field, it occurred to her that identifying the missing pieces was not enough, that she was also going to have to complete the picture of herself without them.

Stephanie made her way through the crowds of spectators. Everyone here had probably had granola and apples for breakfast, and they had probably eaten it after going for a sunrise jog. The running crowd was
very
wholesome, and their early-morning vigor made Stephanie feel guilty all over again. They were all wearing cuffed shorts—better to show off and stretch their muscular legs. Fleece vests abounded. Stephanie felt dirty and absurd in last night's clothes, her silly grandma cardigan and denim skirt. She took off her rhinestone earrings
and shoved them in her handbag. She thought of her mother, how she was always dressed to the right degree of formality. It was a tendency that Stephanie used to see as conformist and demure, but now she wondered if her mother wasn't just trying to fit in, if she dressed carefully as a way to pass as a happy, well-adjusted person.

The runners disappeared into the woods one by one, and a large crowd of people moved toward a flag in the middle of a scrimmage field. Stephanie followed them, her cheap cloth shoes getting soaked with dew. They were Chinese laundry slippers with flimsy rubber soles, like limp Mary Janes. Stephanie ironically referred to them as her “signature shoe,” buying three or four pairs at a time at the hippie shops in Shepherdstown, the college town just over the Potomac in West Virginia. She'd actually applied to Shepherd College and been offered a full scholarship. She could have gone there without the Shanks paying for anything. Maybe she should have.

The flag in the distance turned out to be the two-mile marker. Stephanie heard her father before she saw him; he was calling out splits to a pack of girls emerging from the woods. Then she heard her brothers' smaller voices.

“Go See-See, go See-See, go See-See, go!”

Stephanie knew See-See, although she didn't recognize her at first, because her hair was now short, bleached, and spiked. Last year it had been dark blond with long daydreamy bangs. See-See had been in Stephanie's creative writing class, and Stephanie associated her with one of her short stories, a story about a girl who survives a terrible car crash. The girl is left with an ugly scar across her stomach, a scar the girl hates, but over time, the appearance of the scar changes from a straight
line to a gentle U shape—a smile. The story was called “The Smiling Scar.”

“Steffy!” Bryan called. He ran over to her and hugged her hard, pressing his face into her body, so unself-conscious. Stephanie leaned down to complete the hug, rubbing his back and kissing his forehead. He smelled like fresh air and cinnamon toast.

“Where were you last night?” Robbie asked, hanging back.

“None of your business,” she said lightly.

“Dad is PO'd.”

“Yeah, he seems pretty broken up.”

Their father was standing too close to the freshly mown course. He kept checking his watch and then looking at the course—the watch, the course, the watch, the course. A girl in blue was approaching, and he crouched and yelled forcefully, “Come on, Aileen. Get up there with See-See!”

“She's good,” Stephanie said, watching her glide by on daddy longlegs.

“Our team sucks,” Robbie said.

Their father turned around. “Stephanie! You're here!”

He ran over to her and pushed a clipboard into her hands. “I'm going to call out the splits and you write them down. Aileen got fourteen twenty-one, and See-See had thirteen thirty, which is good, very good. If she keeps up that pace, she's going to break twenty-two.”

Two blue runners were approaching and her father began to holler. “
Go Blue!
”

Bry began to run alongside them, his short legs pumping. “Go blue! Go blue! Go blue!”

“He looks so dumb,” Robbie said.

“He's cute,” Stephanie said, remembering happier times in their family, when they were a big group of five and Bryan's role was always the little clown.

“Here comes Lori,” her father said. “She's going to be sixteen something.”

Lori was a feminine girl whose pink skin, yellow hair, and rounded limbs made her look like a stuffed doll. She glanced at Stephanie's father when she ran by, giving a quick smile to acknowledge that she'd heard her time. A few minutes behind, a second doll-like girl appeared, but this one was a porcelain doll, with pale, blue-veined skin and dark red hair pulled back into a tight braid. As she ran by—at a heartbreakingly slow pace—Stephanie recognized her as Jessica Markham, the smartest girl in school. She was famous for completing all the math courses by the end of her sophomore year and was supposed to graduate early.

“Steffy, come on.” Bryan pointed toward their father, who was jogging toward the gym and the finish line, delineated by two rows of fluorescent flags.

What started out as a jog soon turned into an out-and-out run. Stephanie cursed her shoes and then eventually pulled them off to sprint barefoot in the grass. Her hangover, briefly in hiding, reemerged, and by the time she reached the finish line, her legs and head throbbed with pain. Nearby, an oversized digital clock ticked off the seconds. A skinny man ran up to her father.

“You missed it. Adrienne Fellows broke the course record,” he said. “That girl's talent is wasted in Div III.”