Home Field (21 page)

When Megan finally passed the minipack, there was real agony on her face, but she still had ten yards to go. Dean started to scream her name, and the people around him picked up the chant. Robbie and Bryan jumped up and down like
younger versions of themselves. Megan's arms turned sinewy as she crossed the line, reaching past an imaginary ribbon.

She stopped almost immediately and bent over like she was going to throw up or gag. The other runners, the ones she had beat, came rushing across the line in third, fourth, and fifth. They kept jogging, as directed, but Megan wouldn't move. Dean ran over to her, ducking beneath plastic tape to get to her.

“Megan! You broke twenty on your first race!”

“My heart.” She pressed her hand to the middle of her chest. She meant her lungs. “I'm going to die.”

“Keep running,” he said. “Real slow. I'll go with you.”

She started to jog, barely picking up her feet, her eyes on the ground. When she got to the end of the chute, she sped up just enough to sit down in a grassy spot, free of foot traffic.

“You have to keep moving,” Dean said. “You have to cool down.”

“Okay,” she said, lying down on her back. She stretched her arms above her head and smiled at the sky.

L
ATER THAT DAY,
Dean tried to describe the moment to Laura. They were lying on her futon, looking up at her slanted ceiling. Late-afternoon light glowed on the pale yellow sheets and the walls, which Laura had painted sage green.

“She's going to remember today for the rest of her life. No matter what happens to her, she's always going to remember today. How she felt. How that grass felt, how blue the sky was. It makes me proud.”

“Why does it make
you
proud?” Laura teased. “All you did was cheer her on.”

“It just makes me happy to see a kid like that. Someone who's got everything going for her.”

“Don't you feel that way about Stephanie, too?”

“No . . . I mean, I'm proud of her. Of course I'm proud. I love her. But it's more complicated. I can't appreciate her the same way. There's guilt, because of her mother.”

“Do you blame yourself?”

Dean rolled over onto his side to face her. “I don't know, Doctor.”

“Sorry,” Laura said. “I'm not trying to analyze you.”

“I know.” Dean tucked her hair behind her ear, admiring her long neck. He traced her collarbone with his finger, and then down past her clavicle, between her breasts. He wished he could stay all afternoon, all night.

“I wish you could stay,” Laura said.

“I could,” Dean said. “The boys are with Joelle again tonight.”

“You know I can't,” Laura said. Tim was a subject they really couldn't discuss. Dean didn't know why he was pushing. He didn't want to force a breakup. He just wanted comfort. And little pockets of time. That's what it felt like in her pale green room. Like he had found a place to go for a little while, where the past and the future didn't press down on him.

“So what did Joelle say about Megan running?” Laura said. Dean could tell she was trying to get past the awkwardness, that she didn't want to discuss Tim, either.

“She was waiting in the parking lot when we got back. But Ed was there, too. When he saw the medal, he couldn't believe it. He said the only reason he was angry was because he hadn't gotten to see the race. What could Joelle say after that?
Bryan actually smoothed things over by asking if he could go to church with them the next day.” Dean sat up and searched for his underwear at the foot of the bed. “I should probably get going, right?”

“Maybe . . . I don't know. Stay for a cup of coffee?” Laura pulled on her robe, a plaid flannel that matched her faded slippers.

Dean finished dressing and followed her down the cramped stairway that led to her small living room. She lived in an old stone house that had been divided into three apartments. Her slice of the pie was a narrow two floors, the downstairs a living room and misshapen kitchen and the upstairs a low-ceilinged bedroom that was likely once a maid's quarters.

Laura described her decorating style as “recovering graduate student.” There were stacks of books and magazines on the floor, a pilled sofa draped with scarves, a large trunk that doubled as a coffee table, and two precarious CD towers, looking like miniature skyscrapers amid a city of low book buildings. Dean examined her books while she made coffee. He didn't recognize any of the authors, except for a romance novelist Nicole sometimes read.

“You know, she lives around here?” Dean said, holding up a paperback. “She's very nice. You'd never know she's a millionaire.”

“Oh God, I can't believe you saw that!” Laura laughed. “I got that at the airport.”

“Looks like you go to the airport a lot.”

“Stop it! Everyone has their guilty pleasures.”

“What's the guilt?” Dean skimmed the summary on the back.

“You want to borrow it?”

“Maybe I will.” Dean stuck it in the back pocket of his jeans.

Laura smiled. “I bet you read two books a year—and neither of them is a novel.”

“Maybe two and a half.” Dean held up a thick paperback called
Abnormal Psychology.
“Is this part of your self-help collection?”

“Ha, right. I should have sold all my textbooks when I had the chance.” Laura came over to him, bringing a mug of milky coffee. “I keep thinking I'm going to use them again.”

Dean skimmed the titles. Many referred to depressive disorders. It occurred to him that Laura probably understood Nicole's psychological makeup much better than he ever could.

“Are you thinking of your wife?” Laura sat down next to him.

“Yeah.”

“Is that okay for me to ask?”

“It's fine,” Dean said. “I just don't know what to say about it. I try to understand it. People say it's a sickness of the mind, but I lived with her and she wasn't crazy.”

“Sometimes I think suicide is a way of controlling death. There's a logic to it.”

“That's some logic.”

“I always try to look for the germ of reason. I don't believe in crazy.”

“Is that what you tell Robbie?”

“You know I can't talk about that.” She adjusted her robe, covering her neck with the shawl collar. “He doesn't really ask about those things, anyway. He's trying to figure out how to live without a mother.”

“Sorry, I shouldn't have said that,” Dean said. He was shaken by her simple summary of his son's predicament.

“It's my fault. I shouldn't be talking to you at all, let alone about Robbie, let alone doing any of this . . .”

“Hey, don't beat yourself up,” Dean said. “This started before things got complicated.”

“Did it?” She raised her eyebrows. “You know, I already broke up with Tim once for you. Last spring, before you stopped talking to me.”

“I never stopped—”

“You did. It was after Stephanie saw us together. You got scared. And you know, I didn't blame you. I understood. I think you sensed that I had broken up with Tim because of you. Because I had feelings for you.”

“I didn't know that.”

“On some level you did. That's what I mean when I say people aren't crazy. They do things for some kind of reason even if they don't understand it.”

“Did you think I was going to leave my wife for you?”

“Just the opposite. I thought you backed off because you realized how I felt and you were trying to protect your marriage.”

“And now what do you think?”

“I don't know,” she said. “I never expected this. And I don't want to analyze it, I just want to live it. I realize that makes me a hypocrite. But therapists are always the most fucked-up people.”

She was getting upset, and he saw how precarious their situation was. They couldn't talk about the things that really mattered to them without untangling the past.

“God, I have to have dinner with Tim's family tonight.” Laura stood up, twisting her hair into a knot at the nape of her neck. “I need to take a shower.”

He stood up with her, slipping his arm inside her robe and around her bare waist. Her skin felt soft and cool. Outside, the sun was low in the sky, the shadows long.

A
tray came meandering down the conveyor belt with a message—
HI GABE!
—spelled in Froot Loops, the cereal glued into place by a small pond of syrup.

“I think this is for you.” Stephanie pushed the tray toward her fellow dishwasher, Gabriel Hahn. She was on dumping duty, while Gabe had the relatively cleaner job of loading the dishes into plastic crates before sending them on their way toward the industrial dishwasher. They had agreed to switch off every other morning.

Gabe came over to admire his friend's handiwork. “Must be Evan, he's the only one I know who'd be up this early.”

“Do you get a better choice of shifts after a couple semesters?” Stephanie asked.

“Yeah, sure.” Gabe expertly rinsed the syrup-sticky tray, the Froot Loops message briefly spelling
I BE
before being washed away into the drain. “But I love breakfast. Nobody eats breakfast. Dinner is hell, it's carnage. If anyone asks you to take their dinner shift, you tell them no. That's my advice to you, young grasshopper.”

“Okay, got it.” Stephanie turned her attention to the half-finished bowl of cream of wheat coming her way. There was no
way she was going to continue working in the dish room as a junior, like Gabe. She'd already put in applications everywhere else: the admissions office, the faculty day care, the library, the museum, and even the gym. But she'd been told that, with the exception of day care, these positions were usually given to upperclassmen. First-years had to start in the cafeteria.

“How about some music?” Gabe said, switching on the portable radio that was perched on the dish room's one windowsill. He tuned it to the college's station, explaining that his friend deejayed the morning show. Gabe had a lot of friends. He had an exuberant, babyish appeal, with blond curls that seemed to be constantly springing from his head; round, flushed cheeks; and large, light eyes made even more innocent by blond eyelashes. Combined with his angelic name, it was almost too much.

“I love this song!” Gabe said, turning the music up. BjÖrk's “Hyperballad” blasted through the dish room, competing with the sound of industrial-weight china and silverware clanking together.

Stephanie had only just been introduced to BjÖrk—by Raquel, of course. She told Stephanie that “Hyperballad” was about the sacrifices made for love, but Stephanie felt certain it was a song about suicidal depression. Drunkenly, she had argued that everyone had a sliver of suicide in their hearts, that it was the other side of the self-deceiving behaviors humans had evolved in order to deal with the crushing weight of consciousness. Knowledge of death was the apple Eve bit into from the Tree of Knowledge. Stephanie was getting everything she was learning mixed up in her mind, her classes were blending together in a way that was exhilarating and also muddying.
She knew she wasn't thinking clearly, that everything kept bending back to her mother, to the past, her fears, her loneliness. She was learning how alcohol could lift her up, but also how it could throw her back onto herself. The mornings were the worst. She had hoped this cafeteria job would help her get through them, the way the Red Byrd had helped her over the summer. But the dish room was too chaotic, and the reek of bleach got to her, as did the ugly lumpiness of the leftover uneaten foods, the sickening smell of it. The waste.

“Oh shit!” She dropped a plate. It broke neatly into four pieces.

“Don't worry about it,” Gabe said. He picked up the pieces and tossed them into the trash can so quickly it was like it didn't happen. “I did that all the time my first few weeks. They're slippery.”

Stephanie nodded, grateful and also a little embarrassed by his kindness. Maybe it was just work-study camaraderie. As far as Stephanie could tell, only a small percentage of the student body had to work; everyone else spent their savings or had allowances from their parents. Stephanie had plenty of cash from her summer of waitressing, but if the past couple of weeks were any indication of her spending habits, she was going to go through it well before the end of the semester. She and Raquel bought things every day, usually just food and coffee and occasionally booze, but there had also been another weekend jaunt to Philadelphia, where they had dropped quite a bit of cash in a used-CD store, a Goodwill, and a makeup boutique that carried beautifully iridescent eye shadows. Not to mention the cost of lunch and train tickets. It was clear to Stephanie that Raquel thought nothing of their expenditures,
which bothered Stephanie only because she wished Raquel could share in her own sense of financial abandon. Stephanie's favorite euphemism for drunk was
wasted
because that was how she felt and how she wanted to feel. Like she was wasting something good.

The trays were coming intermittently. It was just the slow eaters now, the students who lingered over coffees with reading assignments. A big group of trays came all at once, which meant the cafeteria had been cleared out, finally.

“We can start stacking,” Gabe said. Stephanie followed him to the other side of the dishwashing apparatus where there were metal shelves for storing the clean dishes, trays, and silverware. Some of the dishes were almost too hot to touch and she passed them off to Gabe as quickly as she could, getting into a rhythm. What was it about physical labor that she found so satisfying? Was this how her father felt about athletics? Maybe she should drop out of school and be a waitress. Or she could work outdoors. Somebody was going to have to run her uncle's farm one day. Her little cousin Jenny would probably take it over; she took after her father. Stephanie hated how her thoughts kept returning to Willowboro and to her family.

Downstairs, in the basement, she and Gabe took off their rubber gloves, put their aprons in a bin for the laundry, and punched out. When they finally got outside, it was surprisingly warm and students were lounging on the quad, sitting on their jackets, heads bent over books or in discussion.

“Look at this postcard for the liberal arts!” Gabe crowed.

“It's a beautiful day,” Stephanie said, repulsed by her own banality. But as she looked at the scene in front of her, all she could think was that she deserved none of it.

“Hey, do you want to get a cup of coffee?” Gabe asked. His blond curls shone in the sun.

“I have to shower before my class,” Stephanie said.

“Oh yeah, what class?”

He was making conversation, she realized. He liked her company. Why? He was a cherub floating on his good fortune, while she was a backward-looking rain cloud.

“I have to go,” she said, turning away from him. She gave a little wave without really making eye contact, as if that was enough.

Back at her dorm, she stood for a long time under the hot shower, washing off the cafeteria smells. The bathrooms were mercifully quiet and empty. It was one of those off times, still too early for the late risers but too late for those who had morning classes. Stephanie let herself cry a little. God, she was miserable. She missed her mother—it was that simple—but her longing was mixed up with an anger so powerful that she couldn't really touch it without hurting herself. She had no idea what she was supposed to do to save herself. She didn't have God; she felt lost to her father. She could devote herself to her education, but her idea of becoming a doctor did not seem big enough, or maybe specific enough, to carry her to a different place. Lots of people here wanted to become a doctor; it was an ambition so ordinary that many of her classmates—Raquel included—viewed their undergraduate years as a kind of respite before medical school. It was a kind of entitlement Stephanie wasn't familiar with, but which she recognized, because she had also envisioned her college years as a kind of respite—from her mother. And now she needed her mother more than anyone else. She didn't care if her mother was de
pressed, she didn't care what her mother said or did, she just wanted her mother's body in the world.

Stephanie had the urge to take a nap when she got back to her room, but Theresa's neatly made bed seemed to goad her to action. She couldn't skip another class. And anyway, she liked going to Psych I. Raquel would be waiting for her, saving her a seat. She would write notes to Stephanie in her notebook and slide her sticks of gum. Afterward they would get lunch or maybe they would fill paper cups with cereal and go to the library to nibble granola and sip tea. Stephanie tried to dress in an outfit that Raquel would approve of: a plaid shirt, clashing plaid skirt, black tights, and Mitchell's hand-me-down boots. She still hadn't heard a word from him. At this point his lack of communication felt deliberate, a message in and of itself. He was saying that she had to learn how to be herself without his friendship.

She was drying her hair when she heard her phone's high ring over the dryer's blurry roar. Her instinct was not to answer it, even though her father hadn't called in almost two weeks. Or maybe Theresa had stopped giving her messages. She and her roommate had reached a wary understanding: in exchange for minding her own business, Theresa got to have the room to herself most of the time.

The phone kept ringing, so finally she switched off the dryer and picked up. A small voice answered.

“Steffy? It's Robbie.”

“Oh my God, Robbie!” Stephanie hadn't heard from him since the weekend he'd called from Aunt Joelle's. That was the night she and Raquel had gone dancing, a night Stephanie could really only remember in flashes, as if the whole eve
ning had been edited with severe jump cuts. Blackout drunk, Raquel said. Stephanie knew she wouldn't have gone that far if her brother hadn't called, if his high voice hadn't reminded her of everything she missed and had lost.

“Guess where I'm calling from? A pay phone! I snuck out of gym class. I said I was sick and they sent me to the nurse's office. But then I just walked out the door.”

“Robbie, you can't do that, you're going to get in trouble.”

“They won't notice. I have lunch right after gym. I'll get back in time.”

“You could get suspended.”

“It's only middle school,” he said. “No one cares what you do in middle school. It's just where they hold you until you're ready for high school.”

There was some truth to this, so Stephanie let it go. She didn't want to antagonize him. “So aside from sneaking out of school, what's new?”

“Um, I'm going to Outdoor School at the end of the month.”

“You are? Already? That's cool. October is a good time to go. Our class had to go in the winter, it was so cold. All the animals were hibernating. We had to study taxidermy animals instead.”

“Gross, like the dead stuffed animals?”

“Yeah, exactly. But the end of the month will be good. The leaves will be falling. You'll have fun. How's Bry?”

“He's completely a Jesus freak now,” Robbie said. “We went to church with Aunt Joelle again last weekend and he went down front and witnessed.”

“What does that mean?”

“It's like when you hear God talking to you and you start
crying. They give you a chance to do it at every service. Like, after the sermon and the money basket and all the prayers for everyone, the minister asks if anyone wants to take Jesus into their heart. And last time this lady raised her hand and everyone made a big fuss over her, so Bryan raised his hand this time and the minister asked him to come down to the front. And then in front of everybody the minister asked Bryan if he wanted to take Jesus into his heart and he said yes and then the whole church clapped and then the minister said this prayer and put Jesus in his heart. And ever since then he's been bugging me and Dad to put Jesus in our hearts because otherwise he doesn't get to be with us in heaven.”

“What does Dad say?”

“He ignores it.”

Stephanie heard cars in the background of Robbie's call. “Are you at the pay phone by the Tastee Freez?”

“No, the one near the post office.”

“I didn't know there was one there.”

“It's kind of hidden. I saw it when I was walking by and then I thought, ‘Let me call Stephanie.'”

“So it's not like Dad doesn't let you call me or anything?”

“No, I just don't want Bryan hearing me complaining because he'll make me feel bad. I like church fine, but I don't understand Aunt Joelle's. I think it's cheesy.”

“Why do you keep going?”

“I don't know, we just do. Dad doesn't go. He stays home.”

Listening to him, Stephanie got a glimpse of her own childhood, the way things just happened to her and she just accepted them because what choice did she have? Maybe going on walkabouts was Robbie's way of getting some freedom.

“Hey, Steffy, a voice said I have to put in more quarters but I don't have any. So good-bye!”

“Wait, Robbie! Go back to school, okay? Robbie? I love you!”

The line was dead. Stephanie wondered how much he'd heard. A sense of his vulnerability overwhelmed her. Where would he go next? To Willow Park? The cemetery? Back to Asaro's, where their mother used to take them? She had an urge to tell someone his whereabouts and wondered if she should try to call her father at school. But at the same time she took a kind of angry satisfaction in knowing something he didn't.

L
AURA
'
S SMALL, WINDOWLESS
office was barely unpacked, the decor echoing her apartment, with stacks of books and files piled on the floor, waiting to be shelved. “I keep meaning to come in some weekend and straighten things up,” she said airily as she let Dean in. Dean understood her small-talk excuses were a show put on for her receptionist, a woman who also worked for the principal and vice principal. Their offices were nearby, but more prominently located, with interior windows overlooking the main corridor.

He began to kiss her as soon as she shut the door, feeling protected by the painted cinder-block walls.