Home Field (3 page)

“Missy's going out for cheer squad,” Smoot said. “She can't help herself, she just has to cheer me on—oh, shoot! Brain freeze!” He pressed the heel of his palm to his forehead and squeezed his eyes shut, as if it was the worst pain he'd been in all day.

“You drink those things way too fast.” Melissa turned to Dean. “I don't play sports. I'm not coordinated.”

“Maybe you just haven't found the right sport.”

“Maybe.” She nudged her brother. “Come on, you said you'd drop me off.”

“Yeah, okay. See you Monday, Coach.”

They waved guilelessly, completely absorbed by the logistics of their evening and the politics of siblinghood. They couldn't see Nicole's ghost, and for that, Dean was grateful. Both the best and worst thing about working with kids was that they had almost no ability to imagine life beyond the age of thirty.

Dean turned on the radio for the ride home, searching for WINQ, the oldies station he and Stephanie used to sing along to together. Once, they had been buddies, best friends. She had tagged along to every game, and sometimes even to practices, doing homework in the stands. She'd been three years old when he met Nicole, the young widow no one wanted to date—or maybe, the young widow everyone wanted to date but was too cautious to approach. Dean had no idea of her previous marriage. And neither did Stephanie. As far as she was concerned, Dean was her new father. He'd never pictured himself marrying a woman who already had a child, but after their first week together, he was already sitting next to her in a church pew, unwilling to be apart from her for any part of the weekend. He'd never fallen for someone so quickly, and it was exhilarating. When he and Nicole broke the happy news to Stephanie, she seemed confused. It took them a while to realize that she thought they were already married. They let her pick the wedding cake, and she chose to have it decorated with pink and purple flowers. She wore a ruffled pink-and-purple dress to match.

Now Stephanie was a different kind of girl altogether. She didn't fantasize about wedding cakes and she never wore pink. She had gone to her junior prom wearing a torn slip and a
man's blazer, her date a boy who was not the least bit interested in girls—a fact that unsettled Dean, though he was careful not to say so. Nicole was even more disappointed than he was. Stephanie had started high school on her mother's path: a cheerleader, a churchgoer, a smiling girl with smiling friends. But she started to change at the end of ninth grade. Nicole noticed before Dean did; it began with her clothes. Stephanie stopped shopping with Nicole at the mall and instead went to thrift stores to find items that no one else had. New clothes led to new friends; that was how it worked with girls, apparently. The new friends weren't bad—they were smart and polite—but they mystified Dean with their dark clothes, their dark looks, and their dark under-the-breath jokes. What did they have to be depressed about? There had been a war going on when he was in high school. He blamed the culture, the muddy-sounding music. He would watch MTV with Stephanie to try to figure it out. One of the singers mumbled so badly that his lyrics were put up on the screen, like subtitles. This guy wore a dress onstage. When he killed himself, Stephanie wanted to take a day off from school. An absurd request, Dean thought, not even worth acknowledging, but somehow it turned into one of her and Nicole's bigger fights. Sometimes it seemed as if the two of them could not even breathe the same air. Dean's policy was impartiality. Nicole thought he was taking Stephanie's side.

Dean turned onto Iron Bridge Road, a lane divided into two sections: one old, narrow, and badly paved, and the other new, wide, and smooth as a highway. Dean lived in the old section, where the road's namesake, a wrought-iron bridge, had once stood. It was demolished in the late seventies and re
placed by a plain cement structure with thick safety rails made of corrugated metal. Dean might have seen the original if he'd arrived in Willowboro just a couple of years earlier. He was genuinely sorry to have missed it. He'd had a fondness for Iron Bridge Road even before he lived on it. When he first moved to the area, he would take long bike rides in the country, lacking anything better to do. He remembered discovering the old part of Iron Bridge Road and thinking it would be a good place to build a house. He had been surprised, later, when Nicole agreed. Her family all lived close to one another on a farm on the outskirts of town. He assumed she would want to stay near them. But she had wanted a change.

They ended up buying an old house and constructing an addition, instead of building something new. It was a simple two-story stone house, similar to others in the area, made from gray limestone and white mortar, with small square windows, evenly spaced and white-silled. The house's selling point was a double-decker side porch, a real Maryland porch. In the summer, the boys liked to spend the night there, dragging their sleeping bags right up against the window. Mornings they'd come downstairs with imprints of the screen on their cheeks. Their real bedroom was downstairs, in the addition. Robbie had been planning to move into Stephanie's upstairs bedroom after she left for college, but he hadn't mentioned it recently. The boys had once complained about having to room together; now they seemed pleased to have a shared retreat, a reason never to be alone.

Dean didn't see Stephanie's car in the driveway as he approached his house. He pulled in and saw that it wasn't parked in the shady side yard, either.

He cursed aloud. He had wanted to say good-bye before she left. He was becoming superstitious.

There was no note in the kitchen and the boys weren't in their usual spot, playing Nintendo in the living room. He checked their bedroom, but it was empty.

He went to the back porch and called for them in the yard. “Robbie! Bry!” Then he went upstairs to check from his bedroom window, where he could see into the backyard and surrounding fields. His door was closed, which was odd, since he usually left it open. Nicole was the one who would close it—a signal to him to leave her alone. Had he left her alone too often? Not enough? It was impossible to know in retrospect.

With Nicole so strongly in his mind, Dean wasn't surprised, at first, to see her clothes strewn across the bed. It was a sight that had greeted him many mornings when he emerged from the shower. “What's the weather like?” she would ask, as if their bathroom was a portal to the outdoors. He always said, “Partly cloudy.” One day he added, “with a chance of hail,” and that stuck for years, becoming funny for no good reason. At some point she stopped asking.

He gazed at the clothes, the layers of patterns clashing with the bedspread. Florals, bright colors, lots of blue—to bring out her eyes. Stephanie must have been going through them to see if there was anything she wanted to bring with her to college. He'd told her to take a look in the closet before he gave them away, but he didn't think she actually would. He began to pile the clothes into the hamper. They rustled and he thought he heard whispering. “Nic?” he said aloud, involuntarily. The room was silent. He didn't believe in ghosts. He didn't even try
to talk to Nic in prayer. Still, he felt that someone was in the room with him.

“Boys?” he called.

He heard the whisper again. It was coming from underneath the bed.

“Boys?” Dean knelt to lift the duster. There they were, squeezed together, their eyes bright like little animals'. “What are you doing?”

“Playing hide-and-seek,” Robbie said.

“Who are you hiding from?”

“Steffy.”

“She said to tell you she went to work,” Bry added.

“No, she
didn't
.”

“She did so—ow!”

Dean stood up. “Look, I don't care, just get out from under there.”

“Can you go down to the kitchen and we'll meet you there?” Robbie asked.

“No,” Dean said, sharply—too sharply, he knew, but he was losing patience. They were hiding something, obviously, something that was probably nothing, but in their kid brains it was worth lying about.

“
Please,
” Robbie said.

“Hurry up,” Dean said. “I'm waiting.”

There was no movement, and Dean thought he was going to have to lift the box spring off the frame, but then Bry began to wriggle out on his stomach. At first, Dean noticed nothing unusual about his eight-year-old son's appearance. His dark-blond hair was its usual cowlicked mess, his cheeks flushed, his fingernails dirty. It wasn't until Bry's torso was completely ex
posed that Dean realized his son was wearing a woman's white blouse. Nicole's blouse. He was wearing a skirt, too. It was green with tiny yellow polka dots. The skirt, which had been knee-length on Nicole, hit Bryan midcalf. Dust bunnies clung to the hem.

“Daddy—” Bry began.

Dean held up his hand. “Robbie! Did you put your brother up to this?”

“Why do you always blame me?”

“Get out from under there right now.”

Robbie rolled out at the foot of the bed. He was wearing one of Nicole's dresses, a pale blue one with buttons down the front. On his feet he wore a pair of her heels, with bows. Everything feminine about his older son—his shaggy overgrown hair, his long-lashed and expressive eyes, his slender neck and arms—was brought into relief.

“Steffy was trying things on—” Bry said.

“Never mind! I don't want to hear it. Just get back in your regular clothes.”

Bry began to cry. He was always the first to do so; sometimes he seemed to be the family's designated mourner, tearing up whenever his mother's name was mentioned by some sympathy-wishing stranger. “I'm sorry,” he said, wiping his nose with Nicole's ruffled cuff.

“I'm sorry, too,” Dean said. “I'm sorry I had to see this.”

“It's not that big a deal.” Robbie tossed his head to get his hair out of his eyes. Dean had to look away, but when he averted his gaze, he caught his sons' bizarre image in Nicole's vanity mirror.

“Just change back into your clothes, all right?” Dean said.

“Steffy said you told her to try things on. So can't we?”

“Don't be smart with me. You know the answer to that question.”

“Why didn't you just get rid of them?” Robbie said. “Stephanie already has a ton of dead-lady clothes from Goodwill.”

“Don't talk about your mother that way.”

“What, that she's dead?”

“We're not a family that just dumps things at Goodwill.”

“What kind of family are we?”

“I don't know, Robbie! Will you get out of those clothes?”

Bryan was still crying. “I'm sorry, Daddy! I didn't know you would be so mad.”

“It's okay,” Dean said. He glared at Robbie over Bryan's head. “I'm going downstairs. I want you down there in five minutes, in your normal clothes. Got it?”

Bryan immediately began to unbutton Nicole's ruffled blouse. Dean hurried out, not wanting to see his scrawny chest beneath. In the kitchen, he got a beer and downed it quickly, and then opened a second can and poured it into a glass, like he was a civilized person having a drink at the end of the day. Everyone had told him this would happen, that his boys would “act out,” but Dean had steeled himself for something quite different. He thought they would pick fights, punch walls, break things. Instead they had become quiet. They never talked about their mother, except when Dean brought her up, and even then, they said very little. He never had any idea what they were thinking. And now this. He couldn't even tell anyone about it. There was a sexual element that disturbed him.

“Boys!” he called.

They came downstairs together. It was such a relief to see
them in their T-shirts and shorts that Dean immediately apologized.

“Let's go out to dinner, okay?” he said. “We can go to the Red Byrd and surprise your sister.”

“But you got subs,” Robbie said, pointing.

“We can have them tomorrow,” Dean said. “Come on, don't you want to get out of the house? You've been stuck here all afternoon.”

Only Bryan nodded, but that was enough for Dean.

The radio came on loud when Dean started the car, startling the boys, but somehow it cleared the air.

“Steffy's leaving next week,” Dean said. “We have to figure out something for you to do when I'm at practice.”

“I don't want to go to Aunt Joelle's,” Robbie said.

“You don't like playing with your cousins?” He wasn't eager to leave them with Joelle, but there was no reason for them to know that.

“She has Bible verses taped up everywhere,” Bryan said. “And she makes you say one before she gives you a snack.”

“It's good exercise for your brain to memorize things,” Dean said, trying to find the secular virtue. Joelle's fundamentalism was getting harder to ignore. It had started before Nicole's death, but then he'd had Nicole as a buffer. Or maybe it was that Joelle had spent her energies trying to convert Nicole instead of him. She thought love of Jesus could cure Nicole, that modern psychology was a crock. Dean was no big fan of psychology, either, with all its doped-up promises, but he thought Joelle's minister told bigger lies, with his shiny face and his PowerPoint “teachings.” Nic had gone to Joelle's church one Sunday and returned confused. “They actually think they're
talking to God,” she said. “Can you understand that?” Dean's answer had been no, he couldn't. He assumed that God had more important people to talk with.

“What if we went to Grandpa's?” Robbie said.

“Grandpa lives too far away,” Dean said, carefully.

“We could stay overnight,” Robbie said.

“All week? No, that's not going to work.” He couldn't believe they wanted to go back there.

“Maybe Grandpa could come live with us,” Bry said.

“Grandpa would never leave his horses,” Robbie said.