Home Field (32 page)

“Goddamn,” Dean said, running his hand over his face. He kept walking through spiderwebs. The feeling of the sticky threads on his nose and mouth was like being lightly suffocated.

“I can take the lead,” said Ian, the Outdoor School's director.

“I'm fine,” Dean said. He was furious. He didn't want to walk behind this bearded, high-strung hippie who spent his days in the woods teaching children how to use compasses and bows and arrows, as if preparing them for the apocalypse. Ian had a whiff of paranoia about him. He'd told Dean at least four times that they'd used this orienteering test for years, that it was age-appropriate and well supervised, and that no one had ever gotten lost, at least not for this length of time. Dean wanted to tell him to relax, he wasn't going to sue the school, but at the same time he was annoyed that this man he'd just met was basically asking to be let off the hook. As if that was what mattered. Who cared how any of this had happened? He wanted his son back.

They'd been walking for almost two hours, starting from the school and retracing Robbie's steps as best they could. Ian showed Dean where the test began, at a large limestone rock that was nicknamed “Pirate Rock” for its shiplike shape. It was one of dozens of boulders scattered throughout the woods, the remnants of some long-departed glacier. Dean used them as landmarks, something to keep him going; he would trick himself into believing that Robbie might be curled up behind one and he would stride toward it eagerly, some part of him actually expecting to find his son. He felt prone to delusions, his body pumped up on stress hormones. He tried to be rational, tried to talk himself down:
You're high on adrenaline and cortisol; take it easy, Dean, take it easy.

He was disturbed to notice that there was an edge of giddiness to all these feelings. He felt just as he had the week after Nicole's death, when there was so much to do, immediately,
and he was cast in the role of leader. His strongest memory of that time was not of the funeral, or of the burial, or of all the visitors who came by the house, but of eating alone, late at night, filling a plate with cold fried chicken and macaroni and cheese and coleslaw and soft rolls, his appetite so huge it was as if he were back in college, recovering from a hard practice, his body ruling him, demanding attention, his mind placid. Nicole's absence wasn't yet real to him, although it had been during the hours immediately following her death, when he had been allowed to view her body. He'd braced himself for something grotesque—her face bloated, her tongue hanging, her neck broken—but instead her eyes were shut and she looked placid, her skin pale and faintly gray, as if she'd been lightly erased. She was wearing a sleeveless button-down shirt, the collar partially obscuring the rope burn that crept up past her ears. Dean pulled the collar away from her neck to see the full extent of the damage. Something in him had to know. As he gazed at the dark red bruising, he had an out-of-sync thought:
Somebody strangled her.
For the briefest of moments, he had a fantasy of revenge. He was going to get whoever had done this awful thing to his wife. But then he realized he was looking at the murderer.

“She didn't suffer,” the coroner said, watching him. “She would have lost consciousness immediately.”

Dean had straightened Nicole's shirt, embarrassed.

“Make sure your kids know she didn't suffer,” the coroner said. “Especially your son, the one who saw her. He's probably going to have some questions.”

“Okay,” Dean promised. But as soon as he got back outside, some survival gene kicked in and sent a message to his body to
disregard those strange, protracted minutes with a complete stranger and his wife's dead body, to keep them separate from his daily mind.

“There's the fire road.” Ian pointed ahead, where a break in the trees was barely visible. “There's a good chance Robbie hit this same spot. The question is, would he have walked on the road or gone back into the woods?”

“I don't know,” Dean said. And he really didn't. Of his three children, Robbie was the one he knew the least.

“If you take this road north, it dead-ends, but obviously it hits the main drive if you go in the other direction. Hard to believe he could have walked on the main drive undetected.”

Not that hard to believe,
Dean thought. How and when the school lost track of Robbie was unclear to Dean and, it seemed, also to the teacher who had been supervising him at that time. She had not been able to stop crying when Dean questioned her. Dean's conversation with Kyle, Robbie's orienteering partner, had not gone much better. Dean knew Kyle well—the boy had stayed overnight several times, although it occurred to Dean that it had been a long time since Robbie had hosted a sleepover or been invited to one. When he spoke to Kyle, he sensed that something had been lost in the boys' friendship, something that neither Kyle nor Robbie was even aware of. All Kyle would say was that Robbie had been walking slowly, and that he had gotten tired of waiting for him.

“You're supposed to stay with your buddy,” Dean said. “That's what the buddy system is.”

“He didn't stay with me!” Kyle said, his freckled face going red. And then Ian had intervened, with soft words for Kyle, and even softer words for Dean, assuring him that the chil
dren knew and understood the concept of the buddy system. This was before the police had been called, when Ian probably thought the whole thing was going to blow over, that Robbie would show up for dinner, like a dog. But then he didn't. And then after dinner, another boy—one Dean didn't know—volunteered that he had seen Robbie removing money and candy and a flashlight from his bunk drawer right before they gathered for orienteering class. This corroborated something Bryan had said, which was that Robbie had emptied his shoebox bank when he was packing.

So he had planned it. Dean remembered Robbie's insistence on a new flashlight, extra batteries, new gloves, new boots. He didn't know his son could live with that level of deception.

They had reached the fire road, and without the trees overhead it seemed almost bright. Dean remembered Nicole telling the boys that the moon was a nightlight for the animals.

“I think we should take this back to the main road and check in with the others,” Ian said.

“Can't you check in with that?” Dean pointed to his walkie-talkie.

“I still think we should get back. What if there's news? It's better for you to be in a more centralized place.”

“Okay,” Dean said, barely mustering a shrug. It felt stupid to head back, but it was probably even stupider to walk aimlessly in the woods, hoping to find your child by trial and error.

“We're going to find him,” Ian said. “He's a smart kid, and I'm sure he's taking care of himself. There's nothing dangerous in these woods. Just deer and squirrels.”

The school director kept talking. He told Dean about Native American traditions in which boys Robbie's age were
sent on weeks-long treks into the woods as a coming-of-age ritual. Then he told Dean about a quarry he used to go swimming in when he was a boy, a treacherous place where he and his friends could easily have drowned or knocked themselves dead with one false dive. Both anecdotes seemed meant as lessons of the dangers children naturally encountered in adolescence. And beneath them, Dean sensed a kind of romanticism, a lefty, back-to-the-land longing for a simpler life when children were free, more in touch with nature, and slightly wild. Never mind that quarries were manmade. Never mind that Native Americans had been decimated by disease, greed, and pure unadulterated aggression. Dean wanted to tell Ian that he'd watched kids burn their youth for him, tearing muscle and banging helmets. He didn't need examples of the dangers boys needlessly courted.

“I'm going to run,” Dean said. He started without waiting for Ian's reply. His legs felt tight but quickly loosened up. Ian caught up and gave a thumbs-up, too winded to talk. Gravel crunched beneath their feet. Dean breathed deeply from his diaphragm, the way he'd taught the girls to do.

He kept thinking of the day he'd seen Robbie dancing onstage. The grace of his movements, his long arms white and slender under the lights, the way Nicole's had been. That was the day he'd seen who his son was—could be—in the world, the day he'd seen who Robbie was outside their family. It was a gift to see that, Dean knew that, but in the wake of it there was a sense of loss. He and his son were not alike, just as Dean and his own father were not alike. There had been a certain disappointment knit into Dean's relationship with Robbie, starting from the night he was born, when Dean witnessed the imme
diate intimacy between mother and son. He remembered Ed joking with him, “Step aside, you're useless the first two years.” That was the beginning of Dean's closeness with Stephanie. She was seven going on eight, just a little younger than Bryan was now, a wonderful age, an inquisitive, optimistic age.

Dean's lungs ached. He was running fast. He ran harder.

He thought of Laura's face when she told him. As soon as he saw her at the track, he knew something was wrong. The school had called her when they couldn't get a hold of him in his office.
Why did they call you?
That was the first thing Dean could think to say.
Because he's under my care.
He saw in her eyes that she loved his son, and that her affection for Robbie was mixed up with whatever she felt for him. He saw her fear and he felt it.

And yet he could still locate the calm he'd felt before Laura had appeared, when the girls were racing on the backstretch, all of them hitting their splits, their strides long, their arms reaching. The pain was there, it wasn't disregarded, but it was transmuted. The drama was completely internal. There was something mysterious and joyous about the sport that impressed Dean. It was so true to life.

Dean had watched Megan sprint toward him, the others trailing her, closer than they'd ever been. He remembered thinking:
This is the start of a championship team.
And with that simple, childish idea came the possibility of happiness.

That was how happiness worked: it was simple, it was elusive, it was something to reach for but not to grasp.

And Dean had felt he could begin, again, to reach for it.

“That's the main drive ahead,” Ian said. He paused to catch his breath. “I think I hear someone coming.”

The two men hurried to the edge of the drive where two headlights appeared, casting everything around them into darkness. Ian ran into the middle of the road to flag down the driver. A police officer, Dean assumed. The car drew closer, and all at once Dean recognized it. Stephanie's car. She'd come back.

A
S THE
O
UTDOOR
School's 1970s-style buildings came into view, Stephanie got an eerie and not entirely happy sense of déjà vu. Here was a place she had visited only once, but which had made such a huge impression that it existed in its own room in her mind. She felt as if she were driving into her memory.

The road forked as it approached the Outdoor School's main lodge, a sprawling, split-level construction with a large, round room at its center. This was the lounge, with its stone fireplace, round cushions, and a glass display case containing pebbles and rocks, fossils and shells, feathers, crystals, seed pods, arrowheads, bones, snakeskins, and birds' nests. Stephanie had a strong memory of looking carefully at each object in the case while she waited for a class to begin. There had been something so mesmerizing about the display, full of dead things and yet so evocative of life.

This evening, the windows of the lounge glowed softly, lit by firelight. A gray stream of smoke escaped from the chimney. Were the kids still awake? No, Stephanie realized, it was the teachers. It had never even occurred to her that they would stay up. You wore such blinders in childhood. But maybe they helped you to see more directly.

“Turn left here,” said Mr. Knapp, the school's director.
He sat in the backseat, behind her father. He had introduced himself as Ian, but Stephanie could only think of him as Mr. Knapp. His beard and eyebrows were a faded brown instead of the deep reddish brown she remembered. He didn't recognize her, but then why would he? He met hundreds of eleven-year-olds every year—and then never saw them again.

They parked outside the mess hall, which stood at the end of two rows of cabins full of sleeping children. Everything seemed smaller. Stephanie remembered the cabins as quasi tree houses, raised high on stilts, with leafy branches brushing up against their wraparound porches, but instead they were only slightly raised, perhaps one story, and the porches were narrow balconies, barely wide enough for two children to pass each other. Only the trees were as impressive as in memory, even with their branches bare.

The local police had set up shop inside the mess hall, their equipment piled on one of the round folding tables. The room was small and shabby, with its wood-paneled walls, gray linoleum flooring, and the faded sheets of construction paper stapled to the bulletin board next to the kitchen. A chalkboard announced tomorrow's breakfast: French toast sticks, turkey bacon, and applesauce. Stephanie remembered eating at the round tables first thing in the morning, the intimacy of seeing her classmates right after they woke up, with wet hair and toothpaste residue in the corners of their mouths, the thrill of being able to excuse yourself when you were finished and walk outside in the open air. Stephanie had loved the freedom, or maybe she had simply loved being away from home, away from toddler routines, away from her exhausted mother, away from
the pressure of always having to be the good older sister. She realized now that she had imagined college would be something like Outdoor School.

A couple of teachers emerged from the kitchen with mugs of tea. Stephanie didn't recognize either of them, but then her old sixth-grade teacher, Mrs. Davis, came in from outside, her gray hair in a ponytail and her cheeks pink with cold. She had not changed at all; in fact she was possibly wearing the same red down vest that she had worn when she accompanied Stephanie's class to the school seven years before. When she saw Stephanie, she hurried over to give her a hug. “Oh, my poor dear! I can't stop thinking about your brother. He's probably trying to make his way home right now. I've always said that they should retire this orienteering unit.”