Home Field (27 page)

“You're a hard man to get a hold of,” she said. “I was coming to the high school anyway, so I thought I'd see if you were here.”

“I'm glad you did.” He gave her a quick kiss on the cheek and led her into his office. “Bryan's around, just so you know.”

“I know,” she said. “He goes to practice with you, right?”

“Sometimes Robbie, too. But not today, he has rehearsal. He's actually really good, I saw him dancing the other day, not that I know the first thing about dancing. But still, he's got something!” Dean could hear how fake and jovial he sounded. He could see on Laura's face that she heard it, too.

“What's going on with you?” Laura said.

“I'm sorry, I've been busy.”

“If you're busy, that's fine,” she said. “I'm busy, too. But you don't have to avoid me.”

“It doesn't have to do with you.”

“Dean, I've been through this before with you. Where you fade out. I can't do it again.”

“I'm not fading out. It's Stephanie. She got into trouble over the weekend and I've been trying to deal with it.”

“What kind of trouble?”

“I shouldn't get into it,” Dean said. “For her sake.”

“Okay, but I want to be there for you, if I can.”

“You can't,” Dean said, more sharply than he'd intended.

“I don't even get to try?” Laura took a step back toward the doorway, and he remembered kissing her when he was still married.

“I'm sorry,” he said. “It's just more serious than you think. She was in the hospital.”

“She was in the hospital?” Laura said. “Was it a suicide attempt?”

“No, of course not! She would never do that.” Dean felt jolted; he couldn't believe this possibility hadn't occurred to him.

“I'm sorry,” Laura said. “I don't know why I assumed that.”

“You don't know why?”

“I mean, it was insensitive.” She looked at him uncertainly. “You're never sarcastic. I don't like it.”

“I need to get my head together, I'm about to run a practice.” He took his clipboard from his desk, the one Stephanie had decorated with a Sharpie years ago, without asking him. He'd been annoyed then, but now he liked seeing his name in little-girl lettering.

“So that's it? That's the end of our conversation?”

As she spoke, the bell rang for dismissal, as if to answer her question. But they couldn't even joke about it.

“The girls are waiting for me,” Dean said.

“You can't just blow me off,” Laura said. “I can't be here for you when you need me and spend the rest of my time wondering what's going on in your head.”

“Sometimes you overthink things.”

“That's better than what you do. I'm starting to see why your wife felt like she was shut out.”

“Who told you that?”

“
You
told me that. You told me everything about your life and now I'm just supposed to be the girlfriend you keep on the side?”

“Nobody told you to break up with your fiancé. If you needed me to be your excuse to change your life, that's fine.”

“I didn't need an excuse. You're projecting things onto me.”

“I don't have time to be analyzed, Laura. I've got three kids. I have to think about them.”

“You know I can't argue with that.” Her eyes were filled with tears. “I think that's why you're saying it.”

“I'm sorry—”

“No, let me go. I'm going.”

He followed her into the hallway, but he couldn't say anything more because Megan was waiting outside his office. She was sitting on a bench near the small gym, at a respectable distance, which made Dean think she must have overheard something.

“Hey, Megan. What's going on? Did you talk to your dad about getting racing flats?”

“Not yet. My mom just wanted me to ask if you still need us to babysit tomorrow night.”

“Oh, yeah.” Dean had forgotten that he was supposed to go to an away game. Garrett had asked him to come along, a couple of weeks ago—not to coach, but to ride in the van with the Boosters, as a “special guest.” In the back of his mind, he'd thought of asking Laura to meet him there.

“So you'll drop them off tomorrow?” Megan said.

Dean paused. He really didn't want to go. This was his chance to cancel. He nodded and said he'd drop them off at five.

O
N
T
UESDAY,
S
TEPHANIE
took her Psych I midterm and failed it. She had never failed a test before, and when she got it back,
on Thursday, the letter was written so neatly and precisely that it didn't immediately register as a bad thing. In her mind's eye, an F would be written with a thick red pen; it would be angry-looking. This F was a small notation at the top right-hand corner of her blue book. She flipped through the pages, skimming the corrections in the margins of her error-ridden essays. She barely remembered writing them.

Next to her, the margins of Raquel's exam were punctuated with checkmarks and stars. She had done well, somehow. Her mind wasn't caught in the same fog.

“How'd you do?” Raquel whispered.

Stephanie shrugged. “Not great.”

“I pulled this B-plus out of my ass,” Raquel said. “I don't like cramming, I never want to do that again.”

“Yeah, I know what you mean.” Stephanie shoved her booklet into her backpack. Something had shifted in her relationship with Raquel. Without discussing it, they'd stopped eating meals together and now only met to study in the library, where they couldn't talk much. It was as if Stephanie had swum out to a place that Raquel didn't want to go. Or maybe it was simpler. Maybe Stephanie had admired Raquel and now she didn't and without that admiration, the coziness between them was gone.

The professor started to go through the exam, question by question. Stephanie couldn't take it. She excused herself to use the bathroom, but once she was in the hallway, she knew she was going to leave the building. Outside, the day was overcast, the sky a dull white sheet in need of washing. She went to the library to check her e-mail. There, sitting in her inbox, was a message with the subject line
Re: Nostalgia's a bitch
. She opened it hungrily.

                
Steph, I am so sorry I didn't answer this sooner. I kept putting it off because I wanted to say the right thing. Anyway, I'm sure you're feeling much better about school now. The first weeks were hard for me, too. I think I had this ideal in my head. I thought none of the guys here would be like the guys we knew in high school because they were smart, but it turns out that being smart does not prevent you from being a boring asshole. Also, it has to be said, there are a lot of nerds here. And the drinking is out of hand. Apparently it gets worse in the winter. I don't know how that is even possible. All that being said, I am pretty fucking happy. My roommate is really funny and he's getting me into improv comedy. We've been going to shows in town. And my classes are amazing. For the first time in my life I am struggling to keep up and it's a weirdly good feeling. I already know I want to go to grad school, maybe even get a PhD. It feels possible. There is such a huge distance between my life here and my life at home. I don't know if you feel that way, too, but it makes me feel lonely sometimes. This is going to sound so sentimental but I was thinking of you the other day, wondering what kind of person you are going to grow up to be (and at the same time wondering what kind of person I am going to be) and imagining us as friends ten years from now. It was all very vague but I just had a strong sense of how happy we would be, and that maybe the hardest thing—leaving Willowboro—is behind us. It was a big leap for me. Maybe not as much of one for you, because you always knew you were going to have a different kind of life from your parents. One more thing,
Steph, I had a dream about your mother: She was walking in a field behind my house. I stopped her and asked if she needed directions. She said, “Oh no, I just wanted to let your father know that I'm dead.” I said, “Because my dad's a pastor?” But she didn't answer and that was the end. I don't know what the dream means, probably my own Freudian shit, but when I woke up it was like I had seen your mother. I remembered so many things about her—the smell of her hair and her smile and the way she had of pausing, very slightly, before she answered a question. And I thought, if I can miss her this way, then Stephanie must really really miss her. So I am so sorry, Stephanie, I am just so sorry. I don't know what else I can say except that. And I miss you. And I hope we will always be friends.

Love, Mitchell

Stephanie read the e-mail twice. Then a third time. She inhaled deeply through her nose every time she reached the end, needing to keep back her tears. Relief, sadness, and a sense of deep, deep longing. She closed her e-mail without answering Mitchell's message and left the library. Outside, she let out a brief, involuntary moan. Then she felt better. Not good, not normal, but better. Something had been cleared away. She felt she would never forget this day in her life, the cold air on her face, the gray sky, the worn grass, the red brick, the bare trees, and the voices of her classmates in the distance. She walked back to her room, and as she made her way down the paved pathways, she listened, with childlike concentration, to the sound of her own footsteps.

T
HE NEXT MORNING
Stephanie woke up early, had a quick breakfast of raisin toast, and headed toward the other end of the campus, to the history building, where her academic adviser had his office. Every first-year student was assigned an adviser, a professor randomly selected and, more often than not, ill-suited to his advisees. In Stephanie's case, this was Professor Haupt, a short, good-humored man whose glasses were almost always pushed to the top of his forehead, balancing uncertainly, waiting to be called into service.

Stephanie knocked softly on his door, nervous because she was visiting right at the beginning of office hours. When no one answered, she turned to leave, only to see him coming down the hallway carrying a cup of coffee and a large muffin on a paper napkin. He seemed so contented that she didn't want to disturb him. She began to write her name on the sign-up sheet outside his door, as if this had been the original purpose of her visit, but when he saw her, he called to her.

“Sarah! How can I help you?”

“It's Stephanie,” she said.

“Oh, right. Beg pardon. I got the
S
right, at least.”

He invited her into his office and she sat down in a wooden chair across from his desk, which was noticeably messier than on her previous visit, at the beginning of the school year. There were stacks of file folders, fat with student papers, as well as piles of books, all of them about Lincoln or the Civil War.

“I'm reviewing a new Lincoln biography, and it's taking over my life,” Professor Haupt said, clearing a space for his breakfast. “I'm also writing a book
about
Lincoln, fool that I am. If you go into academia, do yourself a favor and stay
away from the great men. They're already covered in other people's fingerprints, so the best you can do is to write about the fingerprints—or over the fingerprints. Remind me, what are you thinking of majoring in?”

“I haven't decided yet,” Stephanie said. “I came because I need to use my freshman drop—for Psych I.”

“Are you sure?” Professor Haupt asked. He pushed his glasses down and began to search for her file. “As I recall, that's not the most challenging course on your schedule.”

The freshman drop was a kind of safety net for first-year students, allowing them to stop taking a class midsemester, no questions asked, and with no adverse effects on their GPA. Students often invoked its magical powers in conversation when they were feeling nervous about an upcoming test or paper, but Stephanie had not yet heard of anyone actually using it. She wondered if she had misunderstood and suddenly worried that she would be penalized for using it on a gut course.

“I just failed the midterm,” she said.

“You can make it up on the final and with the labs.” He had found her file and was flipping through it. “At the very least you could wait a few weeks and see how you feel.”

“I don't want to study psychology,” she said. “It's not what I want to learn right now.”

Professor Haupt's face registered surprise, and she knew she sounded stubborn, like she was issuing a pronouncement to the world:
I refuse to learn psychology
. The truth was, she didn't want to waste her psychology professor's time. Or her own. She had other things to learn.

“Fair enough.” He handed her an add/drop form and continued to look through her file while she filled it out. “I didn't
realize you were from Willowboro,” he said. “That's a very small town.”

“It's not that small,” she said, feeling defensive. He probably thought she was on the slow side. Admitted for geographic diversity.

“Don't get me wrong, I love Willowboro.” Professor Haupt pushed his glasses back up to his forehead.

“You've been there?” Stephanie said.

“Many times. I wrote a book about the Battle of Antietam.”

“The single bloodiest day in American history.”

“That's right! My book was actually about the hospitals that sprang up nearby, the way people turned their houses and barns into makeshift infirmaries. You probably already know this, having grown up in the area, but Lincoln visited several of these residences. But there are no official records of it. All we know of his visits is from the letters that soldiers wrote home. Apparently, he gave speeches at each one—incredibly beautiful speeches. One man wrote to his daughter that every soldier was moved to take out his handkerchief.”

“That's interesting,” Stephanie said neutrally. She was a little bit suspicious of anyone who fetishized the Civil War. It was always men and boys who knew the battles intimately, memorized the gains and losses and the weather patterns and the terrain. She got the feeling they saw these old, prenuclear wars as a kind of lost sport—a pure, brutal game that could only exist in a simpler time.