Home Field (28 page)

Professor Haupt pushed his glasses back down to sign Stephanie's add/drop form. “I would give anything to hear those speeches. History is such a heartbreaking field. Don't become a historian.”

“I won't,” Stephanie said. “Thank you.”

Classes were letting out when she left the history building. Stephanie headed toward the campus center to get her mail. She was waiting in line at the packages window when she saw Raquel checking her mailbox. Her maroon hair was in a stubby ponytail, and her natural color showed at the roots like a dark halo. She must have felt someone staring at her because she looked up and Stephanie had to wave.

“You disappeared!” Raquel said.

Stephanie just nodded.

“You waiting on a care package?”

“Yeah. Probably another Bible from my aunt.” Stephanie still felt compelled to be sarcastic in Raquel's presence.

“Isn't it totally bizarre that we're studying serotonin right now?” Raquel leaned in to whisper, “I mean, considering?”

“That's karma for you.” Stephanie had no idea what she meant. She was just trying to get this conversation over with. She realized she'd been fooling herself: She and Raquel were no longer friends. They were acquaintances, and in a few months, they'd be even less than that. At graduation, Raquel would go back to using her real name, Kelly. Her hair would be a deep, good-girl brown, her clothes would be ironed, new, preprofessional, and she'd have a one-way ticket to graduate school. That was her future, if she wanted to take it, and she would, because it was never really going to be any other way. She was like Theresa, except she wasn't as kind.

The boy working at the package window called to Stephanie, and she used it as an excuse to say good-bye to Raquel, who seemed equally relieved to go.

“You have two,” the boy said, glancing at her slip. He ex
cused himself and then returned with a large box from her aunt and a small white FedEx package from her father. It had been mailed two-day express, a lavish expense. Guilt sickened Stephanie. It felt like a poison she had to spit out.

Back in her room, Stephanie opened her aunt's package first. The box was full of food: pretzels, Hershey bars, dry-roasted peanuts, raisins, jars of peanut butter and Marshmallow Fluff, gummy bears, gum, mints, and a shoebox of homemade chocolate chip cookies. At the bottom of the package was a folded-up newspaper article and a Garfield card containing a ten-dollar bill and a coupon for Herbal Essences. How did she know Stephanie's favorite shampoo? Families were so strange. The trivial things you knew, the big things you didn't. The two getting confused, one masquerading as the other. Her aunt had written a short note:

            
Dear Stephanie,

                
Hope you're having fun at school! We're fine here but we miss you. You've probably heard from your dad how well Megan is doing. She's a runner now on his team. Her picture was in the Sunday paper. I put a clipping in the box.

Love,

Aunt Joelle

Stephanie unfolded the newsprint and there was Megan running, the camera catching her midstride, head-on, so that she appeared to be floating above the ground. Her expression was pained, making her seem older. Behind her was a huge
expanse of sky bordered by pine trees. Where were they? It looked like Colorado. Stephanie skimmed the article, which covered several cross-country races across the county. Megan's surprise win was mentioned in the first paragraph. The reporter noted that she was coached by “Willowboro's former football coach.” That bugged Stephanie. It was like her father was getting credit for Megan's talent.

She opened her father's box, expecting something practical like her mail from home. Instead she found a fleece jacket. She unfolded it, baffled by the gesture. It was the kind of present her mother would have sent her, because her mother always wanted her to wear the thing that everyone around her was wearing. And she would have been right about this jacket because everyone had them. It was kind of a joke between her and Raquel. They called them Muppet pelts.

Stephanie pulled it on. It was cozy, she had to admit. She got why people wore them. She checked her reflection in the full-length mirror that hung from the bedroom door. She had lost weight and her clothes fit her loosely, her boring clothes: faded brown corduroys, a black turtleneck, black Chuck Taylors. The purple fleece was a dose of richness; it would be called
aubergine
or maybe just
plum
in a catalog. She recalled a line of dialogue from the matinee she'd gone to on Sunday: “a
plum
plum.” The movie had stayed with her longer than she'd expected. Much of it took place in an abandoned farmhouse that reminded Stephanie of an old, falling-down stone house that she used to play in as a kid. It was in the woods, on the other side of the creek. You had to cross over at the shallow part, where Robbie and Bry liked to build dams. Maybe it was one of Professor Haupt's Lincoln houses. As a little girl, Stephanie
dreamed of buying the house when she grew up—buying it and fixing it up. She was obsessed with fixing things up. When she drove through town with her mother, she would try to imagine how everything would look if the buildings were remodeled and made to appear new again—still with their old façades, but with fresh clapboard and shingles and doors. It bothered her that things got old and fell apart. It wasn't until she was older that she learned to see the beauty in decay and even gloom. Grunge had schooled her in that sensibility. Or maybe it was her way of learning to live with her mother.

Stephanie got her books together to go to the library. She was tired and depressed, but she had to catch up on her reading for her medieval studies class. She thought of Professor Haupt telling her not to study history. He was one of those people who told you not to do the things they clearly enjoyed, some kind of defensive irony. Or maybe it was the luxury of those who paid nothing for their happiness. She was never going to be like that. She was never going to pretend like she wasn't feeling something.

T
HE AWAY GAME
was in Plattstown, a half hour's drive. Dean dropped the boys at Joelle's before dinner and headed toward the highway, a route that took him by Coach's. He pulled into the bar's parking lot knowing that he was never going to make it to the game. It was an out-of-body feeling. He knew he should go for the sake of his players, but they were playing fine without him. They weren't going to be a championship team, like last year's, but Dean doubted that he could have brought them to that level anyway. They were too young. Key players had graduated. Last year's team had been special; there was an
intensity to that group, a brotherly dynamic that let competition, love, and aggression mix together. He wondered if girls could have that, too, if he could build the cross-country team the same way he'd built the football program.

He didn't notice Karen Coulter coming into the bar. She sat down next to him, ordered an Amstel Light, and then nudged him with her elbow.

“Looks like you're having some deep thoughts,” she teased.

“Hey, you.” He was flirtatious without exactly meaning to be. There was something relaxing about her presence; she was the kind of person who made you feel more casual about life. “Ready for tomorrow?” he asked.

“I'm not the one running. Thanks for talking to See, by the way. She's applying to University of Maryland. She said she might get in free because her grades are pretty high. Is that true?”

“Yeah, it's to keep the smart kids in state. To prevent brain drain.”

“Do a lot of kids take it?”

Dean shrugged. “Most of my football players didn't qualify.”

Karen smiled and sipped her beer. “I would love for her to stay in state. It's crazy, she barely talks to me these days. Sometimes I think she's trying to prepare me for next year, when she's gone.”

“Stephanie kind of did the same thing.” Dean didn't know why he was bringing up his daughter. He didn't really want to talk about her. It was too painful.

“How's she doing, by the way?”

“She's good . . .” he began, vaguely. He was going to give
a quick gloss. But then, to his surprise, he told Karen everything.

“It's not as bad as you think,” Karen said. “She's going through a rough time. I mean, who wouldn't be? Considering what she's dealing with.”

“I know. It just kills me that I can't do anything.”

“What do you think your wife would do? If she were alive?”

“I don't know,” Dean said, a little taken aback by the question. “This wouldn't be happening if she were alive.”

“You don't know that.”

Dean tried to imagine the scenario. Right away he saw Nic sitting on the front porch with her tea, pushing the lemon back and forth with a spoon, not saying a word while he stood there waiting. They would argue, eventually, the same argument they always had about the way she withdrew, and how this was his fault, because he didn't understand what she was going through. But how could he understand if she didn't explain?

“You've done what you can do,” Karen said. “She's not in danger. Now you have to wait.”

“Thanks,” Dean said. He felt a little ridiculous. “Let me buy you a beer. Where's your friend James, by the way?”

“He dumped me!” Karen said it with a certain amount of relish. “I was too old for him, I guess.”

“If you're old, I'm old.”

“I have news for you: you're middle-aged. Unless you're planning to live past ninety.”

“Maybe I am,” Dean said. Life already seemed long. One day, his marriage to Nicole would be just one part of his life, not the whole of it.

They talked for a while longer. Karen worked at a company that manufactured aboveground pools as well as lawn ornaments, but her own yard was unadorned. She preferred gardening. She talked a little about her divorce, and a little about her dating life. She kept things light, but Dean could see that it was a learned lightness. He admired her way of being in the world; she protected herself without being guarded. He had the sense that she would come home with him, if he wanted. And he did want it. He needed to sleep with another woman in his own house. It was an obstacle he hadn't yet acknowledged to himself.

When it came time to order another round, he told her that he couldn't drink any more and still drive. She said she felt the same way.

“But I'd like to keep talking,” he said. “Do you want to have a beer at my place? I have a nice porch.”

She laughed and said, “I like porches.”

T
he next morning, Dean drove to Joelle's house to pick up his kids and Megan for the meet. But when he arrived, only his boys were ready to go. Megan was still in bed. She was sick.

“I am so sorry, Dean, but she's running a fever,” Joelle said. “Whatever it is, I want to nip it in the bud.”

“Uncle Dean?” Megan called down from upstairs. “I think I could run if you really needed me. Maybe I could sleep a little more now and run later—”

“You can't run in the cold! Are you crazy?” Joelle yelled upstairs. She turned to Dean, irritated, as if he'd infected her daughter with athletic ambition.

“I don't want her to run if she's sick,” Dean said. And he didn't. But it was as if something had been taken from him when his back was turned. In an irrational way, he felt he was being punished for his dalliance with See-See's mother.

Karen and See-See were waiting at the school when Dean arrived. Karen was dressed in a zip-up sweatshirt and jeans. She had brought a cup of coffee for Dean, but nothing in her demeanor gave away their new intimacy. Beside her, See-See
looked sleepy and childlike without her usual heavy eyeliner and jewelry. Her bleached hair was growing in naturally now, the same sandy blond as her mother's. Dean had been nervous about seeing them, but now he felt nothing but relief. He told them about Megan, and they both frowned in the same way.

“We still have enough to score,” See-See said.

The meet was at St. Luke's Academy, a small private school near the Pennsylvania-Maryland border. It reminded Dean a little of Stephanie's school, with its winding sidewalks and brick buildings. She hadn't called to say she'd gotten the jacket. FedEx said it had been delivered. So he had to assume she'd gotten it and decided not to respond.

All the girls' parents attended. They stood in a small crowd near the tarp, drinking hot cider and commenting on the beautiful weather and the changing leaves. Dean had sent the girls off on a warm-up run with Robbie and Bry tagging along. Meanwhile, he busied himself with the racing bibs.

Karen came over to him. “Would you like me to take splits again? I can stand at the second mile.”

“If you don't mind,” Dean said, catching her eye, trying to read her mood. She'd been so discreet up to this point, barely even smiling at him.

“I really don't,” she said, taking a stopwatch from his box. “I'm feeling pretty single right now, with all these married couples.”

She said it confidentially, as if he in particular would understand, and it threw him off balance.

“Even with me here?” He meant that he was single, too, but as soon as the words were out of his mouth, he realized they could be taken another way.

“Especially with you here.” She held up her stopwatch. “I better get to my post.”

The girls came back from their warm-up and stripped down to their uniforms to pin on their bibs. Dean gave them a racing strategy as they jogged toward the starting line. Missy would lead on the first mile, then See-See and Aileen would run as a twosome for the reminder of the race.

“What happens to me?” Missy asked.

“Hopefully you'll keep running,” Dean said, lightly sarcastic. He turned to Lori and Jessica. “You two are my snipers. You stay together for the first mile. Don't go out too fast. Stay in the back of the pack. Relax, enjoy the scenery. Okay? But when you hit mile two, I want you to start picking people off. You'll flank them on either side, and then you'll pass them at the same time. You know how demoralizing that is?”

They had reached the starting line. The other teams were gathered there, many from private schools they'd never raced against before, large teams that were two, three, and four times the size of theirs. One team with green-and-white uniforms formed a ring, the girls holding hands and laughing, the ring getting larger and larger as they stretched their arms to their full length. The girls kicked their long legs into the center. They all seemed to be long-limbed, with long ponytails. They were like horses.

Aileen said what they were all thinking: “I wish Megan was here.”

“You've run without her before. You can do it again.” Dean gathered them together into a huddle. “Treat this like a practice, okay?”

The girls nodded without saying anything.

“Can I get a hell yeah?” Dean asked, now desperate to loosen them up. Other teams were beginning to chant and yell their pep-talk slogans. They were surrounded by jittery energy. Over by a tree, a girl was holding her side, throwing up. Dean recognized her as Adrienne Fellows, one of the top competitors.

“Look!” Dean said, pointing. “She's nervous, too, okay? Harness those nerves and get out there and run hard. It's a beautiful day. You're a strong team. You've got everything going for you.”

He had to leave them at the line so he could get to the first mile in time. St. Luke's was basically an out-and-back, and the first mile was at the end of a long dirt road. Dean heard the starting gun go off while he was still jogging toward it. He was barely in place with the other coaches when he saw Missy coming down the lane. On either side of her were Aileen and See-See. They were in the top twenty, better than he'd expected. He called out their splits and they quickly glanced at him, barely turning their heads. He could hear them breathing, the soft thuds of their feet hitting the ground.

Jessica and Lori came by two and a half minutes later. They were several yards behind a big group of runners. “Go get them!” Dean pointed. They looked ahead warily and then Lori accelerated. Of all the runners, she had improved the most. He watched as she passed one girl and then another. Jessica lagged behind. They rounded a curve and disappeared behind a stand of pine trees.

That was it. His runners were gone, off to finish the race on their own. He began to jog toward the finish, cutting diagonally across an open field. He was struck by the silence. He recalled
going to horse races with his father, the way the horses seemed so far away when they were on the backstretch. His father stopped going to races after his mother left. Dean never asked him why. He was too busy being angry with his parents for splitting up. A few years after their divorce was finalized, he'd had a choice of moving to Ohio with his mother and starting over in another high school. Or he could stay in Pennsylvania with his father. He chose to stay because he'd made varsity as a sophomore. He hadn't wanted to prove himself all over again at a new school. It was such kid reasoning. Sometimes Dean wondered how much that one decision had set the course of his life.

The draft ended a year before he turned eighteen. He wondered about that, too. During her junior year, Stephanie had visited the Vietnam Veterans Memorial on a field trip to D.C. Before she left she asked Dean for names to search for. She said her teachers had told her to ask.
How morbid,
Nicole said. But Dean was moved when Stephanie brought home a piece of paper with the name of one of his old teammates—a rubbing showed the etched letters. Dean remembered his friend's big hands, how they held the ball so casually. At the end of every practice he would take off his socks and cleats and lie on his back with his legs up in the air; he'd heard this was the best way to recover after a hard workout. Sometimes Dean would lie next to him, the two of them looking up their outstretched legs, their bare feet foregrounded against the sky's expanse, their bodies relaxing into the grass.
It doesn't get any better than this,
his friend would say. He was named Bruce, after his father, but everyone called him Dash because he was so fast.

Robbie was waiting for Dean near the finish line. “Dad, Bry is hot but he says he's cold. I think he has a fever.”

“Where is he?”

“He's lying down on the tarp.”

Dean hurried back to the warm-up area, leaving the race behind. He heard Adrienne's finish, the crowd yelping with delight. Bryan was lying on his side on the tarp with Dean's fleece jacket wrapped around his narrow shoulders. His blond hair was damp, and his cheeks were flushed. Dean realized he'd shown signs of sickness earlier, when he'd dozed off on the bus. He must have caught whatever Megan had.

“Daddy, I'm okay. The sun is giving me vitamins,” Bryan said.

In the distance, Dean could hear the girls finishing their race. See-See and Karen were the first ones back. See-See had gotten a PR and her face was still blotchy with exertion. She seemed disappointed to find Dean at the tarp instead of at the finish, but when she saw Bryan, she softened.

“You have to get him home,” Karen said.

“We rode the bus,” Dean said. “We're stuck until the end of the boys' race.”

“Take my car,” Karen said. “I can get a ride. Or I'll take the bus back with the kids.”

“We can stay; he's not going to get any worse.”

“I insist—as a mother,” Karen said. She pushed the keys into Dean's hand.

Both boys fell asleep on the car ride home. Flu was going to sweep through his house; Dean could see it coming. He felt stranded. It was being in a different car and driving unfamiliar roads. It was having to accept favors from a woman he barely knew. It was realizing he was truly alone in the care of his sons. His heart began to beat crazily, and he had to pull over
to the side of the road to steady himself. Cars sped by; nobody stopped to see if he was okay. Eventually, he pulled back onto the highway.

T
HERESA'S PARENTS,
S
TEVEN
and Candace, were physicists. They worked in a lab at Johns Hopkins where they studied laser technology. Stephanie could tell by their vague description that this was a significant generalization of what they actually studied, and she pressed them for more details. Theresa interrupted. “They make weapons,” she said. “It's a government lab.”

“That's an exaggeration,” Candace said, pointing a long, manicured fingernail. She had touches of femininity, but you had to look for them. “There are military applications for some of what we do, yes, but we're hardly making weapons.”

“Whatever you say, Mom.”

Stephanie couldn't get a read on Theresa's sarcasm, whether it was politically motivated or if she thought there was something square about working for the government. Stephanie was slightly dazzled by Theresa's parents; they were easily the smartest people she'd ever met. Maybe Mitchell would be like them.

“What does your father do?” Steven asked Stephanie.

“He's a football coach.”

“I'm afraid I don't know much about football,” he said.

“For me, football is too much stop and start,” said Candace. “And I don't like the tackling.”

“My dad doesn't let people hit during practice,” Stephanie said. “Only games. And only certain kinds of hits.”

“Still, I would be wary of letting Andrew play,” Candace said.

“No danger of that,” Theresa said. “Andrew's arms are like twigs.”

Andrew was Theresa's older brother. He was in the sciences, too, studying epidemiology, a word Stephanie didn't know, but she was too embarrassed to ask for a definition.

“Andrew's a runner,” said Steven. “Just a fun runner, like me.”

Stephanie nodded. She could say that her father was a running coach, too, that he actually wasn't coaching football anymore, but it seemed like too much to explain. She had the sense that Theresa's parents knew about her mother, that Theresa had briefed them. She'd probably also told them not to bring it up. That made things easier, in a way, but at the same time Stephanie wanted them to acknowledge that she was missing something important.

Her depression hangover was starting to lift. It was fall break, a mysterious interlude that did not correspond with any holidays. Stephanie's plan had been to spend the long weekend studying and picking up extra cafeteria shifts, but when Theresa extended an invitation, she felt such relief that she realized she was desperate to leave campus.

It felt luxurious to be in a house, to have so much domestic space to move about in. Everything about Theresa's house was soft and personal, from the gently curving road that delivered them to Theresa's driveway, to the carefully pruned shrubberies that concealed their house from the road, to the wall-to-wall carpeting and blond wood furniture. Theresa's parents explained that Columbia was a planned community, and that all the roads and property lines had been mapped out in advance. There were no houses on the main road; everyone
lived on a small side street, each house arranged at the perfect distance from its neighbor, uninterrupted by random expanses of field, broken-down barns, or hastily constructed prefab homes. The overall effect was one of extraordinary calm; it also felt opaque. Stephanie had no way of reading the landscape; she couldn't see in it a history of the town's rising and falling fortunes. She couldn't tell what anyone did for a living or for fun. It was disconcerting and yet she liked it. It gave her a feeling of privacy, which she badly needed—not only to grieve, but to figure out who she was in the wake of her grieving. She was becoming someone, or maybe she was figuring out who she had always been.

Her father always said that people revealed their character on the playing field, and she had always thought it was such an old-fashioned belief—both the idea of character and the idea of sports as some kind of crucible. But now she thought she had taken him too seriously. All he was saying was that if an athlete was determined or lazy or bold, you saw it in his actions when he was challenged physically. And here she was, being challenged physically—she saw her depression as something physical—and she knew, deep down, that it wasn't going to break her. She wasn't like her mother. There was relief and sadness in this realization, the two feelings mixed together in a way that was so different from her high school years, when she would feel one emotion so strongly it was like an engine in her chest. Was this adulthood, she wondered, or was it grief? Was grieving how one became an adult?