Home Song (2 page)

“So tell me about your goals,” Tom said, feeling the boy out further.

“Short-term or long-term?”

“Both.”

“Well . . .” Kent rested his elbows on the arms of his chair, joined his hands, and cleared his throat, thinking over his answer. “Short term. . . I'd like to bench-press three hundred pounds.” He sent Tom a mini-grin, half shy, half proud. “I'm up to two-seventy now.”

Tom said, “Wow,” returning a pleased grin. “And your long-term goals?”

“I want to be an engineer like my mom.” Kent glanced at his mother, throwing the front of his face momentarily into direct sunlight. Something caught Tom's eye,
something he hadn't paid any attention to before, something that clicked in his brain and sent a sizzle of warning through him: a tiny cowlick right at the center front of Kent Arens's black crew-cut hair, the smallest wedge, which made it look as if no hair grew at the very tip of his widow's peak.

Just like his own.

The recognition came and kicked Tom Gardner in the gut while the boy went on speaking.

“I'd like to go to Stanford because they've got a great engineering program and a super football team, too. I think I'm good enough to maybe go on a football scholarship . . . that is, if I can play again this year so the scouts can see me.”

The boy looked back at Tom, full-face. The similarity was uncanny. Startling!

Tom glanced away to disabuse himself of the preposterous notion. He reached across the desk. “Mind if I take a look at your class schedule?”

Concentrating on the blue paper, he hoped that when he looked back up he'd believe he was mistaken. The boy had chosen a very heavy load: calculus, advanced chemistry, advanced physics, social studies, weight training, and honors English.

Honors English . . . taught by Tom's wife, Claire.

His gaze remained lowered longer than necessary.
It can't be, it can't be
. But raising his eyes once again, he saw features too much like those he encountered in the mirror every morning—a long swarthy face wearing a deep summer tan, brown eyes with dark brows curving much like his own, an aquiline nose, a good, solid chin—faintly dimpled—and that tiny wedge of a cowlick he'd hated his whole life long.

He shifted his attention to Monica, but she was studying her knees, her mouth drawn tight. He remembered how flustered she'd acted when they were introduced in the outer
office, how she'd blushed. Sweet Jesus, if it was true, why wouldn't she have told him seventeen, eighteen years ago?

“Well, this . . .” Tom began, but his voice cracked and he had to clear his throat. “This is an impressive schedule . . . tough courses. And football on top of that. Are you sure you can handle it all?”

“I think so. I've always taken a heavy class load, and I've always been in sports.”

“What kind of grades do you get?”

“I have a three-point-eight average. Mom's already told my old school to send my records, but I guess they haven't gotten here yet.”

Queer, zingy rivers were whizzing through Tom's bloodstream as he rocked forward in his chair and spoke, hoping nothing showed on his face.

“I like what I see, and I like what I hear, Kent. I think I want you to talk to Coach Gorman. The team has been practicing for two weeks already, but this should be the coach's decision.”

Monica spoke up, meeting Tom's eyes directly for the first time since entering his office. She had regained her composure but her face remained impassive. If she had truly blushed before, she now exemplified a woman in control.

“He's college-bound, one way or another,” she stated, “but if he doesn't get a chance to play his senior year, you know what happens to his chances of getting a scholarship.”

“I understand, and I'll speak to Coach Gorman myself and ask that he get a tryout. Kent, do you think you could come down to the football field this afternoon at three? The team will be working out then and I can introduce you to the coach.”

Kent glanced at his mother. She said, “I don't see why not. You can take me back home and use the car.”

“Good,” Tom said.

At that moment Joan Berlatsky interrupted, thrusting her head around the doorway. “Excuse me, Tom. I forgot to tell Kent . . . we have a newcomers' group that meets every week, Thursday morning before school. Nice way to get to know the kids, if you're interested in joining it.”

“Thanks, I might.”

When Joan disappeared, Tom rose, and the other two followed suit. “Well, Kent . . .” He extended his hand across the desk and Kent returned the handshake. At close range, appraising his dark good looks, touching him, Tom's suspicion seemed even more believable. “Welcome to HHH. If there's anything I can do to make your transition here easier, just let me know. I'm here for the students anytime. Even if you just need to talk . . . well, I'm available for that, too.”

Tom went around the desk and shook Monica's hand. “Monica, it was nice to see you again.” He searched her eyes for a clue, but she gave away nothing.

She fixed her gaze on something behind his left shoulder and remained coolly distant. “Nice to see you, too.”

“Same goes for you. If you need any help getting him settled in here, just give a call. Mrs. Berlatsky or I will be glad to help however we can.”

“Thank you.”

They parted at his door, and he watched them walk away through the messy outer office, where someone had propped open the hall doors to dilute the strong paint smell. A radio was playing a Rod Stewart song. A copy machine set up a rhythmic
shd-shd-shd
while yellow papers flapped from it. Secretaries typed at their desks while a trio of teachers checked their mailboxes and chatted—everybody going about their business and not one of them suspecting what a
life-altering shock had just befallen the man who led them all. He watched as Monica Arens and her son walked out of the office, crossed the hall, and exited through the set of propped-open outer doors into the sunny August day. He could tell they were talking as they strode down the sidewalk, stepped off the curb, and continued toward a new Lexus of a piercing aquamarine blue. The boy got behind the wheel, the engine started, and the sun glinted off the car's clean, luminescent paint as it backed up, turned, and disappeared from his view.

Only then did Tom Gardner move.

“I don't want to be disturbed for a while,” he told Dora Mae, as he entered his office. He closed the door, which was normally left open unless he was with a student. Alone, he flattened his vertebrae against the windowless door and let his head drop back against it. He felt all cinched up inside, as if a tree had fallen across his chest. His stomach quivered and held a knot of impending fear. He closed his eyes, trying to force the fear into submission.

It didn't work.

Pulling away from the door, opening his eyes, he actually felt dizzy.

He went to the window and stood in the slanting rays of late morning, one hand covering his mouth, the other wrapped across his ribs. Outside, in the arboretum, the sun striped the manicured grass, dappled the pruned trees, and faded the old-fashioned wooden picnic tables; in the distance it sketched a second, fallen chain-link fence at the foot of the one delineating the perimeter of the tennis courts; it whacked out large trapezoids of shadow from the visible half of the spectator stands; it lustered the cornfields behind them.

Tom Gardner's gaze registered none of it.

Instead, he saw the handsome face of Kent Arens and the stricken, blushing one of Kent's mother. Then later her closed expression and the air of detachment as she carefully avoided Tom's eyes.

God in heaven, could the boy be his?

The dates matched.

The third week of June 1975, the week of his marriage to Claire, who had been pregnant with Robby at the time. Staring sightlessly, he regretted that one breach of good sense eighteen years before, that single infidelity on the eve of his wedding, that sin for which he'd done silent penance earlier in his marriage but which had faded gradually as the years of absolute fidelity had built between himself and Claire.

He dropped his hand from the heat of his own blush and felt a wad in his throat that stuck there like a piece of hard candy each time he swallowed. Maybe the boy wasn't seventeen. Maybe he was sixteen . . . or eighteen! After all, not every senior was seventeen!

But most were, and common sense told him Kent Arens was too tall and well developed to be only sixteen. It appeared he shaved every day, and his shoulders and chest muscles were those of a young man. Furthermore, the startling physical resemblance to himself seemed to bear out Tom's awful suspicion.

He stood over the photographs of his family. He touched the frames. His family: Claire, Chelsea, and Robby.

None of them knew a thing about the night of his bachelor party.

Oh, please, let this kid not be mine
.

Abruptly he spun and opened his door. “Dora Mae, did you file Kent Arens's registration card?”

“Not yet, it's right here.” She picked it up from her desk
and handed it to him. He took it back into his office, dropped to his desk chair, and read every word.

Kent was seventeen, all right: birthdate 3-22-76, exactly nine months after Tom Gardner's irresponsible act of rebellion against a marriage for which he wasn't ready.

Parents' name: Monica J. Arens; no father listed.

He searched his dim memory of that night, but it had been so long before and he'd been drinking—a lot—and she'd been nothing more than this girl who showed up at a party delivering pizza. Had either one of them used any birth control? He had no idea if she had. Had he? Probably not, because at that time Claire was already pregnant, so no birth control was necessary. Before that she'd been on birth control pills, but she had forgotten to take them along on a weekend ski trip to Colorado, and like most randy young whelps, they'd thought themselves invulnerable, and that's when she'd gotten pregnant.

Irresponsible? Yes, of course, but that entire night of his bachelor party had been irresponsible, from the amount of alcohol he'd consumed, to the porn movies his fraternity brothers had shown, to his indiscriminate sex with some girl he scarcely knew.

All because he was being rushed into a marriage that had—in the long run—turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to him.

Sitting in his office holding Kent Arens's registration card in his hand, Tom sighed and rocked forward in his chair. Could the kid look that much like him and not be his? Given the circumstances, he doubted it. And if he had so easily spotted the resemblance, anybody could: the office staff, Chelsea, Robby . . . Claire.

The thought of his wife threw him into a tailspin of panic, and he rocketed from his chair, leaving the card behind,
instinct driving him straight to her to protect whatever might possibly be in jeopardy.

“I'll be up in room two-thirty-two,” he told Dora Mae, striding past her desk.

Like the main office, the long halls leading to the classrooms were a mess, piled with study materials, covered with drop cloths, smelling of paint. From some of the classrooms came the sound of radios, the volume turned low while teachers, dressed in work clothing, put their rooms in order. The audiovisual director came trudging toward Tom, pushing a cart piled with tape recorders, having trouble negotiating the junk-filled hall.

“Hi, Tom,” she said.

“Hi, Denise.”

“I need to talk to you sometime about the new photography class I'll be teaching. We'll have to work out a darkroom schedule between us and the school paper staff.”

“See me in my office and we'll set something up.” Already he resented the intrusion of school business and felt a pang of guilt for letting his personal concerns eclipse the importance of the job he was paid to do. But at that moment nothing mattered as much as his relationship with Claire.

Approaching her room he felt a touch of contained terror, as if his indiscretion of eighteen years ago would somehow show on his face and she might look at him and say,
How could you, Tom
?
Two women at once
?

Her room faced south, like his office. A nameplate beside her door read
MRS
.
GARDNER
. Though there was no school policy on students using teachers' first names, she held that the respect inherent in their using the more formal term of address carried over into their respect for her in the classroom. And she realized plenty of it from her students.

Tom stopped in her open doorway and found his wife
bent over a cardboard box, removing an armload of portfolios. Her backside was pointed in his direction; she was clad in blue denim stirrup pants and a red football jersey that nearly reached her knees. The sun fell in slices across her blond hair and her shoulders as she grunted and set the heavy stack of paper on a table. She pushed her hair back, jammed both fists into the hollows of her waist, and stretched backward. Observing her so—unaware she was being studied, working at the job she did better than any other teacher he knew, still trim, stylish, and pretty after eighteen years of marriage and two children—Tom experienced a sudden stab of fear that he might lose her.

“Claire?” he said, and she turned, smiling, at the sound of his voice. She was tan from a summer of golf. A pair of twisted gold earrings appeared richer for swaying against her golden skin.

“Oh, hi. How are things downstairs?”

“Still crazy.”

“Did you find the new English books yet?”

“Not yet. I'm still working on it.”

“They'll show up someplace. They always do.”

The missing textbooks had lost all importance as Tom entered the room and shuffled to a halt before her.

“Claire, I've been thinking . . .”

Her face clouded. “Tom, what's wrong?”

He took her in his arms.