Home Field

by Hannah Gersen

  “I didn’t mean to make you mad at Aunt Joelle.” Bryan was such the peacemaker, had always been this way, starting from when he was little and was trying to get his toddler brother to like him, giving him his baby toys and smiling guilelessly when Robbie threw them back at him.

  “I’m not mad,” Dean said, taking his son’s hand and leading him down the bales. “Come on, let’s go find your brother.”

  Outside the barn, the sun seemed unreasonably bright. It was hot and only going to get hotter, one of those days that required a late-afternoon or midnight thunderstorm to crack it open. Dean liked nighttime storms best of all, the way they awakened him for a few minutes, and the way Nicole would move closer to him in the darkness.

  Chapter 3

  Stephanie’s roommate, Theresa, had long, soft brown hair and a frank, pale face—a face that could use some makeup, in Stephanie’s opinion. But she seemed like the kind of girl who never wore makeup, on principle. She looked like her parents: tall, sturdy people made nervous by the fact that Stephanie had arrived at school without her family. Theresa’s mother offered snacks she’d brought along “for the road,” raw almonds and a small bunch of damp green grapes wrapped in a paper towel. When Stephanie declined, Theresa’s mother seemed overly concerned, as if Stephanie might be anorexic on top of being neglected. But she cheered up when she found out that Stephanie was from Maryland.

  “We’re from Columbia!” she said. “It’s right near Baltimore.”

  Stephanie knew of Columbia, but it was so distant from her experience that Theresa might as well have been from California. Likewise, Theresa and her parents were unfamiliar with Willowboro.

  “It’s close to the Battle of Antietam, if you know your Civil War history,” Stephanie said, aware that she sounded like a huge nerd, but not caring because it was obvious that Theresa was going to outnerd her in every area, except perhaps music. Theresa had an extensive CD collection and a really nice stereo, which she had unpacked first, arranging her CDs into a sleek rotating tower.

  “Antietam sounds familiar,” Theresa’s father said politely.

  “It was the single bloodiest day in American history,” Stephanie said, emphasizing the word bloodiest. She had the perverse desire to shock these people, who seemed almost pathologically sensible with their healthy snacks and thick-soled shoes.

  “Do you like the Indigo Girls?” Theresa asked Stephanie. She held up their debut CD with an expression that hoped so earnestly for approval that Stephanie felt embarrassed—for herself or Theresa, she wasn’t sure. She gave a thumbs-up but then excused herself, leaving her suitcase open and half-unpacked.

  The hallway was crowded with parents and younger siblings, the parents either busy or trying to seem busy. Some were beginning to depart, giving long hugs, their expressions frankly sorrowful. One girl sneezed as she was saying good-bye, and when her mother handed her a tissue, she lost it completely. Stephanie was glad her father and brothers had not accompanied her. It would have been awkward with Robbie and Bry getting bored and her father not knowing what to say. She was glad they hadn’t come and yet she kept imagining her brothers playing in her dorm room, sitting cross-legged on the bare linoleum floor and flicking a paper football back and forth between them.

  Outside, more families were spread across the freshman quad, the grass Crayola green, the border gardens freshly mulched, the tall oaks and elm trees casting generous shadows, perfect for reading and contemplation, as well as for farewell conversation between parents and children. No one noticed Stephanie as she walked by. She felt like a ghost. And in the days that followed, her sense of alienation only deepened. She kept meeting people from Maryland, but they were always from Columbia or Chevy Chase or Silver Spring or some other blandly named place near a Metro stop she didn’t know. Her classmates’ Maryland was a suburb of D.C.: international, professional, secular, well-to-do. Her Maryland was small-town: rural, blue collar, evangelical, down-at-the-heel. Their Maryland was the Maryland that she and Mitchell fantasized about living in, a Maryland where no one would say Where’s the funeral? if you dressed all in black. Her Maryland was their place of exile, a place she had longed to get away from. A place she now missed dearly.

  She set up her e-mail account and wrote a message to Mitchell with the subject line Nostalgia’s a bitch. He was the only person she knew with e-mail. When a couple of days passed and he hadn’t written back, she thought maybe he hadn’t checked his account yet. But that wasn’t like Mitchell. He loved anything to do with computers. Maybe he was busy. Maybe he was already happy. Maybe he’d made new friends.

  Or maybe he was out by himself, enjoying Boston, reveling in his independence, going to whatever movie he wanted, listening to whatever music he liked. Stephanie didn’t know why she couldn’t enjoy her freedom. She missed the rigidity of her summer. She hadn’t understood how comforting it was to take care of her brothers. She had to keep reminding herself that she had earned the right to be at a school so nice, that she’d sacrificed nights and weekends to get the right grades, to participate in the right extracurricular activities. And yet these were the same things that had pushed her away from her parents, especially her mother.

  When classes started, Stephanie threw herself into the selection process, sitting in on two or three lectures a day. But that only made her feel more like a ghost as she sat in one-armed desks in crowded classrooms and took notes on subjects she doubted would end up on her schedule. The only class she knew for sure that she would take was Psych I. It was full of first-year students, and when she went to the used section of the bookstore, she was disappointed to find that secondhand copies of the required textbook had already sold out. At the same time, she was pleased to have an excuse to purchase a new copy. The pages were clean, unmarked by anyone else’s highlights and underlining, a stranger’s idea of what was important to remember. In the safety of her room, Stephanie turned to the chapter devoted to depression, skimming until one paragraph stopped her, forcing her to read slowly:

  Postmortem examinations indicate that suicide victims have low levels of serotonin throughout the brain. Decreased levels of serotonin are caused by stress and increase stress, which in turn increases aggressive behavior—the “fight or flight” instinct. Suicide can be seen as an aggressive behavior against the self.

  It had never occurred to Stephanie that her mother might be characterized as “aggressive.” For Stephanie, the emblematic moment of her mother’s depression was a cold winter morning when she came down to breakfast to find her mother standing stock-still at the kitchen counter, staring at a lemon on the cutting board, staring at it like it was a Rubik’s Cube. When she finally noticed Stephanie watching her, she asked Stephanie if she wouldn’t mind quartering the lemon for her, because she needed to drink her black tea with lemon and honey, and it was somehow too difficult to find the right knife and to hold the lemon still and to wield the knife precisely enough to slice it into pieces. What could Stephanie do but cut the lemon? But when Stephanie drove to school, she had to pull over to the side of the road because she couldn’t stop crying. She remembered the frost on the windshield that morning. It had given the window a cracked appearance. For the first time she understood that whatever was wrong with her mother was not just “in her head.” It was in her body, too.

  Stephanie shut her brand-new textbook and impulsively called her father, even though it was early in the evening and the long-distance rates would be expensive.

  “Stephanie! How are you, sweetheart?”

  “Okay. I was just calling to say hi.”

  “We’re actually heading out. There’s a team dinner—pizza night in the gym. You know how that goes; I have thirty pizzas showing up. But tell me how school is. Real quick. Have you picked your major yet?”

  “You don’t declare your major until your sophomore year.”

  “Oh, right. I wouldn’t know. I majored in football.”

  “That’s not an option here,” Stephanie said, her voice going tart.
She couldn’t help it; her father was being so breezy, it was as if he wasn’t even sad she was gone.

  “You’re going to be the intellectual of the family. Listen, I have to go—”

  “Wait, how are Robbie and Bry?”

  “Oh, they’re good, they’re good. Getting more independent, which is good. They got your postcards. I told them to write back.”

  “It doesn’t matter, they’re just kids.” Stephanie wondered what her father meant by “more independent.” He was probably leaving them on their own too much. Dragging them along to every practice. Making them babysit themselves. She knew what it was like to be the football coach’s kid. But she’d always had her mother.

  She hung up the phone. Never in a million years would she have guessed that college could be lonelier than high school. She couldn’t stay in her room any longer; she couldn’t risk running into Theresa, who would no doubt invite her to some boring, tame event for whatever boring, tame club she was thinking of joining. Stephanie gathered together her new books. She would go to the library and study. She would just be that person, the same person she was in high school, escaping into academics.

  Outside, the sun was setting. It was Friday night, the first official weekend of college, with all the students now on campus, not just the first-years. The dining hall was busy and noisy. Stephanie grabbed a to-go sandwich and an apple and left without saying boo to anyone—as her grandmother Geneva would say.

  To Stephanie’s surprise, there were other students in the library. She had to wait to use one of the computers to check her e-mail. She sat down on a nearby sofa, one with oversized and faintly prickly cushions. She felt impatient and wondered if she should take her grandparents up on their offer to buy her a computer for her room. But the Shanks were already paying for so much of her education. She felt guilty accepting even more. She was so tired of feeling guilty.

  There was another memory of her mother she couldn’t get out of her mind: One morning—after the lemon incident—Stephanie had come down to breakfast to find her mother reading the Bible. But when her mother saw her, she put it away, returning it to its spot on the kitchen counter, next to the phone book. And when Stephanie asked her mother why she was reading it, her mother had said, “Oh, it’s just something I started doing in the mornings. I thought it would help.” And for some reason Stephanie had let the conversation end right there. She had not asked, “Help with what?” Even though Stephanie didn’t believe in God, the idea of God slipped into her thoughts. It wasn’t divinity she craved so much as an omniscient perspective, something to help her see past the speck of her ego-driven life and even past her family.

  She glanced around the library at the quiet tall shelves of books that surrounded her and at the other students sitting at the long wooden tables. She felt exposed, sitting alone with her thoughts of her mother. As if everyone who passed by could see what a foolish, childish person she was.

  Another girl was waiting with her on the couch. She was paging through the most recent issue of Spin magazine, a paper cup of tea balanced precariously on the cushion next to her. Stephanie recognized her from her brief trip into the cafeteria, in part because the girl had also avoided dining, but mainly because of the girl’s clothes. She didn’t wear the preppy, boxy, semi-unisex attire that dominated the campus. Instead she was dressed in a flowered minidress, shiny black tights, and purple lug-soled Mary Janes. Her short, bobbed hair was dyed red and adorned with plastic little-girl barrettes in bright neon colors.

  “I like your barrettes,” Stephanie said in a library voice.

  The girl seemed startled, but then she touched her hair. “These? I got them at the drugstore.” She gazed at Stephanie, who immediately felt self-conscious in her relatively pedestrian ensemble of black jeans, white button-down shirt, and Chuck Taylors.

  “Are you taking Psych I?” the girl asked.

  “Yeah.” Stephanie was flattered, thinking the girl had recognized her, too, but then she realized that her textbook was visible in her tote bag.

  “I haven’t decided if I’m going to take it.”

  “I kind of have to,” Stephanie said. “There are a lot of crazy people in my family.”

  “That’s a good reason.” The girl laughed and then introduced herself. She was Raquel, or at least she was trying to be Raquel, now that she was away from home. At home she was Kelly.

  “I mean, God,” she said, making a face, “is there a worse name?”

  “It’s not so bad. There were a lot of Kellys in my school.”

  “That’s just it! There are so many Kellys. You must know how that is, as a Stephanie.”

  “Yeah, I was always ‘Stephanie R.’ Or ‘Steffy.’”

  “Don’t tell me that’s your nickname!”

  “Sometimes, yeah. I have a good middle name: Geneva. It’s my grandmother’s name.”

  “I love that.” Raquel squinted at Stephanie. “Do you want to go out tonight? I got invited to an incredibly stupid party.”

  “I was going back to my dorm.”

  “Come on, please come with me. It’s with a bunch of football guys. I can’t go alone, I’ll get raped.”

  Raquel’s way of exaggeration was familiar to Stephanie. It was how Mitchell talked, and it was how Stephanie used to talk with Mitchell. But lately, she hadn’t felt like exaggerating. Her emotions always threatened to overwhelm; she didn’t feel the need to inflate things anymore.

  “Maybe another time,” Stephanie said, standing up. “I should go.”

  Raquel began to apologize in a reflexive, vague, and faintly pathetic way, but Stephanie strode toward the library’s front door without replying. She knew she was acting like a weirdo, and also that she was throwing something valuable away. But it felt good. It felt like a repudiation of the person she’d been in high school, a person she no longer liked, a person constructed to repudiate the person her mother was.

  A person who had never really existed in the first place.

  THE PIZZA BOXES were smashed flat, piled high next to the trash cans. Asaro’s had thrown in a few extra pies, but everything still managed to get eaten. Dean added one more grease-stained box to the tower. Out of nowhere that night Robbie had announced he was a vegetarian, picking off his pepperoni one at a time and stacking them at the edge of his paper plate. Tummy Boyer—nicknamed for his appetite—grabbed them off Robbie’s plate with a cheerful “You saving those for me?” Dean was pleased to see how well his boys were getting along with his players. It was good for them to be around older boys; it strengthened them—that was what Joelle and Stephanie couldn’t understand.

  The team had a scrimmage tomorrow, against Greenbrier, an easy opponent, but it was their first time playing without Laird. Today was his last day. Dean nodded to Garrett to get the cake for him—a surprise sent over by the boy’s mother. Dean had stopped by Laird’s house earlier in the week to say good-bye to his parents, but Laird’s father had already left to start his new job. The hallways were crowded with cardboard boxes bearing the name of a moving company. Laird’s mother seemed tired, so Dean kept his visit short. But she ran out to Dean’s car after Dean and the boys had said good-bye, wanting to know if she could provide a cake for pizza night. She knew of a place that made football-shaped ones.

  Garrett brought out the oversized cake on a wheeled ball cart, balancing it on the top two bars.

  “Whose birthday?” someone called out.

  “That’s just for Tummy.”

  Tummy laughed and smacked his belly. For the time being, he was Laird’s replacement.

  “Mrs. Kemp sent this over,” Dean said. “Laird, come on up here.”

  Laird came to the front of the room, his head slightly bent in embarrassment. His dark, almost black hair was recently cut, and with his strong neck prominently displayed, he seemed more like an adult than ever before. He stood next to Dean, slouching until Dean put his hand on his back to make him stand straight. Dean felt unreasonably proud of him, as if Laird were an ambassador
of Willowboro, going out into the world to represent the town.

  “You all know Laird’s leaving,” Dean said. “And you all know what a loss it’s going to be for us. Maybe some of you who are seniors remember when Laird was starting out. He was always athletically gifted. He didn’t have to try. But he did. He worked harder than anybody on this team. He built this team. And now he has to leave. That’s a hard thing to do, gentlemen. So I want a big round of applause for Laird, for everything he’s done for us. And let’s wish him well in his new endeavors—and be grateful he’ll be playing Division II at his new school, so we won’t see him staring us down on the field.”

  The boys whooped and clapped, immediately getting to their feet. The gym echoed with noise. Laird turned red, but he couldn’t stop smiling. “I’ll be back to see you play!” he yelled. “You guys are going to States!”

  The noise got even louder as the boys began to stamp their feet. Dean felt a familiar swell of happiness in his chest. The buzz of youth. It was contagious. He looked for Robbie and Bry—he wanted to see their expressions—but the standing, cheering players blocked his view of them.

  LAIRD LEFT THE next morning. That afternoon the team lost the scrimmage against Greenbrier. It was unusually hot, especially in swampy Greenbrier, but still. That was no excuse. Dean brooded on the bus ride home. He couldn’t remember the last time they’d lost a scrimmage in preseason. He stayed up late trying to figure out what went wrong. They just weren’t strong enough, he decided. More weights, more conditioning—it was that simple.

  But the next day it was hot again, and Dean didn’t want to trap them in the muggy, padded weight room. Also, he didn’t think Robbie and Bry would put up with it. They were sitting in the bleachers now, eating candy and reading the comic books he’d bought for them. Bribery. Lately it was the only thing that worked.

  At the far end of the field his players were jogging slowly, cooling down between drills. They looked scrawny from this distance.