Love All: A Novel

by Wright, Callie

I stepped in and took the second feed on the rise, moving it deep into the forehand court nearly beyond Claw’s reach. He scrambled over in carioca step and uncoiled a one-handed backhand lob, a bit of a desperation shot that fell short of the T. The point was mine to win, and I moved in to crush it, plowing it instead into the net.

  “Dammit!” I yelled.

  “Language,” said Claw. He pointed to the gate and I trolled out for five penalty laps. It was the kind of thing Sam and Carl and I would’ve laughed about, but we didn’t even look at one another.

  At five fifteen, Claw called for suicides. Sideline to center line and back, sideline to opposite sideline and back. Repeat five times.

  I ran as if I were being chased. My lungs heaved and my legs were jelly, but I willed myself in—third after Phillip and Evan—collapsing at the baseline on Court 1.

  “Nice,” said Claw, clapping. He stood with his fingers laced through the chain-link fence. His cheeks and nose were sunburned, his millions of freckles colored in. “Get a water break if you need one.”

  No one moved. The sun danced on the court, breaking through the pine trees in wobbly yellow lines. I looked up, cupping my hands around my eyes like blinders until all I could see was sky.

  “Okay,” said Claw, “listen up.”

  We spun to face him. Sam sat cross-legged at the front of the group, his arms locked at his sides, his shoulder blades jutting out like wings under his T-shirt. Far to the right, Carl hunched with his elbows on his knees.

  “We have our first match tomorrow,” said Claw. “For those of you who don’t remember or weren’t here, Sauquoit beat us last year, and all their players are back.”

  “Great,” said Evan. “I get the paddy-baller again.”

  “What do you do with junk balls?” asked Claw. “You attack. Hit the ball out in front of you; use heavy topspin. And come to net.”

  “Except I can’t volley,” said Evan.

  “You were swinging up there today. Punch it. Shorten your backswing on your approach shot.”

  Evan nodded.

  “Sam,” said Claw. He scanned the group until he found him. “What’s the plan?”

  “Hit a massive serve.”

  “Right,” said Claw. “Then concentrate on holding.”

  Sam nodded, and Claw pointed to Danke Schoen.

  “Friedrich,” he said. “You feel good?”

  “Yes,” said Danke Schoen, nodding.

  “Doubles,” said Claw. “Phillip and T.J.?”

  “Locked up,” they said in unison.

  Alan and Doug high-fived and agreed they were ready to go.

  “Okay. Announcement,” said Claw. “There’s going to be an exhibition match tomorrow, so everyone plan to stay. Julia and Carl.” My stomach dropped, then rose, as I calculated, computed. Sam turned to face me, asking me with his eyes if I’d known about this, and I shook my head no.

  “Carl,” Claw continued, “you’re trying out Julia for the team. If she wins, she’s on.”

  “What if she loses?” asked Carl.

  “If she loses, she’s off.”

  It was a fair deal. I tried to catch Claw’s eye but he was already collecting the equipment, his hand on the hopper. “Anyone coming with me,” he said, “get on the bus. The rest of you, see you tomorrow at three o’clock.” Soon the Womb was motoring off toward Beaver Street and Sam and Carl and I were alone.

  Carl said, “I’m not going to let you win.”

  “I know.”

  He walked over to the bench to collect his sweatshirt while Sam scooted closer to me.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “You’re speaking to me again?”

  “That was more Carl,” said Sam.

  “It was you, too.”

  Sam ran a hand over his buzzed hair. “An exhibition match between you and Carl,” he said, considering it. “You could win, you know? You played really well today.” I felt a thaw pass into my stomach and legs. Sam stood and dusted off his shorts. “Want a ride?” he asked, and I started to say yes but then I remembered that he’d have to drop me off first.

  “I’ll walk,” I said. Sam took a ball from his pocket and threw it at me, and I caught it and kept it, bouncing it on the sidewalk on the way home.

  * * *

  At 59 Susquehanna, both my parents’ cars were in the driveway and I steeled myself for their iciness but instead found Mom and Dad huddled with Poppy around the kitchen island, Mom gripping the cordless phone, her face ash gray.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “Have you seen your brother?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “He cut school,” said Dad. “He didn’t show up for practice.”

  I studied Dad’s face. He looked tired, dark shadows circling his eyes. His cowlick was sticking up like he hadn’t combed his hair in days.

  “How do you know he cut school?” I crossed the kitchen to the cabinet and got out a glass.

  Mom nodded toward Poppy. “Your grandfather told us.”

  “The school called this afternoon,” said Poppy officiously. “I said, ‘Mrs. Hoeke, I’m going to hang up this phone right now and I’m going to call his mother.’”

  Mom turned to me. “Did you know anything about this?”

  I shook my head, filling my glass at the tap. If Poppy was answering the phone, our fail-safe plan to erase the answering machine before our parents heard the school’s message was shot. Even so, Teddy should’ve been home by now.

  Mom studied my face. “What?” she said.

  “Nothing.”

  Dad stood, scraping the legs of the stool against the polished wood floor, then started toward the back stairs.

  “Where are you going?” asked Mom.

  “To shower. I can’t think straight.”

  We listened to Dad’s footsteps on the stairs, over the kitchen, over the hallway.

  Mom said, “Did you see your brother at school?”

  “We walked in together.”

  “And he didn’t say anything about cutting?”

  I shook my head again, a weight settling in my stomach. Even if I told them where he’d gone, that didn’t explain where he was now. Teddy and Dave should’ve been back hours ago.

  Mom scooted past me, pulling a bottle of wine out of the fridge and uncorking it with a pop. I watched the buttery liquid flood her glass, sloshing up the sides and settling near the rim.

  Before taking a sip, Mom pushed her hair back with both hands, giving herself a mini face-lift. Suddenly her brow was smooth and the tiny lines at the corners of her eyes disappeared, and she looked young. It was weird to think she’d been my age once, that she’d grown up here, gone to school here, had some friends but not a boyfriend, same as me.

  “Are you really worried?” I asked.

  “What do you think?”

  I shrugged. “He’ll come home soon.”

  “He’s never done anything like this,” said Mom, and it was true. The very fact that he’d skipped baseball practice was enough to make you think he was pinned under the wheels of a bus somewhere.

  I took the long way to my bedroom, pausing in Mom’s office to grab the phone book, then hightailed it upstairs. On my bed, I flipped to the Bs and used my Swatch phone to dial Dave’s number. When his mother answered, I told her who I was and asked to speak to Dave.

  “Is he home?” asked Dave as soon as he came on the line.

  “I thought he was with you.”

  “He was,” said Dave. “We went to Albany, and then on the way home he jumped out of the car. I’m not kidding. Outside Cherry Valley. That was, like, one thirty.”

  I held my breath. It was past six now. In an hour, it would be dark.

  “Julia?”

  “Did you try looking for him?”

  “He took off.”

  “Why would he do that?” I asked.

  “I have no idea,” said Dave. “I thought maybe he was upset about selling his baseball cards. Or just sick of me.”

 
I said nothing and Dave said nothing. We’d known each other for ages but we’d never spoken on the phone and I was eager for it to be over.

  “We could go look for him,” Dave suggested.

  I pictured Dave’s blue Saab and the two of us inside it.

  “I don’t think I can,” I said. “My parents are really worried.”

  “Do they know he was with me?” asked Dave.

  “No.”

  Dave paused, then said, “You should probably tell them.” Before I could hang up, he said, “Julia, would you want to do something this weekend?” He cleared his throat. “Like, go to dinner? Or there’s kind of a cool art museum in Utica.”

  I tried to picture Dave opening the car door for me, buying my museum ticket, then kissing me on my front porch at the end of the night, but I couldn’t see it, not the way I could see Sam. “I have a boyfriend,” I said, willing it to be true.

  “Oh,” said Dave. “Right. Well, tell Teddy to call me.”

  “I will.” I hung up the phone and counted to ten, then went downstairs to confess.

  “Wait,” said Mom. She went to get Dad, leaving me in the kitchen with Poppy. He licked his lips with saliva so thick that I could hear it on his tongue, and when he shifted on his stool, his arm skin flaked onto the island.

  “Okay,” said Mom, returning with Dad in tow. “Let’s hear it.”

  I told them everything: Rick Delaney, the Wrangler, Dave, the baseball cards, the trip to Albany, Teddy running off into the woods, my promise not to tell.

  “He just jumped out of the car?” asked Mom.

  “I guess.”

  “Where?” asked Dad.

  “Dave said Cherry Valley.”

  “Cherry Valley?” Dad repeated, alarmed.

  Mom looked up.

  “Maybe I should go after him,” he said, already moving toward the door. “He can’t be far.”

  I couldn’t picture Teddy sitting on the pitcher’s mound waiting for us to pick him up—if he was missing, he didn’t want to be found—but Dad collected his car keys and shut the door behind him without saying goodbye.

  Upstairs, I sat at my desk and stared at my backpack. I had fifty pages of Wuthering Heights to read for English and a chem lab to write, but I couldn’t concentrate. It meant something that Teddy hadn’t come home to erase the school’s message—he wouldn’t have thought of Poppy answering the phone. He wanted to be caught, maybe, or he wanted Mom and Dad to worry, but there was enough to worry about without Teddy’s tardmore antics, and I found myself angry at him for making things even worse than they already were.

  Forty-five minutes into my homework, I gave up and considered calling Sam. Carl hadn’t looked at me when he’d left the courts, but he had said goodbye, which at least meant he was speaking to me. The question was, what now?

  It was then that I remembered the note about Carl’s mom, and I picked up my jeans off the floor and felt inside the back pockets, but they were empty. I stood and stuffed my hands into the front pockets, turning the liners inside out, milking the fabric: empty. Sweat beaded on my forehead—it was too bright in the room, two thousand degrees. I flapped the jeans. Nothing. I thought of all the desk chairs I’d sat in that day, all the classrooms in which the note might have worked its way up and out of my pocket; I thought of the girls’ locker room before gym class, where I’d carelessly dropped my jeans on the floor. I dug into the clothing pile in my bedroom, shaking shirts and pants over the rug, whipping empty sleeves, but it was gone, MIA, out in the world for anyone to read.

  Downstairs, the front door opened and I had no choice: I left my room and crept to the seventh step on the back staircase, where I could spy into the kitchen without being seen.

  “Where have you been?” asked Mom.

  Teddy walked into the kitchen with his shirttails untucked beneath his sweatshirt, his laces untied, his khakis wet and dirty. His lips were nearly blue: it looked like he’d been swimming.

  “You have five seconds to start talking,” said Mom.

  The sound of Poppy’s steps from the den echoed in the stairwell, and I hugged my legs to my chest and stayed low.

  Poppy sat on Teddy’s stool. “Your principal called,” he said, as if he were our father.

  “Why would the principal call?” asked Teddy. There was something new in his voice, a go-eff-yourself-ness that sounded wrong on Teddy’s tongue. He took a granola bar from the bread drawer and began to unwrap it.

  “Teddy,” said Mom desperately. “We’ve been worried sick about you.”

  “We?” Teddy looked left, then right. “Where’s Dad?”

  “Where do you think?” Mom snapped. She took a step toward Teddy. “What’s that?”

  Teddy shifted, hiding what looked like a wet piece of paper.

  “Nothing,” said Teddy, but when Mom took his hand, he allowed her to pry back his fingers, and I leaned over the railing until I could make out Dad’s Ted Williams card, signed for his brother, George, just before he drowned at a place called Reacher Falls.

  No one spoke. The front door was opening again and soon we heard the sound of Dad dropping his car keys in the silver bowl and then, “It’s too dark out there. I could barely see the sidewalks.”

  “Hugh,” said Mom.

  Dad walked into the kitchen and stopped. He looked at Mom, who nodded toward Teddy’s hand.

  “I saw you today,” said Teddy.

  Dad reached for the card, but this time Teddy stepped back.

  “I saw you kiss that woman’s hand—”

  “Stop,” said Dad, and in two quick steps his hands were on Teddy’s face, not so much hitting him as trying to push his words back into his mouth.

  He grabbed Teddy’s arm and Teddy jerked away, and for a second I thought Teddy was going to hit our father, but instead he crushed the baseball card in his hand, then slapped it on the island, the wet cardboard curling at the edges.

  I wanted to move but I was Tasered. Teddy thundered past me on the stairs and I told myself to follow him, but I couldn’t move my legs.

  In the kitchen, Mom picked up a tea towel and threw it at Dad. She was crying but Dad didn’t go to her. Instead, he folded the towel and leaned over his card and gently began to blot.

  8

  Despair tugged at Anne’s heart and danced in her peripheral vision. She tried to listen to Hugh’s story about an injured boy on the playground at Seedlings, but she was too distracted by images of her own children, just upstairs, who had come into this world when called, dutifully showing up for years now to clean their rooms, finish their dinners, ride in the backseats of cars—all the things that kids did—and now Hugh had brought something horribly adult—complicated, insoluble—into their house, while Anne, who ought to have known better, had instead been steeled by her own childhood wounds, certain it couldn’t happen again.

  Now her eyes were wide open, trying not to cry, and all she could think was, I want my mother. How would Joanie have managed this? Hints and innuendos would not solve Anne’s problems: from what she understood, Hugh had committed adultery with a woman whose son was being treated for an injury whose cause may have been the Seedlings School’s negligent supervision on the playground (though if schools must supervise their students only as a parent of “ordinary prudence” would supervise his or her child [Ramirez v. Brookhaven School District], then Caroline Murphy, who fucked the school’s principal while her son lay semiconscious seven steps away, ought to think twice about introducing the topic of negligent supervision). God only knew how many people had witnessed this tryst. Ron Metcalf, MD, the boy’s surgeon and Anne’s cochair on the booster club’s annual Not Quite Free Throw committee? Luanne Thompson, RN, who’d kindly squeezed in Teddy for his third MMR shot before the September 1 school deadline? Wally O’Shea, PsyD, pediatric psychologist and Anne’s junior high science partner, who’d once pushed her into Mr. Franconi’s coat closet for a not-unwelcome French kiss? To date, the only known witness was Graham Pennington, age five, the injured
boy at the heart of the case.

  But Teddy, too, had seen something, this very afternoon in Cherry Valley, witness to his father kissing a woman’s hand. Anne was not nearly guileless enough to believe that Hugh’s hospital-room incident was an isolated event, though he maintained he’d been at Caroline Murphy’s house today only to discuss the lawsuit, kissing her hand as a way to say thank you. Was Anne supposed to believe this shit? Part of her wanted to stand up right now and toss Hugh out of the house. Instead she remained locked to the seat of her desk chair, arms crossed, and when her body began to shake, right foot hooked around left ankle, anchoring herself to herself.

  She pictured an early autumn evening in Boston, a Saturday, when she was seven months pregnant with Teddy. Anne and Hugh had spent the day at garage sales, hunting for a set of dining-room chairs, and now Anne had collapsed on the couch with their plastic shopping bags—six records, an alarm clock, a new paperback, but no chairs—and kicked off her espadrilles, which had carved deep purple lines into her flesh. Hugh, meanwhile, had gone to their bedroom to change and she’d expected him to return in sweatpants and a T-shirt so that they could spend the rest of the evening right there on the couch, but instead he’d emerged in khakis and a pressed shirt, his hair combed and parted, his face newly shaved.

  Hugh’s coworker was having a birthday party in Beacon Hill, he reminded her, and it was true that he’d told her about it a week ago, but they weren’t really going to go, were they? They’d been running around all day, and now that they were home, Anne couldn’t think of a reason in the world to go back out again.

  “Come on,” he said, “we’ll only stay for an hour.”

  But they’d have to take the T, and she’d have to shower, and Anne didn’t think she owned a pair of shoes that could contain her swollen feet.

  If she had demurred, waffled; if she’d said that the party would be crowded, that the birthday boy wouldn’t miss him; if she’d pointed out that Hugh had recently complained about this very coworker for hijacking Hugh’s research before Hugh himself could make sense of the data; if she had simply asked him to stay. But Hugh was all dressed up, looking so handsome in the plaid shirt that Anne had bought for him, and so what if he wanted to go to a party and she didn’t? Hugh was nothing like her father—his face was an open book, and she would know immediately if something untoward had occurred.