Home Field

by Hannah Gersen

  “If you care so much, where were you last night when I called?”

  “That’s not relevant.”

  “You say you want to be there for me, but you’re never there when I need you. Where were you? What were you doing? Were you out with that woman?”

  “You know what, Stephanie? It’s none of your business.”

  “Then it’s none of your business what I was doing last night.”

  “It is when the Shanks show up on my doorstep to tell me that they picked you up from the hospital.”

  “I said I was sorry.”

  “I don’t care how sorry you are. You’re being reckless. You’re not acting like yourself.”

  “You don’t even know who I am!” Stephanie said, hearing the cliché even as she said it. But it seemed so true. It seemed like no one in her family had bothered to find out who she was, where she had come from, and now both her parents were dead and she was never going to know.

  “You’re my daughter. I’ve known you since you were a little girl.”

  She saw he was getting choked up, and she felt sad, too, but not crying sad. Empty sad. It was as if her soul—or her cache of dopamine receptors, whatever—was a barren creek bed. What had once been flowing was dried up. She wondered if this was how her mother had felt. She wondered if she had wanted to find out how her mother had felt. If that’s why she’d done the drug in the first place. There was no way she could ever explain that to her father. He was too levelheaded a person. He would never understand.

  “You’re not my real father,” she said, calmly. “We don’t actually have anything in common.”

  “That’s not how I see it,” he said. “But if that’s how you really feel, I don’t know what else I can say to you.”

  He paused, and when Stephanie didn’t refute him, he told her to go say good-bye to her brothers, that he would catch up in a minute.

  Chapter 11

  The girls were still high off Megan’s win on Monday afternoon. They were waiting for her on the sidewalk when Ed dropped her off, cheering and clapping, like a miniature fan club. Dean watched from inside the school. Saturday’s meet felt like a distant memory. He was tired from driving to and from Stephanie’s school, tired from arguing, tired from loneliness. He wanted to tell Laura, to be comforted, but he hadn’t called her yet. He was too embarrassed. Laura didn’t really know that much about his daughter. He didn’t want illegal drug use to be among her first impressions—especially since Laura probably knew more about the drug than he did.

  “All right, girls,” Dean said, calling them inside. They arranged themselves on the bottom row of bleachers. “You had a good race this weekend, every single one of you. There were three PRs, and as a team, we got the lowest score we’ve ever had.”

  “Thanks to Megan,” See-See said.

  “Thanks to all of you,” Dean said. “We race as a team and we practice as a team. And now it’s less than a month until Regionals. For some of you, Regionals is the end of the season. For others, it’s the gateway to States. But we’re all going to practice like we’re all going to States, because you never know. We’ve already caused a stir—did everyone see the article yesterday? We were ‘underdog Willowboro.’”

  Jessica had a funny, knowing half smile, and Dean guessed she’d read the article in full, including the part where the reporter pointed out that “former football coach” Dean Renner was in the unusual position of coaching a team with “long odds.” Dean had read that line and felt himself marginalized: already a former something. And at the same time, there was freedom in coaching a team that no one followed or cared about. He wasn’t trying to impress a crowd of fans or justify a big budget. No one was looking over his shoulder saying he should have done x or y, no one was calling in to a radio show to say that See-See slowed down too much in the second mile, and why wasn’t Coach Renner taking splits on the third mile? There was a purity to the sport that pleased him; the athletes who won races were the ones in the best physical and mental shape, period.

  He sent the girls off on a two-mile warm-up run and told them to meet him and Bryan behind the middle school, where there was a wide, flat playing field that the band sometimes used for its practices. Dean planned to use it for a speed workout of ten 100-meter sprints. He wanted the girls to develop a kick. Philips had told him it was the key to getting more points.

  Dean measured the distance on the field, and Bryan set up orange cones to mark the start and finish. He leaped over the cones while he waited for the girls to finish their warm-up. “Daddy, look, I’m hurdling!” he said.

  “You’re not hurdling,” Dean said. “You’re jumping. Like a little frog.”

  “I’m a jumping frog, I jump, jump, jump for joy!”

  Dean smiled uneasily. Lately, Bryan seemed almost maniacally happy, as if trying to make up for Robbie’s and Stephanie’s melancholy.

  The girls arrived on the field and Dean started the workout. He told them to run the first hundred as fast as they could and then to run the next four at three-quarters speed. The shorter distance rearranged them; Missy came in first, followed by Aileen, Megan, See-See, Lori, and Jessica. Now he knew who could really sprint. They were starting to show the strain after they finished the first five. All except Jessica. She still seemed relatively energetic. Dean realized she was holding back. He pulled her aside.

  “You’re not pushing yourself,” he said. “Why?”

  “It hurts to go fast,” she said. “I feel like I’m not good at it.”

  “You’re not a natural sprinter,” he conceded. “But it hurts for everyone, even the people who are really good. Ask Missy—Missy, are you in pain?”

  “Hell, yeah!” She covered her mouth with a glance toward Bryan. “Oops, I’m sorry.”

  “He’s heard worse,” Dean said. “In fact, let’s get a hell yeah from all of you. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. It doesn’t matter how fast you can run. What matters is how fast you can run when you’re tired. So let me ask, are you tired?”

  “Hell, yeah!” they yelled back.

  “Are you ready to run five more?”

  “Hell, yeah!”

  “Are you ready to run fast?”

  “Hell, yeah!”

  They lined up and waited for Dean’s signal. Dean felt their happy anticipation as his own. He raised his stopwatch, yelled “Go!” and watched them race across the fading green field. Life could be so easy.

  He had them alternate between half speed and three-quarter speed. Jessica improved. So did Lori. For the last hundred he told them to go all out. Only Megan hit a time faster than her first splits.

  Dean sent the girls on a cooldown run and then headed to his office with Bry. Robbie was usually waiting for them there, doing homework, but today Dean’s office was empty.

  “I guess he’s still at rehearsal,” Dean said.

  “Can we go watch?” Bryan asked.

  Dean shrugged. “I don’t see why not.”

  Dean used his master set of keys to take a shortcut through the locked-up school. Outside the chorus room he saw a couple of kids sitting in the hallway, artsy kids with headphones and homework.

  “You looking for Robbie?” one asked. He hooked his thumb toward the auditorium. “The dance rehearsal is going long.”

  “Thanks,” Dean said.

  He let himself and Bryan into the theater through the side door. Raucous, stormy-sounding music was blaring, so loud that no one noticed Dean enter. He and Bryan sat down in the old creaky seats with itchy upholstery, seats that Dean associated with faculty meetings. He thought fleetingly of Laura and then watched the stage, where a group of children were dancing in violent circles, kicking their legs and arms. It took him a moment to locate Robbie in his dance attire. He was wearing black sweatpants and a black T-shirt that accentuated the whiteness of his arms. He was moving with a fluidity that Dean had never seen before. The expression on his face was calm, focused, and sincere. Dean was surprised by how proud he felt. Was it h
is imagination or was his son more graceful than the others?

  The music was shut off abruptly.

  “You guys can’t just flail about!” the teacher said. “Think of how monkeys move. They swing from place to place. They’re going somewhere. They’re playful but deliberate. The only one of you who is following the choreography is Robbie. I want you all to stop and watch him. Is that okay, Robbie?”

  Robbie nodded with the same calm expression.

  Dean felt as if he were snooping. As a coach, he knew there were interactions between students and their teachers that were somehow too intimate for parents, those times when children revealed their potential, the ambitions they couldn’t share with their parents because to do so would expose their intention to separate. Dean wondered if he and Stephanie were close—had been close—because he was more like a teacher than a father, if she had felt she could reveal her true nature to him in a way that she couldn’t with her mother. Now she had taken that sliver of distance and turned it into a weapon.

  Onstage, Robbie’s dancing was expressive but controlled; his movements were angry and urgent like the music, but there was a hint of joy, too. Dean could tell that Robbie knew he was good. That was all Dean really wanted for him—to be good at something and know it. He wouldn’t have chosen dancing, of course, but he was glad that it was something physical. Maybe it was the dumb jock in him, but he felt that the physical world was more reliably rewarding than the intellectual one.

  If Dean had come into the auditorium alone, he would have left without letting Robbie know what he’d seen, but he had Bryan with him and Bryan wouldn’t understand that impulse. Instead, he clapped at the end of Robbie’s impromptu solo. The spell was immediately broken. Robbie blushed in displeasure and all the elegance disappeared from his body at once, his limbs going slack. He returned to his usual “whatever” posture. But Robbie’s teacher was happy to see Dean.

  “Coach Renner! Thanks for dropping by.” She smiled as if she knew him already, and Dean struggled to remember her name as they shook hands.

  “Abby,” she said. She lowered her voice. “We met once before. At Coach’s? You were with your brother-in-law?”

  “Oh right, of course.” Dean felt awkward. One of Laura’s friends. She probably knew more about his personal life than he did.

  “I’m so glad you got to see Robbie dance.”

  “Me too,” Dean said. “Sorry to interrupt. We’ll wait outside so you can finish up.”

  “Oh, it’s fine. Robbie, you can actually go home now, if you’d like. You’ve got it down.”

  “I can stay,” Robbie said. “I don’t mind.”

  “It’s fine, don’t worry. Go home with your dad.”

  Robbie reluctantly left the stage and grabbed his backpack and school clothes from the first row of theater seats.

  “You can go change,” Dean said. “We’re not in a hurry.”

  “Let’s just go.”

  Outside it was already dark. Robbie hurried ahead to the car, clearly embarrassed. Dean apologized for intruding and Robbie mumbled “It’s okay” and then unzipped his backpack and started to reorganize its contents.

  “I’m glad I got to see you rehearse,” Dean said. “You’re really good.”

  Robbie shrugged. “It’s only dancing.”

  “You know what they say—the most grueling sports are football and ballet.”

  “That wasn’t ballet. And I know you’d pick football if you could choose—or basketball, or soccer. Anything with a ball.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “Dad.”

  “All right, there’s some truth to it. But that’s only because I’m a terrible dancer.”

  At last, Robbie smiled, a little. “You’ve still got Bry,” he said. “I mean, to play football.”

  “Did you hear that, Bry?” Dean said. “It’s all on you.”

  “Put me in, Coach!” Bryan said, eager to make them all laugh. And they did.

  At home, Dean made a quick dinner of chicken drumsticks with mashed potatoes and green beans. Laura called when Dean was loading the dishwasher.

  “I can’t really talk now,” he said. “The boys . . .”

  “Oh, are they right nearby?”

  “Yeah. I’ll call you back later, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  But he didn’t call later. Instead he read about racing strategy after he put the boys to bed. He stayed up to watch Letterman, mindlessly, like he used to do over the summer. The guest was an actress he’d never heard of. He dozed off during her interview and woke up, an hour later, to a commercial for a CD collection of hits from the 1960s. Song titles scrolled down the screen, lyrics from his childhood. He felt disoriented as he made his way upstairs to bed, stopping as always to check on Robbie and Bry. The room seemed thick with their breathing. Two lives, he thought vaguely. That night he dreamed of his mother. He had dinner with her at the Red Byrd diner and she was very charming, asking him questions about the football team. He kept trying to tell her about the cross-country girls, but she was dismissive. “You never got to know me,” she said. In the midst of the dream, Dean became lucid and, realizing he was in a dream, tried to interpret it. He had the idea of calling Laura but he couldn’t, he was in a dream. Then it was morning, and he was waking up. He could call Laura, if he wanted, but when he picked up the phone, the receiver felt too heavy in his hand.

  That day at practice, Dean took the girls to the Antietam Battlefield for a fartlek workout. It was one of the first truly chilly days of the season, with a cold wind that seemed to warn of winter. On the wide-open battlefield, whipped-up clouds slid across the sky.

  Dean warmed up with the girls, leading the first mile at a relaxed pace. He’d brought Bryan’s bike so that Bryan could keep up. It felt good to run on the battlefield’s smooth, paved roads and to breathe the cold autumn air. The leaves were beginning to change on some of the trees, spots of red and gold at the edges, and the grasses were yellowing. It gave the park the bleak sepia tones it had in photographs of the war.

  After about ten minutes, Dean dropped back and told Missy to take the lead—and to run fast. She bolted ahead, and the other girls rushed to follow. Dean’s own lungs burned as he kept the pace. He thought she would tire after a few minutes, but she kept it up for almost a mile. Then See-See took over and slowed things down for a while. They came to a steep hill, and Bryan lost momentum on his bicycle and had to stop and walk. Dean dropped back to help him, watching as the girls crested the hill and then disappeared from view.

  “Come on, Bry, let’s cut across and meet them at the other side of the loop.”

  As he ran across the transverse road, Dean kept glancing to his right, watching for the girls in the distance. He couldn’t see them and worried they might have taken a wrong turn. Ahead, Bryan made lazy loops on his bicycle. “Daddy!” he said. “I see them!”

  Dean sprinted ahead. There they were, running toward them, Jessica in the lead. He felt a sense of relief that he knew was out of proportion, but he didn’t care. He let the feeling wash over him as he ran.

  ON THURSDAY, THE last hard workout of the week before race day, it was overcast and gray. The football team had reserved the weight room, so Dean used his planning period at the end of the day to set up a simple circuit-training workout in the small gym. He was in the midst of pulling out the tumbling mats from the equipment room when he saw Laura heading toward his office.

  “Hey!” he called to her.

  “Hi!” She waved back, but in a cautious way that made Dean feel guilty. He hadn’t talked to her since their brief conversation on Monday night. Instead he’d left an apologetic message with her secretary, calling at a time when he knew she wouldn’t be available.

  “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, ju
st 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?”