Home Field

by Hannah Gersen

  “I’m going to run,” Dean said. He started without waiting for Ian’s reply. His legs felt tight but quickly loosened up. Ian caught up and gave a thumbs-up, too winded to talk. Gravel crunched beneath their feet. Dean breathed deeply from his diaphragm, the way he’d taught the girls to do.

  He kept thinking of the day he’d seen Robbie dancing onstage. The grace of his movements, his long arms white and slender under the lights, the way Nicole’s had been. That was the day he’d seen who his son was—could be—in the world, the day he’d seen who Robbie was outside their family. It was a gift to see that, Dean knew that, but in the wake of it there was a sense of loss. He and his son were not alike, just as Dean and his own father were not alike. There had been a certain disappointment knit into Dean’s relationship with Robbie, starting from the night he was born, when Dean witnessed the immediate intimacy between mother and son. He remembered Ed joking with him, “Step aside, you’re useless the first two years.” That was the beginning of Dean’s closeness with Stephanie. She was seven going on eight, just a little younger than Bryan was now, a wonderful age, an inquisitive, optimistic age.

  Dean’s lungs ached. He was running fast. He ran harder.

  He thought of Laura’s face when she told him. As soon as he saw her at the track, he knew something was wrong. The school had called her when they couldn’t get a hold of him in his office. Why did they call you? That was the first thing Dean could think to say. Because he’s under my care. He saw in her eyes that she loved his son, and that her affection for Robbie was mixed up with whatever she felt for him. He saw her fear and he felt it.

  And yet he could still locate the calm he’d felt before Laura had appeared, when the girls were racing on the backstretch, all of them hitting their splits, their strides long, their arms reaching. The pain was there, it wasn’t disregarded, but it was transmuted. The drama was completely internal. There was something mysterious and joyous about the sport that impressed Dean. It was so true to life.

  Dean had watched Megan sprint toward him, the others trailing her, closer than they’d ever been. He remembered thinking: This is the start of a championship team. And with that simple, childish idea came the possibility of happiness.

  That was how happiness worked: it was simple, it was elusive, it was something to reach for but not to grasp.

  And Dean had felt he could begin, again, to reach for it.

  “That’s the main drive ahead,” Ian said. He paused to catch his breath. “I think I hear someone coming.”

  The two men hurried to the edge of the drive where two headlights appeared, casting everything around them into darkness. Ian ran into the middle of the road to flag down the driver. A police officer, Dean assumed. The car drew closer, and all at once Dean recognized it. Stephanie’s car. She’d come back.

  AS THE OUTDOOR School’s 1970s-style buildings came into view, Stephanie got an eerie and not entirely happy sense of déjà vu. Here was a place she had visited only once, but which had made such a huge impression that it existed in its own room in her mind. She felt as if she were driving into her memory.

  The road forked as it approached the Outdoor School’s main lodge, a sprawling, split-level construction with a large, round room at its center. This was the lounge, with its stone fireplace, round cushions, and a glass display case containing pebbles and rocks, fossils and shells, feathers, crystals, seed pods, arrowheads, bones, snakeskins, and birds’ nests. Stephanie had a strong memory of looking carefully at each object in the case while she waited for a class to begin. There had been something so mesmerizing about the display, full of dead things and yet so evocative of life.

  This evening, the windows of the lounge glowed softly, lit by firelight. A gray stream of smoke escaped from the chimney. Were the kids still awake? No, Stephanie realized, it was the teachers. It had never even occurred to her that they would stay up. You wore such blinders in childhood. But maybe they helped you to see more directly.

  “Turn left here,” said Mr. Knapp, the school’s director. He sat in the backseat, behind her father. He had introduced himself as Ian, but Stephanie could only think of him as Mr. Knapp. His beard and eyebrows were a faded brown instead of the deep reddish brown she remembered. He didn’t recognize her, but then why would he? He met hundreds of eleven-year-olds every year—and then never saw them again.

  They parked outside the mess hall, which stood at the end of two rows of cabins full of sleeping children. Everything seemed smaller. Stephanie remembered the cabins as quasi tree houses, raised high on stilts, with leafy branches brushing up against their wraparound porches, but instead they were only slightly raised, perhaps one story, and the porches were narrow balconies, barely wide enough for two children to pass each other. Only the trees were as impressive as in memory, even with their branches bare.

  The local police had set up shop inside the mess hall, their equipment piled on one of the round folding tables. The room was small and shabby, with its wood-paneled walls, gray linoleum flooring, and the faded sheets of construction paper stapled to the bulletin board next to the kitchen. A chalkboard announced tomorrow’s breakfast: French toast sticks, turkey bacon, and applesauce. Stephanie remembered eating at the round tables first thing in the morning, the intimacy of seeing her classmates right after they woke up, with wet hair and toothpaste residue in the corners of their mouths, the thrill of being able to excuse yourself when you were finished and walk outside in the open air. Stephanie had loved the freedom, or maybe she had simply loved being away from home, away from toddler routines, away from her exhausted mother, away from the pressure of always having to be the good older sister. She realized now that she had imagined college would be something like Outdoor School.

  A couple of teachers emerged from the kitchen with mugs of tea. Stephanie didn’t recognize either of them, but then her old sixth-grade teacher, Mrs. Davis, came in from outside, her gray hair in a ponytail and her cheeks pink with cold. She had not changed at all; in fact she was possibly wearing the same red down vest that she had worn when she accompanied Stephanie’s class to the school seven years before. When she saw Stephanie, she hurried over to give her a hug. “Oh, my poor dear! I can’t stop thinking about your brother. He’s probably trying to make his way home right now. I’ve always said that they should retire this orienteering unit.”

  “I’m getting some coffee,” Stephanie’s father said, abruptly walking away. Stephanie knew he was irritated with Mrs. Davis, with Mr. Knapp, and possibly even with the police. He’d been radiating anger. But there had been a moment, when he first saw her, when he embraced her with dry, haunted eyes. And she had gone straight back to the morning her mother died.

  “Are braids the style now?” Mrs. Davis asked.

  “What? Oh, no, this is for a costume,” Stephanie said, touching her Dorothy plaits.

  “Were you a farm girl?”

  “Yeah, basically.” Stephanie didn’t feel like explaining.

  Mrs. Davis had the sense to leave when her father returned with two coffees and a stack of apple juice containers. Stephanie peeled back the lid of one of the juices, the gesture reminding her not of Outdoor School or school lunch but of visiting her mother in the hospital after Robbie was born. There had been two containers of apple juice included with her postpartum meal, and she had given them to Stephanie, who drank them while staring at her tiny baby brother with his red wrinkled face and his head leaning in the crook of his arm, which he held above him. Her mother said, “That’s probably how he slept in the womb, with his arm up like that.” And Stephanie remembered thinking that she wasn’t alone anymore.

  “The officers want us to stick around here,” Stephanie’s father said. “If he doesn’t turn up by the morning, they’ll alert the local news. They’ll treat it like an abduction.”

  “Abduction? Jesus.”

  “Hey, it’s okay.”

  “No, it isn’t.” Stephanie felt a surge of anger. “Robbie could be kidnapped, he could be dead. Don�
��t say it’s going to be fine.”

  “Honey, calm down. I only meant that abduction is the word they have to use to take it seriously. Right now they’re operating from the assumption that he got lost.”

  “Of course he’s not lost. He’s too smart for that. He had a compass! He obviously ran away.”

  “That’s what I think, too.” Her father took a sip of coffee. “You know, he’s been leaving school, playing hooky. More than just that one time.”

  “I know. He called me.”

  “When?”

  “It was last month. He called from a pay phone. I don’t know why. It was like he wanted to say hi.”

  “Maybe he’ll call you again. Is there someone at school near your phone?”

  “Where’s he going to call from the woods?”

  “If he’s running away, he’s going somewhere.”

  “Don’t you think we’ll find him before that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Stephanie wasn’t sure if she’d ever heard her father say he didn’t know something. It scared her almost as much as the word abduction.

  “Bryan is at Joelle’s,” he said. “In case you’re wondering.”

  “I figured.”

  Her father finished his coffee. Stephanie still hadn’t touched hers. She felt wired already.

  “I can’t sit here, waiting,” he said. “You want to drive down the mountain? We can get on the lower trail. There’s a road that goes around the other side.”

  “Okay.”

  Her father consulted with the officer in the mess hall and returned with a walkie-talkie. “He understood,” he said. “He has a son about Robbie’s age.”

  Outside, a few stray clouds crept across the night sky. The stars were bright pinpricks of light.

  “It’s colder up here.” Stephanie shivered as she got into her father’s car. “Is Robbie wearing his winter jacket?”

  “I don’t know. I packed it, but it was a little small.” Her father got out his keys but didn’t put them in the ignition. “I should have gotten him a new one.”

  “It’s not that cold,” Stephanie said. “There hasn’t even been a hard frost yet.”

  He shook his head. Stephanie could tell he was trying to hold it together for her.

  “Don’t worry, Dad. We’re going to find him, I know we are. He got in over his head, that’s all. Remember when he was little and he ran away and he packed three cans of soup? And we all laughed at him because how was he going to open them?”

  “Yeah.” Her father grimaced.

  “We’re going to find him,” Stephanie said. “Come on.”

  They got into her father’s car and drove halfway down the mountain until there was a turnoff for what looked to Stephanie like a private driveway. But it was an actual road, narrow and patchily paved, tunneling through acres of trees. Every few miles there was a road sign warning of blind turns, or the occasional mailbox standing sentry at the end of an anonymous, unmarked gravel driveway.

  “People live out here,” her father said after a while. “It’s not the wilderness.”

  “No,” Stephanie agreed. But it was other human beings that made her nervous for her brother’s safety.

  “I guess we should pull over at some point and get on foot.”

  Her father slowed the car, pulling over onto the shoulder. There were power lines above; that was why the trees were cleared. When they got out of the car, Stephanie could hear the electricity crackling—a static, ghostly sound.

  “This is pointless,” her father said. “Let’s keep driving.”

  “Let’s walk a little. Do we have flashlights?”

  “In the glove compartment,” her father said, without a making a move toward the car. He stood looking up at the power lines, listening to them.

  Stephanie was disappointed by her father’s lack of energy, even though she knew he’d been searching for hours. She’d only just arrived.

  There was one flashlight in the glove compartment, along with the paperwork for the car, an empty water bottle, and a paperback. Stephanie took the book, thinking it must be hers. But it wasn’t. It was a romance novel with the author’s name on the cover in a big swoopy font. A lavishly red flower bloomed beneath. Stephanie’s first thought was that it was her mother’s, but then she noticed a price tag with the name of a chain store that didn’t have any locations nearby. All at once she knew whose book it was. Her anger toward her father, tamped down by Robbie’s absence, returned all at once, like a bad memory. She felt exposed by the car’s interior light and abruptly got out, slamming the door. Her father was startled from his power line reverie. She held up the flimsy paperback.

  “Is this hers?”

  It took her father a moment to recognize the cover in the dim light.

  “Where did you find that?”

  “In the car. Did you two go on a road trip or something?”

  “No, I was borrowing it.” He took the book from her. “It was sort of a joke.”

  Inside jokes were almost worse than a road trip.

  “I don’t understand. Are you dating her? Are you two together?”

  “No, we’re not together.” Her father opened the car door and threw the book in the backseat. “We were never really together.”

  “How long were you seeing her?”

  “Not when your mother was alive.”

  “But you knew her before?”

  “We were friends. I needed a friend.” Her father leaned against the car. “I don’t expect you to understand.”

  Stephanie remembered her grandmother saying the same thing to her after she explained her petty resentments. I don’t expect you to understand. But they did expect her to understand; otherwise, they wouldn’t bother with their vague explanations. And why did they want her to understand? So she would forgive them. What Stephanie really didn’t understand was why they thought she had it in her to forgive when they didn’t.

  “I don’t understand,” Stephanie said. “I don’t understand how you could need a friend when Mom was so lonely. How you could have ignored her.”

  “I didn’t ignore her. I was watching her all the time. You were, too.”

  Stephanie shook her head. “I pushed her away. At least I can admit it.”

  “You didn’t push her away,” her father said. “You kept an eye on her. You always did.”

  Stephanie felt tears coming on. She clung to her anger. “It didn’t help.”

  “I know you want to feel guilty,” her father said. “But you shouldn’t. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “Everyone keeps telling me that. But we must have done something wrong. Otherwise—” Stephanie couldn’t speak. “Otherwise she just did it to get away from us.”

  Her father took a Kleenex from his pocket and wiped her eyes. The gesture reminded her so much of her mother, of childhood, that she cried even harder.

  “You can blame me if you want,” he said, wrapping his arms around her. His jacket smelled like cold air, dried leaves, dirt, and faintly, beneath all the outdoor scents, of their house. Stephanie thought of how many times her mother’s cheek must have pressed against this jacket, and how impossible it seemed that she would never see her mother’s face again. And she thought of her brother, out in the night, searching for their mother like a boy lost in a fairy tale.

  “We have to find Robbie,” Stephanie said.

  “I know,” her father said, releasing her. He looked down the mountain, down the sloping path cleared by the wires. Then he took a step back from her and started yelling her brother’s name, really yelling, almost screaming: “Robbie! Robbie Renner! Robbie! Robbie! Robbie! Where are you? Robbie! Answer me! Where are you? Robbie, come home! I won’t be mad. I promise I won’t be angry. All is forgiven. Did you hear that, Robbie? All is forgiven!”

  Stephanie stood there, watching him. It was like he was in a trance. He didn’t wait for answers. He just kept yelling. After a while, he stopped. The wires crackled above.

  “Pro
bably no one heard that,” he said.

  “I did,” she said.

  STEPHANIE FELL ASLEEP in the passenger seat on the way back to the school. She was still so young, she still slept like a child. All Dean ever wanted was for her to be a kid. When he met her, she was on the verge of becoming her mother’s keeper. Even at three years old.

  Nicole had told him, once, that she would have killed herself if not for Stephanie. She told him once and he didn’t take it seriously, so she told him another time, so that he would. It was important to her that he understood how low she could get. “You need to know this about me,” she had said.

  She told him on a sunny June day, a week before their wedding. The trees were in full leaf, the grass was overgrown, the gardens and farms were bursting with fresh green color, it was that time of year, right before pruning and weeding, when everything was allowed to bloom and grow without restraint.

  Dean and Nicole were picnicking on her parents’ farm. Just the two of them. Stephanie was with Nicole’s parents; they could see the house from the grassy pasture where they sat on a blanket. Nicole was wearing a short-sleeved plaid shirt and a necklace that Dean had given to her, a gold chain with a gold heart and a tiny glint of a diamond. He loved her. They had packed sandwiches and watermelon and Geneva’s oatmeal cookies, but he could hardly eat; he kept taking her arm and kissing it, and he put his head in her lap and closed his eyes as she played with his overgrown hair, in need of a trim.