Home Field (33 page)

“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.

“Probably no one heard that,” he said.

“I did,” she said.

S
TEPHANIE 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.

Dean said, “I can die now, a happy man.” A cliché but she had laughed. And then she startled him, saying that thing that had locked the scene into his memory for good, making it something more than just a lovely lovers' day.

“I can't believe I ever wanted to kill myself,” she said. “Last year at this time . . . that's all I could think about.”

“Not really,” Dean said, his eyes still on the sky.

“Really,” she said. She made him sit up. She took his hands in hers. “You need to know this about me. I don't handle . . . I don't handle things well. There was a time when I thought it would be better for Stephanie if I was gone.”

“Stephanie adores you.”

“I know,” she said. “I know, I know.”

“You're a wonderful mother.”

“Dean, you don't have to say that. You don't have to reassure me. It was a kind of sickness. A kind of weakness. I didn't want to face my life. And maybe I was tired, too. I don't know.
You would never feel that way so you can't understand. But I want you to try.”

“Okay,” he said. But he didn't try. He didn't want to imagine her feeling those things.

“Dean, listen to me.” She squeezed his hands. “These weren't just thoughts. I bought a gun.”

“Okay.” He searched her face for some change, some hint of bitterness or sorrow, but he could only see his beautiful fiancée with her gray-blue eyes and smooth, untroubled brow. “Do you still have it?”

She shook her head. “I got rid of it. I told myself it could still be a possibility; it just couldn't be that easy. That's how crazy I was. But then I started to feel better. And then I met you. And I didn't want you to know how I felt—how low I could get. I didn't want you to see me any differently.”

“I don't,” Dean said. And he didn't, in that moment.

“You don't have to say that. You don't even have to marry me. I just wanted you to know.”

“But I want to marry you, that's all I want.”

Did he want to save her? That was what Dean wondered now. Or was it Stephanie he wanted to save? And what was this thing in him that needed to rescue women? He saw Megan as someone in need of rescuing, he realized, trapped by Joelle's ideology. And maybe he saw Laura that way, too, as a woman who needed to be saved from marrying into the town that had trapped him.

He coaxed a drowsy Stephanie from the car and led her into the lounge, which was empty and dark. Dean turned on a small floor lamp near the fireplace. The coals were covered in
bright gray ash; Dean blew on them and they briefly glowed orange.

Stephanie lay down on one of the sofas against the wall.

“I'll get you a blanket,” Dean said.

“Mm-hmm,” she murmured.