Hannah Gersen - Home Field

“Oh, I love it. I love trail runs. And I think this one is one of the prettiest. But it’s slow. No one’s going to get a PR.”

“What’s a fast time?” Dean asked. “What does a first-place runner usually get?”

“It depends on the course.” Jessica pointed to a runner ahead of them, a girl from Middletown. “See that girl over there? The one with the high ponytail?”

“The short one?”

“That’s Adrienne Fellows. She’s going to win the race. She wins every race.”

“Does that mean Middletown wins every meet?”

“Usually,” Jessica said. “But not always. They have a lot of runners, but none as good as Adrienne.”

Jessica then began to explain the intricacies of cross-country scoring, which she likened to the scoring of card games. You could win a game of gin rummy even if you never won a hand, simply by playing smart and never getting stuck with a high card. Same with cross-country meets. Even if none of your runners cracked the top five, you could still win if your top five runners managed to beat the fourth and fifth runners of other teams.

Clearspring’s coach, who was leading the course walk, interrupted them. “We’re going to make a sharp U-turn up ahead,” he said, yelling to be heard. “Then you’ll be going downhill for about a half mile, back toward the school.”

“This is my favorite part,” Jessica said.

“Seems like it would be everyone’s.”

Jessica shook her head. “Some people hate going downhill. They get so afraid of falling that they slow down. And then they fall anyway.”

Dean had a vision of Nicole and Stephanie running down the hill behind the farmhouse — before it was Joelle’s house, when Nicole’s parents still lived there. It was summer, and Stephanie was little, maybe four years old, with squat legs and arms that motored to keep up with her mother. Nicole was trying to run slowly, so as not to get too far ahead of Stephanie, but at some point she gave up and let gravity take hold. The joy in her body was obvious as she leaped across the last few yards of grass. Dean remembered feeling as if there was something eternal in that joy. As if it was some salient quality that would never leave his wife.

LAIRD’S HOUSE WAS filled with morning light; it shone unimpeded through the bare windows. Stephanie woke up in a mellow, observant daze, faintly hungover and hungry. Laird’s broad back faced her, an amazing situation. She tickled the back of his neck. Then a flicker of urgent feeling prodded her to remember something about the morning.

“Shit!” she said, sitting up. “The meet.”

Laird rolled onto his back, rubbing his sleepy eyes with his big hands.

Stephanie was already getting dressed, changing out of Laird’s Pearl Jam T-shirt and pulling on her skirt. She felt self-conscious changing in front of him, but when she turned away from him, she was facing the unadorned window. And there were houses nearby! Where had they come from? Last night, she and Laird had lived in their own moonlit world. She picked up their empty beer cans and tied them up in the plastic bag. She put the chairs back and rubbed the wall-to-wall carpeting with her foot, trying to erase the indentations the chairs’ legs had made. Everything seemed so sordid, the rental furniture dingy. She remembered her father at the bar, sitting at some flimsy table, with that Laura across from him. How long had he been seeing her? Had her mother known?

She thought of her mother trying to cut the lemon in the morning light.

“What meet?” Laird asked.

“It’s nothing, I have to go. We have to fix the quilt. What if the Realtor comes?”

“I can drive you,” Laird said, pulling on his boxers.

“I have to go to Clearspring. That’s, like, an hour away.”

“You think I have someplace better to be?”

She felt a wave of affection for him, this boy standing in the guest room of his old house.

They stopped at Sheetz for doughnuts and coffee drinks from the cappuccino machine. The sugary brew cut through the fog of her hangover, as did Laird’s music, a worn-out mixtape of hard-edged rock bands like Korn and Nine Inch Nails, bands that would normally be too aggressive for her. But that was what she wanted to hear now, as she stewed over her father’s transgressions. Outside, the overcast sky was giving way to sunshine, and by the time they reached Clearspring, the place was an illustration of its name, seeming to exist in its own cloudless atmosphere.

Laird wanted to come to the meet, but Stephanie didn’t want her father seeing her with him.

“I’m sorry,” she said. She gave him a frugal peck on the cheek and then impulsively kissed his neck.

“No, you’re right,” he said. “I just don’t want to go home.”

The starting gun went off as Laird was driving away. The noise came from the soccer fields, where a horizontal line of runners was quickly becoming vertical as they headed toward the perimeter of the field. Stephanie stood at the edge of the school’s parking lot, uncertain of where to go. In the race, one girl was already pulling ahead of the others, her gold uniform like a little light for the others to follow. Stephanie had actually run cross-country her freshman year of high school, but only for half a season. She dropped out when she realized that the satisfaction she felt at the end of a race didn’t begin to make up for the pain she felt during it. And she couldn’t really relate to the girls on the team, who were true athletes beneath their nerdy, skinny veneer. They actually cared whether they won or lost, whereas Stephanie had just been looking for a sport that she didn’t hate. That was when she was still trying to want what her parents wanted for her, the simple things they thought would make her happy: health, popularity, routine. A wholesome ideal that would only work for someone who was already whole, who didn’t have big parts of her life missing. It had taken all of high school for Stephanie to stop pretending as if pieces of her past weren’t missing: her father, her grandparents, her mother’s happiness. Now, as she gazed at the long line of girls running around the empty field, it occurred to her that identifying the missing pieces was not enough, that she was also going to have to complete the picture of herself without them.

Stephanie made her way through the crowds of spectators. Everyone here had probably had granola and apples for breakfast, and they had probably eaten it after going for a sunrise jog. The running crowd was very wholesome, and their early-morning vigor made Stephanie feel guilty all over again. They were all wearing cuffed shorts — better to show off and stretch their muscular legs. Fleece vests abounded. Stephanie felt dirty and absurd in last night’s clothes, her silly grandma cardigan and denim skirt. She took off her rhinestone earrings and shoved them in her handbag. She thought of her mother, how she was always dressed to the right degree of formality. It was a tendency that Stephanie used to see as conformist and demure, but now she wondered if her mother wasn’t just trying to fit in, if she dressed carefully as a way to pass as a happy, well-adjusted person.

The runners disappeared into the woods one by one, and a large crowd of people moved toward a flag in the middle of a scrimmage field. Stephanie followed them, her cheap cloth shoes getting soaked with dew. They were Chinese laundry slippers with flimsy rubber soles, like limp Mary Janes. Stephanie ironically referred to them as her “signature shoe,” buying three or four pairs at a time at the hippie shops in Shepherdstown, the college town just over the Potomac in West Virginia. She’d actually applied to Shepherd College and been offered a full scholarship. She could have gone there without the Shanks paying for anything. Maybe she should have.