Hannah Gersen - Home Field

Down by the creek, the air was cooler. Robbie and Bry took off their shoes and socks and waded into the water. The creek was narrow here, no more than twenty feet across, and shallow, littered with hundreds of smooth, baseball-sized stones that created small disturbances in the current. The boys had spent much of their summer down here, industriously piling small rocks into dams, only to find them dismantled the next time they visited. But they didn’t seem to care about their progress — or at least, Robbie didn’t. At eleven, he wavered between adult interests and childish ones, capable of discussing current events and football strategies with Dean, but also still interested in building Lego cities or cuddling with his stuffed animals, which he arranged on his bed every morning, in a particular order. The image of Robbie in Nicole’s pale blue dress flitted through Dean’s mind before he could dismiss it. He could accept the behavior if it had been instinctual, if Robbie hadn’t really thought about it, if it was an act of grief, of confusion — not pleasure. But what if Nicole’s death had perverted him in some way? Dean was angry with Nicole for not thinking of this; he had to believe she hadn’t been able to fully imagine the consequences of her actions.

He had to believe it, and yet he couldn’t.

Dean tried to recall some of the strange things he’d done after his own mother left. But it wasn’t the same because his mother hadn’t died; she’d just married another man, a salesman she’d met in the hospital where she worked as a nurse’s aide— not even a nurse, Dean used to think, when he wanted to think ill of his mother. He’d taken his father’s side, calling his mother a self-loathing snob. He assumed she left because she was tired of being married to a borderline servant. His father had worked on a bigger farm then, and they’d lived in a small house near the training grounds of a pristine estate surrounded by white fences that were painted every spring. The farm was owned by one of the oldest horsing families in the state, not that Dean’s father would ever describe his employer that way. It was the horses Dean’s father admired, not the lavish properties, not the races, not even the status that went along with being the kind of person who stabled such beautiful animals.

There were dozens of people like Dean’s father, people who humbled themselves in moneyed society in order to be close to horses. Why were all these men and women, possessed of beautifully calibrated efficient muscle and bone, wistfully gazing at horses as if their strength were somehow more mysterious? The one time Dean had felt close to his father’s horses was when he was in training for his first varsity season. He was out for a jog and the grazing horses broke into a run toward him, as if to say, It’s easy, don’t you see? As a teenager he’d seen his father as a weak person, a minor failure, not because of his job but because his mother had cheated on him. After she left, Dean’s father stopped working with racehorses, taking a more low-key job at the farm where he now worked. It was for Dean’s benefit, but Dean resented it. He did everything he could to be different from his father, starting with his body.

In the summer between ninth and tenth grade, Dean bought a pair of running shoes and a set of dumbbells and got a book from the library called Speed, Strength & Agility . He did every workout in the book, marking each one with a penciled checkmark. Every two weeks he had to renew the book, and he would run the 4.7 miles to the library in town, carrying it in a backpack. It was easier each time, his muscles a little less sore afterward. In the barn, in one of the unused stalls, he set up a makeshift weight room. The barn was hot, a dry and dusty heat. The smell of hay and horseshit — sweet and fetid — seemed to make the place even hotter. Dean kept a canteen of ice water next to him, his reward between sets. Water never tasted so good. Cold never tasted so good. In the evening he took baths, his muscles aching and expanding. Sleep came immediately; it was like going into a dark cave. Dean doubted he’d ever been healthier. Whenever he got on a self-improvement kick, when he dieted or tried to get “back in shape,” it was this elusive time that he was chasing.

Dean’s mother was athletic, and Dean would begrudgingly admit that he owed his love of sports to her. He remembered watching the 1964 Olympics with her when Billy Mills won the 10,000 meters out of nowhere, upsetting the race, the announcer screaming, “Look at Mills! Look at Mills!” and his mother jumping up and yelling, “Go! Go! Go!” It was rare for her to show that level of excitement. He saw now that she was an unhappy person, perhaps wanting to escape her marriage for a long time before she actually did. On weekends she would take Dean for hikes on the Appalachian Trail, smiling back at him sometimes but mostly keeping her gaze ahead, fixed on the trail. Dean wondered now why his father had not joined them. His mother taught him how to swim, and she liked to tell a story about the time a diving instructor singled her out at a public pool and said she should train professionally. But her high school didn’t even have sports for women. At his most charitable, Dean imagined his mother had been born at the wrong time, unable to make use of her strong, muscular frame. She’d had so much energy. That was her best quality. She’d died of a heart attack while she was out picking up trash alongside the road. It was something she did every morning, walking three miles after breakfast. A state trooper had seen her collapse, with her garbage bag full of bottles and cans and fast-food wrappers. Dean had to explain to the police it was her Good Samaritan hobby, that she wasn’t some homeless person.

He felt relieved after she died, like he had one less person to worry about. But he knew he wouldn’t feel that way when his father passed away. He still needed his father. He didn’t think of him as weak anymore. His father had been the one to cut Nicole down. Dean didn’t ask him how he’d done it, but he had seen the standing ladder and the hay bales next to it, draped with a horse blanket. He must have laid her body down on the bales. He must have done it fast. Maybe the ladder was already in place. It must have been. But it would have been hard to carry her down alone. Adrenaline must have flooded his body; Dean knew what it felt like to want to protect your children.

His father came with him to the hospital, and he stayed up with him that night. They’d watched a baseball game because what else were they supposed to do? Stephanie came into the room in the middle of it, and the expression on her face was one of such pure disgust that Dean got a jolt back to his own adolescence, remembering those sharp, hot judgments that would seem to burn inside him. He hadn’t thought she would hold on to her resentment the next day, but he had been wrong. She held on to it all summer. After a while, he’d realized she was blaming him the same way he’d blamed his father after his mother left.

Bry called to him, pointing, and Dean saw a heron standing calmly on the opposite shore, one leg drawn up. The bird had something of Stephanie’s stern regarding manner, the affect she’d adopted when she began to change in high school. After the new clothes and the new friends, she’d started quitting things: cheerleading, choir, student council, and even church. Her reasoning, that she wanted to concentrate more on academics, was foolproof. And she had the grades to prove it. How could they complain? Dean thought he understood, having pulled away from his own parents, but Nicole didn’t get it. She’d never left the town where she’d grown up. She’d married her high school sweetheart. College was her big adventure, and she talked about it like it had been a visit to a faraway place, even though she’d gone to a Christian school just an hour away. Sam had been at the same school, recruited to play football for their no-name team. Nicole remembered him as a big star, though — the whole town did. Sometimes Dean got annoyed and wanted to point out that he couldn’t have been that great if he ended up at a Division III program.