Hannah Gersen - Home Field

“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.

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.

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.

Dean found a large walk-in closet, but it was full of scientific equipment: scales, magnifying glasses, microscopes, water-testing kits, rubber gloves, and a variety of measuring instruments. On one of the lower shelves there was a box of compasses. Next to it was a pile of laminated maps. Dean took one out and unfolded it. It covered only a small portion of the mountain: the school, the fire tower, and the nature and fitness trails. The markings were cartoonish and not drawn to scale; it was more like the map you might find at the beginning of a children’s story. Dean traced its borders with his finger, then pointed to a spot in midair, high above the map. That’s where his son was. Out in the nothingness.

Stephanie was fast asleep when he returned to the great room. She had draped her coat over her, like a blanket. Dean imagined Robbie in the same prostrate position, somewhere in the woods. Fear gathered in his chest; it was a kind of tightening, a kind of pain. He went outside onto the deck where he could see the mess hall, the windows still lit. There was no news, no point in going over there unless he wanted the distraction.

He didn’t want the distraction.

He noticed a telescope at the far end of the deck and went over to it. He knew nothing about the constellations, so he just looked at the moon.

Robbie had once asked him why the moon didn’t fall out of the sky. That was one of his first big questions. Robbie asked more “why” questions than Bryan. Or maybe it was that he asked more specific ones. Bryan accepted life’s constants more easily. You couldn’t just say “the law of gravity” to Robbie. Dean had to set up a miniature solar system on their kitchen table. The moon was a blueberry. Earth was a Golden Delicious apple. The sun was the basket that held all the fruits. It took forever to explain how the moon could reflect the sun’s light even as it was surrounded by darkness. Dean had to demonstrate how the moon could orbit the earth while at the same time the earth was turning.