Robbie was waiting for Dean near the finish line. “Dad, Bry is hot but he says he’s cold. I think he has a fever.”
“Where is he?”
“He’s lying down on the tarp.”
Dean hurried back to the warm-up area, leaving the race behind. He heard Adrienne’s finish, the crowd yelping with delight. Bryan was lying on his side on the tarp with Dean’s fleece jacket wrapped around his narrow shoulders. His blond hair was damp, and his cheeks were flushed. Dean realized he’d shown signs of sickness earlier, when he’d dozed off on the bus. He must have caught whatever Megan had.
“Daddy, I’m okay. The sun is giving me vitamins,” Bryan said.
In the distance, Dean could hear the girls finishing their race. See-See and Karen were the first ones back. See-See had gotten a PR and her face was still blotchy with exertion. She seemed disappointed to find Dean at the tarp instead of at the finish, but when she saw Bryan, she softened.
“You have to get him home,” Karen said.
“We rode the bus,” Dean said. “We’re stuck until the end of the boys’ race.”
“Take my car,” Karen said. “I can get a ride. Or I’ll take the bus back with the kids.”
“We can stay; he’s not going to get any worse.”
“I insist — as a mother,” Karen said. She pushed the keys into Dean’s hand.
Both boys fell asleep on the car ride home. Flu was going to sweep through his house; Dean could see it coming. He felt stranded. It was being in a different car and driving unfamiliar roads. It was having to accept favors from a woman he barely knew. It was realizing he was truly alone in the care of his sons. His heart began to beat crazily, and he had to pull over to the side of the road to steady himself. Cars sped by; nobody stopped to see if he was okay. Eventually, he pulled back onto the highway.
THERESA’S PARENTS, STEVEN and Candace, were physicists. They worked in a lab at Johns Hopkins where they studied laser technology. Stephanie could tell by their vague description that this was a significant generalization of what they actually studied, and she pressed them for more details. Theresa interrupted. “They make weapons,” she said. “It’s a government lab.”
“That’s an exaggeration,” Candace said, pointing a long, manicured fingernail. She had touches of femininity, but you had to look for them. “There are military applications for some of what we do, yes, but we’re hardly making weapons.”
“Whatever you say, Mom.”
Stephanie couldn’t get a read on Theresa’s sarcasm, whether it was politically motivated or if she thought there was something square about working for the government. Stephanie was slightly dazzled by Theresa’s parents; they were easily the smartest people she’d ever met. Maybe Mitchell would be like them.
“What does your father do?” Steven asked Stephanie.
“He’s a football coach.”
“I’m afraid I don’t know much about football,” he said.
“For me, football is too much stop and start,” said Candace. “And I don’t like the tackling.”
“My dad doesn’t let people hit during practice,” Stephanie said. “Only games. And only certain kinds of hits.”
“Still, I would be wary of letting Andrew play,” Candace said.
“No danger of that,” Theresa said. “Andrew’s arms are like twigs.”
Andrew was Theresa’s older brother. He was in the sciences, too, studying epidemiology, a word Stephanie didn’t know, but she was too embarrassed to ask for a definition.
“Andrew’s a runner,” said Steven. “Just a fun runner, like me.”
Stephanie nodded. She could say that her father was a running coach, too, that he actually wasn’t coaching football anymore, but it seemed like too much to explain. She had the sense that Theresa’s parents knew about her mother, that Theresa had briefed them. She’d probably also told them not to bring it up. That made things easier, in a way, but at the same time Stephanie wanted them to acknowledge that she was missing something important.
Her depression hangover was starting to lift. It was fall break, a mysterious interlude that did not correspond with any holidays. Stephanie’s plan had been to spend the long weekend studying and picking up extra cafeteria shifts, but when Theresa extended an invitation, she felt such relief that she realized she was desperate to leave campus.
It felt luxurious to be in a house, to have so much domestic space to move about in. Everything about Theresa’s house was soft and personal, from the gently curving road that delivered them to Theresa’s driveway, to the carefully pruned shrubberies that concealed their house from the road, to the wall-to-wall carpeting and blond wood furniture. Theresa’s parents explained that Columbia was a planned community, and that all the roads and property lines had been mapped out in advance. There were no houses on the main road; everyone lived on a small side street, each house arranged at the perfect distance from its neighbor, uninterrupted by random expanses of field, broken-down barns, or hastily constructed prefab homes. The overall effect was one of extraordinary calm; it also felt opaque. Stephanie had no way of reading the landscape; she couldn’t see in it a history of the town’s rising and falling fortunes. She couldn’t tell what anyone did for a living or for fun. It was disconcerting and yet she liked it. It gave her a feeling of privacy, which she badly needed — not only to grieve, but to figure out who she was in the wake of her grieving. She was becoming someone, or maybe she was figuring out who she had always been.
Her father always said that people revealed their character on the playing field, and she had always thought it was such an old-fashioned belief — both the idea of character and the idea of sports as some kind of crucible. But now she thought she had taken him too seriously. All he was saying was that if an athlete was determined or lazy or bold, you saw it in his actions when he was challenged physically. And here she was, being challenged physically — she saw her depression as something physical — and she knew, deep down, that it wasn’t going to break her. She wasn’t like her mother. There was relief and sadness in this realization, the two feelings mixed together in a way that was so different from her high school years, when she would feel one emotion so strongly it was like an engine in her chest. Was this adulthood, she wondered, or was it grief? Was grieving how one became an adult?
After dinner, she and Theresa hung out in Theresa’s room, where Theresa showed Stephanie photos of her high school boyfriend, Jason. He was tall and pale, with a long dark ponytail. He wore wire-rimmed glasses that made his eyes look smaller.
“He went to Brown,” Theresa said. “He broke up with me the first week of school. I think he was planning to do it all along. He wanted to keep having sex up until the last minute, I guess.”
“Maybe he was scared of being lonely,” Stephanie said.
“I hope all the Brown girls ignore him.”
“There’s probably only a certain percentage of girls who like a guy with a ponytail, so already he has pretty low odds.”
Theresa laughed. “I know! That stupid ponytail! I really hated it. I tried to tell myself it was cool. He could trick you into thinking things were cool that weren’t. He was kind of a snob, I guess. I still miss him, though. I really miss him a lot. Isn’t that the stupidest thing?”