One evening in July, she opened the window after the summer storm-monsoon-rain event-thing had blown through. Through the buzz of cicadas she heard a distinctive metallic ping: an aluminum bat connecting with a ball. She turned off the computer and walked toward the sounds of the game. She crossed a wooden footbridge that connected the ball field to the neighborhood, and as she walked closer, she could see men and women leaning on the fence, the toes of their tennis shoes in the chain link, cheering for kids up to bat. She could smell the stale popcorn and hear the clang of hard soles on the metal bleachers. Memories rushed in like high tide, foaming at the edges.
She didn’t think of the ball games with Charlie, although those were legion, those old date nights full of hot dogs and peanuts and beer and sex, or of the nights when their relationship began to fray and she’d sit in the bedroom and watch the game alone. Her mind went farther back—to long days at the beach when it really did seem she had all the time in the world. When she, tomboy girl child dreaming of becoming a ballplayer, would shag pop flies and throw pitches with her dad and brother in the low surf. Her dad squeezed and shaped her hand around the baseball, bent her pliable arm. His reedy voice in her ear: Throw hard, the more speed the better. Find your balance, there’s a girl. Plant your feet, get grounded. Focus. Work from instinct, from the heart, don’t think too much. For the first time, as she watched those parents lean on the fence, she recognized the larger life subtext of his advice. And she had done none of those things.
Laura wanted to join the crowd, get some stale nachos and a soda and climb to the top of the bleachers, but instead she turned around, full of a sudden unnamed fear, a gripping force that made her keep her eyes on her feet. She walked toward the house of a woman who had lost her mind, and she thought of one of the final moments with Charlie: he’d grabbed her by the shoulders, his eyes narrow, and said, “You’re such a goddamn little girl, Laura. You’re such a fucking child. An infant.” Then he began to sob, and watching his puckered face, she’d thought, Well, there’s irony for you.
Midstride, she hauled off and kicked a rock, sending it skittering across the pavement. As her knee twinged again—bone cancer? bursitis?—she wondered if he wasn’t right. She certainly felt childish in her homesickness, in her creeping fear of darkness and creaks in the house and the eerie yowl—coyotes? cats in heat? starving mountain lion stalking humans?—she heard each night over the clanking evaporative cooler. She called her parents and brother too much because it seemed as though they were the only part of her she recognized anymore.
She tracked the rock she’d kicked and scooped it into her pocket. She rubbed the rock’s pitted surface with her thumb and gazed at the darkening sky, still luminous at the edges. An image of the ocean rose beneath it like a palimpsest. She missed it as if it had died. Or as if she had. And part of her had, hadn’t it? Where was that fearless young girl on the beach, baseball in hand? Who was this woman in the near dark whose walk turned to a run? Who was this woman who flew up the sidewalk to her front door, keys in hand, belonging nowhere and to no one?
When she finally slept, she dreamed a spider had eaten a hole in her knee.
On the last day of July, Laura timed the walk from home to her new office at Sycamore College: twelve minutes, door to door. She walked in blue cross-training shoes with books stuffed in her pack. She walked through the iron arches of the renovated entrance where just beyond, the Black Hills flexed with sun and shadow. She walked the no-frills cement paths of the young campus, built in the early 1960s to serve the fast-growing Verde Valley. She walked through the buildings’ breezeways, admiring the sandstone walls and benches. She walked inside the linoleum halls of the stuccoed Humanities building, stopping to read the comics and notes and news clippings on office doors. She paced at the front of the lecture hall, still nervous at the prospect of all those eyes on her, though she could lecture on the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in her sleep.
Back home, she called her mother, who told her about her father up on the goddamn roof despite his limp—his retirement is going to kill me, she said. Her mother talked about the Padres losing to the goddamn Dodgers, about their upcoming trip to Taipei, and when the Realtor called on the other line, she hung up before Laura could ask, “When are you going to come visit?” She tried not to cry, like the fucking child she was.
She decided to tackle a few moving boxes. Much of what she’d packed in haste was crap, anyway, cheap tin pots from college days, tattered gift baskets, expired medicine she should have tossed, but today she slung clothes into drawers and shelved a few books. On that last day of July, she slit open a cardboard flap to discover she’d accidentally packed the box Charlie had put next to the dryer as a trash can for lint. Inside was a soft bluish pile: fibers from their clothes, scales from their skin. She reached in and grabbed the wad, squeezing the sloughed-off parts of a past life, and she was struck by an oceanic wave of grief. She dropped the lint back, folded the flaps down, and went to bed. She did not walk that day, nor the day after, nor the day after that. She did not get out of bed, and she left the TV on all night, the brittle laugh tracks reverberating on the tile. When she finally checked the mail, Maud had left a note in the box: “Everything okay in there? Holler if you need anything.”
In early August, Laura finally rose early and walked again. Out on the path she saw a runner, a bald man with a big smile and bigger ears who gave a wave and wide berth—cues he wasn’t a threat—as he loped past her with a long-legged grace she envied in her slow plodding. His face was nice enough, but those legs: heroic, dense as quarry stones. She couldn’t help but think of how they would feel locked together with hers, muscle and heat and bones, and she created an elaborate, very sweaty sexual fantasy right there on the dirt path. The next day, when she saw him again, she was embarrassed and could barely meet his eyes, pulling her stupid visor even lower.