For years, watching Little League baseball had always bored Claire in precisely the same way that watching children run around a playground bored her. It wasn’t awful. It wasn’t a hardship to sit there on the bleachers and watch. If the day was pretty and she was sitting beside someone whose company she enjoyed, it could be a perfectly pleasant way to pass a spring or summer afternoon. But the game itself, the action on the field (if it could even be called action) could not hold her attention. When Evan came to bat, of course she watched and clapped her hands and cheered when he hit the ball hard or far, and also when he didn’t. But when the other boys were up to bat, or when Evan’s team was in the field and she couldn’t even see his face behind the chunky catcher’s mask, she did her best to appear engaged but she couldn’t have ever said, without looking at the scoreboard, who was winning, or by how much, or what inning it even was—only that it always seemed like it was the top of the third forever.
By the time the boys were ten or eleven, this lack of interest set her apart from almost every other parent in the stands, including her own husband, who perched for three hours on his row of bleacher as if he might at any moment have to spring over the backstop and join the game. She could not understand it when parents yelled at the umpire—almost always the same skinny, acne-faced teen who looked like he’d agreed to be an umpire with a gun held to his temple—nor when the parents made terse comments under their breaths about who should be batting cleanup or why the coach continued putting that boy at first base even though he always took his foot off the bag. “They’re ten,” she always wanted to say. “Who cares?”
But then something happened, something that surprised everyone. Or maybe not everyone. Mark, she had to admit, had anticipated it for years, claimed to see something in Evan, some great promise in his build, his hand/eye coordination, some secret baseball recipe—though she’d just always attributed the prediction to Mark’s usual optimism. But Mark was right. What happened was that Evan suddenly got good. Really, really good. Claire had seen his body change over the winter of his seventh-grade year, his shoulders and chest broaden, the belly that had once earned him the unmentionable nickname transform into muscle, the mustache darkening on his upper lip. (Really? So soon? She had not steeled herself properly for that darkness, had to stop her double-take the morning she first noticed it.) But she had never considered how puberty might translate on the field. Always one of the better players, at the age of thirteen Evan was abruptly and undeniably the best, hitting the ball with power that made parents lingering at practice look up from their phones and say whoa. He hit screaming line drives that other boys, instead of trying to catch, leaped away from. And she did not blame them. And suddenly, though she was ashamed to admit it, she turned from an apathetic baseball parent to the foam fingered #1 fan in the space of—well, really, there was no space. She was one, and then abruptly she was the other.
Claire loved going to his high school games, loved that Evan was the star, because she loved watching him excel, in the same way she’d loved, when we was two, watching him put the shaped blocks into the correctly shaped holes. It seemed to come to him just that easily. But it was more than that. It was something about her, too. She had always sat back and judged the other parents a little bit, how seriously they took everything, but now she was one of the crowd, automatically included: somehow Evan’s success was her ticket past the gates of her own judgment. She and Mark were popular. At the games they were Evan Oliver’s parents, a single unit of accomplishment. They held hands on the bleachers while they cheered the boy who had made them popular and modestly accepted the accolades from those around them, the mothers with their big sunhats and Dunkin’ Donuts iced teas, the fathers with their Phillies caps and hypertension. It was a mortifying cliché, but nonetheless true: Claire was actually warmed, inside, by the glow of her son’s towering home runs.
The mothers—a few of them she’d gotten to know well enough to look forward to their company—had called often after Evan was hurt, called over the spring and summer, and then eventually stopped trying when she did not return their calls.
Claire had long been friendly with many people but had no close friends. After what she and Mark always referred to half-jokingly (ha-ha-ha) as the Season of Divorce, when the three couples they had been best friends with split up, she had had a difficult time making connections with people that were based on anything other than convenience. She was too busy and too old to make new friends. Not that she could no longer be friends with the divorced couples. She was—she and Mark both were. They had made a somber vow that they would not be side choosers, but ironically it was that vow that wound up making the individual friendships difficult to sustain. You could say all you wanted that you would not choose sides, but the fact was that sometimes there were sides, and some days not choosing could wind up feeling more like outright betrayal than any kind of high-minded neutrality. And so instead of remaining good friends with half the divorced people, they became acquaintances with all of them. Sometimes the men came over for movies in the yard, but their lives were different now, and everyone could feel it. And sometimes the women came over for drinks, but Claire grew tired of the variation on the theme from years before: you wouldn’t understand; you have Mark.
Still, this was not something that had particularly bothered her, and it was only after Evan stopped playing baseball that she realized that those people, the women in the stands with the iced teas and sunhats, had become her closest friends without her even realizing it. And then they, too, were gone, in the course of one afternoon, in the path of one foul ball.
?
“Do you give out toothbrushes at your house?” a young patient asked Claire on Halloween.
“We’re just dentists,” she said. “We’re not monsters.”
In fact she had always loved Halloween, and they had the perfect Halloween neighborhood—no porch lights dared dim on their street, the long lawns dotted with gravestones and giant inflatable spiders. She would stay on the porch swing with her cauldron of candy while Mark walked the kids around one square block, and then they’d switch places and she’d take them on the second loop of the figure eight. They would not have given it up, either of them, the sight of their children bathed in the light of someone else’s front porch, the looks on their faces when they turned from the door and started back toward the sidewalk, their pumpkin buckets swinging, Evan holding Meredith’s hand so she would not trip on a darkened stair or stone. Claire mourned the loss of those moments even as they were happening. And now here she was, those moments ghosts.
The days of trick-or-treating had long passed for Evan and Meredith. Now it was parties—music, costumes (either bloody or ironic, extra points for both), possibly pranks, probably alcohol. This year, with Halloween on a Friday—there should be some sort of law preventing this, Claire thought—both kids would be god knows where and she and Mark would sit on their porch swing with their cauldron of Kit Kats for two hours and feel ancient. And it wasn’t as if they could even feel ancient together. Tonight, she was fairly certain, they would feel ancient alone.