Claire had not seen Colleen Bellow in person since that afternoon at her house. Meredith had been over there after school several times since, but Claire always asked Evan to fetch her. Evan excelled at awkward situations—he’d inherited this from his father, clearly, the ability to effortlessly put people at ease, set a comfortable tone. Good old whistling Evan, with his winning smile; one day he would make some woman the envy of her friends, make her miserable by being so perfect. Plus, the added bonus, the talent that set him a cut above even his father: Evan was good at rescuing Meredith.
Except. Except. Things had been oddly cool between her children for the last couple weeks. The deeper Evan folded himself back into baseball, the deeper Meredith folded herself . . . where? Somewhere Claire could not see. It was the new friends, yes, and it was Colleen Bellow, but there was somewhere else, too, somewhere else she was going in all that silence. Twice a week Meredith went to see Dr. Moon and came out looking tired and annoyed—though, to be fair, these days Meredith looked tired and annoyed no matter where she was. When Claire requested an update, Dr. Moon said, “She doesn’t say a lot. But sometimes what she doesn’t say is as important as what she does say,” which sounded to Claire like a load of bullshit. She tried to imagine getting away with that degree of bullshit in her own treatment. How easy to be a therapist, the evidence of your failures always obscured! No rotting teeth, no abscess, no—
“Let’s find a new doctor, then,” Mark said. “There have to be good therapists in the world. They can’t all be terrible.”
“Fine,” she said. “Ask around. Be my guest.”
She knew he’d do nothing. Mark considered himself inept at such things, and so he was inept at such things. Give the man a shopping list and he’d make all your dreams come true. Ask him to find a new psychiatrist for your daughter and he’d dance around the edges of the job for a week before declaring himself unable to complete the task. It would fall to her. So why even waste the effort of pretending?
But the thought of finding a new therapist, all by herself, was exhausting. She needed to be patient, she reminded herself. It had only been six weeks. There was no magic wand, no miracle cure. Not to mention, she wouldn’t expect Dr. Moon to know how to fill a tooth, so wasn’t it gross arrogance to presume that she, only the mother, knew better than he how to counsel a trauma victim? She’d turned it over in her head a thousand times, and always wound up back at the same place: be patient. Let people do their jobs.
“I’m buying extra wine,” Mark said. Yes, there he was at his kitchen table with his beloved list and his special list-making pen, his weapons of choice. “I’m buying wine for twelve.”
She could not imagine drinking any wine. She hadn’t had a drink since Halloween. Every day she did not drink made her a little less drunk in the minivan, a little less pathetic at the Deli Barn, a little less inappropriate standing at the foot of that stranger’s porch with her broken phone and Logan Boone crawling through the grass looking for the lost battery. When Mark had asked her about it the next morning she had said, “It was fine. I was fine. Just tired.” He had nodded sympathetically, her faithful co-conspirator.
“It won’t be for long,” Mark said.
“What won’t?”
“They’re just coming for the day, right?”
“A flyby,” she said. “On their way to Nancy’s kids for the weekend. They don’t want to intrude. I’m sure it was my father who insisted upon that. ‘One day only. We shouldn’t intrude. We don’t want to add to their burden.’ You know what he’s like.”
“Your mom was worse,” Mark said.
“They were born that way,” she said. “Both of them. Maybe that was what they had in common. A desire to not intrude. Maybe if you find someone who shares that desire then you never have to worry about intrusion again.”
“Maybe. Though I guess it kind of depends on what your definition of intrusion is. If intrusion is just showing up . . . ”
“Get like six bags of stuffing mix,” she said, peering over his shoulder at the list. “Evan can eat four by himself.”
“Got it,” he said. He wrote “x6” after “stuffing.”
She heard a thud on the roof, like a very heavy bird falling from a tree.
“What was that?” she asked.
“He’s out there playing,” Mark said. “Our stuffing man.”
“What? On the roof?”
Another thud. She was already at the back door, her hand on the knob.
“Stop. Jesus, of course he’s not on the roof. Jesus, Claire. He’s throwing a ball onto the roof and letting it roll off. That’s all.”
Thud.
“He’s throwing a ball onto the roof?”
“He’s practicing. He throws it up there with some spin on it so he doesn’t—”
“I don’t care,” she said. “I really don’t care about the details. I could not care less about—”
Thud. A new addition to the baseball symphony.
“You were right about the pop-ups,” Mark said. “They’re killing him. They’re impossible. And I don’t think it’s getting any better. He’s trying all sorts of drills, making them up as he goes. I don’t know . . . maybe it’s a little better. But only a little.”
“Think about the number of things he could do,” she said. “Sports, I mean. I’m not trying to be a bitch about this, okay? I know everybody thinks I’m the world’s biggest killjoy, but good god. He could swim or run or play soccer, even. Don’t you think he could play soccer?”
Thud.
“Do you remember him playing soccer? Do you remember how terrible he was?”
“He was nine years old,” she said. “He was—”
“Exactly,” he said. “And now he’s seventeen. Seventeen. He’s a baseball player, Claire. He’s been a baseball player for ten years. He can’t just learn to be a soccer player now. That’s not how it works. It’s not what he does. It’s not who he is.”
“Baseball is not who he is,” she said. “He’s lots of things. He’s smart. He’s funny. He could do a thousand different things really well if he put his mind to it. It’s not like all his windows of opportunity have closed. He might be great at something else and not even know it yet.”
Thud.
“But this is who he is right now,” Mark said. “I mean, you can take it or leave it. But I don’t think there’s anything you can do about it.”
Evan came into the kitchen and laid his mitt on the counter. His cheeks and hands were pink. The lenses of his glasses were thick with steam and he took them off and wiped them with his shirt.