Take Another Look (3 page)

Some of the parents had already set up chairs along the foul line. At the grassy edge of the outfield, Linda Ferguson lay on a blanket reading a book. One bare foot bent back over her butt as if she were a beach bunny. Linda's husband, Pete, hovered over the coach, who sat on the team bench working on the lineup. Legs crossed and head down, Carrie didn't seem interested in Pete's opinion, but no one in the Ferguson family read or respected body language. Although Harper had not played with Olivia yet, Harper had already been strong-armed by seventeen-year-old Olivia during practices. And Jane had been warned by a few of the softball moms that the Fergusons had been at the center of last year's varsity turmoil. A believer in education, Jane hoped that this year the Fergusons might learn a few lessons about teamwork.

Fortunately, two of Harper's friends since grade school were on the team with her, which gave Jane two instant “mom” friends, stable, capable women with a sense of humor and perspective. She headed toward Trish Schiavone, the most down-to-earth mom on the team. Trish squatted beside three grade-school kids, digging through a flexible cooler. “Did we really leave all the juice packs in the car? Kids, Mom is losing her marbles.” Trish stood up and sprinted past Jane. “Be back in a sec.”

Jane set her bag down and opened the canvas tote. “How are you kids doing today?”

“We're okay,” Trish's daughter said, scratching her freckled nose. “But my mom is losing her marbles.”

“I hate when that happens.” As Jane set up her chair, she eavesdropped on bits of conversation: talk of a new wine bar in town, tales of summer vacation, and something about Olivia Ferguson. Summer camp? Jane recalled that Olivia had spent three weeks at a “superstar” softball camp, a pricey operation that promised amazing results. Harper had begged on her knees for the opportunity—“Please! Oh, please, please, please, Mama-dish! ”—but Jane had explained that they couldn't afford a camp that would cost the same as a semester's tuition at the state university. The parent chatter was a bit more heated than usual today, with someone making a barb that “you can't buy athletic skill” and someone else expressing worry that the team would suffer. She sensed that the controversy swirled around the Fergusons.

Sinking into her chair, Jane tipped her face to the blue sky and vowed to remain neutral. As a teacher, she had to steer clear of the social dynamics that pitted parents against each other. Still, as a parent, she needed to advocate for her daughter. She walked a fine line, but wasn't life a series of choices and compromises? “Maintain balance,” her yoga teacher said cheerfully. Such a good lesson for anyone.

Over by the team bench, Luke was just about finished working his magic, connecting poles and unfolding canvas to unfurl the canopy over the home team bench. Carrie still penciled notations on her clipboard, mindless of the tent rising over her as she fended off Pete Ferguson. It was unlike the two of them not to lend Luke a hand. Jane took out her cell and texted him.

The home team galloped over from the practice field, a herd of powerful, wild fillies. Some of the parents cheered, though most had their heads down, eyes locked on cell phones. Linda Ferguson had come in from the outfield, her blanket neatly folded under her arm as she talked with her husband. Clearly unhappy, they sat apart from the covey of parents.

When Trish returned with a carton of juice pouches, she was distracted, scowling toward the tiered parking lot that cut into the hillside. She leaned close to Jane, muttering under her breath. “There's some man sitting in a car down there.”

Jane rose and turned toward the parking lot.

“A silver Chevy. Second tier.”

Jane couldn't tell which car that was from here, and Luke had already disappeared.

Trish dug her fingers into the end of the carton and dumped the juice into the small cooler. “Okay, guys. You can each take one for now.” The kids took their juice and scooters and headed toward the path. “And don't go down by the parking lot,” Trish called after them.

“Should I call the police?” Jane said in a near whisper. “Or the office? Gray Tarkington will check him out.” At six-foot-five, their vice principal was a tower of intimidation.

“He wasn't doing anything illegal,” Trish said as they walked over for a closer look. The middle tier was a good hundred yards away, but from the ridge of the ball field they had a clear view. “It just gave me the creeps. I mean, he wasn't talking on a cell, and any parent picking up his kid goes to the front of the school.”

“It is weird,” Jane agreed. “We need to trust our instincts. It wouldn't hurt to get his plate number.”

Sunlight glinted off a silver car as it backed out of a space and crawled up the hill toward the exit. It happened too fast and far away to make out any details.

“There he goes.”

“Well. That's a relief.” Jane promised to relay a description of the driver—a dark-haired, middle-aged male—to the administrative staff. “It's always good to report these things.”

“Right? You never know,” Trish agreed as they returned to their seats.

A few years ago, the report of a loitering dark-haired man would have sent Jane into a panic, but time had eased her fears. She still double-checked the locks at night, and her reserved demeanor kept most strangers at bay, but with each passing year the cloak of security grew stronger.

Without fanfare the game began as a West Green player grounded to first. Trish cheered for their pitcher KK Dalton, whose parents had missed most of last year's games.

“Come on, girlfriend,” Trish shouted. “You can do it.”

Jane smiled. Trish was way cooler than she was.

“Good afternoon, Jane.” A chuckle came from beside her, and she found Keiko Suzuki squatting gracefully beside her chair. Jane had met Keiko when their girls were in the same preschool class, and over the years they had weathered a few parenting storms together. “You look like you're enjoying the sun, and I hate to bother you on this beautiful day.”

“You could never be a bother,” Jane said, and she meant it. She had always found Emma's mother to be kind, poised, and patient. Besides that, Jane was mystified at the way Keiko managed to hold down a job with a state agency, volunteer at school, and still attend every game.

“So much going on. Have you heard Pete Ferguson's new plan?”

“Tell me.”

“Apparently, Olivia was told she is playing the wrong position for her body type.” Keiko pressed a pale hand to her clavicle, wistful and respectful. Years ago, Jane had learned that a word for “no” did not exist in the Japanese language, and she saw that penchant for stating things positively in Emma and her mother. “That's what they were teaching at this softball camp. They said she is too tall and big-boned to be a shortstop.”

“Really? Just like that.”

“This is a new theory, but the Fergusons are taking it very seriously.” Keiko gazed at the coach as she spoke. Linda had joined her husband, apparently double-teaming Carrie, who was not making eye contact.

“And they're badgering Carrie to switch Olivia's position,” Jane said, narrating the scene before them. “What position did the experts tell Olivia she should be playing?”

“That's the concern,” Keiko sighed. “I'm afraid she wants to be the catcher.”

Chapter 2

J
ane tried to stay in the moment and avoid falling into a pit of worry, but the game moved slowly for the first few innings. Foul balls and full counts. She watched for signs that Harper's performance was impaired by news of Olivia's plan, but Harper remained fluid and energetic, batting in two runs in the second inning. She couldn't have heard.

A breeze swept in from the west, brushing across the golf course that bordered the school grounds and bringing the scent of freshly mown grass with it. Jane took a deep breath and savored the moment; it was too easy to take Mirror Lake's beauty for granted and get caught up in small, biting worries that would pass.

In the top of the fourth, the tension thickened as the home team pitcher began to weaken and West Green loaded the bases with no outs. Crap. Jane squirmed as Harper stopped a wild pitch in the dirt. KK's face was beet red; the poor girl was falling apart. On the next pitch there was a bland chinking sound as the ball popped straight up. Harper scrambled to her feet, ripped off her face mask, and edged over to the chalk line by first base.

“I got it!” Sydney Schiavone called from first base. The ball seemed to hover in the air forever. At last, it looped down, right into Syd's mitt.

“Yes!” Jane cheered. But it wasn't over. Sydney shot the ball to home, where the runner was closing in on Harper. In one glorious motion Harper tagged the runner out and lobbed the ball to third base for a triple play.

“Out!” the umpire shouted.

“That's what I'm talking 'bout!” Trish high-fived Jane, who whooped with delight amid the thundering parent contingent. In the years of watching her daughter play ball, Jane had learned that you had to celebrate the great moments.

As the fielders met for a fist bump on their way to the bench, Jane saw elation in her daughter's face.

She's a great catcher,
Jane thought as Harper scooped up a batting helmet.
Don't take that away from her.

Maternal instincts ran deep, Jane knew that, but she thought she had honed hers down to her daughter's specific needs. She had to protect the light that shone inside her daughter, and for Harper that flame had always burned for activity. From the time Harper could move, she had been an active baby, rolling and crawling and pulling up on anything she could get a grip on. She had hated being cradled and insisted on being held so that she could face out and observe the world.

Those first few months had been a trial. More often than not, Harper would awaken from sleep screaming and writhing, as if someone were pressing a knife in her belly. Colic did not begin to describe the inconsolable crying jags, the harsh glare of pain in her periwinkle eyes, the long nights of pacing. Jane's stress had been increased by the fact that she was cut off from her family in California, living off her savings in the Seattle area as she cared for Harper and contemplated her next move.

Marnie had been a lifesaver. Even as she juggled a marriage, a child, and a teaching job, Marnie had managed to find the time to drop by with a dinner plate or to take all the kids out to the park after school. When Jane had asked Marnie and her husband Jason to be Harper's godparents, Marnie had thrown a celebration back at the house, including a small group of family and neighbors. Although Harper had slept through the church ceremony, stirring only slightly when water was poured over her head, she had awoken at Marnie's house in a blistering mood. The warmth of the kitchen, the noise level, and the food smells—it was all too much. Escaping out to the back deck, Jane had come upon an elderly man, staring out over the yard.

“Sorry,” she had said, moving Harper to her other arm. Although the first blast of cool air had reduced the volume of the baby's wails, she was still whimpering. “You came out here looking for peace and quiet, and now you have a baby crying in your ear.”

“I'm glad to hear it. Reminds me of the fierce emotion of youth.” When he had turned toward them, she had noticed the folds of skin at his jowls and neck, like her Grandpa Harold had. The man looked to be every bit of ninety, but there had been a calm intelligence in his eyes. “Still sharp as a tack,” Marnie had said. When he'd been introduced as Marnie's great-uncle, he'd teased that he liked that title. “Like Alexander the Great. You can call me George the Great, if you like.”

He had touched the white bootee on Harper's foot, and she had given a sour yowl. “Yes, I know. At least when you cry, you've got a wonderful mother to comfort you.”

Harper's face had puckered, and a sob had bleated past her rosy lips.

“I'm sorry. It's not you. She cries all the time.”

“It's what babies do best. It doesn't make them any less magnificent.”

She had switched Harper's position and begun rocking from side to side. “It's hard to see the magnificence when she drags you out of bed at four in the morning.”

“An ungodly hour,” George had agreed. “She's lucky to have you. I look at her and see what a good life she's going to have. With a loving mother, this little one will grow and learn. Ah, what joyous discoveries she has ahead of her.”

Jane had smiled. “That's quite a prediction for such a grumpy baby.”

“She's learning how to find her happy place, and you're nurturing her through this rough time.”

Harper had been quiet then. Jane had thought she might have drifted off to sleep, but when she tipped her head down, Harper's periwinkle eyes had been shiny bright and wide as quarters. Both mother and child had taken to Uncle George; maybe it was the deep, raspy timbre of his voice.

“This is the most important job of your life,” George had said. “I know it doesn't seem that way now. Time puts a golden light on some things. I wish I'd had an ounce of patience when I was raising my kids. But I loved them, and they turned out just fine.”

“Harper doesn't have a father.”

“And that will be her normal. No father, but who needs that when you've got a terrific mother like you?”

“You're too kind.”

He had shaken his head. “Just observant. And a little jealous. My life is in the final act, and yours is just beginning. I envy you your future . . . such an important future as a mother. You just took on the biggest job of your life.”

At the time, Jane had not seen the big picture of raising a child; the formative years and early development were lost in her focus on survival. One diaper change to the next. The rare moments of quiet between crying jags. The rewarding smiles and knowledge that these robotic days would pass were rare. But George the Great's advice had eased her through Harper's first year. She had a goal. She was raising a child, a new person.

Just days before her first birthday, Harper had risen for the first time in the middle of the kitchen floor and walked away from the pot Jane had given her to play with. She had simply walked off and disappeared into the living room. With a whoop of excitement, Jane had followed her in. Harper had dropped to all fours and rapidly crawled to the couch, where she pulled herself up to her feet, mouthed the arm, and tried to climb it. And just like that, Harper had graduated from baby to climbing toddler. Stairs, sofa arms, banisters . . . nothing was safe from the limber body of Harper scaling to the heights. But with the freedom of movement had come liberation. No longer trapped in a bouncy chair or stroller, Harper had stopped crying and traveled wherever she wanted to go.

Harper's fascination with basketball had emerged when she was barely three. When Jane had tried to interest her in the play structure at the park, Harper had ventured over to one of the basketball hoops and stationed herself under the net. On their cul-de-sac, loaded with Toys “R” Us's brightest trucks, wagons, and tricycles, Harper kept wandering to the Tullys' hoop, where one or two basketballs always sat on the edge of the curb. From her spot under the hoop, Harper would turn the ball in her pudgy hands, her round blue eyes searching its rugged surface.

“Honey, that's not your ball,” Jane would say.

And then Nancy Tully would hurry out of the house and melt over Harper's adorability. “Let her play. Anytime. We put that hoop up so that we could have our kids right under our noses.” Nancy's teenage sons had gotten such a charge out of seeing Harper with the ball. As days wore on and the little girl doggedly posted herself under the hoop, the boys had begun to work with her, grabbing the rebounds and demonstrating shots. Evan would squat down to be on her level. “We gotta make it a fair game,” he had insisted. Carter used to hoist Harper up so that she could stuff the ball. “Slam dunk!” Harper would say. The Tully boys had taught her well. They were grown now; Carter was nearly thirty with two kids of his own, and Evan was studying to be a physician's assistant. Jane would always be grateful to them, though Harper was embarrassed to see them now. “Mom, don't tell my friends those stories about Carter and Evan,” Harper would say, pulling a hood over her shiny dark hair. “It's so embarrassing.”

Jane had been awed by her daughter's determination. Where did her drive come from? Certainly not from Jane, who had suffered through high school PE, overweight and uncoordinated. She had been a bookworm by default, whereas Harper's blood ran thick with determination to move. In the early days, when you couldn't even see Harper's little head behind the basketball, Jane had figured the girl would eventually lose interest. She couldn't score a basket; she couldn't even hit the rim. But Harper had refused to give up. Determined to give the little girl some satisfaction, Jane had purchased a short plastic kiddie hoop . . . and the gaming began. Of course, Harper had scorned the kid-sized balls as inferior. Nothing but the real deal for her.

By kindergarten, Harper was taking part in clinics for older kids, and Jane had sat in the bleachers, intrigued by her daughter's fierce concentration on dribbling between cones and controlling bounce passes. In school, Hoppy lagged behind the other kids a bit, but she loved books, insisted that Jane read to her every night before bed. The poster Harper had made in kindergarten still hung on the bulletin board by the kitchen door. Next to a drawing of Dr. Seuss's Cat in the Hat, with his red-and-white-striped hat, whiskers, and amused smile, Harper had printed CAT IN THE HOP. The teacher had thought it was a minor mistake, but Harper had insisted that it was intentional. “That's 'cuz I like
Cat in the Hat
and
Hop on Pop,
both of them, so I wrote them together.” Jane couldn't have been more pleased and proud; in that moment, she had realized that her daughter, though not conventionally brilliant, saw the world through a different filter.

By second grade, Harper had developed an unconventional left-handed hook shot that flabbergasted other “Little Hoopers.” The parent coach had worried that Harper's unconventional shot might injure the developing arm muscles, but Harper had scowled at the idea of learning another way, and Jane had let her be. Basketball was Harper's comfort and joy.

When the third-grade coach convinced some of the girls to try softball in the spring, Harper had gravitated to the bulky catcher's equipment. She had told Jane that she felt safe behind the catcher's mask and padding, and she liked the position at the plate “so I can keep my eyes on everything.” That had made Jane wonder if some of her fears had seeped into her daughter's psyche. Did Harper sense that she was being raised in hiding, camouflaged by a different name, a distant state, and a suburban landscape?

“You can't change the truth,” Jane's therapist had said. “Someday, she'll need to know about her father.”

Jane understood the power of the truth. It was the very reason she had held back the details about Harper's father for all these years. Would Harper want to know that her father was an avid surfer? The crash of a wave in Half Moon Bay came to mind, and now Jane wondered if that was true. Maybe Frank hadn't been a surfer at all. So much of his image had been built on lies, a wavering mirage designed for maximum appeal.

No, she would not credit him for passing amazing agility and athletic prowess on to Harper. Her steely concentration as she crouched behind the batters, her rapid response in the heat of a play, and the powerful connection between the ball and her bat. Harper commanded the field, inspiring awe. Other parents had mentioned her scholarship potential. “A girl like Harper will get a full ride,” Coach Carrie had said, more than once. Jane just thanked them and hoped her daughter would develop the academic skills to make it into a good college.

The game was tied in the bottom of the ninth when Harper dug her cleats into the red soil at the plate and cocked her bat. That bat had given Jane pause; she'd been told that her daughter needed a three-hundred-and-fifty-dollar Louisville Slugger. “A bat that costs the same as a month of groceries?” Jane had asked Harper and her batting coach, who was already twenty-five an hour. “Why can't she keep using the team bats?” But the coach had explained how important the length, weight, composition, and balance of a fast-pitch bat were to the success of a hitter. He'd used phrases like “composite carbon fiber” and “good pop right out of the box.” Seeing the plaintive look on her daughter's face, Jane had caved. And the coach had been right. “Blue Lightning,” as the bat had been dubbed, had added a good twenty feet to Harper's hitting distance, and she reported no sting when she made contact with the ball. Blue Lightning had been worth a few ramen noodle dinners.

“Be a hitter!” Pete Ferguson barked at Harper from right behind the backstop. Bad form.

Harper connected on the first pitch, with a resounding clang of Blue Lightning. The ball soared out in a beautiful wide arc, sailing over the players' heads and the home-run fence. The home team roared. The West Green girls slouched on the field as Harper ran the bases, and then, the first game of fall ball was over.