He slumped to the floor, back to the wall, his hair, shoulders and chest soaked from the rain. He couldn’t believe this was happening now, on the eve of his season. He just wanted to play ball. As his eyes adjusted to the gloom something winked at him from the corner — the soft cotton baseball he used to play catch with Rafe. He imagined Rafe toddling towards him, holding the ball out and tossing it gleefully at his face.
Jesus, he thought, how did it ever come to this? The only reason they’d decided to get married was Rafe, and now he was gone. It was right here, lying on the floor searching for the best location for Rafe’s crib, where Vicki lifted her blouse and put his hand on her stomach. He could feel the beat of Rafe’s tiny kicks. He’d kissed her bulging womb, feeling so surprised and hopeful.
He began to cry, remembering the time he was eight-years-old and asleep in Port Sulphur and the moving van came and started packing everything for the move to Point Barrow. No one had warned him that he’d have to leave behind every friend he ever had and move from the gelid air at the bottom of America to the ice box at the top. His father had been in Point Barrow for five months already — on temporary assignment, his mother said. In the middle of the school year — in the middle of winter — they boarded a bus in New Orleans for the four day trip to Seattle, and five years of exile in Alaska. But no matter how bad he felt about any of that, nothing compared with this feeling of losing his son.
Goddammit, Jason thought, why hadn’t he left first? The whole affair should have lasted one night, two at the most. He’d found her standing alone on the porch outside his fraternity house the night of their year-end party. She was so improbably beautiful that he felt emboldened by the fact he had nothing to lose. She was clearly older than him, slim, sexy, reserved, with long dark hair and olive skin and intense black eyes. She wore a black mini-skirt and high heels, a white sleeveless blouse and gold charm bracelet filled with miniature replicas of the Elgin Marbles. She looked as if she had stepped from a European movie.
“Jason Thibodeaux,” he’d introduced himself gallantly. “A member of this august fraternity, and candidate for a degree in the Sociology of Humanity.” He drew her hand to his lips and kissed it.
“Victoria Repetto,” she replied warily. “Second year law.”
They danced in a room that literally shook with the vibrations from a DJ’s repertoire, beneath a dented National Park Service sign that warned, “ELK RUTTING SEASON. AGGRESSIVE BEHAVIOR. DO NOT APPROACH.” He had a surprising gracefulness that was incongruous with his size. She watched wonderingly as people touched or squeezed him as they walked by, as if he were some kind of talisman. “Heat,” they called him. He clearly had something that people wanted.
When they finished dancing, Jason grabbed a bottle of champagne and two glasses from the bar and led her back to the porch. They sat in the tiny love seat and shared the outlines of their lives. She was the second of five children — and only daughter — in a big Italian family across the Bay in Fremont. “It was like living in a house of Roman centurions,” she said with distaste. “Four guys — five, counting my father — all God’s gift to the world.”
“You obviously held your own,” he remarked. “You got in Stanford Law.”
“It was either that or stay home and iron shirts. My father helped my brothers through college, but not me. In my family, girls were for having babies.”
He wasn’t really listening, though he wished he had. Her anger at her family would figure prominently in theirs — as prominently as the barrenness and isolation of his family life had. He watched her thin, lipsticked lips, her earrings dancing in the Christmas lights strung along the porch railings. Everything seemed pointed towards fulfilling that perfect college moment — gratuitous sex on the cusp of summer vacation.
He described the little town he was from — Port Sulphur, Louisiana, on the Gulf south of New Orleans. His father was in the oil business when he’d died eight years before. Jason told her about trying to be “the man of the house,” but never coming close to touching his mother’s depression. She’d died during his sophomore year, leaving him alone in the world. He’d come to Stanford to get the best education he could, and make a better life for himself than what his parents ever had.
“Why do they call you ‘Heat’?” Vicki asked.
“My fastball.” He could tell she didn’t have the faintest idea what he was talking about. “I’m here on a baseball scholarship.”
“You’re a jock?”
“Actually, we don’t wear jocks anymore.” He held his hands as if pressing the sides of a melon. “They have these sports briefs that hold everything together.”
She laughed, and he poured her more champagne. Later, they went to his room and made love. After that night, she insisted she’d been drunk. When finals were over he asked her out to a Tom Petty concert at the Shoreline Amphitheater, but they were more courteous than courtly and did not sleep together a second time. It was three weeks before they spoke again, when she called with the news. She had left to clerk for a federal judge in Philadelphia,
“Hey!” he said, surprised. He turned down the sound of the Giants game on his television. “How’s life in Philly?”
“I’m at my parents’ house,” she said. “There’s been a change in plans.”
“What’s going on?” he asked, only half-listening as he watched the game.
“I’m pregnant.”
He turned the game off. “I thought you couldn’t get pregnant.” That’s what she had told him, why they didn’t use protection — that she had scarring in her tubes from an untreated case of chlamydia that surgery may or may not correct some day.
“Obviously the doctor was wrong.”
The next day he drove to her family’s ranch house in a suburban cul-de-sac. He’d brought the number for Planned Parenthood, though she’d made it clear on the phone that she was going to have the baby. As soon as she opened the door, he knew what was going to happen. She wore a pair of radiant white shorts and a wine-red blouse with the top two buttons unfastened. Her dark eyes looked at him with a mixture of sorrow, defiance and expectation.
He handed her a large bouquet of mixed flowers with a price sticker still on the wrapper. “You look really nice,” he said, kissing her on the lips.
They went for a drive, ending up in a tree-shaded parking lot at Lake Del Valle State Recreation Area. They sat for awhile with their own thoughts, watching a Vietnamese family — mother, father, little girl — fish from a freshly painted pier.
Vicki finally spoke. “My father says I have to get married.”
“To who?” Jason asked.
She laughed. “To you — but I know that won’t happen.”
He watched the Vietnamese father grab the handle of a fishing rod while his daughter excitedly reeled in the line and the mother leaned forward with a net. In a moment a small fish broke the surface and the little girl screamed with delight as the fish flopped in the net. Jason wished he had somebody to tell him what to do. But even if his parents were alive, what could they have offered? Every decision his family had made seemed completely off-the-cuff: go to Point Barrow, to Galveston, to Norway. Nobody discussed anything — least of all with him. Now here was somebody who needed him, who was going to have his child.
“We can do it,” he said. “We can do whatever we want.”
“We don’t even know each other.”
“I know that you’re beautiful,” he said. “I know you’re smart, you’re sexy, you’re a great dancer.” Right there, right then, he’d decided he loved her and that anything was possible. And why not? She was beautiful — and smart, and sexy. He didn’t stop to think at that point that what he