braced his forelegs.
Bristle sprang back to nip at her brother. He stinks of the humans. Remember.
Pax was startled by the image she communicated to her brother then: a cold, howling wind; a mated pair of foxes, struggling with something that reminded Pax of his pen – steel, but with jaws and clamps instead of bars. The steel jaws and the snowy ground were smeared with blood.
Bristle tipped her head to assess the sky and sniff the breeze, which carried the threat of thunderstorms from the south. Home.
Runt lowered his tail and began to follow his sister. But then he turned back to Pax, inviting him to come as well.
Pax hesitated. He didn’t want to leave the spot his humans would return to. But dark clouds were rolling in, and just then, thunder boomed in the distance. He knew his boy would not venture out during a storm. He didn’t want to think of getting drenched by the side of the road. Alone.
He tucked the toy soldier into his cheek and set out after the two foxes.
Bristle turned when she sensed his presence. One night only, Human-Stinker.
Pax agreed. He would follow his scent back to the road after the storm. His humans would come for him then. And once he found his boy, he would never leave his side.
Peter recognised the sounds before he was fully awake: the footfalls of a herd of just-released kids, their hoots, the thumping of their eager fists into gloves. He scrambled out from under the bench and grabbed his stuff. Too late: twenty boys and their coach were streaming down the hill. Up at the parking lot, a bunch of adults were overseeing the dismissal, and some of them wore uniforms. His best option was to join the dozen or so kids who were already scattered over the bleachers, heads bent together in clusters of two and three, and blend in when they left.
Peter climbed the bleachers to the top row and dropped his pack. A kid watching a baseball practice – nothing could be more normal, yet his heart skidded.
Below, the coach started lobbing fungoes into the field. The players were mostly the usual guys you expect to see on a ball field, all muscle and shout. Peter found the one he wanted to watch: a small kid with a straw-coloured crew cut and a bleached-out red T-shirt, playing short-stop. While the rest of the players scrambled around like puppies, this kid was a statue, hands poised waist high, eyes glued to the coach’s bat. The instant wood smacked cowhide, he sprang. Somehow he managed to reach every ball that came anywhere near his territory, even though he was so short that he looked like someone’s tag-along kid brother.
Peter knew he himself wasn’t the kind of kid you’d expect to find on a ball field, either, and he was even less at home in the dugout with all the shoulder punching and trash talking. But a baseball field was the only place where he felt he was exactly where he was born to be.
The feeling that brought Peter was something he had never even tried to describe to anyone else – partly because it felt too private, but mostly because he didn’t think he had the words to explain it. “Holy” came the closest, and “calm” was in the mix, but neither was exactly right. For a crazy minute, Peter sensed that the short-stop understood about that holy calm, was feeling it too, right now.
The coach had taken the mound and was tossing puffballs. The batters were hitting sharp liners and grounders, and the outfielders were finally paying attention, or at least facing in the right direction. The short-stop was still the one to watch – he looked like he was stitched together with live wires, gaze steady to the play.
Peter recognised that kind of concentration – sometimes his eyes would actually go dry because he forgot to blink, so focussed was he on every move of every player – and knew it paid off. Like the kid in the red T-shirt below him, Peter owned his territory on a ball field. He loved that territory right down to the cut-grass, dry-dust smell of it. But what he loved more was the fence behind it. The fence that told him exactly what was his responsibility and what wasn’t. A ball fell inside that fence, he’d better field it. A ball soared over it, and it wasn’t his to worry about any more. Nice and clear.
Peter often wished that responsibility had such bright tall fences around it off the ball field, too.
When Peter’s mother had died, he’d gone for a while to a therapist. At seven years old, he hadn’t wanted to talk, or maybe he just hadn’t known how to shrink that kind of loss into words.
The therapist – a kind-eyed woman with a long silver braid – said that was okay, that was perfectly okay. And for the whole session, Peter would pull little cars and trucks from a toy box – there must have been a hundred of them in there; Peter figured later that the woman had cleaned out a toy store for him – and crash them together, two by two. When he was finished, she would always say the same thing: “That must have been hard for you. Your mum gets in a car to go buy groceries, a regular day, and she never comes home.”
Peter never answered, but he remembered a sense of rightness about those words, and about the whole hour – as if he was finally where he should be, and there was nothing else he should be doing except crashing those little cars and hearing that it must have been hard for him.
Until one day, the therapist said something else. “Peter, do you feel angry?”
“No,” he’d said quickly. “Never.” A lie. And then he’d gotten off the floor and taken a single green-apple Jolly Rancher from the brass bowl by the door, exactly the way he did at the end of every session – that was the deal the kind-eyed therapist had made with him: whenever he’d had enough, he could take a sweet and the session would be over – and left. But outside, he’d kicked the sweet into the gutter, and on the way home, he’d told his father he wasn’t going back again. His father hadn’t argued. In fact, it had seemed a relief to him.
But not to Peter. Had the nice therapist known all along he’d been angry that last day, that he’d done something terrible? That as punishment, his mother hadn’t taken him to the store? And did she blame him for what happened?
A few months later, Peter had gotten Pax. He’d come across a fox run over by the side of the road near his house. So soon after watching his mother’s coffin lowered into the ground, he’d felt an unshakable need to bury the body. As he’d looked around for a good place, he’d found the den, filled with three cold, stiff kit bodies and one little ball of grey fur still warm and breathing. He’d tucked Pax into his sweatshirt pocket and brought him home, and said – not asked, said – “I’m keeping him.” His dad had said, “Okay, okay. For a while.”
The kit mewed piteously all through the night, and hearing him, Peter had thought that if he could visit the kind-eyed therapist again, he’d smash those toy cars together all day and all night, all day and all night, forever. Not because he was angry. Just to make everybody see.
Thinking about Pax made the old anxiety snake tighten around Peter’s chest. He needed to get moving again, make up some time. The practice was breaking up now, boys loping in from the field, shedding equipment as they streamed past the dugout. As soon as the field was clear, he dropped from the bleachers, pulled his rucksack down, and hitched it over his shoulders. Just as he set out along the diamond,
