Home Away Read online

  Vicki scrambled from her seat and backpedaled towards the door. “Then get out! Get out — nobody wants you here!”

  He stepped towards her. Their altercations had never been physical; the sound, the spray, the audacity of the exploding yogurt shocked them both.

  “Stay away from me!” Vicki cried.

  “I wouldn’t touch you if you paid me!”

  Vicki’s foot hit a pool of yogurt and she slid hard against the wall, banging her shoulder. “You asshole!” she screamed. Jason stood over her, uncertain what to do.

  “Get away from me!” Vicki screamed louder. “You hear me? GET AWAY FROM ME!”

  Rafe was crying now. The day Jason had dreamed about for more than a year somehow had turned into a nightmare. He grabbed his Stanford jacket from the living room chair and fled down the front stairs two at a time, striking out on a run across the dark lawn towards East Campus Drive. The sound of Rafe’s crying chased him like a siren.

  THE STANFORD DAILY

  CARDINAL FATE HINGES ON DAD’S RETURN STANFORD ACE HITS 1,000 (DIAPERS) IN OFF-SEASON

  When “JT” Thibodeaux takes the field today in the opening practice of the Cardinal’s baseball season, for the first time in a year he won’t be playing with a Nerf ball. A two-time high school All-American recruited out of Henry Beaumont High in Galveston, Texas (where he was known as “Heat”), JT elected to take a leave of absence to raise his one-year-old son while his wife completed Stanford Law.

  “I’m ready to play,” Thibodeaux told the Daily on the West Campus playground, where we caught up with him on the swings with his fledgling Cardinal, Raphael. “I wouldn’t trade this year with my boy for anything,” JT said, though he is looking forward to trading in his diaper bag for a duffel bag.

  Thibodeaux was an overpowering 16-1 as a junior in the Cardinal’s near-trip to the College World Series two seasons ago. With the birth of his son to second year Stanford Law student Victoria Repetto, Thibodeaux red-shirted his final year of eligibility in order to take primary responsibility for raising him.

  “I can always pitch,” the hard-throwing 6’4” left-hander said. “But I won’t ever have the opportunity again to raise my son. It’s just something I decided to do. I think it worked out great for both of us.”

  A Sociology major in the School of the Humanities, Thibodeaux managed to earn three credits towards his degree on his year off. Working with department staff, he turned his fathering experience into a year-long sociology tutorial, recording his son’s developmental progress. Thibodeaux estimates that he read nearly forty books on child-rearing — in addition to “changing a thousand diapers.”

  Thibodeaux’s coaches and teammates are happy to see their ace return. “JT has always done things his way,” one teammate said. “I don’t care what he does off the field. I just want to go to the World Series.”

  THE MORNING session was hell. The new conditioning coach, Brad Sievert, started them with a half hour of calisthenics, then running drills and wind sprints from line to line before shagging flies. Pitchers and catchers took fielding drills with the equipment manager, Donnie Burt — or “Toast,” so named because two seasons ago one of the dryers caught fire and burned the team’s uniform pants — rolling simulated bunts onto the infield grass. At eleven o’clock the pitchers practiced covering the bag on balls hit to first.

  Jason worked as hard as he’d ever worked in his life. His legs ached. His t-shirt was soaked. His thighs screamed from sprinting from the mound to first base. He loved it. Men being, trying to be, pretending to be the fastest, the most powerful, the most prolific players in a game that Americans had played for as long as most Americans could remember. He was embarrassed for ever giving it up. But that was the past. He could forget the year he had taken off. He could forget his blow-up with Vicki, the sound of Rafe crying, the yogurt sprayed across the wall and floor of the kitchen. Here, inside the sanctuary of Stanford’s legendary stadium, it was all baseball, only baseball, a wholly self-contained and self-referential world.

  Lunch was catered, with mounded platters of pasta, risotto, baked chicken breasts, buttered green beans and biscuits with honey, all passed up and down the table. Jason sat with the other seniors — Jeremy Asher, his battery mate since freshman year; Barf Connolly, the baby-faced infielder from San Diego with the social mores of John Belushi; Damon Lister, the stuck-up world government major from Perth, Australia, who played center field like a roadrunner; John Corliss, scion of Corliss Software; Artemio “Artie” Garza, the son of a real Texas Ranger from San Antonio and premier base stealer on the team; wide-body first baseman Brent Seligman. Jason had searched his teammates’ faces for any sign of disapproval and found none. But neither did he discern any interest in what he had done the past year. The chatter was generic. It was an emotion-free zone.

  “Hey Selly, you eating clean up or hitting it?”

  “What this needs is a good white wine.”

  “Whine, whine, whine … Pass the honey, will you?”

  Jason slid the jar to Garza. “You know if a kid under two eats honey, he can have a seizure and die?” Nobody said a word. “Scarlet fever, bee stings, choking on a peanut — there’s a million things can kill a kid.”

  “Nobody ever does that, do they?” Corliss said skeptically. “The honey thing.”

  “Naw, naw, people know,” Jason replied. He beat the table with his open palms. “It gets passed down from generation to generation, like drumbeats.”

  The sound of forks scraping, large mandibles chewing, chairs squeaking. “So how’s marriage?” Seligman asked with a sardonic drawl.

  Jason nodded as if he’d never heard the question in his life. He hated to acknowledge defeat. It was an awful marriage, but he was hardly willing to admit that. “Having a kid is awesome,” he replied enthusiastically. “They’re kinda like Mini-me’s: they do whatever you do, but they do their own shit too.” A large plate of green beans made its way around the table. Jason heaped some onto his plate, then began filling the plate beside his. “But one thing Rafe loves to do, I don’t know where he gets it — he loves to sing in his bed in the mornings. He wakes up and just starts singing whatever comes into his head — ”

  A strong hand seized his forearm. “I don’t like green beans,” Lister said in his imperious Australian accent.

  “Sorry, mate,” Jason smiled. “Rafe loves them. He calls ‘em ‘bean beans.’”

  Lister swept the beans off his plate with a fork. “I’m not your fuckin kid.” Corliss laughed with a single, sharp bark. Jason blushed and passed the platter along. Rafe’s image came to him, running toward him in his comical, top-heavy toddle. He saw his sparkling eyes, his tiny mouth calling out “Da-Da!” He was surprised by how much he missed him — and how little his teammates cared.

  AFTER LUNCH came more running, more calisthenics, more stretches, loosening muscles that had tightened during the break. Jason lay on his back, his legs twisted to the right, his left shoulder straining to reach the ground when Vucovich’s shadow crossed his face. He looked up and saw his own reflection in Vuco’s Robocop shades. Bill Vucovich was a ramrod straight, square-jawed, thirty-three-year-old former second baseman for the Anaheim Angels who had torn an anterior cruciate ligament at twenty-seven and never returned to play. As a former Stanford Cardinal, coaching at his alma mater was the closest he could get to recreating his dreams of stardom. The will to play still burned in his taut body. It was a will that made him impatient with players who didn’t give 100% or more.

  “You been throwing?” Vuco asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Let’s see what you got.”

  Jason stood on the mound with the new ball in his hand, the leather as familiar as his own skin. He looked over and saw head coach Milt Baptiste talking with an assistant, his hands thrust in the back pockets of his uniform, shoulders rounded, abdomen thrust forward looking as if he had been born in a baseball uniform. A hundred fans lounged in the stadium seats, die-hards of the senior set or parents of prospects there to give their offspring some moral support.

  Jeremy Asher squatted behind the plate and offered his mitt as a target. “Show ‘em how it’s done, JT.”

  Jason rocked into motion, his right knee rising against his belt, his long left arm sweeping from three-quarters above his shoulder toward the plate. The echo came milliseconds after the ball slammed into the pocket of Asher’s mitt, like a sonic boom. Heads turned — Lister, Seligman, Connolly, the new guys who only had heard stories about the flame thrower from Texas who gave it up to raise a kid. Jason nodded to himself. The thrill of being able to do something that only a van full of guys could do was deeply satisfying. This was his world. This was his ticket to the Show.

  The coaches lined up along the first baseline and watched their big lefthander throw fifteen, eighteen, twenty pitches. They never used the radar gun this early in the season, but it was clear he was throwing heat. Jason felt good — for himself, for the team, for Vuco. Vuco had gone out on a limb to keep him in the program. He never knew what he had said exactly, but Baptiste had finally agreed to red-shirt him rather than release him. Red-shirting was something teams did all the time — but at the team’s instigation, not the player’s. Guys were held back for injuries, for academic reasons, because they had another player at your position who they wanted to play ahead of you. But raising babies? No one had ever seen that before, at least on the men’s side of Stanford sports. It was a first that Baptiste hadn’t wanted to earn for his esteemed program, but he had to. He could hardly teach personal responsibility while forcing a young man to abandon his child for baseball — or vice versa. And then, there was the 98-miles-per-hour fastball.

  Jason started his motion but stopped when he saw Vuco walking towards the mound. “I th
ought the kid was covered.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Vuco gestured towards the dugout. There was Rafe with his babysitter, Carmen, dressed in the tiny Stanford uniform Vicki’s father had bought for him, the number 1½ stitched below little letters spelling out “Thibodeaux.” He could see Rafe’s wide brown eyes, his fair hair fringed at the bottom of his cap.

  “It’s just for today,” Jason tried to explain. “Vicki had a conflict.”

  Vucovich rubbed his eyes beneath his shades, then reached for the ball. Jason handed it over and trudged past Baptiste without looking. Rafe’s eyes danced happily as his father drew near. “Da-Da!” Carmen looked at him apologetically. “Vicki can’t come until 4 o’clock,” she explained. “I have to go to my other job.”

  Jason shoveled Rafe with his Rugrats backpack into his arms, snatched the stroller from Carmen and hauled them down the right field line towards the clubhouse. He could feel forty pairs of eyes burning into his back as Rafe played with the bill of his hat. Goddamn Vicki, he steamed. Fifteen months caring for Rafe and she still wouldn’t pull her weight. This was his career, not some Sunday pick-up game.

  He set Rafe down and looked at the clock on the clubhouse wall — 2:40. Twenty minutes to nap time. If he could get him down he could get back to the workout before Vicki showed. Rafe, however, ran straight for the free weights laying on the floor. Jason grabbed his right arm and snatched him back.

  “Nap time, Buddy.”

  Rafe tried to squirm away. “Jugo! Jugo!” he shouted, using the Spanish word for juice that Carmen taught him. He was excited, the clubhouse was something new.

  “Come on, Rafey — it’s time to take your nap!”

  Rafe’s small face collapsed. “I-want-some-jugo,” he cried, tears streaming down his now-reddened cheeks.

  “Oh for Christsakes.” He pulled Rafe into the clubhouse and opened the huge refrigerator stocked with juice and soda. Rafe grabbed a Pepsi from the bottom shelf but Jason yanked it away. Before Rafe could even think of crying again, Jason opened a bottle of Orangina and filled Rafe’s sippy cup and shoved it into his hand. He carried him to the big leather couch where they could see through the open glass doors as Eric Freeholder spanked grounders to the infielders and Baptiste skied fly balls to the outfielders and Vucovich huddled with the pitchers and catchers down the left field line. As Jason watched, Rafe pulled a pile of magazines off the slate coffee table. Jason heard them hit the hardwood floor with a thud, and turned to see Rafe spraying the magazines with orange soda from his sippy cup.

  He caught Rafe’s arm and shook him. “That’s a NO-NO!” he shouted. “NO-NO!” The toddler’s face contorted and a pitiful wail escaped his mouth. A wave of guilt swept over Jason, then utter frustration. He should have lined up another babysitter, but he never thought Vicki would actually leave him in the lurch. What the hell was he supposed to do now?

  He pulled a tissue from the bag and wiped the streams running from Rafe’s nostrils. “I’m sorry, Buddy,” he said. But Rafe was inconsolable. The blare of his crying burrowed into Jason’s brain like a dentist’s drill. He jumped up and slid the clubhouse door shut. He wanted heads turning at the thud of his fastballs, not his son’s tantrums.

  He took a deep breath and looked closely at his agitated boy. Of course — he’d forgotten to ask Carmen when he’d been changed last, when he’d eaten, when he’d slept. He pulled Rafe to him and peeked inside his pull-ups — dry as a bone. He found a box of Saltines in the cupboard and pulled out a stack, set Rafe on his lap, wiped off his tears and held out a cracker. “No!” Rafe pouted, but Jason could see his face soften. Soon Rafe was chewing the cracker, the twinkle in his eye beginning to reappear. Jason squeezed his son’s hand and watched the world beyond the sliding glass doors play out in silence, like a diorama of vintage Americana: Young Men Playing Baseball.

  Jason leaned back and Rafe snuggled into the crook of his arm, his head against his chest. Jason began to sing, softly. “Rock-a-bye baby in the tree tops …” He stroked Rafe’s chest across the letters of his little Stanford jersey. Rafe picked at the sleeve of his daddy’s shirt. Outside, Vuco pitched and Corliss pounded a line drive that streaked past the clubhouse window like a comet. “When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall, and down will come baby, cradle and all.”

  After a few minutes, Jason looked down and Rafe was asleep.

  WHEN PRACTICE was over he strapped Rafe into his stroller, tucked his blue flannel blanket snugly around him and wheeled him outside into the shade of the clubhouse wall. He hurried across the field and caught Vucovich as he was about to step into the dugout.

  “How about some infield practice?” He knew Vuco could never turn down a guy who wanted to do more, even one who had pissed him off as much as he had.

  “Where’s the kid?”

  Jason pointed across the field. “He’s asleep. We do this all the time.”

  Vuco grabbed his fungo bat and a couple of balls. Jason stood on the manicured grass between the mound and shortstop and Vuco hit hard groundballs to his right, to his left and straight at him, over and over again. Left right left right, his legs burned but he pushed himself, he wanted to show Vuco that he was serious about the season. Then suddenly the sound of Vuco’s bat, the smell of the grass, the slant of the winter sun produced a powerful déjà vu. He looked sharply towards the bullpen — Rafe was there, wrapped snugly in his stroller. Every few chances he glanced over, making sure Rafe was still there. Lunge, snatch, throw … lunge, snatch, throw …

  Then one time he looked and Vicki was there.

  He waved to her just as a ball shot sharply past his knee. “Pay attention!” Vuco shouted. “OK!” Jason said as he watched Vicki pull the blanket tightly up to Rafe’s neck and wheel him away without looking back.

  HE SLEPT on the couch in his old fraternity that night. He didn’t want to see Vicki and have to apologize for throwing the yogurt. Besides, he had meant what he’d said. He was sick to death of their marriage. All he wanted to do was play ball.

  The next day was more like winter, a strong wind pushing a procession of dark clouds off the Pacific. But enclosed in the magic land of Sunken Diamond, Jason ran, stretched, sprinted and threw with a passion that inspired everyone. He was determined to wipe out the catastrophe of Day One, to erase the image of him as a Dad and replace it with one of the flame thrower who would lead them to Omaha.

  He stayed late again, working on his pick-off move. He was alone, undressing in the locker room when Vucovich appeared in the doorway holding a Coke. A pale ring traced the outline of his shades around his eyes, accentuating the intensity of their blueness. “I probably don’t have to say anything, but I’m going to,” Vuco said.

  “Let me guess: Baptiste thinks I should go out for water polo.”

  “That thing with your kid isn’t going to be the highlight of his year.”

  “It won’t happen again.”

  “It can’t happen again.”

  Jason peeled off his socks. He wanted to say ‘fuck Baptiste’ but he couldn’t. Vuco had discovered him but Baptiste controlled his fate. They had driven down together from Houston and watched the kid called Heat pitch for the Gulf Coast American Legion. Fast ball and curve, that’s all he needed to blow his way through line-ups like a Gulf hurricane. Baptiste had clocked him at 95 and gone to check the radar gun with the Texas Highway Patrol. Most high schoolers didn’t throw 95 miles per hour. They had pegged him as a strong, uncomplicated kid ready for molding into a world class pitcher. Vucovich, at least, still believed that.

  “You looked good out there today,” Vuco said. Jason nodded in agreement. “Milt, Freebie — they know you’re the real thing,” Vuco went on. “But you’re the only one who can make it happen. Prospects don’t make it, JT — players do. You’ve got to work as hard for this as you’ve worked for anything in your life.”

  “I know that.”

  Vucovich tapped his chest. “Heart.”

  “You don’t think I’ve got heart after what I’ve been through?” Jason pointed with his chin. “I got heart as sure as you got that caterpillar on your lip.”

  Vuco touched his new moustache. “My wife says I look like Brad Pitt.”