The Art of Fielding_ A Novel - Chad Harbach [136]
“He’ll cool off.”
“Someday. Anyway we’re all in one room. I’m keeping away from there.”
Schwartz wasn’t sure what to do. He could take Sophie to Carapelli’s for dinner with the team, she could meet Aparicio Rodriguez, nobody would object—but he was already beginning to understand that Henry might not be there. That he might be gone. Whatever gone could mean, on this little campus.
His phone trilled in his hand. He assumed it would be Owen, but the caller ID showed his own home number.
“Hello?”
“Hey,” said Pella. “Where are you?”
“In front of the VAC.”
“In your favorite towel?”
It took Schwartz a few beats to remember what she was talking about.
“I really need to talk to you. Will you be back soon?”
“I have to go to team dinner. I’ll be back around ten.”
“Could I come meet you? I’m sorry, Mike. I know you’ve had a rough day. I just really need your advice. It’s about my dad.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ll be home by ten.”
Pella sighed. “Okay. Is it okay if I wait here?”
Sophie had wandered a few yards away and was sitting on the bottom step, staring at the tapping toes of her laceless sneakers. Schwartz couldn’t send her back to her parents, couldn’t take her with him, couldn’t leave her here. He was about to hang up the phone when an idea struck him.
“You want me to what?” Pella said plaintively.
“You heard me.”
“You’re kidding. Mike, it’s been a really weird day.”
Schwartz wasn’t kidding. “Go get dressed,” he told Sophie as he hung up the phone. “Pella’s going to meet you here in half an hour.” He pressed two of Coach Cox’s C-notes into her palm. “Tell her you want to go to Maison Robert.”
53
After dinner Schwartz and Owen searched the library and the union—nothing else was open on Saturday night—and found no sign of Henry. Nor was he in the room, nor with his parents; Henry’s mom had called Owen’s cell in search of him, and Owen told her that Henry had gone for a walk.
They went to the VAC and scoured the building from the bottom floor up, turning on all the lights as they went, and then from the top floor down, turning them off again. Schwartz locked the door as they left. A delicate frigid breeze blew due west off the water. “I don’t like this,” Schwartz said. “I don’t like this at all.”
“Henry’s an adult,” Owen said. “Or close enough. He probably just wants to be alone right now.”
“He’s not allowed to be alone right now. Not without telling us where he is.” Schwartz held his watch up into the cool blue glow of a security lamp. “Bus to Coshwale leaves in eight hours.”
“Maybe we should return to the scene of the crime.”
They checked Westish Field, and then the big stone bowl of the football stadium. Nothing. There weren’t many electric lights nearby, and the moon that hung between banks of clouds was as slender as an eyelash. Schwartz had never experienced this kind of darkness before enrolling at Westish; in his first days on campus he’d been afraid to fall asleep, as if the night and the quiet might swallow him whole. Now he wondered whether he could ever live in a city again.
“I don’t suppose he’s out drowning his sorrows,” Owen said.
Henry never went to the bars unless he was forced to, like on a teammate’s birthday or the Harpooners’ annual Freshperson Initiation Night. But Schwartz and Owen found their steps tending toward Bartleby’s anyway. Westish was only so big, and there were only so many places to try.
It was prime drinking time for all non–baseball players: midnight on a Saturday in early May, with finals still two weeks away. The line to get into Bartleby’s snaked through the amusement-park ropes and continued down the block. Girls shivered in flimsy dresses, huddling together two to a thin black jacket. Guys jammed their hands in their pockets and tried not to look cold.
Schwartz unclipped the rope from its ball-topped metal pole and moved to the head of the line, Owen behind him. One of the young Harpooner linebackers perched on a tall wooden