The Fall of Lisa Bellow by Susan Perabo

Author:Susan Perabo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

PART TWO

12

The sound coming from below her, in the garage, did not surprise Claire. Not at first. It had been the soundtrack to their lives for so long, the background noise of so many early mornings, that when she woke to it she did not think of all the months that had passed without it. It was so familiar that she couldn’t have said, in that first moment of being awake, if it had been six hours or six months since she’d last heard it, the ping of aluminum on leather.

She rolled over to face Mark’s side of the bed. He was awake, looking up at the ceiling. “You hear it?” he asked.

As if there were any not hearing it. When Evan had first started his routine, the summer before his freshman year, they had looked into putting extra insulation in the garage, which sat directly under the western hemisphere of their bedroom. Or maybe, they suggested, he could take his swings just a little later in the morning. Or after school? But he was thirteen and he cared about something, cared about it intensely. He had a routine. He stuck to it. He was disciplined. It felt wrong to discourage him, even if it was a little annoying. Wasn’t this precisely what you wanted from a boy approaching fourteen? Passion? Commitment? Practice?

So they got used to it, like the sound of traffic, or crickets, or lapping waves. There was a rhythm to it. Ping. Beat (ball from bucket). Beat (ball on tee). Beat (stance). Ping. Beat (ball from bucket). Beat (ball on tee). Beat (stance). Ping.

She looked at the clock. 5:55. Even the traditional time. Half hour of swings before a shower, alone in the garage with his tee and a net and his big, beat-up white bucket of weathered balls, no sound but the contact, no distraction, no chance of distraction, everyone else still in bed. How many hundreds of hours had he spent there, how many swings, how many balls launched into the soft net? After that first summer the garage had become Evan’s personal training facility, in and out of season. Sometimes his teammates came over on winter evenings and there would be a group of three or four down there, their voices echoing against the metal door, laughter, ping-beat-beat-beat-ping, music playing from someone’s phone, jeering, the voices of boys now, suddenly, the voices of men. But mostly it was Evan’s alone, his sanctuary. Often she’d be in the kitchen making the coffee when he finished at 6:20, and they’d exchange smiles as he passed. He never seemed more comfortable in his own skin, more sure of himself, than that moment he crossed from the garage into the kitchen. Not even when he was actually playing in a game.

After the injury she and Mark, together, had zipped the bats into the black bat bag and hung it up beside the rakes and snow shovels. They’d pushed the net back into a corner, laid the tee on

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