Two hours later Jesse was standing next to the bleachers alone, a few feet, no more than that, from where he’d watched the Paradise−Marshport game the day before.
Night had fallen by now, lit by candles that seemed to be everywhere at O’Hara Field.
The first speaker, a girl, said they were going to begin by playing some of Jack’s favorite songs, picked out by Ainsley Walsh. Jesse saw Suit standing in the first row of the crowd, his wife, Elena, on one side of him, his sister on the other, Suit’s arms around both of them.
Coach Hal Fortin spoke when the music stopped, talking about how Jack Carlisle was the most talented kid he’d ever coached, a team leader. A great kid. And a sure thing, Fortin said, to make The Show. Jesse knew it was a cliché. But it had always been Jesse’s, too. He talked about The Show all the time still.
But wanted to tell Coach Hal Fortin there were never any sure things when it came to making it all the way to the big leagues.
There were more songs, none of which Jesse recognized. More speakers. Some of the kids broke down. Boys and girls. Some of them fought through, the air in the night thick with sadness. A couple volunteer firemen played “Amazing Grace” on bagpipes. Ainsley Walsh read “To an Athlete Dying Young.” Jesse had heard the poem plenty of times before, once when one of his Albuquerque teammates had died of lymphoma before he turned thirty.
The only line he remembered was the one about silence being no worse than cheers.
He walked away from the field then, toward the parking lot. He would talk to Molly in the morning about what she might have learned from Ainsley Walsh, if she even talked to the kid tonight, and what her fight with Jack Carlisle had been about.
He would talk to Laura Carlisle, knowing he needed a face-to-face with her, at her house, just the two of them. Suit would think he’d asked her all the right questions. Jesse knew better. Suit was too close. How the hell could he not be? But if it was suicide, Jesse needed to know, even knowing that it wasn’t his job to know why the boy might have killed himself.
But he had to rule it out, in case it wasn’t suicide and wasn’t an accident and somebody had done this to Jack Carlisle.
Jesse thought about checking his phone and seeing if he could find a late AA meeting somewhere in the area, knowing that meetings always made him understand that whatever he had going on in his life, that first drink wasn’t going to do him any good, or fix things.
He decided, just like that, to drive over to Charlie Farrell’s house instead. Telling himself it would be better than a meeting, even better for the soul. Not even thinking about seeking out Nellie Shofner for comfort tonight.
Jesse felt himself smiling about that as he drove across town, feeling better just thinking about sitting with the old man, even knowing he’d just chosen an elderly man for companionship tonight over a woman in her thirties.
He’d make sure to ask Dix, his therapist, to explain that to him first chance he got. Jesse liked to give people the impression he knew everything.
Dix actually did.