"I know."
Imre looked at him a second longer. Then he looked back over his shoulder at the yellow split-level, at the lamp glowing in the kitchen window, where a broad figure was moving slowly back and forth at the sink, washing a griddle.
"Maybe," he said. "I'll ask Bastian if he wants to come. He hasn't been to a game in three years." He paused. "We'd sit on the visitor side. Up high. Where it's quieter."
"Visitor bleachers," Gerrit said.
"They're cold," Imre said, and almost smiled. "But you can see the whole field from up there."
Port Clinton came to Castine the next Friday on a night so clear and cold that the stadium lights had hard, clean edges and no halos at all. Gerrit noticed that. He noticed it standing on the sideline in his team jacket with his hands in his pockets and the useless headset around his neck, and he stood there for a moment just looking up at the lights, the plain white glare of them against the black sky, and felt something he could not name, something between grief and relief, settle somewhere in his chest and stay.
He was four days symptom-free at rest. Dr. Quarrier had started him on stationary bike work. Five days at a time, she had said, and do not count ahead. He was trying not to count ahead. He was not very good at it yet.