When Ghosts Come Home

by Wiley Cash

  A handful of taxis was lined up by the curb. A middle-aged Black man stood with his elbows propped above the driver’s-side door of the taxi closest to Colleen. He looked at her across the roof of the car and nodded hello. He wore black sunglasses too, and he also wore one of those yellow-tinted visors that you picture card dealers wearing in dark, smoky rooms where men hide out from their wives and the police.

  The man mouthed something, and Colleen could tell that he was speaking to her. She took off her headphones and waited for him to repeat himself. She was still able to hear the tinny whine of Pat Benatar’s voice.

  “You need to go somewhere?” the man asked.

  She looked down and pushed stop on the Walkman, then she wiped her eyes behind her sunglasses. She looked back up at the man. “No,” she said. “My father’s coming to get me.”

  “That’s good,” the man said. “That’s good.” He turned his head forward, and she knew that from where he stood he could see the spot on the runway where the airplanes were turning around after landing before taxiing to the airport’s one terminal. “Fathers should come get their daughters when they’re crying.”

  She wanted to tell him that she wasn’t crying, but she was, and what did it matter if this man she had never seen before and would never see again watched her cry? She also wanted to tell him it was none of his business, but his business was picking people up from the airport, and she very much looked like someone who needed that business. As to her father coming to get her, that seemed to imply a rescue, and she would have to admit her father did have a history of rescuing her.

  When she was twelve years old and in the seventh grade, she had saved up her babysitting money to buy a new outfit from Belk’s Department Store for the school photo. She could still picture the outfit now: a pale yellow blouse, a bright yellow skirt with a matching yellow cardigan. A white flower had been stitched over the left breast. The stitching of the flower’s blue stem ran down the front, under the left arm, and across the back of the sweater.

  She was incredibly proud of the outfit, and it was easy for Colleen to recall her devastation, along with her humiliation, when she felt the warm dampness of her first period seep into her cotton underwear and wet her thighs where she sat at her desk in Mrs. Roberts’s English class. Colleen and her mother had already talked about her getting her period, and she knew exactly what was happening, but she couldn’t stop a mixture of shame and shock from overtaking her. She resisted raising her hand and calling Mrs. Roberts over for fear of having to tell her what had happened and having anyone else hear. Instead, she slipped off her cardigan and did her best to bunch it around her to hide the stain that she knew was spreading across the front and back of her skirt. Everyone else in the class was bent over their desks, working quietly. She stood and pushed back her chair. Her underwear felt heavy, as if its weight could cause it to slide down her legs to the floor.

  “Mrs. Roberts,” she said. The teacher looked up at her. “I don’t feel good. I need to go to the office and call my mom.” She backed away, opened the door, and stepped into the hall. Neither Mrs. Roberts nor anyone else in class had said a word. She fled as soon as she’d pulled the door closed.

  Colleen had hidden out in the bathroom while the school secretary called home to tell her mother what had happened and to ask her to bring a new outfit to the school. The nurse had given Colleen a sanitary pad, and she sat down on the toilet, her stained underwear on the floor beside her, and held the pad between her legs. Her sweater and skirt had been folded inside a paper bag that sat on the floor beside her underwear. The outfit was ruined. Colleen cried at the realization that she would not wear it in her school picture, and she wondered when her mother would arrive and what outfit she would bring to replace it. She didn’t know how long she sat there, but she remembered the bell ringing and knowing that she would have to return to Mrs. Roberts’s classroom to gather her things and that she would have to answer questions from her teacher and her friends.

  When Colleen heard the door open, she snatched her damp underwear from the floor and held it before her with the tips of her fingers as if it were a dead animal. She expected to hear her mother’s voice, but instead she heard the sound of handcuffs clinking and the squeak of her father’s rigid belt, the heavy footstep of his hard-soled shoes. Her heart sank.

  “Honey,” he said. “Are you in there?”

  “Yes,” Colleen said, choking back a sob. She had never been embarrassed to cry in front of her father, but sitting there in a closed bathroom stall, naked except for a rumpled blouse and a pad held between her legs, she was humiliated. “You’re not supposed to be in the girls’ room.”

  “Well,” he said, “I’ve been given a special dispensation by the principal.” The stall creaked, and she imagined her father leaning his body against it. “They told me what happened, and I brought you something to wear.” He sighed. “I hope I got it right.”

  She pictured her father in her room at home, opening the closet and her dresser drawers, pulling out skirts and sweaters and blouses and placing them on the bed as if trying to fit them into some kind of puzzle that made sense to him. She could not imagine what he had chosen, and she was terrified at the thought of hurting his feelings, but she was even more terrified of leaving the bathroom and sitting for photos in whatever he had brought.

  Colleen looked up to see him lowering down an outfit on a hanger. It was the same yellow sweater set she had purchased from Belk’s, the tags still attached. She stood up, still holding the pad between her legs, and took it from his hand. She remembered crying with relief. Her father had never been shopping with her—she didn’t know that he had ever been shopping by himself—and she could not imagine him at the department store alone, wandering through Belk’s until he found the outfit she had ruined.

  “How did you know to get this?” she asked.

  “You think I don’t pay attention?” he said. “Your mother thinks the same thing. I pay more attention than y’all think I do.” He bent down and slipped an unopened pack of underwear beneath the stall door.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “Honey, why are you sorry?”

  “Because they called you at work,” she said. “Because you went all the way to the Belk’s in Shallotte.”

  “Don’t be sorry,” he said. “Don’t ever be sorry. You needed me, and I came. I’ll always come when you need me.”

  And here he was, on his way once again.

  The man who stood by the taxi was chewing gum, and he blew a pink bubble before pulling it back into his mouth. Colleen had had two more beers in the Charlotte airport during her layover and another one on the flight to Wilmington, and she didn’t want her father arriving and smelling alcohol on her breath. He wasn’t the kind of person to scold or judge someone for having a drink or two, but Colleen didn’t want him to learn that the law school graduate who didn’t practice law and who’d just lost a child and who might be losing her marriage had also become a day drinker.

  “You got any extra gum?” she asked.

  The man stopped chewing for a moment. He looked away from the runway and back at Colleen.

  “I do,” he said.

  “I’d love a piece if you don’t mind.”

  “I don’t.”

  He stepped around the front of his taxi and onto the curb. He pulled a package of gum from his pocket and passed a wrapped, pink square of Bubblicious to her.

  “Thank you,” she said. She unwrapped it and popped it into her mouth.

  “You’re welcome,” he said. “I hope your day gets better.”

  “Me too,” she said.

  “It will.”

  He stepped off the curb and walked back around the front of his car to the driver’s side. He opened the door and climbed in. Colleen heard the radio come on inside the cab. He leaned back in his seat.

  She put her headphones back on and pushed play and closed her eyes too. The taste of the gum was almost overwhelming in its sugary sweetn
ess. She thought of the Bubblicious commercials and how the kids on television blew bubbles that lifted them up off the ground and allowed them to float through the air and even carried them into outer space. She kept her eyes closed and listened to Pat Benatar’s voice and turned her face up toward the sky and blew a bubble, pictured her body leaving the bench and her feet leaving the ground. She would look down and search for her father’s car on the roads around the airport, and she would somehow lower her body back to the earth just seconds before he arrived. She stayed like that, eyes closed but lifted toward the sky. A tear rolled down each cheek and met at the bottom of her neck.

  On the flight from Charlotte, Colleen had finished her beer and then closed her eyes and laid her head back on the seat. She had imagined the spirit of her dead son flying alongside her outside the plane’s window, going extra fast to stay abreast of the airplane so he could keep his eyes on her. She knew this would sound crazy—insane, in fact—if she were to say it out loud, but a few months ago she’d been a woman waiting on a baby, and she was just a woman who’d lost one, and somehow it felt like now she was less than what she’d started out being. As the airplane had prepared to land, she opened her eyes and looked out the window to see its shadow on the clouds beneath them. When the clouds broke, the plane’s shadow fell to the earth below, skimming over the faces of waterways and the waving heads of sawgrass and the tops of scrub oaks. The spirit of her son merged with the shadow of the airplane, and she knew he had returned to the place where she and Scott had spent so many hours skirting his parents’ boat through these waters, the place where they had planned to make their home so very far from Dallas, Texas.

  But this area hadn’t always been home, at least not to Colleen anyway; it was Scott’s home. He had even looked like the North Carolina coast the first day she’d laid eyes on him four years earlier in the registration line at Carolina. They’d been grouped together because their last names both started with B, and she’d spotted Scott with a folded class schedule sticking out of the back pocket of his shorts. Unlike the other guys in line to register for classes—most of them with shaggy hair and in blue jeans and boots—Scott looked as if he’d just stepped onto the dock after a day on the water: canvas boat shoes that were tied so loosely they appeared to have been slipped on; the tan shorts and the baby blue polo shirt tucked into them; the braided leather belt; the Ray-Ban aviators that sat atop the white cotton sun visor. It was easy to see him for what he was: a rich kid from the eastern side of the state whose parents didn’t quite have the financial pull necessary to get the prodigal son into an Ivy League law school or even somewhere like Wake Forest or Duke, but a family nonetheless with just enough political clout with the board of governors to encourage Chapel Hill to look the other way while opening its doors for their boy.

  Colleen certainly didn’t have the grades, connections, or financial backing to attend Wake Forest or Duke, but she’d done well on the LSAT and maintained a solid GPA, so Chapel Hill had thrown a little scholarship money her way. North Carolina Central had offered her a full ride, and although she had to admit to herself that something vaguely liberal and progressive spoke to her about the prospect of attending a historically Black university, she always knew she would end up choosing Chapel Hill. It was the late 1970s, and the thought of being a minority among minorities validated whatever it was inside her that made her feel that, so far, her life had been far too comfortable.

  Life had been comfortable for Scott too, but the more she watched him that first semester and the more she learned about him the clearer it became that he found law school especially challenging. It was evident that he wasn’t going to be the smartest student in their classes, and, after a few weeks of listening to him stumble around his answers when called on in Property, Colleen understood that Scott had never been the smartest student in any of his classes, even if he had more than likely been the richest and the best looking. But there was something in his willingness to try to talk through tough questions that attracted her, and by the time their first semester was halfway over she and Scott and a handful of other 1Ls were regularly meeting for beer and pizza on Wednesday nights at a basement dive called the Rathskellar, just off Franklin Street.

  The group—there were six of them: three guys and three girls—would drink Coors Light and eat pizza and occasionally go to the jukebox and play Duran Duran or Springsteen to drown out the voice of Ronald Reagan, who so often appeared on the television above the bar. The place was a dive, and the bar didn’t yet have cable, but the bartender would continually clamber up and down the beer kegs to switch the stations and adjust and readjust the rabbit ears to get the reception just right.

  Only one person in their group liked Reagan: Brantley Suttles, a staunch Baptist from Shelby who’d gone to Campbell as an undergrad. The rest of them believed themselves to be Democrats, although it was clear to Colleen that none of them but Scott knew exactly why. Unlike their parents—hers included—who were still mourning the assassinations of John and Bobby Kennedy and still pissed at Nixon for too many reasons to count, Scott’s mother and father were blue-blood conservatives, products of the old money that seeped from the once-decaying and now-gone plantations in the eastern part of North Carolina. But that power was fleeting and recentering itself politically and geographically in Raleigh, Charlotte, Greensboro, and Chapel Hill. Scott seemed to understand this, and he was more than willing to discuss the waning powers of his parents’ worldview. Unlike Colleen’s political ideologies, which were based on protests, headlines, song lyrics, and domestic bombings by fringe groups, Scott’s political ideology was much simpler. What he didn’t possess in inherent brilliance or revolutionary zeal he made up for in his simple understanding of people: their motivations, fears, and frustrations.

  Theirs was a strange generation. They grew up with headlines about marches, protests, and sit-ins; they watched the Vietnam War and Woodstock live on color television; they all wanted to be H. Rap Brown and Jane Fonda and Patty Hearst; and when they turned eighteen and felt the full conviction of their revolutionary duty, they all voted for a soft-spoken peanut farmer who was systematically humiliated from his earliest days in office until what seemed his very last. And what did we do then? Colleen asked herself. They turned their gazes inward, a turning that had begun much earlier than they realized.

  Colleen had never wanted to be Bernardine Dohrn; she wanted to dress like Bernardine Dohrn, to talk like Bernardine Dohrn, and to be desired like Bernardine Dohrn. Scott seemed to understand this posturing before Colleen did, but he never called her on it, never tested her liberal ideologies beyond those Wednesday night conversations in the months before and after Reagan’s election.

  Their courtship began with Scott and Colleen leaving the library together on Wednesday nights, walking out to their separate cars, and driving back home to their separate apartments before meeting their friends on Franklin Street for pizza and beer. But soon enough Scott was asking Colleen if she’d like to ride with him, and they’d leave her car on campus, then stop by her place so she could drop off her books and change clothes before heading to the bar. Afterward, he’d return her to her car late that night and sit behind the wheel of his own while she cranked the engine and gave him a wave. But by Thanksgiving she was being dropped off at her car in the early mornings before class, always in the clothes she’d worn out the night before, Scott now leaning against her driver’s-side door and giving her a long kiss for the hour or two they’d go without seeing one another. Soon she found herself staying at Scott’s apartment nearly every night, driving over after leaving the library when it closed its doors at midnight, finding Scott sitting at the table in his tiny kitchen, a cassette of Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska playing relentlessly on the small stereo he kept on the counter. They’d ride to campus together the next morning, enter the building together, unafraid of anyone noticing, knowing, or imagining what went on between them when they weren’t in class.

  And so they carried on that way
throughout their first year of law school at Carolina, and that summer Colleen returned to her parents’ house in Oak Island and began a paid internship at a real estate law office that a friend of her father’s had lined up for her. Scott was just up the road in Wilmington, where he lived with his older brother Don and his wife and found an unpaid internship at Legal Aid, a job that took him into some of the most depressed neighborhoods in the city to meet some of the poorest people in the state. The stories he told Colleen over the phone during the week made her worry about him: his safety, his sense of justice that could easily be taken advantage of, his heart that let in too much at once. But she also worried that what he was doing actually mattered, and not just in the grand scheme of the careers they often talked about but couldn’t really imagine awaiting them at the end of their third year of school.

  But Colleen hadn’t thought or worried about these things on the weekends when she drove her crappy hatchback Cavalier north on Highway 17, and she, Scott, Don, and his wife, Karen, would launch Don’s boat from the waterway at Wrightsville Beach and head out to Masonboro Island, where they’d hitch to one of the other dozen or so boats that were captained by similarly tanned, well-dressed, attractive twenty- and thirty-somethings. On the way out Don would follow the coastline and point out the gorgeous homes that had once hosted guests like the Vanderbilts and the Astors on Masonboro Sound, and Colleen couldn’t help but feel that in pointing out the absence of these families, perhaps Don was pointing out the fact that his and Scott’s family was still there, present and accounted for, not quite as glamorous or as famous, but every bit as capable of impressing Colleen with their wealth, standing, and dedication to leisure.