by Wiley Cash
Once they reached Masonboro Island, they’d stay around the boat drinking and swimming and sunning themselves to a ruby red until dusk. Then they’d go ashore and make a fire and sit around with many of the same people they’d spent the day with, grilling hot dogs and hamburgers, drinking beer, and listening to music, eventually sneaking off in couples to go farther up the beach to spend the night atop a sleeping bag with nothing but a thin cotton sheet to protect their sunburned skin from the warm breeze that came off the water. They’d fall asleep to the sounds of conversations around the fire that would not die down until just before dawn.
Colleen thought that would be her life. Back then she wasn’t thinking about marrying Scott or having a child with him; she was simply living a life that she thought would last forever. And now here she was back in the place where she had thought that life would continue, sitting on a bench alone and waiting for her father.
Colleen knew that her father was not the kind of man who’d sit behind the wheel of a running car at the curb and wait to be found. He was the kind of man who parks and comes to find you, and that’s what he did. Colleen looked up, and suddenly he was there. The last time she’d seen him, he and her mother had arrived in Dallas for their grandson’s birth, and now something about her father seemed or looked different, but Colleen knew that it was she who was different. Everything about her had changed.
“Hey, bean,” her father said.
She stood, and he opened his arms to her. She left her sunglasses on and hugged him, smelled the familiar scent of him—his old man aftershave, wood smoke from the fireplace, something of the salty air. She closed her eyes. “Hey, Daddy,” she said. “Thanks for coming to get me.”
“Of course,” he said.
“I know it’s a surprise.”
He pulled away from her but kept hold of her arms. He looked directly into her eyes.
“It’s a good surprise,” he said. “It’s always good when you come home.”
Colleen did her best to smile, and then she bent down to pick up her suitcase. Her father took it from her hand when she stood.
“How’s Scott?” he asked.
She sighed. “Let’s talk in the car,” she said.
He’d parked the Regal in the short-term lot, and, while she waited for him to unlock the passenger’s-side door, she spied the posters and flyers bearing her father’s face in the backseat.
“How’s the campaign?” she asked.
He laughed, shook his head. “Let’s talk in the car,” he said.
Once they left the airport, Colleen and her father made small talk as he drove through Wilmington:
“How’s the weather in Dallas?”
“Hot. How’s it been here?”
“Cooler than you’d think.”
“How’s Mom?”
“About the same.”
It wasn’t until they were crossing the bridge over the Cape Fear River and into Brunswick County that he put his rough palm over the back of her hand and gave it a squeeze. Colleen looked at the river below them where it snaked inland from the ocean. She’d missed bridges and open water, although she’d grown up terrified of both. She felt her father’s hand on top of hers, and suddenly she recalled what he would say to her each time they crossed a bridge when she was a girl, no matter where they were. She looked over at him.
“Are you going to say it?” she asked.
“Say what?”
“Don’t look down,” she said.
“Don’t look back.” He smiled, kept his eyes on the road, gave her hand another squeeze.
“Why don’t you say it anymore?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe it’s because you’re not scared anymore.”
But was this true? Was she not scared anymore? Or was it possible that the intervening years had found them rarely in the car together, certainly not crossing bridges together? That possibility filled her with sadness, and she chose to believe that she was no longer afraid instead of believing the truer thing: that she was no longer a girl who spent time in the car with her dad.
Her father cleared his throat, took his hand off hers, and moved it back to the steering wheel.
“Colleen, I’m not going to ask you what made you decide to come home. That’s not my business.” He coughed as if he were buying time to consider what he would say next. The sun was directly overhead, and Colleen knew the river probably looked beautiful in the brilliant light, but she didn’t turn to see it. “But your mother’s probably going to ask a lot of questions. That’s just how she is, and she doesn’t mean a thing by it. I’m just telling you so you can think of whether or not you want to give answers.”
“I might wait and see what her questions are first,” Colleen said. “Then I’ll decide if I want to answer them.”
“That’s fair,” her father said. He looked over at her and smiled. “That’s fair.”
“Are you playing ‘good cop’ before we go into the interrogation room?”
“No,” he said. “No. I just don’t want you walking in the door and being caught off guard or upset by anything your mother says. She’s been worried about you, and I know you’ve been worried about her, and I just—I don’t know.”
“It’s okay, Dad,” she said. “I know.”
He nodded toward her Walkman.
“I see you got one of those radios.”
Colleen had forgotten that she’d clipped the Walkman to her belt loop and left the headphones around her neck.
“What’s it sound like?” he asked.
“You want to hear it?”
“Sure.”
She slipped the headphones from around her neck and placed them on his ears, and then she pushed play. She heard the music come on, and she sat back and watched him bop his head up and down. He passed his hand through the air in front of him as if he were groping for something in the dark, and Colleen understood that this was his idea of dancing.
“Groovy,” he said.
She laughed and pushed stop.
“That’s enough, Dad,” she said. “I don’t want you getting too hip. I don’t want Mom having questions for you too.”
Colleen’s father didn’t tell her about the airplane he’d found the night before or the body of Rodney Bellamy until they were driving past the tiny airport where the abandoned airplane waited like a subject that could not be avoided. Although the day was bright, Colleen could see the distant glimmer of the beacon light in its rotation as they drove past.
“You knew Rodney, right?” he asked.
“Yes, I knew him,” she said, “but not well. He was nice. Everyone liked him. His dad is—”
“Ed Bellamy,” he said. “I know, but your mother reminded me in case I didn’t.”
“How do you think he ended up out there?” she asked. “I can’t imagine him being somebody who’d deal drugs or meet airplanes in the middle of the night.”
“I don’t think he was that kind of guy,” her father said. “His wife said he’d gone out for diapers.”
“Gone out for diapers?” Collen repeated. She turned away from her window and looked at her father. “He had a baby?”
With that question, Colleen felt the weather change inside the car; it became cold and quiet, and she could feel that her father understood that whatever wound he feared her mother would uncover had been uncovered before they’d even arrived home.
“Yes,” he said. “He had a baby.”
“How old?”
“Five months, I think his wife said.”
“Boy or girl?”
Her father inhaled, held it. Although her gaze had moved to the windshield, from the corner of her eye Colleen saw her father look out the driver’s-side window as if he could not risk seeing her face.
“Boy,” he said.
Colleen closed her eyes. She felt her father’s rough palm on the back of her hand again, felt his fingers closing over hers.
Her mother was in the kitchen when they arrived home, but by t
he time she and her father made it inside and were standing at the bottom of the stairs, her mother had left the kitchen and was walking toward Colleen with her arms open wide.
“Colleen,” she said, “I was so surprised when you called!”
Her mother wrapped her arms around her, and Colleen hugged her back. They rocked from side to side as if it had not been just a few months since they’d seen one another, but much longer. Her mother’s body felt slender and frail, and Colleen was afraid of hurting her, even more afraid of acknowledging the changes in her mother’s body in such a short time.
They released one another, and Colleen stepped back and hitched her bag farther up her shoulder. “Well, I hope you like surprises,” she said.
“I do,” her mother said. “I do, especially good ones, good ones like this.”
Colleen’s mother looked her up and down, reached out and touched the bob of Colleen’s hair where it fell along her jaw, fingered the Walkman’s headphones as if they had come from the moon. She sighed.
“Scott called,” her mother said. “He wants you to call him as soon as you can.”
“Okay,” Colleen said. She slipped the headphones from around her neck, set the Walkman on the table inside the door, and shrugged off her jean jacket and hung it on the post at the bottom of the stairs.
“He was surprised that you were here,” her mother said, “but surely you told him you were coming?” Her statement ended in the lilt of a question, but it felt more like an accusation.
Colleen realized that her father had fled upstairs with her suitcase. He had predicted this trap, and he’d had the sense to retreat before it was sprung. Her mother held out a small slip of paper, and Colleen reached for it. It was a phone number with a 469 area code: Scott’s office telephone number, a number Colleen had not yet called enough times to memorize.
“Are you going to call him?” her mother asked.
“Yes, Mom. He’s my husband. I’m going to call him.”
“Well, good, because I think you should, because he seemed really surprised when I told him you were here.”
“I’ve got it, Mom. Thanks.”
As Colleen walked up the stairs, she passed the framed eight-by-ten photograph of her and Scott on their wedding day. She hitched her bag over her shoulder again and reached out and took the frame off the wall and held it before her. In the photo, Scott is wearing a black tuxedo with ruffles over the buttons on his shirt, and she is in a white dress dotted with silver sequins and topped by sleeves that are bunched up into what appear to be shoulder pads. They are both smiling smiles that are more nervous than happy, the slight bump of her pregnant belly imperceptibly rising against the dress’s sequined middle.
Seeing the photo did not remind her of her wedding day; it reminded her of standing at the sink in their shared bathroom in Chapel Hill with a pregnancy test sitting on the counter while she spent an hour staring at the clear plastic box, wondering at its chemistry, willing it not to reveal a brown circle the instructions described as a doughnut, but of course that doughnut had appeared.
During their final year in law school, she had moved into Scott’s too-small two-bedroom, one-bathroom apartment in Carrboro. The bathroom was a repository of their personalities and emblematic of their lives: the tiny shrapnel of beard left in the sink after Scott shaved each morning; the toothpaste they shared simply because he never bought his own; the bevy of shampoos and conditioners she would buy, try, and leave in the shower for Scott to pillage; the deodorants, shaving creams, and toothbrushes that crowded the laminate countertop around the small sink. Right in front of that sink was where she had been standing when she learned that it would no longer be just the two of them; and when she looked from the pregnancy test to her own eyes in the mirror, she did her best to see past the shock of her personal devastation and to imagine how Scott would react. Would he want to have a baby with her? Would he want to marry her? Did she want either of those things, now or ever?
Like all soon-to-be mothers, both those who plan it and those who don’t, Colleen had immediately done the math in her head: it was November, and, depending on how long she’d been pregnant, that meant the baby would arrive sometime in the early summer, right when she and Scott were supposed to begin studying for the bar exam, something she had thought of as certain and impending, something that seemed much more daunting and real than the baby the test had revealed to be growing inside her—the proof of it floating in a plastic test tube right there on the bathroom counter.
Colleen tucked the framed photograph under her arm and walked up the stairs into her old bedroom. It had remained virtually untouched since she’d left for college. A four-poster bed with a white lace canopy rested on the same brown shag carpet that covered the floors in the rest of the upstairs. The bedspread was an orange quilt she had used since junior high. Posters covered the walls: a moppy-headed David Cassidy leaning against a tree as if posing for a senior photo; a Fleetwood Mac poster in now-dull neon colors; Joan Jett leaping into the air against a yellow background, a white guitar in hand, her lips puckered in enviable confidence. Her old, olive-green rotary phone rested as if waiting for her on the white wicker table beside the bed.
Colleen slid her bag from her shoulder and tossed it onto the bed beside her suitcase. She looked again at the wedding photograph of her and Scott, and then she opened the top drawer of her dresser, moved lonely, mismatched socks and old underwear out of the way, and slid the photograph inside—facedown—before closing the drawer.
She picked up the telephone and carried it over to the tan beanbag chair that sat beneath the window, the paper with Scott’s office number curled in her hand like a scroll. She lowered herself onto the beanbag chair and felt the tiny Styrofoam balls give way to her weight. The sticky leather rose up and closed around her body. She placed the phone in her lap and stared at it.
They had decided to get married and have the baby. Somehow, they had also decided that she wouldn’t sit for the bar since she wouldn’t be taking a job after the baby was born. All that—the bar exam, the job, the career—would come later, at least for her anyway. Scott had the federal job waiting for him in Dallas. He’d begun interviewing and had been offered the position—and others—not long after becoming president of the Student Bar Association at Chapel Hill. He had wanted to be editor of the North Carolina Law Review, but he didn’t have the grades, so he settled for running for president instead. It suited him better anyway. People liked him. He could build consensus, and, no matter what he said or did, he never made waves, even when he talked about using the association’s limited budget to lure Jesse Jackson to speak on campus. In the meantime, Colleen had been a dutiful first lady, although no one called her that or thought of her that way, especially when it became clear that she was a pregnant 3L without a job offer who would not be sitting for the bar that summer.
She didn’t tell anyone—she still hadn’t—but she’d had better grades than Scott. She’d pulled straight A’s except for the B in Con Law I and the C+ in Secured Transactions. But Scott was president. He had a job waiting for him. He would soon be a father, but of course you wouldn’t have known it by looking at him unless Colleen had been standing by his side. It was supposed to be her turn after the baby was born. She was supposed to spend the fall and winter studying for the Texas bar. Scott was going to help with the baby so she could prepare. They would find a good day care once she began working. It would be everything she had never considered wanting but felt she was getting nonetheless.
And now, sitting in her old bedroom with more than half the country separating her from Scott, she knew that the only thing she wanted was her son, and no matter what happened after this was over—whatever that meant—he was the only thing she could never have.
She lifted the phone from the cradle and held it to her ear. She listened to the dial tone and took a deep breath and began to dial. While she dialed, she pictured Scott in his office in the federal courthouse in downtown Dallas, the silvery shee
n of glass windows reflecting the setting sun, the dull noise of traffic echoing below. She could not help but compare their current views: the stale, musty bedroom of an adolescent girl against the dignified office of a man who’d grown up to do exactly as he’d wished. Scott had made it all seem so easy because things were easy for him. Colleen could think of nothing that he had reached for that he had not grasped.
The phone rang a few times, and then Scott answered. “Where are you?” he asked.
“I’m at my parents’,” she said. “My mom said you called.”
“Well, I called our house all morning,” he said. “And then I drove home at lunch, and you weren’t there.”
“Can you call me back?” she asked.
“Call you back?”
“This is long-distance,” she said. “From my parents’ house. Can you call me back?”
“Yeah,” he said. She heard him sigh.
“You don’t have to,” she said. “You’re the one who called here. I’m just calling you back.”
“No, I will,” he said.
“Okay,” she said. She hung up.
She realized her heart was racing, her blood pounding in her ears. She looked down at her hands. They were shaking slightly. She closed her fingers over the phone, waiting for it to ring. And then it did.
“Hey,” she said.
“Hey,” Scott said.
“Hello?” her mother’s voice said. Colleen could hear her from the kitchen phone as her voice snaked its way up the stairs. “Scott?”
“Hey, Marie,” Scott said. “I was just calling Colleen back.”
“Mom, I’ve got it,” Colleen said. The heat in her body broke toward a cold, sweaty frustration.
“Okay,” her mother said. “Okay,” she said again. “I hope everything’s okay.”
“It is,” Scott said. “Thanks.”
