A Boy a Girl and a Ghost

by Robert J. McCarter

  “There’s still some eggs in the pan,” Dad says from behind his newspaper. His tone is even, but I can sense the tension underneath it. “You’re too late, your mother already went to church,” he adds as if reading my mind.

  I sigh, get a plate, and push the cold eggs from the pan onto the plate. They’re way overcooked now, but I’m hungry. I take it over to the table across from my father and sit down. My hunger is being fought down by my nervousness. We are about to have a “talk.”

  If there is a talk to be had, my father is always the one to deliver it. Frankly, I don’t know if I’m better off that way. My mom gets much more emotional than my father, but my father can be stone-cold logical in these circumstances, leaving me very little wiggle room.

  I take a bite of the cold eggs and swallow hard. I feel the urge to apologize bubble up but force it down. I don’t want to start this thing with me babbling on like some scared ten-year-old kid.

  After a few minutes, I’ve eaten about half the eggs—all I can stand—and my dad has slowly folded his newspaper up and is staring at me. His hand delicately touches the diary and he says, “What’s going on here?”

  “You knew about this. It’s my diary, Dad. You encouraged me to write in it.”

  He purses his lips and nods. “That I did. But what are you writing in here?”

  I shrug. “You know… stuff. What’s going on with me… that kind of thing.”

  “So, read me something from it,” he says. His voice is so damn even, it’s freaking me out. He’s worried. He thinks I’ve lost it.

  I grab the diary and flip through it, trying to find a passage that won’t get me into further trouble.

  I start reading. “‘I help out at my Dad’s bookstore. I love it. In fact it would be fine with me if I could just quit school and do that. It’s simpler. I know my place. I know what to do.

  “‘With the leukemia, I’ve missed so much school it’s hard for me to fit in and I—’“

  “Okay,” he says. “That’s enough.” He lets out this long sigh and actually smiles. “Can I see that page?”

  I nod and hand it to him. It starts out like this in the diary “Cinn nne leuqegia”.

  He looks at it and then back up at me, his smile growing. “What kind of algorithm did you use?”

  I smile back, glad that my dad understands. “Alternating letter shifting. Pretty simple.”

  He nods and gives the diary back to me. “And why did you see the need to do this?”

  “I was afraid Mom might go snooping.”

  He leans back, crosses his arms over his chest, and lets out another sigh. “You forgot about your offer to go to church, didn’t you?”

  I nod and look down.

  “You’re going to have to make this up to her,” he says.

  “Yes, sir,” I say.

  There is silence then and Dad is fiddling with his paper. “Can I ask you a question?” I ask.

  “Yes. Please.”

  “I have a right to privacy, don’t I?” I swallow hard. My parents have given up a lot for me, but I have secrets. I need to keep them.

  The smile he gives me is compassionate and for some reason that freaks me out. Why does that question engender compassion? “Yes,” he begins, “of course you do. But if you had fulfilled your obligation, gotten up on time, this wouldn’t have happened.”

  “That doesn’t give her a right to snoop,” I say, my heart starting to beat hard.

  My dad pauses, licking his lips. “Actually, Aaron, it’s pretty understandable.”

  “She… I… What?” I stammer. I was not expecting him to take this position.

  “Picture yourself as a mother of a child that had a long and devastating life-threatening illness. Your child has been healthy for a good stretch and is now experiencing some rather normal teenage things that you don’t understand. Girls, sneaking out of the house, hiding things from his parents.

  “But you’ve given him the benefit of the doubt. He’s offered to do something nice for you, so you get up early, make a nice breakfast and await your son’s arrival. When he doesn’t show up you go into his room to wake him and find him fully dressed, propped up on his bed, with pen in hand holding a book. What do you do? Do you worry about his privacy or, having nearly lost him several times, do you look at the book he’s holding?”

  My dad is clearly wound up about this. His tone is still even but with each sentence I find myself feeling smaller and smaller.

  “Of course, you look at the book,” he continues. “And when you do it’s written in this gibberish that scares you. It may not be rational, but you fear something else has happened to your son, your only child.

  “Your son wakes up and finds you that way. You try to ask him about it. Your words aren’t the best you’ve ever chosen, but you’re scared. Your son’s answers are defiant and not the least bit illuminating. You feel…” Dad trails off, looking at me. He’s silent for a moment. “Tell me, Aaron, how do you think your mother felt this morning?”

  I feel the tears just behind my eyes. My dad’s damn little speech has given me empathy for her. Something, frankly, I am not interested in. I try to speak, but my mouth just moves in a silent pantomime as I hold the tears back.

  I know that my illness has been so hard on them. That even though I am healthy we are all still living with Cancer. I know all this. But I don’t want to be reminded. I don’t need to know the exact extent that I just hurt my mother.

  I stand up quickly, the chair falling behind me and clattering to the floor, but I don’t care or look. The tears have found their way out and I feel shame that my father is seeing them.

  “Nice speech, Dad,” I say, nearly spitting the words out. His eyes are wide now. “I suggest you picture yourself as a son whose father has just delivered that speech to him.”

  I run out the door, get on my bike, and ride away.

  My bike is freedom—or at least the symbol of it. No, it’s more than a symbol, it is an actual level of freedom. It lets me go places on my own, places my feet couldn’t carry me as well or as easily. And it feels like freedom. The wind whipping through my hair, the houses speeding past, the feel of my body warming up with the effort of pedaling.

  It’s freedom, carrying me away from my father and his criticism. From my house where so much history has occurred… the good and the bad. And my bike is mine. I bought it with my own money that I earned. I take care of it.

  As I ride away from my father and my house, I’m not aware of that freedom stuff, just that I want distance. The warm wind dries the tears on my face and soon I find myself at Billy’s house. The big Chevy Suburban isn’t parked in the driveway and my brain stalls for a minute before I remember that it’s Sunday. They are at church.

  I ride onto their yard, step off the bike, and let it clatter to the soft grass. I move to the spigot by the garage and turn it on, swallowing handfuls of water. The ride has left me thirsty. I then go plop down by my bike and my mind just ping-pongs around.

  Lionel the ghost… where is he now? Is he here, but I just can’t see him in the light? I close my eyes, but don’t see him that way either.

  This makes me think about Billy and his discomfort knowing that there are ghosts in this world. His faith doesn’t seem to have a place for them. And that makes me wonder where they fit in to my own beliefs.

  My mother… she is frankly a bit of a mystery to me. My father assures me this is somewhat universal when the male observes the female (or vice versa), but then I think of Helena. I understand her better than my mother. I can talk to her much easier than I can talk to my mother.

  With a sigh, I get up and pull my bike up. My legs are a bit jellyized—I rode hard here—so I get on and start riding at a reasonable pace. Church isn’t over yet. I may not fully understand my mother, but I do understand that I hurt her. Time to do something about that.

  When I slide into the pew next to my mother, she doesn’t say a word, but her eyes widen briefly. Pastor West is really wound up
, his voice echoing over the small church, his cheeks red and his hands stabbing out to point at the assembled citizens of Cedar City.

  “But what is the righteous path? How do we know our actions are what god wants for us? What He needs of us?” the pastor says. He holds up his bible and shakes it at us. “It’s in here, right?” He pauses, but it doesn’t seem like he’s really waiting for an answer. “This is the ‘good’ book. It contains all the answers, right?”

  There are some shaking of heads and mumbles of “yes” and “right.”

  “And how do we sinners know those answers?” he asks, this time tilting forward his ear towards the audience.

  I am, frankly, very uncomfortable, and I shift on the hard wood of the pew. I find Pastor West’s sermons manipulative and condescending. We are all lowly sinners crawling along and can’t tell right from wrong without some god on high telling us every little thing to do. A god that seems to treat everyone as dumb children but then allows the most horrible things to happen in this world. Things like war and murder and… yes, Cancer.

  “We read it!” a woman yells out a few pews in front of us.

  Pastor West nods solemnly. “We read it,” he repeats quietly. “We read it,” he says again, his voice getting louder. “We read it!” he yells.

  He slams his bible down on the podium, the sound of it echoing through the brick building, the congregation quiet.

  He sucks in a deep breath, his large chest expanding. He brushes at his thinning brown hair and grips the front of the podium and leans forward, a large wood cross on the brick wall behind him. “But how do we read it?” he asks quietly. “Do we read it like we read the newspaper or a cheap novel?”

  I groan and my mother stabs a look at me. I shut up, but feel my thoughts hardening against his message. He just said that novels are cheap, that since they aren’t the Bible they are somehow worth so much less. Is The Great Gatsby cheap? Is Pride and Prejudice cheap? Is Hamlet cheap? Well… for me, them are fighting words.

  “Do we read it like we read the instructions on a TV dinner?” he continues. In fact, he asks about four other questions, his volume rising, his hands shaking out towards us until he finally answers his own questions. “No!” He picks up the bible again, waving it at us. “We read it like it is holy, like it is the word of god, like it is the one thing that can keep us from eternal damnation!

  “We read like it is our salvation. Because, you know what? It is our salvation. It is not something to be read lightly or once. It is what we turn to again and again, day after day, night after night. We humans… we sinners, we live in a world full of temptation and doubt. This book, this holy word of god, is our only way home. Our only way. The only way.”

  Done, the pastor’s big body slumps, his shoulders rolling forward as he steps away from the podium. He wipes sweat from his face with a handkerchief.

  The musical director, a plump blond-haired woman, leaps up and tells us where to turn in the hymnal while everyone stands. I’m not paying attention though. I am watching everyone.

  My mother is studiously scanning the hymnal, taking a deep breath and preparing to sing. Pastor West looks like he just ran a marathon, his body slumped in a chair on the small raised stage. There’s a tall man on the other side of me who is flipping through the hymnal seemingly having trouble finding the right page. A bored girl of about five years is turned around in the pew in front of me, and when I catch her eye, she sticks out her tongue and turns back around. A young couple are holding hands tightly. An older woman has her bible clutched to her chest.

  This book, the Bible, has answers for people who believe. It strikes me then, like a ton of bricks, that having answers might be kind of nice. Having a single place to go in a quest for understanding could be comforting. Believing in an omnipotent god in this chaotic world might just be a relief. There’s always an answer then. There’s always a way forward. It’s in the Bible. The word of god.

  As everyone sings, I watch them, wondering what that might be like but knowing that it’s not for me.

  Pastor West’s warm hands engulf mine as he greets my mother and me as we leave the church. He’s standing in the summer sun, sweat forming on his brow. “Good to see you, Aaron,” he says.

  My mother says something nice about the sermon—everyone always says something nice about the sermon—and then looks at me pointedly.

  “Pastor, I was wondering,” I begin and suddenly feel nervous. I’m not sure why, and I feel silly about it, but I think I’m afraid if I interact with Pastor West too much, his religion, his belief, might rub off on me. Like it’s contagious or something.

  And now that I think about it, belief is contagious, isn’t it? Belief and ideas spread from person to person just like a virus does. Sometimes that’s a good thing—the ideas of basic hygiene transformed our health as a race—and sometimes that’s a bad thing—take Hitler and his belief in a master race. With religion, like Pastor West tries to spread, I don’t think it’s just good or bad, but a bit of both.

  “Yes, son?” he says. He has such a kind face, round with a wide, easy smile. He is always so kind.

  “Umm… yes… well, we have a swing set that I’ve outgrown. I was wondering if you might know a family that could use it.”

  His grey eyes light up like there is suddenly hope for my soul, which makes me even more uncomfortable. I shift my feet on the cement below me.

  “What a kind offer, Aaron,” he says. “No one comes to me off of the top of my head, but I’ll tell you what, I’ll think about it. How about we confer on this again next week?”

  I look up at my mom and I can see the smile on her face. I really screwed up this week, so I feel like I kind of owe her. “Sure,” I say to Pastor West, swallowing hard.

  After we get home and Mom is working in her garden, I go out and talk to her. I know I’m not halfway there to making things up to her yet. She just started the vegetable garden this year. It’s a small raised bed with a few tomato plants and one zucchini plant. It’s not much, but it’s another sign of my health—my mother feeling like she has time to garden.

  She’s dressed in tan shorts and kneeling on a pad as she pulls weeds out of the soil with her gloved hands.

  “I’m sorry, Mom,” I say. I dive right into it, because I really don’t want to drag it out.

  She glances at me and then turns her attention back to the plants. “What are you sorry for, Aaron?”

  I take a deep breath and sigh. Here it is, the test. Not only do I have to be sorry, I have to be sorry for the right thing. “I’m sorry that I forgot about my promise to go to church with you. I am sorry for being grumpy this morning.” I stop short of apologizing about my diary. I don’t care what Dad says, she shouldn’t have been snooping in it.

  She rocks back onto her feet and swivels so she’s looking right at me. She doesn’t say anything at first, just looks into my eyes. I have a hard time keeping the eye contact, but I do. She looks down, her brows furrowing before she says, “Thank you, Aaron. I appreciate the apology.” With that she turns her attention back to the garden.

  I go into the house and hold my sigh in until the patio door is closed. She “appreciates” the apology, not “accepts” it.

  My father has taught me to listen carefully to the words people choose. They don’t always do it consciously, but there is meaning behind it. And the meaning here is that she’s still mad. That I have to figure out something else to do to get into her good graces.

  My father looks up from the living room as I hit the stairs going towards my room. I don’t make eye contact. I’m still mad about his speech.

  16

  Monday, June 27, 1977

  I think I need to revise what I said about my bike and freedom. It’s not that my bike isn’t freedom, it is. And I’m sure when I get a little older it will be a car that symbolizes freedom.

  But it’s not the essence of freedom. Health is.

  Without my health, I couldn’t get on my bike and ride. Without hea
lth, I couldn’t go to church to try to be nice to my mother, or spend my afternoons under a big tree talking to Helena, or be mad enough at my dad to give him the silent treatment.

  All these things stem first from being healthy enough to experience them. Health is the real freedom.

  Here’s the thing about my dad and the silent treatment; he is immune. Or at least he appears to be. If you want to talk, he’s always right there. If you want to brood and be silent, he can roll with that.

  I hadn’t spoken more than a few words since his “here’s how you hurt your mother” speech. When I get to the bookstore for my shift, he’s there, having opened it up as usual.

  He gives me a neatly written list of things to do and I answer with as few of words as possible.

  “You know, son,” he says as he picks up his leather satchel about to head out the door. “If you’re mad at me, I think this will work better if you actually tell me what’s bothering you.”

  I say, “Probably,” and get up on the stool that sits behind the little counter and start reading the list. The sting of the empathy he forced on me is still running its course. I don’t want to tell him what I’m mad about. He should know, shouldn’t he?

  My dad shrugs and heads out the door.

  My time at the bookstore isn’t very enjoyable, but I have a smile on my face when I see Helena walking towards me. I’m in the shade under “our” tree on the lawn not far from the Globe replica theatre. She smiles and waves and all my family junk gets swept away like dandelion tufts in a stiff breeze.

  “Hey, Wade,” she says as she plops down beside me, chewing noisily on her peppermint gum.

  “Hey, Helena,” I reply, a goofy smile on my face.

  She looks at me, her eyebrows coming together. “Having a good day?”

  “Am now.”

  She blinks and looks me over for a moment. “Good to see you too, Wade.”