A Boy a Girl and a Ghost

by Robert J. McCarter

  “Come on,” she says to me as she walks towards the big double doors that lead back into the ER. “Let’s get you checked out.”

  I feel a swell of relief and gratitude as I follow her. She has taken me seriously. Thank god.

  Doctor Schwartz examines me and orders a blood draw. He’s a short man with balding grey hair who talks very rapidly. I’m just grateful it’s not Doctor Rogers, although I keep seeing him walk by. He’s on shift too.

  My father sits with me in the little curtained area. They made me change into one of those horrible gowns that are open in the back (procedures and all) and I feel vulnerable in the bed with just that gown and a sheet covering me.

  Doctor Schwartz is very thorough. He asks me lots of questions and does a more extensive version of what my mother did. I’ve been through this kind of thing a thousand times.

  Dad has been silent during all of this. Too silent. It’s making me nervous.

  “Sorry about all the drama this morning,” I say when I can’t stand the silence anymore.

  He nods and smiles briefly, but he won’t keep eye contact with me. Is it me, or is it that secret he has from when Mom said, “This is not my fault. I didn’t start this. You explain it to him”?

  In the silence, I think about it. His secret is actually a welcome distraction from worrying about leukemia. And then it occurs to me. “Do you have a girlfriend?”

  He smiles again, but it’s one of those tight, pained smiles. “No, son. I don’t.”

  “Did you? Is that what started this?” I ask.

  His brows furrow deeply and he gets that faraway look in his eyes. “No. And I owe you an explanation. But now is not the time or place.”

  I think on that for a moment. And I know he’s right. It might, temporarily, easy my discomfort at being here, but it would a terrible place to be for another episode of the Wade Family Drama.

  I bite my lip and wait for the test results to come back.

  Billy intones his favorite word, shit, about a thousand times as I bring him up to speed. After the hospital, my dad went to the college, and having given me the day off from the bookstore, I called Billy and he rode his bike over.

  I know Billy feels strange about Lionel and the whole ghost/religion thing. But I tell him everything and it feels good to get it out. Keeping something like that inside can be poison.

  “And what did they find at the hospital?” he asks. Even though the house is empty we’re in my room. I’m on my bed and Billy’s on the floor. Unlike his, my room is neat. Very neat. I don’t like things out of place, it makes me nervous.

  “Nothing definitive,” I say with a sigh. “My white blood counts are a little high and platelets low, which they are worried about, but it doesn’t mean anything yet. The other main leukemia markers, immature white blood cells called ‘blast cells’ and other things like anemia, are missing.”

  He pauses, chewing on his lower lip and then running his hands through his red hair. “So…” he begins, his voice much softer than normal. “What now?”

  I laugh. On which front does he mean “what now?” With my family not being what I thought it was? With me and my perhaps returning Cancer? With Lionel and that I promised to solve his murder? My laughter starts out strained and tight, barely there. But as I think on these three things it starts to rumble out of me, the stress of the last day coming out. I laugh hard until my belly hurts and my face is wet with tears.

  The whole time Billy is just staring at me with this pinched look on his round face. He’s worried about me. His question, of course, was about my health, so I’m sure my laughter seems a little out of place to him.

  “Sorry, B,” I say when I can talk again. “It’s just that… well, it’s all a little too much.”

  He nods and asks me again, “What now?”

  I take a deep breath and sigh. “The doctors will confer. Doctor Schwartz will talk to my oncologist in Vegas at the children’s hospital. They’ll decide what the next step is.”

  He nods gravely. “Are you scared?”

  I feel the laughter coming back, but I bite it down. There is so much to be scared about—family, health, finding murderers. “Yeah,” I say. “I’m scared, but…” I trail off. I know it’s going to be hard to explain and might make Billy uncomfortable.

  He does this tiny little nod and says, “Lionel.”

  I smile because it’s Billy, my best friend Billy, and he knows what I’m thinking without me having to say it. “Yeah. Seeing him… Well, it kind of changes things, doesn’t it?”

  Dad comes home early, at about 4 p.m. I’ve got my head deep in Stephen King’s “The Shining” in an attempt to distract myself and am sprawled out on the couch in the living room.

  I hear his Pinto pull up and my heart starts beating faster. I don’t move, keeping my eyes on the page.

  When he walks in and I see the look on his face, I’m just dying to run away. He’s got dark circles under his eyes and stubble all over his normally clean-shaven face. But that’s not it. It’s his eyes, they look a bit haunted. My dad is steady as a rock, calm to a fault, he doesn’t look this way. Ever.

  He places his leather briefcase down and comes into the living room, sitting in the uncomfortable rocking chair that I sat in last night after Helena brought me back. “I guess we need to talk,” he says.

  I note the page I’m on and slowly close the book, setting it down on the couch next to me.

  My father rocks a little, then rubs his hands on his slacks, and then leans back in the rocking chair before tilting himself forward. This is not like him. He’s not a fidgeter. How bad can this be?

  “Dad,” I say, trying to catch his eye, but I don’t. “What is it? It can’t be that bad, can it?”

  He gives me one of those pained smiles and gets up and goes over to the bookshelf by the fireplace. There’s a shelf there that doesn’t have books but has little crystal decanters and glasses. He pours himself a drink of scotch, and not just two fingers, it looks more like three or four. Drinking this early and this much is also out of character.

  He doesn’t sit back down but takes a sip of his drink and starts this slow pacing back and forth across our tan shag carpet.

  “I’ve done my best to try to educate you,” he begins. “To teach you to think rationally and for yourself. To show you that the world is much bigger than what we see here in Cedar City.” He pauses, turns toward me, and gestures at me with his glass. “And look at you. Kids your age would be glued to the TV, not you. You read. You read everything. And…” he trails off with a sigh.

  I shift uncomfortably on the couch. TV doesn’t interest me much, but not ever having one, I’ve had very few opportunities to watch it. And I do love books. With all my heart, I do. I know that is the part of me I got from my dad.

  He sits down on the couch, the King book between us, and sets his drink down on the end table. It’s covered with a white crocheted doily that my mom knitted. “I’m proud of who you are,” he says, looking me right in the eye. “I need you to hear that, Aaron. I am very proud of you. You are a thoughtful young man, a hard worker, honest, and you have a very good mind.”

  I just blink. For my dad, this is effusive. “Thank you.”

  “And as I tell you what I must,” he continues, “I hope that what I have taught you, the larger world I have tried to expose you to, comes into play.” He sighs and grabs his drink, taking another sip.

  I’m beginning to freak out a bit. This buildup, the longer it goes on, is making me more and more anxious.

  But I don’t have long to wait. He takes a deep breath and tells me his deep, dark secret.

  My dad is gay.

  There it is. In stark black and white. My dad is gay.

  And not in the “joyous and/or happy” meaning of the word, the way it was used a few decades ago, but in the slang for homosexual.

  My father is so scared as he tells me. I’ve read about people “coming out of the closet,” so I know it can be difficult. And for m
y dad telling me, his sixteen-year-old son, it looks to be the hardest thing he has ever done.

  My father is stoic. He’s the very definition of stoic, and as he tells me he is everything but. And it is that change in his demeanor that freaks me out at first. He’s nervous and twitchy, nursing his scotch and repeating himself a lot.

  In this conversation, it’s like I’m the parent and he’s the child. He seems desperate for my approval. Desperate for me to tell him it’s okay. That I still love him. That I understand.

  Except, I don’t…

  Well, I do love him, but I don’t understand and it doesn’t feel okay.

  “I knew when I was young, about your age,” he says. “It was confusing. The other boys couldn’t stop talking about girls… Not me… I…”

  His shoulders are hunched and he’s staring at his drink and not looking at me. “I was shy,” he continues. “At first I thought it might just be that. This was more than twenty years ago, when homosexuality was more suppressed than it is today. I had no role models, knew no openly gay people, had no basis for understanding what I was feeling.

  “And in some ways, it’s like that for all teenagers—not understanding what you are feeling. I thought there was something wrong with me. I began to talk like the other boys, pretended I liked girls. That was the way it was supposed to be.”

  He gets up and pours himself more scotch. He sits back down in the rocking chair. “Growing up in Naperville in the early fifties—attitudes about homosexuality were harsh, full of misunderstanding and hate. In many ways like Cedar is today. Small town Utah is not exactly progressive when it comes to human sexual expression.” He barks out a laugh and sips more of his drink.

  “Wh… Why?” I manage to say.

  His eyes widen and then his brow furrows. I hadn’t got out what I wanted to say. He thinks I’m asking him why he is the way he is.

  “Why Mom?” I say, finishing the question. “Why did you marry her? Why did you…” I can’t say anymore. I don’t understand. If he knew what he was (and that is a really terrible way to think about it, but that is what I thought then) why did he get married, and more importantly, why did he have a child… me?

  “Fair question,” he says. “I was raised Catholic. You know that, right?” I nod. He has some horror stories about going to Catholic school. “It wasn’t okay to be who I was. So I changed myself. I… I buried that part of who I was as deep as I could. I pretended to like girls long enough until I believed I did.” He shrugs, it’s a pitiful thing, his shoulders barely rising an inch until falling lifelessly.

  “Do you love her?” I ask. I’m sitting still on the couch watching him, but I feel this nervous energy coursing through my body. I want to shout, to run, to break something. But I don’t, I sit there and ask the question with my father’s usual calm.

  “Yes, yes. Of course I love her. I love her with all my heart. I wish that I were different, that I could be who she needs. I… I tried. For so long I tried. But I can’t… not anymore.”

  “Anymore? What happened?”

  “The world has changed, Aaron. It may not be safe to be gay in Cedar City, but in larger cities, it’s starting to be out in the open. It’s starting to become tolerated, and in some cases, accepted. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still difficult and different and the bigotry is horrible. But things are moving… finally.”

  My own brow furrows as I contemplate his use of the word “bigotry.” Not applied to different races, but different sexual orientation. It’s a brief whisper and I don’t pay much attention to it. “I… I don’t understand. That doesn’t sound right. The world changing is why you can’t be who Mom needs you to be? Isn’t it normal to give up things to be in a marriage?”

  He sighs, gets up, and puts his half-empty glass back on the shelf. “It’s not that simple, son. When you change who you are, who you essentially are, for too long… It… It…” He slumps back down into the rocking chair, leaning forward. “I tried… God, I tried for years and years. Your mother and I… we were never as passionate as many are, but it was good for a while.” He bites on his lower lip, hard. “It comes out in small ways, terrible small ways, when you suppress something that big. We… we actually get along much better now. You’ve got to understand, she’s my best friend. Our relationship isn’t ideal, but we, the three of us, are a family.”

  There is more to all of this, so much more. I can feel it, like the iceberg lurking beneath the dark waters of the ocean. But I don’t want to hear it. I don’t want to know about it.

  My father isn’t who I thought he was. My family isn’t what I thought it was.

  “You’re only together because of me, right?” The damn question slips out my lips. I feel the tears coming, but I am cool and calm in the moment. So cool and so calm that my father probably figures I can handle the answer. That I deserve to know the truth.

  “Yes,” he says, the room suddenly quiet, the ticking of the clock on the hearth all too loud.

  I sit there for two breaths blinking until I can’t hold the tears back anymore. I run from the room, my father calling my name, but I ignore him. I run up the stairs and lock myself in my room.

  Reading is my solace in this world. It’s a gift from my father and I love him for it. Books can educate, they can entertain, and most importantly right now, they can distract.

  Since locking myself in my room, I’ve been chugging through some of Shakespeare’s plays. Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear, all plays with seriously messed up families. Their problems are so much bigger than mine, but similar. I’ve got family issues. I’ve got a ghost who wants something from me.

  The other thing about Shakespeare is its age. The language is English, but 400 years old. I’ve got to really concentrate to read it and look up the archaic usage of some phrases. It’s perfect. It’s just what I need, and it’s not helping. Not really. It’s nice not to think about all of this, but it is not solving anything.

  It feels like my family has cancer. That this sickness has been creeping under the surface for years, unseen by me, and when I saw my mother with Doctor Rogers, the first symptom finally appeared. As I ponder it between the pages of Shakespeare, I wonder what chemotherapy would be like for our family. Something so terrible it would kill what was wrong but not quite kill the family.

  And then in my more compassionate moments, brief though they are, I think maybe the problem is me. My lack of understanding of the situation. But those are brief flickers, like trying to light a candle in a hurricane.

  I’m startled by a knock on my door. It’s the third time this has happened. The first was my father, the second was my mother. “Go away,” I yell.

  “Okay,” a husky female voice says. “Have it your way.”

  Helena was not the voice I was expecting. I leap out of my bed, unlock the door, and rip it open. She’s holding a tray with a sandwich and some milk. Although my stomach rumbles, my eyes are more hungry for her than for the food.

  She walks in without saying another word. I close the door and lock it behind us. She’s wearing her La Familia skirt and top and has quite a bit of makeup on.

  I feel a brief wave of excitement. A beautiful girl in my room… for the first time, really. But that is washed away by my present reality and the firm friendship that Helena and I have built.

  She puts the tray down on my desk and looks around the room, her eyes narrow, her lips pursed. “Just as I suspected,” she says.

  “What?” I ask, a bit confused.

  “You’re neat. Orderly. Everything has its place.”

  I shrug my shoulders. It doesn’t seem important to me.

  “My room,” she says, “is quite the opposite. Chaos, but controlled. It may seem a mess, but I do know where everything is.” She smiles briefly and adds, “For the most part, that is.”

  She sits heavily on my bed, bouncing a bit and takes up the large book of Shakespeare’s complete works that I was reading. My growling stomach drives me towards the food and I eat quickly as she le
afs through the book.

  I sigh when I’m done, slumped in my wood desk chair.

  “You can go to the bathroom if you want,” Helena says, waving lazily towards the door. “They are both downstairs and won’t be coming up while we have our little talk.”

  I nod and make a quick trip. I had been locked in my room for hours and was way past the need for a pit stop.

  When I get back, Helena is up and pacing around my room, her arms folded in front of her.

  “They told you… everything?” I ask.

  She nods, not looking at me, and keeps pacing.

  “Lionel… he… he saw dark spots. My leg and my sternum. That’s why I wanted the tests.”

  She nods again but still doesn’t look at me.

  “My dad… he’s… My family… it’s…” I stammer, trying to express what I’m feeling, but getting nothing out. It’s why she’s here. They must have gotten ahold of her.

  She finally stops pacing and stands right in front of me, her arms rather than crossed in front of her are more wrapped around her. She seems to be holding herself.

  “I’m mad at you,” she says, her voice low.

  “Mad? What?”

  She blinks a few times, a single tear running down her left cheek. “You get news like that—like what Lionel told you—and you don’t tell me?”

  “It was late. I didn’t want to wake you.”

  “Bullshit,” she says, the word tight and bitter. “I told you’d I’d be up late. That I was there for you. I want to know why you didn’t tell me.”

  I scoot back in my chair until it bumps up into the desk. This is not what I expected from her.

  “I called you earlier… about being grounded. We talked last night.”

  She shakes her head slowly, her golden-brown eyes focused on mine, unrelenting. She sniffs and breaks eye contact, moving to the bed and sitting on the edge, her spine erect. “I’m only going ask you one more time. Please tell me why you didn’t call me.”