Ghosting

by Kirby Gann

  He tried to juggle the blade’s arms but the bad washer kept one from closing completely and he had to squeeze the handle shut. He set the knife on the floor beside him, Shady’s thigh pressed against his own. She stole in a little closer. He felt the warmth of her, a warmth almost like fever. He didn’t answer her question. She placed her head on his shoulder, and her strange heat radiated over his throat. She settled her face into his neck, nuzzled her nose in a discernible line over his collarbone, and he tried to imagine what her face must have looked like right then, that her eyes must be closed, her mouth open slightly. Her breath shipped skids of air beneath the collar of his T-shirt, and despite his great fatigue there came an upsurge in his blood, a quickening. She stilled her head again on his shoulder. Cole’s entire body began to teem, as if every nerve ending or capillary web in his skin had its own song to sing—a song heightened as he tried to remain perfectly still.

  “Sometimes it’s really hard to know what you’re supposed to do,” Shady said. Her voice vibrated in his chest. Winter ladled cold over their bodies. She nestled closer and stretched one arm across him. “Listen, I’m sorry about the other night.”

  “For what? What other night?”

  “By the river. In your truck.”

  His head fell back onto the bed as he remembered. He stared at the ceiling and saw the white bag flapping over the river and his clumsy advances; saw Shady playing with the drawstrings of her sweatpants, knotting them and drawing them straight again. The brutal quiet between them as he’d driven her home.

  She straightened, rubbing her hands over her arms. “It’s freezing in here,” she said, and stood and shut the window with a loud clap, apologizing immediately and looking to his open bedroom door. But there were no stirrings from Lyda, not even snores. Shady kicked off her sneakers and wrapped the old quilt from his bed around her, sitting on the mattress. With her feet on the floor she toppled slowly to one side, raising one foot and resting it on his shoulder. They remained like that for what seemed to Cole several very long and difficult-to-interpret minutes, long enough for him to inspect her foot sidewise, to decide her feet were pretty, and to wonder if she had fallen asleep.

  “Are you staying on the floor all night?”

  “You going to crash here?”

  “Is it okay if I do?”

  “It’s all right with me. You know it’s all right with me.”

  She made room for him and opened the blanket as he got in, Cole flat on his back and suddenly aware of his sheets, quickly speculating how long it had been since he had washed them and noting they smelled of his sleep and maybe a touch of mildew, or dust, he wasn’t sure, glad his wet dreams ended up in boxers and that he jerked off into socks. Shady set her head on his chest; she used some kind of floral shampoo—no, not floral, but fruitlike, the scent of berries in your mouth, fresh black raspberries plucked from a patch stumbled upon in the woods. He marveled at the firmness of her body, embarrassed by the thickening between his legs that she must have felt as she slid a leg over him. Her leg stilled there, the inside of her knee over his crotch. His jeans trapped his cock at an uncomfortable angle. Shady was aware, he could tell. She pulled his shirt from his jeans and guided her palm up his side, let it rest over his heart.

  Her breathing turned heavier and evened out and they lay still, her body clutching his. He wondered if she had fallen asleep and could not believe she could, not with her ear pressed against the pounding in his chest. Finally she rose with a small moan and in the dark Cole could barely make out her face inches away, staring at him, considering him. Then she brought her mouth to his.

  The moment was as he had hoped it would be, his tongue searching hers, this instant so longed for in secret and with the guilt of a brother’s betrayal, but these concerns fell aside easily as his hands, his arms, came alive. It did not take long before he was naked above her. She cradled his face in her hands, casting warm smiles into his own. They wrestled one another, twined themselves in the blankets; he pressed into her and tried to slide her jeans down but she was adept at preventing him, he couldn’t figure how she managed it, a twisting of her body or a flex to her legs so that, somehow, the jeans would not move. He tried everything he could, shifting his mouth from hers to her jaw and to her neck and then down, taking in the palm-sized wonder of her breasts and the smooth belly, managing to get his tongue to graze the top of her pubic line and inhaling the deep true smell of her there—but her hand grasped his jaw gently and tugged him up again. Over the next hour the bed turned on dyskinetic awkwardnesses: Shady over-ardent, almost penitent, Cole relaxing, forcing himself to a degree of calm in disappointment. The jeans stayed on. Soon the kisses shortened, died away, and he rolled onto his back, drawing the sheet over his waist, painfully aware of his full nakedness next to her half-clothed.

  “I’m sorry, Cole,” she whispered. “I’m not ready.”

  He tried to be gracious. He did. He told her it was okay in a way both sincere and respectful and yet expressive of the effort it was costing him at that moment to be honorable. He wanted to tell her there were many things he wasn’t ready for in which he had to take part, thinking this bitterly even as he recognized the saying of it would ruin all.

  “You kiss well,” her voice hoarse and close to his ear. “I always wondered.”

  “I always wondered, too.”

  “If I kissed well? Didn’t you ever ask your brother?”

  “No, I wondered if I did. I guessed you kissed well.”

  This prompted a guffaw from her, Shady rising on one elbow and with her small breasts in clear view—Cole was still inexperienced enough to be thrilled by the sight of an actual girl naked and close. He was still hard. She told him not to worry, she was no tease, but did he know she drove his brother crazy?, fending him off for months once they’d started dating and this one time—

  Cole covered her mouth with his hand. “Please, Shady. I don’t want to hear this.”

  She hushed, nodded. “Of course you don’t, I’m sorry,” she said, and then took him in her hand and leaned in to kiss him again, her tongue slipping deep into his mouth before retreating; she bit at his lower lip, nibbled at the thickest fold and held it between her teeth. Then her mouth was on his neck, his stomach, moving down his body with quickening velocity and it did not take long for him to empty into her mouth, his hands bunching the sheet on either side. He made her laugh into her hand held over her lips as he thanked her not once but twice, and with great feeling.

  “No problem,” she said.

  Weeks have passed. He keeps his bedroom window cracked open in hopes she might surprise him again, but each morning he awakes only to late-winter chill and her absence. Shady’s mother answers the phone every time he calls and she doesn’t appear to know who Cole is and informs him that Shady isn’t available, or she’s out. (A phrase he tries not to read much into.) He doesn’t own an answering machine, instead he has Lyda, and with the long stretches of time on the road he has no idea if Shady ever calls back or not. Every few days he calls again, gets the mother again, and then he’s gone.

  When finally she does reach him she sounds preoccupied, admits she has needed some time to herself. Her father is pressuring her to get on track with her schooling, to enroll in summer courses to ease back into med-school discipline, but she feels no motivation and doesn’t want to waste his money.

  “What’s your mother say?” Cole asks.

  “She’s supportive of whatever I do, she’s a great mom.”

  “You talk to your sisters?” Shady is the youngest of three and her two sisters are significantly older, and wildly disparate in the directions their lives have taken: Laura, at thirty-two the oldest and the pride of her father, researches blood diseases at Duke as she pursues her PhD, while the middle daughter, Breyer, leads a life of breeding with three children each from different fathers, living now with a man who is father to none of them. Shady says she doesn’t want to follow either direction, or maybe more precisely a little of each;
she hopes to find her own middle way.

  “I’ve talked to both of them. Laura says since I was the surprise unexpected baby of the family that I was doted upon and so have no real understanding that gratification does not come on an immediate basis. Ergo I should just shut up and realize how luxurious my situation is and embrace my opportunities and buckle down to school and create a life that will not be reliant on anyone else, in particular not any man.”

  Shady says things like ergo and he doesn’t know anyone else who does and that fact alone thrills him.

  “And she has a point, it’s true,” she continues. “I’m listening.”

  “What about Breyer?”

  “Breyer says I should listen to my heart and prepare myself to recognize my path when it presents itself to me.”

  As he listens to her expand on the subject, he fingers small cakes of plaster from the hole in the living-room wall that he knows he should get around to covering one day. It has existed there since before Lyda packed him off to live with his uncle’s family. He doesn’t know how it got there and Lyda says she does not remember. It’s possible the hole, grown with age and absent-minded picking like now, goes all the way back to Bethel Skaggs; wouldn’t that be something, to have left behind as the marker of your existence in the world nothing but a hole in a wall—a hole made in anger, your violence imprinted, a house-wound no one ever bothered to fix. Not three feet away he spreads one hand on the faded hallway wallpaper covered with vines, a design he had followed many times as a child trying to discern the path of each stalk that wove in and out to blooming flowers, striving to identify the repetition in the pattern; he never did tease out the scheme of it. Somewhere beneath that decorative paper his name is inscribed beneath Fleece’s in the plaster—Lyda had been infuriated to discover their carved signatures, and infuriated again at the cost of the wallpaper to cover them up.

  “I’ve got to get a job,” she concludes. “I need to get off my ass.”

  “That doesn’t sound like the path your daddy wants presented to you.”

  “Be nice, Cole. I love my sister. Is Lyda around? Can I talk to her?”

  She is and he passes the phone to her and sits at the kitchen table half-listening to the gradual arrangement for Shady to try a position at the rehab clinic where Lyda used to work. He’s lost in his reverie over the various family imprints scattered about this house when he startles at Lyda replacing the receiver in its cradle.

  “She didn’t ask you to give the phone back to me?”

  “No, she didn’t, hon. You should probably get used to not hearing from her like you want. She’s not a girl for you, you know that.”

  He doesn’t know that. He knows what happened three weeks before, and what was that? He stares at the phone and waits. He stares at its gray plastic receiver standing ready beside the rusty toaster oven on the corner of the counter while his mother stirs herself a cup of instant. The small LED light indicates the phone is charging.

  “Do you want some motherly advice?” she asks. Cole raises his eyes to her with a feeling of growing alarm. “I know you don’t want to listen to me but I’ll say it anyway. You need to be careful of yourself with a girl like that.”

  “Careful? With Shady?”

  “A girl from her background, a boy like you. Honey I’m a woman and I know my types. Once you have her in your hands she’s liable to tear you to shreds til there’s nothing left.”

  Cole remains motionless on his feet taking this in, listening to Lyda move on down the hall, opening and shutting the bathroom door. Then she opens the door again and announces that she plans to get some tonight and so has her doing to do. “You pick up anything for me?”

  The question stirs him from his thoughts and he pulls a sandwich bag containing twenty oxy-eighties from a pocket—pills bought from Grady Creed—and brings them to her. “Stretch these, will you? Don’t throw a party.”

  She answers Mmm-hmm and shuts the door again. He returns to the kitchen as the shower kicks on and the lights on the phone have not changed. The hole in the wall is slightly bigger than his own fist, seismic cracks bracketing eight inches in all directions around it. That hole has been there so long it belonged there. He thinks he can be like that; he can wait. She’ll call again. She will.

  Following instructions from Arley Noe, he meets Creed in the strip-mall parking lot where CWE Ministries holds services. No rental this time; instead Creed hands him keys to a ministry van, an Econoline with bus seats. “For our purposes, the safest rig on the road has got to be a church van,” Creed mumble-mouths, pushing a magenta toothpick from side to side. “This is a experiment. You got a seven-point-three liter V8 under the hood if you need it. Try not to get pulled over.”

  Behind the last row of seats a large net holds soccer balls. These are not full of air, okay? Creed says. Cole is to deliver the balls to Morehead. There he’ll exchange vehicles and drive to Prestonburg to deliver, then over to Ashland to deliver, and then back to Morehead to pick up the ministry van again.

  Looking over the van he can see Creed’s point: these are not the kind of wheels anyone would pay attention to. On each side, beneath the CWE insignia, the slogan CHART A PROSPEROUS COURSE THROUGH LIFE spans fender to fender, the two T’s amended into an image of the Cross. Cole looks over at the old warehouse storefront where the church continues to hold services.

  “Don’t think so much,” Grady says. “Nobody’s watching you.”

  “Shady goes to that church sometimes. She says I should go.”

  “Then you best be careful, young man. A girl gets you into church with her then it won’t be long before she’s either marrying or burying you in the same place.”

  “Well.”

  “Don’t think too hard on it. That preacher’s street-schooled sure as me and one day I’m going to figure him out. Now get a move on ’fore I decide to make this run myself just to get off this lot. What’s your momma do when you’re gone? She alone tonight?”

  “You’re a sick fuck, Grady.”

  “It’s a sick world. Don’t you worry over Lyda, I’ll certify nobody hurts her any way she don’t want to be hurt.”

  He can’t think of a good comeback. He hops into the driver’s seat and snaps the chew foil from Creed’s shirt pocket and shuts the door before Creed can grab it back. He doesn’t roll down the window until Creed has thumped it several times, the two of them staring one another down.

  “Promise you’ll keep your dick out of my mom. That’s all I ask. She’s got it rough enough as it is.”

  Creed’s face betrays a brief interior consideration. Then he shakes his head, decided. “You keep my chew then. Don’t spit on the floor less you’re keen on cleaning it up, we have to return this van when you’re done,” and he slaps the fender twice to send Cole on his way.

  Shady had said she’d hook up with him on Wednesday night, but when he returns on Tuesday she calls and says she can’t make it tomorrow night after all. The trips leave him beleaguered and forlorn and when she calls he’s already suffering a vicious dehydration headache, belly aswim from Grady’s chew. He feels too unwell to analyze what she is saying. He tells her all is cool and he understands how things get in the way. I’m sorry I won’t see you then but let’s get together soon, he says, and she says okay.

  Yet on Wednesday a sudden impulse prompts him to call. Just to see how she’s doing. Her mother answers and Cole feels dirty, creepy and stalkerish. He almost hangs up when she tells him to hang on, she’s unsure if Shady’s still home or not and she’ll have to look. He hears her call out to her daughter, and a long time passes in which he feels nakedly stupid, absurdly obvious, filled with that horrible word—NEED—and then Shady’s there and short of breath like she had sprinted to the phone, asking, Yes? and he shuts his eyes: “Hey Shady. I was just calling to say hey, see if you needed a ride anywhere.” As if the girl would prefer being driven in his go-cart quality pickup rather than her own fine Audi.

  That’s sweet Cole but you’re go
ing to make me late to work, remember?

  He apologizes, already bored with the conversation and angry at himself.

  Oh forget it. You all right?

  Yeah of course I’m fine. I’m always fine. I’ll see you soon.

  Count on it.

  Not real often but sometimes Shady likes to get high alone. At night, alone, not doing anything else and she’s not going to call anyone or get in the car to wake up a girlfriend because she’s lonesome, just some time alone in her room with the window open, preferably on cold winter air but any time of year will do, like now, nearly April and with March this year holding winter longer than usual, and with the porch light below her window lending the only light to her room. The type of light is important; smoking up in a bright room isn’t the same. Her father has his martinis and her mother her Librium and Klonopin and Shady doesn’t think that choosing a bowl that she doesn’t even smoke every night, not even once a week unless she happens to have a whole lot on hand, which isn’t often, in fact it’s almost never that there’s more than a dime in her underwear drawer and even less in her purse, she doesn’t think it’s any different from what either of her parents do to relax. She’s not a wake’n’bake kind of girl. She’s not high all the time nor does she allow it to run her life. She doesn’t even really do any other drugs, doesn’t even like to drink, particularly—the occasional pop of X on nights with her friends clubbing back at school. But that was nearly a year ago now.

  But late and when she’s alone and it’s so quiet in her neighborhood (if it can be called a neighborhood; the properties are all so large that it feels like the middle of nowhere at night) and her parents are asleep, she likes it like nothing else. She likes how good pot, when she’s alone and in this certain frame of mind that seems to come only late at night, seems to open her to certain avenues of thought she doesn’t have otherwise—and somehow having the room dark except for that soft porch light outside encourages this—she likes how she kind of slides into self-conversation about her current place and moment in life, where she is and where she’s going, the kind of questions she tends to avoid because they make her all anxious. She looks over the trees out front and thinks, Where are you going, Shady Beck? What will you do, little girl? Like the doing so allows her to almost touch on some special knowledge or insight into secrets she may be keeping even from herself. Maybe it’s only that she’s relaxed and it’s quiet with that feeling that the world is asleep and soon she will be too but not quite yet. A sort of meditation-slash-prayer routine. And she’s high. When talking about this with her girlfriends back in school they decided it’s something like what Indians used to do, maybe. She calls these little sessions her dream routines, and often that’s just how it feels, like she’s dreaming but awake in it and it’s good and as she looks through her window at the darkness out there—there are only a few distant house lights visible, mostly it’s trees—she can be filled with such an overwhelming love of life and the world even as she comprehends that she doesn’t understand any of it.