Unquiet Ghosts

by Glenn Meade

  But in every relationship there is the lover and the loved, and my father was the lover, and he never stopped trying to please. He wasn’t five-star-general material, although in my mother’s delusional moments she was convinced he belonged on the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The peak of my father’s military promotion was colonel, but that would never be enough for my mother.

  She would rail after a few drinks. “That idiot Maguire they made two-star general is dumber than a half-breed ass. You’re a smart officer, Frank. Why not you?”

  My father would simply shrug. “It’s not for me to say, honey.”

  “It’s all about connections, Frank. We need to make more connections! Ask General Hogue to dinner. I’ll make supper, some drinks. We’ll show him what a smart, capable officer you are.”

  The social grid my mother longed to plug into somehow always revolved around booze. And I have a suspicion that any chance my father had of further promotion was ruined by my mother’s love affair with the juice.

  Yet it wasn’t always that way.

  I still keep pictures of her wedding day, and I see a happy young woman of nineteen with dreams bright in her eyes. Yet for whatever reasons, her life was not to become the one she imagined, no more than her marriage to my father was the upwardly mobile vehicle she sought to propel her youthful hopes.

  My father’s inheritance would come to little. At a late stage in life, his doctor father, my grandfather, a wonderful, kindhearted man, lost his mind a little. He was grieving the death of his wife from ovarian cancer and turned to playing rich man’s poker—as a stock-market investor. He lost all of his life’s savings and the title deeds to most of his land in a tech crash—four hundred acres of prime real estate in Knox County—except for the modest family home on a ten-acre gentleman’s farm out in Loudon, near Knoxville, Tennessee.

  I think it was on that account my parents often fought, argued, and had pitched battles. Much of it was incited by my mother’s angry drinking. First came small barbs, then metaphorically the guns were drawn. If the battle got worse, the cannons were rolled out, and then it was full-scale war, one the soldier in the family could never win. Once combat began, my mother could sustain her mood for weeks or even months.

  “I hate you, Frank Kelly. Hate you. Just keep out of my way. I don’t want to see your wretched face. Do you hear me? Are you deaf? I said, do you hear me? You’re a loser, a no-good, rotten loser.”

  Yet despite her brittle addiction, my father still loved her. Even if his letters or notes to her often went unanswered when he was deployed or the cards and flowers he sent were left untouched because of my mother’s alcoholic moods. I know that every letter and note my father wrote to her—from a posting abroad or if he simply wrote a “love you” note—was kept in my mother’s personal bedroom safe, behind a portrait of her in a scarlet chiffon dress that my father had had painted of her the year before I was born.

  When I was eighteen and my father retired at fifty with a military disability pension—and “the parting gift of a gammy prosthetic left foot,” as my mother liked to remind him—we left Fort Campbell for good. But my father didn’t move us far, just to the modest ten-acre gentleman’s farm he inherited from his father and where he grew up, a few hundred miles away in Knoxville.

  It was a simple basement rancher built by his grandfather in 1918 after he came back from the First World War. My father remodeled it, adding a sunroom and a boat dock to complement the beautiful views of peaceful Loudon Lake. It had a two-story guest cottage that looked out onto the water. We had once lived in the rancher for four years while my father was seconded to army recruitment, soon after my mother became pregnant with Kyle. We had fond memories of the house.

  Knoxville is a sports-mad, compact Southern city that straddles the Tennessee River, mostly beautiful in a Norman Rockwell kind of way. Aside from the slum areas off Magnolia Avenue, the wrong end of North Central, and the gritty east side with its shabby rental units and ethnic ghettos, Knoxville is pretty idyllic. Rolling hills, forests and lakes, parklands galore, granite mansions nestled among immaculately landscaped wealthy subdivisions. Refinement is there, with ladies clubs, church clubs, rich socialites swanning it in their walnut-paneled parlors, but it’s still down home.

  It’s Dolly Parton country, my mother used to say—vivacious, welcoming to strangers, a touch redneck eccentric, but darn nice with it. Banjo music might waft from a trailer home out on Knoxville’s hillbilly edges, which might be enough to convince some migrant idiots from up north that there are still shades of the homicidal feuds of the Hatfields and McCoys.

  The jagged majesty of the Smoky Mountains adds to the beauty. The Gatlinburg mountain resort does a pretty good impersonation of a displaced Austrian ski town, minus the yodelers. For fun, throw in Dollywood and the glittering carnival canyons of tacky neon at Pigeon Forge that stretch for miles. It’s no wonder some people call their city Knox Vegas. And it was here that a ray of hope began to shine in our lives.

  * * *

  I started college, first at Pellissippi State, and then I transferred to UT after two years, setting my sights on an English degree and becoming a high school teacher. It seemed the sensible thing to do, giving me summers free to learn to write, a path I longed to pursue.

  Meanwhile my mother did her best to decorate the remodeled house as she would have wanted her very own Southern mansion to look.

  Antique furniture belonging to my grandparents was combined with chintz curtains, a big plastic faux chandelier in the hall, wingback loungers, a polished walnut dining table and chairs, and white porch rockers on the veranda. She was in her element. Her drinking seemed to subside.

  It appeared she felt at home in Knoxville, a city with what seemed like a thousand different houses of worship—Methodists, Presbyterians, Greek Orthodox, Jews, Catholics, Church of God. Name a religion, and Knoxville had it. Signboards outside churches announced that everybody seemed to be recovering from something; there were classes in divorce recovery, bereavement recovery, marriage guidance, overcoming substance abuse. Preachers sometimes lured you in with a smart joke. “The Dollar Store isn’t the only saving place in town.” Or my own favorite: “Eternity. Smoking or nonsmoking?”

  I graduated from UT and got a temporary English teacher position at Bearden High School, while I thought about attempting my master’s in education. For a time, my mother managed to ingratiate herself into Knoxville society by joining several ladies clubs. But when her bingeing started again, her few new friends faded. I know that her failure caused her to be unhappy again.

  Sometimes I’d find her sitting alone and staring out at the lake, her eyes fixed intently on the water, as if she was looking for something.

  “What are you looking for, Mom?” I’d ask.

  And she always gave me the same answer. “Peace, honey. I’m looking for peace.”

  There was a kind of pain in her voice, as if the peace she sought truly eluded her.

  Something else I remember. Once, while my father was away, I passed her bedroom and heard her sobbing.

  I eased open her door. “Hey, Mom. Are you OK?” I said it lightly, with a smile on my face. “You still looking for peace?”

  When she looked around, I saw tears wet her face. She wiped them away and looked back out at Loudon Lake with a vacant stare. “You’re home early, sweetie.”

  She struggled to show a fragile smile when she finally turned back. “What do you dream of most, Kath?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You have dreams—or daydreams. All girls do. Don’t you dream about what you’d like to do with your life or how you’d like it to turn out? About meeting a good man, a Prince Charming?”

  “Sure, Mom.”

  “Dreams like those are dangerous. Don’t ever entertain them.”

  “Why?”

  “When I was your age, I had those dreams all the time.
Dreams so vivid that I knew I was going to leave my parents’ home one day, and I was never going to come back, not until I was rich and famous.”

  “Tell me more, Mom.”

  “There’s nothing to tell. I didn’t want my family to hear from me, I wanted them to hear about me. Except our dreams often mislead us. Most times they just fade to smoke and don’t come true, honey. They just don’t come true.”

  And then she came over and hugged me, harder than I ever remember being hugged by her, even since I was a child. The familiar aroma of alcohol and stale cigarette smoke wafted from her.

  When she drew back, she held my chin, looking into my face with moist eyes. “Kath, you have to be prepared for that, you hear? So never pay too much heed to those kinds of dreams. Or they can mess up your life. You’ve got to be careful, honey. Remember that story I told you? About the bird that looks for a thorn tree?”

  “Sure, Momma.” The bronze cast my mom brought back from Ireland of a legendary Celtic bird perched on a thorn tree took pride of place on our mantelpiece.

  “Don’t go looking to put no thorns in your heart, you hear? Those thorns are going to find your heart anyhow. So you be careful of that.”

  But then that was what she always told me, to be careful, and then she wiped her eyes and was gone.

  Late that night in my room, I thought I heard her crying again.

  When I finally went in to see her, she was lying on the bed, fast asleep, one arm stretched out as if to reach the vodka bottle on her nightstand, her glass heavily smudged with lipstick. There was always a pile of books by her bed. Novels mostly—we shared an interest in books. They were now scattered on the floor by her bed as if she’d knocked them over.

  I noticed how frail she looked, how loose the skin around her neck had become. She was getting thinner and looked more sallow. Her once-raven hair was flecked now with so much gray that a cheap dye job couldn’t hide it. Makeup did little to mask the corners of her heavily wrinkled eyes.

  I pulled up the bedsheet, kissed her cheek, and felt overcome by her alcohol breath and the smell of cigarettes and cheap perfume. She’d sometimes used the perfume to mask the fact that she urinated on herself but was too tired or too drunk to change her underwear.

  That night, as she sometimes did, she called out in her sleep, a muttered word or two. This time it was a mumbled cascade. “Frank, Frank, no, please . . . you have to take this further . . . you have to tell the authorities. But who? Who’ll kill us? No, that’s absurd.”

  What did she mean? I was sure she said “kill.” Were her words merely the hallucinations of a drunk woman or something else? I suspected the former, could never have imagined otherwise. It was a threat that made no sense. Besides, at that moment all that mattered was dressing her in fresh nightclothes and cleaning up her mess. I placed a towel under the damp bedsheet and threw her soiled garments into the washing machine. I left her, closing her door, and went to sit on my bed.

  I bent my head and cried. I wasn’t sure why.

  Perhaps I was crying for the mother I wished I’d had. I know that sometimes people drink because alcohol is their mistress, a substitute lover, or a crutch to help them cope with life’s harsh ways. Or to flee some unbearable truth they cannot face. In my mother’s case, I would eventually learn that there was another reason, deeper and much darker. There were many truths and lies she could not face, and her slurred, drunken words that night hinted at them.

  But the next day, when she was sober, I asked her about her talking in her sleep. She looked at me askance. “I . . . I said that?”

  “You said, ‘Who’ll kill us?’ Who would, Mom? What were you thinking?”

  “I’ve no idea what I was saying. I . . . I had a slip, that’s all. A drink or two too many last night. Forget it.”

  I sensed the lie in the anxious quiver in her voice.

  But she never spoke about it again.

  27

  * * *

  Sevierville, Tennessee

  8:00 a.m.

  “Kyle, can you hear me?”

  I stared at my watch. I felt as if I was looking at it every few seconds, and I knew I’d have to stop. I had slept badly, tossed and turned in a half-wakeful state all through the night, and I felt exhausted. Every waking minute, I felt expectant, desperate to see my children, to touch their faces, anxious to hear from Jack again. I tried to imagine what they might look like now. It drove me crazy. I still had six hours before he called again.

  I seemed to be the only visitor at Serenity Ridge that day, which was hardly surprising, considering I arrived there at seven-forty-five a.m. after waking at five a.m. Mostly, Serenity Ridge catered to patients with mental-health and drug issues. A range of types, from those who appeared pretty normal to those who looked like they could be extras in the movie Crazy People.

  These days, Kyle looked somewhere in the middle. Withdrawn as always, staring into nothing, and only in a presentable state because the nurses made sure of it.

  I was totally distracted and didn’t even feel I was in the room with Kyle. Throughout the drive to Serenity Ridge, I kept the blue sweater and the purple hoodie on the seat next to me. Every now and then I picked them up, held them to my face, inhaled the new-washed scent as I drove. Same when I finished parking my car. I felt like I was going crazy.

  I forced myself back to the present, tried to focus.

  I looked around Kyle’s room. It was just like in a hospital—a metal bed, no protruding edges anywhere so he couldn’t harm himself if he fell or, worse, tried to self-harm. Gray rubber-tiled floor. Family pictures pasted neatly on the straw-colored walls—Kyle, my dad, Mom, me. A bunch of greeting cards from Kyle’s last birthday that I’d tacked on a string behind his bed.

  Kyle sat in front of me in a wheelchair, not making eye contact as usual, his head rocking from side to side and his mouth dribbling a little. I leaned across to dab his mouth with a tissue from my pocket. He smelled of soap and sweat. I brushed flakes of dandruff off his dark sweater.

  So many times I hoped and waited for his beautiful voice to sing, but he never sang. Kyle still liked music. He wore a pair of earphones, attached to a new-looking iPod, lying in his lap. I could hear the music playing through the earphones. Opera—Kyle liked opera. Or Taylor Swift or Adele or the Dixie Chicks or pretty much anything that wasn’t hip-hop or rap, Snoop Dogg or P. Diddy. Play the wrong kind of music, and he vamoosed out of the room as if his wheelchair was on fire or he had a rocket attached, for he had a gritty determination to avoid what he didn’t like. I hadn’t seen the iPod before. Kyle still got gifts now and then, on birthdays and at Christmas, from old friends.

  I took a deep breath, let it out. The thing that drove me nuts about Serenity Ridge was that it was über-clean, nothing out of place, everything exactly where it should be. The smell of disinfectant wafted in the air like poison gas. The bedclothes were virginal white. You could lick gravy off the floors. I hated it. There was no happiness, just a neutral state that seemed sterile and soulless and, well, drugged, I guess.

  If Kyle made a mess of his bib at lunch, it was quickly whisked away a second after he ate, and he was tidied up and buffed and polished again like new. It should have been comforting that the nurses at Serenity Ridge did their job. But it wasn’t home, and it never would be. It seared my soul, thinking that Kyle was never coming home. Or ever going back to any real home. Sure, we took him to stay at home for the occasional night, but he needed full-time care. Serenity Ridge was where it was at.

  My dad and I took turns visiting, or sometimes we came together. Today was my turn, with my dad away. Despite all the turmoil in my head—the crash-scene visit, the news about Jack and my kids, and my thoughts doing cartwheels—I couldn’t miss it. I had brought fresh clothes and the treats Kyle liked—Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, Snickers bars, fruit gums, Saltine crackers, Mountain Dew. Kyle looked at me, so there in body b
ut not in mind. As terrible as it sounds, I often wondered sometimes if we were being cruel to him.

  Would it have been better if he had died that day in the park? It was a harsh thought. But I sometimes mused about it. My brother’s hollow, sad blue eyes always got to me. There was a heart and a soul and a life trapped inside his lackluster body, but they were forever entombed in the past and bound by its chains. He had no present life, other than Serenity Ridge, which was just death’s waiting room.

  I leaned across the wheelchair and gently removed the iPod headphones from Kyle’s ears. I hadn’t bought it. I spotted an open Apple box in the garbage bin and a scrunched-up ball of gift-wrap paper. His birthday was last month. Thirty. He looked eighteen. I’d found a few birthday cards in his room. One from Courtney—I recognized her handwriting. “Love you, Kyle, always will. Happy Birthday, honey.” Courtney had visited. Had she left the iPod?

  “Is that new, Kyle? Did someone give you a gift? Who was it?”

  Kyle said nothing, as usual, just gave me the familiar thousand-yard stare that had meds written all over it. Sometimes he’d grunt, gesture to things, utter a whispered word or two, smile, laugh. But mostly—well, mostly nothing. Finally came a brief nod. Yes. He got it. It just took a while. You had to have patience with Kyle.

  There’s another patient, Raymond, childlike, the kind it pained you to ever see hurt in a world this harsh. Severe brain damage from a car accident when he was twelve, and he was now forty—but still twelve, forever trapped in a mental time warp. He liked to take it upon himself to speak for Kyle sometimes, and he would sit with us when he felt like it. Raymond liked cake. Whenever anyone left some for Kyle, Raymond was never far away, angling for a slice.