When Ghosts Come Home

by Wiley Cash

  “I’m sorry,” she said again. “I’ll give you some privacy.”

  “Wait,” Janelle said. “Stay. Your dad’s talking to my father-in-law. It may be a while.”

  Colleen turned around, and Janelle gestured toward the matching wooden ottoman that sat in front of the rocker. It had a tan cushion resting on top of it. Colleen slid the ottoman away from the rocker to give herself more space to sit, and then she settled herself on it, her knees close together, her fingers interlocked in the middle of her thighs.

  The baby continued to nurse, his eyes open and scanning what he could see of the room from his position, his left arm raised and grasping absentmindedly at the air. Colleen had never been this close to a woman who was breastfeeding a baby, and she tried to look at everything in the room aside from Janelle’s exposed breast and the nipple the baby worked in his mouth.

  “He’s just absolutely beautiful,” Colleen said.

  “Thank you,” Janelle said.

  “What’s his name?”

  “R.J.,” Janelle said. “Rodney James, or Rodney Junior. R.J.”

  Colleen nodded, not taking her eyes from the baby’s face. “How old is he?”

  “A little over five months,” Janelle said.

  Colleen was unable to control her mind as it flipped through the Brazelton book. She wanted to tell Janelle that by now R.J. knew her well enough to read her emotions, that he could understand the grief or hope or fear in her face. But the baby had closed his eyes while nursing, and Colleen watched him instead, wondering at the images and thoughts that flashed behind his eyelids. Was she the first person who’d ever scared him? Had anyone else ever made him cry?

  The baby’s arm continued to move through the air. Janelle touched it with her free hand, closed her fingers around it, and brought it close to her body. She kept her eyes on his face. “This one looks just like his daddy,” she said. She sighed, and then she freed her hand from the baby’s grip and wiped the tears from the baby’s cheeks. “But he cries just like his mommy.” Then, perhaps fearing that she’d said something too personal or given too much of herself away, Janelle looked up at Colleen and smiled as if to reset the moment. “Will you tell me something about him?” she asked. “You said you were friends with Rodney in high school.”

  “Yes,” Colleen said.

  “What was he like back then?”

  “I’m sure he was the same as when you knew him,” Colleen said. “It hasn’t been that long since we were all in high school.” But as she said it, she recalled the yearbook photo of Rodney she’d seen two nights earlier, and she combed back through her memories, searching for one that would reveal something about Rodney that Janelle did not already know.

  Her mind settled on a face that was not Rodney’s, and sharp, tactile memories and sensations of smell and sound washed over her as wholly as if the experiences had been lived just moments before. The face she recalled belonged to a boy named Billy O’Grady. They had all been in the tenth grade together and were probably only fifteen or sixteen years old, but when Colleen thought of Billy O’Grady’s face in that moment she recalled the face of someone who looked like a middle-aged man, all sharp angles and sunken cheeks, tawny skin and a fluff of white-blond hair that seemed impossibly bright. She could not recall ever seeing Billy smile or speak, but somehow she knew his teeth had been crooked and misshapen, his accent thick, nearly unintelligible with its deep, twangy country resonance.

  “There was a boy we were in school with in the tenth grade,” Colleen said. She turned and gazed out the nursery’s window as if the glass opened up to time itself, the dense trees lining the backyard less real than the memory she recalled. “Everyone made fun of him because he was poor and his clothes looked dirty, and we— Everyone called him a terrible name.”

  “What was the name?” Janelle asked.

  Colleen kept her eyes on the window. “People called him Butt Munch,” she said.

  “Oh, my God,” Janelle said. “That poor boy. Kids can be so mean.” The baby stirred in her arms, and a near-silent moan came from his tiny body, continuing on until it ended in a sigh.

  “It’s awful to think about now, but we were kids, and no one really thought about it at the time.”

  “Did Rodney—?”

  “No,” Colleen said. “That’s what I was going to say. I don’t remember Rodney being mean to him. As a matter of fact, I can remember them shooting baskets before gym class.” She looked from the baby back to the window. “Billy would take these really awkward, dramatic shots from half-court or the three-point line, and Rodney would rebound for him, chase the ball down, toss it back to him.” She looked back at Janelle, who was smiling, her eyes wet. “I remember Rodney doing that.”

  “So that’s what he was like in high school?” she asked.

  “Yes,” said Colleen. “That’s what he was like.”

  “He was still that way,” Janelle said. “He was just a really good person.”

  “That’s how I remember him too,” Colleen said.

  The music that Colleen had first heard in the bathroom suddenly grew louder, and she was aware that a door had opened in the hallway. She turned to see a young Black boy standing in the doorway to the nursery. He wore black shorts and an Atlanta Hawks jersey. His hair was cut close and sharp, and his eyes were large, his body thin and long in the way that all teenage boys’ bodies seem when they have not yet learned how to carry themselves.

  “Jay,” Janelle said, “this is Colleen.”

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Hello,” Colleen said.

  “She was one of Rodney’s friends in high school,” Janelle said.

  “I’m so sorry about your brother-in-law,” Colleen said.

  Jay just stood there for a moment, his face portraying nothing. “Do we have any Coke?” he finally asked Janelle.

  “I don’t know, Jay,” Janelle said. “I’ve got my hands full. You can check the refrigerator easier than I can at the moment.”

  With that, the boy was gone. Colleen could hear his heavy footfalls as he moved down the hallway, across the living room, and into the kitchen.

  “I’m sorry about that,” Janelle said. “That’s my little brother. He moved up here from Atlanta for school, and he wasn’t yet settled when all this happened.”

  “That’s okay,” Colleen said. “I’m sure it’s nice to have him close.”

  “Not really,” Janelle whispered, as if confessing a secret. “He was getting into some trouble, and my parents were just hoping—” She stopped as if searching for the right words or phrase, but she didn’t finish. Instead, she looked down at her baby. He had stopped nursing, and he was threatening to close his eyes and drift off to sleep again. Janelle, perhaps sensing Colleen’s awkwardness at the things Janelle had just said to her, looked up and smiled. “Do you want to hold him?” she asked.

  “Me?” Colleen asked, as if someone else was in the room. “I mean, if that’s okay. I’d love to.”

  “Do you mind burping him?” Janelle asked. She smiled as if knowing that she was offering Colleen the more undesirable half of the feeding process.

  “No,” Colleen said. “No, not at all.”

  Janelle lifted the baby toward Colleen. He had opened his eyes and was staring intently at her. She raised her hands and held him under his arms. She stared at him for a moment, making eyes at him, trying to get him to smile. He gurgled and smiled. Milk spilled from his mouth and landed on his shirt.

  “Whoops,” Colleen said. She turned the baby to face Janelle, and Janelle smiled and leaned forward and wiped the milk from the baby’s mouth and shirt. She draped the towel over Colleen’s shoulder, and Colleen held the baby so that his face rested there. She patted his back gently.

  “It’s not any of my business,” Janelle said, “but your dad told me what happened to you and your husband, and, again, it’s not my business, but I just want to say that I’m sorry.”

  Colleen stared at Janelle’s face, her hand rhythmically
patting the baby’s back until his body heaved in a small burp. Even then she did not stop patting him. She was shocked, both by Janelle’s condolences after her own recent tragedy, and that Winston had managed to mention it in the short time Colleen had been in the bathroom.

  Colleen was crying before she realized it. Janelle cocked her head and whispered, “I’m sorry,” and she reached out and touched Colleen’s knee. Colleen nodded her head, but she didn’t know why, and then Janelle reached out her arms for the baby, and Colleen passed him back to his mother. The burp cloth remained resting on Colleen’s shoulder. Janelle passed her a tissue, and Colleen wiped her eyes.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “I hope I didn’t say the wrong thing,” Janelle said. “I just wanted you to know that I’m sorry.”

  Colleen thought of Scott in Dallas, all those miles and a time zone away. She didn’t want to go back there, but she couldn’t imagine living without him after what they had been through, even if it often felt as if they hadn’t been through it together. She knew she had to go home, and she found herself wondering what Janelle would do.

  “Do you think you’ll stay here?” Colleen asked.

  Janelle looked at the floor and shook her head. “Somebody killed my husband for no reason. And two nights ago we had the Klan or something show up at our door, shoot off guns, crash a log through my little brother’s window. Will I stay?” Janelle said. She shook her head again. “Would you?”

  It was late afternoon, and Colleen was sitting on the bed in her bedroom, on the phone with Scott. After leaving Janelle Bellamy’s house, Winston had driven her home before going back to work. As soon as she’d walked in the door, she’d gone upstairs to her bedroom and called Scott’s office in Dallas. He hadn’t answered when the receptionist patched her through to his desk, but Colleen had left a voice message, and she’d spent the day waiting for him to call back.

  When he finally called back, Colleen had found herself in tears, recounting the visit with Janelle Bellamy, her memories of Rodney, and now the particular predicament Janelle found herself in with a new baby and a younger brother both living under her roof. Colleen had tried to imagine herself in that situation—the murder, the terror, the loneliness.

  “I would leave too,” Colleen said. “I don’t blame her for wanting to.”

  “But who’d want to live in Atlanta?” Scott said. “It’s hot and flat and traffic is terrible, and there’s no water. It’s totally landlocked.”

  Colleen laughed. “You just described Dallas to a T,” she’d said. “T for Texas.” Her mother’s half-read magazines—Southern Living, Ladies’ Home Journal—were open on the bed and scattered all around her.

  “Yeah, I guess you’re right,” Scott said. He was quiet for a moment, but Colleen could feel him thinking on the other end of the line. “Is that why you left and went home? Are you thinking that she should go back to Atlanta because you went back to Oak Island?”

  “I haven’t come back to stay,” Colleen said. “I think Janelle would go back to Atlanta to stay. That makes sense for her.”

  “That’s good to hear,” Scott said. “The part about you not being there to stay, I mean.”

  “I think Janelle should go back because it’s not safe for her and her family here, and she doesn’t have an anchor,” Colleen said. “And she hasn’t been here long enough for the place to get inside her, you know.”

  “Do you think Dallas could ever get inside you?” he asked.

  “God, I hope not,” Colleen said. She heard Scott laugh. She waited, wanting to say the right thing, the true thing. “But you’re my anchor,” she finally said.

  “And you’re mine.”

  After she hung up the phone, Colleen realized that her body was humming with contentment. She lay back on her pillow and stared at the ceiling, fighting the urge to call Scott back to fan the flame of what she now felt. She had not realized that she had spent the past few months hungering for this feeling until the very moment she felt it. And then she realized something else, something that both pained her and healed her: the conversation that she and Scott had just had was the first serious conversation they’d had without mentioning their son since the day they had lost him. That alone made her want to call him back, made her want to share this news with him, made her want to ask him what it meant. Had they healed? Had they forgotten him? Had they grown used to him being gone? Or had their lives—which is to say life, really—just moved on?

  She recalled the feeling she’d had as she’d flown over the waterways before touching down in Wilmington, the feeling that her son’s ghost or spirit had followed her from Texas. She thought of the nursery door she’d kept closed since coming home from the hospital, of the remnants of her child that she’d hoped to store there without them escaping. But he would be with her—was with her now—no matter where she went. She thought of Janelle and her baby and her brother, Jay, loading up the car for Atlanta, Rodney’s spirit watching them leave and then trailing behind them as they headed south, flying alongside the car, peering through the back window at his child where he slept in his car seat.

  Colleen dozed off and on, her mind never far from Scott or Janelle or her father or the feeling of holding Janelle’s baby in her arms, the scent of powder that lifted from his body and clothes. From her bed, Colleen heard Winston come home, heard him speak to her mother, heard him refuse dinner on his way up the stairs. She opened her eyes. It had grown dark outside.

  When she opened her door, she could hear Groom’s voice downstairs, talking with her mother in the kitchen. The light was on in her parents’ room, and she walked across the hallway and found her father sitting on their bed in his undershirt and pants. He looked exhausted.

  “Hey,” she said. She leaned against the door frame and crossed her arms.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “You done for the day?”

  “Done for the day,” he said. “But not for the night. I’m on runway duty.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. With her father in his undershirt, she saw how thin his arms looked, how much older his body appeared now.

  “But I’ve got some good news,” he said. “Groom finished up with that rear landing gear today. We’re cleared for takeoff, as they say.”

  “That is good news,” Colleen said.

  “One half of the puzzle solved,” he said. He had his shoes off, and she could see his socked toes curling against the carpet. “Thanks for going out to Janelle’s house with me today. That made it easier, I think. For me and for her. Hopefully, we can find out what happened to him.”

  “Any word on the bust down in Myrtle Beach?”

  “No, no results back yet,” Winston said. “But I’m hopeful we’ll get a break.”

  “Me too,” Colleen said. “I’m hopeful too.

  Friday, November 2, 1984

  Chapter 13

  Maybe it was the strafing beam of the airport’s beacon light that gave Winston the dream that he had, or perhaps it was his sitting up in the driver’s seat, his head cocked back against the headrest, his mouth open, sucking damp night air through the cruiser’s open windows. The light was in his dream, and so was his breathlessness, and so was the dampness. And so was the airplane.

  In the dream it is dark, and Winston and Marie and Colleen are all floating in the ocean, the bright winking light of the Yaupon lighthouse hovering above the horizon in the inky, black distance. Winston knows the three of them are floating with the aid of something hard and buoyant, and as the lighthouse revolves and casts a weak beam like an arm reaching too far to touch you, Winston is able to make out the piece of the airplane’s wing that he is clinging to. Colleen and Marie float within earshot, close enough for him to see that they too are clinging to pieces of the airplane, close enough to hear Marie’s panicked cries, close enough to hear Colleen’s terrifying silence. The ocean roars around them. Winston knows they are being pushed toward the shore, closer and closer to the breakers, where walls of water will so
on crash down upon them. His clothes are soaked, and they are so heavy he fears they will either pull him down or be ripped from his body, exposing his skin to the sharp plane debris that floats around him. His fingers grip the wing as tightly as they can. He is terrified of letting go, going under and never seeing Colleen and Marie again. And then he thinks of them floating somewhere behind him. He looks back, sees that the ocean is on fire with the plane’s wreckage, oil slicks burning like torches, Colleen’s and Marie’s faces lit in terror by the orange light.

  “Hold on!” Winston screams.

  When the radio blasted a voice into the quiet car, Winston lurched forward as if tossed by a wave, his feet kicking as if trying to swim to the surface. He was in the cruiser on the runway, the beacon light behind him, the airplane’s silhouette lit by the moon.

  “We just got another fire reported in Plantation Cove,” Rudy’s voice said over the CB.

  “I can be there in ten,” Glenn’s voice responded.

  Winston caught his breath, shook the image of the fiery ocean from his mind, and picked up the receiver.

  “I can be there in two. I’m right out here at the airport.”

  “Meet you there,” Glenn said.

  Winston looked at his watch. It was a few minutes past midnight. He cranked the engine and threw the cruiser into reverse, cutting a wide semicircle before pulling it into drive and gunning it down the runway back toward the parking lot.

  There was no traffic and he was already so close that there wasn’t any need to turn on his siren or roof lights, but he drove as fast as he could down Beach Road before turning right into the development. He’d known the arsonist would keep setting fires, but he was surprised that he was back at it—especially back at it at the same place—so soon. It meant that, at least to the arsonist, the fires he was setting were personal.

  Winston killed his headlights once he’d driven into the neighborhood, the cruiser’s running lights giving him plenty to go by. He followed the road to where it ended in a T-bone at the marsh-front properties, and he looked to his left at the house he’d investigated the night before. It appeared quiet and vacant, but across the street from that house he caught the flicker of orange flames coming from another home that was under construction. He watched a truck pull into the muddy yard and turn its high beams on. Someone had beaten Winston there. He turned left and barreled down the road as fast as the cruiser could accelerate.