Help for the Haunted(29)

“Joined the navy. You know that.”

“Well, how would I know that, Dad? I never hear from either of you.”

“Phone rings both ways, son. Phone rings both ways.”

Perhaps that was the moment my father first shifted his gaze toward the window and saw the idling bus in the parking lot. Emergency flashers blazed, turning the snow red then white then red again. Perhaps that was when a matronly, gray-haired woman stepped inside and approached the row of pay phones, opening the phone book and flipping pages. “I’ll try to call more often in the New Year,” my father said, putting his back to the woman since he didn’t like people knowing his business. “But, well, there never seems to be anything to say.”

Silence. More silence.

“Dad? Are you there?”

The tinkling sound of glass and ice. The sound of a sitcom laugh track. Finally, his father’s voice: “Your mother was the talker. Not me.”

What his father said was true, though his mother’s conversations were limited to gossip: which neighbor was having trouble paying rent, whose husband was screwing another woman. Things that held little interest for my father. “Well,” my father said, “Merry Christmas.” Those bus lights blinked outside and he thought of the artificial tree his mother used to assemble. The angel on top wore a white dress splotched with yellow from all her time spent in the attic. Year after year, her blank face stared down at the four of them before she was stowed away once more. At last, my father pushed the thought of that angel and that tree and his mother and even his father who was still on the line from his mind. It had been a mistake to call, he decided. It always was.

“Same, same,” his father said, then fumbled with the phone in a clunky good-bye.

Whatever appetite my father felt had vanished. He made up his mind to head home on an empty stomach. But as he walked out to the parking lot, he came upon a young woman with long, raven-black hair and impossibly narrow shoulders sitting on a suitcase outside the bus. She held the thick end of an icicle against her face. Her skin was so translucent, her features so delicate, he thought she might very well be an apparition.

“Ghost of the Future,” he exclaimed, “I fear you more than any spectre I have seen. But as I hope to know your purpose is to do me good, and as I hope to live to be another man from what I was, I am prepared to bear your company, and do it with a thankful heart. Will you not speak to me?”

The woman glanced up at him, and my father heard himself asking, “Did someone sock you?”

“Sock me?” Her voice was like the rest of her: soft, fragile.

“You know, hit you? I’m wondering on account of the icicle.”

“Oh. No. I have a terrible toothache. I’m on a choir trip, and the director is inside looking through the phone book, trying to find help. I thought I could bear the pain until we got to where we are going, but now that the bus is having problems, I just don’t know.”

My father stepped closer, reached out a hand, and lifted the icicle away from her face. “If it’s a toothache, the pain you are feeling is in your nerves. So you can put all the ice in the world on your face, and it is not going to make you feel better.”

“It’s not?”

“No. But I can help you.”

Did that broken-down bus and the rest of the choirgirls make it to Harlem? How did my mother convince that matronly choir director to allow her to go off with a man she met in the parking lot? Or was the pain so severe that she made one of the few rash decisions of her life and simply picked up her suitcase and got in his car without telling anyone? I don’t know those answers. However it came to be, less than an hour after he lifted that icicle from her face, my father was back at the clinic with my mother. X-rays revealed her need for a root canal. He was far from a specialist, and he couldn’t perform one on his own that night, but he gave her a pulpotomy, removing the dead tissue to alleviate the pain and pressure until she could be properly treated.

That night in Ocala, after my father shared a modified, less personal version of those events with the crowd, my mother spoke up for the first time. In her lilting voice, she said into the microphone, “Since my mouth was stuffed full of instruments, Sylvester got to do all the talking. What better way to make a man fall in love with you?”

Not the funniest joke ever told, but something about her mild-mannered delivery ignited a burst of laughter from the crowd. All at once, the feeling in the air of that auditorium shifted. People had been won over, I sensed. They were on my parents’ side now. Even my father relaxed, placing his index cards on the podium and putting a period on their how-we-met story by saying he and my mother spent that Christmas together and every one since. One of the things that drew them to each other, he explained, was their belief that the world consisted of more than just what we see and understand. And when he first confessed to her the strange things he’d witnessed starting as a child in his parents’ movie theater, she did not laugh like so many before. Instead, she asked questions. She tried to make sense of it all.

“In this way, together over time, my wife and I began to investigate ‘the otherness’ of this world we live in,” my father told the crowd. He pressed a button on the podium and the screen behind him filled with an image of an institutional hallway with a light in the corner that looked amorphous until you stared long enough and an elongated face emerged, its mouth open in a ghoulish howl.