Last Girl Ghosted(86)

“We’ll get to her,” said Cooper, probably reading his body language. “We’ll find her.” The other man picked up speed; Bailey leaned back.

“Tell me about your case,” said Cooper. “Start from the beginning.”

Bailey Kirk didn’t like lost things. And he wasn’t going to lose the ghost again, Mia—and Wren—with him.



forty-one


The road, a great unfurling black ribbon, the engine, a low hum in my brain. It’s hypnotic and I fight to stay awake. My phone is off and stowed, a nod to your request—demand? Maybe you won’t show because you know I’ve disobeyed. Or maybe this is just a game you are playing with me. How far can I get her to run? How long will she chase? Will she follow me wherever I go?

My mother told us over and over about the night she met my father. How she was a waitress in a diner, and he came in with a group of his friends, many of them coworkers on the same construction site. They were a rowdy, funny group, bawdy, flirty but not disrespectful as groups of men can sometimes be. They ordered a ton of food—burgers, big subs, fries, onion rings, and milkshakes mostly.

As a kid, I liked to imagine it. In my mind the diner was a sunny, glossy place, colorful, and kitschy with red booths and big menus, a pie case with deserts circling slowly, vintage ads and a sizzling grill. Probably it was nothing like that; it was just a dump at a truck stop. But in my imagination, it gleamed with shiny surfaces, the Beatles playing on a jukebox.

My mom, Alice, she was in a bad place that day. She’d run out of money and had to drop out of community college, was taking care of my grandmother who was sick. She never even knew her father; he’d left her mother before Alice was even born. She got the occasional Christmas card from him, which she tossed right in the trash. Alice wasn’t prone to depression or dark moods, but she was feeling lost, adrift in her life—not sure what was coming next.

“I saw him right away,” she said. “There was just this one second when they all walked in, crowded into a couple of booths, and our eyes met. I swear, I knew right that second. Felt it right here.”

She’d always put her hand to her heart.

While she served the tables, the men joked with her and hit on her, and all the while she just smiled and kept to her work. When one of the guys got handsy, wrapping an arm around her hips when she came to stand beside him, my dad stepped up.

“Show some respect,” he told his friend, who tipped his baseball cap and apologized to my mom with a sheepish grin.

Show some respect.

It was those words that moved Alice, who said that she rarely felt respected as a young woman with no money, a struggling student until she couldn’t even afford to be that anymore. Just a waitress then, working for tips. Respect was for other people. She blushed, was embarrassed for herself and even for the handsy guy who probably meant no harm.

After a while, my father rose to talk to her when she was at the register.

“Sorry about my friend,” he said. “They’re good guys. It’s just that—they’re guys.”

“It’s fine,” she said. It was fine. There were good men, and bad men, she thought then. Bad men who hurt you, left you, broke you—like her father. But Alice had my dad and his friends pegged for good men—maybe rowdy, silly, but not dangerous, not cruel.

“So I’m not hitting on you, but—”

“But?” She smiled at him, and he blushed like a girl, his cheeks turning pink. He looked down shyly, dug his hands into his pockets.

“When does your shift end? Can I take you for an ice cream?”

Rocky road for him. Chocolate chip mint for her. A proposal with his mother’s gifted ring not even a month later. A backyard wedding with family and friends, wildflowers, and tears of happiness. Then she was pregnant with Jay—not planned but they greeted the news with joy. Then my father was deployed for the first time. That’s how the story went. Later, when he was home between tours, I was conceived.

It was no fairy tale, but it was their story.

She always told it after a bad night with him, when we were all shaken and he was sleeping it off. It was like a prayer, a reminder that there was good in him somewhere and that she had seen it once. That she’d loved him.

As a kid, I loved that story—imagining them, who they were before us, before he went overseas. And toward the end I hated it. It was a fantasy about a man who no longer existed. And no matter how badly she wanted him to come home, he was gone. And when I think of it now, anger lodges in my throat. I think if she just gave up on who he was, maybe she would have seen who he had become. Maybe she could have saved us all.

Instead, we all followed him, and didn’t leave even when he hurt her again and again.

What would Dear Birdie say?

She’d say to forgive the past, forgive my mother for loving someone who hurt her, for not taking us away. Because she could only do what she knew how to do.

It’s cold comfort.

There’s no moon, no stars. Just the trees and layers of dark. Up ahead I see it. A tilting wood post with three red reflectors. Here, I should turn right. I stop, idle a moment. I haven’t seen another car for an hour; the road I’m on is completely deserted. I roll down the window, hear only the wind, smell the scent of pine.

What is this place?

Did Bonnie, Mia, and Melissa come to this fork in the road and make the turn, never to be heard from again?