When Ghosts Come Home(27)

As to their visit, his parents only stayed at Rodney and Janelle’s house for a long weekend before heading back to Atlanta without him, although Jay knew his mother had wanted to stay longer to make sure Janelle and the baby were settled, but his father had never been one for vacations, which really meant that he’d never been one to allow himself to take any time off work, and by Saturday he was openly questioning whether or not he and Jay’s mother should just leave on Sunday afternoon instead of Monday morning.

“Less traffic on Sunday,” he’d said.

“No, James” was all his mother had said, not even raising her eyes from the baby’s face where he slept, cradled in her arms.

Janelle’s husband, Rodney, had sensed his father-in-law’s restlessness and the strain it was putting on Janelle and her mother, so on Sunday, Rodney borrowed a jon boat from a friend and took Jay’s father fishing. Janelle had tried taking the family to the beach on Saturday, but that had been a challenge. The baby had cried in the sticky sand and hot sun, and Jay’s father had sat on a lawn chair, reading a newspaper he had folded into a tiny square to keep it from being rattled loose from his grip and carried away by the wind coming off the ocean, his only concession to his daily wardrobe being the shorts he wore. He still wore his same black work shoes, black socks, and long-sleeved shirt buttoned at the wrists, and, of course, his cap.

They were the only Black family on the beach that day, and Jay could feel the eyes of the white tourists upon them, and he couldn’t help but remember what Kelvin had joked about white people doing to Black folks out in the country.

Once he and Rodney had walked down to the ocean and crashed through the breakers and were floating far from the shore, Jay had asked him, “Where are all the Black people at?”

Rodney had turned back toward the beach, its gray sand littered with pasty white bodies except for the dark clump where Jay’s mother and sister sat on beach towels and his father sat on his chair, fighting against the wind as he turned one of the pages of his newspaper. Rodney laughed and looked back at Jay.

“Working,” he said. “Or hunting, maybe fishing.” He looked back at the beach. “None of those people on the beach are from here. People from here don’t come to the beach.”

“What do they do?”

“I don’t know,” Rodney said. “Same thing you do in Atlanta, I guess,” but Jay knew that couldn’t be true. In Atlanta, he played video games at Kelvin’s house, hung out at the mall, shot hoops on the court that was walking distance from his house. He looked at Rodney, who was now floating on his back, his eyes closed and his arms thrown wide as if welcoming the sunlight. Jay couldn’t imagine Rodney being a kid his age, couldn’t imagine him growing up in a place like this.

And then Jay’s parents were gone, leaving him behind in a small house with a much older sister, who’d become a mother and who now felt more like a stranger than she ever had before. He was also left with a nephew who made him feel much too young to be called “uncle” and a brother-in-law whose cool, calm distance made him feel younger still.

It was late June, and while Jay did not know how long he’d be staying with his sister and her family, the fact that Janelle took him to the mall in Wilmington to shop for a backpack and new school shoes gave him a good idea. And then, in early August when classroom assignments were released by the county schools, Rodney drove him over to South Brunswick High School, where his father, a gruff, surly old man who reminded Jay of his own father, had his father worn glasses and gone to college, gave him a long, nearly silent tour of the school.

There wasn’t much to do during the bright, white-hot August days while Jay waited in dreadful terror for school to start. Rodney left for work at Brunswick Electric early in the morning, and by the time Jay left the guest room, Janelle would’ve already fed the baby and put him down for his first nap of the day. Jay would find bland, unexciting cereal in the pantry and milk in the refrigerator before sitting down at the small kitchen table and pouring himself a cold breakfast.

Sometimes, Janelle had sat with him while he ate, and she’d ask about life back in Atlanta. How were Mom and Dad? What did he and his friends do when they weren’t robbing convenience stores? What did he like to study in school? Jay understood these questions as honest attempts to know him, but they merely pointed out the gulf in their ages and the fact that the two of them had been raised by two seemingly different sets of parents and that life had been and would be very different for them both as a result.

In the instances in which he had been at the house alone, Jay had taken the opportunity to explore its contents, which meant he scoured the drawers and shelves in Janelle and Rodney’s bedroom. What he’d found there had embarrassed him: Rodney’s underwear; Janelle’s panties; a pack of condoms; and a bundle of love letters Rodney had written to Janelle that featured descriptions of sex that seemed more real and romantic, and therefore more embarrassing, than anything Terry had described to him and Kelvin back in Atlanta.

Most often, Jay spent time in Rodney and Janelle’s narrow walk-in closet, where Rodney’s clothes hung on the left and Janelle’s on the right. Above the racks, shelves rose all the way to the ceiling, and it was there, on the top shelf above Rodney’s clothes, that Jay found the rifle.

It was resting inside a hard, powder-blue case, but Jay knew what lay inside as soon as his fingers swept over the hard, plastic shell that was as finely dimpled as gooseflesh. He found the handle, and he lifted the case down and set it on the floor in the middle of the closet. When he opened it, he caught the scent of the rifle’s oiled metal barrel and its polished stock. The weapon was hard and cold and beautiful, and he imagined Rodney carrying it in the woods around Brunswick County, sighting down a deer or squirrel or rabbit or bear, whatever it was that men like Rodney hunted with a gun like this. Jay had grown up hearing his father tell hunting stories about his life as a country boy down in Norcross, Georgia, and Jay remembered that when Janelle first began dating Rodney, their father felt that he finally had someone with whom to share his stories, someone who would appreciate them in the same way their father did. Jay had felt left out, had felt that Rodney was just one more person who had more in common with Jay’s father than he did, but he’d also been certain that he could’ve never enjoyed hunting the way the two of them did. But now, gazing down at the rifle where it begged to be handled, Jay finally understood. He wanted to load it, aim it, and fire it, but it was weeks before he did any of that. In the meantime, he left the open case on the floor of the closet, never going farther away than Rodney and Janelle’s bed, never pointing the rifle at anything other than the image of himself holding a weapon in the bedroom mirror that hung on the wall above the dresser.