When Ghosts Come Home(3)

He’d been worried about her being too tired to pick up the posters and flyers after her treatment, and he’d asked her not to do it, but he wondered now if he’d only been afraid to continue involving her in what he had come to believe was a losing venture. He felt shame creep over him, and he tried his best to push it down and away from him in the same manner he’d learned to vanquish his grief and fear.

But those things—shame and grief and fear—still overtook him sometimes and fell upon him like a weight that wanted to remind him of its heaviness at the very moment he forgot to stoop beneath it. He found that the weight kept him hidden from people, certainly from Marie and Colleen. From the moment his daughter was born, Winston had wanted to make himself known to her in ways his father had never made himself known to Winston, but he knew he had failed because at that very moment he and Colleen were strangers to one another, all of them—Marie included—alone and lonely in their pain.

It seemed cruel and ironic, but over the past few years Winston had dreamed of himself as his father, a man who’d left this world when he was only seventy-two. If Winston’s lifetime were to roll along the same track as his father’s, that would mean he now had twelve years left, which on some days seemed like too much time, and on other days seemed like not nearly enough.

Winston had a habit, each year around his birthday, of trying to conjure his father’s face at that same age. How old did that man seem in his mind’s eye? Older than Winston, for certain. Probably wiser too.

Sometimes, in his quiet moments, Winston’s mind would flash back to the last days at his father’s bedside. His parents had lived their whole lives in the house he’d grown up in at the end of an unpaved, wooded road in a town called Gastonia on the other side of North Carolina. The house had sat at the base of Crowder’s Mountain, and while his father was dying Winston and his younger brother had set up a hospital bed in his parents’ bedroom by a picture window that looked out over the trees. It had been fall, an October very much like this one, in fact, and they had left the windows open to allow the scents of sweat and medicine and soiled clothes and bedding to leak from the sickroom out into the chilly world. But something else had happened: the comforting rot and waste and piney reek of the forest had found its way inside, so much so that for the rest of Winston’s life, whenever he smelled pine, he was forced to confront the loss of his father with the clean, heavy nostalgia of a forest doing its work to live and die and live again.

But he still had that dream of being his father, and he’d had it again tonight before the sound he and Marie had heard had woken them both. In the dream, his father is in the hospital bed back in their house in Gastonia, his hands clenched around the sheet where it is pulled up to his chest. Winston is watching his father sleep and drift toward death, his dry tongue occasionally moving across his dry lips. Winston reaches for a cloth on the bedside table and dampens it with water. He passes the wet cloth over his father’s mouth. In the dream, Winston looks down at his own hands and sees his father’s, and then he realizes his hands are closed around the sheet, and he is lying in his father’s sickbed, and he is dying alone.

Would Colleen sit at his bedside like he’d sat at his father’s? Winston wondered if the old man had cared for him as much as Winston cared for his daughter. Surely he did, but it seemed impossible to Winston, impossible that his own father had been interested in or capable of feeling this love that could only be described as debilitating. It embarrassed him to think of his father loving him that much. And why was he thinking of it? What was he afraid of on these nights when he saw his father’s hands as his own? Colleen sitting or not sitting by his bedside, swabbing or not swabbing his chapped lips with cool water? Was he afraid of the hole his passing might leave in her life?

Colleen was just twenty-six, but she had already lost a child, Winston and Marie landing in Dallas too late to even lay eyes on his body. What do they even do with a baby that never drew breath? They hadn’t attended a funeral, and Colleen had never mentioned one. He’d been too afraid to ask her; he didn’t know if Marie had asked her, and he was ashamed of that. He’d spent so many nights since lying in bed, hurting for Colleen and her lost child, his grandson. Now the thought of his or Marie’s passing as compounding that hurt was too much for him, and for a moment he found himself wishing he and Marie had never had Colleen, had not created this life they would hurt for, this life that would hurt for them in return.

Jesus Christ, Winston, he thought, why are you even thinking about this right now? Was it Colleen’s losing the baby? Was it Marie’s being sick again, this time worse than before? Or was it the plane they’d heard—or at least the plane they thought they’d heard? The specter of a fiery crash flashed through Winston’s mind with no sound, only the images of flames and the spinning down of huge engines. But it was just an airplane coming in low, he thought. Or a dream. Maybe he and Marie had dreamed the same thing, and he would arrive at the dark airport and find it just as quiet and empty as his side of the bed back home.



The day before Halloween and not as cold as it would be, but cold enough to send the vacationers scrambling back to work and to school and to their lives somewhere outside Oak Island. Even the soft-spoken, unassuming Canadians—the ones who hadn’t headed as far south as Myrtle Beach, whose wives had combed the autumn beaches in one-piece bathing suits while looking for sand dollars, and whose husbands had kept the municipal golf course open into the middle of the month—had all gone home.