When Ghosts Come Home(33)
He lay in bed listening to their quiet voices, and then he heard Rodney’s heavy footsteps in the hallway, and then the sound of the front door opening and closing quietly. In the driveway, Janelle’s car started, and the yellow glow of the Datsun’s headlights illuminated the blinds that covered the window above Jay’s bed.
He wondered where Rodney was going this late at night, and he wondered if Janelle was still awake, still staring at the rifle inside the open case that Rodney had left on their bed, her mind doing its best to decide whether or not Jay was to blame. Jay decided that he would wait to see what they asked him in the morning, and he hoped that he could catch the school bus without seeing either one of them so that he could find Cody and they could get their stories straight.
And school was where he’d been the next morning when Mr. Bellamy, Rodney’s father, opened the door to his math class and gestured to the teacher to join him in the hall. It wasn’t uncommon for a teacher or the principal or another administrator to interrupt a class to speak with a teacher, but even though he knew this, Jay could not stop the thrumming of his heart nor deny the sudden clamminess of his skin. Why did it have to be Rodney’s father at the door?
Jay’s teacher stepped halfway through the doorway and looked at him, and then she said his name and waved him out into the hall. “Get your things,” she said.
Jay stood, his body and legs feeling rubbery and cold, and slid his book and papers into his backpack. He could feel the other students’ eyes on him, and although none of them were speaking, he knew they were all wondering what the quiet Black kid from Atlanta had done.
His teacher was waiting for him at the door, and she put her hand on his shoulder as he passed through the doorway and into the hall, where Mr. Bellamy stood, his hands in his pockets. Jay had never spoken to Mr. Bellamy at school and had spent very little time with him outside of it, so he did not know how to read the man’s face.
“Jay,” Mr. Bellamy said. “Something terrible has happened.”
Chapter 5
The airport in Wilmington, North Carolina, especially in 1984, was small, and Colleen couldn’t help but think of it as a miniature model of a real airport. After getting off the phone with her mother, she found a bench near the curb outside baggage claim and took a seat, her suitcase on the ground at her feet and her purse resting on her lap. She wore a jean jacket over the T-shirt she had slept in the night before and a pair of white jeans with black Keds. She slid her headphones over her ears and pressed play on her Walkman; Pat Benatar’s “Shadows of the Night” came on in mid-song. She remembered a pair of black sunglasses in her purse. When she looked for them, she found the dog-eared copy of T. Berry Brazelton’s Infants and Mothers that she’d been carrying around in her purse for nearly a year like some kind of talisman that could change her fate. She thought about pulling out the book and flipping through its pages, but instead she found her sunglasses and slid them on, and then she sat there and cried.
A handful of taxis was lined up by the curb. A middle-aged Black man stood with his elbows propped above the driver’s-side door of the taxi closest to Colleen. He looked at her across the roof of the car and nodded hello. He wore black sunglasses too, and he also wore one of those yellow-tinted visors that you picture card dealers wearing in dark, smoky rooms where men hide out from their wives and the police.
The man mouthed something, and Colleen could tell that he was speaking to her. She took off her headphones and waited for him to repeat himself. She was still able to hear the tinny whine of Pat Benatar’s voice.
“You need to go somewhere?” the man asked.
She looked down and pushed stop on the Walkman, then she wiped her eyes behind her sunglasses. She looked back up at the man. “No,” she said. “My father’s coming to get me.”
“That’s good,” the man said. “That’s good.” He turned his head forward, and she knew that from where he stood he could see the spot on the runway where the airplanes were turning around after landing before taxiing to the airport’s one terminal. “Fathers should come get their daughters when they’re crying.”
She wanted to tell him that she wasn’t crying, but she was, and what did it matter if this man she had never seen before and would never see again watched her cry? She also wanted to tell him it was none of his business, but his business was picking people up from the airport, and she very much looked like someone who needed that business. As to her father coming to get her, that seemed to imply a rescue, and she would have to admit her father did have a history of rescuing her.
When she was twelve years old and in the seventh grade, she had saved up her babysitting money to buy a new outfit from Belk’s Department Store for the school photo. She could still picture the outfit now: a pale yellow blouse, a bright yellow skirt with a matching yellow cardigan. A white flower had been stitched over the left breast. The stitching of the flower’s blue stem ran down the front, under the left arm, and across the back of the sweater.
She was incredibly proud of the outfit, and it was easy for Colleen to recall her devastation, along with her humiliation, when she felt the warm dampness of her first period seep into her cotton underwear and wet her thighs where she sat at her desk in Mrs. Roberts’s English class. Colleen and her mother had already talked about her getting her period, and she knew exactly what was happening, but she couldn’t stop a mixture of shame and shock from overtaking her. She resisted raising her hand and calling Mrs. Roberts over for fear of having to tell her what had happened and having anyone else hear. Instead, she slipped off her cardigan and did her best to bunch it around her to hide the stain that she knew was spreading across the front and back of her skirt. Everyone else in the class was bent over their desks, working quietly. She stood and pushed back her chair. Her underwear felt heavy, as if its weight could cause it to slide down her legs to the floor.