When Ghosts Come Home(34)

“Mrs. Roberts,” she said. The teacher looked up at her. “I don’t feel good. I need to go to the office and call my mom.” She backed away, opened the door, and stepped into the hall. Neither Mrs. Roberts nor anyone else in class had said a word. She fled as soon as she’d pulled the door closed.

Colleen had hidden out in the bathroom while the school secretary called home to tell her mother what had happened and to ask her to bring a new outfit to the school. The nurse had given Colleen a sanitary pad, and she sat down on the toilet, her stained underwear on the floor beside her, and held the pad between her legs. Her sweater and skirt had been folded inside a paper bag that sat on the floor beside her underwear. The outfit was ruined. Colleen cried at the realization that she would not wear it in her school picture, and she wondered when her mother would arrive and what outfit she would bring to replace it. She didn’t know how long she sat there, but she remembered the bell ringing and knowing that she would have to return to Mrs. Roberts’s classroom to gather her things and that she would have to answer questions from her teacher and her friends.

When Colleen heard the door open, she snatched her damp underwear from the floor and held it before her with the tips of her fingers as if it were a dead animal. She expected to hear her mother’s voice, but instead she heard the sound of handcuffs clinking and the squeak of her father’s rigid belt, the heavy footstep of his hard-soled shoes. Her heart sank.

“Honey,” he said. “Are you in there?”

“Yes,” Colleen said, choking back a sob. She had never been embarrassed to cry in front of her father, but sitting there in a closed bathroom stall, naked except for a rumpled blouse and a pad held between her legs, she was humiliated. “You’re not supposed to be in the girls’ room.”

“Well,” he said, “I’ve been given a special dispensation by the principal.” The stall creaked, and she imagined her father leaning his body against it. “They told me what happened, and I brought you something to wear.” He sighed. “I hope I got it right.”

She pictured her father in her room at home, opening the closet and her dresser drawers, pulling out skirts and sweaters and blouses and placing them on the bed as if trying to fit them into some kind of puzzle that made sense to him. She could not imagine what he had chosen, and she was terrified at the thought of hurting his feelings, but she was even more terrified of leaving the bathroom and sitting for photos in whatever he had brought.

Colleen looked up to see him lowering down an outfit on a hanger. It was the same yellow sweater set she had purchased from Belk’s, the tags still attached. She stood up, still holding the pad between her legs, and took it from his hand. She remembered crying with relief. Her father had never been shopping with her—she didn’t know that he had ever been shopping by himself—and she could not imagine him at the department store alone, wandering through Belk’s until he found the outfit she had ruined.

“How did you know to get this?” she asked.

“You think I don’t pay attention?” he said. “Your mother thinks the same thing. I pay more attention than y’all think I do.” He bent down and slipped an unopened pack of underwear beneath the stall door.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“Honey, why are you sorry?”

“Because they called you at work,” she said. “Because you went all the way to the Belk’s in Shallotte.”

“Don’t be sorry,” he said. “Don’t ever be sorry. You needed me, and I came. I’ll always come when you need me.”

And here he was, on his way once again.

The man who stood by the taxi was chewing gum, and he blew a pink bubble before pulling it back into his mouth. Colleen had had two more beers in the Charlotte airport during her layover and another one on the flight to Wilmington, and she didn’t want her father arriving and smelling alcohol on her breath. He wasn’t the kind of person to scold or judge someone for having a drink or two, but Colleen didn’t want him to learn that the law school graduate who didn’t practice law and who’d just lost a child and who might be losing her marriage had also become a day drinker.

“You got any extra gum?” she asked.

The man stopped chewing for a moment. He looked away from the runway and back at Colleen.

“I do,” he said.

“I’d love a piece if you don’t mind.”

“I don’t.”

He stepped around the front of his taxi and onto the curb. He pulled a package of gum from his pocket and passed a wrapped, pink square of Bubblicious to her.

“Thank you,” she said. She unwrapped it and popped it into her mouth.

“You’re welcome,” he said. “I hope your day gets better.”

“Me too,” she said.

“It will.”

He stepped off the curb and walked back around the front of his car to the driver’s side. He opened the door and climbed in. Colleen heard the radio come on inside the cab. He leaned back in his seat.

She put her headphones back on and pushed play and closed her eyes too. The taste of the gum was almost overwhelming in its sugary sweetness. She thought of the Bubblicious commercials and how the kids on television blew bubbles that lifted them up off the ground and allowed them to float through the air and even carried them into outer space. She kept her eyes closed and listened to Pat Benatar’s voice and turned her face up toward the sky and blew a bubble, pictured her body leaving the bench and her feet leaving the ground. She would look down and search for her father’s car on the roads around the airport, and she would somehow lower her body back to the earth just seconds before he arrived. She stayed like that, eyes closed but lifted toward the sky. A tear rolled down each cheek and met at the bottom of her neck.