When Ghosts Come Home(35)

On the flight from Charlotte, Colleen had finished her beer and then closed her eyes and laid her head back on the seat. She had imagined the spirit of her dead son flying alongside her outside the plane’s window, going extra fast to stay abreast of the airplane so he could keep his eyes on her. She knew this would sound crazy—insane, in fact—if she were to say it out loud, but a few months ago she’d been a woman waiting on a baby, and she was just a woman who’d lost one, and somehow it felt like now she was less than what she’d started out being. As the airplane had prepared to land, she opened her eyes and looked out the window to see its shadow on the clouds beneath them. When the clouds broke, the plane’s shadow fell to the earth below, skimming over the faces of waterways and the waving heads of sawgrass and the tops of scrub oaks. The spirit of her son merged with the shadow of the airplane, and she knew he had returned to the place where she and Scott had spent so many hours skirting his parents’ boat through these waters, the place where they had planned to make their home so very far from Dallas, Texas.

But this area hadn’t always been home, at least not to Colleen anyway; it was Scott’s home. He had even looked like the North Carolina coast the first day she’d laid eyes on him four years earlier in the registration line at Carolina. They’d been grouped together because their last names both started with B, and she’d spotted Scott with a folded class schedule sticking out of the back pocket of his shorts. Unlike the other guys in line to register for classes—most of them with shaggy hair and in blue jeans and boots—Scott looked as if he’d just stepped onto the dock after a day on the water: canvas boat shoes that were tied so loosely they appeared to have been slipped on; the tan shorts and the baby blue polo shirt tucked into them; the braided leather belt; the Ray-Ban aviators that sat atop the white cotton sun visor. It was easy to see him for what he was: a rich kid from the eastern side of the state whose parents didn’t quite have the financial pull necessary to get the prodigal son into an Ivy League law school or even somewhere like Wake Forest or Duke, but a family nonetheless with just enough political clout with the board of governors to encourage Chapel Hill to look the other way while opening its doors for their boy.

Colleen certainly didn’t have the grades, connections, or financial backing to attend Wake Forest or Duke, but she’d done well on the LSAT and maintained a solid GPA, so Chapel Hill had thrown a little scholarship money her way. North Carolina Central had offered her a full ride, and although she had to admit to herself that something vaguely liberal and progressive spoke to her about the prospect of attending a historically Black university, she always knew she would end up choosing Chapel Hill. It was the late 1970s, and the thought of being a minority among minorities validated whatever it was inside her that made her feel that, so far, her life had been far too comfortable.

Life had been comfortable for Scott too, but the more she watched him that first semester and the more she learned about him the clearer it became that he found law school especially challenging. It was evident that he wasn’t going to be the smartest student in their classes, and, after a few weeks of listening to him stumble around his answers when called on in Property, Colleen understood that Scott had never been the smartest student in any of his classes, even if he had more than likely been the richest and the best looking. But there was something in his willingness to try to talk through tough questions that attracted her, and by the time their first semester was halfway over she and Scott and a handful of other 1Ls were regularly meeting for beer and pizza on Wednesday nights at a basement dive called the Rathskellar, just off Franklin Street.

The group—there were six of them: three guys and three girls—would drink Coors Light and eat pizza and occasionally go to the jukebox and play Duran Duran or Springsteen to drown out the voice of Ronald Reagan, who so often appeared on the television above the bar. The place was a dive, and the bar didn’t yet have cable, but the bartender would continually clamber up and down the beer kegs to switch the stations and adjust and readjust the rabbit ears to get the reception just right.

Only one person in their group liked Reagan: Brantley Suttles, a staunch Baptist from Shelby who’d gone to Campbell as an undergrad. The rest of them believed themselves to be Democrats, although it was clear to Colleen that none of them but Scott knew exactly why. Unlike their parents—hers included—who were still mourning the assassinations of John and Bobby Kennedy and still pissed at Nixon for too many reasons to count, Scott’s mother and father were blue-blood conservatives, products of the old money that seeped from the once-decaying and now-gone plantations in the eastern part of North Carolina. But that power was fleeting and recentering itself politically and geographically in Raleigh, Charlotte, Greensboro, and Chapel Hill. Scott seemed to understand this, and he was more than willing to discuss the waning powers of his parents’ worldview. Unlike Colleen’s political ideologies, which were based on protests, headlines, song lyrics, and domestic bombings by fringe groups, Scott’s political ideology was much simpler. What he didn’t possess in inherent brilliance or revolutionary zeal he made up for in his simple understanding of people: their motivations, fears, and frustrations.

Theirs was a strange generation. They grew up with headlines about marches, protests, and sit-ins; they watched the Vietnam War and Woodstock live on color television; they all wanted to be H. Rap Brown and Jane Fonda and Patty Hearst; and when they turned eighteen and felt the full conviction of their revolutionary duty, they all voted for a soft-spoken peanut farmer who was systematically humiliated from his earliest days in office until what seemed his very last. And what did we do then? Colleen asked herself. They turned their gazes inward, a turning that had begun much earlier than they realized.