When Ghosts Come Home(36)

Colleen had never wanted to be Bernardine Dohrn; she wanted to dress like Bernardine Dohrn, to talk like Bernardine Dohrn, and to be desired like Bernardine Dohrn. Scott seemed to understand this posturing before Colleen did, but he never called her on it, never tested her liberal ideologies beyond those Wednesday night conversations in the months before and after Reagan’s election.

Their courtship began with Scott and Colleen leaving the library together on Wednesday nights, walking out to their separate cars, and driving back home to their separate apartments before meeting their friends on Franklin Street for pizza and beer. But soon enough Scott was asking Colleen if she’d like to ride with him, and they’d leave her car on campus, then stop by her place so she could drop off her books and change clothes before heading to the bar. Afterward, he’d return her to her car late that night and sit behind the wheel of his own while she cranked the engine and gave him a wave. But by Thanksgiving she was being dropped off at her car in the early mornings before class, always in the clothes she’d worn out the night before, Scott now leaning against her driver’s-side door and giving her a long kiss for the hour or two they’d go without seeing one another. Soon she found herself staying at Scott’s apartment nearly every night, driving over after leaving the library when it closed its doors at midnight, finding Scott sitting at the table in his tiny kitchen, a cassette of Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska playing relentlessly on the small stereo he kept on the counter. They’d ride to campus together the next morning, enter the building together, unafraid of anyone noticing, knowing, or imagining what went on between them when they weren’t in class.

And so they carried on that way throughout their first year of law school at Carolina, and that summer Colleen returned to her parents’ house in Oak Island and began a paid internship at a real estate law office that a friend of her father’s had lined up for her. Scott was just up the road in Wilmington, where he lived with his older brother Don and his wife and found an unpaid internship at Legal Aid, a job that took him into some of the most depressed neighborhoods in the city to meet some of the poorest people in the state. The stories he told Colleen over the phone during the week made her worry about him: his safety, his sense of justice that could easily be taken advantage of, his heart that let in too much at once. But she also worried that what he was doing actually mattered, and not just in the grand scheme of the careers they often talked about but couldn’t really imagine awaiting them at the end of their third year of school.

But Colleen hadn’t thought or worried about these things on the weekends when she drove her crappy hatchback Cavalier north on Highway 17, and she, Scott, Don, and his wife, Karen, would launch Don’s boat from the waterway at Wrightsville Beach and head out to Masonboro Island, where they’d hitch to one of the other dozen or so boats that were captained by similarly tanned, well-dressed, attractive twenty-and thirty-somethings. On the way out Don would follow the coastline and point out the gorgeous homes that had once hosted guests like the Vanderbilts and the Astors on Masonboro Sound, and Colleen couldn’t help but feel that in pointing out the absence of these families, perhaps Don was pointing out the fact that his and Scott’s family was still there, present and accounted for, not quite as glamorous or as famous, but every bit as capable of impressing Colleen with their wealth, standing, and dedication to leisure.

Once they reached Masonboro Island, they’d stay around the boat drinking and swimming and sunning themselves to a ruby red until dusk. Then they’d go ashore and make a fire and sit around with many of the same people they’d spent the day with, grilling hot dogs and hamburgers, drinking beer, and listening to music, eventually sneaking off in couples to go farther up the beach to spend the night atop a sleeping bag with nothing but a thin cotton sheet to protect their sunburned skin from the warm breeze that came off the water. They’d fall asleep to the sounds of conversations around the fire that would not die down until just before dawn.

Colleen thought that would be her life. Back then she wasn’t thinking about marrying Scott or having a child with him; she was simply living a life that she thought would last forever. And now here she was back in the place where she had thought that life would continue, sitting on a bench alone and waiting for her father.



Colleen knew that her father was not the kind of man who’d sit behind the wheel of a running car at the curb and wait to be found. He was the kind of man who parks and comes to find you, and that’s what he did. Colleen looked up, and suddenly he was there. The last time she’d seen him, he and her mother had arrived in Dallas for their grandson’s birth, and now something about her father seemed or looked different, but Colleen knew that it was she who was different. Everything about her had changed.

“Hey, bean,” her father said.

She stood, and he opened his arms to her. She left her sunglasses on and hugged him, smelled the familiar scent of him—his old man aftershave, wood smoke from the fireplace, something of the salty air. She closed her eyes. “Hey, Daddy,” she said. “Thanks for coming to get me.”

“Of course,” he said.

“I know it’s a surprise.”

He pulled away from her but kept hold of her arms. He looked directly into her eyes.

“It’s a good surprise,” he said. “It’s always good when you come home.”

Colleen did her best to smile, and then she bent down to pick up her suitcase. Her father took it from her hand when she stood.