When Ghosts Come Home(37)

“How’s Scott?” he asked.

She sighed. “Let’s talk in the car,” she said.

He’d parked the Regal in the short-term lot, and, while she waited for him to unlock the passenger’s-side door, she spied the posters and flyers bearing her father’s face in the backseat.

“How’s the campaign?” she asked.

He laughed, shook his head. “Let’s talk in the car,” he said.



Once they left the airport, Colleen and her father made small talk as he drove through Wilmington:

“How’s the weather in Dallas?”

“Hot. How’s it been here?”

“Cooler than you’d think.”

“How’s Mom?”

“About the same.”

It wasn’t until they were crossing the bridge over the Cape Fear River and into Brunswick County that he put his rough palm over the back of her hand and gave it a squeeze. Colleen looked at the river below them where it snaked inland from the ocean. She’d missed bridges and open water, although she’d grown up terrified of both. She felt her father’s hand on top of hers, and suddenly she recalled what he would say to her each time they crossed a bridge when she was a girl, no matter where they were. She looked over at him.

“Are you going to say it?” she asked.

“Say what?”

“Don’t look down,” she said.

“Don’t look back.” He smiled, kept his eyes on the road, gave her hand another squeeze.

“Why don’t you say it anymore?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe it’s because you’re not scared anymore.”

But was this true? Was she not scared anymore? Or was it possible that the intervening years had found them rarely in the car together, certainly not crossing bridges together? That possibility filled her with sadness, and she chose to believe that she was no longer afraid instead of believing the truer thing: that she was no longer a girl who spent time in the car with her dad.

Her father cleared his throat, took his hand off hers, and moved it back to the steering wheel.

“Colleen, I’m not going to ask you what made you decide to come home. That’s not my business.” He coughed as if he were buying time to consider what he would say next. The sun was directly overhead, and Colleen knew the river probably looked beautiful in the brilliant light, but she didn’t turn to see it. “But your mother’s probably going to ask a lot of questions. That’s just how she is, and she doesn’t mean a thing by it. I’m just telling you so you can think of whether or not you want to give answers.”

“I might wait and see what her questions are first,” Colleen said. “Then I’ll decide if I want to answer them.”

“That’s fair,” her father said. He looked over at her and smiled. “That’s fair.”

“Are you playing ‘good cop’ before we go into the interrogation room?”

“No,” he said. “No. I just don’t want you walking in the door and being caught off guard or upset by anything your mother says. She’s been worried about you, and I know you’ve been worried about her, and I just—I don’t know.”

“It’s okay, Dad,” she said. “I know.”

He nodded toward her Walkman.

“I see you got one of those radios.”

Colleen had forgotten that she’d clipped the Walkman to her belt loop and left the headphones around her neck.

“What’s it sound like?” he asked.

“You want to hear it?”

“Sure.”

She slipped the headphones from around her neck and placed them on his ears, and then she pushed play. She heard the music come on, and she sat back and watched him bop his head up and down. He passed his hand through the air in front of him as if he were groping for something in the dark, and Colleen understood that this was his idea of dancing.

“Groovy,” he said.

She laughed and pushed stop.

“That’s enough, Dad,” she said. “I don’t want you getting too hip. I don’t want Mom having questions for you too.”



Colleen’s father didn’t tell her about the airplane he’d found the night before or the body of Rodney Bellamy until they were driving past the tiny airport where the abandoned airplane waited like a subject that could not be avoided. Although the day was bright, Colleen could see the distant glimmer of the beacon light in its rotation as they drove past.

“You knew Rodney, right?” he asked.

“Yes, I knew him,” she said, “but not well. He was nice. Everyone liked him. His dad is—”

“Ed Bellamy,” he said. “I know, but your mother reminded me in case I didn’t.”

“How do you think he ended up out there?” she asked. “I can’t imagine him being somebody who’d deal drugs or meet airplanes in the middle of the night.”

“I don’t think he was that kind of guy,” her father said. “His wife said he’d gone out for diapers.”

“Gone out for diapers?” Collen repeated. She turned away from her window and looked at her father. “He had a baby?”

With that question, Colleen felt the weather change inside the car; it became cold and quiet, and she could feel that her father understood that whatever wound he feared her mother would uncover had been uncovered before they’d even arrived home.