When Ghosts Come Home(38)

“Yes,” he said. “He had a baby.”

“How old?”

“Five months, I think his wife said.”

“Boy or girl?”

Her father inhaled, held it. Although her gaze had moved to the windshield, from the corner of her eye Colleen saw her father look out the driver’s-side window as if he could not risk seeing her face.

“Boy,” he said.

Colleen closed her eyes. She felt her father’s rough palm on the back of her hand again, felt his fingers closing over hers.



Her mother was in the kitchen when they arrived home, but by the time she and her father made it inside and were standing at the bottom of the stairs, her mother had left the kitchen and was walking toward Colleen with her arms open wide.

“Colleen,” she said, “I was so surprised when you called!”

Her mother wrapped her arms around her, and Colleen hugged her back. They rocked from side to side as if it had not been just a few months since they’d seen one another, but much longer. Her mother’s body felt slender and frail, and Colleen was afraid of hurting her, even more afraid of acknowledging the changes in her mother’s body in such a short time.

They released one another, and Colleen stepped back and hitched her bag farther up her shoulder. “Well, I hope you like surprises,” she said.

“I do,” her mother said. “I do, especially good ones, good ones like this.”

Colleen’s mother looked her up and down, reached out and touched the bob of Colleen’s hair where it fell along her jaw, fingered the Walkman’s headphones as if they had come from the moon. She sighed.

“Scott called,” her mother said. “He wants you to call him as soon as you can.”

“Okay,” Colleen said. She slipped the headphones from around her neck, set the Walkman on the table inside the door, and shrugged off her jean jacket and hung it on the post at the bottom of the stairs.

“He was surprised that you were here,” her mother said, “but surely you told him you were coming?” Her statement ended in the lilt of a question, but it felt more like an accusation.

Colleen realized that her father had fled upstairs with her suitcase. He had predicted this trap, and he’d had the sense to retreat before it was sprung. Her mother held out a small slip of paper, and Colleen reached for it. It was a phone number with a 469 area code: Scott’s office telephone number, a number Colleen had not yet called enough times to memorize.

“Are you going to call him?” her mother asked.

“Yes, Mom. He’s my husband. I’m going to call him.”

“Well, good, because I think you should, because he seemed really surprised when I told him you were here.”

“I’ve got it, Mom. Thanks.”

As Colleen walked up the stairs, she passed the framed eight-by-ten photograph of her and Scott on their wedding day. She hitched her bag over her shoulder again and reached out and took the frame off the wall and held it before her. In the photo, Scott is wearing a black tuxedo with ruffles over the buttons on his shirt, and she is in a white dress dotted with silver sequins and topped by sleeves that are bunched up into what appear to be shoulder pads. They are both smiling smiles that are more nervous than happy, the slight bump of her pregnant belly imperceptibly rising against the dress’s sequined middle.

Seeing the photo did not remind her of her wedding day; it reminded her of standing at the sink in their shared bathroom in Chapel Hill with a pregnancy test sitting on the counter while she spent an hour staring at the clear plastic box, wondering at its chemistry, willing it not to reveal a brown circle the instructions described as a doughnut, but of course that doughnut had appeared.

During their final year in law school, she had moved into Scott’s too-small two-bedroom, one-bathroom apartment in Carrboro. The bathroom was a repository of their personalities and emblematic of their lives: the tiny shrapnel of beard left in the sink after Scott shaved each morning; the toothpaste they shared simply because he never bought his own; the bevy of shampoos and conditioners she would buy, try, and leave in the shower for Scott to pillage; the deodorants, shaving creams, and toothbrushes that crowded the laminate countertop around the small sink. Right in front of that sink was where she had been standing when she learned that it would no longer be just the two of them; and when she looked from the pregnancy test to her own eyes in the mirror, she did her best to see past the shock of her personal devastation and to imagine how Scott would react. Would he want to have a baby with her? Would he want to marry her? Did she want either of those things, now or ever?

Like all soon-to-be mothers, both those who plan it and those who don’t, Colleen had immediately done the math in her head: it was November, and, depending on how long she’d been pregnant, that meant the baby would arrive sometime in the early summer, right when she and Scott were supposed to begin studying for the bar exam, something she had thought of as certain and impending, something that seemed much more daunting and real than the baby the test had revealed to be growing inside her—the proof of it floating in a plastic test tube right there on the bathroom counter.

Colleen tucked the framed photograph under her arm and walked up the stairs into her old bedroom. It had remained virtually untouched since she’d left for college. A four-poster bed with a white lace canopy rested on the same brown shag carpet that covered the floors in the rest of the upstairs. The bedspread was an orange quilt she had used since junior high. Posters covered the walls: a moppy-headed David Cassidy leaning against a tree as if posing for a senior photo; a Fleetwood Mac poster in now-dull neon colors; Joan Jett leaping into the air against a yellow background, a white guitar in hand, her lips puckered in enviable confidence. Her old, olive-green rotary phone rested as if waiting for her on the white wicker table beside the bed.