When Ghosts Come Home(62)

Even though it was Halloween night, it was still a Wednesday, and at midnight the house lights had been brought up in the near-empty bar. Danny cupped his hands around his mouth and booed, and then he smacked his palms on top of the bar, trying to get the bartender’s attention. She looked at him and rolled her eyes as if she were used to seeing him behave this way. “Fix your makeup, Danny,” she said.

The streaks of blood he’d painted at the corners of his mouth were now nothing more than pink smears. Colleen laughed and reached for him, gently trying to get him to drop his hands. Unable to convince him to stop, she tried to get ahold of his hands to keep them off the bar.

“Stop it,” she said. “She’s going to call the police.”

Danny stopped booing for a moment.

“Call the police, Becky!” Danny said. “Call them! And bring Sting! We need to dance.”

“Night’s over,” Becky said.

“Not for the undead,” Danny said. He swooped from his bar stool in a dramatic spin, swishing his arm upward as if lifting a cape to cover his face. Becky laughed and threw a bar towel at him. Colleen climbed off her bar stool, and she and Danny staggered across the now-lit dance floor toward the door. Colleen looked at the corner where Bradley Frye and the two men had been sitting, but while the two men were still there, Brad was gone. She looked around, hoping he wasn’t outside, and then she spotted him on a pay phone, leaning against the wall in the hallway that led to the restrooms.

Outside, Colleen and Danny weaved through the parking lot on the way to his red Camaro T-top.

“Are you okay to drive?” she asked, already knowing what his answer would be.

“Are you okay to ride?” he asked. He had a cigarette in his mouth and was trying to line it up with his lighter’s flame while he walked. He lit it and slipped the lighter into his pocket. He smiled, took a drag. “What a silly question,” he said. “Colleen Barnes was born to ride.”

She held up her ring finger, suddenly remembered that she had left her ring in her top drawer back at her parents’ house along with the framed wedding photo.

“Colleen Banks,” she said.

“Shit,” Danny said. He unlocked his door and swung it open. “You’ll always be Colleen Barnes to me.” He climbed inside and reached across to unlock Colleen’s door. She heard the click of the door unlocking and closed her hand around the door handle. She stared out toward the ocean that was apparent yet invisible in the dark night. She knew that she would always know herself as Colleen Barnes too.



They drove up the street to a convenience store that was still open and selling beer. Danny parked by the gas pumps and went inside. Colleen settled back in the seat and allowed her head to drop against the headrest. The world spun when she closed her eyes. She opened them slowly, and she saw what looked like her mother’s car parked across the street outside the closed Carolina Motel. The business was darkened, and there was little light, but Colleen could swear that she was staring at her mother’s burgundy Regal.

She opened her door and stepped out, and then she walked across the dark, quiet street to the parking lot of the Carolina Motel. Her mother’s car—at least the car that she thought was her mother’s—was parked alongside the motel as if it had been left there, which didn’t make sense to her. Her mother’s car had been in the driveway when she’d left home, and there was no good reason for it to be parked here this late at night. She walked toward it to peer inside its windows, and then she heard a man’s voice. Colleen turned to see a man on a pay phone at the other end of the lot. It was dark, and she was too far away to be certain, but perhaps it was her father. “Dad?” she called.

The man on the phone stopped speaking, and he turned to face her. She knew she had never seen his face before, and something about seeing it now in this dark parking lot after assuming he would be her father chilled her to her core. She stepped backward until she was in the middle of the street, and then she turned and walked to Danny’s car. The man who’d been on the pay phone hung up and walked toward the burgundy Regal. He climbed inside, started the engine, and, with the lights off, pulled out and headed toward the west end of the island. She’d been mistaken. It wasn’t her mother’s car. The man hadn’t been her father. She was drunk, and when Danny came back out with a six-pack of beer and set it down in her lap before climbing behind the wheel, she knew for certain that he was drunk too.

For Colleen, the night had changed, and along with feeling drunk she also felt the heavy regret of drinking too much and the acute knowledge that her regret would have grown by the time she woke up in the morning. She could feel Danny’s eyes on her.

“Uh-oh,” he said. “You’re not going to throw up again, are you?”

“No,” she said. “But I think it’s time I get home.”



Night on the island was pitch black, but as Danny drove her home, the Camaro’s windows down, the cool, humid midnight air wafting into the car’s interior, Colleen looked to her right where the waterway rolled along on the other side of the trees, intermittently visible where the forest had been cut away for land to be claimed and squat houses stamped out or two-story vacation homes built.

Seated this way, her eyes fixed outside the passenger’s window as the car hurtled forward, her head swimming with beer while the sound of the wind poured into the car, Colleen felt herself becoming dislocated, outside of time as if the car ride were carrying her somewhere mystical or spiritual instead of geographical. She wanted to explain this to Danny, but when she turned her head to look at him—her eyes sweeping across the glowing dash with its green numbers and buttons and dials—she saw that Danny’s eyes were locked on the road, his index finger tapping out a silent beat on the steering wheel. He looked over at her and smiled. “You sure you’re not going to throw up, Colleen Barnes?”