When Ghosts Come Home(77)

The baby continued to nurse, his eyes open and scanning what he could see of the room from his position, his left arm raised and grasping absentmindedly at the air. Colleen had never been this close to a woman who was breastfeeding a baby, and she tried to look at everything in the room aside from Janelle’s exposed breast and the nipple the baby worked in his mouth.

“He’s just absolutely beautiful,” Colleen said.

“Thank you,” Janelle said.

“What’s his name?”

“R.J.,” Janelle said. “Rodney James, or Rodney Junior. R.J.”

Colleen nodded, not taking her eyes from the baby’s face. “How old is he?”

“A little over five months,” Janelle said.

Colleen was unable to control her mind as it flipped through the Brazelton book. She wanted to tell Janelle that by now R.J. knew her well enough to read her emotions, that he could understand the grief or hope or fear in her face. But the baby had closed his eyes while nursing, and Colleen watched him instead, wondering at the images and thoughts that flashed behind his eyelids. Was she the first person who’d ever scared him? Had anyone else ever made him cry?

The baby’s arm continued to move through the air. Janelle touched it with her free hand, closed her fingers around it, and brought it close to her body. She kept her eyes on his face. “This one looks just like his daddy,” she said. She sighed, and then she freed her hand from the baby’s grip and wiped the tears from the baby’s cheeks. “But he cries just like his mommy.” Then, perhaps fearing that she’d said something too personal or given too much of herself away, Janelle looked up at Colleen and smiled as if to reset the moment. “Will you tell me something about him?” she asked. “You said you were friends with Rodney in high school.”

“Yes,” Colleen said.

“What was he like back then?”

“I’m sure he was the same as when you knew him,” Colleen said. “It hasn’t been that long since we were all in high school.” But as she said it, she recalled the yearbook photo of Rodney she’d seen two nights earlier, and she combed back through her memories, searching for one that would reveal something about Rodney that Janelle did not already know.

Her mind settled on a face that was not Rodney’s, and sharp, tactile memories and sensations of smell and sound washed over her as wholly as if the experiences had been lived just moments before. The face she recalled belonged to a boy named Billy O’Grady. They had all been in the tenth grade together and were probably only fifteen or sixteen years old, but when Colleen thought of Billy O’Grady’s face in that moment she recalled the face of someone who looked like a middle-aged man, all sharp angles and sunken cheeks, tawny skin and a fluff of white-blond hair that seemed impossibly bright. She could not recall ever seeing Billy smile or speak, but somehow she knew his teeth had been crooked and misshapen, his accent thick, nearly unintelligible with its deep, twangy country resonance.

“There was a boy we were in school with in the tenth grade,” Colleen said. She turned and gazed out the nursery’s window as if the glass opened up to time itself, the dense trees lining the backyard less real than the memory she recalled. “Everyone made fun of him because he was poor and his clothes looked dirty, and we— Everyone called him a terrible name.”

“What was the name?” Janelle asked.

Colleen kept her eyes on the window. “People called him Butt Munch,” she said.

“Oh, my God,” Janelle said. “That poor boy. Kids can be so mean.” The baby stirred in her arms, and a near-silent moan came from his tiny body, continuing on until it ended in a sigh.

“It’s awful to think about now, but we were kids, and no one really thought about it at the time.”

“Did Rodney—?”

“No,” Colleen said. “That’s what I was going to say. I don’t remember Rodney being mean to him. As a matter of fact, I can remember them shooting baskets before gym class.” She looked from the baby back to the window. “Billy would take these really awkward, dramatic shots from half-court or the three-point line, and Rodney would rebound for him, chase the ball down, toss it back to him.” She looked back at Janelle, who was smiling, her eyes wet. “I remember Rodney doing that.”

“So that’s what he was like in high school?” she asked.

“Yes,” said Colleen. “That’s what he was like.”

“He was still that way,” Janelle said. “He was just a really good person.”

“That’s how I remember him too,” Colleen said.

The music that Colleen had first heard in the bathroom suddenly grew louder, and she was aware that a door had opened in the hallway. She turned to see a young Black boy standing in the doorway to the nursery. He wore black shorts and an Atlanta Hawks jersey. His hair was cut close and sharp, and his eyes were large, his body thin and long in the way that all teenage boys’ bodies seem when they have not yet learned how to carry themselves.

“Jay,” Janelle said, “this is Colleen.”

“Hey,” he said.

“Hello,” Colleen said.

“She was one of Rodney’s friends in high school,” Janelle said.

“I’m so sorry about your brother-in-law,” Colleen said.