When Ghosts Come Home(8)
The house had been dark and quiet, the only sound being the mechanical hum of the German grandfather clock that the previous owners had left behind. It now sat at the top of the stairs at the far end of the hallway. Their first night in the house, the clock had chimed with a series of deep, resonant melodies, and Colleen and Scott had been launched from their mattress as if they’d been electrocuted. Colleen had grown so used to being pregnant that her belly’s unwieldiness was a feature of her new body that she never lost track of, but she had lost track of it that night. In her sleep and sudden waking confusion she had panicked at the heavy weight sitting atop her middle, and she had only calmed when Scott found her hand in the darkness and the two of them had lain together without speaking, listening to the slow, deep chimes of a song that seemed born in a distant era and a dark, forested continent that felt very far from their new lives in Texas.
The next morning, Scott had opened the glass cabinet and disabled the clock’s chimes. In the bottom of the cabinet they had discovered a stack of old editions of the Dallas Morning News, each one marking a historic event: Pearl Harbor; the Armistice; the assassinations of Jack and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King; the moon landing; and every presidential election since World War II, ending with the November 4, 1980, headline “Gipper Cruises to Victory over Carter,” along with a photo of Reagan and his wife waving from the stage on election night.
She and Scott had flipped through all the newspapers, wondering why someone had saved them, brought them to this house, and then left them abandoned in the bottom of the clock. Their talk turned to birth announcements, and they decided that, when the baby came in June, they would run announcements in Wilmington for Scott’s parents, Oak Island for Colleen’s, and here in Dallas for their own new family because this city would be the baby’s home.
When they returned the newspapers to the bottom of the clock’s cabinet, they stacked them oldest to most recent, just as they’d found them. Now each time Colleen saw the grandfather clock, as she had on this dark morning, where it stood sentinel at the far end of the hallway, she thought vaguely but powerfully of time and change and tragedy and life and all the ways we hang on to these things, store them, and then take them out over the years to leaf through the memories in their pages.
To the right of their bedroom was the open door to what they called the office, a room full of boxes of their law school texts, a desk, and a few chairs. Across the hall was a guest room, the bed still made from when Colleen’s mother and father had stayed just a few months before. They’d flown in for the birth, which was something she’d actually felt guilty about, given how expensive it was and how inexperienced her parents were with flying. Scott’s parents had also flown in from North Carolina. They had stayed in a hotel, but none of them had stayed for very long.
The room beside the guest room was empty, but the last room on the right at the top of the stairs was home to the carefully and blissfully decorated nursery, a room whose door had remained closed since she and Scott had arrived home from the hospital. Colleen had stayed downstairs, leaning against the kitchen counter, while Scott had gone up and closed the nursery’s door before Colleen followed behind him and headed for their bedroom. The next day, she bent in the hallway and stuffed a rolled towel beneath the nursery’s door. She did not want to go in, but she also did not want whatever remained inside the room—memory, magic, hope, perhaps a spirit or a ghost—to escape.
In her bare feet and as quietly as she could, Colleen now padded down the curved staircase to the foyer below. They had not meant to buy a house this grand. Even with the new baby on the way, why did they need three thousand square feet, four bedrooms, and a “keeping room” in a house that already had a living room? But it was 1984 and Scott was an assistant U.S. attorney at the federal courthouse in Dallas, and money didn’t seem to be a factor for them. It had never been a factor for Scott, and his father—who’d gotten Scott an interview for the job because he’d been college roommates at the University of North Carolina with the Texas attorney general and had kept in touch ever since—had talked so much about a first home as an investment. So, here they were, investors in a nearly empty home that was much too large for two people who rarely found themselves living in the house together unless lying in silence in bed at night.
Colleen turned on the dim, fluorescent light above the kitchen sink and opened the cabinet on her right. She took down the tin Maxwell House coffee canister, empty but for a wad of crumpled dollar bills. She selected five twenties and a range of fives and tens, and then she put the lid on the canister and lifted it back into the cabinet. This was their emergency money, and she didn’t know if what she was doing qualified as an emergency. Her emergency, yes, but was it an emergency for both of them? She believed she could make the case that it was, but she didn’t imagine that Scott would agree.
A jolt of nervous panic careened through her body, and she folded her arms across her chest and tucked her fists, one of them still hiding the wadded-up cash, beneath her armpits as if trying to warm herself. For a moment, she considered fleeing up the stairs and back into their bedroom, but then she remembered the money in her hand, and she felt that some invisible line of trust had already been crossed and she couldn’t turn back. Then she considered opening the refrigerator and reaching for a beer to settle her nerves. The clock on the oven read 3:12 a.m., and Colleen tried to gauge the appropriateness of having that beer by calculating the hours from the previous night to the coming morning. She was closer to 2:00 a.m. than she was to dawn, and there had been times in law school, and certainly times in college, when she and her friends were still drinking when the sun came up, and although that was a few years ago, Colleen decided it wasn’t so long ago as to feel unfamiliar, and, by now, nothing was more familiar to her than the taste of a beer when tasting it alone.