When Ghosts Come Home
Wiley Cash
Tuesday, October 30, 1984
Chapter 1
Winston did not hear it so much as feel it as it passed over their house and into the trees across the waterway. He opened his eyes into the darkness of the bedroom. Had he been sleeping? He’d certainly been dreaming. If not dreaming, at least his mind had been seeing the same thing he’d seen over the course of so many nights. He blinked, rubbed his eyes. When he looked over at Marie, she was already sitting up in bed beside him, her sunken cheeks and wisps of graying hair tinged red by the glowing numbers of the alarm clock on her bedside table. Her cancer and sadness are wasting her, Winston thought, and then he knew the same was true for him. Just that morning Marie had forced him onto the scale after he pushed his eggs and sausage around on his plate. “One sixty-four?” she’d said. “Who’s got cancer, you or me?”
Now, in bed, she looked at him as if terrified of what had woken them.
“Did you hear that?” she asked.
“I did,” Winston said. He unfolded the covers off his body, and then he sat up and put his feet on the floor.
“It sounded like an airplane.”
“It did,” Winston said.
“But it’s too late for a plane.”
Winston turned and looked past Marie toward the alarm clock. It read 3:18 a.m. “It is late,” he said.
“It sounded like it came in low,” she said. “I haven’t ever heard one come in like that before. And never this late.”
Winston reached behind him and placed his palms flat against his back. His fingertips explored the knobbiness of his spine, and his thumbs closed around the soft skin on his sides that Marie liked to pinch when telling him he needed to gain weight. He stretched and sighed, curled his toes against the carpet. Then he stood and walked to the back window that looked out on the waterway. The county’s tiny municipal airport sat through the trees on the other side of the water. He parted the aluminum blinds and peered out, half-expecting to find fiery wreckage blazing through the grass and disappearing in a gathering plume of smoke at the water’s edge. But what he found when he looked out the window was what he always found: the dark, empty backyard; the inky black roll of the water; the thin, ghostly silhouettes of pine trees.
Marie clicked on her lamp. The window became a mirror, and Winston found himself staring into his own eyes.
“Do you see anything?” Marie asked.
“Not now I don’t,” he said.
“Sorry,” she said. She turned off the light, but Winston had already let the blinds close. He reached for his pants where he had left them folded across the back of Marie’s reading chair, and he stepped into them and tucked his T-shirt inside the waist.
“Where are you going?” Marie asked.
“Out there,” he said. “To the airport.”
“Why?”
“To have a look around. To figure out what we just heard.”
“There’s no sense in you going out there this late,” she said. “Send somebody else.”
“Nobody else this close,” he said, which was true, meaning it was at least true enough to say. It was late October now. Beach season was over. Just about all the tourists had gone home. The county had slashed budgets back in July, and Winston had had to limit night shifts by assigning three officers to patrol the county while keeping someone on call at home and someone on dispatch at the office. Tonight was his night on call, even if dispatch hadn’t called him yet.
“Send Glenn,” Marie said.
“Glenn’s not on call,” he said. “And I don’t think he’s on patrol tonight. I am on call, and I’m right here.”
“I don’t want you to go. It’s too late.”
“Well, it’s my job,” Winston said. “At least it’s my job until they vote me out next week.” He smiled at Marie, then he turned toward the dresser and pulled a pair of socks from his top drawer.
“Keep talking all hangdog like that and they will vote you out,” she said. “And if you keep going on these calls in the middle of the night, I’ll start campaigning against you.”
Winston lowered himself into her reading chair. He put his socks on. “You’d side with my political enemies out of spite?” he asked. “I didn’t know you had it in you, Marie Barnes.”
“Well, cancer can’t take everything from a girl,” she said. “Believe it or not.”
“Now look who’s talking hangdog,” he said. He stood up and walked to her side of the bed. He bent toward her and cupped his hand under her chin, then he lifted her face to his and leaned in for a kiss. “I’ll be right back,” he said. “Go back to sleep, honey. You won’t even know I’m gone.”
“I always know when you’re gone,” Marie said. “Forty years now, and I always know when you’re gone.”
“Well, I won’t be gone long,” he said.
“You’ve been saying that for forty years.”
“If you take care of yourself and go back to sleep then I’ll be able to say it for forty more.”
“I just don’t want to be—” But she stopped and looked away from him. The room fell into silence, and Winston would swear that he could hear the distant lap of the waterway outside their windows. Or maybe it was the sound of the ticking clock he sometimes heard in his mind. Marie looked back at him after a moment. “I just can’t stop thinking about Colleen,” she finally said. “I wish she’d call us back.”
“I know, honey,” he said. He fought the urge to break his gaze from hers, to drop his chin to his chest. He considered sitting down on the bed beside her, but he knew that doing so would delay his leaving even longer. “I know. Maybe she’ll call tomorrow. If not, we’ll call her. Maybe we can try getting ahold of Scott at work, ask him how she’s doing.” He’d said all of these things many times since he and Marie had come home from Texas, and he was tired of saying them, but he knew that, when it came to their daughter, Marie needed to hear certain things, and he knew that it was his job to say them.
For Winston, what had been a charming bedside scene—a scene of Marie worried over him in the middle of the night—had devolved into a kind of repulsion at Marie’s mentioning their daughter’s name. Winston’s grief for Colleen was caustic, and he knew it had turned poisonous, infecting his heart and hardening it against Marie’s own particular brand of grief and her need to share it with him. Unlike Marie, Winston’s sadness was a thing he could bear only when he was alone.
He reached for her, held her fingers with the tips of his, gave her hand a little shake.
“We’ll call the house again tomorrow,” he said. “And then we’ll get ahold of Scott at work if we need to.”
Marie smiled a weak smile and lowered herself to her pillow. She closed her eyes, and Winston kissed her forehead again. He stood up straight and looked down at her. He watched her turn away from him and pull the covers up over her shoulders.
When the telephone rang on the dresser across the bedroom, Winston jumped like he’d heard a slammed door or a gunshot. Marie didn’t even stir. “I bet that’s Rudy,” she said.