“Colleen, I’m not going to ask you what made you decide to come home. That’s not my business.” He coughed as if he were buying time to consider what he would say next. The sun was directly overhead, and Colleen knew the river probably looked beautiful in the brilliant light, but she didn’t turn to see it. “But your mother’s probably going to ask a lot of questions. That’s just how she is, and she doesn’t mean a thing by it. I’m just telling you so you can think of whether or not you want to give answers.”
“I might wait and see what her questions are first,” Colleen said. “Then I’ll decide if I want to answer them.”
“That’s fair,” her father said. He looked over at her and smiled. “That’s fair.”
“Are you playing ‘good cop’ before we go into the interrogation room?”
“No,” he said. “No. I just don’t want you walking in the door and being caught off guard or upset by anything your mother says. She’s been worried about you, and I know you’ve been worried about her, and I just—I don’t know.”
“It’s okay, Dad,” she said. “I know.”
He nodded toward her Walkman.
“I see you got one of those radios.”
Colleen had forgotten that she’d clipped the Walkman to her belt loop and left the headphones around her neck.
“What’s it sound like?” he asked.
“You want to hear it?”
“Sure.”
She slipped the headphones from around her neck and placed them on his ears, and then she pushed play. She heard the music come on, and she sat back and watched him bop his head up and down. He passed his hand through the air in front of him as if he were groping for something in the dark, and Colleen understood that this was his idea of dancing.
“Groovy,” he said.
She laughed and pushed stop.
“That’s enough, Dad,” she said. “I don’t want you getting too hip. I don’t want Mom having questions for you too.”
Colleen’s father didn’t tell her about the airplane he’d found the night before or the body of Rodney Bellamy until they were driving past the tiny airport where the abandoned airplane waited like a subject that could not be avoided. Although the day was bright, Colleen could see the distant glimmer of the beacon light in its rotation as they drove past.
“You knew Rodney, right?” he asked.
“Yes, I knew him,” she said, “but not well. He was nice. Everyone liked him. His dad is—”
“Ed Bellamy,” he said. “I know, but your mother reminded me in case I didn’t.”
“How do you think he ended up out there?” she asked. “I can’t imagine him being somebody who’d deal drugs or meet airplanes in the middle of the night.”
“I don’t think he was that kind of guy,” her father said. “His wife said he’d gone out for diapers.”
“Gone out for diapers?” Collen repeated. She turned away from her window and looked at her father. “He had a baby?”
With that question, Colleen felt the weather change inside the car; it became cold and quiet, and she could feel that her father understood that whatever wound he feared her mother would uncover had been uncovered before they’d even arrived home.
“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?