24. Such a Scream
24
Such a Scream
KEYS JINGLED IN the front door as Mom unlocked it and stepped in. I only took my eyes off Ben for a second as I scrambled to my feet, but when I turned back, he was gone. Disappeared again, though I didn’t know where he went. Mom jumped when she saw me standing in the parlor, and put a hand over her heart.
“Don’t scare me like that. I thought you were your father,” she said.
“Expecting him?”
“Would I be crazy if I said yes?” she ventured with a secretive smile.
I shook my head. “Not at all.”
“Good! I’d hate for my own daughter to think I was crazy,” she said with a laugh, and held out a takeout box from Olive Garden. “Well, since you’re still here, take your Alfredo.”
She handed me my food after I pulled on my coat. “Thanks. I haven’t been here for that long, have I? You guys just left.”
She shrugged. “It was weird without Xavier. We couldn’t stay.”
“Everything is weird without him.”
“Yes, though not sad. Your father wouldn’t want us to be sad.” Then she fixed my scarf and wrapped it once more around my neck. “If you’re on your way out, would you do me a favor and escort your old mother home?” she asked nobly, crooking her arm so that I could take it, and I did.
She was taller than I was, and thin like Alice. They both had dark hair, and when Alice was going through her rebel phase, she would steal dark lacy dresses from Mom’s closet and wear them to school like a real-life Lydia Deetz, though by then I was already in college and well away from Mairmont.
Mom locked the funeral home doors on the way out, and we stepped down into the brisk April night. There was still a chill tucked into the wind, but I could remember the way April warmed so suddenly to summer it was almost a shock. One week there were coats, the next shorts and flip-flops. Maybe tonight was the last cold one, maybe tomorrow, but either way time
was
passing, slowly ever on, leaving people behind like a flower losing its petals one by one.
“I’m glad you’re home,” Mom began, looking ahead of us. “The occasion I could do without—but I’m glad, nonetheless. Xavier said he’d get you back here one way or the other.”
“I doubt he’d have planned this.”
“Certainly not! But it does suit his style,” she said with a soft laugh. “Oh, he was gone too soon, Florence. Gone much, much too soon.”
“I wish he was still here.”
“I do, too, and I will for the rest of my life.” She squeezed my arm tightly. “But we’re still here, and he’ll be with us long after the wind is gone.”
I swallowed the knot in my throat. “Yeah.”
We passed the ice cream parlor where she and Dad went every weekend when I was little and she was pregnant with Alice. She always craved pistachio ice cream. If I closed my eyes, I could see Dad in the booth by the window with his sundae, feeding Carver with a small plastic spoon. “Here comes the Douglas DC-3 aircraft in for landing!
Zzzzzzoom!
”
But the parlor was different now, with a new coat of paint, a new owner, new ice cream flavors. However much Mairmont stayed the same, it kept shifting ever so slightly. Just enough for me to feel lost, for my past to feel like another lifetime ago.
“I should’ve come home, Mom. Years ago. I should’ve visited. I should’ve . . .” My voice cracked. I swallowed the knot in my throat. “I can’t remember how many times you tried to convince me. But then you stopped.”
“Trying to change your mind was like trying to lasso the sun,” Mom replied. “You’re stubborn—like your father—and you take everything on your shoulders like he did. Everyone else’s problems. Never his own.”
“But I’m the opposite. I’m selfish. I—I never came home. I should’ve. I never told Dad . . .” That I was a ghostwriter. That I
did
keep writing novels after I failed, like he wanted me to. That, although in the strangest sense of the word, I’d done exactly what he believed I could do. And he never knew it.
“I hated this town after they chased you out,” she said scornfully.
“They didn’t chase me, I left.”
“Because other people couldn’t stand that a thirteen-year-old did something they could never do.”
“Talk to ghosts?”
“Help people. Listen. Do something so incredibly selfless, you had to leave for it—oh, don’t give me that look.” She added, “You
didn’t have to go to the police, but you
did
. You helped them solve a murder they wouldn’t have otherwise, and then when you told them the truth—it wasn’t your fault they didn’t believe you. For all I care, this entire town can fuck off.”
“Mom!”
“I said what I said. That boy’s body would still be buried on the Ridge if you hadn’t said something.”
And his ghost would probably still be badgering me about trying out for the debate team. He was adamant that I could argue my way out of trouble if I had to. And I proved him right my junior year of high school when Officer Saget caught me one too many times doing something slightly illegal for very good reasons.
Halfway back to the house, Mom said with a sigh of remorse, “Oh, what are we going to
do
when Carver and Nicki get married? It isn’t quite like I can dance with your father’s corpse.”
I nodded seriously. “You don’t have the upper arm strength.”
“I couldn’t carry that sort of deadweight!”
Gallows humor.
I missed it. I missed talking about death like another step in the journey. Lee Marlow
hated
my humor. He thought talking about death was gross and immature. And the guy before Lee—Sean—thought I was weird when I joked about death. William didn’t much care. And Quinn absolutely would not hear of it.
I missed my family.
I missed
this
. Mairmont’s quiet evenings, and the black dots that were palmetto bugs skittering across the sidewalk, and the moths fluttering around the streetlights, and the sound of the evenings buzzing with insects and the wind through the trees. I missed the certainty of Mom, and the defiance of Alice, and the middleness of Carver, and the steadfastness of Seaburn, and the slow bloom of Mairmont.
It seemed like New York was changing every time I blinked.
One way one moment, and then completely different the next—a chameleon of a city that never fit into one box, that never clung to one descriptor. It was always something new, something exciting, something never before seen.
I loved that for a long time, the steady march to something impossible, the ability to reinvent itself again and again despite hurricanes and pandemics and elections. And I loved everyone who I met on those streets, the Williams and Seans and Lee Marlows . . .
But the sky was always dark, and only the brightest stars shone through the light pollution of the city that never slept.
Dad said that I’d miss the stars too much, and their permanence. In New York, it was hard to pick any out, but here in Mairmont, I could see them from horizon to horizon, and the spring thunderstorms that bubbled up on the southern edge of town.
The kind of thunderstorms Dad loved.
The ones that never made it into Lee Marlow’s book, and with a sudden realization I understood why I had felt so uncomfortable here. Coming home was one thing but—ever since I’d been home, I’d kept Mom and Carver and Alice at arm’s length. It wasn’t because I didn’t love them, or didn’t miss them.
I was ashamed, but talking with Ben helped me realize that I had no control over what Lee Marlow wrote. That it wasn’t my fault.
I couldn’t shoulder every burden, and especially not his.
“Mom?” She stopped on the porch, and turned back to me with a raised black eyebrow. I took a deep breath. “I have something I have to tell you. Before—before you find out from someone else.”
“You’re pregnant.”
“No!” I quickly replied, repelled. “No—no absolutely
not
.”
She breathed out a sigh. “Thank
god
. I don’t think I could bury my husband and welcome a grandchild all at once. My range of emotions is not that flexible.”
“Mine neither,” I said with a laugh. I motioned to one of the rocking chairs on the front porch, and she sat in one, and I in the other. “I . . . remember that man I dated? Lee Marlow?”
“The asshole who kicked you out onto the street?”
I hesitated. “There’s more to it than that.”
And then I took a deep breath—and I told her. About Lee Marlow, and the stories I told him about our family. I told her about his book deal, and how I found out, and the last conversation we had before I found myself outside in the rain. It had been my choice to walk out. My choice to leave.
But really, what was the other option?
Staying?
“I think what’s worse,” I said finally, “is that Marlow wrote Dad wrong. He wasn’t weird or cryptic or terrifying. I think that’s the worst part about this entire nightmare—Dad’s immortalized by that asshole, and he did it
wrong
.”
Mom crossed one leg over the other, and took out a pack of cigarettes from her back pocket. “Fuck him,” she quipped.
“Mom!”
“No, truly,” Mom repeated, lighting her cigarette. “Fuck that son of a bitch for twisting every good memory you told him into some deranged
Twilight Zone.
We aren’t a gothic horror novel. We’re a love story.”
I . . . never thought of myself, my story, my life, as anything more than a boring book shelved in a boring library in a boring town. But the more I thought about my family, about the summers I and my siblings ran around in the sprinklers, and played hide-and-seek in the cemetery, and the Halloweens Mom dressed as Elvira and Dad hid in a coffin and popped out to scare every poor kid who came trick-or-treating, and the years Alice and I played dress-up with the vintage clothes we found in the attic, and the summers collecting animal bones, and lighting candles for
midnight waltzes through the parlors, and sitting so quietly in the kitchen with Dad to listen to the wind sing—
There was nothing but love in those memories.
We might’ve been a family in black, but our lives were filled with light and hope and joy. And that was something that Lee Marlow never understood, never wrote in his cold, technical prose.
It was a kind of magic, a kind of love story, I didn’t think he’d ever understand.
From the oak tree in our yard, a crow cawed in the branches, and a few of his friends echoed. My chest tightened.
Ben
.
“And someday,” Mom added surely, as certain as sunrises and spring thunderstorms and wind through creaky old funeral homes, “I know you’ll write our story the way it was meant to be told.”
“I—I don’t think I could—”
“Of course you can,” she replied. “It might not be in one book. It might be in five or ten. It might be little bits of all of us scattered throughout your stories. But I know you’ll write us, however messy we are, and it’ll be good.”
“You have a lot more faith in me than I have in myself.”
Mom tapped me gently on the nose and smiled. “That’s how I know I’m a good mother. Now, these old bones need some rest,” she sighed, and stood. She kissed me on the forehead. In the porch light, she looked older than she ever had. Weighed down by sadness—but held together, still, by hope. “I’ll see you at the Waffle House in the morning. Sweet dreams, dearest.”
Then she went into the house, and closed the door behind her.
I sat there for a while longer as the wind began to howl through the trees as the storm grew closer. A flash of lightning streaked across the sky.
In my memories, I could see Dad sitting on the steps of the
house, smoking a stinking cigar as he watched the storm roll in, a beer in one hand and a smile on his face, Mom leaning her head against his shoulder, a glass of merlot in her hand, her eyes closed as she listened to the rumble of thunder.
“There’s nothing like the sound of the sky rattling your bones, you know?” he once told me when I asked why he loved thunderstorms so much. “Makes you feel alive. Reminds you that there’s more to you than just skin and blood, but bones underneath. Stronger stuff. Just listen to that sky sing, buttercup.”
Another streak of lightning crawled across the sky, and I finally stepped out into the night.
The air was heavy and human. Alice said she couldn’t smell the rain, but I never understood how she
couldn’t.
It was so distinct, so full, so
alive
, like I wasn’t only breathing air, but the movement of electrons sparking together, igniting the sky.
As I started back toward the inn, thunder rolled across the town in a booming, house-shaking rattle that left my ears ringing. I hoped that when they eased Dad into the ground, the dirt would part for the thunder. I hoped the sound would rattle his bones still, make them dance, like they did mine. I hoped that, when the wind was high, blown from some far-off shore, I could hear him singing in the storm, as loud and high and alive as all the dead I’d ever heard singing.
“Florence?” I heard Ben, and suddenly he was walking beside me.
“It’s going to rain soon.”
“Shouldn’t you be heading home?”
“I already am.”
I passed the inn and kept walking toward the town square. It was empty with the night and the coming storm. And then the rain came with a soft, low hum. First a droplet, then another, and then
the air broke and the humidity rushed away to cool, sharp pinpricks of water. I tilted my head back, face toward the thunderous sky.
In Lee’s book, when it rained, Mairmont smelled like mud and pines, but standing in the middle of town, my flats flooding with water, the world smelled sharp from the oaks that lined the greens and the sweetness of the grass. He said that when it rained the town was quiet.
But my ears were full of noise.
I was soaked in a matter of moments. The rain passed right through Ben. He looked as dry as he had been before because he wasn’t real anymore. He was a ghost.
But he was
here
. Now. In the moment. Nevertheless.
“You’ll catch a cold if you stay out here much longer,” said Ben.
“I know,” I replied.
“And you’re getting wet.”
“I already am.”
“And—”
“I don’t have an umbrella, or a coat, and it’s cold and it’s storming and what if I get struck by lightning?” I finished for him, and tilted my head back, and let the rain wash my face. “Don’t you ever do things you aren’t supposed to?”
He didn’t respond, so I guessed he never did.
My entire life was built on those kinds of things that I wasn’t supposed to do. I wasn’t supposed to move away, and I wasn’t supposed to ghostwrite for a romance author, and I wasn’t supposed to fail in turning the last book in, and I wasn’t supposed to fall in love with Lee Marlow, and I wasn’t supposed to come back here.
Not like this. Not for Dad’s funeral.
“It probably worked out better for you,” I said to him. “Thinking everything through, following the rules, being who you’re supposed to.”
To that Ben replied, “Well, I’m dead and I have nothing to show for it. Nothing to exist after me. I was just here and now I’m . . . I’m gone.” He sounded frustrated and sad. “I had so many
plans
—so many. And now I will never be able to do any of them, and I just—I want—”
“You want to scream,” I filled in.
He looked at me in surprise. “Yeah. I do.”
“Then do it.”
He paused. “Do it?” he repeated. And suddenly—Ben screamed. Just a loud, vicious yell that echoed off the storefront windows and the town hall.
I stared at him, startled.
He said, “Like that?”
A smile curved my mouth. I didn’t think he’d actually
do
it, but . . . “Do you feel any better?”
“Not yet,” he replied.
And he screamed again. In his voice there was aggravation, and heartache, and sadness, because he was a ghost, and he had left his life behind, and he had died in the prime of it—and I hadn’t even thought about what he must’ve been feeling. To be dead. To be ignored. Invisible.
I was the only one who could hear him screaming.
But he didn’t do it for other people. He didn’t do it to be heard.
So I took a deep breath, and I screamed with him. I screamed into the howling storm, and my voice was carried off in the wind, it was struck down by thunder, it was dampened by the rain. I screamed again. And again.
And it did make both of us feel a little better.