Shady has not had the opportunity to get to know her fellow students well; she’s the only one there, aside from Theo, not part of a couple. She passes among them, studying their smiling and laughing faces. Everyone is good-looking or nearly so, and all are fit, tanned, white-teethed. She was surprised to find, when the course started, that she was the youngest by several years; in her mind, taking up diving would be the domain of people her own age or younger. Not that the others could be considered old: as the sun descends and a bonfire catches light, she feels like she’s taking part in a beer commercial. Or she has walked into a catalog shoot for J. Crew or the Gap. James is a graphic designer who specializes in logos; his fiancée Marilynne manages an upscale women’s shoe store and they’re going to get married soon and honeymoon in the Antilles. An older couple (older to Shady; they’re probably in their mid-thirties) tells her they wanted licenses because they’d become bored with the usual vacations, hotels in Europe, cruises in the Bahamas, and now wanted a theme to focus their future destinations, something to get them out of the clubs and pools and into the world. “Now we have this test, there has to be diving available as a feature,” says Esme, who is beautiful in a way that makes Shady wonder about herself, beautiful in a way she would like to be, although it looks very expensive.
She drifts in and out of the gathering, keeping her eye on and distance from Theo. A minute ago she’d seen him standing before the grill near his truck, bragging about the marinade he’d soaked the chicken in for twenty-four hours. Now he’s barefoot and shirtless embracing his knees, a bottle of some craft beer loose in hand against his blond-flecked shins, regaling listeners with tales of underwater adventures, the sharks seen, turtles ridden, the vicious aggression of the Moray eel. To Elaine, the woman closest to Shady’s age and who already runs her own business—a popular vintage clothing store where Shady had often shopped before meeting her here—he explains the difference between jellyfish and the man-of-war, something to do with nematocysts and the pain of the venom. He shows off a spandrel scar that wraps his shoulder and part of one fine bicep. Off the coast of Australia he swam right into a man-of-war and nearly died from an allergic reaction. What does it feel like, Elaine wants
to know, how much does it hurt? No more than being whipped and salted, Theo says. It’s a strange turn of phrase to use. It isn’t apparent why he would make a reference like that or how serious he means it. Elaine admits she doesn’t know what that would feel like and she calls to her boyfriend down by the water, “Hey Bobby, what’s it feels like to be whipped?” No one else knows what she is talking about and the comment provokes a great deal of laughter.
Shady catches Theo’s eye, allowing hers to linger on his long enough that he’ll notice she’s walking up the graded road alone. She’s surprised by the impact the alcohol is having on her after only two beers; it must be due to the full day in the sun—maybe the mix of gases from diving, too. She’s looking over the abandoned cars where the ramp to the water meets the curving two-track road that touches the edge of the quarry and then leads back out across the field, the sky in twilight pulling long shadows from the stacks. She feels him arrive somewhere behind her before she hears his sandals kicking up the ground. He has taken off his sunglasses and thrown a shirt back on and she’s glad for that, there’s something about being outdoors near a man without his shirt that makes her feel even younger than she is, kind of grossed out and stupid at the same time, and she greets him with a smile. “What are you doing up here?” he asks. “Don’t you want to celebrate with the others?”
“I just felt like a walk,” she says, and she does. Feel like it. “I used to know this place. I’ve never been here in the day, though, it was always night.”
“I’ve heard stories of what this place used to be like at night. I wouldn’t have guessed you for that kind of crowd.”
She smiles again and they walk. She’s trying to place where she must have been in the truck with Cole—where they stopped and waited; where Arley Noe had appeared like an apparition in the dark. The area looks much larger in light than how she remembers it; in her mind they were practically traveling through tunnels until they rose back up onto the old alfalfa field. And it had been cold then. Now the junked cars look smaller—many of them are crushed, compacted—and the sandy terrain is still lit up with the day’s sun, vibrant and glowing. She can’t decide where Noe had come from; he was there and
then he wasn’t. She would swear he had walked down the graded road toward the water but where would he have gone to then? It’s all broken rocks and slab-like platforms and sheer cliffs.
“What about you?” she asks.
“I’m not from the county,” he says. As if that meant anything. When the dead space between them extends over several slow steps he adds, “I rode through with a coupla buddies in high school, I think. We picked up some weed once or twice. I was never big into it, that stuff makes me sleepy more than anything else. You smoke?”
“Sure. Sometimes, when it’s around.” She smiles at this touch of self-censorship, thinks:
You can invent who you are any time you want; that doesn’t make you any less true
. Today—maybe for the time being—she’s the kind of girl who smokes pot if it’s around.
They don’t follow the road but stick instead to the edge of the quarry, climbing over stone where necessary (Shady first, glad to have pulled on a pair of gym shorts over her swimsuit), following the lip up to the highest point and settling there, allowing their legs to dangle over the edge. It’s brighter up here, the day clinging more tenaciously than below; she hadn’t realized how much of the setting sun was blocked by the cliffs. Where the rest of her class moves about the small bonfire, dancing, it looks like they’ve already gone under night.
“You don’t strike me as the type to be running around here buying weed,” Theo says. “I have a hard time picturing that.”
She would have expected a magnificent prospect from this vantage, a sense of grandeur with views in every direction; it had not occurred to her that they were merely returning to the surface from what’s essentially a big deep hole. Behind her is weed-riven field (it will be ragweed season soon); the vista below her feet returns the pathway she’d followed up, and, farther, the bright lights of a distant strip mall and gas station.
“We all get into our own little messes,” she says.
“Still. My understanding is this place was pretty rough for a while. Guys with guns.”
She asks him if he remembered whether he had a student once named Cole Prather; Theo’s eyes blank as he thinks. Eventually he says he doesn’t remember the name. Shady begins to describe the boy
she knew, his pole-vault gait, the eye aslant. Theo blanks as he thinks again, then shakes his head. “You sure he got his license through us?” he asks. She doesn’t know; she was guessing. Her eye traces back to the still water below.
Theo’s leg rests against hers; she likes how the hair on his legs catches the sunlight streaming low from behind them. She looks at him straight-on for the first time since they left the others. He’s a convincingly good-looking man, she knew this already, he had stood in as her dive partner to even out the numbers in class. He’s handsome in a conventional and friendly way: tall and broad-shouldered, muscular without seeming desperately so, not a gym rat but someone active, who tasks his limbs. His blue eyes are friendly and reflect a slight glow from this angle of sunlight, and in close he appears older than she would have guessed, a scratch of crow’s feet around the eyes that his tan diminishes from farther away.
“You talk about this guy in the past tense,” he says. “Was he a boyfriend or something?”
“I’m not sure what you’d call him,” she says. “I don’t talk about him in the past tense, though. I don’t mean to talk about him.” She looks at the stubble of his beard, blond and fibrous like the rest of him, and again, maybe it’s the beer in her, but she thinks again of how handsome this guy is, he has a jaw for heroes, it’s like he’s not even real—half-surprising her own fool self, she lurches forward and kisses him.
His first reaction is a laugh that she fills with her tongue, and his skin smells of warmth and salt and very lightly the taste of beer. He allows her to kiss him, one arm taking the weight of them both. But then it does not take long for her to notice his response is not as passionate as she would have liked, or even, to be honest, expected. With his free hand he touches her bare shoulder. Then he pats it, lightly—like one would do to calm a puppy.
“Is this not okay?” she asks.
“Sure, it’s fine. It’s all good. There’s no rush.”
She sits back to take this in, squinting at him. “No rush?”
He grins, takes a swig of his beer. He’s the kind of guy (a summer boy who belongs on a beach) it would be difficult to dislike for long, a pleasant shallowness about him that doesn’t bear ill will against anyone,
that only wants to have fun. A kind of fun Shady would tire of in about a week or two. He pats her shoulder again and she tells him she would rather he not do that anymore. This brings his grin into a broad smile, and he shrugs. He says: “You know, this beer has a high alcohol percentage in it, like eight percent or something. You have to be careful with this stuff.” Then he stands up, and as though she had not just thrown herself at him or even mentioned so much as the weather, as if she is not sitting right there in the dying sun feeling humiliated and near to naked in her swimsuit and shorts, he tells her he shouldn’t spend much time away from the rest of the class. Then, perhaps noting her wary disappointment, her sense of unbelief, he throws her a line of escape, saying, “I can’t afford to be known as the instructor who hooks up with his youngest student. It’s a small group, divers. Word gets round and a guy has to be careful. You coming down?”
She tells him she’ll be down in a minute. “You go on ahead. They’re probably
all talking about us right now
,” and she rolls her eyes in a display of sarcastic fretting.
She feels the pout as soon as his back is turned. She’s not sure how or what just happened, but the promise of the day that had begun with her early arrival at the quarry has vanished, and her pride is hurt. She thinks, I would never . . . , but immediately she recognizes she has done the same to boys before, not teasing them, exactly, but playing open to overtures, frolicking in their flirtations, and then backing out when the moment got too close.
What’s going to become of me, she wonders.
She doesn’t know. All she knows is that it won’t be here. This leads her back to Cole, who had believed the same about himself, and she wonders again, did you do it, Cole? Are you living the life you hoped for—if not what you planned, close enough to claim you hoped for it? She thinks of that time just two years before when she had run into him at the Winn-Dixie and he had explained how he had returned to the lake to keep up on his mother, nobody had a clue to even wonder about Fleece then. After a few minutes in the cleaning supplies aisle he had asked if she wanted to hang out with him that night, and she had said yes. And how that night had ended at the seminary before it was torn down and there was that great thunderstorm and the transformer
exploding not twenty feet away from her (a word that plied her mind, her imagination:
transformer
), it was like fireworks, or a brief act of war, and she had scurried back to the boys and found them on their backs and had called to them, come see, come see, and they did, they followed her up that dark corridor to where the transformer and the post it was attached to burned in the night, it pulsed with a fire like she had never seen before, and it was terrifying, it was beautiful, it was a miracle, and she did not say it then—she did not tell anyone ever—that it was like a promise to her,—when she reflected on this later she thought of it just like that, a promise from somewhere that miracles happen and that she is safe, the world was frightful but she is safe, she could ask what she wanted and she would be safe. And what is it she wants, that any of them wanted from this life? Life. Life and more life.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kirby Gann is the author of the novels
The Barbarian Parade
and
Our Napoleon in Rags
, and co-editor (with poet Kristin Herbert) of the anthology
A Fine Excess: Contemporary Literature at Play,
which was a finalist for the
ForeWord Magazine
Book of the Year Award (Anthologies). He is Managing Editor at Sarabande Books, and teaches in the brief-residency MFA in Writing Program at Spalding University.
GHOSTING
Copyright © 2012 by Kirkby Gann Tittle.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without
written permission of the publisher. Please direct inquires to:
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gann, Kirby, 1968–
Ghosting / Kirby Gann.
p. cm.
eISBN : 978-1-935-43950-9
1. Drug traffic—Fiction. 2. Family secrets—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3607.A55G47 2012
813’.6—dc23
2011051470