POWER BACK

Chapter 18: Love Like Ghosts

Love Like Ghosts

Jack October

I don't know if I believe in ghosts. But I do know that memories can be like ghosts when they haunt a person. I wonder if Bree carries her memories like phantoms that won't let her rest. She told me once, about the time she found her mom on the bathroom floor.

Her dad wanted to be a musician. He stayed out late every night, playing bars in Livingston, Navasota, College Station. Her mom didn't like being left behind, stuck with Bree. She wanted to be a singer too. Instead, she stayed home and drank, letting the injustice of it all seep into her bones and radiate back out through anger and tears. One night, he came back, and she unleashed her pent-up rage. He didn't take it so well.

He locked her in the bedroom. Bree sat in her own room crying, listening to her screams. She wanted to call the police but was too scared. She didn't want her father to go to jail. By the time the house was quiet, he was gone. She found her mother unconscious next to the bathtub, blood smeared on the white tile.

She was nine.

She told me because she didn't have anyone else to tell.

And she knew that I'd understand.

When I was nine, I would find my mom in the little room she called her library. It was her secret hiding place. I watched out the window as spits of snow blew sideways in the wind. My older brothers were out in it, somewhere. I turned from the window and looked at my mom as she sat quietly in the corner reading by lamplight. She had a habit of tucking herself away in that room full of books while my dad raged through the house searching for one of his five sons.

"Y'all gotta scatter," she told us, "when he gets like that."

But I refused to scatter. I wanted to stay by her. I was too young to understand that I couldn't have offered much protection if his anger ever turned on her. 

"He won't ever hurt me, Jack," she promised. "He's just going through some hurt himself. He needs some time. To get better. Go find Jess. Stay out of sight for a while, okay?"

My dad wasn't always like that.

My mom said it was the drought. The drinking. And that it would all pass. Nobody knew but us—not my grandparents or our friends. There was nowhere to run but into the wilderness.

She hugged me close, kissed my hair. "Now go, but don't stray too far."

I scurried down the hallway, grabbed my boots and coat, and quietly closed the door behind me. Then I ran as fast as I could down the winding gravel path until I stopped at Tempe Creek. The cold December air stung my lungs by the time I reached my favorite tree. I climbed as high as the branches would take me.

As close to God as I could get.

"Don't let him hurt her. Don't let him hurt Joe anymore. Please God, help him get better." I opened my eyes just as the setting sun streaked pink and orange through the breaks in the gray cloudbank.

To a boy of nine, that was an answer. Proof that God could hear my prayer.

I don't like to think about it. I don't want to remember. But little things remind me. Triggers they call them. When the weather gets icy and gray or when my brother Joe comes home to visit. I think about it and wonder how it all went so wrong.

And why God saved us that winter from that monster who took hold of my dad. 

*****

            Saturday morning, I'm up early even though we didn't get back from the football game in Vidor until after midnight.