April, 2013

 

There were ghosts in the lake house.

Keira felt them breathing on her skin. They were filaments of memory, echoes behind the words of the woman she buried yesterday: disappointment and dread, fear, pain, tear-soaked pillows, impossible expectations required of the teenage girl she used to be. In the crevices and alcoves of this old place, Keira saw her younger self—awkward, curious, broken—filling days of neglect with imaginary friends.

The lake loomed in front of her, and the cool patio stone under her feet chilled her skin, had her fingers moving up her arm in a futile attempt at warming herself. The slide of slow currents and the slip of each wave against the dark sand brought peace and relief, neither of which Keira had ever known in this place. Fireflies skidded along the surface, and the heavy limbs of cypress trees brushed against the water. In the distance, toward the cityscape she couldn’t see, she knew there were beacons of activity that she might touch if she were brave enough to venture beyond these haunting walls. With each flick of her eyes, Keira called more ghosts from the past, pulling them into her mind—unseen creatures lined on a hook.

Behind her closed lids, Keira saw the priest’s face, the quick nod of his head that confirmed the woman in the coffin had been her mother. She’d have never believed it otherwise. The protruding collarbone and pallid skin on the woman’s small frame had been a shadow of the domineering mother Keira had left behind.

Sixteen years ago, in the city hospital, with Keira’s bruised limbs throbbing like a burn, her mother had insisted she kill the baby growing in her belly.

Eighteen, the woman had said, was too young to be a mother.

She hadn’t been wrong, but Keira had tired of her mother’s commands, her quick temper, those sharp slaps, and the insistences that had been drummed into her ears since childhood, and so, at least that one time, a small rebellion changed her life.

It brought her son into this world.

The ghosts, the heartache of the past, had kept her from New Orleans. She’d been determined to never resurrect them, but her mother’s death called her back, forced her to return, and when their plane touched tires on the tarmac, Keira felt the ghosts remerge—the pain of what she’d been forced into, the disappointment of what she set free, and the unbending betrayal of the boy she loved.

The past was a slippery vine of regret. It was a reminder of what Keira had given up. And now that she was back home, her mother buried behind the walls of the old family crypt, Keira felt that vine tightening around her neck like a noose.

The click of the television in the room just beyond the open patio doors and the slick squeak of Ransom’s sneakers on the leather sofa pulled Keira from her thoughts and the mesmerizing current of the lake.

“Mom,” Ransom called to her. “The draft starts in ten minutes. You watching?” 

A chill had set in the home, carried through the broken seals of the windows with the spring rain, and Keira pulled her cardigan tight around her as she followed the noise of the television into the den. “Of course.” Ransom’s drink left a wet ring on the mahogany coffee table, and as habit, as conditioning, she placed a coaster onto the wood surface. “Here.”

Her son smiled, brought into focus a dimple that carried in more echoes of the past. “She’s gone, you know. Why do you care about coasters?” She knew he was right, knew that her mother’s presence was the largest ghost, the one she thought she exorcised years before. But this place was too familiar, too reminiscent of her. When she didn’t answer him, ignored his comment with eyes on the screen in front of them, Ransom placed his drink onto the coaster, letting the comment lie. “These jackasses are yammering about the Steamers’ rankings. We win the Super Bowl and still get no respect.” He nodded at the television, and Keira could only smile that he said “we” and not “they” as though he grew up in New Orleans and not Nashville.

Ransom’s gaze ran over the commentators’ too-tanned faces, their receding hairlines, small hints of the handsome men they’d been when they took the field. Her son soaked in each detail of the teams being discussed, the bodies running, scoring in the file footage, and for the millionth time Keira was reminded that he looked nothing like her.

There were no traces of her in his features, no hints of her French ancestors.  His eyes were dark pools that screamed of a knowledge and struggle far beyond his nearly sixteen years. They were not blue like hers, but inky black, narrow, bottomless. His cheeks were high, sloped, far more distinguished than her own. His skin wasn’t pale like hers, but dark, near caramel, and his face was peppered with faint, brown freckles.

He was his father in duplicate. Just as imposing, just as beautiful.

Sometimes her son grinned a certain way, laughed with a tone that was placating and sarcastic, and both gestures brought her back to the boy she loved—another ghost of the past reflected in her son’s gait, in his pleased, happy laugh.

“Elam went to the Ravens. He’s good. Not as good as Vasquez. That dude will help land us in the NFC Championship.”

“That’s months away, son.”

But Ransom ignored her, lifting the remote to the screen when the commentary shifted from the players waiting to be selected to NFL gossip and speculation, and the name she’d tried to forget she knew for all of Ransom’s life.

“Kona Hale enters the 2013 season as a free agent…” the sportscaster began, but Keira didn’t hear the rest of his monologue. She only saw the picture flash on the screen. The hooded eyes, black and penetrating, the familiar grin, the scar across his cheek that Keira knew wasn’t from a football game. Ransom sat up straight as a video of Kona moved over the screen, reporters surrounding him, cameras clicking furiously, microphones pointed at his face as he left an airport.

Ransom’s gaze slipped to her and she thought there was a question there; the same question she’s waited for him to ask since the first time he became obsessed with Kona Hale, NFL darling. She knew Ransom saw the similarities. How could he not? But he didn’t ask. He had never asked.

“Rumor is Hale is going to practice with the Steamers this summer.” Ransom flashed a grin identical to the one on the television set, and Keira repressed a shudder. “It would be cool if he came back home, right? Played with them? I mean, he’s getting up there, kinda old for a long contract.”

“He’s around my age, you know.” She was unable to resist a smile when her son’s eyes went wide.

“I mean, you’re not old, Mom. But for a linebacker, well, thirty-six is pushing it.”

“Nice save, little man.”

Keira’s elbow moved off the sofa when Ransom nudged it. She didn’t look at the screen, tried to ignore the voice, his voice, as he answered the reporters’ endless questions. She’d spent years doing that: blocking out an article online or him on a late-night talk show. Keira learned to blind herself to the sports figure, reminding herself he was no longer the boy she loved. That face, that name, was something unreal to her. He was no longer the boy who shredded her heart.

Ransom stopped asking about his father when he was thirteen, when “what’s my father’s name?” had Keira’s hands shaking until she had to shove her fingers under her thighs to keep them still. She’d meant to answer him then. She’d meant to answer all of his questions over the years. But her boy stopped questioning, seemed to stop wondering out loud who had given him his wide stature, the small cleft in his chin.

He stopped asking, and Keira believed he no longer cared.

What an idiot she’d been.

“Kona, is it true you’re tapped for spring training with the Steamers?” a reporter asked, and his laugh drew Keira’s attention back to the screen.

“You never know, Bryan. We haven’t decided…”

Still beautiful. Still charming. And when Keira’s heart clenched, vibrated like a baseline drumming from a speaker, she couldn’t listen anymore.

“Want some popcorn?” She didn’t wait for her son to respond before she moved into the kitchen. Keira took a moment to herself, to push away the ghost that has lingered the longest.

On the counter, she saw her mother’s cookbook. It was a red and white Betty Crocker and opened on the stand to a recipe for chicken and dumplings. It was rarely used and never by her mother, but the sight of it had Keira looking around the room. The counters still shined, even though they were unused by her mother, who never learned more about cooking than picking up the phone to have someone else prepare it.  Still, those shadows of her mother’s ghost could not block other things she remembered about this room.

Like Keira attempting French toast, and Kona’s successful efforts at distraction. Kona leaning her against the counter, shirtless, his jeans lowered; her legs around that thin, tight waist, her open to him, giving, taking; her fingers hanging onto the edge as he worked inside her. Keira could still hear her own moans bounce into her ears across the wood floors. He filled this place, and sometimes, Keira thought, he filled too much of her head, too much of her heart.

She had pushed back those memories, those sensations that Kona always worked up in her, but being home had allowed her to remember how much he had consumed her. To her, then, he was life. He was breath. He was the searing part of her soul that burned her from the inside. With him, she couldn’t think, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t move past the way his mouth felt on her skin. He had been that—life, death, breath—all those impossible things you weren’t supposed to feel at eighteen. A first love so real, so tempting, that sometimes she was sure he was a figment of her imagination.

She blinked away that memory and pulled out an empty bowl when the volume on the television increased. Kona’s voice was louder then, clearer, and Keira moved to the pantry, fetched a small bag of popcorn and slammed it into the microwave. The cadence of his voice had grown deeper, heavier, with a rasp, and there were no vestiges of his Uptown roots in the inflection. He belonged to the world now, not the city, not their university, certainly not to her. Keira’s heart skipped double time, throbbing with each word she managed to hear from Kona’s interview.

Sixteen years and she still couldn’t manage to forget him.

Sixteen years and the heavy weight of his words to her still rendered her dumb.

“Walk away, Keira. Walk away from me and don’t look back.”

She did. He could hardly blame her for listening.

“Mom, it’s starting,” Ransom called into the kitchen.

She took a breath, then another, and opened the microwave when it sounded. “Just a second, son. I’ll be just a second.”

 

The woman had looked older than her sixty-four years when she died. The picture accompanying the obituary told him that much.  

Kona pulled the newspaper closer to his face, examining the hollow cheeks, the thin nose. He hadn’t thought of her in years. Not the dead woman. She’d always been an uptight, cruel bitch, and he felt nothing, save surprise, at her passing. He had been convinced she was simply too mean to die.  

Cora Michaels (nee Marquette) died peacefully in her home April 29th after a lengthy illness.

Peaceful was something Kona believed she didn’t deserve. Painful, kicking and screaming, he thought, befit her better. He skimmed the obituary until his eyes found the name he was looking for.

She is survived by her daughter Keira Riley, and her niece Leann Marquette-Bankston.

Keira Riley.

Not Keira Riley hyphenated with another name. No husband? He knew not to get his hopes up. Keira was a bridge he burned long ago. His indifference had been the kindling, his words the bright spark that set flame to them both.

But he couldn’t stop himself from lingering on the memory of her smile. The laugh he released caught him off guard. He didn’t know where it came from, or why it had come so quickly. Absently, Kona rubbed his thumb along the smooth scar on his cheek. A beer bottle, in the alleyway of a bar they were too young to frequent, had left its mark and still reminded him of her every day.

Of them.

Keira’s temper had been quick and sharp. His face was marked because he fell in love with a girl who didn’t like him touching a flirty waitress. God, how she’d raged that night. He’d loved every second of it.

“Wildcat,” he said to himself. A small chuckle moved out of his mouth at the memory. She’d sworn she hated the nickname, but he caught her blush each time he said it.

Kona left the newspaper behind on the table and took in the bustle below him in the city. Street cars gliding by, packed with tourists. Horns blaring, fingers lifted in the city’s greatest tribute to assholes, cops parked in the medians, itching to pull anyone over, and in the distance, the river—the great old girl that breathed the pulse of half the country’s struggle right into the Gulf. This city, his hometown, reminded him of years past, of her. His eyes glanced back down at the paper, and Kona retrieved Keira’s face, that smile again, the memory of her skin.

Was she there now? Had she finally returned to say goodbye to the mother she hated? Was it even possible that fate would bring them both back home? Now?

Had she forgiven him?

I will haunt you, Kona. When you think of me, see my face, hear my name, you’ll only remember that I loved you. You’ll remember that my love for you was never thin. You’ll remember this moment because it will be the biggest regret of your life.

She’d cursed him.

He could still see the pain in her eyes, the hollow shock that had transformed her features that day. He’d told her to leave. He’d told her he never loved her. All the grief he’d felt at that moment, Kona laid at Keira’s feet. Blame was a dagger he sliced into her heart; his own sorrow, his own pain, directed at the only girl he’d ever loved. He’d told her to walk away. He told her so many lies that went against everything he’d felt. But she’d had a future. At the time, he thought his was over. She deserved better than him, better than the uncertain fate he’d fallen into at twenty.  

Keira’s curse stayed with him. There had been women; sometimes he could not remember even one of their faces, but with her, the image was clear. Her soft, pale skin. Eyes like the sky, like the ocean trapped in a hurricane. That long, thick, chestnut hair. There was no erasing her from his memory.

But now? No. It was too late. That bridge was ash by now, not even the splinters of its remains could be felt. She’d been gone from him for too long. But some nights, when the games were too rough, when his body ached from damage, from age, from too many years of exertion, he remembered how she would hold him, how every rake of her fingernails on his scalp brought him calm, how good it felt to protect her, love her completely. How she’d hum, her low, beautiful voice strong, comforting, as he lay on her chest, finding the only real relief he’d ever felt, in the arms of the girl he loved.

No woman could erase her completely, and nothing would ever compare to the sight and feel of his Wildcat.  

The phone in Kona’s pocket chirped twice. The messages were endless, all saying much the same: “meeting with the Steamers coaching staff at noon tomorrow,” or “interview with ESPN at five.” His manager was relentless. His fans were enthusiastic. His mother refused to be rebuffed about him spending the morning with her.

They all wanted something. They said they were trying to help. But it had been a long time since he believed that anyone truly needed him. Longer still since he was convinced anyone wanted him.

Not since her.