Ghost Summer, Stories Read online

Danielle shook her head. The thought of food made her feel sick. She had ended up with the stroller, even though Odetta had promised her she wouldn’t have to get too close to Lola. But Danielle found she didn’t mind too much. Being at Handi Mart with the truckers and locals buying their lunch and conducting their business almost made Danielle forget her situation. As she pushed the stroller aimlessly down aisle after aisle, hypnotized by the brightly colored labels, she kept expecting to feel Lola kicking her feet, squirming in the stroller or screaming at the top of her lungs. Her usual antics.

  Instead, Lola sat primly with her hands folded in her lap, her head turning right and left as she took in everything around her. Odetta had spent the rest of the morning braiding Lola’s hair, entwining the plaits with pretty lilac-colored bows alongside the well-oiled grooves of her brown scalp. Despite her best efforts, Danielle had never learned how to do much with Lola’s hair. Mom hadn’t known much about hair, either. This was the best Lola had looked in ages.

  “I’ll get to you in a minute,” Uncle June called to Danielle as the stroller ambled past the register line. “I know what you’re here for.”

  “Take your time,” someone said, and she realized she had said it. Calm as could be.

  Although Odetta was kin to Uncle June, she had to stand in line like any other customer. She’d helped herself to two burgers, a large bag of Doritos, and a Diet Coke from the fountain in back. It’s no wonder she was still carrying her baby weight eighteen years later, Danielle thought. With nothing left to do, Danielle stood beside her cousin to wait.

  “Well, ain’t you cute as a button?” a white woman said ahead of them, gazing back at Lola in the stroller. The woman was wearing an ostrich feather hat and looked like she was dressed for church. Was it Sunday? Danielle couldn’t remember.

  “But-ton,” Lola said, the first sound she’d made in two hours.

  The woman smiled down at Lola. Danielle almost warned her not to get too close.

  “Thank you,” Danielle said. Lola didn’t get many compliments, not with her behavior.

  “How old is she?” the woman asked.

  “Thirteen months,” Danielle said, although it was a lie. As far as she knew, the thing in Lola’s stroller was as old as the swamp itself.

  “Lovely,” the woman said. She turned away when Uncle June asked her pump number.

  And Lola was lovely today, thanks to Odetta. There was no denying it. Maybe that was why Danielle could touch her stroller without feeling queasy, or getting goose bumps. The nasty thing that had crawled out of Lola’s diaper that morning was beginning to seem like a bad dream.

  “One minute,” Uncle June said when it was their turn in line. He vanished through a swinging door to the back room. As the door swung to and fro, Danielle saw a mess of boxes in the dank space, and she caught a whiff of mildew and ammonia. Danielle felt her heart speed up. Her fingers tightened around the stroller handles.

  “You sure you don’t want your own burger? These are mine,” Odetta said.

  Danielle only shook her head. A fly landed on one of the ribbons on Lola’s head.

  Uncle June came back with a brown iodine bottle with a black dropper. He set the bottle on the counter next to Odetta’s hamburgers. “Remedy’s free. Odetta, you owe me five-fifty.”

  While Odetta rifled through her overstuffed pocketbook, Uncle June leaned over, folded his hands, and stared Danielle straight in the eye. His eyes looked slightly bloodshot, and she wondered if he had been drinking that morning.

  “Remember what I said,” Uncle June told her in a low voice, so the man in the Harley Davidson T-shirt behind them wouldn’t hear. “Six drops. No more, no less. At midnight. Then you’ll have your baby back.”

  Danielle nodded, clasping the bottle tightly in her hand. She had questions about what was in the remedy, or how he’d come to concoct it, but she couldn’t make her mouth work. She couldn’t even bring herself to thank him.

  Another fly circled, landing on the counter, and Uncle June killed it with his red flyswatter without blinking. He wiped it off the counter with a grimy handkerchief, his eyes already looking beyond Danielle toward the next customer.

  “Won’t be long now, Danny,” Odetta said.

  Danielle nodded again.

  Odetta opened the gas station’s glass door for her, and Danielle followed with the stroller. She was looking forward to another nap. Hell, she might sleep all day today, while she had the chance. She hadn’t had a good night’s sleep since Karl had been gone.

  Danielle almost ran down an old white man in a rumpled black Sunday suit who was trying to come in as they walked out. “Sorry—” Danielle began, but she stopped when she saw his face.

  Danielle and her neighbor had never exchanged a word in all these years, but there had been no escaping his face when he ran for Town Council in ninety-nine and plastered his campaign posters all over the supermarkets. He was Old Man McCormack, even though his face was so furrowed with lines that he looked like he could be his own father. He was also very small, walking with a stoop. The top of his head barely came up to Danielle’s shoulder.

  Odetta froze, staring at him with a stupefied expression, but McCormack didn’t notice Odetta. His eyes were fixed on the stroller, down at the baby.

  He smiled a mouthful of bright dentures at Lola.

  “Just like a little angel,” McCormack said. Some of his wrinkles smoothed over when he smiled, as if a great burden had been lifted from his face. He gently swatted away a fly that had been resting on the tip of Lola’s nose. Danielle didn’t know how long the fly had been there.

  “Lit-tle an-gel,” Lola said.

  McCormack’s smile faded as he raised his head to look at Danielle, as if he expected to find himself staring into a harsh light. His face became tight, like hardening concrete.

  “Afternoon, ma’am,” he said. His voice was rough, scraped from deep in his throat. And his eyes flitted away from hers in an instant, afraid to rest on hers too long.

  But Danielle had glimpsed his runny eyes long enough to see what he was carrying. She could see it in his stooping shoulders, in his shuffling walk. She felt sorry for him.

  “Afternoon, Mr. McCormack,” she said.

  He paused, as if he was shocked she had been so civil. His face seemed to melt.

  “You and your pretty little girl have a good summer, hear?” he said with a grateful smile.

  “Yessir, I think we will,” Danielle said. “You have a good summer, too.”

  Despite the way Odetta gaped at her, Danielle wasn’t in the mood to pass judgment today. Everyone had something hidden in their past, or in their hearts, they wouldn’t want dug out. Maybe the McCormack family would have to answer to God for those bodies buried on their land, or maybe they wouldn’t. Maybe Danielle would give Lola six drops of Uncle June’s remedy at midnight tonight, or maybe she wouldn’t.

  She and this old man deserved a little peace, that was all.

  Just for the summer.

  Danielle rubbed the top of Lola’s head, gently massaging her neatly braided scalp. Her tiny visitor in the stroller turned to grin up at her with shining, adoring eyes.

  “Summer” was written for Brandon Massey’s Whispers in the Night, the third anthology he edited in the Dark Dreams series featuring black writers. As the mother of a young son, I wanted to explore difficulties in parenting—and how any parent might make an unconscionable choice. Just for the summer.

  Ghost Summer

  Davie Stephens was sure he must be dreaming when he heard his mother singing softly in his ear. It was an old call-and-response song she used to sing to him when he was young: “Kye Kye Kule . . . Kye Kye Kofisa . . . Kofisa Langa . . . Kaka Shilanga . . . Kum Adem Nde . . . ”

  The sound nearly made him clap his hands in rhythm to the song, reminding him of the game they had played. His first name was Kofi, just like in the song, from his mother’s family in Ghana. But he had used his middle name since first grade because other kids called him Coffee
and tried to pick fights. It was like a stranger’s name. He preferred to be All-American David, like his father.

  “Kye Kye Kule . . . ”

  When Davie felt a cold fingertip against his ear, he jumped up with a gasp.

  He wasn’t sleeping! A shadow sat beside him on the bed, washed in darkness. Davie’s heart thumped. He opened his mouth to yell, but the shadow planted a firm palm across his lips.

  “Don’t be loud. You’ll wake your sister,” his mother said.

  Only Mommy! He smelled the smoky scent of her shea butter as she flicked on his light. She was wearing her “home clothes,” as she called them; green and gold and red and blue woven into her dress from Ghana. Davie looked at his Transformers clock radio, confused. Four a.m.

  “I thought you left,” he said.

  “I’m leaving now. One last goodbye,” she said, and kissed his forehead. Davie thought he saw tears shimmering, but Mommy was always emotional about trips and airplanes. She thought it was every airplane’s destiny to crash from the sky, and the pilots had to fight for their lives the whole way. For months, she had talked about nothing but her visit to Accra to see her family, and now she seemed sad to be leaving. “I’ll pack you in my bag, I think.”

  “You’ll be back soon, Mommy,” I said.

  Mommy didn’t answer, except to sigh. Suddenly, Davie was sure he saw tears.

  “Saida?” Dad called from the hallway, his voice hushed in the dark. “Van’s here.”

  Davie was glad Mommy had lost the argument, but he felt sorry for her. She wanted to take them all to Ghana with her, but this was time to go to Grandma and Grandpa Walter’s in Gracetown, Florida. The summer trip had been planned since Christmas, but Mommy wanted them to go to with her instead. Mommy had said they should take a vote, and Davie had felt guilty raising his hand to choose Dad’s parents over hers. Of course, Neema raised her hand to side with him too, because she mimicked his every movement.

  Gracetown won, even though their older sister, Imani, had refused to vote because she was going away to Northwestern for the summer anyway. The relief Davie felt only had a little bit to do with the farmer in Gracetown who let them ride his tractor and horses whenever they wanted to, or Grandma’s fried chicken and sweet potato pie. Mommy and Dad knew exactly why he and Neema wanted to go to Gracetown instead.

  It was never the same at Christmas. The best time to go was in summer.

  “Hope you see your ghosts,” Mommy said, and kissed his forehead. She was smiling; a sad, empty smile, but still a smile. Mommy’s smile made Davie’s heart leap. Maybe she wasn’t mad about his vote against her, or how he had led Neema to his side. The injured look on her face when he’d raised his hand had pierced him in a strange new way, as if she was his child—and he a parent who had made a terrible, unthinkable choice.

  “I’ll get video this time,” Davie said. “Proof. You’ll see.”

  Mommy made a tssk sound. “You think I never saw ghosts? On my street, they lived in the acacia trees. They sang us to sleep! We never saw it as a special thing. Not like you. Take care of your sister. I’ll miss you, Kofi.”

  “I’ll miss you too, Mommy.”

  Her hug lasted so long that Dad called for her twice more. The last time, he came to the doorway and stood there as if to block her way. “You’ll be late. Come on.” His voice was clipped, like he was mad. But he was only tired. That was what Davie told himself then.

  It would be a month and two days before he would see Mommy again. He had never been away from her so long, so he didn’t move from her arms even after Dad huffed out an annoyed sigh. More than annoyed, actually. Later, Davie would wonder why he hadn’t realized right then that something was very, very wrong.

  He’d known, maybe, but he hadn’t wanted to.

  That summer wasn’t going to be like the rest. Not one tiny little bit.

  Davie heard the shuttle drive off beneath his window, taking his mother far away from them. But as he tried to go back to sleep, twisting and turning beneath his sheets until they bound his legs, ghosts were the only thing on Davie’s mind.

  The weeks in summer usually fly by, but the two days before they would leave for Florida passed as slowly as the last two days of school. The day of the trip passed even more slowly. First, the flight itself was endless. One plane to Atlanta to took forever, landing at the airport that was more like a city, with a transit system and far-flung terminals. The next plane was so teeny that they climbed up metal stairs from the hot tarmac in the rain, and Dad had to stow his computer case because the attendants said there wouldn’t be room.

  Neema, of course, complained the whole way. She always complained more when Mommy wasn’t around, because Dad would cluck and tug her braids gently and try to make her smile as if she were still a baby instead of eight already. She really played it up when Mom was gone, carrying around her brown-skinned Raggedy Ann doll and batting her eyelashes. Pathetic.

  Maybe Mommy is right about planes, Davie thought when the second plane landed with a terrible shaking and squealing. But then they were on the ground and everyone clapped with relief, and Mommy’s fears seemed silly again.

  Not Mommy, he reminded himself. He was twelve years old now. He was going to middle school in the fall, and he’d heard enough nightmarish stories about middle school to know that if any of the other kids heard him call his mother Mommy, he’d come home with a bloody nose every day. He’d already seen evidence of it: A hard glare from a teenager watching him play with Neema on the playground equipment at the McDonald’s Playland had been Davie’s first hint that the Punk Police were watching him now. He wasn’t a kid anymore; he was a target. His mother was Mom now. Nothing so hard about that. Like Dad told him, she would keep him a baby forever if it were up to her. He had to be stronger than that.

  As if in confirmation, when the plane rocked to a halt Dad patted Davie’s knee the way he patted his business partner’s knee when he came over for dinner. (His father was a movie producer, except not the rich kind.) That pat made Davie feel grown, even important.

  “Well . . . we’re here now,” Dad said. He didn’t look happy the way he usually did when he visited his parents. He said it as if flying to Tallahassee to drive to Gracetown were like being flown to the moon against their will, held prisoner for ransom by space pirates camping on moon rocks. Dad sounded like he wished he could go anywhere else.

  There was no rain during the long drive past acres of thin, scraggly pine trees on I-10 east of Tallahassee, and Davie was disappointed to realize how much daylight was left even after such a long trip. Maybe two whole hours. He was ready to go to bed right now, even if it was only two o’clock in Los Angeles, not even time for SpongeBob.

  But the ghosts never came until after dark. And to Davie, the ghosts were the point of visiting Grandma and Grandpa Walter in Gracetown during the summer.

  The ghosts were why he put up with having to share a room with Neema, and the excruciating fact that Grandpa Walter and Grandma only had a huge old satellite dish, and every time they came to visit the number of channels had shrunk because all the networks were bailing to cable and DishNet or DirecTV or something invented in this millennium, so unless he was going to watch CNN or the History Channel or Lifetime—get real!—there was hardly anything on TV all summer long. And ghosts were definitely the reason he put up with mosquito-infested, broiling North Florida in the middle of hurricane season—yes, sometimes it rained every day—instead of just holding out for Christmastime.

  In summer, it was all about the ghosts.

  Large trucks carried away load after load of fallen pine trees, but the woods were still thick. You see how they’re cutting it all down? Grandma always said on her way to this or that meeting to try to stop a new construction project. But while Gracetown had a shortage of virtually everything else—particularly in the movie theater department—there was no visible shortage of trees whatsoever. Welcome to Gracetown—We’ve Got Trees!

  Grandma and Grandpa Walter had liv
ed in Miami most of his life, but they had retired to Gracetown four years ago, on six acres of land shaped like a slice of pie—well, not a perfect piece, but it tapered to nothing at the V at the far fence. The single-story house was fenced in and set back from a two-lane road where traffic raced past on its way to more interesting places.

  It didn’t look anything like Davie would have imagined a haunted house should look—old and decrepit, or with an interesting feature like a balcony, or at least a veranda. Gracetown was full of plantation-style houses that looked like a reminder of the slavery Davie had seen with his own eyes when Dad showed him Roots, but Grandma and Grandpa Walter’s house looked like they had ordered it over the Internet from Houses-R-Us. Just like any other house, except painted bright peach, a splash of Miami in the middle of the woods.

  Grandma and Grandpa Walter were waiting for them in the yard when they drove up. The gravel driveway was a million miles long, so his grandparents needed plenty of notice to walk down to unlock the gate. Locking the gate was a Miami habit Grandma never gave up. Sometimes Grandpa Walter drove his car instead of walking because of his arthritis.

  When Davie and his sister got out of the rental car, his grandparents fussed over them as if they’d been gone half a lifetime, like they always did. Tight hugs from Grandma. Playful punches from Grandpa Walter, who liked to remind Davie that he used to box when he was in the army in the 1950s. Promises of special outings and homemade sweets.

  But it was different this time, too. Usually Dad just stood in the background and grinned, watching his parents. Davie’s father had told him that when he was a kid, a psychic at a booth at a county fair told him that his parents would die when he was young—and he’d lived in fear of losing them since. Dad had never expected Grandma and Grandpa Walter to see him grow up, or to know his children. Dad said he finally figured out that the psychic wanted to scare him.

  “But why would a psychic want to scare a little kid like that?” Davie had asked.

  Dad had looked at him like it was the dumbest question in the world. “That was in 1976, Davie,” Dad said. He waited a moment, as if the answer was hidden in the year, a code. Davie’s blank face made him sigh. “Racist, that’s all. What do you think?”