Ghosting by Kirby Gann

Author:Kirby Gann
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: IG Publishing
Published: 2012-03-12T22:00:00+00:00

Weeks have passed. He keeps his bedroom window cracked open in hopes she might surprise him again, but each morning he awakes only to late-winter chill and her absence. Shady’s mother answers the phone every time he calls and she doesn’t appear to know who Cole is and informs him that Shady isn’t available, or she’s out. (A phrase he tries not to read much into.) He doesn’t own an answering machine, instead he has Lyda, and with the long stretches of time on the road he has no idea if Shady ever calls back or not. Every few days he calls again, gets the mother again, and then he’s gone.

When finally she does reach him she sounds preoccupied, admits she has needed some time to herself. Her father is pressuring her to get on track with her schooling, to enroll in summer courses to ease back into med-school discipline, but she feels no motivation and doesn’t want to waste his money.

“What’s your mother say?” Cole asks.

“She’s supportive of whatever I do, she’s a great mom.”

“You talk to your sisters?” Shady is the youngest of three and her two sisters are significantly older, and wildly disparate in the directions their lives have taken: Laura, at thirty-two the oldest and the pride of her father, researches blood diseases at Duke as she pursues her PhD, while the middle daughter, Breyer, leads a life of breeding with three children each from different fathers, living now with a man who is father to none of them. Shady says she doesn’t want to follow either direction, or maybe more precisely a little of each; she hopes to find her own middle way.

“I’ve talked to both of them. Laura says since I was the surprise unexpected baby of the family that I was doted upon and so have no real understanding that gratification does not come on an immediate basis. Ergo I should just shut up and realize how luxurious my situation is and embrace my opportunities and buckle down to school and create a life that will not be reliant on anyone else, in particular not any man.”

Shady says things like ergo and he doesn’t know anyone else who does and that fact alone thrills him.

“And she has a point, it’s true,” she continues. “I’m listening.”

“What about Breyer?”

“Breyer says I should listen to my heart and prepare myself to recognize my path when it presents itself to me.”

As he listens to her expand on the subject, he fingers small cakes of plaster from the hole in the living-room wall that he knows he should get around to covering one day. It has existed there since before Lyda packed him off to live with his uncle’s family. He doesn’t know how it got there and Lyda says she does not remember. It’s possible the hole, grown with age and absent-minded picking like now, goes all the way back to Bethel Skaggs; wouldn’t that be something, to have left behind as the marker of your existence

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