Thin Love (2 page)

There are ghosts in the lake house.

Keira feels them breathing on her skin. They are 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 sees her younger self—awkward, curious, broken—filling days of neglect with imaginary friends.

The lake looms in front of her and the cool patio stone under her feet chills her skin, has her moving her fingers up her arms in a futile attempt at warming herself. The slide of slow currents, the slip of each wave against the dark sand, brings peace, relief, neither of which Keira had ever known in this place. Fireflies skid along the surface and the heavy limbs of cypress trees brush against the water. In the distance, toward the cityscape she can’t see, she knows there are 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 calls more ghosts from the past, pulls them into her mind—unseen creatures lined on a hook.

Closing her eyes, Keira sees 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 been 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 is a slippery vine of regret. It’s a reminder of what Keira had given up. And now that she is back home, her mother buried behind the walls of the old family crypt, Keira feels 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 pulls Keira from her thoughts and the mesmerizing current of the lake.

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

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

Her son smiles, brings into focus a dimple that carries in more echoes of the past. “She’s gone, you know. Why do you care about coasters?” She knows he’s right, knows that her mother’s presence is the largest ghost, the one she thought she exorcised years before. But this place is too familiar, too reminiscent of her. When she doesn’t answer him, ignores his comment with eyes on the screen in front of them, Ransom replaces 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 nods at the television and Keira can only smile that he says “we” and not “they” as though he grew up in New Orleans and not Nashville.

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

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

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

Sometimes her son grins a certain way, laughs with a tone that is placating and sarcastic, and both gestures bring 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 ignores her, lifts the remote to the screen when the commentary shifts from the players waiting to be selected, to NFL gossip and speculation and the name she’s tried to forget she knew for all of Ransom’s life.

“Kona Hale enters the 2013 season as a free agent…”
the sports caster begins, but Keira doesn’t hear the rest of his monologue. She only sees the picture flash on the screen. The hooded eyes, black and penetrating, the familiar grin, the scar across his cheek that Keira knows isn’t from a football game. And then, Ransom sits up straight as a video of Kona moves over the screen, reporters surrounding him, microphones pointed at his face as he leaves an airport.

Ransom’s gaze slips to her and she thinks there is 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 knows Ransom sees the similarities. How could he not? But he doesn’t ask. He has never asked.

“Rumor is Hale is going to practice with the Steamers this summer.” Ransom flashes a grin identical to the one on the television set and Keira represses 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 says, unable to resist a smile when her son’s eyes go 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 moves off the sofa when Ransom nudges it. She doesn’t look at the screen, tries to ignore the voice,
his
voice, as he answers the reporters’ endless questions. She’d spent years doing that; blocking out an article online or him on a late night talk show. Keira’s learned to blind herself to the sports figure, reminding herself he is no longer the boy she loved. That face, that name, is something unreal to her and not 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 meant to answer him then. She meant to answer all of his questions over the years. But her boy stopped questioning, stopped 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 asks and his laugh returns Keira’s attention back to the screen.

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

Still beautiful. Still charming and when Keira’s heart clenches, vibrates like a bassline drumming from a speaker, she can’t listen anymore.

“Want some popcorn?” She doesn’t wait for her son to respond before she moves into the kitchen. Keira takes a moment to herself, to push away the most relentless, insistent ghost.

On the counter she sees her mother’s cookbook. It is 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 has 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. And still, those shadows of her mother’s ghost could not block other things she remembers about this room.

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 can still hear her own moans bounce into her ears across the wood floors. He fills this place and sometimes, Keira thinks, he still fills too much of her head, too much of her heart.

She had pushed back those memories, those sensations that Kona always worked in her, but being home has 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 all—life, death, breath—all those impossible things you aren’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 blinks away that memory and pulls out an empty bowl when the volume on the television increases. Kona’s voice is louder now, clearer, and Keira moves to the pantry, fetches a small bag of popcorn and slams it into the microwave. The cadence of his voice has grown deeper, heavier with a rasp and there are no vestiges of his Uptown roots in the inflection. He belongs to the world now, not the city, not their university, certainly not to her. Keira’s heart skips double time, throbbing with each word she manages to hear from Kona’s interview.

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

Sixteen years and the heavy weight of his words to her still render 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 calls into the kitchen.

She takes a breath, then another and opens the microwave when it sounds. “Just a second, son. I’ll be just a second.”

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

Kona pulls 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 19
th
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 he 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 is 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. Absently, Kona rubs 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 reminds 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 says to himself, a small chuckle moves out of his mouth at the memory. She swore she hated the nickname, but he caught her blush each time he said it.

Kona leaves the newspaper behind on the table, takes 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 glance back down at the paper and Kona retrieves Keira’s face, that smile again, the memory of her skin.

Was she here 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.