Ghosts: Creative Nonfiction by Meredith McCarroll

Turning my rental car toward the lake, the road has been widened and the house where Amity grew up is nothing. A spot between roads. The gravel lot where I used to park is a condominium now, so I make my own spot in the grass. I prop my foot onto the tire to tighten my laces and then set my keys where my foot had been. It used to be safe to do that. Leave your key right there on the tire. I look around and even though I don’t see anyone, I grab the key and shove it into my pocket.

Leaning against the car, I circle my ankles and rub the backs of my arms with opposite hands. It is April and there is a cold snap. A little strip of skin between my leggings and running socks is exposed, but I just need to get my blood flowing to warm up. I cross the road with long strides, stretching out my hip flexors. A few bounces up and down and I take off running with the lake on my right, clockwise.

Alley and I used to run at the lake in high school. Partly in training for soccer season, partly to be seen by everyone else on the trail or at the pool on the far end of the lake. It’s 2.3 miles around the lake, and we got to where we would run it twice before piling back into one of our cars and calling first shower. We would end up back down at the lake in the evenings. Everyone did. Some nights it was the meeting point before heading to the next destination. Some nights, it was the destination.

As I run around the first curve, I see the house that used to belong to Adam’s dad. The kids moved away with their mom following the divorce but spent summers back at this new house the dad had bought with his new wife. I had been Adam’s date to their wedding—the dad and the new wife. All the kids got to bring someone, but Adam was the only one who took them up on the offer. I had gotten picked up in a limo that was driving all the way across the county to the wedding ceremony. The mood in that limo had been more like a funeral than a wedding. Four kids at various stages of grief with the oldest angry and the youngest in denial as she held a small stuffed animal in her lap and drank Shirley Temples. Adam was just sad.

Adam’s dad doesn’t live in that house anymore, and the new owners have put too many lawn ornaments for the lawn that they have. It is a beautiful house with a wraparound deck. I remember awkward dinners on that deck when Adam was back for summers. After those dinners, we would take the canoe out to the middle of the lake and just talk. I would sit there with Adam, already missing him though he was right beside me.

I check my pace on my watch. I try to slow my footfall. A physical therapist told me I need to take shorter strides to keep my feet underneath me and protect my knee. Instead of my long slow strides, I needed a shorter, faster stride. He told me the beats per minute that would force me into the right stride. I feel the cold burning my lungs as my breaths deepen. I work to match my mental metronome. I do.

At the top of the first hill, I look down and see huge shadowy catfish below. Marc had taken me fishing here once, but all I hooked was tree limbs. He had carried both poles as we climbed down the steep hill. He baited my hook but told me I had to learn how to cast. After losing two hooks to the trees, he cast for me.

“You know there’s catfish big as a Volkswagen bug down there,” he said, bright sly grin with his head turned toward me as he reeled in his line.

“The new bugs or the old ones?” I asked.

“Which is bigger?”

I laughed then and said I didn’t know.
“You can reel me in if I hook a car-sized catfish,” I said.

“Oh no!” he laughed. “I’ll tie a rope around your waist and run up the hill to haul you and the catfish up. You just have to hold on.”

“Where’s your rope?” I had asked.

“I guess we’ll have to come back another day,” he said with that smile that made me want a thousand more days with him sitting anywhere and doing anything.

We were just kids then, I thought, looking down from the road above. Not even in drivers ed. His dad had dropped us off to fish and picked us back up in a couple of hours. I hadn’t seen his dad since the day after Marc died.

Now my hands were getting warm and my knees felt good. The chill was knocked off and I was in a good pace that I could settle into. Four steps for each inhale. Four steps for each exhale. Just like Coach Grover taught us.

The dogwoods are blooming, which is why it is so cold. Call it an old wife’s tale, but it happens every year. Whenever the dogwoods bloom, it turns cold for a few days. Dogwood Winter.

I pull my gloves off and shove them in my pockets. They are really my mom’s gloves and are too bulky for running, but they were what I found when I went digging in the hall closet this morning. Mom died six years ago, but my brother and I haven’t moved any of her clothes out of the spots she left them. I wear this one sweater of my mom’s like a robe whenever I visit and then just hang it back up in the closet when I leave. It still has a folded tissue in the left pocket. I hold it in the pocket between my fingers and thumb, certain that my mom had done the same. And that feels good to me. My brother thinks it is weird, I can tell. But he doesn’t say anything about it.

I am near the pool now but the pool won’t open for another two months. My mom saw her best friend drown in that pool. That was probably why my brother and I were in swim lessons almost before we could walk. We were both on swim team all the way until college. I still swam to keep in shape, but I had never been that competitive. I used to imagine swimming across this lake, but it isn’t a lake people swim in. Maybe it is all those car-sized catfish, I think.

My mom hadn’t told me about her friend dying until just a month or so before she died herself. Mom was in hospice and so was thinking about dying most of the time.

“Penny was the first dead body I saw,” my mom had said.

They had been at the pool together and when the lifeguard called for break, everyone rushed to the two ladders in the deep end. It was always chaotic and add to that the goofing off of middle schoolers, so no one had noticed that Penny had gotten pushed underwater. When the pool cleared, the guard had taken a break, so it was my mom who first noticed Penny was missing when she didn’t show up at their towels. By the time the guards rushed into the pool, it was too late. My mom had sat beside Penny, knowing she wouldn’t cough up water and start breathing again.

“When a body is dead, you can just tell,” Mom had said.

Two months after she told me the story, she—my mom—was dead. And it was true. There is a line that a body crosses and it isn’t going to cross back.

The water is already in the pool and it reflects the sun that is getting higher in the sky. It is warming up already. I am planning on spending the afternoon weeding mom’s bank, so it is good to have a little sun shining down.

My watch buzzes, telling me I have run two miles. I meant to do two laps, but now I decide that one is enough. I am breathing hard heading up the second hill. I remember watching older people our parents’ age run. Knee braces and slow paces, we laughed a little at them.

Marc would always be running at the lake when Alley and I were there in the afternoons. He’d do four or five loops and would pass us at least twice. He was a runner. State championships since freshman year. Our romance was well behind us, but he’d always slow down and run beside me when he saw us.

“How you doing, Boner?” he would say to me, using the nickname he made up after my dog in 8^th grade whose stump of a tail seemed phallic and hilarious to a fourteen year old boy. I learned to stop trying to explain it to everyone and just answer to Boner.

Alley and I didn’t listen to music when we ran. We also weren’t the kind of friends who had deep talks. When we played cards, which we did a lot, we could be quiet for half an hour. Only saying, “Knock” or “Your deal.” I have spent the rest of my life looking for someone to be quiet with like that. But when Alley and I ran at the lake, we would sometimes sing. And driving in the car, we would always sing. The Eagles. Indigo Girls. Songs with parts. Alley let me take all my favorite parts. I am not a strong singer, but Alley was strong enough to fill in the spaces that I left for her.

I turn the corner on the big auditorium where I had every dance recital. I know the smell of rosin by the stage door that I would dip my toe shoes into. My stomach still tightens with nerves when I see that building with all its windows looking out at the water. Too many afternoons posing in various brightly colored Lycra, sequined and tassled, to settle on one specific memory. Just a childhood of blurry leotards and tap shoes at all angles around that auditorium.

Marc and his girlfriend had a fight right before he died. They found him with a belt around his neck in the hallway. It had been years since I had even seen him, but when I heard what happened, one of my first thoughts had been that I had given him a braided belt for Christmas that year that we dated. He gave me a gold chain and I gave him a belt and a sweater. I knew it probably wasn’t that belt. I knew it didn’t matter if it was or wasn’t.

Right before the downhill to the car is the spot that Marc and I made out. In the days where slow kissing your way toward chapped lips for 45 minutes was everything. His hands were firm but didn’t wander. He was kind. He was handsome. He brought me to this spot, across the lake from his fishing spot, because you couldn’t see it from the path. There was something exciting about hiding like that. Hearing people walk by, but knowing they couldn’t see you. They put up a fence for safety sometime after we sat there and before he died. Does anyone still crawl down to that rock just under the ledge where you could feel so much with no one knowing?

I let my legs take long strides down the last hill. Knees be damned. I realize my cheeks are wet and I let myself sob unevenly while I push into a sprint. My heart pounds, my fists fly back and forth chaotically, and I yell some guttural something to no one that means nothing. At the bottom of the hill, the path meets up with the road and crosses the dam. I stop and put my hands on my knees. Heaving and panting.

I don’t even know what I am crying for. I have this whole life I carry around. A map of this place where markers are moments of lost times and lost people. Sometimes there are just too many of them.

I get to my car and check the tire for the key. It is gone. I look around quickly before remembering the key is in my pocket. I look over toward where Amity’s house should be. She is in Austin now. Adam is in Baltimore. Alley is in Atlanta. I could call any one of them right now. For a moment, I am caught in the web of all the possible ways our lives might have spiraled out from here. I hold my breath between the me who ran with Alley and swung by Amity’s and wrote letters to Adam and watched for Marc over my shoulder and the me I have become. I look back over the lake at the mountains beyond. I close my eyes to remember who I am, to remember that I am, and when I open my eyes the layers of lyrics and laughter and lips touching and legs running have shifted back into place and I am home.

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