Ghost Summer, Stories

  Standing frozen in the waiting room, Kenya forgot why she had been angry. Or why she had come in. Or even where she was.

  “That music’s something, isn’t it?” a man’s voice said from her left.

  Released from the spell, Kenya turned to see a hulking figure standing behind a half-open glass partition, wrapped inside an ill-fitting doctor’s coat. He was only partially visible, the rest of his bulk muddied behind the misted glass. She saw his enormous wiry beard, one curious brown eye, and half of his round spectacles staring out at her like a Moon.

  “It’s . . . ” Kenya searched her mind for words, avoiding not only clichés but words that were unworthy. But her search was fruitless; her mind was empty of words.

  “Are you hungry?” the man behind the partition asked.

  The question was odd, a non sequitur, a muted part of Kenya’s brain realized, but her mouth nonetheless flooded with saliva. She saw the man fling something toward her at an arc, and her nose recognized long before her eyes could focus that it was a small strip of raw beef. To her own astonishment, she snatched the meat out of the air with a decisive snap of her teeth.

  “I thought your sign outside was a joke,” Kenya told him later, when the music was gone and she felt more like herself. Now, sitting primly on the leather sofa in the waiting room, the woman who’d heard the music was a stranger to her. Only her satisfied stomach, and tiny bits of raw beef caught between her teeth, reminded her of who she’d been. Embarrassed, she worried at the food fragments with a peppermint-flavored toothpick the doctor had offered her.

  “Sure, right. Most people think it’s a gag. That’s the beautiful part.”

  Dr. Jack, as he insisted on being called, had fixed a pot of coffee that he served himself in a mug that read, wryly, WHAT A HAIRY SITUATION. He offered a cup to Kenya, but she refused. Caffeine in any form, even a minuscule amount, made her crazy, she told him. Especially right after the Moon, she thought, noting that last part only to herself.

  “To some people, crazy is good,” Dr. Jack told her, winking. “But you’re smart to keep your distance. Coffee’s my vice.”

  Kenya tried to assess Dr. Jack the way her grandfather had taught her, looking for signs. He had a mane of intricately curled dark hair that spilled onto his face in the form of a neatly combed beard, which rode high on his cheeks and grew all the way to his mid-chest before tapering away. From what she could see of his neckline above his white smock, the hair grew freely there, too. Dr. Jack, yes, was one hairy guy.

  But there was always more to it than the hair, she knew. She tried to hold his eyes, to see what she could find there, that arcane quality that had informed her grandfather’s brown-eyed gaze. Dr. Jack’s eyes were set back deep beyond his bearded pudgy cheeks, and they told her nothing except that he might be kind. She decided, in that instant, to trust him.

  “How did you know about me?” she asked

  He shrugged. “The music. If you didn’t have the genes, all you’d hear was Muzak. An ocarina and strings playing ‘Black Dog’ by Zeppelin.”

  She regarded him blankly. She didn’t know the song.

  “That’s a joke,” he said, grinning. She tried to assess his teeth, but the grin vanished too quickly. “But seriously, the music gives you away. Only my very special patients hear it at all.” He said this with tremendous warmth, a little too much. Kenya didn’t like his eagerness; it glowed from him like the bright, giddy energy of first dates with the kind of men who typically had too many chips and dents just beneath the surface to warrant any more of her time.

  “When did your condition manifest?” he asked, suddenly sounding like a doctor again.

  “I don’t think I want to talk about that.” The awful episode right before her ninth birthday tried to goad its way to consciousness, but she refused to open that window. Not now.

  “Right. I forget, you’re not a patient yet. So you do the asking, then.”

  “How many . . . I mean . . . ”

  “I have thirteen special patients, a very small part of my practice. All from the Tri-State area except for one guy from DC. He takes the train in for group night, once a month. Last night, matter of fact. You missed it.”

  Thirteen! This doctor was the first person she’d met in New York who seemed to share her condition. There were other men, too? Kenya imagined the commuter from DC in a tailored suit with a briefcase in his hand, probably a lawyer, scanning the Washington Post or the Times while he rode in. She liked that picture. The image of the man on the train re-awakened her hopeless adolescent yearnings for a mate who would accept her. She’d been so certain that no man like that would exist that she’d sat for hours on the back porch with her grandfather, allowing him to fill her head with nonsense and cynicism, only to escape the ache of her daydreams. Had hopelessness also driven her to accept the marriage proposal from Lee, a man who was funny and good-hearted, but who lived three-thousand miles away and whom she honestly had yet to really know. And, more to the point, a man who could never know her.

  Dr. Jack’s faceless commuter on the train saddened Kenya in ways she couldn’t explain. And to think he’d been here only yesterday! Perhaps in this very room.

  “That many? Just in New York?” she said.

  “Give or take. I have to account for a few strays, pardon the expression. But you’re the first new face I’ve seen in two years.”

  “You have . . . ” Kenya stumbled over the word, momentarily lapsing into the desperation of a fifteen-year-old’s mind. “ . . . treatments?”

  “Mostly cosmetic. I’m a dermatologist, understand, so I’m—”

  “The hair,” she said, her voice shrill and urgent. Had that really been her voice at all? “You have treatments for the hair?”

  “Sure, right.” He nodded, the grin floating back across his mouth. This time, unless she imagined it, she did notice a slight extra sharpness to his incisors. Just like her grandfather’s. “That’s my specialty. I’ll have you smooth as a baby’s bottom.”

  Kenya stared at him. She could feel the steadily rising pulsing of her heartbeat in her fingertips, surging with blood that warmed her face in a flare. She didn’t speak. She was afraid that strange, helpless voice would fly from her mouth again.

  “Yeah, I know,” Dr. Jack said, as if responding to her thoughts. “Sometimes you don’t even know what you’re looking for until you’ve found it.”

  “Sheep don’t live lives, they live lies,” Gramp always told her. “Your mama’s hell-bent on tryin’ to raise you in the world of sheep. But you damn sure ain’t no sheep, girl. Are you?”

  There were never real answers to Gramp’s questions. When Kenya was twelve and began thinking for herself, she’d tried to pose logic against him, but his questions always writhed and twisted like snakes that could change their shape and size depending on the point he wanted to make. Not that the point ever changed.

  Summers with Gramp were always more fun to anticipate than they were to actually spend, because by the third day of her two-month visit Kenya always figured out there was no one but Gramp to talk to and even less to do. He had a seventy-year-old wood-frame house that had never heard a whisper about the invention of air-conditioning in a tiny Oregon town called Fortune, which was not big enough to be a true town. The six buildings that made up what Kenya supposed was “downtown” Fortune were a saloon, a market that served hot and cold sandwiches, a barber shop that doubled as a post office, the two-room First Church of the Living Christ, a drugstore, and a tack and feed. The entire patch of buildings went dark after nine, so no one driving by could even see Fortune at night. Most people never saw Fortune at all. There, Kenya disappeared, and so did the world outside.

  Mostly, timber families lived in Fortune. Houses dotted the hilltop tree-lines on large parcels of land, but the precious few neighbors never ventured near Gramp’s house, and Kenya had never been able to identify any families with children her age. Which left her and Gramp. Two months, each year, felt like a lifetime. She’d t
ried to complain to her parents that Gramp was a bad influence on her, but either they didn’t believe her or Gramp’s bad influence was exactly what they were counting on, especially her mother, with her secretive gazes each summer as she waved goodbye.

  The only nights at Gramp’s she truly enjoyed—the nights that, given her circumstances, were more incredible and long-awaited than Christmas Day—were the Moon nights. One night each month. And every night until the Moon, he told her, was preparation. He told her there was only one night each month when she truly existed at all.

  “It’s like any other gift. You don’t pay attention to something long enough, you forget,” Gramp used to say, gazing out from his back porch across his unkempt property, where wild tiger-lilies grew in quilt patterns in the crabgrass. “And don’t be afraid of that word ‘monster.’ That’s a word invented by conventional folk either too stupid or too scared to follow their own souls. Too scared to create nothin’ of their own.”

  “Monsters don’t create anything,” Kenya might have argued, or something like it.

  “What’s wrong with you, girl? Of course they do. They create fear, and there ain’t nothing more powerful on this planet Earth.” Gramp gave her headaches from so much confusion.

  But the confusion vanished on Moon nights. The Moon gave her experiences that defied memory, that had no place for discussion at her parents’ dinner table or among the classmates who sat in the neatly-lined desks at her school: Bare feet descending nearly weightless across beds of sharp twigs that could not hurt her. Wind tickling and stroking the hairs across her naked back. Foreign songs emerging from her throat, screeching across the treetops.

  And twice, when she was very fast and very lucky, the opportunity to kill. Once, it had been a squirrel. Another time, a raccoon. Caught, startled, in her hands. Killed with instinctive swiftness, fur raking against her teeth.

  Only on Moon nights did it make any sense at all. Only then did Kenya truly understand why Gramp lived in Fortune, secluded as a forest creature himself. And why the neighbors never once came to call.

  Every year, despite the prospect of hot boredom of summer nights that made her want to scream herself to sleep, Kenya couldn’t wait to go see her grandfather. When she wasn’t with him, Moon nights were almost like any other. The forgetting always began right away.

  Dr. Jack’s office seemed much less inviting when Kenya came back for her first official appointment. The lovely incense was still in the air, so it calmed her nerves; and she could hear traces of the music, even more faint than before. It was harder to hear now, of course, because the Moon had been nearly a week ago, and her senses had faded considerably.

  But she was put off when she saw his examining room. There was a framed eight-by-ten photo of Lon Chaney, Jr. in elaborate costume placed prominently on the wall, alongside a full-sized movie poster, which jarred Kenya so much in its cartoonish menace that she could taste bile in her throat. Seeing the images, she could very nearly smell her grandfather’s pipe tobacco and the perfume of the pine needles of the Christmas trees that had grown wild on his property. Gramp had kept film reels of classic horror movies, and she’d watched them with him late at night for lack of anything else to do, all the while feeling slightly sick to her stomach. Now, seeing Gramp’s favorite movie celebrated again, Kenya felt a prickling in her marrow that couldn’t have been deeper if she’d been staring at a poster of a handkerchief-bound Mammy or a fat-lipped, watermelon-slurping pickaninny.

  Why in the world had she come here? This coarse, trivial man had nothing to teach her.

  But it was too late now. Already, she had bared herself to her midriff, and his fingers were traveling up and down her spine, following the trail of hair.

  “Geez, this isn’t bad at all,” he said. “Is this your typical growth?”

  “Pretty much. I never get much facial hair, thank God. Just very fine hair on the cheeks, and it falls out after a few hours,” she told Dr. Jack, yanking her eyes away from the movie poster’s glare. “My back and chest are the problem.”

  “Let’s see the chest,” he said, walking around the table to face her. There, she knew, he had a perfect view of the triangle-shaped thatch of black fur between her breasts. Only a select few people had ever seen it, mostly technicians at hair-removal salons who clucked with shock and pity at how a hormonal condition could go so badly awry. Not even her mother had seen what grew on her chest. But Gramp had, of course. Her hair had delighted him, and he promised her that if she followed the diet he taught her, she’d grow a lot more like it once she was older. Of course, she had done nothing of the sort.

  “This is nothing,” Dr. Jack said.

  It hadn’t seemed like nothing to Terrell Jordan, who’d slipped his hand beneath Kenya’s blouse while they were necking in the back row of a movie theater when they were both in high school. He’d been so quick, she hadn’t even seen it coming; and if she’d expected a maneuver like that from bookish Terrell, she’d never have made out with him at all. When his fingers met the hair, he didn’t say anything or make a sound. His fingers just twitched and flew away as if he’d been burned. He pulled his lips back and stared at her, his eyeglasses reflecting the light from the movie screen. That was all she could see of his face.

  No more making out after that, or movies either. But at least, as far as she knew, he never told anyone. She very nearly loved him for that.

  “It doesn’t feel like ‘nothing’ when I’m getting it pulled out, believe me,” she said.

  “How do you do that?”

  “Well, creams don’t work and electrolysis is a waste of time. Waxing, usually.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, are you kidding me?” Dr. Jack said, gazing at her with the abhorrence and concern she had come to expect from everyone who had tried to tend to her hair. He sucked his teeth. “Don’t do that. Not ever again. You’ll damage your skin that way, believe me. See these dark spots . . . ? That’s why I’m here.” From his coat pocket, he produced a white jar of unlabeled paste. He unscrewed it and showed her the texture, which was the color of peanut butter not quite as thick. It had a sweet scent.

  “This is a combination of flowers, herbs and enzymes,” he said. “Apply it to the affected area the day before the Moon, and keep applying it every six hours for the next forty-eight hours. You’ll see a difference right away, if the hair grows in at all. Within a day or two, any hair you do get should wash right off. If it doesn’t, we can try something else. But this works great in ninety percent of my cases, and your growth is so mild you shouldn’t have a thing to worry about. I have patients who need vats of the stuff, but it works.”

  Con-artist, Kenya thought. It couldn’t be that easy.

  “Money-back guarantee,” Dr. Jack added. “But it ain’t cheap, I’m afraid. Fifty bucks a jar. Most of the ingredients are imported.”

  “That’s all there is to it?”

  “Modern times,” Dr. Jack said. “Modern solutions.”

  Kenya took the jar and stared at the brown paste. She wondered what Gramp would have thought of it. Or her parents, for that matter. Perhaps, armed with the paste, they might not have sent her to spend her summers with Gramp at all. What in the world had they been trying to prepare her for?

  Dr. Jack pulled up a wooden chair and sat in front of Kenya with a slate. He seemed so much more conventional now than he had that first night, when he was tossing her raw meat across the room. “Since you’re my patient now, how about a few questions?”

  Kenya shrugged, then nodded.

  “Tell me when your condition manifested.”

  “Uhm . . . When I was a toddler, my mother says. I had mood swings . . . ”

  “On Moon nights?”

  “Yes.”

  “And your parents?”

  “No. I don’t even think my father knows, not the whole thing, and my mother pretty much pretended it wasn’t happening,” Kenya said, momentarily despising their smooth skin and predictable temperaments the way she had as a child. ??
?But my grandfather, yes. I got the genes from my mother’s father. They barely talked to each other, but she knew about him.”

  “That’s it? No aggravating circumstances?”

  “A bite,” she said softly. “More like a nip, I guess. From a wild dog.” Her first and only camping trip with her parents, and it had been a disaster. Out of her parents’ sight for only a few minutes, she’d offered some food to the underfed, haggard-looking animal sniffing their campsite out of a child’s natural pity. The dog had bitten her instead, drawing pricks of blood. Her right hand still bore the scar, although it was so faded that only she could still see it was there.

  “A dog? That’s an old wives’ tale,” Dr. Jack said.

  “Still . . . it got worse after that. I was eight. That’s when the hair started coming.”

  “Average age of onset is about twelve, thirteen, so you were definitely accelerated,” Dr. Jack said. “Certain sun-blocks aggravate it. And a high-protein diet. But dog-bites? Nah.”

  “That’s what happened to me. Maybe it wasn’t all dog, then.”

  Dr. Jack’s pen paused as he considered this. His shaggy eyebrows climbed, then fell at rest. “Okay, I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt on that one. What about symptoms?”

  Kenya did not want to tell him about Gramp and the woods. He’d died when she was thirteen, and she’d long ago discarded those experiences as though they had never been. “Uhm . . . irritability. I get a little jittery. A few appetite changes. Mostly, it’s just the hair.”

  “So it’s a cosmetic problem,” he said.

  She smiled. She wished she’d learned to think of it that way before now. “Yes,” she said, at ease for the first time since her arrival. “I like that.”