Ghost Story

When Beth had come across the cataract that morning, the water plummeting downward had driven for a moment the past month from her mind, had allowed her to forget the heart attack, the ambulance. . .

Camping with his mother in the back mountain was not the way David had intended to spend his first birthday home from college. He had imagined himself pounding beers at the Towne Crier with his old high school friends, getting a couple of gag gifts, having to be driven back to his mom’s house in the backseat of someone’s car—not waking up on the ground at daylight after a night of hauling gallons of water into the wilderness and dining on freeze-dried turkey and reconstituted lasagna.

Where had she gotten the idea anyway? They had never gone camping before, although his dad used to talk about it.

“Why don’t you learn to camp?” he would say whenever he found David sitting in front of the TV on a Sunday afternoon. “Get out of doors.”

He even bought David a geodesic tent, complete with sleeping bag and Coleman stove as a bar mitzvah present. When David opened the gifts after his aliyah, he looked up at his mother, who raised a sympathetic eyebrow but didn’t say a thing. He had wanted a PlayStation.

“We’ll take a trip one of these days to the back mountain,” his dad said, but they never did.

When he was fourteen, his dad tried to get him to go to the YMCA sleep-away camp. “I’m too old for that,” David said. “And besides, it’s the Young Men’s Christian Association.”

“It’s just a name,” his father said. “But maybe you could do Outward Bound? I’ve also heard of something called NOLS, National Outdoor Leadership Something.”

“Not interested, Dad.”

David got a job as a lifeguard that summer instead. He liked sitting up on the throne of the lifeguard chair, high above the water at the Leland Country Club. It was quiet and dry; he got a great tan and terrific views of the girls lying out in their two-piece swimsuits. He worked there every year until going off to American University, and the tent and the sleeping bag and the stove sat untouched in his closet for half a decade. Then last week, his mother called him at school and said she wanted the two of them to go camping for his birthday.

“We should use the things your father gave you.”

Yeah, like the table lamps he gave them one year for Chanukah, the ones that turned on and off when you touched the shade.

“No switches,” his Dad said. “Isn’t that amazing?”

Or the Casio keyboard he had gotten for David, who hadn’t the slightest idea how to play it or the least inclination to learn.

His father never asked what they wanted and was always giving them gifts they couldn’t use.

But David didn’t argue with his mother because she was a widow now, and he went along with the camping idea, though he couldn’t imagine anything duller than a weekend in the woods, alone with her, nothing to do but wander among the trees and heat baked beans on a glorified Bunsen burner.

But it was even worse than he had thought.

He would not have agreed to his mother’s proposal had he foreseen the sunken air mattress and the cold, hard ground, the small rocks pressing into his ribs in the hours before sunrise. He would not have come if he had imagined himself clawing through half a mile of pricker bushes, a damp roll of Charmin wedged under his arm. He would have stayed home had he known the leaves would be so wet and the mosquitoes awake so early. And he certainly would have objected if he had anticipated that, when he finally broke through the brush that morning, just wanting to take a dump in peace, he would discover his mother stark naked and weeping under the most amazing waterfall he had ever seen.

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When Beth had come across the cataract that morning, the water plummeting downward had driven for a moment the past month from her mind, had allowed her to forget the heart attack, the ambulance, the funeral, the wake, canceling all those credit cards, changing the name on the utility bills, the mortgage, and the bank accounts, the hordes of sympathy cards received and the piles of thank-you notes to write.

She hadn’t remembered to be mad at the arrogantly gangly middle-aged man who thought he was immune to the side effects of double-deluxe cheeseburgers and chicken-fried steak. Her mind did not return to the hospital bed and the respirator and the mouth that would not close after he died. She had tried to push it shut, but it would not stay.

Looking up at the waterfall, she forgot it was the morning of her son’s birthday, and that he reminded her of his father because he was so solipsistic and because he also ate nothing but junk. She forgot David was getting all Cs in college and that he still didn’t have a major or a girlfriend or any sense of direction, and that she was angry because she had to twist his arm to get him to come camping with her.

She didn’t really know why she had done that or why she had woken today with the sunrise and left her tent to walk and think of the morning nearly two decades earlier when David, himself, had gotten her up before daybreak with an urgent need to emerge into the world, and she had to shake his father awake to drive her to the hospital.

“So the ride begins,” David’s dad-to-be had said as they pulled onto the freeway. “Next rest stop, twenty years.”

With the white-noise rush of the falling water in her ears, she forgot she was lonely and sad and excited all at the same time and that she couldn’t sleep for the sorrow and for the knowledge that the universe had altered its plans for her, decided she would start all over again.

Instead, she recalled all those print advertisements for travel agencies, the ones displaying white-clad couples embracing in pooled water under tumbling streams, backdrops of towering ferns and purple orchids. After his death, she had found a stack of them, cut from the backs of People and Time magazines and stashed at the bottom of her husband’s desk drawer, hidden away like a stash of pornography.

And though there was nothing more exotic than a balsam fir in the vale today, she felt just now as if she had found a portion of paradise. She wondered what it would be like to have all that water pounding against her skin. She guessed it was icy cold. Would she be able to stand it? To breathe? Would it wash away the thousand griefs she knew still existed, though for the moment, could not feel?

That’s when Nathan, her dead husband, whom she neither saw, nor heard, nor felt, put it into her mind to kick off those boots, shed the jeans, drop the drawers, and go for a swim. Have yourself a shower, play the nymph. The water’s clean and clear. It will take your breath away and then give it right back to you.

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Nathan had first found the waterfall nearly forty-five years ago when he and his grandfather stumbled across it while bow hunting. They had to shield their eyes from the sunlight that glittered off the falling diamonds raining down before them. These descended in long sparkling ropes of blue and white and silver that his eye could follow individually as they broke on the rocks or allow to meld into one undulating, ever-changing column of water that brought to mind Telemachus and Proteus, about whom he’d read in school that winter.

His grandfather, Uriah, threw down the bow.

“Boy, let’s have us a shower,” he said and stripped off all his clothes, nodding for Nathan to do likewise, and they stood barefoot and naked, holding hands under the cascade that was so cold they both had trouble drawing air, and that turned the old man into a landscape of rivers rushing wildly through his close-cropped gray hair, down his wrinkled torso, over his long, uncircumcised penis, and splashing from his thighs to the pool in which they stood. The boy’s own small, bareheaded thing retracted like a frightened turtle, and his mouth was full of the river, and everywhere the light was broken and refracted.

He wished his dad was there, then, so he too could stand beneath the falls and become a pillar of water.

But Nathan’s father didn’t have time for such things, didn’t see the point of hunting without a gun, and had he been here, would just as likely have sat on the bank and dug sticks into the earth, waiting for the boy and the old man to finish. Nathan had sworn not to be like him, a man too busy for his own family, more interested in work than his children.

He was determined not to follow that path, but then he, too, became an attorney, married a Jewish woman, and spent Monday through Saturday in the office.

That’s why, after he died so unexpectedly, so close upon his son’s nineteenth birthday, Nathan insisted his family go camping with an urgency and authority he would never have mustered while alive.

That’s why he left Beth in the river and slipped back to the campsite where he rattled trees, dropped acorns, and sent squirrels scurrying through the shrubs around the tent, until the boy could take it no more and rose from his sleep.

It was a parting gift, a birthday present to his son, offering what he, himself, had been given so long ago, and it made sense to him because he was dead and no longer thought about the meaning of naked bodies and old taboos about mothers and sons. And the falling water was so beautiful that it saddened and confused him when David turned away and fled back to the campsite.

This story originally appeared (2009) in Turnrow, the literary journal of The University of Louisianna, Munro.