Haunted Passages Nonfiction: “Ghost Beach” by Asha Dore

Every Friday after Grief Group, Jen took me on blind dates. The first two dates had been a boring bust, watching dudes light up bowls of bad weed in their parents’ basement. “Sophomores are so immature,” Jen said, passing me a joint. I sat in the passenger seat of her ancient 4Runner, parked in front of guy #3’s parents’ house. I inhaled the oily skank weed she’d gotten from one of those genius, elderly juniors in her class. “Tell me about this guy,” I said.

“Toby’s cool, sweet, easy, a junior,” she said. She talked about Toby’s art awards and how he took photography classes at the community college, which I already knew. His community college photography teacher had also been my photography teacher. In the beginning of my first class with her, she presented Toby’s award-winning color photo showing half a blurred Ferris wheel at night, the county fair lights like a constellation around it. The teacher said, “How did this kid make a Ferris wheel at the Escambia County Fair into this magic?”

“Everyone thinks Toby’s so special on account he like glitter and shit,” Jen said, exhaling.

She told me they bonded over shopping for 70s and 80s clothes at Goodwill. She talked shit about Toby’s aesthetic sense, about how it was so boring and pedestrian, how she was more into genius stuff like chemistry and hard lines. I pretended to be interested in her analysis, but I had seen Toby around the veterinarian where his dad treated my pet dogs for five years, which was one third of my lifetime at that point and therefore: I had known Toby, like, actually, forever. Plus, before my dad died, he took me to one of Toby’s Pensacola-famous art shows.

In the single historic street of downtown Pensacola, once a month, bars, restaurants, and retail shops lining the old brick streets host local art showings, usually with free wine, sparkling apple juice, crackers, and cheese slices. They called this Gallery Night. My family had gone to Gallery Night infrequently while I was a kid, usually when my mom had recently met another parent who did art on the side. When I was fourteen, Dad and I went for the first time, together. I had just enrolled in the photography class at the community college. Dad wanted me to be exposed to real art, to see what was out there in the world, and by “world” he meant a small but substantial chunk of the Florida Panhandle. “Maybe it’ll inspire you,” he said.

Dad and I walked up and down the street, drinking juice and eating free cheese. Every time someone offered Dad wine, he made a joke about his liver like, “My liver disease says hell yes, but I’ll have to pass … and by pass I mean drink juice … not die.”

At one point that night, I walked in circles on the edge of an old fountain while Dad took a business call on his super fancy Motorola flip phone. Water drizzled out from the spout on the pointed top of the fountain and leaked down into the algae-filled basin. The whole structure hummed a little. While he talked on the phone, Dad massaged his calves. Down the street, two people walked, laughing loud. I recognized one of them as Toby. His photograph of a Ferris wheel at night had won the school art contest then moved on to a city-wide competition. He won that, too. It hung in one of the galleries down the street.

Walking with his friend, Toby was like 100 feet taller than the last time I saw him. No longer the little boy in his dad’s office talking in cute voices to other people’s dogs and cats. He wore a white T-shirt and camo shorts with rainbow paint splatters across them. He was thin with a big Adam’s apple and shaggy hair. He had a kind of modern Ichabod Crane thing going on, and he laughed loud with his mouth wide open and his eyes squeezed shut. Somehow, that whole package was hot as fuck. Dad hung up his phone, and I sat down next to him. I felt like I should talk, but I didn’t know what to say. Dad always seemed so comfortable in silence. We sat together and watched Toby and his friend pass a few meters away. Dad said something about Toby looking a lot like the vet’s kid, and I nodded, acting like I didn’t care.

“That’s a real good family,” Dad said. “Kid seems like he’s got a big ass heart.”

Back in Jen’s car, outside of Toby’s house, Jen took a last long drag of the joint and put it out in an ash tray in her cupholder. Toby appeared outside the front door. I got out of the passenger seat and held the door open for him. I introduced myself. He laughed nervously and said that so much smoke followed me out of the car he was surprised either of us could breathe. On the way to the beach, I sat in the backseat, Toby smoked a new joint, and Jen played matchmaker.

“So, Asha is going on dates with like every guy in your class.”

Toby said, “This is a date?”

“Surprise!” Jen said.

“It’s fine,” I said.

Jen said, “Basically this is an episode of Singled Out, and Asha is the prize.”

“How does that make you feel, Asha?” she said in her game show host voice. We passed the suburbs and the small thatch of woods and the low slung, closed shopping centers on our way to the beach bridge.

“Why are you going on all these dates?” Toby asked.

I leaned up between their seats and said, “Jen is just really high—”

“Asha just broke up with this asshole for like the fifth time. Anyway she needs a distraction. And Toby, tonight, you ARE that distraction. How does that make you feel, Toby?”

Toby looked back at me, “So what are you into?”

I told him about sculpture, my newest favorite form of art. I told him that I was taking ceramics at the community college over the summer, that my first class had been a photography class the summer before. I told him about the teacher gushing over his art.

“I know you too,” he said. “You came to my dad’s office. Doesn’t your dad have like, a really mean Yorkie terrier?”

“Not anymore,” Jen said.

“Oh no,” Toby said. “It’s so hard to lose a dog.”

He looked genuine when he said it.

“No dumbass. The dog is fine.” Jen said. “But her dad—”

She stopped at a stoplight and took Toby’s joint out of his hand, took a long drag.

“—is, like, super dead.”

“Jen,” I said.

“That’s the real reason you’re here, Toby,” she said, coughing.

“For real?” Toby said.

“No,” I said.

“Yes,” Jen said. “You really do need a distraction. Dead daddy issues is bad enough, but Grief Group must be hell.”

Grief Group met in a windowless room in the middle of the small, L-shaped campus of Gulf Breeze High School every Friday afternoon for the last four months of my sophomore year in high school. When the grief counselor took over the office, she covered the long fluorescent ceiling lights with aqua pillow cases. They were calming lights, now, she said.

The Friday before I met Toby, the calming lights were off, and the room was lit with lamps and electric candles. Enigma played on low volume from a boom box on the counselor’s desk. She sat beside us, reading through a guided meditation that she had typed up herself and printed on pink paper.

Six of us lay in various shapes on the floor. One girl curled in a fetal position on a bean bag. A guy lay on his stomach, face down. Two girls lay together, not touching, flat on their backs, their arms and legs out like narrow starfish. I lay on my back, too, my forearm over my eyes, my feet on the floor, knees up. I knocked them against each other, back and forth like a metronome. The minute the counselor freed us, I planned to zip out of the room, find Jen, and roll my eyes with my whole body. We’d talk shit about the counselor, a short, kind woman with oversized glasses, comparing her to a hobbit or some kind of forest creature. I imagined how the laughs would blast out of Jen when I said the right but totally inappropriate cut down of my lovely, goodhearted counselor. For some reason, being extra mean about totally benign people was the most hilarious thing. For some reason, after Dad died, when adults in my life tried to do something nice for me, I couldn’t stand it. I had to find some way to escape the moment, either by ignoring them, arguing with them, running away, or laughing at them.

For now, though, lying in the grief group room, I had to endure the counselor’s singsong voice and totally goodhearted intentions for at least another twenty minutes. She had just finished going through every single body part, jaw to shoulders to tummy to toes, telling us to tighten then relax, tighten then relax.

Imagine yourself in a beautiful place. The beach on a bright, sunny day.

Barf, I thought, imagining the sweat and blinding sun and sand fleas bouncing up and down my calves leaving stinging welts. How about the beach while a storm rolls in black across the sky, a thin branch of lighting cracking sharp and hot across the horizon? Or even the beach before sunrise when the air is cool but warming, when the shorebirds disappear in the shadows between little blasts of purple light peeking through the clouds.

Imagine someone you love is standing beside you.

Who do I love? I wondered. In my mind, I stood on the beach on a cool, stormy afternoon, wearing my favorite outfit: torn bellbottoms and a faded paisley blouse I’d found at Goodwill. A litany of candidates came and went. Not you. Not you. Not you. In my mind, I heard Mom’s voice, telling me that love was something I was incapable of doing. “Sociopath,” she said. “Just like your father.”

To be fair, she hadn’t used that specific word in a couple of years. She had, however, made casual references to my inability to perform love. “What kind of daughter doesn’t love her mother?” she asked me after explaining that if I loved her, I would never put a coffee cup in the bottom part of the dishwasher. If I loved her, I would remember that she did not like to wake up before 10 on weekends, actually 11, actually more like 11:15, but if I woke her up later than about 12 she would miss out on the whole day off that she could have spent with her kids, her kids who could barely stand her, it was obvious, from the distracted expressions on their arrogant little faces. If I woke her up too late, it was clear that I didn’t want to be around her. If I loved her, I would wake her up at the right time by sitting on the side of her bed and lightly massaging her shoulder. I’d say “Mommy” like I used to. I’d hug her more often, but I would definitely not hug her if it was obvious from her demeanor that she did not want a hug. If I hugged her in one of those latter sort of moments, it was made clear again that I didn’t really love her because I couldn’t read her, even though I came out of her body. How can you not understand someone with your whole heart if you came out of their body?

In the grief group room, the girl lying in the beanbag uncurled herself and sat up. You are safe at this beach. You are safe with this person.

The girl on the beanbag crossed her arms over her chest. I watched her with my eyes half shut.

Walk down the beach together. You can hear the waves crashing, softly, along the shoreline. A seagull passes above you. Other seagulls caw in the distance—

“Fuck that,” the girl on the beanbag said. I hoped she was going to point out that seagulls were malevolent sky rats not the beacons of peace every single beach scene wanted us to believe. Instead, she said, “Do you know who my safe person was? My brother. And he killed himself.” She delivered the line with an oomph, to make sure we all understood that his suicide was actual self murder, a point she had emphasized often over the last few weeks. She glared at the counselor.

The counselor looked at her and said, “We will have time to share after the meditation.” The Enigma CD scratched then began to repeat a syllable like sa-sa-sa-sa-sa-sa-sa …. guh-guh-guh-guh.

The girl turned over and curled up again.

The counselor fiddled with the boom box beside her for a while then gave up. She turned on the overhead lights. The room was a weird mix of gold from the lamps and aquamarine from the pillowcases, like a box aquarium sitting in a sunny window. Everyone sat up, blinking.

The counselor said, “Let’s go ahead and share around the circle. How are we all feeling this week?” She set a timer for two minutes per person. The girl on the beanbag went first. She wore a pale camo T-shirt and darker camo pants. She crossed and uncrossed her arms while she spoke about her anger toward her brother who, she said, killed himself to ruin her life, how she had quit ROTC, how she wasn’t going to college no matter what anyone told her. Her brother used to protect her, she told the counselor. She cussed even more than I did and glared at all of us when she was done, like try me, bitches. None of us wanted to try her. We looked away, obediently.

The two girls beside each other were sisters. They took turns crying softly and talking about wanting to hear their mom’s voice one last time.

The guy who laid face down sat slumped with his eyes closed. “I’m fine,” he said. The counselor probed a couple more times, asking him open-ended questions like, “How is school going?” He shrugged until she stopped trying.

When it was my turn, I took a breath. “Well,” I said, “I’m super glad to miss my bio test today.”

The counselor perked up a bit. “What about home life? How’s everyone?”

“Mom’s nuts and my brother hangs out with his friends. And also my dogs are so annoying. Dad’s little yorkie, Stuff, bites everyone. He’s like a piranha.” I lifted up the cuff of my jeans to show the scars on my ankle from Stuff’s random assaults. The sisters who had been crying about their mom put their hands on their mouth almost simultaneously.

“Damn dude,” said the girl on the beanbag.

“I think he’s mad that Dad is gone but his brain is like, soooo small. How can a puppy comprehend their alpha disappearing from the planet? Sir Pocket Stuff has no chance.”

Someone snorted. Awesome. I felt the room opening up. The counselor pursed her lips but didn’t try again to redirect me from my stupid jokes, at least for now. After our share out, we watched a short video called Allison’s Loss Makes Her Stronger. At the end, a cartoon Allison with a poof of walnut hair announced, “And so! I learned to grow and let go!” Then the words appeared on the screen: Grow and Let Go! The counselor turned off the video and asked us to draw two pictures. In the first one, we should draw what our grief looked like that day. In the second, we should draw what it would look like to grow and let go. I spent too long on the first one, a Christmas tree with boring ornaments. “Draw the second picture later, sweetie,” the counselor called as I bolted out of the room the second the bell rang.

Every Grief Group was like this, first a space to express our feelings, then an opportunity to think about our feelings differently. As if by naming the feelings, we could heal the ramifications of losing siblings and primary caregivers. As if naming feelings, anything in our real lives would change.

I didn’t know back then that there is a reality in which naming your feelings can open up a little space inside of you where your emotions can shift, where an ache can become anger, where anger can become sadness, and where sadness can become a kind of surrender to what is. Maybe it wouldn’t happen in that order, but inside of this space, that surrender to the moment of your life that you are actually living looks something like acceptance of all the hard shit that has happened to you.

It’s not exactly healing. In this reality, professing emotions out loud is more like the first step in learning to move forward with a kind of emotional limp, a sore wound, sore but still moving.

In the years immediately following Dad’s death, this reality was not my reality.

In my reality, saying my feelings out loud gave my mother all the information she needed to prove that I only cared about what I was feeling and truly did not care about her. Saying my feelings out loud either started or prolonged an argument with her, and because of this, I believed that saying my feelings out loud was a kind of accidental weapon that could hurt or anger anyone I cared about.

In Jen’s 4Runner, we picked up fries with ranch dressing and Biggies of sweet tea at Wendy’s. Jen pulled into the toll booth for the beach bridge. She handed the attendant a dollar. Toby looked back at me, “Did your dad actually pass?”

“Mmhmm.”

He held my gaze for a few beats. “That’s really, so terrible,” he said. I blinked. I should feel something, I thought.

“Yeah,” I mumbled. “Thanks.”

Jen and Toby switched to school gossip, but Toby kept glancing back at me, a small wrinkle between his eyes. I realized that to Toby, the loss of a parent was an actual heartbreak. His voice had this quality to it when he said, It’s really so terrible. Like, he could feel it in his body. Like, he could actually imagine the spontaneous and massive cannonball that had plowed through my life. He could imagine it and he gave it a name. Terrible. Until then, people had said, I’m so sorry. But nobody had taken the risk of admitting that it was a slow burning nightmare, a nightmare that felt, in some ways, like it hadn’t yet happened, like Dad’s death and being stuck with Mom without him hung like a heavy shadow hanging over the whole town of Pensacola, like if I looked at it, just looked up, the shadow would sink down and squash me.

There was something else in Toby’s voice, too. It was thick when he said it, like he could have cried. I wondered if the seconds after hearing of my dad’s death had caused him to imagine the loss of his own father and the heartbreak would cause. How curious, I thought. I wondered if my own heart was broken. I checked my sensations, like in our grief group meditation. My shoulders and jaw were tight, as usual. Everything else felt fine. I tried to feel where my actual beating heart was in my chest without touching it with my hand. It felt neutral there. Maybe that was a silly place to look. The emotional heart and the physical heart are obviously two different things. But then where in your body do you feel a broken heart? I tried to imagine Dad, but I couldn’t remember what his face looked like, what his voice sounded like, or anything, really, at all. He had a beard, I told myself. That’s right. I could remember his beard.

Jen pulled her 4Runner into a parking lot at the dark beach and rolled another joint.

Toby talked about how amazing the white sand looked under the moon, how we should maybe sneak into the old historic fort and tell ghost stories or something. I said mmhm and sure at the appropriate moments, feeling an increasing sense of dread. Why couldn’t I remember Dad? Why didn’t I feel heartbroken? Where was my own heart? Maybe, I had become a sociopath, like Mom had been telling me my whole life. Maybe I always was one.

I stayed behind while Jen and Toby set off on their adventure to explore the ruined fort. I sat on the sandy cement beside the warm 4Runner. I’d become paranoid from the weed, and the dark hallways of the ancient Spanish fort with their low, stained ceilings were too damn scary. After a while, I saw the tiny light on Jen’s VHS video camera blink in the distance. The two of them had come up with some kind of Blair Witch Project horror movie plan, and it looked like they were executing it.

There’s no such thing as ghosts, I told myself. I looked up at the massive night sky. It glittered with stars.

Every time I heard the echoes of Toby and Jen’s laughter, I breathed easy. They are going to be okay. I am going to be okay. This is just a beach. There is no such thing as ghosts.

I could see the Milky Way up there, the stars and planets swirling together like cream dripping into black coffee. Stars tumbled across the sky.

The wind picked up, and my friends’ voices grew more muffled as they walked deeper into the cavernous forts, probably entering the prison area. The only thing in the world that can be haunted is a person, I told myself. That was another one of Dad’s sayings about choice and agency. You can choose to be poor. You can choose to be abundant. You can choose to be afraid.

Can you, really?

The sky at Pensacola beach really was one of the most beautiful things on earth. Because few city lights competed with the stars, they sparkled like the globs of fallen confetti of some glam rock gods who danced, invisible, on top of the sky.

I realized suddenly that I felt really scared.

I stood up. “I’m scared,” I said to no one. I squinted, looking for Jen’s camera light. It wasn’t visible. I thought maybe I heard their laughs from far away, but it may have been a seagull. I had seen one earlier dragging around a Family Size! bag of Lays potato chips that it had probably stolen right out of some pale snowbird’s bag while they slept on the beach. “Fuck,” I said.

I paced a while, whispering, “Don’t die, don’t die.” Although Toby seemed to have a super solid grasp on his own emotional connection to his dad, neither he nor Jen knew just how possible, how easy it was for a body to disappear. “You could actually fucking die, you idiots,” I told no one.

I searched for some evidence of the camera light. I sat against the hood of the 4Runner. Something ticked in the engine. I looked up. The sky. The sky. The stars.

When you’re feeling real shitty, what if you find something beautiful to look at instead, Dad said on the nights after Mom had leaned on me hard, the nights I couldn’t handle it, the nights I ran to my room, sob yelling that I was sorry so sorry and I don’t know what’s wrong with me. When I stopped hollering, Dad came in, sat beside me on my bed while my brother hid in the doorway and Mom sat in her fake silk slip, chain smoking clove cigarettes in her room. Sitting beside me, Dad told me not to worry too much about whatever Mom said when she was upset. “It’s just her feelings that make her say that stuff,” he said.

He pointed out my bedroom window at the moonlight on the flowers of the magnolia tree in our front yard. “What happens in your heart when you find something beautiful? What if you really take it in? Look at the light. Look at the color. That’s what some people call god, but to me, that’s just the world. Can you believe that light is even real?”

“A ghost is going to fucking eat my friends in that prison fort, Dad,” I said, leaning back on the 4Runner. “I don’t care about the stupid starlight.”

But, I looked anyway, counting the stars that fell or shot across the sky, making wishes on them and remembering that once upon a time, when I was five years old and our family moved to Pensacola from the sweaty fishbowl of Central Florida, I believed this town, this pearly white beach with the dolphins always leaping out of the water and the shells and the starfish, I believed this new whole world of sea creatures and birds and salt, I believed my home was full of a kind of magic. Under this night sky, I tried to pull my attention from the truth that everything pretty can fall apart without warning at any second. I tried to stop knowing that the dream of that magic is just as true as the hurricane that could blow in to knock it all away.

“You don’t never know what’s comin,” Dad said, pointing at the light on the leaves of the magnolia tree.

I looked up at the blinking starlight.

“But you can certainly look hard on what is.”

That night at the beach, Toby and Jen weren’t murdered by a fort ghost, and Toby and I didn’t make out or fuck or touch each other at all until about six months later when I invited him over to share a terrible pot pancake filled with every fruit I could afford with Mom’s leftover food stamps. We ate the pancake and laid on my bed with our heads hanging upside down off the bottom, and he kissed me as the weed kicked in and the world went sideways. Toby wasn’t the first person I fucked or even fell for. Toby and I only dated for a few years. Still, there was something about the way we walked together on the train tracks that snake through downtown Pensacola and fucked on the beach sand or in my bedroom, even though our arms were both covered in ringworm we’d gotten from kittens we rescued from the road and brought into his dad’s office. I told myself that when I was with Toby, I didn’t have daddy issues. I told myself I didn’t need a man to fill in the space Dad left behind. I told myself even if I wanted him to, Toby couldn’t fill that space because he was long and thin and soft, not burly and bearded and hard lined like my dad. I told myself I dug Tony because of his art and his gentleness and the way his eyes didn’t close all the way when he slept. I told myself that the fact that Dad said I always liked that kid had nothing to do with it. I told myself I chose Toby and in a year that went dark with death and Mom’s rage, I chose to love on a boy, and he chose to love on me.

People call those first loves puppy love like Toby and I were so stupid and clumsy but also so cute with our too big eyes and our naïve minds. Maybe that was part of it. I told myself for years that my thing with Toby was a dumbass infatuation like the way I believed I could be Tinker Bell when I grew up when I was five or the way I believed that the space Dad left behind didn’t follow me, didn’t haunt me, didn’t direct me around like I was some weird skinny puppet. I didn’t want to believe I spent every minute of my life trying to fill that space or step into that space or fight the space, trying to cast it out or punch it through a wall or explode it like a glitter bomb into the rough beach wind.

On our last session, the grief group counselor told us that there was a before and after and there was nothing we could do about it. “When someone dies when you’re young, it changes your brain. You get to choose how to carry it, but you will always carry it,” she said. She told us to let the good moments be as big as the bad moments. She told us a lot more probably beautiful and really important things that our brains were too thrashed with hormones and grief to hear or ever remember.

I wanted to believe I was my own person with my own choices and my own trajectory, but the truth is, when I spent time with Toby, I learned to laugh with my mouth wide and my eyes squeezed shut, and I learned to look at people the way Toby looked at me that night on the way to the beach, like I could feel what they were feeling or at least imagine it. I learned how to imagine it even if I didn’t feel it.

The truth is, I’m probably not a sociopath, just a little bit burnt out from Mom’s ruckus when I was a kid, but it did take me like ten years to feel much after Dad died, until I looked up at the sky one night on a beach in another country and realized like boom that the space Dad left behind wasn’t ever a ghost or a haunt, just a space, an imagined potential, a life where he could have seen me through high school and raising up my babies and through some of the hard things and the perfect holidays and all the other long moments already lost to time.

About ten years after Toby and I stopped talking, we met again at Jen’s wedding, both of us making speeches and taking pictures of all the pretty cakes and dresses and drunk strangers under string lights glued to the inside of mason jars like trapped fireflies.

In a brief, quiet moment, I thanked Toby for the way he looked at me when he and Jen went ghost hunting and all the long walks and car sex and the way he took pictures of my body with my shitty bedroom lamp in the background making my hips and ankles and shoulders look as glittery as his famous Ferris wheel. He nodded, “It was a terrible year for you. But at least it was beautiful terrible.”

I’d like to believe he was right, that it’s less important to grow and let go of our heavy ghosts than it is to believe the good moments are as big as the bad ones so every shitty year or rough day or long haunting can be as beautiful as it was terrible. Like artificial light on magnolia leaves or a whole sky full of glitter or a seagull all graceful in the sky when you know it’s been up to some raunchy nonsense just a minute before, maybe there’s always room for some beauty. Maybe in the most horrifying moments there’s at least a little bit of room for awe.

Asha Dore is a writer and artist living in Seattle. Her work can be found at The Rumpus, River Teeth, and elsewhere via her website ashadore.net. Asha is the EIC of Parley Lit and the associate director of art and marketing for Parley Productions. 

Image: visitpensacolabeach.com

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