Shot in the Heart by Mikal Gilmore

competitive with her twin, and told Ida that she was the uglier of the two (or so my mother claimed). In turn, Bessie became protective of Ida and dressed her in pretty clothes and bought special ribbons for her hair. Many years later, the relationship between my mother and Ida would take on its own difficulties—in part because Ida had made a stable marriage to a good, sober man, and her children were loving and respectful, and prone only to unspectacular trouble. By contrast, my mother had married a drunk who left her regularly, and her children were … well, we were bad news, no matter how you sliced it.
    But during our visit to Utah, these differences were never mentioned. In fact, some of the old affections and allegiances seemed to get resurrected. When Bessie and Ida saw each other they couldn’t stop talking and laughing and crying, and on our second day there, Ida insisted that we move to her house, where she lived with her husband, Vernon Damico, and their daughters. Vern was a tall, husky man who walked with a limp—the by-product of an old war wound. He ran a popular shoe store on Provo’s Center Street, where I spent my happiest hours in Utah, watching his big hands as they soled shoes, probably in much the same way my mother once had studied her father in his work. Vern was a good man to have as an uncle: He was big, warm, protective, and good-humored. Also, he had a handsome mustache that caused him to resemble the comedian Ernie Kovacs. I didn’t know it then, but the mustache had been grown to cover a cleft palate. Vern had borne a lot of grief and nastiness because of that particular birth defect, and as a result, he had grown up rough. But I never saw any of that roughness in him. I just saw the first man who would make me wish for a different father.
    Vern and Ida also had two teenage daughters, Brenda and Toni. I may have been only eight at the time, but I already knew cute and sexy when I saw it, and Brenda and Toni fit that bill in an unmistakable manner, though there was nothing showy or inappropriate about it. They were sweet and concerned, and they were the only women who would ever feel like sisters to me. I felt safe at Ida and Vern’s house. I remember thinking: This would be a good family to stay with. That same thought, I later learned, had also occurred to my brothers many times over the years, and eventually it led to horrible consequences for us all.
    On the third or fourth night of our Provo visit, I was sitting on thefront porch of my grandparents’ house with my mother and grandmother. The BYU football team had won a game earlier that evening, and the players had made the trek to light up the Y on the side of Bessie’s mountain. My mother was thrilled that I got to witness this ritual. We sat there and watched the burning Y until it faded into a bare glow. A few minutes later, from down the road in the direction of Mary Brown’s old farm, we saw something white emerge from the darkness and move our way. As it quickly got closer, it seemed to float about a foot off the ground. Above its white form—which now looked like a gown, rippling in the night breeze—we saw two eyes, looking our way, glowing. Bessie and Melissa stood up at the same moment. “It’s the ghost,” my grandmother said, and my mother took me by the shoulders and steered me into the house. I wanted to go closer—I had never seen a ghost before; I wanted to see what it would do if you moved its way—but Bessie and Melissa would not allow it. So I watched for a while from the front window. After we moved inside, the apparition stopped advancing toward the house. It moved back and forth across the road several times, like it was waiting for something to happen, or like it was studying us. Then, after a minute or two, it took off, moving quickly back into the night it had come from. Later, when I told my father about the ghost, he laughed. “That was no ghost,” he said. “It was probably just a neighborhood