often when he pulled past the guard kiosk and drove up the main road , striped every ten yards with yellow speed bumps that rattled his axles , sean could almost see the ghost streets and ghost neighborhoods and ghost lives the wingate residents had left behind , as if cold-water flats and dull white iceboxes , wrought-iron fire escapes and shrieking children floated through the present landscape of eggshell stucco and spiky lawns like a morning mist just beyond the limits of his peripheral vision .