Grief Cottage

by Gail Godwin

“She came to her husband’s ancestral beach cottage as a bride of twenty. Ninety-five minus twenty is seventy-five. Lachicotte can furnish you with all the specifics, they’re buddies. Could you phone him and tell him she’s on her way? He’ll want to bake her a pie.”

  “An oyster pie?”

  “No, she hates oysters. Steak and kidney, probably, without the kidneys.”

  “Will she be coming today?”

  “Tomorrow. Her retinue precedes her. As soon as she arrives, she sends her caregiver over with a calling card to let us know she’s receiving visitors. The card used to be on a silver salver but now it arrives on a sweet-grass tray made by Roberta Dumas, the current caregiver.”

  “Will you visit her?”

  “She knows my ways. She understands. She respects artists. Roberta herself comes from a dynasty of basket weavers who have examples of their work in the Smithsonian. Where have you been? Let me guess.”

  “Mr. Coggins was up there with the Army Corps of Engineers.”

  “What were they doing?”

  “I didn’t talk to them. But Mr. Bolton from the Turtle Patrol says they’re measuring erosion around the cottage. I met him down by the egg clutch.”

  “How are our little friends?”

  “He says yesterday’s rain may delay their hatching.”

  “I’ve been on this island for twenty-five years and never seen a hatching. What’s the term they use? ‘Boil up’?”

  “Want me to knock on your door?”

  “Well … why not?”

  “Even if it’s late?”

  “Sure. If I’m feeling up to it, maybe I’ll hop down and see it for myself. After all, they have incubated under our boardwalk.”

  I called Lachicotte, who sounded glad to hear from us. “I’d call more often, but I don’t want to be a bother (bah-thah).” We made plans to go over to Mrs. Upchurch’s early the next afternoon. “You’ll appreciate her. She’s quite the raconteur. Will you tell your aunt I have taken the liberty of tuning up her Mercedes and replacing the tires? It’s my little thank-you for the extended loan.”

  After supper with Aunt Charlotte, I walked down to the surf and stood on the shiny wet surface mirroring the same orange light of her big Sunset Calm painting that now hung in the library—and had once been taped as a postcard on Mom’s refrigerator. I was thinking how awful it must be to have painting taken away from you. It could happen in all sorts of ways. You could hurt your painting arm, or some fascist regime could come in and forbid you to paint. At supper Aunt Charlotte had been telling me about this German painter, Emil Nolde, who was forbidden by the Nazis to paint anymore when he was seventy years old and at his peak. For the duration of World War II, he painted small secret watercolors on Japan paper, which he hid in his house.

  “What is Japan paper?”

  “Well, it’s not necessarily made in Japan anymore, but it’s a high quality paper made from bark fibers rather than wood pulp. It’s tougher. If you have to paint with water like poor Nolde, you can build up layers, like in oil. He wrote notes to the secret paintings.”

  “What kind of notes?”

  “Things like ‘Only to you, my little sheets.’ That’s the one I like best.”

  He couldn’t paint in oils because he couldn’t be seen buying any, and also if they raided his house they would detect the smell. During this period of artistic oppression, he abandoned the landscapes that had made him famous and made little watercolors of dreamlike figures and faces on his Japan paper. He called them his “unpainted pictures,” and Aunt Charlotte turned on her laptop while we were still eating and showed me the vividly-colored little paintings of surreal or grotesque people, some in lewd and threatening poses, that seemed to have come straight out of his dark regions. I told Aunt Charlotte they made me think of the fiends and fantasies a person had inside of him that maybe he didn’t even know he had. “That’s very astute, Marcus,” she said, sipping her wine. Her face bunched up as it tended to do when she was trying to figure something out. Having impressed her by saying this, I was about to ask how her secret project was coming, but decided to stop while I was ahead. Soon after, she asked me to uncork another bottle and hopped off with it to her studio.

  Making patterns in the wet sand with my sneaker, I recalled my extravagant despair of this morning when I had hoped to be scared to death by the ghost-boy. How could a person’s moods change so many times in a day? Was it my age, or was it going to be like this from now on? What if a person decided to kill himself in the morning and then woke up dead and realized he had made a huge mistake? Now here I was, the same person in the same body, the same clothes, even, standing in the placid orange light of Aunt Charlotte’s Sunset Calm and feeling excited about those little turtle embryos under the sand who, if they survived all the intermittent dangers, had eighty to a hundred or more years to go before they could die an old turtle’s death and become part of loggerhead ancestral history. Soon they would be bursting out of their shells, flattening out into proper turtle shapes, clambering on top of one another to “boil up” for their dash to the sea—which we would be part of.

  For some reason this led to thoughts of William, my ad litem friend, and of our final Vulcan salute to each other at the airport. I wondered what kind of minors he was guarding now and if he ever missed me.

  How lucky I was to be assigned to a person who would understand that I needed to see my mother’s body before it was embalmed so I could truly accept that she was dead. We drove to the hospital in his truck. He had arranged everything with the head of ER, who took us down in the elevator to the hospital morgue. The ER person unzipped the black body bag on the gurney. There she was. It was her and not her. I had been told what to expect. The bone and cartilage of her nose was exposed where it had hit the steering wheel—our Honda was from the pre-air-bag era. Her eyes were open, but the life had drained out of them. The blue irises were now a lusterless yellow-green. Her mouth was ajar, exposing the tooth gaps she was so self-conscious about. She had hennaed her hair recently; it was at its glossiest mahogany-brown. (“At least I didn’t die with my roots showing.” I heard her exact living voice with its equal mix of self-put-down and resolute humor.)

  William and I had gone over burial plans during our drive to the hospital. As an adolescent Mom had read a novel by a famous occultist who had warned against cremation, the reason being that you had to stay in one piece so you could be brought up whole out of your grave. “You might need your bones,” Mom said. “It may be superstition, but you find it all the way back in the Book of Ezekiel, so I’d rather not take chances.” When we still lived in Forsterville, Mom and I often talked about death and where we would like to be buried. We took walks in a beautiful little cemetery a short way out of town. “If we’re still here when I die,” Mom said, “I’d like to be buried in this place.” But after we moved to Jewel, we stopped romanticizing about graves and cemeteries because we weren’t sure how long we’d be staying in Jewel, especially after Mountaintop Joinery closed down and Mom lost her good job.

  William took me to the little country cemetery where most of his family had their graves. It was on a hill overlooking mountain ranges stretching as far into the distance as you could see. When the life insurance trust was set up, he said, you’ll be able to buy a nice stone with her name and dates. “So wherever you go, Marcus, you’ll know you can always come back and find her in the same place.”

  XXIII.

  With the approach of bedtime came the start of a bad feeling. Usually I looked forward to shutting the door to my room, Aunt Charlotte’s former room, knowing that nothing more would be required of me until the next day. For at least eight hours I didn’t have to be astute or useful or empathetic. I could just fall back on my pillows with childish irresponsibility until I fell asleep.

  But this was a new fear that kept me from wanting to fall asleep. It was stronger than my top supernatural fear (could I survive an extended face-off with the ghost-boy without going crazy?) and it was str
onger than my top realistic fear (could I survive being sent away by Aunt Charlotte and starting over in another foster home?)

  The new fear was that tonight, as soon as I fell asleep, I would dream a continuation of last night’s dream. I would be standing in the open doorway of my mom’s beautiful apartment and she would have just told me about my wonderful half brother in his own room, and then I would look beyond her and see a door in the rear of the apartment slowly opening. I did not believe I could endure seeing him face-to-face.

  To put off going to bed, I made two after-dark trips to the beach. On the first trip, I paced around the dune protecting our egg clutch. I got down on all fours and sniffed. No fresh earthy smell. I shone my infra-red flashlight on the thermocouple stuck in the sand: no rise in temperature. On the second trip, I sat down cross-legged on the dune and talked to them in the same spirit that Mom would talk to me at night when she was not too tired. She told stories about when I was an infant. (“We used to look into each other’s faces. I never tired of looking at you and seeing you look back. You were so new, you didn’t have words yet, but I could see your thoughts and moods play across your face.”) Or she made up stories about our future prospects, how we were going to prevail.

  So I spoke to the turtle embryos about their present secure state of egginess and about their future great voyage. (“It’s been programmed into you, so don’t worry, your ancestors have been doing it for over a hundred million years. You’ll just get out of your egg—rip the shell with your ‘egg tooth,’ which is that hard little projection on top of your snout—and take care not to get exhausted as you’re climbing up because you’ll need all your energies for later. It will only be about a twenty-inch climb, and you’ll have all your brothers and sisters to step on, as they will step on you in turn, and the whole pile of you will rise like a slow elevator, an elevator made out of yourselves, and then you’ll pop your heads through the sand, and we will have scooped out a path through the sand to the ocean. Just follow the path and don’t get diverted and crawl up the sides—but if you do, a human hand will be right there to gently guide you back into the groove. It will take you about fifteen minutes to crawl from nest to water, moving at about ten feet a minute. We will escort you the whole way to the water to guard you from the ghost crabs. The reason we can’t pick you up and carry you is because you need to do the walk yourselves so you can smell the sand and remember your way back to this beach when you’re grown up.”)

  I did eventually sleep, but woke early into the weird no-light that precedes morning. My first thought was: I escaped the continuation of the brother-dream. Then I lay very still to grab onto another dream that was fading away—not a nightmare, not even what you’d call a bad dream, because there were some parts of it I wanted to keep. I salvaged as much as I could, and then quickly made my bed, dressed, snatched some stand-up breakfast, and headed north on my bike. The sky had not yet separated itself from the flat gray of the ocean. I had never been out this early. The empty beach contained not a single living creature.

  “It’s like a video game,” Wheezer had explained to me in the dream I’d tried to hold on to. “But what you need to remember, Marcus, is we’re inside the screen. Someone else is at the controls.” What we had to do, he said, was avoid the “powder-colors.” When the game was switched on, whoever was playing on the outside would try to shoot colored powders at us through little holes. Already we could see those powder-colors amassing and waiting to be sent forth from their chamber: thick crusty reds and blues and yellows, like those primitive colors in the un-paintings by the German artist my aunt had showed me on her laptop. If we wanted to stay alive, Wheezer said, we had to keep alert. When the powders hit us, we needed to wipe them off fast. “What happens if some powder gets stuck on us?” I asked. “If too much gets stuck on you,” he warned in his hoarse little asthma voice, “the colors will paste you over and you’ll be trapped inside the screen forever.” Even though the dream had its scary aspects, it had been nice to be with Wheezer again.

  The wind hissed past my ears as I sped north without my helmet, which I kept fastened to the back of my seat. The old people never bothered with helmets on their early morning bike rides. I was anxious to stay within this eerie zone, no longer night but not yet day, until I reached the cottage. It was like the beach was under a spell. The tenuous light through which I rode seemed to wrap itself around me and push me forward to meet whatever I had to meet.

  Looking back on that morning, as I have so many times, I calculate that the ten or twelve minutes it would have taken me, pedaling at top speed, to reach Grief Cottage would have given an ordinary summer dawn more than enough time to break through. But as I felt it then, the penumbra stuck to me all the way to the cottage like a faithful cloud cover. It lasted through my dismounting and hiding my bike between two dunes, and it hung above me as I crawled through the sand beneath the wire fence with its warning signs. It was as if time and light and sound had conspired to hold themselves back so that I could receive the full impact of what I saw.

  He stood there in the doorway on his own terms, not mine. I reeled with the vividness of him. He was stronger and sharper in substance, and, unlike our last encounter, he didn’t slouch or seem to wait passively to see what I might do next. The tense way he braced himself against the door frame, pushing himself outward with both hands (I saw the prominent knuckle ridges between the spread fingers), was that of a figure ready to spring after having been kept trapped for too long.

  I saw the long narrow face with indented cheeks, the small raisin-dark eyes lodged deep in their sockets, the pale stalk-like neck, an off-kilter nose that looked as though it had been broken and not properly reset; I saw the wide mouth and the thin lips, and the gangly, slightly bowed legs in jeans, and the black ankle boots. The faded red shirt I had seen before, but this time buttons were left open, exposing the articulated chest of a man.

  It felt like turning a corner in a corridor at school and suddenly coming face-to-face with an older boy. He’s just there, this totally other being; you’re right smack in the center of his attention, and you have no idea where this is going.

  Whether daylight had by this time edged out the gloom I don’t know, but I remember being thankful for a couple of observations that presented themselves like solid posts of realism for me to clutch onto, as he looked ready to burst out of his door frame. The first thought came in the form of a calculation: If you measured by an unbroken stretch of time, he had been in this place longer than all the previous dwellers put together since 1804. The second observation, seeing those knuckly hands braced against the door frame, was a practical question, the kind Charlie Coggins might ask: Why had nobody bothered to replace the door or at least board over the space to slow down the decay? Maybe it was these infusions of practicality that kept me standing there for as long as I did. Was it long enough for me to gauge that I had reached the toleration point of what I could sanely handle? Or had my primal brain propelled me into flight without giving me the luxury of thought?

  On this occasion I hadn’t even gotten as far as climbing the rotting stairs to the porch. All I knew was that one moment I stood below him in the sand, transfixed by our mutual gaze, and the next thing I knew I was standing far from the cottage, my face turned toward the ocean. The first sound to come back to me was the thud of my heart racing inside my chest. Then the sound of surf and birds followed, and daytime was definitely in control. I knew that if I turned around now all I would see would be a falling-down cottage and a gaping doorway.

  At some point I realized I wasn’t by myself at the ocean’s edge. Not far away there was a woman holding a golden retriever on a short leash. Both of them stood still as statues facing the breaking waves, as though they were competing to see which could outlast the other in utter stillness. The dog wore a dark green vest with a number and an insignia. The woman was about my mom’s age and had her small upright build and coloring. Only this woman had the means to take care of herself. Mom would o
ften comment on the ways you could spot this when she saw a certain kind of woman in a store. “That’s a very expensive look,” she would remark about the woman’s hair. “It looks like casual sun streaks, but it’s actually a three-color process.”

  Suddenly the retriever lunged at an incoming wave and the woman tightened the leash and murmured something. The dog sat down and was perfectly still again. This happened several times. It seemed cruel to bring a dog to the edge of the ocean and then not let him play in the surf. The longer I watched this tug of wills between them, the more indignant I became.

  Both woman and dog watched me approach. The woman’s look was questioning but not unfriendly. It was as though she already knew what I was going to ask.

  “Why can’t he go in?”

  “It wouldn’t be a good idea. He’s in training to be a service dog. Normally, Barrett is the calmest dog you can imagine, but when we brought him here, he got excited as soon as he heard the sound of the ocean, and when he saw the surf he went wild.” She had a Lachicotte-type accent, though not as pronounced.

  “Is he for a blind person?”

  “No, he’ll go to a disabled vet. It’s a new program. Prisoners at the Navy brig in Charleston train the dogs. My husband and I are volunteers. We take one dog at a time during weekends and holidays and get him accustomed to new experiences. Distractions and unexpected sounds. This afternoon, my husband is taking Barrett to a firing range, and after that to a children’s playground.”

  “Who named him Barrett?”

  “They name them at the brig. Each dog is given the last name of a fallen person in uniform. That’s a nice idea, don’t you think?”

  “Do you know who Barrett will go to?”

  “Not yet. That gets decided in his final weeks of training. There’s a long waiting list and it gets longer and longer. It’s such a strange, awful war over there in Iraq. I never knew there were so many ways a person could get wounded and still be alive.”