by Gail Godwin
“Send a brief reply that the artist doesn’t paint people,” said Aunt Charlotte.
“How should I sign it?”
“ ‘Marcus Harshaw, Assistant to Charlotte Lee.’ Next someone will be asking for me to paint that Confederate ghost into the foreground.”
The art store deliveries, the inquiries on her website, the fact that she spent all day, except for speedy bathroom hops, shut away in her studio with the Japan paper and whatever else had arrived in the parcels: these I took as very positive signs she was getting on with her secret project and preparing for resumption of business as usual with her right hand.
Two days before the trip to the surgeon in Charleston, Aunt Charlotte asked me to trim her hair and then wash it. I was halfway around her head, “grabbing small clumps” and snipping, when she said, not for the first time, how handsome I looked with the new haircut. She went on to relate how I had impressed Lachicotte on my back-to-school shopping trip. “He expected you to spend twice that amount.”
“Mom and I had to make every dollar count, so I guess I was trained well.”
“So much needless want and suffering. All to escape a monster. If she had stayed at home and finished high school and kept inside the lines of Brenda’s bourgeois groove … but I should be careful about wishing in retrospect. If she hadn’t run away, you wouldn’t exist.”
I followed her line of thinking, though I shied away from contemplating my nonexistence. The line led back to her devil incarnate father who was my mom’s grandfather, who had caused them both to run away. I longed to know more, but how much more would be more than I needed to know? It was like in my dream when I asked the sunburned man what was in the trash barrel in front of Grief Cottage and he laughed and said, “I could tell you but then I’d have to kill you.”
“Well, Marcus, you’ve made me svelte for our trip to Charleston,” she said after I had cut, shampooed, and blow-dried her hair. Coasting on the good feeling between us and remembering her anguish on my behalf about missing the turtle boil, I said I was really looking forward to it.
“You’re not going, Marcus. It’s just for a meeting with the surgeon. There won’t be time for fun and shopping with Lachicotte.”
“But I thought—”
“You thought what?”
“You’ve always said our trip to Charleston. Even Lachicotte—”
“Well, ‘our’ in this case meant Lachicotte and me. It’s not a family outing.”
Did I pick up a disparaging twist on the word “family”?
“All you’d be doing would be sitting in the waiting room with Lachicotte.”
“Yeah, I’d probably be in the way.”
“I’ll level with you. If it’s unpleasant news I don’t want to have to put on a cheerful face. I’d rather be driven home in silence and feel as bad as I like.”
“But I wouldn’t—”
“Enough, Marcus. This is the way I want it.”
My daily list was no longer full. No more turtle eggs to watch over and keep me company while I ran my reality check at the end of the day and concluded I was still sane. No more boxes to unpack. No afternoon visits with Coral Upchurch, who was getting down to her real grieving. Someone had taken over the sunburned man’s route. Had he gone back to college (if he went to college), or had he done something to cost him his job? I still had my housework and grocery shopping. I biked faithfully to an empty Grief Cottage every morning and some afternoons. I was like those characters in movies who are determined to keep faith with the old schedule while the loved one is away or off fighting in a war.
After Aunt Charlotte had set me straight on who was going to Charleston, I looked for things that needed doing so she wouldn’t think I was “moping.” I cut the tags off my school clothes and ran them through the wash several times so they wouldn’t shout “I’m new!” when I was coming down the halls. I missed having the boxes to unpack, but at least I could clean the garage where they had been stacked. Then I worried that Aunt Charlotte might interpret this as a ploy to make her change her mind about the trip. But she was pleased when she saw it and said it had never looked that neat. Then she repeated that thing about me being too good to be true and that I was restoring her faith in humans. It occurred to me that it would take some pressure off if she could accept that I was not as good or as strong as all that.
Since she hadn’t asked to see my Grief Cottage photos, I hid them away in the same place where (at her request) I had hidden her container of painkillers. Either she had more important things on her mind or she was superstitious about seeing the photos before she was certain she would be painting from them again soon.
XXXVI.
“Marcus, where did we store that walker I brought home from the hospital?”
“It’s in my closet.”
“Would you get it? I don’t want to lean on Lachicotte more than I have to.”
The day of the surgeon had arrived. I helped Lachicotte guide Aunt Charlotte and her walker down the front steps and get her settled in the passenger seat of her own car. “Why does it smell so good?” she asked.
“I had it detailed for you,” Lachicotte said.
“Detailed?”
“A place just opened, it’s their specialty. You leave it all day and they recondition it inside and out. Steam-clean the carpeting, wax the leather, the whole enchilada.”
“How nice to be reconditioned inside and out. How much do I owe you?”
“It’s a thank-you for letting me drive it.”
“You already thanked me with four new tires.”
“Then think of it as another thank-you,” said Lachicotte.
“Be good, Marcus. Not that I need to tell you that. We should be back by late afternoon.”
It smelled so good because she had remembered her car smelling of vomited-up shrimp. They would probably have an early lunch in some nice restaurant. Maybe there would be a shrimp dish on the menu and Aunt Charlotte would say it reminded her of the day I arrived and reveal some specifics, charitably adding “But poor boy, he was mortified.” Then she would say, “I’m not hungry, I’ll just have a salad and a glass of red wine. But Lash, why don’t you have one of the specials?” It would be her first outing this summer without me tagging along as “family.”
The rest of the day stretched ahead like an endurance test. It was too early to go next door and see if Roberta had a list for me. I had missed my early morning bike ride to Grief Cottage in order to be around when they left for Charleston, and now it was late morning, the beach filled with shrieking children, the light wrong. I prowled around inside the house, imagining a less honorable version of myself crossing the threshold of my aunt’s forbidden studio. Having washed the few breakfast dishes by hand, I was elated when I looked down at the floor and saw scuff marks and sand on the kitchen tiles: overlooked remnants of Pickett’s ass-tucked scramble for the toilet? A really good floor scrubbing was needed. Kneeling and applying the hard-bristle brush in serious circles recalled the day we had been cleaning house for the Steckworths’ visit, when Aunt Charlotte had dropped to her knees and scrubbed with a fury. (“It’s either that or kill someone.”) Then she had ordered me from the house. (“Just go, Marcus. Don’t make me ask again.”) This was after she’d learned from me that Mom, like herself, had run away at sixteen to escape a worse situation.
After I finished the kitchen floor, I mopped the hall, cleaned the bathroom, and tidied my own already-tidy room. Following that, I took the trash out.
As I was closing the lid to our bin in front of the house, a silent ambulance with its red revolving light turned into our street and stopped in front of the Upchurch house.
Roberta was beside the ambulance before the two men had finished unloading the stretcher from the bay. She led them quickly up the outside stairs. She hadn’t looked my way. Soon they returned, this time bearing the stretcher down the ramp, probably for a less bumpy ride for the tiny figure covered with a blanket. All you could see above the blanket was the b
reathing apparatus clamped to her face. They loaded her into the bay and, after a short consultation with Roberta, slammed it shut and drove off as noiselessly as they had come, red light revolving. Roberta still hadn’t looked my way, so I ran after her as she headed to the house.
“Roberta! What happened?”
“They’re thinking pneumonia. Her breathing was all wrong when I went in this morning.”
“Pneumonia in the summer?”
“You can get it any time. Healthy people carry the bacteria without it hurting them. My guess is the beauty salon. The hairdresser could have coughed on her, or the lady under the next dryer. But it’s no joke at her age. She was running a fever and I wasn’t taking chances.”
“Will she be all right?”
“Pray God, Marcus. We’ve been together since she got in that wheelchair. It’s—it’s a friendship.” Tears rolled down her cheeks.
“Do you need anything at the market?”
“No, I’m going to pack her some necessities and drive them over to the hospital and wait until we know something.”
“Tell her I said please get better.”
“I surely will. She has enjoyed you so much.”
I crossed the immaculate kitchen floor and stepped out on the porch. The shady hammock was not inviting before afternoon. Out of habit I went down to the dunes and sat in my old meditation spot. The absence of the turtles’ nest made the spot as forlorn as the unhaunted doorway of Grief Cottage. Why had Roberta said, “She has enjoyed you”? Why not “She has been enjoying you”? Before the sun went down today, it could easily become “She enjoyed you.”
It had been like watching some tiny extraterrestrial creature carried respectfully out to the ambulance by some large humans. Just some helpless little bumps under a blanket with an oxygen mask perched on top. I had not seen a single human part of her, not even a wisp of white hair. Now she wouldn’t get to finish her archaeology on herself. No, she said she had finished it and down at the bottom found only love. But now I would never be able to tell her, “It’s not such a bad thing to find love at the bottom.”
I was losing the casing that held me together. I could feel it coming loose, like that boy’s cheek melting down the side of his face back at the foster home. I drew up my knees to make a smaller, denser package of myself, and buried my face in my hands. When Mom was alive she would say, “Marcus, when you sit like that with your knees drawn up and your face covered, I want to die.”
Well, you did die. I waited for you to come back and you didn’t. Whereas I’m still here, coming loose from my moorings, getting ready to fly apart.
The corpses of the hatchlings and the eggs that never opened had been taken away to be studied. It might have been better to be one of those eggs that never opened. No pain, no fight, no terror. Just a kind and curious person in a lab, gently cracking your egg, looking inside to see how your remains might benefit future hatchlings.
When you start feeling sorry for yourself, the foster mother told us, make a list of all the good things you’re grateful for. What were the good things of this summer? My bike, my room by myself, the ghost-boy until he shut down. Lachicotte, Coral Upchurch, Aunt Charlotte.
For Wheezer, a “true” was a story that had really happened to someone, the more shocking and sensational the better: Van Gogh slicing off his ear and handing it to a prostitute; Wheezer’s brilliant uncle who read Latin and Greek and died shooting up inside a trailer full of rats.
Wheezer also had a term for a person you could always count on to be thinking of you and missing you, no matter where you were. Wheezer called this person a “sure.” Like rare marbles, we displayed and discussed our sures. Each of us had only one. (“But, Marcus, lots of people don’t have any.”) The cigarette-smoking grandmother in whose house Wheezer lived was his sure. His mother and father, even his big brother, all of whom lived in other places, were not. (“Weeks can go by without any of them giving me a thought.”)
My mom was my sure. “And who knows?” Wheezer had said. “Maybe one day we’ll end up being each other’s sures.”
Fool that I was, I had been on my way to considering Aunt Charlotte and Lachicotte as my potential sures. And maybe even Coral Upchurch, since she no longer had Billy in this world.
If that patch of black ice had been a little to the left a little to the right of Mom’s tires, we would still be sleeping in the same bed; there was only room for one bed in the apartment on Smoke Vine Road. I wondered what age I would have had to reach before she said, “Marcus, you’re getting to be a big boy, let’s go see if we can find a sofa-bed and squeeze it into a corner and pay for it on the installment plan. I may not be able to afford an extra room, but it’s time you had your own bed.”
What if the time never comes? I sometimes caught myself thinking as I lay beside her. And then I would try not to think the next thought: How will I ever get away from her?
“I’m not staying around to think any more ‘next thoughts’ with you,” my gremlin from the causeway suddenly piped up. “I am an evolving gremlin, trying to improve myself. You are going in the opposite direction. You’d be more suitable company to the others.”
“What others?”
“The evil baddies that balance us out. I’ve called in a cutting-edge baddie, fresh off the assembly line. Here he comes now. I’m out of here!”
Maybe I’d had my meltdown, after all. Here I was, running from the beach at midday, fleeing a gremlin. I didn’t want to meet Cutting Edge or even glimpse him out of the corner of an eye. I slammed the kitchen door behind me and wished it had Charlie Coggins’s Gullah-blue paint sloshed all around its frame. To put an extra door between us, I shut myself in my room.
What help was in here? I picked up the black bear in the hoodie and rubbed him against my face. I looked out my window at the line where the ocean met the sky. Out there I had felt I was melting away; now my skin felt like it was growing too tight to hold me. The tension was unbearable. I was sweating and heaving but nothing came up. The awful things I didn’t want inside me kept expanding.
I opened Mom’s tin box with its sacred contents and plucked out Aunt Charlotte’s container of painkillers from its hiding place. I had never taken anything but aspirin. Maybe one pill would kill enough physical feeling to tide me over until they got back. Now to wash it down. In the kitchen, on an impulse, I grabbed an opened bottle of wine in its usual hiding place and swigged down the pill, drinking from the bottle. The wine tasted murky and sour. How could she put away glass after glass of this? If I were to become a serious drinker I would choose something light and clear that worked really, really fast. I walked a circle around the kitchen, then another and another. How long did a painkiller take to kick in? It wasn’t that my thoughts were “racing,” but that every time I started to think any thought my mind recoiled from it. Every subject I approached had some kind of pain or horror attached to it.
I turned on Aunt Charlotte’s laptop and checked for new e-mails on her site. No promising inquiries, no inquiries at all. I deleted the junk mail.
“Did you think,” said a voice I can only describe as crumbly, “did you really think you could keep me on the other side of a measly door? I’ll tell you something you won’t want to hear. You can’t keep me out because I’m one of the cutting-edge models. We work from inside. And I don’t mean inside the house. I mean inside of you. The upside to this, the only upside, is that you don’t have to see me or imagine what I look like. I am beyond looks. I am inside you so I can camouflage myself in your looks.”
XXXVII.
“What’s behind that door?”
“I’m not supposed to go in there.”
“Who says I can’t? And since I’m inside of you, you’ll have to come with me.”
The painkiller must have reached my bloodstream because everything felt … not better, but a remoteness now muffled the unbearable anguish. Soon they would be having their early lunch in Charleston; they might be at the table already. (“This shrimp
dish on the menu reminds me of the day Marcus arrived …”) They would take care of each other. He would get her to a recovery place in time. They would be each other’s family without the commitments. They would become each other’s sures. But now this didn’t hurt as much as it would have a short while ago.
“Go on, turn the knob. Good boy. Or I should say bad boy. So this is the forbidden temple. What have we here?”
A neat and organized studio. Giant easel pushed out of the way to the same spot where she had ordered me to move it. Laundry sink (where she had talked me through changing the washer) clean, but with paint rags hung to dry on its sides. The wall-high cork board from which she had told me to take down samples of famous landscape paintings she admired, rough drawings of clouds, postcards of her own paintings, and some write-ups about her in local papers, was filled with tacked-up little paintings, all the same size. (“I have a particular fondness for four by sixes, about the size of my palm,” she had told Ron Steckworth the day they carried away their forty-two by fifty-six. She had held up a palm to demonstrate.) I measured my palm against the paintings on the corkboard. My hand was already the size of hers.
“What is it?” asked Cutting Edge. “Some kind of comic strip?”
“Why would you think that?”
“Because, dumbass, the story goes from left to right, then drops down and goes left to right again.”
“What makes you think it’s a story?”
“Because I’m a speed reader and I’ve already scanned it. Wow, your aunt is one obscene lady. And so clumsy and crude for someone who passes herself off as an artist.”
