Grief Cottage

by Gail Godwin

  “She injured her right hand. These are painted with her left hand. Also I think she painted them with her fingers. Except for those first drawings.”

  “Filthy Auntie!”

  “I wish you’d shut up.”

  “Mum’s the word until slowpoke has stumbled through the story.”

  The few ink drawings before the paintings started were so badly done they were embarrassing. It was like someone with a shaky hand had been struggling to keep control of the pen; like Aunt Charlotte’s left-handed signature that day she wrote Lachicotte that left-handed check for my bike. And even for that, she said she had been practicing all day.

  But despite their clumsiness it was obvious what she had set out to draw: a figure of a little girl standing before a man seated on a bed. The strange thing was that the trembliness of the lines made the figures appear to be slightly moving. The little girl was standing close to his outspread legs. Drawn on a bigger scale, he bulked over her like a sitting giant. Her outer hand loosely held a doll by its arm and her other arm reached out to the man. In the first picture, this arm stopped at the wrist, but in the ensuing drawings there was a hand that moved nearer and nearer to the man’s crotch. Then splotches of color began to be painted over the ink lines until the lines disappeared. The rest of the board was tacked up with progressive paintings of the two figures. A suitcase materialized beside the bed and the doll had been dropped on the floor with floppy legs outspread. The man sprouted a green penis that curved upward. At first you could see its green tip like a small mushroom until gradually it was obscured by the girl’s bowed head being held in place by the seated man’s large hand.

  She had used lots of pink and green, the girl being pink and the man green, though there were other colors, too. She had piled paint on top of paint and the man and girl mutated into less human images, grotesque figures in a bad dream, the man’s head becoming anvil-shaped and sprouting stubby green horns, the girl’s face widening into a sinister grimace. Where had I seen this crusted-over paint style, these grimaces before?

  You could see the little paintings getting sharper as she gained control of those left-hand fingers. On a paper halfway down the board she had finger-painted some blue words, edged in yellow: ONLY TO YOU, MY LITTLE SHEETS.

  That’s why the pictures looked familiar. It was what the old German artist resorted to after the Nazis had forbidden him to paint: watercolors piled on top of each other on heavy pieces of “Japan paper”: his “Unpainted Pictures” small enough to be hidden if necessary.

  “I need to get out of here,” I heard my voice saying from a hollow place inside my ears. As I was uttering the words, my floaty mind reached out and brought back Wheezer’s voice saying the exact same thing that day in our apartment when he was handing back the forbidden photograph.

  “Such lengths you humans go to color up the evil inside of you,” crowed Cutting Edge. “How many green penises did you count?”

  “Shut up!”

  “I kept my trap shut till you spoke first.”

  “I’m out of here!”

  “Oops, watch it! Oh, too late. Oh, dear, dear, dear. Now what are you going to do?”

  I had knocked against the trestle table where Aunt Charlotte had left a small work in progress, which I had overlooked when we came in. One of the plastic glasses still filled with colored water slopped over onto the painting, which started to bleed. I ran for the paper towels and he followed right behind. Or from deep within.

  “You’re done here, you know,” Cutting Edge observed, as we re-entered the violated studio.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I have to spell it out for you? You’ve trespassed, you’ve overstayed. You’re not ‘too good to be true’ anymore, you’re too bad to be wanted, even by Filthy Auntie. Especially by Filthy Auntie. When she sees you’ve discovered her filthy pictures she’ll never want to see you again. We need to hot-foot it out of here. You need to be somewhere else before she sees what you’ve done. What’s ruined is ruined. Oh, ruination, we crown you king.”

  The little painting-in-progress I had ruined was the girl sitting alone on the bed where the man had sat. From out of a black background, a giant green mask was starting to emerge. The glass I had tipped over was unfortunately the one that held black water.

  “You’re just making it worse with all that dabbing, stupid. Besides, what could you possibly tell her when she gets home? ‘Oh, Filthy Auntie, a weird wind blew up out of nowhere and I heard noises in your studio and I went in to see if anything was damaged and I saw the knocked-over glass. I did my best with paper towels and I didn’t look at anything else in the room, I swear.’ ”

  “Do you ever shut up?”

  “I’m programmed to keep my mouth running till yours stops.”

  “But if mine stops it means I am dead.”

  “I was waiting for you to catch up. So here’s the plan. Leave Filthy Auntie a nice note. Don’t go on too long and don’t get theatrical. Thank her for taking you in. Say you aren’t too good to be true—you are harboring a cutting-edge baddie—no, dumbass, don’t write that second part, just stop at you aren’t good anymore. Then close with ‘I’ve decided to go somewhere else.’

  “Now I’m going to tell you something you won’t want to hear. She’ll be alarmed at first. But she’ll be relieved to have you gone.”

  “You’re probably right.”

  “I know I’m right. Give up and let me run things. Now you’re going to pocket the rest of Filthy Auntie’s painkillers and take along a bottle of water. Then get your bike—that’s right, put on that helmet. Don’t want shit-boy to spot you riding past his grandparents’ house and saying ‘freaking little loser, he’s gone and copied my haircut!’

  “Tell me, Marcus, now we’re out on the beach, pedaling north on your usual route, don’t you feel you’re headed in the right direction? Isn’t it a relief to finally face your awfuls? You aren’t wanted, you weren’t wanted, and you’re not going to be missed. You weren’t wanted back when Mom kept checking her panties and it didn’t come. Then when you were about the size of a bean, she panicked: ‘I can’t do this, not by myself, scraping it out would be kinder than bringing it up poor without a father.’ But when you had swelled to the size of one of those little hatchlings she realized she’d left it too late and submitted to her penance.

  “And do you really think when Filthy Auntie received word she was your only kin she ran down to the beach and danced for joy at the prospect of sacrificing her solitary life, not to mention her only bedroom?

  “Wait, there’s worse to come. We haven’t got to the thought you were trying not to think, the thought that was too much for poor Evolving Gremlin and sent him wailing back into the ether. Pedal a little faster. No use trying to arm yourself against it because it’s already written on the fleshy, bumpy insides of your pink soul. However, I’ll keep up my cutting-edge standards and tell it aloud in my crumbly voice.”

  “Not yet, please!”

  “Please isn’t programmed into my vocabulary.”

  XXXVIII.

  “I’ll hang out with you on this squalid porch while you swallow your medicine. We’ll think the next thought together while you’re swigging down the pills. How many did Filthy Auntie leave you? There are seven in the bottle and you swallowed one back at the house. That should cover it. No, no, no, don’t cram them in your mouth, swallow each individually and wash it down with water. You don’t want to ruin everything by choking up and vomiting. You’re such an easy little vomiter. Now, are you ready for that contemptible next thought? The one that takes all the prizes?”

  I buried my face in my hands as Cutting Edge spewed out the contemptible thought. I did feel like vomiting, but kept it down.

  “So now you know the worst about yourself. And you know what you have to do now.”

  “No one would want to go on living after hearing that.”

  “You get the idea. I’ve done my job. Off to the next client!”

  “Aren
’t you going inside the cottage with me?”

  “I’ll level with you. Do you know what DNA is?”

  “Of course I know what it is.”

  “The thing is, I share some DNA with Ole Plat-eye. I might self-destruct if I passed through those blue-painted portals. You’re on your own when you go through that door.”

  At first the dead silence inside Grief Cottage felt worse than Cutting Edge’s voice. At least he had been company.

  I prowled around the cobwebby front room waiting for the pills to take effect. A surge of dark clarity washed over me. I understood what I was going to do now and why it had to be done. I also understood that if I had anything to say to Johnny Dace I’d better get going because my time was ebbing.

  “I don’t expect you to appear. I don’t expect you to respond in any way. But I have to tell you that you got me through the summer. I sought you out and you were there for me as I was for you. You were my sure. You were my lifeline, if that doesn’t sound too weird.

  “Just in case you are listening and wanting to hear the rest of the story in whatever way ghosts want to hear the rest of the story, I’ll bring you up to date. This morning my aunt went off to Charleston to find out if her wrist is healing. Strange to think I’ll never see her again. Then you know I told you about Billy Upchurch’s mother? Well, an ambulance came and took her away. They think it’s pneumonia, which is no joke for a person her age, and she’ll probably be gone by nightfall. Now I’m like you, I don’t have anybody. It’s really lonely without the turtle eggs. The hatchlings are well on their journey now, though some of them have already been eaten or caught in the shrimping nets, others didn’t have enough energy left over for their ten-mile swim to reach the open ocean, and others never made it out of their egg yolks.

  “There are so many things I wish I knew about you. About you and Billy. Where was that hiding place you showed him?

  “You will have to be my eighth grade friend. You’ll be the boy I suddenly come face-to-face with when I turn a corner in a corridor at school. I have seen you, the long narrow face, the raisin eyes deep in the sockets, the stalk-like neck, the nose that looked broken and not reset right, the bowed legs in jeans and the black boots. You were braced in the door frame, pushing yourself outward with your hands. I was close enough to count the knuckle ridges on your spread fingers. You had unusually large hands.

  “Have you ever had a thought as contemptible as this? It’s a wonder how I managed to forget it until now. When my mom went out to get our pizza and didn’t come back, I got hungry. The smells of our landlady’s supper wafted up through the heat register and I got hungrier and hungrier and finally wolfed down some cereal and hated myself—and Mom—for spoiling my appetite. I watched the movie. I watched the whole movie. A lot of it I didn’t pay attention to because of this separate track running in my head. The separate track had already killed her. I was at the point in the track where I was fantasizing what would happen to me after she was gone. And I could see possibilities spread out in front of me. I didn’t think of Aunt Charlotte that night, my scenarios were more on the line of myself, Marcus, alone, with Mom gone. Independent and alone. People would walk softly around me and ask me what I wanted to do.

  “Then I yanked myself off that track and felt despicable for letting the scenario progress as far as it had. By this time in the movie, the old lady had helped them steal the gold with no one the wiser, including herself. At that point I got scared. I worried that I might have already killed her by thinking these thoughts. I got a blanket and a pillow and lay down in front of the TV with the sound turned off. When she got back she would find me on the floor still in my clothes and feel terrible for taking so long.

  “And then I really did fall asleep, and was waked by the state troopers knocking on our door.

  “I think I can go to sleep now, here in Grief Cottage. But not in this cobwebby room. I want to be where you are. Please show me. Put your hand on my shoulder and when I stand up just push me from behind. I want to sleep where you sleep.”

  I almost left it too late. I was half asleep when I felt the pressure on my shoulder. How could I ever have dreaded his touch? I wobbled and almost fell when I stood up, and I tripped going up the stairs. (“Hey, hey, hey! Watch it!” Charlie Coggins had cried.)

  How peaceful it was going to be when all this chatter stopped.

  I felt the palm of his large hand guiding me up the remaining stairs, then steering me to the right and to the right again, over the threshold of the oceanfront room Charlie Coggins wouldn’t let me enter.

  I was somewhere in the middle of saying, “I have seen you and felt you and that’s enough. I’m glad your voice never joined the rest of the human noise—”

  I may have reached the “I am glad”—then there was a splintering and a falling followed by a crack that brought horrible pain and my weak shout from the bottom of darkness.

  XXXIX.

  Before I ever walked through the doors of my new school, I was known as “the bones boy.” And all through the school year I was called “Bones.” (“Hey, Bones …”) The nickname trailed me into high school, then faded as more and more people came along who knew nothing about how it had originated. I sort of missed being Bones because the name had evoked awe and respect and some notoriety. But it had certainly done its job, airlifting me out of the realm of merciless peers before any of us had a chance to lay eyes on one another.

  I said “walked” through the doors of my new school, but I should have said “swung through on crutches.” (Spiral break of the tibia, requiring a plate and eleven screws.)

  “Do you know what a realtor’s worst nightmare is?” Charlie Coggins went around saying to the news media. “When they find human bones under one of his properties.”

  “You were still under your self-administered anesthesia,” Lachicotte said, “when the paramedics were putting your leg into alignment. But the firemen had to come and knock out a wall so the paramedics could get to you. And there you were, doubled up in that cramped enclosure. They had to stabilize your breathing first (fust) before they moved you. The next problem, at the hospital, was what kind of anesthesia to give you for the surgery when the Percocet you swallowed was still meandering through your bloodstream in dribs and drabs. So they opted for the spinal block.”

  Concerning the subjects of Aunt Charlotte’s painkillers and Aunt Charlotte’s breached studio, silence reigned. Maybe each of us was waiting for the other to go first, but it felt more like an unwritten restraining order that the three of us had tacitly agreed upon.

  I was still on crutches and into regular sessions with a psychiatrist in Myrtle Beach when the painkiller subject got brought up. Lachicotte’s former second wife who had become a therapist had recommended this psychiatrist as being excellent with children and adolescents. Lachicotte drove me to these sessions as Aunt Charlotte had not yet resumed driving. Both ankle and wrist were healing, though she would later insist she never did recover full range of motion in her right hand. On one of our drives to Myrtle Beach, Lachicotte suddenly spoke up. “I had to report the container in your pocket, Marcus. For a scintilla of a moment I considered keeping it quiet. But that wouldn’t have been in anybody’s best interests. You understand, don’t you?”

  “What’s a scintilla?”

  “A touch, a dash, next to nothing.”

  “I think you probably did right.”

  I was more resentful of what I considered “the worst” betrayal Lachicotte had been guilty of while I was still in the hospital. Yet I knew that eventually I’d have to forgive him for that one, too.

  ***

  In my sessions with the psychiatrist, I had made up my mind that everything was going to be on the table, even my true feelings when I was beating up Wheezer—everything except for my sightings of the ghost-boy. Since Johnny Dace’s remains had been discovered, I had a second reason for keeping the secret. Formerly, it was because I didn’t want to be thought crazy and sent away. But if I were to tell
about our relationship after his bones became public property, I would be seen as a boy who was making up things to get more attention for himself. As Aunt Charlotte had put it, back when we had been discussing the “man in gray” who was said to walk the beach before a hurricane: “People see what they want to see. Or imagine they saw. And others say they saw something in order to sound psychic or special.”

  Predictably, the psychiatrist encouraged me to talk about my mother. In order to get the awful part out of the way, I described the scenario I had been creating on the night of her accident, and how when I finally remembered it as “the thought I didn’t want to think,” I hadn’t wanted to live anymore. The psychiatrist was a lady of about Aunt Charlotte’s age, whose disposition was a lovely mix of alertness, humor, and respect. Her filigree earrings swung along with her shoulder-length gray hair when you made her laugh. She wore nice clothes and shoes and spoke with a sanded-down version of Lachicotte’s accent. As I completed the story about my awful scenario, I noted, as good students do when they have pleased their teacher, that she was excited by the start we had gotten off to. This is exactly the right material for us to be facing together, I could see her thinking.

  This is not meant to be condescending to the woman who helped me so much. Having chosen her profession myself, I know all too well how cautiously we must treat our young patients, how we are taught to follow diagnostic guidelines until we can glimpse the individual beneath the presenting material. We start all over again with every new patient—or we should.

  The “pleased teacher” being “played” by the student was the perception of a boy whose sessions with an earlier psychiatrist had taught him a few strategies for protecting his secrets. Because he still lives in me I am perfectly aware how cunning an eleven-year-old boy can be when it comes to withholding information. Being super-cunning requires handing over another secret in place of the one you want to keep buried.

  She was just what was needed and she was in the right place when I needed her. Her most lasting gift has been the little notebooks. She told me to go out and buy a small notebook, small enough to fit in my pocket, and to write things in it that were important to me.