by Gail Godwin
The phone in my back pocket buzzed once. Who at this hour was sending me a message?
It was Charlie Coggins:
Fellow wants you to call him, said it’s important. He found my name in all those Grief Cottage news stories and phoned our office to ask if I knew where you were. Here is his contact info. Said you’d remember him as Shelby’s older brother. I hear good things about you when I run into your aunt, which is not often.
Below were the home phone, cell phone, and street address of Andrew Forster. It took me a minute to realize Andrew was Drew and Shelby was Wheezer.
A man picked up the home phone.
“Is this Andrew?”
“He’s still asleep. Can I take a message?”
“Oh sorry, I didn’t realize it’s so early. I’m all turned around today. This is Marcus Harshaw, I’m calling from—”
“Wait, Marcus, give me your number in case we get cut off. I’ll go wake him. We’ve been trying to locate you.”
“Marcus? This is Andrew, Shelby’s older brother. Thank you for calling back. Do you remember me at all?”
“Yes. Wheezer always called you Drew.”
“Hey, I forgot his little friends called him that! We’ve been trying to find your whereabouts, Marcus. First we found an article you wrote in a psychiatry journal, and Shelby said he would gamble on that being you. Then we found those old news stories—about you discovering the buried boy on the South Carolina island—and we decided to contact the realtor who was quoted. Listen Marcus; Shelby—Wheezer—isn’t doing so well. Lymphoblastic lymphoma, Stage Four, if that means anything to you. He had a high response with the initial chemo and we had high hopes he was going to make it, but he had an early relapse and—well, now it doesn’t look so good. It’s too late for a bone marrow transplant and we’ve made him comfortable at home. He’s been talking about you a lot. Where are you right now?”
“I’m on that same island in those news stories. Where are you?”
“Same old town, Granny’s old house. You know it. Granny’s gone, but we’re all living in her house.”
“There are a few things I need to take care of here, but then I could come.”
“That’s what we were hoping for. But, look, Marcus, don’t leave it too long.”
“I could get away from here by noon.”
“You mean you would come today?”
“If I left at noon I think I could be there in late afternoon. What’s the street address, I don’t think I ever knew it.”
“We’re Number One Maple Avenue. It’s at the top of the street. You’ll stay with us. There’s plenty of room. Oh, and when you get as far as Asheboro? Why don’t you call to let us know you’re close. That’ll give us a good half hour to get him up to speed for your arrival.”
“Will you tell him I’m coming?”
“I surely will, as soon as his nurse gets him bathed and set up for the day. Then he’ll have something to look forward to.”
Getting a sick person “up to speed” for a visitor could mean anything from disconnecting a catheter or an IV so the person could move around without dragging a pole, or taking injections or pills to block pain, or to keep you sharp and awake for short portions of time. It was useless to try to guess. I would know soon enough.
The route from the island to Forsterville was largely interstate, cutting northwest through salt marshes, coastal plain, up into the piedmont, and right into the foothills of the Appalachian mountains, but what I saw was mostly the asphalt in front of me and signs naming the towns that I was not going to see. “It is still possible to go the back roads and get an idea of how people lived,” Mom had said when we had been planning our trip to West Virginia so I could see my roots, at least on her side. “The backroads take longer, but we’ll take all the time we need.” I had traveled this interstate route before, when I had gone back to see to the stone for her grave.
The big white Forster house at the top of the tree-lined street looked down at a nondescript car packed to the gills with belongings laboring upward in second gear. (“We’re Number One Maple Avenue,” Drew had said.) Wheezer and I had always taken the back route to the house to avoid the uphill pedaling. Why this surge of anger and worthlessness at the sight of the house on top of its green hill? I was expected, I was wanted; wasn’t I an equal player now?
“They got here first,” Mom had explained when we had taken our afternoon walks in the Forsterville Cemetery. “So naturally they would choose the highest lots to be buried in.” Her favorite spot was at the top of the hill. My best photo of her, which I carried tucked in my wallet along with the headshot of my unknown father, was of her sitting beside one of their family gravestones, leaning a little sideways, so her cheek grazed the edge of the upright stone. I had wanted her to pose next to a weeping marble angel farther down the hill, and she obliged me, but the body language between them was terrible. Then she had returned to her usual gravestone. “The view is better up here,” she called to me.
My overloaded car crackled around the circular white gravel driveway of the front entrance. Waiting in the open doorway was a gaunt, elongated person still recognizable to me as the complete little man in first grade. Wearing jeans and a polo shirt to match the Carolina blue baseball cap tipped low over his forehead, he leaned into the door frame, his unsupported side steadied by a cane. In eager silence he watched me unfold myself from the car and make my way toward him. Before I had reached the steps, I could feel myself entering his realm. Whenever we had been separated as boys, even if for only a few hours, he would beam that “I-own-you” gaze at me when I came back. He was now sending me this gaze from under the baseball cap. I was close enough now to take in the skeletal cheeks, the bony shelf of his clavicle, the stick-thin upper arms; I also saw the effort it was taking him to stand upright, even with the help of door frame and cane.
“I knew you’d come, Marcus. All we had to do was find where you were. Now you can hug me if you like.”
I embraced the emaciated frame, taking care not to upset his balance. My tears wet the front of his shirt, which smelled fresh from the dryer. “Whoa,” he said in his new adult voice, “go easy on my bones. I’ve lost forty pounds. Now step back and let me look at you, Marcus. Funny, I always assumed you’d be the tall one, but even in my sorry state you only come to my shoulders. Listen, before we go inside, I’ve made some house rules. You are my company. When I’m awake, we’ll catch up on important things. Any medical information will be left for the others to relate while I’m asleep. I have it all planned, and it will be perfect if everyone will do what I say.”
Supporting himself against me on his cane-free side, he led me through the shadowy formal living room, which had been off-bounds to children, and onto the screened porch, where his grandmother had escaped for her smokes. There, seated in chairs, were three people who clearly wanted to give the impression they had simply been relaxing together and not waiting on tenterhooks to see if he could accomplish his solo welcome of me.
The two white men with pleasant faces and balding heads came forward and greeted me, Andrew clasping my hand warmly in both of his and introducing “my partner, Bryson, and this is Tobias, Shelby’s resident nurse.” The muscular black man in green scrubs bounded forward to shake my hand and in a passing, fluid motion slid his arm effortlessly around his patient, relieving me of the weight.
“Not so fast, Tobias,” Wheezer said. “I’m not done yet. Marcus, how long can you stay?”
“I have ten days before I start my new job. No, nine. I used up one of them today. And it’s an eight-hour drive to get where I’m going. Then I’ll need a few days to unpack and get organized. I could stay here three days.”
“Is that counting today?”
“Counting today.”
“And you’d leave on the morning of the fourth day? Then here’s the plan. Tobias will carry me off for my injection after which I’ll snooze, and Drew and Bryson will get you settled into your room and feed you, and then you and I
will meet up later in the evening, when I’m usually at my best.”
I was to sleep in Drew’s former upstairs bedroom, which I had never been inside. When we were boys he had kept it locked when he was away and when at home he shut himself inside and turned up his stereo, except for meals. The bed had been temptingly readied, the counterpane turned down, and a gentle breeze brought the scent of an unknown flower through the open windows.
“We used to hear your jazz and blues coming from this room,” I told Drew.
“You probably remember me as Gloomy Gus.”
“No, I figured we must annoy you, two loud little boys. You were so much older than us—”
“It’s hard to realize I was once that unhappy wretch. This room was always given to the oldest son, or just the son if there was only one in the family. It was Granddad Forster’s room, then it passed on to my father’s older brother, our ill-fated uncle who threw away his life—I expect Shelby told you about him.”
“The brilliant uncle who died of an overdose?”
“That’s the one. Shelby was born too late to meet Uncle Henry, who was the most lovable and fascinating human being in the world when he wasn’t drinking—or later when he was on the hard stuff. I remember when I was about six, Uncle Henry was reading a book, oblivious to everybody else in the room, and I wormed my way into his lap and asked him to read it to me. ‘But you wouldn’t understand it, Drewie,’ he said. ‘No, I will, I will!’ I insisted, so he wriggled me into a more comfortable position and started to read aloud in this beautiful, mysterious language. After a while, he said, ‘Do you want me to go on?’ and I said I did. ‘You understanding it okay?’ ‘Not every word,’ I told him, ‘but I love it.’ This made him laugh and he went on reading until I got interested in something else and climbed down from his lap. Turns out he was reading something in classical Greek, which he often did for pleasure, the way you and I might curl up and read a detective novel.”
Wheezer and I did not “meet up again” that first evening. “He overestimated himself,” Tobias told me. “When he heard you were coming, he got all excited and wanted so many things done. He would have done it all himself if he’d had the strength. He’s a perfectionist and he likes to be in charge.”
“He was like that when he was six.”
“This is one of those forms of lymphoma there hasn’t been a lot of research on.”
“It’s a relatively rare form, which usually strikes the young. I met several children with it during my oncology rotation.”
“You’re a doctor?”
“As of one week tomorrow. I just graduated from med school and I’m on my way to my residency in Nashville.”
“Way to go. Congratulations. I’ve made up my mind to go on for further training myself. After Shelby doesn’t need me anymore. I’m still deciding between physician’s assistant and nurse practitioner. What do you think?”
“The pay scale for PA is higher—well, depending what doctor you go to work for. But if you want to be your own boss and have more contact with patients, nurse practitioner would be the choice. I know ‘Physician’s assistant’ sounds more important because it has ‘physician’ in the title, but…”
“Isn’t it the truth. What something’s called can sway you before you rightly know what it is.”
During the long evening that Wheezer slept through, Andrew and Bryson updated me on Forsterville and on themselves. Forster’s Fine Furniture had gone out of business back when Mom and I were still enduring the indignities of Wicked and Harm on Smoke Vine Street in Jewel.
“Forster’s downfall can be summed up in three words,” Andrew said. “ ‘China is cheaper.’ We held on longer than most, but it was swift and merciless when it hit. It killed Grandpop. His factory was his family, his preferred family, actually. His employees were his children, his preferred children. He handed out the severance checks himself, crying the entire time, and then came home and collapsed. We buried him five months later. There were occasional renters, who ended up doing more damage than good, until finally someone left a coffee machine on and burned down an entire wing. By then, Granny was gone, having got Shelby through his disaster—this was before the cancer, but since it’s not strictly a medical subject, he’ll probably want to tell you himself—and Bryson and I had taken the marriage vows twice, first a civil service in North Carolina, and then the following year, when it became the law of the land, we had a ceremony here at the house. Shortly after that, we were walking around the empty factory, inspecting the abandoned machinery, debating whether we should sell to someone who wanted to gut it and turn it into condos, when Bryson had his idea. We could make it into a museum. Today’s public doesn’t want too much reality, Bryson said, they’re happier with simulations and reenactments. They like their reality broken into manageable pieces and then stylishly arranged for them as an entertainment. So that’s what we’re doing. Bryson even got us a state grant, and the building was already on the historical register, which helped. We’re both accountants, that’s how we met, but Bryson has all the creative savvy. It’s going to be a Furniture Factory Museum, with rental spaces for custom-furniture makers if they’re willing to ply their craft while people watch. And woodworking courses, with credits from the community college. And we’ve sent out a call that we’re buying fine old pieces made at Forster’s, and we’ve already got some in hand: the idea being that we’ll hold contests for woodworkers to duplicate these pieces, the way painters sit in front of old masterpieces and copy them. And we’re having an old film digitalized—it’s the factory workers doing their various jobs and talking about it. Grandpop had it shot back in the early nineties, and the museum-goers will watch that first in a comfortable screening room.”
“My mom was at Forster’s in the nineties. I wonder if she’s in it.”
“We’ll send you a copy, let’s make a note. Wouldn’t that be something?”
The second day, the first full day I was to be there, Wheezer stayed in bed without his baseball cap. They had made the downstairs sunroom into his bedroom and Tobias had the guest room next door. A hardly visible stand of fine hair was making a comeback on Wheezer’s scalp.
“Come here, Marcus, I want you to feel it.”
I sat down on the edge of his bed and ran my palm respectfully across the new growth. Naturally I thought of the last time I had touched his hair, gathering it into a silky clump so I could hit his face better.
“Bryson says it feels like petting a baby rabbit. How does it feel to you?”
“I’ve never petted a rabbit. Maybe putting your hand down on new grass?”
“Let me guess. Drew and Bryson have got as far as touching on ‘Shelby’s disaster,’ then one of them said, ‘No, no, that’s outside of our medical guidelines, he’ll want to tell you about that himself.’ ”
“How did you know?”
“I lie here and read people’s minds. Drew is so at one with himself he goes whole stretches forgetting he exists as an individual. He plans the meals, pays the bills, and thinks up more things for them to do at the Furniture Factory Museum. Bryson goes around plotting happy little surprises for Drew. Tobias wonders if he’ll be able to register in time for courses in the fall, then feels guilty for having the thought, and rushes in to bring me a fresh glass of shaved ice or a smoothie and ask if I want a backrub.”
“Are you sure you’re not just imagining what they might be thinking because you know them so well?”
“Oh, either way, Marcus. My point is, the mind doesn’t use one-thousandth of its powers. It can be all over the place simultaneously and go down roads you didn’t even know existed. I’ve learned that through being sick and all the drugs that go with it and from my coke and heroin era and even when I tried and failed to kill myself.”
“Oh, Wheezer.”
“Yes, that was my ‘disaster.’ However, I hate to say it, Marcus, but when you’re high you get glimpses of other ways your wonderful mind can operate. That’s one reason people keep doing drugs.
Do you remember how we’d tell each other ‘trues’?”
“I certainly do.”
“You used to do research in order to dig up stories to shock me. Van Gogh handing his sliced-off ear to a prostitute. That’s what I was leading up to, telling you a true about the awful year I spent with my mother. I’d flunked out of college here, so in a rare moment of motherliness she invited me to live with her in Boca Raton and try the local community college. Well, to keep it nice and short, I dropped out after a couple of months and went to work for a contractor. Basic grunt jobs, like climbing on a roof and removing old tiles, doing coffee runs, picking up supplies, but I loved the outdoor work and I loved the paycheck. The contractor had a sixteen-year-old daughter named Cricket, who brought him lunch every day on her bicycle; she was too young to drive. She was a user and a dealer, still in high school, very small and smart and irresistible, she was an awesome little creature, and we fell in love and she introduced me to her wares. Then one night when we were together she didn’t wake up from an overdose and when I woke up I was devastated. It was clear she was dead, and I tried to join her. But I cut the wrong way. If you ever get serious about cutting your wrists, do it lengthwise, not crosswise. But you’d know things like that, being a doctor. Anyway, Mother said she’d raised one queer and one junkie and she was packing it in. Actually, she hadn’t raised me, but I was too despondent to contradict her. Granny came and got me and brought me back to life in this house and then died. Drew had paired up with Bryson by then and they’d started work on their Factory Museum. I went to work for the contractor they hired to do the renovations. As I said, outdoor work suits me and I would still be at it if I hadn’t come down with this children’s cancer.”
“The cutoff age for it is usually around thirty, though I met one man in his sixties who had it.”
