by Gail Godwin
“Did he survive?”
“To be honest, I don’t know. It was at the end of my oncology rotation.”
“How much longer do you have to go to school before you can hang out your shingle?”
“Four years of residency, which includes two of general psychiatry and two of child- and adolescent-specialty training. After that a two-year fellowship. It seems long, but at least I know what I want to do and am on track to do my chosen work.”
“I wanted to read your article we found in that psychiatry journal—I forget its title, it had supernatural in it, but in order to read it I had to join something first and time was running short. We still had to find you.”
“It was called ‘Psyche and Soma in the Human Child: the Supernatural Episode.’ Actually I co-authored it with my supervisor, otherwise it probably wouldn’t have been accepted. I’ll send you an offprint as soon as I unpack my boxes.”
“You always were so smart, Marcus.”
“You were the best friend I ever had. I spent part of first grade watching you so I could learn how to please you. And I never stopped dreaming about you. I still do. You are a permanent member of my dream theater—there are only about ten people in the entire repertory.”
“I don’t know whether to ask this or not.”
“Go ahead.”
“You may be sorry.”
“No, please. Ask it.”
Wheezer raised himself to an upright position, wincing a little from the effort, and took a dramatic deep breath. “Okay, here goes. What did I do, or say, that day I came to have lunch at your apartment, that made you try to kill me the next day?”
“It was something you said at school.”
“What? I know I must have done something, but I can’t remember.”
“It was about my mom. About us sleeping in one bed. Next day you told your other friends, ‘Marcus is his mother’s little husband.’ ”
“I said that? And this was at school the next day?”
“Yes.”
“Funny, all the times I’ve tried to remember, I was sure that whatever I did took place at your apartment. Didn’t I come for lunch?”
“Yes, but you didn’t stay. You left in a huff before my mom returned with the pizza.”
“I don’t remember any of this! Why did I leave in a huff?”
“I had shown you this picture of a man Mom kept in her drawer. I said it was my father and she was going to tell me his name when I was old enough to be responsible.”
“Why don’t I remember any of this?”
“We all have these blank spots. Sometimes it’s because we repressed it, other times it’s because another memory shoved it aside. You took the picture and shook it in its frame and said, ‘Someone cut this out of a book.’ And then you said, ‘You two are crazy. I need to get out of here.’ ”
“I didn’t stay for lunch?”
“No, when Mom came back with our lunch, I told her you’d felt an asthma attack coming on and had rushed home to get your medication.”
“You know what’s funny? I never had another attack after your attack. You’re probably the last person in the world who calls me Wheezer. So did she tell you later who your father was?”
“No. As I told you, she died in that accident when I was eleven, so I never knew. But not knowing doesn’t torture me as much as it once did. I was lucky enough to make friends with a man when I went to live with my great-aunt, and he became a sort of fatherly stand-in. He’s dead now, but he stayed around long enough for me to get an idea what having a father would have been like.”
“Well, you’ll have to tell me about it because I’ve never had the experience. I don’t know if Drew told you, but all those years my father was traveling for Forster’s Furniture he had a second family in Roanoke, Virginia. Married and children and all and this was before Mother divorced him, so he was a full-fledged bigamist for a while. I didn’t learn about this until I was in my teens. I used to fantasize driving up to Roanoke and introducing myself to my half-siblings, but I never got around to it. What would have been the point? I haven’t even told my mother about my present state. She’d feel obliged to rush up from Florida and make a bedside appearance and Drew and Bryson would have to feed her and she’d say something mean to hurt their feelings. But look, you were born in Forsterville, your mom worked at Forster’s Furniture. I mean, we all assumed your father was Mr. Harshaw because that’s what your mom said, but it must have been someone around Forsterville.”
“Whoever it was died before I was born, that much she told me.”
“Do you still have that picture?”
“It’s in my wallet upstairs.”
“No, don’t get it right now. We need to make the most of my waking time. But maybe Drew being so much older, he might recognize the face. Shit, my mouth feels like a sewer and I have so much more to ask! Would you go and find Tobias—he’s probably doing laundry—and tell him I could use a lemon swab?”
“I can do it. Where are the swabs?”
“No, Marcus, the inside of my mouth is not pretty. I can’t let you see it.”
“I’m sure I’ve seen a lot worse. Besides, I’d like to do it for you. I promise I’ll do a good job.”
“They’re in the top drawer of that bureau. They come in individual packages. Will you also promise you’ll be here when I wake up—in case I fall asleep?”
Andrew and Bryson were off to the Furniture Museum and asked me to go along.
“He usually sleeps for hours,” Andrew said.
“Well, but I promised I’d be here when he woke up.”
“Understood,” they said.
“Marcus, I wanted to say about Cricket—it was the total thing and we both knew it. Just because she happened to be sixteen—I mean, I was only six years older. That’s not a lot. Have you ever loved someone totally like that?”
“When I was fourteen, I fell in love with my therapist. She was fifty-one.”
“What did you do?”
“I brooded and anguished and dreamed up scenarios where I saved her from danger or her husband died, or left her. I finally broke down and told her. And she said it had a name, transference, it happened a lot in therapy and if handled correctly it could sometimes turn corners. She said, ‘We can do one of two things, Marcus. I can refer you to someone else, or we can work through this ourselves—within the bounds of therapy.’ And we did that. I still loved her afterward and probably would still love her if I were to meet her today.”
“And that’s all? Your therapist when you were fourteen? Was there anyone after that?”
“I shared a house with another med student for a semester. It started off—well, it started off in a passionate … collision … that’s the best way to describe it. So I asked her to move in with me and after the passion dried up we were nothing but roommates who shared the rent but didn’t like each other very much.”
“So you’ve never known the total real thing?”
“There’s still time. The loggerhead turtle doesn’t reach sexual maturity until he’s in his thirties.”
Forsterville, the last full day.
“Marcus, I’m good for the whole day. Tobias has given me a shot.”
“A steroid? You’ll probably pay for it later.”
“I don’t mind. You said last night you had saved up a true for me that you’d never told anyone.”
“I couldn’t have. They would have thought I was mentally unbalanced and sent me away for treatment, or they’d think I made it up to seem clairvoyant and ‘special.’ It’s about that boy—well, that skeleton I fell on top of. The one in the news stories that led you to me.”
“Were you more grossed out or freaked out when you felt him under you?”
“I was out cold. I didn’t learn about him until I was in the hospital. But I need to start back at the beginning of that summer. I was eleven, my mother was dead, and I was sent to live with my great-aunt on a small island in South Carolina…”
I was
surprised, and frankly let down, to realize that the entire story of Grief Cottage had taken less than twenty minutes to relate to Wheezer. How could that be? I had gone chronologically through those summer weeks fourteen years earlier, bringing in the necessary side-stories, the lost family in the hurricane, Coral Upchurch’s memory of seeing Johnny Dace on the beach that one time fifty years before. I had been careful not to exaggerate the ghost-boy’s manifestations to me: that first time on the porch when I felt invisibly watched from behind; then the two visual showings in the doorway; and the final time when I had taken the Percocet pills and felt his large hand on my back guiding me up the stairs of Grief Cottage.
“Wait, let’s go over this again,” said Wheezer. “That first time, when you fell asleep on the porch and then woke up and felt someone watching you from behind, was that before or after your aunt had told you about the missing family?”
“It was after.”
“Okay, now, I’m going to play devil’s advocate. The first time you saw him was in what you say was dazzling afternoon sunshine. Are you sure the dazzling light wasn’t playing tricks on you?”
“No, he looked like a real person standing in the doorway. His face was in shadow because the dazzling light was behind him, but he was looking at me and he had on a red shirt.”
“Okay. Now what about the big showing? The morning you got there before sunrise and everything was crepuscular and spooky, and he was braced in the doorway ready to spring out at you. You saw his red shirt again, unbuttoned this time, and his broken nose and the expression of his mouth, and his bow legs and jeans and boots. Right? And then later Mrs. Upchurch told you he never undressed at the beach and he was wearing some sort of footwear that might have been boots. Am I accurate so far?”
“An accurate devil’s advocate.”
“But then! Then everything changes. You go to the mortuary and see the bowed leg-bones. The nose was gone and the clothes were gone, but it turns out this was the remains of Johnny Dace, the boy lost in the hurricane, and now there’s the DNA to prove it. It seems to me, Marcus, that somehow you were able to make contact with his spirit. It’s like he needed you and you needed him and there was some kind of collapse in time and you were able to save each other. He got out of that cramped little closet and is laid peacefully to rest, and you are still here instead of being laid out underground yourself. It’s got something to do with how time interacts with spirit, only you’re going to have to figure it out for both of us. I think you do have special powers, Marcus. I give you permission to try them out on me.”
“What do you mean?”
“Look. If you could reach a boy you never knew, a boy who’d been dead fifty years, why, reaching me, as close as we have been, will be a piece of cake.”
Tobias entered, bearing a tray with a protein smoothie and a glass of shaved ice. He suggested his patient take a rest to conserve his energy for my farewell dinner that evening. Wheezer had asked for the dinner, and was planning to show up for it fully dressed and on his feet. Making ready to assist Wheezer to the bathroom, Tobias suggested I take a little walk outside in the sunshine, “and maybe you could use a little rest yourself.”
I hadn’t been outside the house since the first night, when I reparked my car and carried in my overnight bag. As I embarked on my assigned walk, I realized suddenly how drained I was. It was like coming off duty after a twenty-four-hour stint at the hospital. Seeing patients face-to-face, concentrating on their needs, you put yourself on hold, only to be confronted at the end of your rounds, cradling your pent-up umbrage like an ailing pet. Now. What about me?
Circling the backyard once, twice, a third time, I tried to recall how this patch of land had looked and felt when I was a visiting child. I passed the row of boxwoods where Wheezer had seen a snakeskin floating from a branch. (“Look, Marcus, you can even see where its jaw was! It probably rubbed against that bush to start the process and finally crawled out of its own mouth!”) Or were these the same boxwoods? Shouldn’t they have been more mature by now? In acute self-consciousness I performed this memory ritual in Wheezer’s backyard: Now I am looking at the same boxwood or a replacement of the boxwood where the snakeskin floated; now I am remembering how Wheezer’s grandmother stood under that tree, her back to the house, puffing her cigarette; now I am approaching the path where Wheezer taught me to ride Drew’s old bicycle: (“If you’d just stop thinking, Marcus, and ride!”)
Eventually it dawned on me that I didn’t have to continue this forced-march down memory lane. Before a trip she felt neither here nor there, Aunt Charlotte had said, and I, too, was in that sort of antechamber between what was ending and what had not yet begun. I sank down on an outdoor chaise whose canvas pillows bore a faint scent of mildew and fell into a sort of half-sleep in which I was floating above a MapQuest aerial view of all the miles I had to drive tomorrow between Forsterville and Nashville.
We made it, all of us—well, almost—through my farewell supper. Drew, Bryson, Tobias, Shelby, and Marcus. Wheezer, dressed, arrived with a cane on his own steam, Tobias hovering close behind. He had left his head bare, with its rabbit fur exposed. Drew did salmon and vegetables on the outdoor grill. There was wine for those who wanted it, iced tea for those who didn’t. And a silver bowl with fresh-cut fruit waiting for dessert. Beside my plate was a book-sized gift wrapped in white-and-gold paper.
“You have to open it now,” ordered Wheezer. His face had gone ashen and he had sunk down in his chair.
It was one of those too-beautiful leather notebooks with Italian endpapers, the kind you postpone using, or never use, because you don’t want to spoil it. “It’s from all of us,” Wheezer said. “Everyone’s signed the card, but I went ahead and wrote the first entry inside.”
While I am writing this, announced his familiar childish script at the top of the first page, we are still together under the same roof, on the same earth at the same time. As for later, don’t forget!
There was more.
While we were serving ourselves fruit, Wheezer went limp in his chair. “Listen, Tobias, I’d better lie down.” Tobias all but carried him away.
“Listen, Marcus,” he said later, when we had joined him round his bed. “Show Drew that photo you were telling me about. He’s so much older he might recognize the face.”
I went upstairs, returned with the wallet, and handed the picture over to Drew, who took one look and raised his eyebrows.
“I think I do know this person, but I want to be sure. May I borrow this for a minute, Marcus?”
We heard him rustling around in the formal living room nobody used. A book dropped. Drew cursed and sneezed three times in succession.
“Someone needs to dust those shelves once in a blue moon,” he said, returning with a book under his arm. “Okay, I’ve checked it out. This is the picture of Uncle Henry in the 1976 Harvard yearbook. That was his sophomore year, the year he dropped out. Only someone cut it out of the yearbook.”
He opened to the page.
Under the cutout space was the name Henry Arthur Forster, Jr.
“And look,” said Drew, “Marcus’s photo fits right in the space. Now, would someone please tell me what this is all about?”
“Marcus will have to tell you,” said Wheezer in a near-whisper, his eyes excited, feverish, “and it’s going to be an interesting ride. Look, guys, I need to snooze for a while and when I wake up I’ll be good as new. Then I expect to hear everything everybody said, and I mean everything.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Grief Cottage has been enriched significantly by the close readings and rereadings of my editor, Nancy Miller, who has now seen me through six books, and my agent, Moses Cardona, who is all a literary agent should be—and more. Nancy is a master of her craft who has a sharp eye for what is not there yet. Moses, besides being my champion, possesses the rare gift of seeing right into the heart of a story and helping me see it, too.
Thanks to Katya Mezhibovskaya for creating a jacket design that exp
resses the mood and story of Grief Cottage so perfectly.
Thanks to Evie Preston for her guidance and encouragement.
Thanks to my astute “tough reader” of many years, Robb Forman Dew, and to her son Jack Dew, who offered an invaluable suggestion concerning the ghost.
Thanks to Lynn Goldberg, who asked the right question at the right time.
Thanks to Ehren Foley at the South Carolina Department of Archives and History for providing details about two-hundred-year-old beach cottages and their floor plans, and for his enthusiasm and cordiality.
Thanks to Lee Brockington of Hobcaw Barony for putting me in touch with the right sources. I kept her sumptuous volume, Pawleys Island, a Century of History and Photographs, with Photo Editor Linwood Attman, near to me throughout the writing of Grief Cottage.
Professor James R. Spotila’s passionate guide, Saving Sea Turtles, introduced me and Marcus to the fascinating journey of the loggerhead turtle.
And thanks to my sister, Franchelle Millender, who invited me to share a beach cottage with her on the Isle of Palms in South Carolina, where Grief Cottage was first conceived.
Aunt Charlotte’s island is drawn from both Pawleys Island and the Isle of Palms.
A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR
Gail Godwin is a three-time National Book Award finalist and the bestselling author of more than a dozen critically acclaimed novels, including Flora, Father Melancholy’s Daughter, and Evensong. She is also the author of Publishing: A Writer’s Memoir, and The Making of a Writer: Journals, Vols. I and II, edited by Rob Neufeld. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts grants for both fiction and libretto writing, and the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Woodstock, New York. Visit her website at www.gailgodwin.com.
