by Gail Godwin
I missed seeing my whole self. It would soon be half a year since I had been able to stand in front of a long mirror and see myself from top to bottom, dressed or undressed. I was aware of changes going on below where Aunt Charlotte’s mirror stopped, but I couldn’t judge the whole picture for myself.
I was in a sacrificial frame of mind as I headed north on the beach. I was not meant to enjoy the march, not to look forward to seeing little white trucks or discover meaningful patterns in nature. I simply set myself on automatic to march to the north tip of the island and back, where Aunt Charlotte would probably sleep through the night just to have some time all to herself. The march was something I had to do to keep my mood from getting any worse. If only I could walk until I was empty, like Aunt Charlotte used to do.
Since coming here back in May, I had taken it for granted that I would live with my aunt until I went off to college—though she had mentioned boarding school, if I wanted. Now I was wondering if I should take her up on the boarding school before she got really sick of me. Yet I saw myself doing better if I stayed on the island, going to public school with the children of the ordinary working folks who lived here year-round. If I were to go away to a boarding school, there would be snotty questions about family and fathers. I would have a better chance at passing with the local kids.
Passing for what?
Here I tried not to think my next thought, because I knew it would make me feel horrible. But have you ever tried not to think your next thought? Which was that I would be more respected coming from Aunt Charlotte’s house. Artists could get away with living as they pleased. And Aunt Charlotte was a woman solitary by choice who had a website and a waiting list. My mom had been a single mother who worked minimum wage jobs to support herself and her child. How unfair for Mom that there was plenty of money for Aunt Charlotte and me because of the high-quality insurance plan she had chosen while she lived. I had been the spoiler of my mother’s life.
And here came a worse thought: though I loved her and felt it was unfair that she hadn’t had an easier time, I had been ashamed of her in life as I would never be ashamed of Aunt Charlotte.
My sacrificial march moved me past the yellow trash barrels at a smart clip. I had hardly noticed anything or anybody along the way, although I was aware that the tide was going out. A perverse plan was taking shape: in this punishment mode I would go right up on the porch of Grief Cottage and stand facing the door and confront whatever had scared me there. What was the biggest thing I could lose? Myself. And how bad would it be to empty the world of Marcus? The idea thrilled me. Too bad it wasn’t hurricane season so I would have a better chance of being destroyed. (“Marcus knew better than to go out in that storm. He’d read those books about people drowned and washed out to sea. I’ll never forgive myself for letting him slip out like that.”)
If I got destroyed, what would happen to the insurance money that came with me? Would Aunt Charlotte get it, or did it stop when the beneficiary was dead? If it was nontransferable, she would be sorry, but then she would hate herself for even thinking about money when she should be concentrating on her grief.
Lost in my fantasy I was totally unprepared for the Grief Cottage I saw ahead of me. Last time it had been an eyesore. Today the dazzling afternoon light had transformed it. Before its downfall it must have looked like this to walkers approaching from the south. In the golden haze of five o’clock sun, it shimmered like a mirage.
In school we had learned that light was just a wavelength that made you think you saw colors. It all had to do with the light sensing cells in your retina. They activated a chemical reaction that sent an electrical impulse through your nerves to the brain. And then your brain had to decide what to call the wavelength you were seeing. (“Oh, that’s a yellow trash barrel; a golden light has magically transformed the zombie cottage.”) Technically there was no such thing as yellow or golden light. That was just your psychological name for it. First the physiological eye-brain system had to do its job, and then what they called the psychological distinctions kicked in.
Keeping to my forced-march agenda, I wriggled under the wire fence more expertly than last time, and noisily stomped up the unsteady stairs to the sloping porch. I wanted to be heard approaching. As soon as I was on the porch, I “announced myself” by grunting and exhaling loudly the way people do to express their relief at arriving.
This afternoon there was no backpack, no lunch to eat, no nap to sink into, no dream of the sunburnt man standing in the doorway to watch over me. Today I sat on the edge of the slanted porch, my feet on the next-to-top step, but still keeping my back to the house. As I had been climbing the stairs I braved a single glance at the gaping doorway, enough to see that the golden haze filled the room inside. I decided that if something was watching from within that haze, it would be a good plan to sit with my back to it so its curiosity could feast on me.
I don’t know how long I sat with my back to the door before I felt a change in the air that caused me to tense up. The tension was close to fear, but not the usual kind of fear. This was a brand-new sensation. The longer I sat there straining to stay alert, the stronger the sensation became, until it felt like something was coming closer. Then something made me stand up, as though I was being challenged to show more of myself. Still keeping my back to the house, I pulled myself up by the wooden railing and stood on the next-to-top stair where I had been resting my feet. I could hear my heart knocking in my chest. But then whatever was behind me wanted more. It wanted me to step up on the porch and show my full height. This I did, my knees shaking, my back still to the house.
At that point I realized that if something actually did touch me from behind, I would pass out. Drawing on what little courage I had left, I forced myself to turn around and look straight at the gaping doorway. I could hardly breathe as I stood and offered my full body and full face to be seen.
And was met by the violent realization that someone was also showing himself to me. Pale and gaunt, the boy slouched against the frame of the doorway, wearing a faded red shirt and jeans and boots. Because his back was against the light his face was in shadow. But I could make out its lean contours and the flat unsmiling mouth and the hungry dark pools of his eyes. He seemed posted there in a rigid stillness, having perhaps made an effort as strenuous as mine to confront the creature facing him.
Countless times since then I have replayed that scene, trying to imagine what else might have happened if I could have endured the tension between us for a little longer.
But before I even registered what I was doing, I was flying off the porch, scraping knees and elbows in the sand, crawling under the wire fence, and running south, the late sun blinding my vision.
XI.
Aunt Charlotte had answered my note that told her I was going for a long walk. (“Got some more wine and went back to bed. I always crash after finishing a painting. Tomorrow we’ll find you a bike.”)
Now that she had made the first move on the chicken, I ripped off the remaining drumstick, laid it on some squares of paper towel, poured a glass of milk, and headed outside for the hammock. I needed to hear the close sound of the real ocean and feel the ropes of a real hammock against my body and try to find a place in my scheme of things for what had happened at Grief Cottage.
Recalling it now, minus the fear, it seemed as though we had somehow been trapped together in a net of golden light charged with energy. Using what science I knew, I worked out that if technically there was no such thing as “golden light,” no colors at all, only the electrical impulses that made you give names to wavelengths, then maybe the same theory could apply to ghosts. An electrical impulse caused by some unusual wavelength produced an image in your brain and over the centuries people had given that wavelength the name “ghost.”
From the safety of Aunt Charlotte’s hammock (I was relieved that she had crashed for the rest of the day!) I pursued my speculations. I knew a lot about how nature worked. But I was also one of those people willin
g to accept that uncanny things might turn out to be aspects of the natural world.
Before it got dark the moon rose from the northerly direction of Grief Cottage. It was a large, round moon, first the color of butterscotch, then tangerine, as it climbed higher. Its light would be shining directly over his cottage now.
Maybe I would get a pillow and a blanket and spend the night out here in the hammock, close to the ocean, watched over by the moon that watched over him. I was comforted by the ocean’s thud and wash, thud and wash. Not everyone would have seen him; perhaps no one else. He appeared because I had prepared for him, because I sensed the presence of him before he showed himself.
Now the moon changed color again. It was Aunt Charlotte’s cadmium yellow and it had grown larger, a super-moon advancing southward and ascending higher until it was directly in front of me, lighting Aunt Charlotte’s porch and my own face if I could see it. For him the main moonlight would now be past.
Even from this distance, I felt that charge between us—his curiosity coming to meet mine, mine going north toward him.
I wished I knew his name—for all I knew it could be Marcus. I wished I knew if he could think about me when I was not there, as I was thinking about him. I didn’t know whether ghosts could keep track of what was going on in the living world, imagine what could be happening, or be likely to happen, by comparing it with what had gone before. Or were they like animals in not being able to project or imagine the future?
It struck me that he might need me to keep faith that he was still there. He had been waiting all this time, fifty years Aunt Charlotte had said, for someone to wonder where he was—to miss him after he was gone.
***
I did go inside after it was completely dark and bring out a pillow and a blanket. I felt safer outside in the darkness; in the house, there were more possibilities of my doing something wrong. I fell asleep in the hammock and had dreams that seemed to be knitting opposing things together—something about embarking on an important mission that was accompanied by almost unbearable fear. But all details were lost when I was awakened by a thud that shook the house, followed by a smashing of glass.
A halting outburst of obscenities followed, like someone experimenting with profanity. After that came a groan, and then “Stupid, stupid, stupid!” Followed by a final, crisp “Shit!”
I found Aunt Charlotte lying on the kitchen floor, her body curled around a table leg, her right hand, in an awkward position, still clutching the neck of a beheaded wine bottle whose dark red contents were spreading across the tiles.
She groaned. “I fell.”
“Are you hurt?”
“I don’t know.”
My mom had fallen in the snow once. But before she’d let me touch her she systematically ran her hands up and down her body. Then she said, making light of it, “Nothing’s broken. You can help me up.”
“Do you think anything’s broken?” I asked Aunt Charlotte.
“My ankle hurts. And my wrist, oh hell my wrist! Marcus, can you very gently loosen my fingers from around this bottle?”
I knelt beside her, but she screamed when I unclutched her fingers from the jagged bottle top.
“Shouldn’t I call 911?”
“Call the Island Rescue Squad, they come faster. The number’s at the top of the tide chart on the wall. No, wait. Put that phone down. First we need to clean up this mess.”
“But shouldn’t I call the number first?”
“Do what I say, Marcus.”
It seemed the wrong way to do things, but I got the dustpan and the sponge mop and the bucket and swept up all the glass and mopped the tiles while Aunt Charlotte lay curled around the table leg, alternating her stupid, stupid, stupids with moans of pain.
“Can you smell anything?” she asked when I had rinsed the tiles and put everything away.
When I said all I smelled was Mr. Clean, she allowed me to call the number. While washing the floor I had been planning what to say and when a man picked up I told him my aunt had fallen and hurt herself. He wanted to know if she was conscious and if her breathing passages were clear and if she was an elderly woman. I said yes to all, glad she hadn’t heard the questions. He took down the address and told me not to let her move and to keep her calm.
When I sat beside her on the floor she became chatty. “The Rescue Squad pride themselves on efficiency. They like to say they can be anywhere on the island in seven minutes. Of course the island is only three miles long and two-tenths of a mile wide. Which is why I wanted to tidy up first. Everybody knows everybody’s business on this island. I don’t socialize much, but the locals can tell you when I came here and what I do and then they invent the rest. But I don’t intend to give them any new material for their inventions.”
While the rescue men were wrapping Aunt Charlotte’s left leg and right arm in stabilizing tubes and plying her with questions as they worked, I stood above watching and feeling guilty for looking forward to the ride to the hospital in an ambulance. The two responders reminded me of my sunburnt man; they were around his age and spoke with his kind of drawl.
“You’re lucky it wasn’t a hip,” said one curtly while they were easing her onto the stretcher.
“But I’m right-handed! I make my living painting pictures!”
“Maybe it won’t be so bad,” the other consoled her. “It might be just a light sprain. How did you manage to twist yourself around like that?”
“My foot caught against the table leg and I put out my hand to break the fall.”
“You’d be surprised how often people do that,” said the curt one. “Break the fall and break something else. You need to bend your knees and try to roll over on your butt. Keep your hands out of it.”
“I’ll try to remember that, next time I fall,” said Aunt Charlotte.
“Should we lock up the house?” I asked my aunt.
“You’ll stay inside and lock up after us.”
“But aren’t I going with you to the hospital?”
“No, Marcus. You’d be—you’d be bored to death.”
“I wouldn’t!”
“Please, Marcus. Don’t argue. This is the way I want it.”
They lifted her up, one in front, the other in back, commenting on how light she was. (“Bet you never had to diet, ma’am.”)
Aunt Charlotte’s undamaged left arm wafted toward me in a conciliatory gesture. “Be a good boy,” she said, making it sound like I was about six years old. “And be sure and lock up, front and back. I’ll be in touch as soon as I know what’s what.”
“Don’t worry, son, we’ll take good care of her,” the nice one said.
I locked the front door after them, but rebelled by leaving the back door unlocked.
This is the way I want it—as they were carrying her out on a stretcher. She was dying to go somewhere without me—even if it was to the hospital in an ambulance. Just as earlier today she had not invited me to go inside the bank with her. And before that, the annoyance that flickered across her face when she had asked if I wanted to accompany her to the mainland and I’d said yes. And I knew what she’d stopped herself from saying before she changed it to “You’d be bored to death.”
You’d be in the way. For a large part of my life I have lived alone … and it has suited me very well.
Disappointed and angry that I didn’t get to ride in the ambulance, I returned to the oceanside porch. The night had moved on. When I lay down in the hammock the moon was no longer in my face. I was in the same darkness as he was, up at the north end of the island. I wished he could be here with me, but probably he could only stay where he was. A further idea arose: if a dead person could make himself known to a living person, then why wouldn’t the reverse apply? Couldn’t it be equally possible that I was haunting him?
Too much had happened today. The Steckworths and the trip to the mainland in the morning, the encounter at Grief Cottage this afternoon, rounded off by Aunt Charlotte being carried away in the night on a stretche
r.
Though she was at this moment being safely conveyed by ambulance to receive hospital care for non-life-threatening injuries, the incident dragged me back into the winter night not six months ago when I waited for someone who never returned. Where was she, why was she taking so long? Ordinary delays, a road closed, or maybe the place had run out of pizza dough and they had to send out for more. Then on to imagining car breakdown (our Honda had 125,000 miles on it)—or a car accident—then feeling hungry and eating cereal, then resenting her taking so long to get our pizza and making me ruin my appetite. We had been going to watch that movie we liked on Turner Classics, and I watched it anyway and let her existence slip my mind for chunks of time: The Ladykillers—the crooks posing as musicians and renting a room from a clueless old lady, who ends up, still clueless, picking up sixty-thousand pounds for them in a suitcase at the railway station. I laughed and cackled just as I had done with her the last time we watched it together. We loved Alec Guinness. He never knew who his father was, but lived a successful life all the same.
If he couldn’t come south to me and share my porch, I would try to send an emanation of myself north to share his. Down the boardwalk to the beach, the tide coming in. All alone, except for the moonlight, and the little turtle eggs maturing as fast as they could in their protected dune. And then the next ordeal of breaking out of their shells and crawling on their little legs as fast as they could, down a vast stretch of beach to the safety of the waves. Some would make it, some would not.
Since I was sending an emanation of myself, I could order time and space as I pleased. I didn’t have to wait forty minutes, I could be at the wire fence immediately, crawl under it, climb the rotting steps to the porch—and stand facing the doorway.
Then, heart knocking against ribs, I approached him through the darkness, not running away this time.
You came back, a voice says, as if speaking from underwater. Despite its hollow tone, I can hear pleasure. I keep on moving toward him, though it’s too dark to see his shape. I know without seeing that he stands in the doorframe, no longer slouching against it, but upright and welcoming. The energy charge between us is still there. Though I can’t see him, I feel his outstretched arms. I walk forward into them. There’s no going back now.