Grief Cottage

by Gail Godwin

  I stopped here. I would have to trust the fates that she would avoid another disaster between now and getting her casts off. Maybe she’d finish her secret project and go back to taking orders for her paintings. What power did I have to change an old and comfortable habit? I wondered what Lachicotte had said in former days when he “nagged” her…

  “Congratulations,” mocked the gremlin straddling my back. “You’re not the brightest bulb in the drawer, but you finally saw the light.”

  I had carried Lachicotte’s card in my saddlebag ever since the day he gave it to me. Once I came close to using it, but then decided it would be disloyal to call him from the pay phone outside the market to tattle about Aunt Charlotte’s “fermenting.”

  I called his work number first and a pleasant woman answered. “Vintage Motors, how can I help you?”

  “Is Mr. Hayes there?”

  “He’s out at the moment. Would you like his mobile number?”

  “I have it on his card. Thank you.”

  “Would you like to leave any message?”

  “No, thank you. I’ll try the mobile.”

  “Hello,” said Lachicotte’s recorded voice. “You’ve reached my voice mail. Please leave your (yoah) number (numbah) and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.”

  I was still trying out phrases that could convey my message discreetly when I was cut off.

  What would I have said? “This is Marcus. I need some advice. Aunt Charlotte is—Aunt Charlotte is—”

  “You’re off the hook for now, but I’m still here,” conceded the gremlin. He was behind me but, unlike with the ghost-boy, I knew how he looked. The reptilian skin, the pitcher ears, the grinning saw-teeth. Wheezer and I had spent hours expanding gremlin traits beyond the simpleminded possibilities offered by movies. “Don’t you feel,” Wheezer said, “that there must be an advanced model of mogwai more imaginative and intelligent than Gizmo and, to balance things out, a much scarier and evil model than Stripe?” “Why does there always have to be a balance between good and evil?” I asked. “Because those are the rules,” said Wheezer. “I didn’t make them. There always has to be a baddie to balance out the goodie. And if you have a more complex and interesting goodie, you need to make an equally complex and interesting baddie.”

  As I approached the market entrance, I saw a fit, sun-browned boy about my age loping toward the door. He wore a helmet like mine. With a jolt I realized he was my reflection in the glass door. When had this happened? When Charlie Coggins said it was probably safe for me to precede him up Grief Cottage’s hazardous staircase, I had wondered how he could call me “a light fellow.” But he had been right. Someone called Pudge had been nowhere near that staircase.

  “Do you want duplicates?” asked the man when I handed over the disposable cameras.

  “Will it cost more?”

  “A dollar more a roll.”

  “I’ll just have the singles then.”

  I should have asked for the duplicates, I thought, biking home. Then I could have mailed any good ones to Charlie Coggins as a thank-you. But I was still living in two worlds and perhaps always would be. The world in which you forfeited having Batman on your pencil case to save forty cents, and the world in which you could afford to pay two dollars for extra copies of pictures because of a dead mother’s trust.

  XXXII.

  “But don’t go trying to use the same route twice. Indeed, don’t try to get there at all. It’ll happen when you’re not looking for it. And don’t talk too much about it, even among yourselves. And don’t mention it to anyone else unless you find that they’ve had adventures of the same sort themselves…”

  How could I have forgotten the Professor? There he had been, lying at the bottom of one of my boxes all this time, with his sage advice about commuting between reality and the supernatural and the importance of keeping it to yourself.

  I had unpacked the final box from my old life this afternoon after putting away the groceries, checking the turtles’ thermocouple (no change), doing the laundry, including my aunt’s sheets and pillowcases, and tidying the bathroom. Inside the last box were the usual candidates for the black trash bag: first aid stuff, including our eye cup, some outdated medications, Mom’s Ace bandages she sometimes wore at night for her varicose veins, and the little bottle of arnica the dentist had given her to rub into her gums after a tooth extraction. Clothes I was already outgrowing last summer had been folded and stacked carefully, as though the boy who unpacked this box would be the exact same size as last year. And there on the bottom, wedged beside a pair of sneakers (also getting tight last summer) was my boxed Narnia set, which cheered and saddened me at the same time. We had devoured these books, my mom and I, reading them over and over again, aloud to each other and by ourselves, discussing the characters, and figuring out the meanings.

  I was sprawled in the hammock with all the books in my lap, thumbing through them at random, letting the illustrations recall the stories, when footsteps approached up the rarely-used outdoor stairs to our porch. It was Lachicotte Hayes, carrying a paper sack in the crook of his arm. “I brought y’all some tomatoes. I used the rear entrance so I wouldn’t have to knock and disturb anybody.”

  “She’s in her studio. I haven’t seen her since I got back from the market.”

  “It was you I was hoping to find. Oh, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. I read that to my niece when she was young. I don’t know which of us enjoyed it the most.”

  “The niece I met at the library.”

  “Yes, Althea. We were out condo-shopping for her when you called.”

  “You knew it was me?”

  “My receptionist said a young man phoned but didn’t need the mobile number because he had it on my card. Then when I checked my voice mail, there was a silence until the cutoff.”

  “I couldn’t think of an appropriate message to leave.”

  Lachicotte transferred the sack of tomatoes to the stool Aunt Charlotte used to prop up her broken ankle. “Do you fancy a walk on the beach? My father used to say if you went a whole summer without getting your toes in the ocean you were either too busy for your own good or getting too old for your own good. And here is July half over.”

  Lachicotte sat down on the lowest step of the boardwalk, rolled up his pants cuffs, removed his shoes and socks, tucking a sock into each shoe, and placed them neatly beneath the step. I did likewise: I hadn’t been barefoot on the beach since I’d got my bike. It occurred to me as I placed my sneakers next to his docksiders that a passing stranger observing these side-by-side shoes might assume that some father and son were taking a walk on the beach.

  The tide was ebbing, leaving a generous expanse of glassy surf where you could walk and still make contact with the incoming wavelets that broke over your feet.

  “Are you liking it here, Marcus?”

  I was glad he kept walking straight ahead and not looking at me.

  “I like it, but it still feels weird to realize my mom is dead. I’m not sure I can explain it, but often it seems like she’s more alive than ever. I think about her more than ever and I keep seeing new sides of her.”

  “You explain it perfectly (puh-fectly) well. After all the human noise and conflicts have stopped, the absent person has more room in your heart to spread out and be herself. My mother’s been gone ten years and I know her much better now than when we saw each other every day.”

  I felt it was probably time to say something about being grateful to Aunt Charlotte for taking me in. “But I like living here at the beach. Before I came here I had never even seen the ocean. And I love my bike. And Aunt Charlotte is very good to me. She doesn’t preach or pry or interfere. She lets me do pretty much as I like and goes her own way.”

  “That she does. The first time I met your aunt was at the hardware store. I was putting back some items on the shelf that I had decided not to buy and she came up and asked could I help her. ‘I’ll try my best,’ I said. She said she was laying ceramic tiles i
n her bathroom and was tempted to buy the more expensive brand of sand grout, but was it worth it? What did it have that the others didn’t? I read the information on the can aloud to her. It was mildew and mold resistant, but for best results you needed to finish it off with a water resistant sealer. ‘Is the sealer really necessary,’ she asked, ‘or are you just trying to sell me the extra product?’ At that point the owner, who is a friend, came over and made some jokey remarks about my fancy foreign cars. Then he turned to her and asked if he could be of service, and she realized I was not a salesman.”

  “What did she do then?”

  “She looked mortified. Like she’d been forced into violating some taboo. She apologized to me very formally and went her way. But I was left with the sense that she held me responsible for letting her make the mistake.”

  I had no trouble imagining my prickly aunt reacting like that. “Did she buy the grout?”

  “I don’t remember. I felt like an oaf. Soon after, I learned she was new to the island and was renovating an old place known as the Rascal Shack. Young bucks had used it as their drinking club for as long as anyone could remember.”

  “What was she like then?”

  “Much like she is now. Straightforward, laconic, a loyal friend—once she decided you were worth it. Lean as a string bean and handsome in an imperious sort of way—she still is. Her hair was dark then and she may have worn a little lipstick in those days.”

  “I’m not sure I know what laconic means.”

  “Sparing of words. She wasn’t like any woman I’d ever known. To a Southern boy like me, her straightforwardness was exotic. No guile, no gush. The next time we met she was working as a receptionist for the local vet and I had brought in my dog to check out a limp she had developed. All the signs indicated bone cancer, and the options were heart-sickening. I came out of the examining room shattered. When I got to the desk to settle the bill, your aunt glanced down at what the vet had written while I was digging out my credit card and hoping I could make it out of there before I broke down. ‘Mr. Hayes,’ she said, ‘why don’t you and Dinah go on home?’ She did not look at me once. ‘We have your address, we’ll send the bill.’ Then she turned her back on me real fast and looked very busy with some filing.”

  “What kind of dog was Dinah?”

  “Oh, she was a wonderful mix. Shorthair, the color of butterscotch, long, long legs. The vet said he thought she was part golden retriever, part German shepherd, and possibly some greyhound. When she ran on the beach, she scarcely touched the ground. She used to ride everywhere with me, sitting up straight in the passenger seat. She rode like that on our final trip to the vet, although I could tell it hurt her to sit.”

  “Was my aunt there?”

  “There was someone else on the desk that day. But she came by my shop soon after. She said she was sorry about Dinah and I showed her some of the automobiles in their various stages of rebuilding. She said she wished she could take a class in auto mechanics, she was sick and tired of being clueless about what went on inside her car. Did I know of any class? I said I could teach her better than any class. She wanted to know how much I would charge, and I told her it would be my pleasure. And then she offered to work for me part-time as payment.”

  “But what about the vet?”

  “That was a part-time job, too, but it wasn’t long until she came to me full-time. For a while we went into the taxi business as partners. She ever tell you about that?”

  “It was a success. She was able to paint full-time after she got her share of the proceeds.”

  “Painting was the best thing that ever happened to her. You are the next best thing.”

  “But I’m not really—” To distract from the break in my voice, I veered away from him and stamped and splashed in the shallow waves until I got control of myself. “I’m not doing such a good job taking care of her. Like you said, being her guardian. That’s why I called you, but then I couldn’t think of a suitable message just to leave on someone’s voice mail.”

  “Well here I am. You don’t have to leave any message.”

  “She spends all day shut up in her studio. She’s working on that secret project I told you about. She said it will either amount to something or she’s just deluding herself because she can’t do real work. I’m not allowed to go in there even to change the sheets, which I’ve been doing since the accident. The thing is, I’m still in charge of uncorking her wine and the number of bottles keeps increasing. I thought about saying something to her about cutting back, but I knew she wouldn’t appreciate it. I was wondering if you ever said anything like that to her and how it went over.”

  “It didn’t, other than shrinking my welcome mat to the size of a lady’s handkerchief. Usually people with harmful habits don’t want to be told about it. They have to come around to it themselves.”

  “But what if they don’t come around to it until it’s too late?”

  “I’m working toward that, Marcus. I’m thinking this out as I go.”

  “Oh, sorry.”

  “The project, as far as you know, involves painting?”

  “I saw some traces of paint under her fingernails when I was cutting them the other day. Not a lot. She has this separate laundry sink in her studio where she always washes up.”

  “Well, look here, next week we’re going back to the surgeon in Charleston. She’ll have new x-rays and we’ll have more information. Knowing him, he’ll say he can’t tell for sure until the cast comes off. And then there has to be rehab: squeezing tennis balls and so on, slowly building back the use of that wrist. She’s not the only one who’s been scouring the Internet for scaphoid stories, only I’m on the lookout for the positive outcomes. After we’ve been to the surgeon, we’ll see how her spirits are. If they’re tolerably hopeful, let’s let her complete her secret project. It’s possible, you know, things will take a turn for the better. Have you known any folks with addictions, Marcus?”

  “Well, Mom didn’t drink. She wasn’t against it or anything, but she was too tired after work, and also wine and beer cost money. My best friend’s grandmother was a smoke addict. The longest she could go without lighting up was forty-two minutes. We timed it once. And our landlord in Forsterville had to attend an AA meeting every morning before he went to work so he wouldn’t fall off the wagon. And the man in Jewel who had hired Mom for his mountaintop joinery business just before it went bankrupt—he became a meth addict and the next time Mom saw him his teeth were all rotted and he kept picking at sores on his face. Oh, and Mom had this night school teacher in Forsterville she admired, he really cared about his students, but then he overdosed on something and died. She said if he had gotten the proper help in time he might still be alive. I never met him, this was before I was born. So I guess you could say that I’ve never been close to anyone who had an addiction. But what if Aunt Charlotte doesn’t get the proper help in time?”

  “That’s not going to happen, now we’re on the case. There are places to go for treatment.”

  “But she’d have to go away, wouldn’t she?”

  “For a while, yes.”

  “Then I’d have to go somewhere else, too. I’m a minor and I’m not allowed to live alone.”

  “We can find someone to live with you, like Roberta Dumas lives with Coral Upchurch. But let’s wait to hear the surgeon’s opinion next week. My first wife liked to say that the only thing in life you could absolutely depend on was change. And sometimes these changes can be for the better.”

  “But not always.”

  “No, not always. I’m not denying that.”

  XXXIII.

  “Mystery solved,” Ed Bolton said, cheerfully hovering above Lachicotte and me as we sat on the boardwalk step, putting on our socks and shoes. He had dropped by in his World War II jeep for a routine check on our turtle clutch. “I recognized your sneakers, Marcus, but I couldn’t for the life of me figure out who belonged to the docksiders. Good to see you, Lachicotte.”

  “E
d. How’s my favorite jeep?”

  “A-OK thanks to you.”

  “Still not sorry we replaced that tub?”

  “Only thing I regret is that I didn’t capitulate a whole lot sooner. I was under some notion that the old rusty tub was what kept it authentic. Marcus, their temperature’s way up. Tonight may be their night.”

  “But when I checked it earlier there was no change.”

  “You remember how much earlier?”

  It was before I did the laundry and unpacked the final box from Jewel. “Maybe three hours ago?”

  “Even more auspicious. That means it’s risen fast. Listen, Marcus, would you be able to babysit this clutch, say, for the next hour until I can get some other volunteers here? If there’s any change in the sand just phone my beeper.”

  “What kind of change?”

  “The sand collapsing inward would be the first.”

  “Does that mean they’re coming out?”

  “No, they usually boil up within an hour or so after sunset, when the sand’s cooler. But it could mean they’re getting ready. Tonight would be favorable. Early crescent moonrise, tide coming in so they won’t have to race so far. You ever seen a boil, Lachicotte?”

  “I never have. If I didn’t have to drive up to Sumter to let a customer test-drive an automobile, I’d love to stick around. As it is, I should have been on the road an hour ago. Marcus, we’ll be in touch.” Fixing me with a “you-know-what-I-mean” look, he hurried off, brushing his trousers as he went. It was because of our walk, I realized, that he was an hour late.

  I told Ed Bolton that I would have to go back to the cottage and leave my aunt a note.