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 willing 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?”