“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 stretcher.
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.