I had reached the end of the road, where Aunt Charlotte had to park the car when she brought her heavier painting equipment. Hiding Grief Cottage from sight were the tall dunes that she’d had to climb, negotiating her way around the Spanish bayonets.
What I had been intending to do suddenly seemed completely insane. I had been planning on showing him my new bike. (“This bike frame is from a 1954 design that has become a classic. You might have been riding a bike like this if Hurricane Hazel hadn’t happened.”) But there were two levels of reality I had completely left out. Why would it please him, even if he were alive, to see another boy with a bike he probably couldn’t afford? And beyond that, the more serious level: why would a dead boy, trapped in his rotting cottage for fifty years, unknown and uncared about by everyone in the world, wish to celebrate my new bike?
I needed to keep the different parts of myself in their proper places or I could go insane. Aunt Charlotte would be in her rights to send me to an institution.
Yesterday afternoon, at just about this hour, I had seen him slouching in the doorway. I had seen him with my daytime eyes and though his face had been in shadow, he was gazing straight at me. We were in some kind of electric time warp. In the moonlit hammock last night, I had fantasized sending myself north to be with him at Grief Cottage because he could not come to me. And, although this was in my willed imagination, as I walked into his outstretched arms there had been actual physical rapture, which had left results on my body and on my clothes. These results were nothing new. They had been happening for years in my sleep. Mom said it was perfectly normal for little boys. “What about little girls?” I had asked her. “They have those episodes, too,” she said, “only with little girls it happens inside them and there isn’t any evidence.”
If I hid my new bike in the tall grasses, would it be safe from thieves, or had I better drag it with me up through the dunes? I was still headed for Grief Cottage, though not to show off the bike. I would leave it outside the wire with the CONDEMNED and KEEP OUT signs and go up on the porch and simply show myself to him. It was important, I felt, for me to come every day so he wouldn’t think I had forgotten him.
But just as the roof of the cottage showed itself above the dunes, I heard men’s voices fading in and out against the sound of the ocean. And sure enough, when I reached the top and looked down, there were two middle-aged men standing outside the wire fence, one in sunglasses and khakis with a polo shirt and docksiders like Lachicotte’s, but without socks, and the other looking hot and out of place in a dark suit and tie. Not far away in the sand was parked a strange two-seated vehicle with fat wheels and an open frame. The man in the suit was writing in a small notebook but the other man looked up and spotted me and called out. I called back that I couldn’t hear and slid down the dunes dragging my bike.
“I said I hope you weren’t planning on breaking into this place.”
“Oh, no sir, I—”
“Because it’s about to fall in all by itself, and we wouldn’t want anyone to be inside when that happens.” He spoke with Lachicotte’s accent.
But there is somebody inside.
“I’m supposed to take photographs of the cottage for my aunt to paint from. She just broke her ankle, so I said I would ride up here and take some new shots of the cottage.”
“Well, son, you better get cracking. It’s going to have to be leveled pretty soon.”
“But it’s the oldest house on the island.”
“Eighteen-oh-four, to be precise. The Historical Society never loses a chance to drum that date into me.”
“Eighteen-oh-four?” inquired the man in the suit, still writing in his notebook. “They might want to put that in the brochure. ‘The Old—’ Does the house have a name?”
“Grief Cottage,” I said, earning a sharp look from the local man.
“You’d want to call it the old Hassel House,” he told the other. “That’s the family that built it. Rice-planters who came here in summer to avoid the cholera. Back then the cypress was hewn on the mainland. They chiseled numbers on the pieces so the house could be assembled on the island. Then the timber was conveyed by horse-drawn—”
“But why ‘Grief Cottage’?” the man in the suit asked.
“Oh, it’s just a name that sprang up after Hurricane Hazel hit the island in 1954,” the man with no socks replied. “There were some folks staying in the cottage and they were swept out to sea. They weren’t even in the cottage. No bodies were ever found. If they had stayed inside, they’d have probably survived. These tough old houses withstood the storm because they were built so high off the ground on solid brick pilings. Plus the dunes protected them. This house would still be usable today if its successive owners hadn’t let it fall to pieces.”
“Why doesn’t anybody bother to know the name of that family?” I heard myself asking belligerently.
“What family is that, son?”
“The people who died in that hurricane. The family that was in the cottage.”
“Well, I expect their names are known by somebody. It surely would have been in the papers.”
“My aunt has two books about the island’s history and neither of them said a name. Just that it was an out-of-state family, the parents and a boy. And yet they were the only ones lost in that hurricane.”
“Maybe someone should look into it,” said the man in the suit. “It could make interesting copy for the brochure—like that gray ghost you told me about that wanders the beach before storms.”
“I’ll look into it,” said the man with Lachicotte’s accent. He had regarded me coldly since my outburst. I was probably considered a threat to his transaction with the other man. “If you want to take pictures, son, you’d best get on with it.”
“Oh, today I was only scouting out possible angles,” I said. “My camera’s back at my aunt’s house. To tell the truth, I wanted to try out this new bike.”
“It’s handsome. Vintage beach cruiser, isn’t it. You get it locally?”
I named the bike shop. “Lachicotte Hayes helped me choose it.”
The atmosphere warmed. “If Lash helped you choose it you can be sure it was the best bike in that shop. My name’s Charlie Coggins.” He bounded forward and thrust out his hand. “And this is Mr. Sampson from Chicago.”
Mr. Sampson nodded me into existence and resumed his note-taking.