I hadn’t seen the ghost-boy again, but, like with Aunt Charlotte and me, he and I had a routine of sorts. I would sit on the top stair with my back to the open door and talk to him. I kept it safe and casual, the way you might turn away and pretend to be talking to yourself to put a nervous animal at ease. I had thought about warning him they were planning to demolish the cottage, but then decided it would be cruel. Besides, what alternative dwelling could I offer him? Also, he might connect the bad news with the person who brought it. Of course, it was possible that he knew already, that he had seen and heard the men—or absorbed it in some ghostly manner unknown to me.
There was so much I didn’t know about relationships between the dead and the living. Whenever we had indulged in one of our ghost story binges, my former best friend, Wheezer, friend would grumble, “There ought to be a rule book on how to behave with ghosts!” He improvised a few rules for us to follow if we ever met a ghost, but so far none of his rules fit the situation with my ghost.
At first I limited my talk to nature, the ocean, and the surroundings we shared. I remarked on the sunrises and the tides and I worried aloud about the fate of the baby turtles, which had been much on my mind. (“They need to get out to those ocean currents fast because the coastal waters are thick with predators and the babies are defenseless and very tasty.” And when I felt a knot of sadness behind me, like the gathering of someone’s woe, I quickly reassured him: “Don’t worry, they are born knowing what they have to do. They have been doing it for forty million years.”)
It was hard work courting a ghost, requiring constant exertions of empathy. Some subjects left him cold. For instance, I had thought I would initiate personal topics by filling him in on what the islanders thought had happened to him and his family during Hurricane Hazel. But I’d barely begun when I felt his withdrawal. I was a crazy boy talking aloud to an empty porch.
I recalled how stealthily I had courted Wheezer back in first grade. At the beginning I observed him from a cautious remove. He was a delight to watch—a complete little man, everything about him defined and sharp: his precise and finicky modes of movement and speech; his lovely floppy roan-colored hair, cut often at a salon in the style of an old-fashioned boy, like Christopher Robin dragging Pooh down the stairs. He had a soft, reedy, hoarse voice and employed his own phrases for keeping aloof from the mob. “Come on, people,” he would say, or “behave yourself, people.” When his friends displeased him, he called them “people,” which crushed them. But when someone impressed or surprised him he would reward you with an “Outstanding!” in his hoarse little voice that was a side effect of his asthma.
For the whole first half of first grade, I watched and listened and kept my distance. Besides being a natural leader, he was a keen placer of people. Aware that I would be seen by him as an outsider, I decided to play up my outsider-ness. I had studied him long enough to guess that the way to his heart was to be as unlike his friends as possible. I could see that they bored him with their lack of imagination, their likeness to one another. The phrase “single mom” was just coming into popular usage and I told him that’s what my mom was. His grandfather owned the furniture factory where Mom worked as section manager in the polishing and packing department.
Wheezer was fascinated by anything to do with the paranormal and was always devising tests to see how extrasensory we were. (I was more developed than he was, he concluded.) He did a brisk business on eBay, acquiring old issues of Weird Tales dating back to the thirties. He introduced me to the stories of Roald Dahl, Harlan Ellison, and Ray Bradbury.
He loved gossip and hearsay, the more shocking the better, stories about the extreme things people had done, true things that made one lower one’s voice in the telling. (“Tell me a true, Marcus,” he would command.) I was always on the lookout for the kind of trues that would appeal to him. (“Did you know that Van Gogh the artist cut off his ear after a fight with his friend Gauguin? He wrapped it in a handkerchief and on the way to the hospital he handed the ear to a prostitute and she fainted.”)
Wheezer also had trues to offer, including a dramatic one from his own family. His father’s older brother, the brilliant Uncle Henry, who could read Greek and Latin, dropped out of Harvard to return home and become a heroin addict. (“His IQ was off the charts, it almost killed Granny to watch her favorite son disintegrate in front of her eyes. When Grandpa finally kicked him out, he moved into a rusty trailer with rats and died in bed shooting up.”)
As long as it wasn’t about himself, my Grief Cottage friend also quickened at the lure of a true. As soon as I began, “I’m eleven, and I’m an orphan,” I could feel the air behind me snap to attention. “My mom was killed in a car accident last winter and my dad died before I was born. She never told me who he was but when I’m older I’m going to try to find out.”
But if I got too digressive or laid on too many details, the frequency between us faded. Like Wheezer, the listener in the space behind me was a sensationalist. He liked me to head straight for the extremes.
Commuting between Aunt Charlotte and the boy in Grief Cottage, I felt torn. I had specific duties at each place and I told myself my mental health wasn’t in danger as long as I remembered the differences between those duties. It was a matter of keeping separate realities separate and steadying myself inside an awareness that seemed to be expanding too fast. Some days my balancing act felt wobbly or downright precarious and I feared I was on the slippery slope to insanity. If only I had somebody I could ask! But what exactly would I ask them? (“Do you think if your consciousness starts growing too fast it could be just as frightening as the beginnings of insanity? Maybe you could even confuse it with insanity.”)
One morning as I was returning to Aunt Charlotte’s after my hour with my back to the inhabitant of Grief Cottage, I passed the sunburnt man in his white dump truck heading north. I waved enthusiastically, and he waved back. But I could see that he didn’t recognize me. How could he? I was wearing my helmet and riding a bike. In a flash of insight I understood how it felt to be the ghost-boy, who knew others could not ordinarily see him. For a moment I looked forward to sharing this parallel experience with him until I remembered that references to him had so far earned me a cold withdrawal.
XVI.
Aunt Charlotte’s mood was deteriorating. And at supper one evening I made it deteriorate further with a stupid question meant to cheer her up.
She had confided to me that she had been attempting to paint with her left hand. (“I thought why not try for mood expressed through color? Just those two things: mood and color. Well, maybe a few shapes.”) That morning she had squeezed out her colors and chosen a big flat brush and started to work. (“I was going to do a minimalist version of Grief Cottage. After all, I know the proportions, having painted them so many times. What could be so hard about laying in some sky color and some brushy Constable-like clouds and then roughing in a dark broken shape at the bottom? Who knows, I thought, these restrictions might lead to something exciting.”)