He’d had a haircut since I last saw him and seemed altogether more spiffed up. He smelled like someone just out of the shower, and I could smell the pie as well.
“If I could make crust like you, Lash,” said Aunt Charlotte, who had taken an urgent hopping trip to the bathroom following his arrival, “maybe I would start baking pies.” Now Aunt Charlotte smelled of mouthwash. “I’m sure Marcus must miss his mother’s pies.”
I let this go by rather than say our pies were from the frozen section of the supermarket.
“It just came out of the oven,” said Lachicotte, setting down the pie dish on the kitchen counter. “I’d advise you all to have it for supper. It tastes better before it’s refrigerated. I hope you like oysters, Marcus.”
“Oh, yes.” Though I’d only had cans of oyster stew.
“There’s nothing to making crust,” he said to Aunt Charlotte. “All you need to remember is that bowl of ice water for keeping your fingers cold.”
“Maybe I’ll try it when I have ten fingers again,” she said.
“Marcus, I bring you a message from Charlie Coggins. He stopped by my shop yesterday. You made quite an impression on him. He wanted to know how old you were and when I said eleven he wouldn’t believe it.”
“Will you sit down, Lash?” Aunt Charlotte had remembered her manners.
“What was the message?” I asked when we three were seated at the kitchen table. Lachicotte had turned down my offer of a cup of tea because he was meeting a potential buyer for his 1962 Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud at five.
“It was about that family who got swept away during Hurricane Hazel. Charlie said to tell you he checked the firm’s listings for 1954 and it wasn’t a Coggins rental. It must have been a private transaction by the owners. In fifty-four that cottage still belonged to the Barbours, but they sold it soon after Hurricane Hazel. What was it you were interested in knowing, Marcus?”
“I just think it’s strange that nobody remembers their names. In those two ladies’ books about the island, the man in the truck who talked to them when they were out looking for their son—he gets named, but not the only people on the island who were lost. It’s like they didn’t count.”
“Marcus feels the pain of others,” said Aunt Charlotte, “even when they’re dead and gone.”
“Well, we can surely find out,” said Lachicotte. “We can track them through microfilms of local newspapers at the library (li-bry). I’ll take you there tomorrow if you like, Marcus. Then you’ll be able to bike over there whenever you want.”
“Speaking of which,” said Aunt Charlotte. “I need to reimburse you for his bike and all those extras. Marcus, would you bring my checkbook from my purse? I’ve been practicing my left-handed signature. I called the bank to alert them to expect the scribble of a five-year-old child and they said no problem. But you’ll have to fill in the rest.”
Lachicotte insisted there was no hurry and Aunt Charlotte insisted there was, and they almost had a fight before the check finally got written. Then we all played at writing left-handed signatures on Aunt Charlotte’s note pad. Lachicotte’s clumsy attempts got a snort out of Aunt Charlotte. My efforts recalled to me how shaky my early right-handed attempts had been when I was a child. How quickly you forgot how hard it had been to control your fingers when you first started! Aunt Charlotte’s left-handed signature was far better than either of ours, which lifted her mood. “Though of course I’ve had all day to practice,” she said, almost gaily for her.
“Well, your neighbor Coral Upchurch will be arriving right after the fourth,” said Lachicotte.
“How is it you always remember such things, Lash?”
“It’s just this little thing that I do.” He laughed. “My first wife used to call me her walking anniversary book.”
After Lachicotte left, I asked Aunt Charlotte if she knew why he’d had three wives. “Did he leave them, or did they leave him?”
“They left him. Lash is the kind of man who lets women walk all over him. I was just the opposite: I always sought out the kind of men I could depend on to hurt me. Then I left them when I’d had enough.”
“I wonder how many times I’ll get married.”
“Oh, Marcus, you make me want to laugh and cry at the same time.”
XVII.
When Aunt Charlotte told Lachicotte I felt the pain of others even when they were dead, I worried that I had been talking in my sleep. But thinking it over I decided she was simply referring to the interest I had expressed about the nameless boy and his parents and to my sensitivity on their behalf.
Though he was the most compelling presence in my life, I knew better than to tell anyone about our connection, and certainly not that I had seen him. I was drawing from the same fund of wisdom I had called on when the social services psychiatrist kept asking what I had felt while beating up Wheezer and I kept replying that I had “blanked out.”
Funny enough, of all the people in my life, past or present, it was Wheezer alone I would have loved to tell about the dead boy. How he would hang on to my every word. His favorite thing was the occult. He would insist on going over every detail.
“Now Marcus, tell me again, what exactly did you see?”
“He was there in the door frame, facing me.”
“What door frame?”
“It was the front door leading out to the porch. I mean there’s no door, but he was slouching against the frame.”
“You’re sure the whole thing wasn’t a trick of the light or something?”
“I’m sure. He was thin and had a sharp jaw and…”
“Was he tall or short?”
“More like tall. But very skinny. And he wore a faded red shirt and jeans and boots. He was somebody specific. And I not only saw him, I felt him.”
“How do you mean you felt him?”
“The way you feel people when they’re standing right in front of you. I felt I was being looked back at. I felt his curiosity. He was as interested in me as I was in him. The whole thing was as real as you and me facing each other right now.”
“What kind of faded red shirt? Polo?”
“No, it buttoned down the front and it looked a little small for him. It had short sleeves—or maybe they had been cut off.”
“What were the boots like? Why would someone be wearing boots at the beach?”
“I’m not sure. The whole thing was pretty intense while it was happening.”
“Oh, God,” he would have cried out with envy. “Why couldn’t this have happened to me?”