“Maybe I’ll just leave them to you for now,” I said.
It was all I could do to sort out the information arising out of this talk we were having. The revelation about her “nice stipend” had deflated any grand illusions of my being wanted simply because I was me. On the other hand I saw advantages to her scanty information about my past. When she had said, “I asked about your father’s people, but I was the only name on the policy,” I realized she had assumed that my father was the person whose last name I bore—Harshaw—even though Mom and Mr. Harshaw had parted ways two years before I was born. With my background being so vague to Aunt Charlotte there would be less embarrassing information to worry about her finding out. “Look at it this way, Marcus,” Mom had said when I almost killed the grandson of her employer and we had to leave her good job at Forster’s furniture factory in the flatlands of North Carolina and move to the mountains. “In a new place we can tell people what we want them to know and that will be our past.”
To cover the readjustments going on inside me, I asked Aunt Charlotte what she was painting. After apologizing for it being one of her “bread and butter commissions” she removed the cloth from the large canvas on the easel. So far she had only outlined a substantial-sized beach house and some palmetto trees in dark blue. She explained she was working from a color photo provided by the owners. “I don’t paint from life anymore. It’s too messy. Sand blows into the pigment and nosy people crowd around and make dumb remarks. If you’re interested in seeing the actual house, it’s down at the south end of the beach, where they’re building the new McMansions. So far it’s the only one with three stories. And a fake cupola. For my honest paintings I go to the north end of the island. Those are the old houses, when people built behind the dunes. There’s one old house I must have painted at least fifty times. But people keep asking for it. Since I took my business online I can’t keep up with the orders for that one house. I paint it from photos now, but they are photos I took myself.”
“What’s a fake cupola?”
“A cupola is a tower where you can look out at the view. But this one is just stuck up there for show, with no way to get to it.”
“Why do people want paintings of that other house?”
“It’s a very old cottage, what’s left of it. It’s a ruin and it has a haunting quality. I’m still trying to do justice to its quality. Walk up there and see it for yourself. It’s the very last structure at the north end. It’s half gone, but it emanates a powerful mood. The locals call it Grief Cottage. The town commissioners have been dying to tear it down, but the historical society’s on their back because it was built in 1804. I need to go up there and get some more photos in case they lose the battle.”
“Why do they call it Grief Cottage?”
“A family was lost there in Hurricane Hazel. A boy and his parents. The parents were out desperately searching for him, when all the while he may have been in the cottage. Anyway, none of them were ever found. Some of the locals think the boy may have been hiding in the house somewhere smoking. They thought it might have been a cigarette that started the fire that burned down the south end of the cottage, but they never found a body. Others think that when he realized his parents had gone out searching for him he rushed out searching for them and got swept out to sea. But his body never washed up either.”
“Maybe it still could.”
“I don’t think so. It was fifty years ago. I can show you the last Grief Cottage I painted—I mean, on my computer screen. As soon as I get this commission out of the way, I’ll give you a tour of my online gallery. But now I must earn my bread and butter while the north light is still strong.”
III.
“Walk up there and see for yourself,” Aunt Charlotte had said, and I had the rest of the afternoon ahead to do it in. I sprayed myself with sunscreen, marched down the rickety boardwalk that bridged the dunes between the cottage and the beach, descended the wooden stairs, and before heading north stopped for my usual inspection of “our” roped-off hatching site with its big red diamond-shaped warning sign. LOGGERHEAD TURTLE NESTING AREA. EGGS, HATCHLINGS, ADULTS, AND CARCASSES ARE PROTECTED BY FEDERAL AND STATE LAWS.
The eggs buried in our dune had already survived their first catastrophe. Back in mid-May, just before my arrival, the people renting the cottage to the right of Aunt Charlotte’s had been negligent about smoothing out the sand at the end of their badminton games, and that night a mother turtle had mistaken the hilly clump for a dune, laid her eggs, and departed. The Turtle Patrol had to dig them out, a “clutch” of 110 eggs, tenderly transfer them into buckets lined with wet sand, and re-bury them in a suitable spot. The patrol knew Aunt Charlotte’s way of life and could depend on her boundaries to stay untrammeled and safe.
I kept my sneakers on because my beach walks had taught me you made better progress on sand with rubber soles. Aunt Charlotte hadn’t said how far the north end of the island was but surely she wouldn’t have said I could walk there if she had judged it too far.