And then the rains had come and I’d read the two ladies’ books and felt anger on the part of the boy. He and I had things in common, except that he was dead and couldn’t stand up for his rights, or even how truly or falsely people remembered him. And then Aunt Charlotte finished her big McMansion painting for the Steckworths, and later that afternoon I had walked to Grief Cottage and actually seen him. And that same night, I lay in the hammock and watched the moon rise and concentrated on sending my spirit north. And then, without my ever leaving the hammock, there was the embrace and the rapture. From that point on, I couldn’t account for it in literal or sane terms. We were connected: he was always with me.
I used to cringe with embarrassment when the foster mother talked about how Jesus followed her around the house, always a few steps behind her, just out of her line of sight. He is always with me, even in my most private places, she told us. I had imagined what private places she meant and cringed some more. But how was my connection with the ghost-boy any less embarrassing than hers with Jesus?
Sometimes I resurrected the psychiatrist back in Forsterville who had grilled me so patiently and professionally about what my feelings were while beating up my friend. I imagined sitting down in his office once again and explaining to him, this time without holding anything back, my relationship with the ghost-boy. What questions would the psychiatrist have asked? What diagnosis would he have given? So far this exercise had not been very fruitful. I could hear the psychiatrist asking the first thing Wheezer would have asked: was I absolutely sure what I saw wasn’t just a trick of the light? Then he might ask me to describe the onset of the fascination, what had triggered it, how long had it been going on? He would end up prescribing medication, “just for a while, to see how it goes.”
At the end of our final session, the psychiatrist in Forsterville had given Mom a prescription for me—“If needed”—but after we left his office she said, “I don’t think we need to cash this in, do you, Marcus?” and she had torn it up and thrown the pieces into a trash can on the sidewalk. “Let’s make a completely fresh start in this place where we’re going,” she had added, with forced courage in her voice.
Unlike Aunt Charlotte, Mom never said it was “up to me” whether or not I wanted to reveal what Wheezer had said to make me fly at him. I had told Mom that Wheezer had said something about the way we lived. And I told her this only after we left Forsterville. I never told the psychiatrist even that much, because I knew he would pass it on to her.
Naturally I never explained to Mom why Wheezer left our apartment. That would have meant admitting I had gone into the tin box and showed the secret photo to someone else. After she came back with the pizza for our lunch, when I told her he had felt an asthma attack coming on and had bicycled home, she had said, “Oh dear, I hope it wasn’t something in our apartment that set it off.”
But right up until the night she died, she would wait for moments when we were close and then tilt her head wistfully and spring it on me afresh: “I wish you’d tell me what he said about how we lived, Marcus. After all, I am your mother. Whatever it was, it might not be as bad as you think.”
Oh yes it was.
***
The Fourth of July came and went, much to the relief of the island’s Turtle Patrol, whose members had set up NO FIREWORKS! zones up and down the entire length of the beach and had taken turns, in twos and threes, guarding the nest sites of the loggerhead babies, due to hatch soon and make their live-or-die dash for the sea. I had made friends with the retiree on the Turtle Patrol. After he became aware of how often I checked the site below Aunt Charlotte’s boardwalk, he gave me his beeper number on a laminated card so I could call him from our cottage, whatever the hour, if I spotted any threat or change in the protected dune. (“I always carry my beeper, when I’m out on the beach or working on my jeep in the garage.”) This was his beloved wartime 1944 Wilys Jeep, with its original camouflage paint, which he drove up and down the beach to check on the nests. He also lent me one of the patrol’s infrared flashlights. Soon we would be in countdown mode, he said, and proceeded to explain ways we would be able to tell when the hatchlings were going to crawl up through the sand and “boil out” of their nest, usually a few hours after sunset. (“Last year we rigged up a microphone and amplifier and installed it next to the site. We’ll do it again this year when we get close to hatching time. You can actually hear the hatchlings as they crawl up through the sand. It’s a rattling sound, like pebbles being thrown against a metal roof. The first time I heard the amplified sound of those little fellows I had to wipe away tears, it was so affecting.”) His name was Ed Bolton, a retired high school science teacher from Columbia. He’d lost his son, a helicopter medic, in the Viet Nam war. After he retired, he and his wife moved full-time to their beach cottage. “It’s one of the real oldies, with the brick footing columns and the tongue-in-groove joints. But we’ve modernized it a lot, of course.”
He knew the story of Grief Cottage, though Hurricane Hazel was long past before he and his family started coming here. He belonged to the faction of locals who wished it had been leveled decades ago. (“It’s one more disaster waiting to happen.”)
I had not gone to Grief Cottage on the Fourth, which fell on a Sunday that year. All day long the beach had been thick with tourists, and I knew from Mr. Bolton that the north tip of the island was a traditional spot for serious firework displays, with preparations starting early in the day. With so many people milling around, I would surely be seen defying the CONDEMNED and KEEP OUT signs as I crawled under the wire fence. I might become the agent of immediate demolition. (“If that boy is crawling under that fence with us watching, isn’t it time we get moving on the safety measures and level that thing to the ground?”) I tried to imagine how the ghost-boy marked such occasions. Did he enjoy watching the spectacle, or did he hide out from the noise in some safe corner?
But here I was crossing a line again. Hadn’t I reached the limits of imagining what he could do without me? By now I had more or less accepted that we worked in tandem: to a great extent he was dependent on my awareness of him. Since ghosts didn’t have living brains, the work must be done by the living person. The living person had to offer his brain as the dwelling place for the ghost. Once again I reminded myself how imperative it was to my mental health to keep the different levels of reality separate.