How dense people are when they reassure you it was “only” a dream. Never in my waking life had I felt such wretchedness as when my refreshed, excited mother, surrounded by the security provided by another, informed me she had a better son sleeping in his own room. In the dream I experienced the castoff’s full horror of realizing he has been supplanted and is no longer the main object of someone’s love. And then the frantic disbelief (“It’s not true, it’s not final, I can still win her back!”) followed by an agony of hopelessness and the wish to die.
That night last September in Jewel when Mom arrived home triumphant over the life insurance policy she had just bought in honor of my eleventh birthday (“It’s twenty-four dollars a month, but now I know you’ll be okay whatever happens”), what was my unsporting reply? “Too bad kids can’t take out life insurance. If I died first, you could stop cleaning bathrooms.”
And then in the winter—which was to be our last together—when she was working day shift at the new Waffle House near the interstate and cleaning the County Housing Authority offices at night, she had prophesied with her forced cheer: “Things are going to get better from now on, Marcus, I feel it.” And what was my smartass comeback? “That must mean we’ve finally hit bottom and there’s nowhere to go but up.”
Our first year in Jewel while Mom still had her nice job oiling and lacquering furniture at Mountaintop Joinery before it closed, she came home one night in a kind of ecstasy. “Oh, Marcus, I wish you could have heard the song they just played on the radio. I was so moved I had to stay in the car till it was over. Do you remember Captain Kirk?” (How could I not remember Captain Kirk? Wheezer had made me a present of the entire set of the original Star Trek. He had got it on eBay for VCRs because that was all Mom and I had.) “Well, he’s made a new album under his own name, William Shatner. It’s called Has Been, and there’s this heart-stopping song called ‘It Hasn’t Happened Yet.’ I got chills all over, because he was expressing exactly what I was feeling. It Hasn’t Happened Yet! He speaks the song in his rumbly Captain Kirk voice against this background of haunting music.” Deepening her own voice, she chanted snatches from the song: dreaming of success … I would be the best … what I might have done … falling, falling … I’m scared again.
“Isn’t it wonderful what art can do, Marcus? It was so sad, I saw my life in every line, but at the same time it made me feel part of the human family—it made me feel so alive.”
Later, as things got progressively worse in Jewel, I would resort to those phrases as a teasing form of recrimination. Every time Mom came home and broke the news of another “downsizing” in our lives I would deepen my voice to a Captain Kirk rumble and chant: falling, falling … I’m scared again. Or: It hasn’t happened yet. She always laughed, but I could tell it hurt her.
Pedaling faster to get ahead of the rising midmorning tide, I was already talking to the ghost-boy, filling him in on everything that had happened since the last time I was there. (“No wonder she had to go and find herself a better son. Here’s what worries me, though. What if—however bad a son I was—I loved her as much as I am ever capable of loving anyone? Did you ever feel like this? Did you love any special person when you were alive? Did you ever worry that you weren’t capable of loving enough? But it’s all over for you. Your life is a complete thing. I envy that. Is it worth it to go on living, knowing I let my mom down and dreading the new school and worrying how long it will be until Aunt Charlotte tires of my company and gets rid of me? Why not save her the guilt she’d feel after she kicked me out? And, I mean, what’s the point of ‘climbing the ladder’ when you know you’ll never fit in with the already-haves at the top? Did you think things like this when you were alive?”)
A temptation presented itself. Then it morphed into a dare and then into a compulsion, something I knew I had no choice about doing. Today would be the perfect day for me to go up on the porch of Grief Cottage and sit down facing the door.
If you have reached the point of wishing your life was completed but knowing you haven’t got the guts to complete it yourself, wouldn’t the next-best thing be to seek out something that might do the job for you? Today I would face the door of the cottage and stay facing it, inviting annihilation. Surely I wouldn’t be the first person to die from fright.
But my plan was aborted when I rounded the last curve of beach and saw the group gathered around Grief Cottage. Charlie Coggins, the realtor, was with two men wearing some kind of summery uniform with shorts. Coggins’s weird-looking amphibious vehicle that Lachicotte had helped him assemble was parked next to a white truck bearing an insignia. The men in shorts were looking through instruments on top of tripods, while Mr. Coggins hovered near them. I could either conceal myself behind some dunes and wait them out, or go home before high tide forced me to return by the road. The mood was all wrong now. It would be better to come back tomorrow at my early hour and have the place to myself.
Ed Bolton’s jeep with its wartime camouflage was parked in front of our dunes when I got back to Aunt Charlotte’s house, and there he was in his squashed sun hat crouched reverentially beside our loggerhead site.
“Just checking,” he said, knees cracking as he rose to greet me. “All that rain we had yesterday could make a difference to our countdown. Where are you coming from?”
I told him I liked to ride to the north end of the island every morning to sort out my thoughts. “But I got a late start today, and people were already poking around Grief Cottage. There was this realtor I know, Mr. Coggins, and two other men with tripods, measuring things. They were wearing some kind of uniform with shorts and they had instruments on tripods.”
“Dark shorts, gray shirts, and blue caps?”
“How did you know?”
“Army Corps of Engineers. Coggins knows he’s never going to get rid of that real estate until the erosion experts have weighed in.”
“But there was a man from Chicago who seemed interested.”
“He pulled out. Nobody wants to start building a beachside inn and have it falling into the ocean before it’s finished.”
“How do you know all these things?”
“Everybody knows everybody’s business here. Our cottage is only four doors south of Grief Cottage, so naturally we keep our antennae on the alert. What’s probably going to happen, the Army Corps will do their deformation survey and recommend we invest in geotube bladders. They’re expensive as hell, so all us owners at the north end will have to vote on it in a referendum. Coggins will be stuck with those lots unless someone’s foolish enough to buy with no guarantee of future shoreline protection.”