“What are geotube bladders?”
“They’re like great big culverts made of special textiles and buried beneath the high tide line. They’re filled with a sand-and-water mixture and can usually block immense waves caused by hurricanes. Note I said usually, not always.”
“How will the rain change our countdown?”
“It will have cooled the sand. The embryos prefer warmth at this stage of the game. That’s why we always detect a rapid rise in temperature with our little thermocouple gizmos when hatching time is imminent. Yesterday’s rain may set it back a few days. What’s the matter? You look troubled.”
“I just wish I knew more about how things worked in the world. The way you do.”
“Give yourself a break, son. If you keep on asking questions at your present rate, you’ll be a downright sage before you reach thirty.”
XXII.
Cleanup was in full force at the house next door. A team of guys shaped hedges, whacked weeds, mowed and raked the sparse patches of grass on the sandy lawn, hosed down stairs and walkways. One was down on his knees, hand-clipping the overgrown path that led to the beach. Another was planting a last-minute border of hardy annuals. From inside the house came the high-pitched whine of several vacuums going at once.
“That’s the life, isn’t it, Marcus? You’re ninety-five in a wheelchair and won’t be going anywhere near the beach but you maintain a full retinue to prink up your paths and grounds and boardwalk so everything will look the same as it did seventy-five years ago.”
“Seventy-five years ago?”
“She came to her husband’s ancestral beach cottage as a bride of twenty. Ninety-five minus twenty is seventy-five. Lachicotte can furnish you with all the specifics, they’re buddies. Could you phone him and tell him she’s on her way? He’ll want to bake her a pie.”
“An oyster pie?”
“No, she hates oysters. Steak and kidney, probably, without the kidneys.”
“Will she be coming today?”
“Tomorrow. Her retinue precedes her. As soon as she arrives, she sends her caregiver over with a calling card to let us know she’s receiving visitors. The card used to be on a silver salver but now it arrives on a sweet-grass tray made by Roberta Dumas, the current caregiver.”
“Will you visit her?”
“She knows my ways. She understands. She respects artists. Roberta herself comes from a dynasty of basket weavers who have examples of their work in the Smithsonian. Where have you been? Let me guess.”
“Mr. Coggins was up there with the Army Corps of Engineers.”
“What were they doing?”
“I didn’t talk to them. But Mr. Bolton from the Turtle Patrol says they’re measuring erosion around the cottage. I met him down by the egg clutch.”
“How are our little friends?”
“He says yesterday’s rain may delay their hatching.”
“I’ve been on this island for twenty-five years and never seen a hatching. What’s the term they use? ‘Boil up’?”
“Want me to knock on your door?”
“Well … why not?”
“Even if it’s late?”
“Sure. If I’m feeling up to it, maybe I’ll hop down and see it for myself. After all, they have incubated under our boardwalk.”
I called Lachicotte, who sounded glad to hear from us. “I’d call more often, but I don’t want to be a bother (bah-thah).” We made plans to go over to Mrs. Upchurch’s early the next afternoon. “You’ll appreciate her. She’s quite the raconteur. Will you tell your aunt I have taken the liberty of tuning up her Mercedes and replacing the tires? It’s my little thank-you for the extended loan.”
After supper with Aunt Charlotte, I walked down to the surf and stood on the shiny wet surface mirroring the same orange light of her big Sunset Calm painting that now hung in the library—and had once been taped as a postcard on Mom’s refrigerator. I was thinking how awful it must be to have painting taken away from you. It could happen in all sorts of ways. You could hurt your painting arm, or some fascist regime could come in and forbid you to paint. At supper Aunt Charlotte had been telling me about this German painter, Emil Nolde, who was forbidden by the Nazis to paint anymore when he was seventy years old and at his peak. For the duration of World War II, he painted small secret watercolors on Japan paper, which he hid in his house.
“What is Japan paper?”
“Well, it’s not necessarily made in Japan anymore, but it’s a high quality paper made from bark fibers rather than wood pulp. It’s tougher. If you have to paint with water like poor Nolde, you can build up layers, like in oil. He wrote notes to the secret paintings.”
“What kind of notes?”
“Things like ‘Only to you, my little sheets.’ That’s the one I like best.”
He couldn’t paint in oils because he couldn’t be seen buying any, and also if they raided his house they would detect the smell. During this period of artistic oppression, he abandoned the landscapes that had made him famous and made little watercolors of dreamlike figures and faces on his Japan paper. He called them his “unpainted pictures,” and Aunt Charlotte turned on her laptop while we were still eating and showed me the vividly-colored little paintings of surreal or grotesque people, some in lewd and threatening poses, that seemed to have come straight out of his dark regions. I told Aunt Charlotte they made me think of the fiends and fantasies a person had inside of him that maybe he didn’t even know he had. “That’s very astute, Marcus,” she said, sipping her wine. Her face bunched up as it tended to do when she was trying to figure something out. Having impressed her by saying this, I was about to ask how her secret project was coming, but decided to stop while I was ahead. Soon after, she asked me to uncork another bottle and hopped off with it to her studio.
Making patterns in the wet sand with my sneaker, I recalled my extravagant despair of this morning when I had hoped to be scared to death by the ghost-boy. How could a person’s moods change so many times in a day? Was it my age, or was it going to be like this from now on? What if a person decided to kill himself in the morning and then woke up dead and realized he had made a huge mistake? Now here I was, the same person in the same body, the same clothes, even, standing in the placid orange light of Aunt Charlotte’s Sunset Calm and feeling excited about those little turtle embryos under the sand who, if they survived all the intermittent dangers, had eighty to a hundred or more years to go before they could die an old turtle’s death and become part of loggerhead ancestral history. Soon they would be bursting out of their shells, flattening out into proper turtle shapes, clambering on top of one another to “boil up” for their dash to the sea—which we would be part of.