For some reason this led to thoughts of William, my ad litem friend, and of our final Vulcan salute to each other at the airport. I wondered what kind of minors he was guarding now and if he ever missed me.
How lucky I was to be assigned to a person who would understand that I needed to see my mother’s body before it was embalmed so I could truly accept that she was dead. We drove to the hospital in his truck. He had arranged everything with the head of ER, who took us down in the elevator to the hospital morgue. The ER person unzipped the black body bag on the gurney. There she was. It was her and not her. I had been told what to expect. The bone and cartilage of her nose was exposed where it had hit the steering wheel—our Honda was from the pre-air-bag era. Her eyes were open, but the life had drained out of them. The blue irises were now a lusterless yellow-green. Her mouth was ajar, exposing the tooth gaps she was so self-conscious about. She had hennaed her hair recently; it was at its glossiest mahogany-brown. (“At least I didn’t die with my roots showing.” I heard her exact living voice with its equal mix of self-put-down and resolute humor.)
William and I had gone over burial plans during our drive to the hospital. As an adolescent Mom had read a novel by a famous occultist who had warned against cremation, the reason being that you had to stay in one piece so you could be brought up whole out of your grave. “You might need your bones,” Mom said. “It may be superstition, but you find it all the way back in the Book of Ezekiel, so I’d rather not take chances.” When we still lived in Forsterville, Mom and I often talked about death and where we would like to be buried. We took walks in a beautiful little cemetery a short way out of town. “If we’re still here when I die,” Mom said, “I’d like to be buried in this place.” But after we moved to Jewel, we stopped romanticizing about graves and cemeteries because we weren’t sure how long we’d be staying in Jewel, especially after Mountaintop Joinery closed down and Mom lost her good job.
William took me to the little country cemetery where most of his family had their graves. It was on a hill overlooking mountain ranges stretching as far into the distance as you could see. When the life insurance trust was set up, he said, you’ll be able to buy a nice stone with her name and dates. “So wherever you go, Marcus, you’ll know you can always come back and find her in the same place.”
XXIII.
With the approach of bedtime came the start of a bad feeling. Usually I looked forward to shutting the door to my room, Aunt Charlotte’s former room, knowing that nothing more would be required of me until the next day. For at least eight hours I didn’t have to be astute or useful or empathetic. I could just fall back on my pillows with childish irresponsibility until I fell asleep.
But this was a new fear that kept me from wanting to fall asleep. It was stronger than my top supernatural fear (could I survive an extended face-off with the ghost-boy without going crazy?) and it was stronger than my top realistic fear (could I survive being sent away by Aunt Charlotte and starting over in another foster home?)
The new fear was that tonight, as soon as I fell asleep, I would dream a continuation of last night’s dream. I would be standing in the open doorway of my mom’s beautiful apartment and she would have just told me about my wonderful half brother in his own room, and then I would look beyond her and see a door in the rear of the apartment slowly opening. I did not believe I could endure seeing him face-to-face.
To put off going to bed, I made two after-dark trips to the beach. On the first trip, I paced around the dune protecting our egg clutch. I got down on all fours and sniffed. No fresh earthy smell. I shone my infra-red flashlight on the thermocouple stuck in the sand: no rise in temperature. On the second trip, I sat down cross-legged on the dune and talked to them in the same spirit that Mom would talk to me at night when she was not too tired. She told stories about when I was an infant. (“We used to look into each other’s faces. I never tired of looking at you and seeing you look back. You were so new, you didn’t have words yet, but I could see your thoughts and moods play across your face.”) Or she made up stories about our future prospects, how we were going to prevail.
So I spoke to the turtle embryos about their present secure state of egginess and about their future great voyage. (“It’s been programmed into you, so don’t worry, your ancestors have been doing it for over a hundred million years. You’ll just get out of your egg—rip the shell with your ‘egg tooth,’ which is that hard little projection on top of your snout—and take care not to get exhausted as you’re climbing up because you’ll need all your energies for later. It will only be about a twenty-inch climb, and you’ll have all your brothers and sisters to step on, as they will step on you in turn, and the whole pile of you will rise like a slow elevator, an elevator made out of yourselves, and then you’ll pop your heads through the sand, and we will have scooped out a path through the sand to the ocean. Just follow the path and don’t get diverted and crawl up the sides—but if you do, a human hand will be right there to gently guide you back into the groove. It will take you about fifteen minutes to crawl from nest to water, moving at about ten feet a minute. We will escort you the whole way to the water to guard you from the ghost crabs. The reason we can’t pick you up and carry you is because you need to do the walk yourselves so you can smell the sand and remember your way back to this beach when you’re grown up.”)