“Oh, I knew that.”
“It was kind of you to offer to shop for them every day.”
“No problem. They eat mostly deli, like Aunt Charlotte and me, and this way Roberta won’t have to take the van out of the garage and interrupt her art.”
Lachicotte laughed. “That basket sure was a fright.”
“Just because people are rich doesn’t mean they have taste.” A direct quote from my mom.
Lachicotte paused beside Aunt Charlotte’s Mercedes, which he’d been driving since he sold the Bentley. “How is she doing?”
“She has some kind of project going in her studio.”
“Oh? What kind?”
“It’s secret. I’m not allowed to go in there. I think it involves paint but I can’t be sure because I can’t smell anything through the door. I always used to be able to smell the oils. She spends hours and hours in there every day.”
“How is the—?”
“Festering?”
“You read my mind.”
“Pretty much the same. It’s a bad time for her, she says.”
“Well, when we go back to the surgeon in Charleston, I’m hoping we’ll hear encouraging news that will make her feel better. Is she having pain?”
“Not that I know of. She made me hide her painkillers and there’s still a fair number in the container.”
“Well, we may just make it through the summer. If we do, it will be largely thanks to you, Marcus.”
“Won’t you come in?”
“Thank you, no. I’ve got things to do, and we’ve already said hello. One hello is usually enough for your aunt.”
***
“Tell me all,” Aunt Charlotte said at supper. “I hope it wasn’t too boring for you.”
“Oh no, I enjoyed it. I liked Roberta, too. She was making an ugly misshapen basket for some people who wanted it extra large. She wishes she could send word that she died so she won’t have to finish it.”
This amused Aunt Charlotte. She was enjoying Lachicotte’s steak pie—heated according to his directions—and putting away her usual amounts of wine. She was in a mellow, receptive mood.
“So, what did ‘you all’ talk about?”
“Her son Billy died last winter.”
“Really? What of?”
“He had a heart attack at the hospital. He was having his pacemaker batteries replaced.”
“Is she devastated?”
“Roberta said it was more like she was angry. She was supposed to go first. She told Lachicotte that her son had broken ahead of her in line. She was in a pretty good mood. Though toward the end Lachicotte noticed she was dying to have a cigarette.”
“Depend on Lachicotte to notice something like that.”
“She said she’d never known a Marcus before. She asked what I did to amuse myself on the island.”
“And what did you tell her?”
“About the Turtle Patrol. And riding my bike.”
“That doesn’t sound like much. I wonder how you’ll look back on this period of your life, Marcus, how you’ll describe it to someone in the future. ‘When I was eleven, my mother died and I went to live with my peculiar great-aunt on an island.’ ”
“I don’t think of you as peculiar.”
“Naturally you have to say that. I’ve tried to isolate my peculiarities. Being solitary has been a great advantage. At least I don’t force my peculiarities on others. I hope I don’t.”
There was no good reply to this. If I said “You don’t,” that would be admitting she had peculiarities. So I just said I liked living here on the island. I stopped myself from adding that I hoped I didn’t intrude on her solitude too much. That would sound like I was fishing for her to say I didn’t, and then to repeat her usual praise about how helpful and thoughtful and astute I was.
As I was tinkering with these moral mathematics, I realized that I was not going to tell her what Coral Upchurch had said about the boy. He had a name now and some character traits (mostly negative ones, except for the walking on the beach). I wanted to keep him to myself until I had time to think about him some more. Ever since I could remember, I had kept a little private zone where I could work out important things for myself.
I had certainly not told Mom everything—a lot of it would have hurt her. In my mandated sessions with the psychiatrist I stuck to safe answers. With Wheezer, up until our rupture, I had left out significant “trues” in my history, allowing him to create his own pictures of how I lived in idealized poverty with my courageous single mom.
But I did tell Aunt Charlotte that I had offered to shop for Coral Upchurch and Roberta every day. “That way Roberta won’t have to get the car out of the garage and interrupt her work. They eat mostly deli, like us.”
“Sometimes I think you are too good to be true, Marcus.”
“I’m not all that good.”
I had known as I made my shopping offer that it would link me to their lives on an everyday basis. Coral Upchurch wasn’t ready to receive company until early afternoon, but she said she wished I would be her daily visitor. I looked forward to sitting across from her and asking casual questions. And she would send her mental librarian off to the stacks and he would come back with more just-remembered facts about Johnny Dace.
“Actually, I selfishly hope you will turn out to be good from the bottom up,” said Aunt Charlotte. “It might restore some of my faith in human beings.”
XXV.
The dune beside Aunt Charlotte’s boardwalk steps had become my meditation post and checkpoint for sanity. Here I could sit in the evenings above the clutch buried below the sand where 110 turtle embryos squirmed in their shells and know that, despite whatever weirdnesses I had undergone through the day, I was also part of the real day that was now ending. And this day linked me to the real days of the ancient world, when the turtles were already old news, and to a future world when I would be dead, when the whole human race might be dead, but these turtles might still be doing exactly what they had always done without any help from my extinguished species.