“I’d much rather enjoy your company.”
“You can enjoy us both. I’ve been around plenty of smokers.” Wheezer’s granny could count for at least twenty smokers. Because of his asthma, she did go outside to smoke, or into the bathroom with the exhaust fan turned on. Wheezer and I used to count how long she could get by without lighting up and she maxed out at forty-two minutes.
“Well, I’ll keep it in mind. As soon as he walked in the door every summer, Billy would start lecturing me about quitting. And now look, he’s jumped the gun on me. I told Roberta I needed to get myself another bad habit so I won’t stick around forever. Enough is enough. Besides, I’m fascinated by death. I don’t know whether there’s an afterlife or not—I’m not a believer in a conventional heaven and hell—but I’m prepared to be surprised. How about you?”
“My mom said the only heaven and hell she believed in were right here on earth. I’m fascinated with death, too.”
“At your age? Oh, forgive me. You lost your mother so recently.”
“Do you ever wonder if, well, the dead have ways to get in contact with the living?”
“Archie has been gone forty-three years and he speaks to me every day. ‘Let me do that,’ he’ll say, though of course he isn’t there to do it anymore. Things I always did wrong, like folding up a grocery bag properly so it would lie flat. And I’ll make the extra effort and do it his way. After Billy bailed out on me last winter, I tried to scold him into appearing. I wanted to see him again. Even though the last few years he’d gotten red from high blood pressure, just like Archie. But Billy was drop-dead gorgeous in his younger years. You know what, Marcus, with your permission I will have a cigarette.”
I watched the tiny woman transform herself into a forties film star as she attended to the glamorous ritual of lighting up.
“The boy you were telling us about—did you ever see him?”
“The boy?”
“The one your husband thought was a bad influence on Billy. Johnny Dace?”
“Oh, I saw him only once, when Archie and I were looking for Billy on the beach. Archie decided they must have gone up to the Barbour cottage to do bad things, and we were debating whether we wanted to walk all the way to the north end or go back and get the car. Then we saw them walking back toward us and when they got closer Archie said, ‘Please don’t tell me that sorry-looking lout is Billy’s wonderful new friend.’ ”
“How was he sorry-looking?”
“Oh, ruffianly and sort of … paltry. After Billy’s great buildup.”
“How did he look?”
“We never saw him close up. When Billy spotted us, he leaned over and said something to him and the boy spun around and headed back north. He was taller than Billy—Billy hadn’t got his full growth yet—but that might have been because Billy was barefoot and the other boy was wearing shoes.”
“What kind of shoes?”
“I couldn’t say.”
“Could they have been boots?”
“They could have been, I suppose. Billy told us his friend always wore his clothes on the beach, and never went in the water. Billy thought maybe he couldn’t swim. Or he might not have owned a bathing suit, was Archie’s opinion.”
“Did he have on a shirt?”
“I think so, but Marcus, this was half a century ago.” She turned away from me to responsibly exhale her smoke toward the ocean. “Lachicotte said you were intrigued by that unfortunate family. I wish I had more to tell you.”
“It just seems wrong they were the only ones lost in that hurricane and they’re never mentioned.”
“Oh, but it was talked about at the time. Billy was quite distressed when we got the news from the Barbours. He kept saying, ‘But he’d promised to come and visit me!’ Archie said he’d never been glad of anyone’s death except Hitler’s but he confessed to being relieved we were spared the boy’s visit.”
The next time I rode my bike to Grief Cottage, I pictured the two friends walking south toward me. Billy Upchurch saying to his friend Johnny Dace when he spotted his parents walking toward them, “Oh, shit, here come my parents.” Or did he say, “There’s my mom and dad! Now I can introduce you!” And Johnny Dace would have said, “Count me out.” Or something more ruffianly. And then spun around on his (shoe? boot?) heel and decamped. It was easier to do it from Johnny Dace’s side. Of course he didn’t want to meet Billy’s parents. He wanted to escape being judged. How did he know they would judge him? Well, ever since he and his own parents had arrived to be charity occupants of the Barbour cottage, they must have felt some of the ways people like the Upchurches conveyed their judgments on people like them. I myself was more of a Dace set down in the midst of Upchurches than otherwise. I simply had more camouflage: my great-aunt was a respected local artist and had given herself the surname of the general of the Confederate army, and I had entered this island community with Lachicotte’s seal of approval.
Recent events concerning the figure in the cottage had changed my perceptions. He was now two beings. There was the ghost-boy, the presence that I had sensed behind me on my first visit to Grief Cottage and that I had seen twice since, standing full-length in the doorway. And there was Johnny Dace, short-lived friend (and bad influence?) to Billy Upchurch. And the Johnny Dace who came to the beach with his parents and without a bathing suit.
After my last encounter with him, I altered my routine at Grief Cottage. I still crawled beneath the wire fence with all the warning signs and climbed the rickety stairs to the slanting porch. But I now sat facing the door, my back against one of the upright beams that propped up the roof. My old way of sitting with my back to the door had been so he could observe me without feeling threatened. But now I was the one who felt threatened. Better to face the door than to suddenly feel the grip of an unseen hand from behind.