Since I had flunked the test of standing my ground when he appeared to me, he may have, in his ghostly manner, established new rules for my appearances. Rule one: No more “showings” to the visitor. I had become the “nervous animal.” We had reversed roles. Now he needed to ration his presence so as not to scare me off.
I continued to talk to him, however. I believed it still offered the best chance of maintaining the frequencies between us—if any remained. As before, I opened with the “safe” natural subjects: the ocean and the surroundings we shared, the current phase of the moon, the progress of the loggerhead embryos (“Ed Bolton, the retired science teacher, predicts they’ll hatch the middle of next week …”). Then I filled him in on my recent routines (“My aunt had to go back and have a metal pin put in her wrist … Now she’s started some secret project. I’m not allowed to enter her studio …”). Then I thought it worth a try to suddenly drop in my visits to Coral Upchurch. (“You never met her, but she’s the mother of Billy Upchurch, the boy you made friends with when your family was staying in the beach cottage before the hurricane? Do you remember Billy Upchurch? Now I have to tell you something sad. Billy died this past winter. He was sixty-five. He was having the batteries changed on his pacemaker, that’s a device invented after your time, they plant it in your chest and it regulates your heartbeat…”)
I did feel some kind of agitation in the air between me and the empty doorway. What had set the agitation going? Was it sympathy for Billy or revolt at the mention of Billy’s name, or was it exasperation with the tiresome boy on the rotting porch cluttering up the silence with “trues”?
XXVII.
Aunt Charlotte and I were having our one meal of the day together. “His mother told me Billy Upchurch was drop-dead gorgeous. Did you ever see him?”
“Of course I saw him. That first summer when I was fixing up this place he was over here every day of his visit. He was enthralled by all the construction going on. He couldn’t stop gabbing with the hunky young men doing the work. He was certainly good-looking. He was very attentive to me, too, though I knew he didn’t swing that way and he knew I knew.”
“Did his mother know, do you think?”
“I would guess like a good Southern lady she saw only the parts of him she wished to see.”
“She wasn’t in a wheelchair then, was she?”
“Oh, no. She was all over the place. Then about ten years ago she was going to fly up to D.C. to visit Billy and when she got to the airport she just crumpled and had to be carried out. Her spine had disintegrated. Lachicotte says she can still put herself to bed and doesn’t need to be helped onto the toilet. You really are a good egg, Marcus, not only shopping for them but sitting with her every afternoon.”
“She’s one of the most fascinating people I’ve ever met.”
“Have you known many old people?”
“I forget she’s old. We talk about interesting things—she’s doing archaeology on herself to get beyond her name and the way people see her. She won’t let you call her Mrs. Upchurch and now she’s working on getting beyond the ‘Coral.’ ”
“You’re making me feel I’ve missed something.”
“I haven’t known many old people. Before I met Coral, my image of an old person was our landlady’s mother. Her name was Mrs. Harm. That really was her name. And her daughter, who was our landlady from hell, her name was Mrs. Wicket. Mom and I called them Wicked and Harm.”
“Why was she a landlady from hell?”
“You really want to hear?”
“Wicked and Harm—who could resist?”
“Well, when we moved into this upstairs apartment on Smoke Vine Road—this was in Jewel, the place we lived before I came here—Mrs. Wicket made this deal with Mom. She would take fifty dollars off our rent every month if I would stay downstairs with her mother on weekday afternoons after school. This gave Mrs. Wicket some time to herself and saved her from having to pay for someone to be with Mrs. Harm until six-thirty, when the next home help came. Old Mrs. Harm wasn’t much trouble. She just lay in her bedroom with her oxygen tank and her TV. And she had on a diaper in case—you know. I got used to doing my homework to the sound of TV. It was one of those channels that played the same watered-down music, on and on. I had to go in regularly and check to see that she hadn’t yanked her oxygen tubes out of her nose, and I had these numbers to call if there was an emergency. I’m not sure she knew I was a different person from Mrs. Wicket. Lots of times, the home help evening shift was late and I was supposed to stay until she came. So sometimes Mom and I didn’t eat supper until eight or even later.”
“That is taking advantage.”
“Well, there’s more. Mrs. Wicket’s niece came to visit and Mrs. Wicket told Mom I had earned a little holiday and that her niece would sit with Mrs. Harm in the afternoons. But when we got our next rent bill, it was thirty dollars more. The niece had only stayed four days, but Mom said there was no use wasting time doing the math. It was ungenerous of Mrs. Wicket, Mom said, but she was our landlady and we didn’t have a lease. But even when I was back on the job next month’s bill was still thirty dollars more. Mom went down to speak to Mrs. Wicket and when she came back she was really upset. The landlady told her the cost of living had gone up and she couldn’t spare that thirty dollars anymore. Mom said then maybe she didn’t need me anymore, but Mrs. Wicket said, ‘If Marcus stops coming I’m afraid I’ll have to raise the rent.’ ”
“This makes me so mad I want to explode.”
“It all worked out eventually.”
“How?”
“Mrs. Harm died and I lost my job, and then we only had to pay the increased rent until Mom was killed. You might say fate worked it out for us. Mrs. Wicket came out of it well because she had some kind of limited income insurance which reimbursed her for the month we hadn’t paid and until she found new tenants. My guardian ad litem told me she tried to get the state to reimburse her as well.”