On the table that served as my desk were Mom’s GED test books, which I had been studying, and the island histories authored by two local ladies who remembered the days when turtle eggs were gathered for fun breakfasts. The bookshelf, which Aunt Charlotte proudly admitted she had carpentered herself, along with the ones in her studio, was too long without a middle support and sagged in the middle. So far I had refrained from displaying any of my possessions above the top shelf, but the Gaston & Sons Lumber truck was the first thing I judged worthy. It was part of my heritage and also it diverted attention from the sag.
I felt conflicted about the black bear in the hoodie; my first impulse was to toss it. Eleven was too old to be holding on to a toy bear, though it wasn’t so long ago when I insisted on having him. I was not at my best that day and it hurt to remember it now. Mom and I had been in the new Walmart in Jewel, buying my school supplies. When you were on a budget like ours, you calculated the difference between a $1.99 and a $2.39 box of pencils, and decided that it would be foolish to pay forty cents more just because Batman was on that box. I was accustomed to reading my mother’s face and I knew how almost every shopping trip turned into an ordeal for her because she was one of those accursed “crossovers” in society who knew what the best was but couldn’t afford it herself. Sometimes she would let resentment get the upper hand and point out to me someone “trash-shopping” in the stores we shopped in by necessity. (“Look at her, she just snatches up something without looking at the price and drops it in her basket.”) On that day when I was not at my best, we were already in line at a checkout counter when I noticed a bin full of black bears in hoodies. They had probably been placed there strategically for people like me who were following a parent through the checkout line. I plucked one off the top of the pile and fell in love. He was so soft. He smelled so new. “Isn’t he adorable?” I demanded. Mom looked at me rubbing him against my cheek. After scarcely a beat she asked: “Would … you like it?”
For now, in honor of my mother, the bear got to ride in the truck. Grandma alias fault-finding sister Brenda went facedown into a lower bureau drawer, not the upper drawer that held Mom’s tin box with the only photo of my real dad and other cherished items: snapshots we had taken of each other with those throwaway cameras, Mom’s supervisor’s badge from Forster’s Furniture, old Mr. Forster’s To Whom It May Concern letter, which got Mom her nice first job in Jewel. It was a letter of high praise and must have cost the old man some moments of soul-searching, considering that he wrote it while his grandson was still in recovery from her son’s brutal beating.
The two Marcus Aurelius volumes joined the other books on my desk. In the scholarly bilingual hardback, whoever had handwritten their own translation between the lines stopped halfway through the book. Midway down a page of Greek, the penciled interlinear translation broke off at the end of a paragraph.
The same paragraph on the English side of the page completely balked you with its antiquarian twists and turns:
What then there can be amid such murk and nastiness, and in so ceaseless an ebbing of substance and of time, of movement and things moved, that deserves to be greatly valued or to excite our ambition in the least, I cannot even conceive.
The unknown person’s penciled translation was simple and clear.
In all this murk and mire, then, in all this ceaseless flow of being and time, of changes imposed and changes endured, I can think of nothing that is worth prizing highly or pursuing seriously.
XXIX.
Before Aunt Charlotte’s accident, I told her I would learn to use her digital camera and take new pictures of Grief Cottage. The plan had been to bring her up to date on its dereliction so she could incorporate it into her future paintings—if she chose to. How my new photos would affect her new paintings I hadn’t been sure. Either she would be inspired by more ruination (“How sad! Do you think I can capture this added sadness in pigment?”), or she would be turned off by it (“No, this has gone too far, Marcus. If I painted it like this it would be a Halloween cartoon”).
After she came home with her casts, I decided to put off even the mention of it. It would be cruel to hand over a bunch of new photos—assuming they turned out well—to send her rushing off to her studio to see if inspiration struck when she was no longer able to control a brush.
The other reason I had decided against taking the photos concerned the ghost-boy. It might set back our relationship. I had to base my behavior on how I would follow my instincts with living people, and I thought he might feel threatened if he saw me outside, clicking away at the cottage that had sheltered him for fifty years. Was I trying to take something from him? I had heard of those tribes who wouldn’t let you take pictures of them because you would steal their souls.
Anyway, that was how I had reasoned up until now. Since I had failed to measure up to our last confrontation, my old precautions no longer applied. His spirit still remained inside the cottage, but he had turned away. Maybe he heard me, maybe not. Perhaps he had removed himself to the collapsing upper floor, where the roof had caved in to make him skylights. He could see and hear the birds without hearing me. The worst had happened to him a long time ago and some part of him had endured. This part had managed to exist without friends and without hope. And then I had weaseled into his space and offered false hope. All the ghost-boy desired now was to get outside the range of any more overtures from the coward-boy and be at peace with what he’d had before.
After making room for the things I had chosen to keep out of the latest box, I revisited my mom’s memorials in the tin box. The tin box had been with me since she died—except while I was in the foster home. During that interim, I entrusted it to William, my ad litem. I didn’t want the curious foster mom or some nosy child to be rifling through its contents—or stealing something—while I was at school.
First I studied for the umpteenth time the photo of the man Mom said was my dad. I took it into the bathroom to compare my face with his in Aunt Charlotte’s only mirror. Did the picture, which Aunt Charlotte said had been cut from a school yearbook, reveal any more secrets since I had last studied it? It did appear we shared the same arched (“quizzical”) eyebrows and wide-apart eyes, but that might just seem so because Aunt Charlotte had suggested it. The man’s face looked too mature for a high school yearbook, so it must have been college. Compared to his, my face looked undeveloped and embarrassingly open. His face above the coat and tie was still the face of a young man but it had shut down in some way. Aunt Charlotte had said my mouth was like his when I was annoyed, but it was hard to “look annoyed” on demand in the mirror. My mouth was fuller than his and slightly puckered, like someone expecting a kiss. His lips were set in a thin derisive curl as if serving notice to the photographer that this was a crappy waste of time.