I had carried Lachicotte’s card in my saddlebag ever since the day he gave it to me. Once I came close to using it, but then decided it would be disloyal to call him from the pay phone outside the market to tattle about Aunt Charlotte’s “fermenting.”
I called his work number first and a pleasant woman answered. “Vintage Motors, how can I help you?”
“Is Mr. Hayes there?”
“He’s out at the moment. Would you like his mobile number?”
“I have it on his card. Thank you.”
“Would you like to leave any message?”
“No, thank you. I’ll try the mobile.”
“Hello,” said Lachicotte’s recorded voice. “You’ve reached my voice mail. Please leave your (yoah) number (numbah) and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.”
I was still trying out phrases that could convey my message discreetly when I was cut off.
What would I have said? “This is Marcus. I need some advice. Aunt Charlotte is—Aunt Charlotte is—”
“You’re off the hook for now, but I’m still here,” conceded the gremlin. He was behind me but, unlike with the ghost-boy, I knew how he looked. The reptilian skin, the pitcher ears, the grinning saw-teeth. Wheezer and I had spent hours expanding gremlin traits beyond the simpleminded possibilities offered by movies. “Don’t you feel,” Wheezer said, “that there must be an advanced model of mogwai more imaginative and intelligent than Gizmo and, to balance things out, a much scarier and evil model than Stripe?” “Why does there always have to be a balance between good and evil?” I asked. “Because those are the rules,” said Wheezer. “I didn’t make them. There always has to be a baddie to balance out the goodie. And if you have a more complex and interesting goodie, you need to make an equally complex and interesting baddie.”
As I approached the market entrance, I saw a fit, sun-browned boy about my age loping toward the door. He wore a helmet like mine. With a jolt I realized he was my reflection in the glass door. When had this happened? When Charlie Coggins said it was probably safe for me to precede him up Grief Cottage’s hazardous staircase, I had wondered how he could call me “a light fellow.” But he had been right. Someone called Pudge had been nowhere near that staircase.
“Do you want duplicates?” asked the man when I handed over the disposable cameras.
“Will it cost more?”
“A dollar more a roll.”
“I’ll just have the singles then.”
I should have asked for the duplicates, I thought, biking home. Then I could have mailed any good ones to Charlie Coggins as a thank-you. But I was still living in two worlds and perhaps always would be. The world in which you forfeited having Batman on your pencil case to save forty cents, and the world in which you could afford to pay two dollars for extra copies of pictures because of a dead mother’s trust.
XXXII.
“But don’t go trying to use the same route twice. Indeed, don’t try to get there at all. It’ll happen when you’re not looking for it. And don’t talk too much about it, even among yourselves. And don’t mention it to anyone else unless you find that they’ve had adventures of the same sort themselves…”
How could I have forgotten the Professor? There he had been, lying at the bottom of one of my boxes all this time, with his sage advice about commuting between reality and the supernatural and the importance of keeping it to yourself.
I had unpacked the final box from my old life this afternoon after putting away the groceries, checking the turtles’ thermocouple (no change), doing the laundry, including my aunt’s sheets and pillowcases, and tidying the bathroom. Inside the last box were the usual candidates for the black trash bag: first aid stuff, including our eye cup, some outdated medications, Mom’s Ace bandages she sometimes wore at night for her varicose veins, and the little bottle of arnica the dentist had given her to rub into her gums after a tooth extraction. Clothes I was already outgrowing last summer had been folded and stacked carefully, as though the boy who unpacked this box would be the exact same size as last year. And there on the bottom, wedged beside a pair of sneakers (also getting tight last summer) was my boxed Narnia set, which cheered and saddened me at the same time. We had devoured these books, my mom and I, reading them over and over again, aloud to each other and by ourselves, discussing the characters, and figuring out the meanings.
I was sprawled in the hammock with all the books in my lap, thumbing through them at random, letting the illustrations recall the stories, when footsteps approached up the rarely-used outdoor stairs to our porch. It was Lachicotte Hayes, carrying a paper sack in the crook of his arm. “I brought y’all some tomatoes. I used the rear entrance so I wouldn’t have to knock and disturb anybody.”
“She’s in her studio. I haven’t seen her since I got back from the market.”
“It was you I was hoping to find. Oh, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. I read that to my niece when she was young. I don’t know which of us enjoyed it the most.”
“The niece I met at the library.”
“Yes, Althea. We were out condo-shopping for her when you called.”
“You knew it was me?”
“My receptionist said a young man phoned but didn’t need the mobile number because he had it on my card. Then when I checked my voice mail, there was a silence until the cutoff.”
“I couldn’t think of an appropriate message to leave.”
Lachicotte transferred the sack of tomatoes to the stool Aunt Charlotte used to prop up her broken ankle. “Do you fancy a walk on the beach? My father used to say if you went a whole summer without getting your toes in the ocean you were either too busy for your own good or getting too old for your own good. And here is July half over.”
Lachicotte sat down on the lowest step of the boardwalk, rolled up his pants cuffs, removed his shoes and socks, tucking a sock into each shoe, and placed them neatly beneath the step. I did likewise: I hadn’t been barefoot on the beach since I’d got my bike. It occurred to me as I placed my sneakers next to his docksiders that a passing stranger observing these side-by-side shoes might assume that some father and son were taking a walk on the beach.
The tide was ebbing, leaving a generous expanse of glassy surf where you could walk and still make contact with the incoming wavelets that broke over your feet.
“Are you liking it here, Marcus?”
I was glad he kept walking straight ahead and not looking at me.
“I like it, but it still feels weird to realize my mom is dead. I’m not sure I can explain it, but often it seems like she’s more alive than ever. I think about her more than ever and I keep seeing new sides of her.”