“Be good, Marcus. Not that I need to tell you that. We should be back by late afternoon.”
It smelled so good because she had remembered her car smelling of vomited-up shrimp. They would probably have an early lunch in some nice restaurant. Maybe there would be a shrimp dish on the menu and Aunt Charlotte would say it reminded her of the day I arrived and reveal some specifics, charitably adding “But poor boy, he was mortified.” Then she would say, “I’m not hungry, I’ll just have a salad and a glass of red wine. But Lash, why don’t you have one of the specials?” It would be her first outing this summer without me tagging along as “family.”
The rest of the day stretched ahead like an endurance test. It was too early to go next door and see if Roberta had a list for me. I had missed my early morning bike ride to Grief Cottage in order to be around when they left for Charleston, and now it was late morning, the beach filled with shrieking children, the light wrong. I prowled around inside the house, imagining a less honorable version of myself crossing the threshold of my aunt’s forbidden studio. Having washed the few breakfast dishes by hand, I was elated when I looked down at the floor and saw scuff marks and sand on the kitchen tiles: overlooked remnants of Pickett’s ass-tucked scramble for the toilet? A really good floor scrubbing was needed. Kneeling and applying the hard-bristle brush in serious circles recalled the day we had been cleaning house for the Steckworths’ visit, when Aunt Charlotte had dropped to her knees and scrubbed with a fury. (“It’s either that or kill someone.”) Then she had ordered me from the house. (“Just go, Marcus. Don’t make me ask again.”) This was after she’d learned from me that Mom, like herself, had run away at sixteen to escape a worse situation.
After I finished the kitchen floor, I mopped the hall, cleaned the bathroom, and tidied my own already-tidy room. Following that, I took the trash out.
As I was closing the lid to our bin in front of the house, a silent ambulance with its red revolving light turned into our street and stopped in front of the Upchurch house.
Roberta was beside the ambulance before the two men had finished unloading the stretcher from the bay. She led them quickly up the outside stairs. She hadn’t looked my way. Soon they returned, this time bearing the stretcher down the ramp, probably for a less bumpy ride for the tiny figure covered with a blanket. All you could see above the blanket was the breathing apparatus clamped to her face. They loaded her into the bay and, after a short consultation with Roberta, slammed it shut and drove off as noiselessly as they had come, red light revolving. Roberta still hadn’t looked my way, so I ran after her as she headed to the house.
“Roberta! What happened?”
“They’re thinking pneumonia. Her breathing was all wrong when I went in this morning.”
“Pneumonia in the summer?”
“You can get it any time. Healthy people carry the bacteria without it hurting them. My guess is the beauty salon. The hairdresser could have coughed on her, or the lady under the next dryer. But it’s no joke at her age. She was running a fever and I wasn’t taking chances.”
“Will she be all right?”
“Pray God, Marcus. We’ve been together since she got in that wheelchair. It’s—it’s a friendship.” Tears rolled down her cheeks.
“Do you need anything at the market?”
“No, I’m going to pack her some necessities and drive them over to the hospital and wait until we know something.”
“Tell her I said please get better.”
“I surely will. She has enjoyed you so much.”
I crossed the immaculate kitchen floor and stepped out on the porch. The shady hammock was not inviting before afternoon. Out of habit I went down to the dunes and sat in my old meditation spot. The absence of the turtles’ nest made the spot as forlorn as the unhaunted doorway of Grief Cottage. Why had Roberta said, “She has enjoyed you”? Why not “She has been enjoying you”? Before the sun went down today, it could easily become “She enjoyed you.”
It had been like watching some tiny extraterrestrial creature carried respectfully out to the ambulance by some large humans. Just some helpless little bumps under a blanket with an oxygen mask perched on top. I had not seen a single human part of her, not even a wisp of white hair. Now she wouldn’t get to finish her archaeology on herself. No, she said she had finished it and down at the bottom found only love. But now I would never be able to tell her, “It’s not such a bad thing to find love at the bottom.”
I was losing the casing that held me together. I could feel it coming loose, like that boy’s cheek melting down the side of his face back at the foster home. I drew up my knees to make a smaller, denser package of myself, and buried my face in my hands. When Mom was alive she would say, “Marcus, when you sit like that with your knees drawn up and your face covered, I want to die.”
Well, you did die. I waited for you to come back and you didn’t. Whereas I’m still here, coming loose from my moorings, getting ready to fly apart.
The corpses of the hatchlings and the eggs that never opened had been taken away to be studied. It might have been better to be one of those eggs that never opened. No pain, no fight, no terror. Just a kind and curious person in a lab, gently cracking your egg, looking inside to see how your remains might benefit future hatchlings.
When you start feeling sorry for yourself, the foster mother told us, make a list of all the good things you’re grateful for. What were the good things of this summer? My bike, my room by myself, the ghost-boy until he shut down. Lachicotte, Coral Upchurch, Aunt Charlotte.
For Wheezer, a “true” was a story that had really happened to someone, the more shocking and sensational the better: Van Gogh slicing off his ear and handing it to a prostitute; Wheezer’s brilliant uncle who read Latin and Greek and died shooting up inside a trailer full of rats.
Wheezer also had a term for a person you could always count on to be thinking of you and missing you, no matter where you were. Wheezer called this person a “sure.” Like rare marbles, we displayed and discussed our sures. Each of us had only one. (“But, Marcus, lots of people don’t have any.”) The cigarette-smoking grandmother in whose house Wheezer lived was his sure. His mother and father, even his big brother, all of whom lived in other places, were not. (“Weeks can go by without any of them giving me a thought.”)
My mom was my sure. “And who knows?” Wheezer had said. “Maybe one day we’ll end up being each other’s sures.”