Fool that I was, I had been on my way to considering Aunt Charlotte and Lachicotte as my potential sures. And maybe even Coral Upchurch, since she no longer had Billy in this world.
If that patch of black ice had been a little to the left a little to the right of Mom’s tires, we would still be sleeping in the same bed; there was only room for one bed in the apartment on Smoke Vine Road. I wondered what age I would have had to reach before she said, “Marcus, you’re getting to be a big boy, let’s go see if we can find a sofa-bed and squeeze it into a corner and pay for it on the installment plan. I may not be able to afford an extra room, but it’s time you had your own bed.”
What if the time never comes? I sometimes caught myself thinking as I lay beside her. And then I would try not to think the next thought: How will I ever get away from her?
“I’m not staying around to think any more ‘next thoughts’ with you,” my gremlin from the causeway suddenly piped up. “I am an evolving gremlin, trying to improve myself. You are going in the opposite direction. You’d be more suitable company to the others.”
“What others?”
“The evil baddies that balance us out. I’ve called in a cutting-edge baddie, fresh off the assembly line. Here he comes now. I’m out of here!”
Maybe I’d had my meltdown, after all. Here I was, running from the beach at midday, fleeing a gremlin. I didn’t want to meet Cutting Edge or even glimpse him out of the corner of an eye. I slammed the kitchen door behind me and wished it had Charlie Coggins’s Gullah-blue paint sloshed all around its frame. To put an extra door between us, I shut myself in my room.
What help was in here? I picked up the black bear in the hoodie and rubbed him against my face. I looked out my window at the line where the ocean met the sky. Out there I had felt I was melting away; now my skin felt like it was growing too tight to hold me. The tension was unbearable. I was sweating and heaving but nothing came up. The awful things I didn’t want inside me kept expanding.
I opened Mom’s tin box with its sacred contents and plucked out Aunt Charlotte’s container of painkillers from its hiding place. I had never taken anything but aspirin. Maybe one pill would kill enough physical feeling to tide me over until they got back. Now to wash it down. In the kitchen, on an impulse, I grabbed an opened bottle of wine in its usual hiding place and swigged down the pill, drinking from the bottle. The wine tasted murky and sour. How could she put away glass after glass of this? If I were to become a serious drinker I would choose something light and clear that worked really, really fast. I walked a circle around the kitchen, then another and another. How long did a painkiller take to kick in? It wasn’t that my thoughts were “racing,” but that every time I started to think any thought my mind recoiled from it. Every subject I approached had some kind of pain or horror attached to it.
I turned on Aunt Charlotte’s laptop and checked for new e-mails on her site. No promising inquiries, no inquiries at all. I deleted the junk mail.
“Did you think,” said a voice I can only describe as crumbly, “did you really think you could keep me on the other side of a measly door? I’ll tell you something you won’t want to hear. You can’t keep me out because I’m one of the cutting-edge models. We work from inside. And I don’t mean inside the house. I mean inside of you. The upside to this, the only upside, is that you don’t have to see me or imagine what I look like. I am beyond looks. I am inside you so I can camouflage myself in your looks.”
XXXVII.
“What’s behind that door?”
“I’m not supposed to go in there.”
“Who says I can’t? And since I’m inside of you, you’ll have to come with me.”
The painkiller must have reached my bloodstream because everything felt … not better, but a remoteness now muffled the unbearable anguish. Soon they would be having their early lunch in Charleston; they might be at the table already. (“This shrimp dish on the menu reminds me of the day Marcus arrived …”) They would take care of each other. He would get her to a recovery place in time. They would be each other’s family without the commitments. They would become each other’s sures. But now this didn’t hurt as much as it would have a short while ago.
“Go on, turn the knob. Good boy. Or I should say bad boy. So this is the forbidden temple. What have we here?”
A neat and organized studio. Giant easel pushed out of the way to the same spot where she had ordered me to move it. Laundry sink (where she had talked me through changing the washer) clean, but with paint rags hung to dry on its sides. The wall-high cork board from which she had told me to take down samples of famous landscape paintings she admired, rough drawings of clouds, postcards of her own paintings, and some write-ups about her in local papers, was filled with tacked-up little paintings, all the same size. (“I have a particular fondness for four by sixes, about the size of my palm,” she had told Ron Steckworth the day they carried away their forty-two by fifty-six. She had held up a palm to demonstrate.) I measured my palm against the paintings on the corkboard. My hand was already the size of hers.
“What is it?” asked Cutting Edge. “Some kind of comic strip?”
“Why would you think that?”
“Because, dumbass, the story goes from left to right, then drops down and goes left to right again.”
“What makes you think it’s a story?”
“Because I’m a speed reader and I’ve already scanned it. Wow, your aunt is one obscene lady. And so clumsy and crude for someone who passes herself off as an artist.”
“She injured her right hand. These are painted with her left hand. Also I think she painted them with her fingers. Except for those first drawings.”
“Filthy Auntie!”
“I wish you’d shut up.”
“Mum’s the word until slowpoke has stumbled through the story.”