“I’ll hang out with you on this squalid porch while you swallow your medicine. We’ll think the next thought together while you’re swigging down the pills. How many did Filthy Auntie leave you? There are seven in the bottle and you swallowed one back at the house. That should cover it. No, no, no, don’t cram them in your mouth, swallow each individually and wash it down with water. You don’t want to ruin everything by choking up and vomiting. You’re such an easy little vomiter. Now, are you ready for that contemptible next thought? The one that takes all the prizes?”
I buried my face in my hands as Cutting Edge spewed out the contemptible thought. I did feel like vomiting, but kept it down.
“So now you know the worst about yourself. And you know what you have to do now.”
“No one would want to go on living after hearing that.”
“You get the idea. I’ve done my job. Off to the next client!”
“Aren’t you going inside the cottage with me?”
“I’ll level with you. Do you know what DNA is?”
“Of course I know what it is.”
“The thing is, I share some DNA with Ole Plat-eye. I might self-destruct if I passed through those blue-painted portals. You’re on your own when you go through that door.”
At first the dead silence inside Grief Cottage felt worse than Cutting Edge’s voice. At least he had been company.
I prowled around the cobwebby front room waiting for the pills to take effect. A surge of dark clarity washed over me. I understood what I was going to do now and why it had to be done. I also understood that if I had anything to say to Johnny Dace I’d better get going because my time was ebbing.
“I don’t expect you to appear. I don’t expect you to respond in any way. But I have to tell you that you got me through the summer. I sought you out and you were there for me as I was for you. You were my sure. You were my lifeline, if that doesn’t sound too weird.
“Just in case you are listening and wanting to hear the rest of the story in whatever way ghosts want to hear the rest of the story, I’ll bring you up to date. This morning my aunt went off to Charleston to find out if her wrist is healing. Strange to think I’ll never see her again. Then you know I told you about Billy Upchurch’s mother? Well, an ambulance came and took her away. They think it’s pneumonia, which is no joke for a person her age, and she’ll probably be gone by nightfall. Now I’m like you, I don’t have anybody. It’s really lonely without the turtle eggs. The hatchlings are well on their journey now, though some of them have already been eaten or caught in the shrimping nets, others didn’t have enough energy left over for their ten-mile swim to reach the open ocean, and others never made it out of their egg yolks.
“There are so many things I wish I knew about you. About you and Billy. Where was that hiding place you showed him?
“You will have to be my eighth grade friend. You’ll be the boy I suddenly come face-to-face with when I turn a corner in a corridor at school. I have seen you, the long narrow face, the raisin eyes deep in the sockets, the stalk-like neck, the nose that looked broken and not reset right, the bowed legs in jeans and the black boots. You were braced in the door frame, pushing yourself outward with your hands. I was close enough to count the knuckle ridges on your spread fingers. You had unusually large hands.
“Have you ever had a thought as contemptible as this? It’s a wonder how I managed to forget it until now. When my mom went out to get our pizza and didn’t come back, I got hungry. The smells of our landlady’s supper wafted up through the heat register and I got hungrier and hungrier and finally wolfed down some cereal and hated myself—and Mom—for spoiling my appetite. I watched the movie. I watched the whole movie. A lot of it I didn’t pay attention to because of this separate track running in my head. The separate track had already killed her. I was at the point in the track where I was fantasizing what would happen to me after she was gone. And I could see possibilities spread out in front of me. I didn’t think of Aunt Charlotte that night, my scenarios were more on the line of myself, Marcus, alone, with Mom gone. Independent and alone. People would walk softly around me and ask me what I wanted to do.
“Then I yanked myself off that track and felt despicable for letting the scenario progress as far as it had. By this time in the movie, the old lady had helped them steal the gold with no one the wiser, including herself. At that point I got scared. I worried that I might have already killed her by thinking these thoughts. I got a blanket and a pillow and lay down in front of the TV with the sound turned off. When she got back she would find me on the floor still in my clothes and feel terrible for taking so long.
“And then I really did fall asleep, and was waked by the state troopers knocking on our door.
“I think I can go to sleep now, here in Grief Cottage. But not in this cobwebby room. I want to be where you are. Please show me. Put your hand on my shoulder and when I stand up just push me from behind. I want to sleep where you sleep.”
I almost left it too late. I was half asleep when I felt the pressure on my shoulder. How could I ever have dreaded his touch? I wobbled and almost fell when I stood up, and I tripped going up the stairs. (“Hey, hey, hey! Watch it!” Charlie Coggins had cried.)
How peaceful it was going to be when all this chatter stopped.
I felt the palm of his large hand guiding me up the remaining stairs, then steering me to the right and to the right again, over the threshold of the oceanfront room Charlie Coggins wouldn’t let me enter.
I was somewhere in the middle of saying, “I have seen you and felt you and that’s enough. I’m glad your voice never joined the rest of the human noise—”
I may have reached the “I am glad”—then there was a splintering and a falling followed by a crack that brought horrible pain and my weak shout from the bottom of darkness.
XXXIX.
Before I ever walked through the doors of my new school, I was known as “the bones boy.” And all through the school year I was called “Bones.” (“Hey, Bones …”) The nickname trailed me into high school, then faded as more and more people came along who knew nothing about how it had originated. I sort of missed being Bones because the name had evoked awe and respect and some notoriety. But it had certainly done its job, airlifting me out of the realm of merciless peers before any of us had a chance to lay eyes on one another.
I said “walked” through the doors of my new school, but I should have said “swung through on crutches.” (Spiral break of the tibia, requiring a plate and eleven screws.)