“Then, when later owners decided to build the south stairs and the upstairs room, they nailed up a partition to close off the wood closet from inside. They removed its lift latch because it stuck out and then whitewashed over the door.
“Then, when Hurricane Hazel hit us in 1954, the south porch burned down for reasons still unknown. The rest of the house stood up just fine. New owners, interested in a quick flip, sheared off the burnt porch and boarded up the south wall. That’s the quote-unquote ‘wall’ the firemen knocked down. After my dad bought the cottage from the flippers, who had run out of money, he sent me over to nail some vintage cypress shingles over that unsightly makeshift wall.
“Like I said, when I got there the medics were still stabilizing the boy’s breathing, they hadn’t moved him yet, and when they did that’s when we all saw what he’d been lying on top of. I say lying, but the skeleton was in a cramped sitting position and the boy had fallen right on top. It looked like he was sitting in the skeleton’s lap.
“Then everybody began speculating. Folks can’t tolerate loose ends—they’ve got to tie up a story. So it was, Are these the remains of a murder victim? How long have they been buried in there? Is the perpetrator still alive? My first thought was, Oh, ______, now I’ll be stuck with this property until the victim is identified, and maybe even until the murderer is apprehended! But then I recalled going through the house with this very boy not long ago and him talking so much about the boy that got lost during Hazel. That’s when I was almost positive I knew who these bones belonged to. In that case, the sooner I got it confirmed the better, and that’s when I said, ‘Nobody touch or move any of those remains till we get the forensics people here.’ So in this case it was the realtor who gave the order to secure the site. By the way, the inside door to that old wood closet is preserved in fine shape. It’s got its original eighteenth-century lift latch and strap hinge, and even the old wrought nails. I’m going to make a gift of it to the Charleston Museum.”
***
“She must be really mad at me,” I said to Lachicotte when I was emerging from my semi-conscious fugue in the hospital.
“Why do you think that?”
“Because, why isn’t she here?”
“She wasn’t sure you would want to see her.”
“Why not?”
I really could not think why. It would be weeks before all the events (both inner and outer ones) of that day were reclaimed. The first memories to swim up were the bike ride with Cutting Edge hectoring me all the way to Grief Cottage … then a blank … then pain cracking inside me … and another blank … then being carried across sand in daylight with voices calling back and forth against the sound of the ocean, and me thinking as they carried me, Please don’t drop me on one of those Spanish bayonets.
“Well, that note you left her,” Lachicotte said.
“What was in it?” I didn’t remember writing a note.
“You thanked her for taking you in but said you were no longer a good person and you were going somewhere else.”
The words sounded familiar, but why had I written them?
Then I remembered they had gone to the surgeon that day. “How is her wrist?” I asked Lachicotte.
“The news was guarded but good. This surgeon never gets overenthusiastic. Most surgeons don’t. Your aunt is deeply concerned about you, Marcus. She cares about you, more than she shows. The last thing she wants is for you to feel you have to stay with her when you’d rather go somewhere else.”
I was puzzled. “Why should I want to go anywhere else?”
***
Aunt Charlotte’s secret project, dubbed Filthy Auntie’s Pictures by Cutting Edge, and the events leading up to my invading her studio, would be one of the later memory sequences to return. When I did remember and apologized for disobeying her, she simply nodded and then formally invited me into her studio, much as she had that first time when she wanted “everything to be aboveboard” about my trust and about the “nice monthly stipend” she would receive.
In the same matter-of-fact monotone she presented me with a “shrink-wrapped” version of her demon-father’s violation of her childhood, beginning when he took her and her doll on business trips when she was five and ending when she ran away at sixteen. (“That’s enough now. With your super-active imagination, Marcus, you can fill in the rest.” She didn’t add, “Besides, you have the memory of the little paintings to help you picture the scenes.”)
The paintings were never mentioned. They truly did become her “Unpainted Pictures.” I have no idea what she did with them. The corkboard once again bore its former items, tacked up in their former spots: details from landscape paintings she admired, sketches of clouds, of the ocean, the postcards of her own paintings, and gallery announcements and local press cuttings. She asked Lachicotte to move the big easel back to its old spot and would I mind, until her casts were off, changing her linens again and giving the studio a good sweep and dusting in preparation for her return to work.
The opening entry in my first pocket-sized notebook (those Moleskine ones with the elastic band and sewn spine had just come on the American market) was the old professor’s advice:
Don’t mention it to anyone else unless you find they’ve had adventures of the same sort themselves…
—The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, C.S. Lewis
And many notebooks later, when I was in medical school, I recorded this treasure:
It could be said of all human beings that at times when instinctual frustrations lead to a feeling of hopelessness or futility the fixing of the psyche in the body becomes loosened and a period of psyche and soma unrelatedness has to be endured. […] The idea of a ghost, a disembodied spirit, derives from this lack of essential anchoring of the psyche in the soma, and the value of the ghost story lies in its drawing attention to the precariousness of psyche-soma existence.
—“Dwelling of Psyche in Body,” Human Nature,
D. W. Winnicott
“Yes, the anchoring of the psyche in the body is very precarious,” I wrote on the following page. “What I was sure of at the time was that I had seen. What I was not sure of was whether I was different from others my age. If so, was I super-sensitive to the uncanny or was I going insane? Could another person of eleven have this experience? Or was this my experience alone because the ghost-boy was inseparable from my history, my personality, my needs? I knew he was related to my life, but he also appeared to be an entity on his own terms. How could he be both? What I needed was a mature personality who could earn my trust, comprehend my contradictions, and help me form a concept large enough to contain them.”
***
“I can’t believe you didn’t tell me!” My leg was in its cast. I felt perfectly fine. Why was this my fourth day in the hospital?
“Well, I am telling you now,” said Lachicotte patiently.
“But it’s too late! They’ve moved everything. I found him—I was the one who fell on top of him, for God’s sake. And you’re just telling me all this now?”