“It’s hardly daylight, Aunt Charlotte. Savannah is only a two-hour drive.”
“I know, but I get antsy before a trip. I feel neither here or there.”
“You’re sure you don’t want to take along a sandwich and a banana?”
“No, I’ve got my bottled water and a package of that boring trail mix. I want to make it inside the gates of the recovery villa without falling off the wagon.”
“Maybe I’ll replace those damaged shingles on the ocean side.”
“Marcus, the shingles can wait. You’ve been slogging nonstop as long as I’ve known you. Middle school, high school, college, medical school. Now you have ten free days before your residency starts. Why not relax and see what it feels like to do nothing at all?”
“I’m not sure I could handle it. You sure you have all the materials you need for your painting classes at the villa?”
“You loaded them into the car yourself. Now let’s exchange a hysterical hug and I’ll hit the road. A person my age drives better earlier in the day.”
She stuck her hand out of the driver’s window, fluttering her fingers in a playful farewell as she turned left onto Seashore Drive. I stood at the curb, watching her little silver car out of sight. When her vintage Mercedes gave up the ghost after Lachicotte’s death, she went out and purchased a new Japanese compact along with an additional 75,000-mile warranty that included pickup when it needed service or misbehaved and a rental car delivered to your door. (“This ought to see me through to the end. I never go anywhere except for shopping and my periodical recovery jaunts to Savannah. Lachicotte couldn’t stand new cars, but he doesn’t have to know.”)
I feel neither here or there, she said as her excuse for leaving so early. After she was gone, I kept rerunning that fluttery farewell out her window. It reminded me of the dismissive finger-wave from her stretcher as the medics were carrying her out the door. (“Be a good boy, and be sure to lock up front and back.”)
“You can tell when a person has already left you behind,” explained a young patient I had been treating under supervision. “Even if that person is right in front of you, you know they’re only pretending to be with you and that makes it worse.” At fifteen, she had attempted suicide three times.
“Why not relax and see what it feels like to do nothing at all?” Aunt Charlotte had suggested. Still rooted to the curb, I contemplated how I was going to get through the rest of the day and felt the onset of a terror I thought I had outgrown.
I hated it when these clusters started to form. One unwelcome subject sought out its counterparts—farewells, people leaving and never coming back, ambulances—like the silent ambulance with the revolving red light turning into our street and taking away Coral Upchurch. And then those counterparts attracted similar old hurts and horrors until you were trapped in the nucleus of the cluster. This cluster, I knew, was labeled LOSS in big black letters. I knew this much, thanks to therapy and training, but simply knowing it didn’t protect you from reacting to it over and over again. Until one day you resolved to sit down in the middle of the nucleus, fold your arms, and invite the cluster to do its worst. And if you survived that, you could look around and see what was left in its absence.
I followed my feet back to the cottage. What they wanted next, it seemed, was to perform a house check. Kitchen in order, bathroom left neat; Aunt Charlotte must have wiped the sink and floor dry with her used towels and dropped them in the laundry basket.
My room was so full of my boyhood self that I felt the urge to report back to him and keep him apprised of our progress. (“Well, medical school is over, now comes four years of residency in a new place, and after that, if we prove ourselves worthy, a fellowship in child and adolescent psychiatry. That gets us into our thirties, but thanks to your skipping that grade back in the bleak Jewel era, we’re still a year ahead of ourselves.”)
My aunt had left the door to her studio open. It was arranged and tidied as if expecting an imminent tour: “The Painter’s Empty Studio.” The big easel had been wheeled away from the center, the trestle tables with their tubes of pigment and containers full of brushes moved flush against the walls. (Lachicotte’s Coronation tea caddy was still home to the precious sables.) Pinned along the top of the wall-high cork board were Aunt Charlotte’s blown-up photos of tidal pools recorded on low-tide evenings over the period of a month. Below were her pastel sketches on Japan paper of the shapes and colors left in the sand. (“I want to see how far I can get toward pure design while still remaining faithful to what nature left behind.”)
In the “new wing,” as we still called it twelve years after it was built, she had made her bed. I had been half-hoping she hadn’t, so I could justify running a small load of laundry, just the sheets and towels.
(“Marcus, the sheets and towels can wait.”)
My feet having completed their house check, I was at liberty to go back to bed and start catching up on four years of lost sleep as a medical student, or to walk down to the beach, which, sad to say, no longer offered the unrestricted pleasures of my boyhood.
Our beach had not held up as well as Aunt Charlotte’s cottage. Nevertheless, the ocean remained its old self, calming you with its predictable rhythms, taking its ancient watery breaths as it did millions of years ago when the little loggerhead hatchlings made their mad dash for its deep waters.
“The ocean is going to be just fine and the beaches are going to be just fine,” explained an unwelcome scientist at a contentious meeting when the island residents were at their most divided. “They will go on together perfectly well. There will always be beaches, but the ocean will move the beaches to new locations. The only losers will be the property owners fighting a hopeless battle to make nature stand still.” He was booed down and the twenty-three timber groins went up, jutting out perpendicular to the shoreline from the north to the south end of the island. Gone was the wide swath of unencumbered beach as far as you could see, where walkers could walk without going around the regularly spaced four-foot-high beams. Except at very low tide, bicycle tires sank in the sand. Eleven-year-old Marcus would have had to rely on Seashore Road for his daily visits to the ghost-boy.