I sat down on “our” groin, placed a few feet beyond Aunt Charlotte’s boardwalk steps in approximately the same place the Turtle Patrol had relocated the loggerhead eggs the first summer I was here.
The tide had started to go out, but the waves still covered most of the beach. Aunt Charlotte had left so early that there was a good hour left for unleashed dogs to chase one another into the surf, get good and wet, then streak up to shake water and sand on their owners hugging the dry space up by the dunes. Dogs on the beach brought back Barrett, the service dog I had met on the same morning I had seen the ghost-boy poised to leap out from the doorway. Barrett would be an old dog now, his wounded warrior preparing sorrowfully for the loss of him. The warrior himself, approaching middle age, had years more to live with his handicap and his war memories. Would he be given a new dog? Or maybe both Barrett and his warrior were already dead.
The phone in my back pocket buzzed once. Who at this hour was sending me a message?
It was Charlie Coggins:
Fellow wants you to call him, said it’s important. He found my name in all those Grief Cottage news stories and phoned our office to ask if I knew where you were. Here is his contact info. Said you’d remember him as Shelby’s older brother. I hear good things about you when I run into your aunt, which is not often.
Below were the home phone, cell phone, and street address of Andrew Forster. It took me a minute to realize Andrew was Drew and Shelby was Wheezer.
A man picked up the home phone.
“Is this Andrew?”
“He’s still asleep. Can I take a message?”
“Oh sorry, I didn’t realize it’s so early. I’m all turned around today. This is Marcus Harshaw, I’m calling from—”
“Wait, Marcus, give me your number in case we get cut off. I’ll go wake him. We’ve been trying to locate you.”
“Marcus? This is Andrew, Shelby’s older brother. Thank you for calling back. Do you remember me at all?”
“Yes. Wheezer always called you Drew.”
“Hey, I forgot his little friends called him that! We’ve been trying to find your whereabouts, Marcus. First we found an article you wrote in a psychiatry journal, and Shelby said he would gamble on that being you. Then we found those old news stories—about you discovering the buried boy on the South Carolina island—and we decided to contact the realtor who was quoted. Listen Marcus; Shelby—Wheezer—isn’t doing so well. Lymphoblastic lymphoma, Stage Four, if that means anything to you. He had a high response with the initial chemo and we had high hopes he was going to make it, but he had an early relapse and—well, now it doesn’t look so good. It’s too late for a bone marrow transplant and we’ve made him comfortable at home. He’s been talking about you a lot. Where are you right now?”
“I’m on that same island in those news stories. Where are you?”
“Same old town, Granny’s old house. You know it. Granny’s gone, but we’re all living in her house.”
“There are a few things I need to take care of here, but then I could come.”
“That’s what we were hoping for. But, look, Marcus, don’t leave it too long.”
“I could get away from here by noon.”
“You mean you would come today?”
“If I left at noon I think I could be there in late afternoon. What’s the street address, I don’t think I ever knew it.”
“We’re Number One Maple Avenue. It’s at the top of the street. You’ll stay with us. There’s plenty of room. Oh, and when you get as far as Asheboro? Why don’t you call to let us know you’re close. That’ll give us a good half hour to get him up to speed for your arrival.”
“Will you tell him I’m coming?”
“I surely will, as soon as his nurse gets him bathed and set up for the day. Then he’ll have something to look forward to.”
Getting a sick person “up to speed” for a visitor could mean anything from disconnecting a catheter or an IV so the person could move around without dragging a pole, or taking injections or pills to block pain, or to keep you sharp and awake for short portions of time. It was useless to try to guess. I would know soon enough.
The route from the island to Forsterville was largely interstate, cutting northwest through salt marshes, coastal plain, up into the piedmont, and right into the foothills of the Appalachian mountains, but what I saw was mostly the asphalt in front of me and signs naming the towns that I was not going to see. “It is still possible to go the back roads and get an idea of how people lived,” Mom had said when we had been planning our trip to West Virginia so I could see my roots, at least on her side. “The backroads take longer, but we’ll take all the time we need.” I had traveled this interstate route before, when I had gone back to see to the stone for her grave.
The big white Forster house at the top of the tree-lined street looked down at a nondescript car packed to the gills with belongings laboring upward in second gear. (“We’re Number One Maple Avenue,” Drew had said.) Wheezer and I had always taken the back route to the house to avoid the uphill pedaling. Why this surge of anger and worthlessness at the sight of the house on top of its green hill? I was expected, I was wanted; wasn’t I an equal player now?
“They got here first,” Mom had explained when we had taken our afternoon walks in the Forsterville Cemetery. “So naturally they would choose the highest lots to be buried in.” Her favorite spot was at the top of the hill. My best photo of her, which I carried tucked in my wallet along with the headshot of my unknown father, was of her sitting beside one of their family gravestones, leaning a little sideways, so her cheek grazed the edge of the upright stone. I had wanted her to pose next to a weeping marble angel farther down the hill, and she obliged me, but the body language between them was terrible. Then she had returned to her usual gravestone. “The view is better up here,” she called to me.
My overloaded car crackled around the circular white gravel driveway of the front entrance. Waiting in the open doorway was a gaunt, elongated person still recognizable to me as the complete little man in first grade. Wearing jeans and a polo shirt to match the Carolina blue baseball cap tipped low over his forehead, he leaned into the door frame, his unsupported side steadied by a cane. In eager silence he watched me unfold myself from the car and make my way toward him. Before I had reached the steps, I could feel myself entering his realm. Whenever we had been separated as boys, even if for only a few hours, he would beam that “I-own-you” gaze at me when I came back. He was now sending me this gaze from under the baseball cap. I was close enough now to take in the skeletal cheeks, the bony shelf of his clavicle, the stick-thin upper arms; I also saw the effort it was taking him to stand upright, even with the help of door frame and cane.