“I couldn’t have. They would have thought I was mentally unbalanced and sent me away for treatment, or they’d think I made it up to seem clairvoyant and ‘special.’ It’s about that boy—well, that skeleton I fell on top of. The one in the news stories that led you to me.”
“Were you more grossed out or freaked out when you felt him under you?”
“I was out cold. I didn’t learn about him until I was in the hospital. But I need to start back at the beginning of that summer. I was eleven, my mother was dead, and I was sent to live with my great-aunt on a small island in South Carolina…”
I was surprised, and frankly let down, to realize that the entire story of Grief Cottage had taken less than twenty minutes to relate to Wheezer. How could that be? I had gone chronologically through those summer weeks fourteen years earlier, bringing in the necessary side-stories, the lost family in the hurricane, Coral Upchurch’s memory of seeing Johnny Dace on the beach that one time fifty years before. I had been careful not to exaggerate the ghost-boy’s manifestations to me: that first time on the porch when I felt invisibly watched from behind; then the two visual showings in the doorway; and the final time when I had taken the Percocet pills and felt his large hand on my back guiding me up the stairs of Grief Cottage.
“Wait, let’s go over this again,” said Wheezer. “That first time, when you fell asleep on the porch and then woke up and felt someone watching you from behind, was that before or after your aunt had told you about the missing family?”
“It was after.”
“Okay, now, I’m going to play devil’s advocate. The first time you saw him was in what you say was dazzling afternoon sunshine. Are you sure the dazzling light wasn’t playing tricks on you?”
“No, he looked like a real person standing in the doorway. His face was in shadow because the dazzling light was behind him, but he was looking at me and he had on a red shirt.”
“Okay. Now what about the big showing? The morning you got there before sunrise and everything was crepuscular and spooky, and he was braced in the doorway ready to spring out at you. You saw his red shirt again, unbuttoned this time, and his broken nose and the expression of his mouth, and his bow legs and jeans and boots. Right? And then later Mrs. Upchurch told you he never undressed at the beach and he was wearing some sort of footwear that might have been boots. Am I accurate so far?”
“An accurate devil’s advocate.”
“But then! Then everything changes. You go to the mortuary and see the bowed leg-bones. The nose was gone and the clothes were gone, but it turns out this was the remains of Johnny Dace, the boy lost in the hurricane, and now there’s the DNA to prove it. It seems to me, Marcus, that somehow you were able to make contact with his spirit. It’s like he needed you and you needed him and there was some kind of collapse in time and you were able to save each other. He got out of that cramped little closet and is laid peacefully to rest, and you are still here instead of being laid out underground yourself. It’s got something to do with how time interacts with spirit, only you’re going to have to figure it out for both of us. I think you do have special powers, Marcus. I give you permission to try them out on me.”
“What do you mean?”
“Look. If you could reach a boy you never knew, a boy who’d been dead fifty years, why, reaching me, as close as we have been, will be a piece of cake.”
Tobias entered, bearing a tray with a protein smoothie and a glass of shaved ice. He suggested his patient take a rest to conserve his energy for my farewell dinner that evening. Wheezer had asked for the dinner, and was planning to show up for it fully dressed and on his feet. Making ready to assist Wheezer to the bathroom, Tobias suggested I take a little walk outside in the sunshine, “and maybe you could use a little rest yourself.”
I hadn’t been outside the house since the first night, when I reparked my car and carried in my overnight bag. As I embarked on my assigned walk, I realized suddenly how drained I was. It was like coming off duty after a twenty-four-hour stint at the hospital. Seeing patients face-to-face, concentrating on their needs, you put yourself on hold, only to be confronted at the end of your rounds, cradling your pent-up umbrage like an ailing pet. Now. What about me?
Circling the backyard once, twice, a third time, I tried to recall how this patch of land had looked and felt when I was a visiting child. I passed the row of boxwoods where Wheezer had seen a snakeskin floating from a branch. (“Look, Marcus, you can even see where its jaw was! It probably rubbed against that bush to start the process and finally crawled out of its own mouth!”) Or were these the same boxwoods? Shouldn’t they have been more mature by now? In acute self-consciousness I performed this memory ritual in Wheezer’s backyard: Now I am looking at the same boxwood or a replacement of the boxwood where the snakeskin floated; now I am remembering how Wheezer’s grandmother stood under that tree, her back to the house, puffing her cigarette; now I am approaching the path where Wheezer taught me to ride Drew’s old bicycle: (“If you’d just stop thinking, Marcus, and ride!”)
Eventually it dawned on me that I didn’t have to continue this forced-march down memory lane. Before a trip she felt neither here nor there, Aunt Charlotte had said, and I, too, was in that sort of antechamber between what was ending and what had not yet begun. I sank down on an outdoor chaise whose canvas pillows bore a faint scent of mildew and fell into a sort of half-sleep in which I was floating above a MapQuest aerial view of all the miles I had to drive tomorrow between Forsterville and Nashville.
We made it, all of us—well, almost—through my farewell supper. Drew, Bryson, Tobias, Shelby, and Marcus. Wheezer, dressed, arrived with a cane on his own steam, Tobias hovering close behind. He had left his head bare, with its rabbit fur exposed. Drew did salmon and vegetables on the outdoor grill. There was wine for those who wanted it, iced tea for those who didn’t. And a silver bowl with fresh-cut fruit waiting for dessert. Beside my plate was a book-sized gift wrapped in white-and-gold paper.
“You have to open it now,” ordered Wheezer. His face had gone ashen and he had sunk down in his chair.
It was one of those too-beautiful leather notebooks with Italian endpapers, the kind you postpone using, or never use, because you don’t want to spoil it. “It’s from all of us,” Wheezer said. “Everyone’s signed the card, but I went ahead and wrote the first entry inside.”
While I am writing this, announced his familiar childish script at the top of the first page, we are still together under the same roof, on the same earth at the same time. As for later, don’t forget!
There was more.
While we were serving ourselves fruit, Wheezer went limp in his chair. “Listen, Tobias, I’d better lie down.” Tobias all but carried him away.