“Just like Lash … typical, typical,” Aunt Charlotte would rage or lament on my visits to the villa—by this time, I was in pre-med at the state university. “I mean, he was old but not that old. If it weren’t for his foolish need to please everything that crossed his path, he had some vital years left in him. He had no business switching cars with that boy, just because the boy wanted to drive the Jaguar.”
The “boy,” a young man in his twenties, was supposed to follow Lachicotte to Hilton Head in his own car and take him home after they had delivered the Jaguar. “I’ll never forgive myself,” the boy anguished. “I just wanted to drive that beauty for the final stretch, and at the rest stop before the bridge, Lachicotte handed over the keys and said, ‘Remember. You’re still driving on the right side of the road, but now the steering wheel’s on your right, as well.’ And then he jams on the brakes of my car to keep from running over a dog and crashes against an abutment. I saw the whole thing through the Jaguar’s rearview mirror. I’ll never be able to look through a rearview mirror again without reliving the whole thing: that brown dog streaking across the road and Mr. Hayes’s wild, crazy turn straight into the abutment.”
“That boy reminds me of those witnesses being interviewed after a disaster,” Aunt Charlotte would say. “It’s all about the witness who saw the tragedy.” And she would then mimic a witness’s plaintive voice: “ ‘I was sitting in the outdoor café having my cappuccino and planning my sightseeing for the afternoon when suddenly this building right across the road from me explodes! It was close enough to make my table shake and little pieces of ash fall into my cappuccino…’ ”
I could hear Lachicotte as he handed over the keys: “Remem-bah, you’re still driving on the right side of the road but the steering wheel’s now on yo-ah right as well.”
In fact, I could hear Lachicotte a dozen times in a day, saying things I knew he would probably say if we were sitting next to each other in the car or walking on the beach or eating supper together. I will go on hearing him for the rest of my life. He makes fresh observations, suitable to the occasion, and my ear-memory still registers his pitch of voice, his speech rhythms, his modest-warm mode of delivery. He is one of the permanent figures of my dream life.
Coral Upchurch lived another eight months after surviving pneumonia and is buried next to Billy in Columbia. She left me the antique Proven?al writing desk, which is my nicest piece of furniture. Roberta inherited the Upchurch house in Columbia, which she sold to pay for her grandson’s college. The Upchurch family beach house, compromised by Archie’s trellis hiding the old brick footing columns and Coral’s unsightly wheelchair ramp, was bequeathed by Mrs. Upchurch to the island’s Historical Society, which soon restored its vernacular integrity. The William Upchurch Community Center is rented out for special functions, the proceeds going into the Society’s coffers. To celebrate my graduation from college, Aunt Charlotte gave me a party on Coral’s smoking porch.
When I came home to Aunt Charlotte’s during college and medical school breaks, we would make our pilgrimage to where Lachicotte was buried next to his mother.
“Damn it, Lash,” Aunt Charlotte would scold his grave. “Why did you think you had to look out for everything on legs and wheels?”
Though another time she said to me: “Isn’t it strange, Marcus, that after someone dies you like to recall the very traits that used to drive you crazy.”
“I miss him a lot,” I would say.
When we visited the cemetery, Aunt Charlotte usually remained on a shady bench near Lachicotte’s grave while I walked over to the newer part of the cemetery to visit “your friend,” as she called him.
I followed new rules for these visits to Johnny Dace. I wouldn’t have dreamed of plunking myself down beside his stone and choking his eternal stillness with my living chatter. He was no longer the missing dead boy crammed into a forgotten closet. His bones were at rest, laid out flat in their anatomical order until they crumbled in their own time and became part of the island’s soil. And I was no longer the boy who needed the lifeline of a silent listener who had showed himself, on two occasions, as an entity on his own terms.
“It’s so sad,” Aunt Charlotte was to brood at a later date. This was after I had started my residency and was seeing patients, some of them the same age I had been when Aunt Charlotte met me at the airport and shook my hand and said, Well, Marcus, here we are.
“What’s so sad?” I asked.
“When we don’t realize how remarkable someone is while they’re still with us. Then after they’re gone we wish we had told them, but when they were around we didn’t know yet. Does that make any sense?”
That was when I told her about the day I had met Lachicotte. “You were still in the hospital after your accident and he was taking me to buy a bike before we picked you up. We were driving across the causeway and I was telling him about my mom and I said that Mom had planned to take the high school equivalency exam and go on to college. I said, ‘She wanted to make something of herself.’ And he was quiet for a minute and then he said, ‘I would say she had already made a great deal of herself by bringing you up so well.’ ”
“That sounds exactly like something Lachicotte would say.”
“Yes, well, it went right over me that day, but later when I thought about it, I felt such sorrow that I had never understood this when she was alive and how it would have pleased her if I had said something like, ‘Mom, you are a real warrior, I’m so proud of you.’ ”
Aunt Charlotte looked at me. “Then you do know what I’m talking about.”
FORSTERVILLE: AN EPILOGUE
The island in late May, fourteen years later, supper hour.
“Well, Marcus, here we are.”
“That was the first thing you ever said to me.”
“Was it?”
“When you met me at the airport, you said, ‘Well, Marcus, here we are,’ and shook my hand.”
“What a memory. I remember nothing, other than being scared.”
“Of what you were taking on?”
“I was scared you were thinking, ‘Oh, no! I have to live with her?’ Even now I’m not sure I’d want to know your first impression of me.”
“ ‘A thin serious lady all in white, with beaky features and a Roman centurion haircut. When you shook my hand it was such a relief not to be hysterically hugged. Your turn, now. What did you think of me?”
“Marcus, you’re the one studying to be a shrink. Don’t you know when any two people meet both are thinking, ‘What does X think of me?’ ”
“You must have had some impression. What kind of boy did you see when that airline attendant was leading me to you?”
“I’m not sure. Well, let’s see. Maybe that you weren’t as much of a little boy as I’d been expecting. I had no experience of little boys. Though I’m not sure I even thought that much. It may be something I’m adding in hindsight. I guess I was mostly worrying what you thought of me. Sorry to disappoint you.”
“You haven’t. When people think they’re making something up about the past, they’re often remembering.”
The island, early next morning.
“Well, it’s time to be on my way.”