“Perhaps,” Mrs. Grose said, hugging her windbreaker tight around her ample chest. At her feet wheezed her ancient pug. Martin’s son, Jason, and Jason’s wife Moony had once figured that the pug must be well over two hundred in dog years. Even Jason resisted the temptation to try and calculate Mrs. Grose’s age. “But spring isn’t really spring anymore, is it? My primroses, they were so sickly last year. And the lupines…”
Her voice died as she turned, staring past the other toy Victorians nestled on the hillside to where Penobscot Bay sparkled blue and gold and violet in the early-morning light. Martin felt his initial burst of joy ebb.
“I know.” He stared down at the first blades of dandelions thrusting through the earth, a pallid brownish yellow. “Mine too…”
Last spring, after years of watching his friends and lovers die, Martin himself had finally succumbed to his illness. At Jason’s urging, he’d left his apartment in San Francisco and moved back to Mars Hill for good. The virus had gone into remission almost immediately. But his weakness remained, the damage done to his lungs by pneumonia, lesions on his arms and calves that even Mars Hill’s singular magic could not heal. And the ceaseless gnawing at his heart that was grief for not just lovers and friends but for an entire world that had been destroyed: books that would never be written, songs never sung, children never born, tracts of the heart and soul that would remain unmapped. Martin himself terra incognita, the undiscovered country; because who was left now to love him? He had Mrs. Grose for company, of course. And his son Jason and his wife, Moony, came up as often as they could, but flights to Maine were all but nonexistent unless you chartered a plane, and Jason couldn’t afford that.
So Martin spent his days indoors, priming canvases with his failing reserves of linseed oil and turpentine, or scouring the beach for usable things: driftwood, salt-sodden telephone poles, plastic milk cartons, beer bottles. The bleak loneliness of the Maine winter left him depleted and depressed. He did no painting. The stretched canvases were left standing about the cottage like so many blank windows and doors. His online columns faded to bi- and then trimonthly, not because of the lack of power (fitful, but you could usually count on at least one day in the week to bring electricity) but because he had lost all heart. This caused webwide speculation as to whether he was still alive. Martin of course knew more people now who were dead than not, and spent mordant hours in bed devising new addresses for himself: timormort@acadia.com. He moved the photograph of his dead lover John deMartino from the bedside table, because some nights it seemed to speak to him. He read the same lines of poetry over and over again, as though tracing the lineaments of his lover’s cheek—
Martin could not die yet, but he was not healed. Days and nights on end he waited at a window overlooking the wasteland, eyes seared by what lay before him, wounded sky and stranded dolphins rotting upon the beach; he stood and waited for death to come.
At night he lay awake and heard people moving softly in the room about him. They whispered, and he could hear his name amidst other words only half-understood, and he recognized the voices. His father was there; his first lover and many others; and once he knew the corrosive chime of laughter from his old nemesis, Leonard Thrope. He had not heard that Leonard had died, but was not surprised at the thought; nor by the twinge of sorrow that accompanied it.
But mostly he heard John. The voices, of course, must be the first stages of dementia. He knew there was no Good Death awaiting him; yet somehow he had not expected this. One night the whisperings grew so intrusive—scrape of bat wings against the window, giggling cold breath against his forehead—that he took a deep breath and opened his eyes, determined to prove to them, at least, that there was nothing there.
Only there was: an entire roomful of phantoms, all familiar faces as at a spectral cocktail party, chatting and moving their hands quite animatedly. The one nearest to him—it was John—turned and with a smile opened his mouth to greet him. Martin screamed. His entire body spasmed with such horror that he shat the bed. He did not repeat the experiment. He took to swallowing tranquilizers at night and slept with a pillow over his head.
So it was with more than the usual green-starved longing that Martin awaited spring that year. One by one he’d cast off the few remaining ties that bound him to the rest of the world—lovers and friends, telephone, television, radio, car, computer—surprised at how easy it had become, and how commonplace, to take up all the antediluvian burdens this Hotspur century had thrown aside. Chopping and carrying firewood, retrofitting an old hand pump for the kitchen, getting used to the sheen of ice on the interior walls and windows of his poorly insulated cottage. Mrs. Grose’s canned zucchini and wax beans (the only things that grew reliably anymore, though they hardly flourished), a hot bath once a week. He’d offset the expense of wax candles by gathering stunted bayberries in the fall, and cursed himself for not installing solar panels years ago, as John had urged him. Now, of course, it was too late.
“Tired?”
From his porch Martin smiled wanly at Mrs. Grose. “A little,” he confessed. No use lying to a centenarian psychic. “I was thinking I might walk down to the beach.”
Mrs. Grose cocked her head, still staring across the bay. “That was some storm we had, eh?” At her feet the little pug gasped, as though at a bad memory. “I thought the roof would blow away!”
“I’m surprised it didn’t,” said Martin.
They stood in silence, watching the uneasy sky. “Well, I guess I’ll go down and see what the storm washed up,” Martin said at last.
“Dinner tonight?” Mrs. Grose called after him. “Diana’s supposed to come and bring us a chicken.”
“Then I’ll be there.”
He bent to pick up the canvas bag he took with him on his sea walks. Then, waving, he stepped from the porch and started downhill to the pier, past the sign so faded that its letters were imprinted only in his memory.
Drifts of leaves clung to the base of the signpost, but not so many as there had been, once. Martin glanced down at the few sickly daffodils thrusting through the mulch, and winced. Moony had always said she hated spring at Mars Hilclass="underline" “It’s so hopeless!” To which Mrs. Grose had patiently explained that there was always hope—spring always came, followed by that sudden brilliant burst of northern summer that you never were quite prepared for, no matter how many times you’d seen it. But when Martin had last seen Moony a few weeks earlier, she’d avoided any mention of spring, avoided her annual rants against mud season and snow in May and the necessity of fires in cranky woodstoves that aggravated her asthma. At the time he and Jason had laughed about it (though not within Moony’s hearing). Now Moony’s unaccustomed silence seemed ominous.
She knows something, Martin thought as he trudged down the gravel road to the beach. She knows and she’s not telling.
Overhead the sky gleamed a soft metallic grey, streaked with undulating bands of violet and green. Seagulls called plaintively, trailing in the wake of a solitary lobster boat. The air had a harsh scent, hard to pinpoint but unmistakable. Jason was a marine biologist, and he believed the massive die-offs of krill and other plankton were changing the chemical content of the ocean. In the water a few cormorants bobbed, their heads snaking beneath the surface. Beside the rickety building that served as the community’s storage shed, Martin’s sailboat stood raised on concrete blocks, WENDAMEEN painted on its bow in plain block letters. Martin looked at the boat and sighed, and walked the last few yards to the beach.