The Invisible Husband of Frick Island by Colleen Oakley (autobiographies to read .TXT) 📗

Every path has its puddle. That was what Mrs. Olecki always said. No sense dwelling on them—you just gotta walk around them.

And Piper felt that was her job—to show Tom the way around. Even when his puddles seemed so deep and so wide they threatened to take up the whole path as far as you could see. Especially then.

“Of course we have to go. That developer from the mainland is coming to speak, and we told Steve we’d be there.” She flashed her bright smile at him, hoping it would cause a mirrored response. “And I made a cake.”

Every time Frick Island gathered for a meeting—whether it was a Wednesday night potluck or the twice-yearly clothing swap or the monthly town hall (which was really just a gathering, as the island had no formal city council) in the meeting room of the church, a few people rotated the task of bringing a Frick Island cake. They rarely got eaten, most people having long grown sick of the overly sweet concoction, but it was tradition and there was nothing more important than tradition on Frick Island.

Tugging her sweater over her head, Piper turned away from Tom, not wanting to linger any longer on his sullen face, and walked over to the kitchen area. She opened the half fridge.

“Son of a monkey!” she said, upon sight of the carefully chocolate-iced cylinder—which, at some point between being placed in the fridge three hours ago and now, had split right down the center, the inside yellow layers as visible as the stuffing in their threadbare couch.

Under Mrs. Olecki’s tutelage, Piper had become proficient, if not good, at cooking all manner of breakfast staples, but baking was another skill altogether. And she had yet to create a Frick Island cake that she could actually take to a public event.

She plopped the ruined cake onto the counter with a thud and stared at Tom, who was upright and stuffing his scrawny legs one at a time into his jeans. He paused right before buttoning them up and studied the cake, then looked back at Piper. “Well, we obviously can’t go now. They’re gonna kick you off the island for showing up with that thing.”

“Tooooom,” she intoned.

“Piiiiper,” he replied. But he was smiling now, and Piper’s chest loosened a bit. She knew they would go to the meeting and hold hands and talk with their neighbors and everything would be fine.

Everything would be just fine.

Well, everything but the cake. There was no fixing that.

She slid it into the open trash can and went to find her boots.

Chapter 10

Greta was just looking for you. Sounded important.”

Anders glanced at Jess’s face peering over the cubicle wall between them, and took in this week’s do—her hair braided into a jet-black crown framing her forehead. He dropped his bag at the base of his desk and crumpled into his chair, massaging his face with his hands, trying to wake himself up.

“Jesus, get some coffee. You look like you’re auditioning to be an extra in The Walking Dead,” she said, before disappearing back down in her seat.

For a full week after he got home from Frick Island, he spent every waking minute trying to make sense of what he’d seen. He wrote down everything he remembered witnessing, filling four pages of his reporter notebook front and back with details and questions.

He peppered Jess about the missing waterman. Had Tom been married to a woman named Piper? Yes. Had she ever interviewed Piper after the accident? No. Was there any chance he had survived the accident (not that it would have explained anything; even if Tom was alive and on the island, he wasn’t invisible)? I guess. I told you, he’s likely swimming with the fishes. But anything’s possible. Were the police actually ruling it an accident, or was there anything that suggested foul play? An accident, she said, but this was the one question that gave her pause, and she looked up at him with a crinkled brow. Why? “No reason,” Anders said, not quite ready to go down that rabbit hole when there was so much more he needed to find out.

He scoured the far corners of the Internet for information—articles, studies, experts, anything that could help him understand. He Googled everything from “talking to the dead” to “seeing people who aren’t there” and came up with a lot of weird information on séances and child psychology, but nothing that was helpful. At least, not until he typed in “seeing dead people.” Hidden between all the Sixth Sense memes and Reddit threads about ghosts, Anders found something.

A study. A group of researchers in Italy found that six out of ten grieving people have seen or heard their dead loved one. Sixty percent! They were called post-bereavement hallucinatory experiences, or PBHEs. And even though they were common, most people often didn’t mention them, as they feared friends and family would think they were mentally ill.

Anders’s first thought: Well, yeah. His second: Was that what was happening? Piper had recently lost her husband, that much he was certain of. Was she having some kind of prolonged PBHE? He shot off an email to the study author and got a response two days later.

Thanks for your inquiry. Please find my responses for your article on grief and spousal death as follows:

Yes, grief can manifest itself in many different ways, and yes, these “post-bereavement hallucinatory experiences,” or PBHEs, are actually quite common for widows/ers, particularly in the days and weeks directly following the death. Typically they are momentary—not lasting for more than a few minutes, so to your next question: someone who was hypothetically constantly seeing their loved one and behaving as if they were still alive. Without being able to speak with the patient directly, it’s hard to diagnose accurately, but the most likely explanation is a general psychotic break. Someone whose grief has gripped them