“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 so immensely they have disassociated with reality. Though I haven’t dealt with that particular scenario, it brings to mind a news story I read a few years ago about a woman in Australia who lived with her husband’s dead body in their home for weeks, until neighbors started to smell the decomposition. He had died of natural causes, but she simply couldn’t let go. Perhaps you’ve come across that one in your research.
I hope this helps. Please let me know if you have any further questions.
Anders wrinkled his nose. At least Tom’s body wasn’t lying in wait, decaying in Piper’s carriage house. He didn’t think.
But he did think he finally had enough pieces to start pulling together an episode for his podcast. And he spent another week writing, recording, and editing it, until he had forty-nine minutes of a perfectly paced (if he did say so himself) story—beginning with the cryptic email he’d received from someone on Frick Island and slowly revealing his journey to understand climate change (peppering in a few of Mr. Gimby’s wacky clips), which turned into a possible investigation into a missing waterman, which turned into the shocking realization that the wife of that missing waterman was experiencing a delusion on a grand scale—and that the entire island was going along with it.
Ira Glass himself couldn’t have done it any better.
And last night at 3:20 a.m., he’d finally hit enter, uploading the episode to his website, posting it on Instagram and Twitter, and then falling into a deep, restful sleep. When he woke this morning with a start, sitting straight up, he knew without even glancing at the clock that he was wildly late for work. When he did look at the clock, he saw with a shock that he was nearly four hours late.
“Seriously, though, what’s up with you?” Jess said, her head popping up again like a game of whack-a-mole. “Is this about all that Frick Island stuff again?”
“Kind of,” Anders admitted, pulling his laptop out of his bag and powering it up.
Jess shook her head at him before disappearing once again. Last week, when Anders told her what he had seen, Jess was nonplussed. “I told you Frick Island was weird.”
Now he waited as his computer screen came alive and then went through the motions of checking his emails, responding to any that needed responding to, checking the news headlines, and then pinging Greta to let her know he was in.