Lost & Found

by Jacqueline Sheehan

  “Did you put oil in the sauce, Mom?”

  “Oil? No. Well, I had to use a tiny bit of oil when I sautéed the mushrooms.” Elaine shrugged her shoulders. She looked down and tucked her highlighted hair behind her ears. Rocky knew this was not the first time that the girl had questioned her mother about ingredients.

  Melissa was the kind of kid that Rocky had not wanted to work with at the counseling center. Not at first, but after awhile she had begged her director, “Don’t give me one more starving girl!”

  Rocky’s mantra as a therapist had been, “I don’t specialize in eating disorders,” and because another therapist at the clinic did, she had sent all the determined starving young women to her. Ellen was the perfect therapist for girls with disordered eating. She was round, unembarrassed by her own girth, and no threat to girls who were in competition for deprivation. The unhappy army of girls, defined by skin, bones, and grit, found solace with Ellen. Rocky had watched them arrive for their weekly meetings, hardly allowing their sit bones to touch the chair and pulling their osteoporotic spines straight. From her office, she could spot their skin, desperate with goose flesh and extra hair, trying to warm the bodies that insisted on living without fat.

  None of her training had truly prepared her for the tenacity of anorexia or the pure malevolence of the voice of an eating disorder that wrapped around the girls like a smirking python. With Ellen as resident specialist, she was off the hook. Ellen went to all the eating-disorder conferences, talked about eating disorders during lunch (which Rocky found particularly distressing), and became absorbed by the world of restricting. All of this meant that Rocky passed on the big-eyed skinny girls with their hair pulled back tight and their baggy pants and big sweatshirts worn to hide the clatter of their bones.

  And then Ellen left. She married a dentist and moved to Albany last winter. The director of the clinic said to Rocky, “We have to talk about our clients with eating disorders now that Ellen is gone.” She knew what this meant, and a solid sense of dread had lodged in the back of her throat. She tried everything to escape them.

  “It’s not ethical to offer services that are beyond our scope of expertise. We can refer out. Let’s put this in the job description, ‘must have experience in eating disorders,’” said Rocky.

  She said anything except the truth, which was that the tiny young women who refused to eat, but who thought of nothing else all day except food, terrified her, outwitted her, showed that all of her training was for naught. She finally settled on seeing the clients with bulimia. She understood gulping down life in vast quantities, and even had a therapeutic understanding of a sudden change in heart and throwing up. And most importantly, she never wanted to reach out and grab them by the ears and shake them into eating the way she did with the army of anorexic girls.

  On the island, no one expected cures from Rocky. They expected that she would catch, remove, and relocate animals. Her job was confined to the battered yellow truck, finding abandoned animals, picking up roadkill if the town truck missed it.

  At her neighbor Elaine’s house, she watched the girl rearrange the lettuce without salad dressing and the yolkless, hardboiled egg. She wondered if Elaine knew. As the mother, she will be blamed no matter what she does, the way mothers of autistic children used to be blamed because they were thought to be too cold; this was offered as the sole cause for what turned out to be a neurological disorder. If Elaine doesn’t know, she’ll be blamed for being in denial. If she does know, she will still be the culprit for colluding with her daughter who refused the egg yolk.

  Rocky shifted her attention to the girl and a suddenly liberated mean streak ran through her. “Hey, can I have a slice of that egg white? It looks delicious.” She reached across the table with her fork as if to stab the egg white. The mother and daughter drew in tight. Rocky had broken through the perimeter of their rules. She put her fork back on her plate and scooped up more pasta. Rocky reveled in the freedom of being non-therapeutic.

  When all the food was mercifully taken off the table, Melissa slid her chair back and said she had too much chemistry to do. Rocky tried to salvage the rest of the evening by talking about Lloyd, but the tone of the earlier welcome had cooled, and she made an early nine P.M. departure. She knew that the evening had gone badly.

  Sleep had always been a comfort to her, but since Bob had died, sleep was an unpredictable landscape. As she rose and fell through stages of sleep, the dark mask of grief momentarily lifted and cool air rushed beneath and freshened her cheeks, under her eyelids, and up and down the slope of her nose. When was life ever like this? When had she walked so weightlessly?

  She woke hard, the sting of morning raked across her skin. The first hint of panic took hold: Had Bob been dead so long that even the ghastly comfort of grief had loosened and he’d moved farther away?

  In the first few months after his death, she had dreamt endless versions of the cardiac resuscitation she had attempted with Bob. In one dream she tried to plug his heart into the hair dryer to shock him back to life. He sat up and said, “Stop it! You’re burning us.”

  But now, try as she might, her dreams flitted away before she could grab them and she awoke each morning blinded by the complete darkness of sleep. If she couldn’t remember her dreams, would she forget Bob?

  She tested herself. What did his face look like? She closed her eyes and the image of him was distressingly impressionistic. Her breath caught and then quickened. Adrenaline fed in a fury throughout her body, quickening her heart. Could she still smell him? She pulled Bob’s pillow into her face and she tried to curve her entire body around it, one leg pulled around the bottom edge as if it were Bob’s leg. She’d been sleeping with his pillow for six months, judiciously at first, only sniffing it lightly, skimming over the polyester-filled sack with her eyes closed, conjuring up visions of him as if she were a witch commanding his spirit back. She flared her nostrils to catch his scent. But the pillow, after months of such work, was giving up the last memory of Bob, his oily skin and heavy aroma, which used to make Rocky put her face on his chest and close her eyes.

  Her heart beat too fast and she noticed that her hands were trembling. Is this what a heart attack is like? Should she pray for a secret heart ailment so that she could die too? In the first months after his death, she had tried to find the paths of either impulsivity or resolve that would lead her to suicide, but the connections to Caleb and her mother were too strong and the cords of family would not release her. If she died of a respectable early heart attack, would she find him? She couldn’t stay in the house with the pillow that bore such little scent of Bob, with the dreams that foretold of surfacing farther away from him.

  The well-meaning say that the dead are not really gone, they live on in our hearts. Rocky wondered if she ever said that to anyone. She remembered a client, a tough-skinned woman whose brother died of AIDS. “I can’t stop crying in my dreams, I can’t stop wanting him back,” she said to Rocky. Had Rocky said that her brother would live in her heart forever?

  She wanted to find the client, go back to her and look her up, call her and say, “I was full of shit, I’m so sorry. The dead are gone. I can’t find my husband in my heart. The dead leave us. Death is unbearable.”

  The wind shook the tightly woven nest of vines and trees outside. These trees, shrubs, and vines had adapted to the savage winds off the ocean. Their roots were deep and determined.

  If Bob were here, she would have wanted to make love. He was always ready; an easy sell job. “All I have to do is touch you with my pinky finger and you have already decided on sex. How do you do that?” she had asked him on a windy morning like this one. He would have already pulled her to him, letting her straddle his body. He would have put his warm hands on her hips.

  “This is nothing. You should see horses mate. The stud has no other inclination. Every force within him is concentrated on the focal point of mating. He doesn’t care, I’m sorry to say, that the mare would sooner be eating hay, pranci
ng about the pasture practicing her high jumps. No, he mounts her, sometimes bites hard into her and then has at it,” said Bob.

  Rocky always had the same reaction to Bob’s nature lessons; she balanced between arousal and revulsion. “If you bite me, Mr. Horse, I’m sending you out to be gelded.”

  No, he was gone; the pillow had even given up his scent. The memory of him had slowed her heart again, numbed it back into sadness, and the dog, who had been in the room the entire time, began to pace as if even he had had enough of this reverie. It was Saturday and she was out of tampons, a realization that announced itself with a dark red splotch on the sheets. She walked the dog briefly and drove down to the small grocery store.

  Rocky was in the aisle of feminine hygiene products deliberating over Playtex Multipack nondeodorant tampons or Playtex regular when Rocky spotted Melissa before the girl could duck around the corner.

  “Hey!” said Rocky as she put the two boxes behind her back. “Do me a favor and pick left or right. I can’t make up my mind.” This was an effort to be more neighborly with the girl, perhaps redeem her poor behavior from last night.

  Melissa looked mortified. “Go on, pick one, I can’t stand the indecision. Come on, left or right?” said Rocky, hoping that her voice was light, that this was perhaps funny, inviting.

  Melissa froze, and Rocky knew she was once again going down the wrong path with the girl, but she was unable to stop. Melissa pointed a bluish hand to the right.

  “Ah, the variety pack, a tampon for all occasions. Thanks, track star,” said Rocky.

  Melissa remained in a state of frozen stupor, and Rocky stared hard at her, first at the blue tint of her hands, then at her face. Rocky pulled in her bottom lip and pressed down with her teeth. She saw the evil sneer of the child’s eating disorder peering at her behind Melissa’s thin shoulders.

  “Oh. Your periods have stopped, haven’t they? How long?”

  Melissa jolted out of her shocked state. Her eyes opened wide in savage exposure.

  “You’re nuts! There’s something wrong with you. You don’t belong here,” said Melissa and she ran out of the store, abandoning what she had come for.

  Rocky felt guilt descending on her for coming down so hard on the girl, for slamming her with the weapons that the food-deprived child was not prepared to deflect. She had a big, blossoming eating disorder and Rocky knew it. And the kid thought she was fooling everyone in the drunken state of restricting and hiding and measuring. But it was unfair of Rocky to take a swipe at her if the kid couldn’t fight back.

  Still, Rocky was not her therapist, she did not, would not, be so god-awful careful and strategic and firm and fucking nurturing. She was an animal control warden. No one here expected her to be able to fix this kid. No concerned parent or high school teacher or kinesiology professor would call to say, “You’ve got to do something. She won’t eat.” She didn’t have to take the call.

  But she did not have to persecute her. Rocky had to do something to even the score on her bad behavior in the store. She called Melissa when she got home and said, “Hey, I think I was kind of too blunt with you the other day. And I’m sorry about today at the store. I can be that way. People tell me that all the time. I was wondering if you could take care of a dog that I’m fostering for a few days when I’m on the mainland. Yeah? I’ll bring him over with his mountain of food. Could you stop by and bring in my mail? Oh, and put some cat food out for the cat, Peterson. How long? I’m leaving on Friday and I’ll be back on Sunday. Yeah, I’ll give you the key.”

  Rocky felt slightly better, as if the cruel stab at the child had been partially erased. She wrote a couple of paragraphs in her journal about how she didn’t wish every day that she’d die in an accident, or in her sleep, or like Bob did, suddenly, brutally and without a moment’s thought to those left behind. She had told clients who were grieving that doing anything sometimes helped: writing in journals, talking, walking, or painting their house. Make some announcement to the universe that you are going to continue and will not give in to the pull of grief. Or become a dog warden. Was everything that she told her clients worthless? When her father had died, he gave them lots of warning. He developed cancer of the pancreas, and although everyone said that he died so quickly, both Rocky and her brother said that it was oddly one of the best times of their lives; they had never felt closer to him.

  She gave up on writing in her journal and forgot after a few days, and left it sitting on her small dresser. If Bob had been alive, she would have slipped it into a drawer, as a courtesy to both of them. Without knowing it, she had made an adaptation to living alone.

  The visit to her brother’s house was compulsory. Both her mother and Caleb had said that if she didn’t come, they were coming out to the island to see her and she didn’t want that. She didn’t want this ascetic life disturbed by their caring, by their distress.

  Her mother had flown in from California where she had moved several years after Rocky’s father died. “Why California?” she had asked when her mother announced her decision. Her mother, who had been a junior high science teacher all of her adult life, went back to college to study horticulture at UC Davis. She had recently gotten a job at a vineyard in the Sonoma valley.

  When Rocky brought the dog to Melissa’s house, she had explained again about the food, about the mail. “Here you go, kid, front-door key. Most of the mail is addressed to Resident and they’re ads for Wal-Mart.” She had handed the key over to Melissa, who had been in the midst of doing homework.

  “You do homework on Friday morning?” asked Rocky. It was 6:30.

  “I can’t finish it all at night.” She had her game face on, indecipherable, the good-girl look that probably worked so well with her coach. She was ready for Rocky if she said something nasty.

  “OK, well Lloyd will park himself somewhere between you and the door. He’s still gimpy in the leg so don’t take him running with you no matter how much he tries to convince you. Dogs will force themselves to keep up with you even if they can’t. Know what I mean?”

  “I know how to take care of a dog.”

  “Right, sorry. You’ll do fine. Here is Tess’s number in case you need anything. Do you know Tess?”

  “I guess so. The old lady with the hair?”

  Rocky paused. She hadn’t really thought of Tess in that way, but yes, Melissa apparently did know her.

  “That’s the one.” Rocky left after bidding goodbye to Elaine, who stepped into the kitchen, with coffee cup in hand, dressed for work and with a softer look in her eyes than the last time Rocky had blundered into their lives.

  Chapter 8

  The first place Melissa went when she got home from school and the club was Rocky’s house. Lloyd came with her, happy to pee on everything that required his urine-soaked messages to other dogs. He could now balance on his two front legs well enough to once again raise his rear leg. The cat greeted them at the door and instead of wanting food, she dashed out, between Melissa’s legs. Rocky had told her she didn’t know if she should leave the cat in or out. The answer was clearly out.

  She took in the mail on Saturday. The animal warden had been right. Everything was addressed to Resident.

  It was thrilling to be in someone else’s house alone. She opened the cabinets over the sink; two coffee cups and a couple of glasses. This woman traveled light. All the cabinets revealed the same hollow sparseness. Two pots, one fry pan, nothing matched.

  Melissa opened the refrigerator. “Let’s see what she eats.” One quart of milk, a loaf of bread, peanut butter, grape jelly, margarine, a jar of salad dressing, Newman’s Own Vinaigrette.

  “Well, she’s one to talk,” said Melissa to the dog, who raised a questioning ear at her.

  She closed the refrigerator and moved on to the bathroom. She thought immediately of the girls she knew at high school who threw up. Everybody knew who they were. You can’t throw up after lunch in high school without everybody knowing about it. She hadn’t tried it. She didn
’t have to, because she ran. The girls who threw up didn’t get that part, that if you ran and did 300 sit-ups at night in your room, quietly so no one heard you, who needs to throw up? She opened the mirrored cabinet above the sink and inspected each item: ibuprofen, peroxide, rubbing alcohol, boring stuff, no makeup.

  Then she went into the bedroom and caught Rocky’s scent on a fleece scarf tossed on the back of a chair. She went straight to the dresser, as if it was meant to be, as if she should find it, and she put her hands on the black journal and opened it.

  “Oh, this is good, this is very good,” she said to the dog, reading the first page.

  It was a black book, the kind with blank pages. She had received a blank journal for her last birthday and had not used it once. Her grandmother had sent it to her, a pastel blue and yellow book with delicate flowers on the cover. It was so wrong to write in something that her grandmother thought was good. If she lost more weight, she might be able to write in it, but not before.

  She ran her fingers along the lightly embossed cover as she read the entries that started last spring. She saw the labored handwriting, erratic spiking and pages that had been scratched, destroyed by a pen dragged fiercely across the page in a tantrum. “I’m sorry…I hate you…I want to die,” was the message in jagged lines. She began to thumb her way through the pages, slowly, hungrily, savoring each entry and noting the date.

  July 16. There is no one here to give me caution and I am glad of that. I do not need to close the cover of this book to protect someone else’s sensibilities. I leave it open at night and in the morning, no hand has disturbed it, no eyes have scanned my thoughts. What would it take to join you, my love? Is the human organism difficult to extinguish? You were not. Of all the ways, carbon monoxide seems the best and the surest, the least likely to alert the outside world. You would be furious, shocked, disgusted if you saw me plotting my death. But I am not worried about your disapproval, I am terrified about the unknown, about not finding you if I kill myself.