When she opened the door, he was framed in cold air. His eyes blinked in their odd blue and green, and she thought they were startled, registering an alarming sight. She worried that what he saw was stale, rumpled clothing, a tinge of grease in her hair separating it into limp sections. Could he see that she was coming undone? Was it alarm that she saw on his face?
She ran her fingers through her hair and said, “This is my new camouflage outfit. How do you like it? It’s what all the hunters are wearing this year.”
“When did you become a hunter?” he said, softening his face, the right side of his mouth lifting before the other side caught up.
She took in a larger breath. “I haven’t yet. Just checking out the clothing options. I was wondering what it was like to be a hunter, what it would take.” She took one step backward.
“We can start by practicing. Where do you practice?” he finally asked, scanning the area from left to right.
“At a friend’s house. I set up a target behind her house.”
It was early afternoon and they might have an hour or two of strong daylight left.
“Show me where. Let’s go there,” he said.
“Give me a minute,” she said without hesitating, as if it were the most natural thing for him to request. She closed the door with him on the outside. She needed one more moment without looking at him, but this was wrong; she realized that her interpersonal skills were not up to par and she yanked open the door.
“Sorry. Come in. It’ll take me five minutes to get ready.”
He came in and stood in her kitchen with faded yellow and orange linoleum, aluminum strips around the chipped Formica countertops. She retreated to the bedroom, and every sound that she made clattered in naked disclosure throughout the house. Her scuffed steps in the bedroom, dresser drawers opening, a metal coat hanger clanging along an iron rod, the flush of a toilet, the ping of pipes as the sink faucet was turned on. When she came out of the bedroom, Hill stood in front of Caleb’s sculpture, a woman playing the saxophone, her upper torso tilted back in euphoria, her eyes squeezed shut in crinkled joy, her knees spread wide under the folds of a dress. Rocky wished the statue would press her knees together.
He turned slowly toward her. “I didn’t learn to hunt from men. It wasn’t like that. Whatever you’re thinking about hunters, I’m probably not it. I learned first from my grandmother, then later when she was gone, my father took over.”
Rocky rested her bottom on the arm of the couch. She wasn’t sure why Hill was telling this, but she knew that she wanted to hear him.
“Tell me,” she said.
“I learned to hunt early on with my grandmother, and she taught me smells and scat, and broken twigs. She refused to use a compound bow, said it was unfair to the animals. She said anybody could use a compound bow. She told me that if I learned to use a traditional bow, I’d understand the prey better. And I’d understand myself better.”
Rocky pulled one knee up and wrapped her arms around it. “My Italian grandmother taught me to make ziti. That feels a bit tame in comparison.”
Hill put the archery gear on the counter. “She taught me to find deer scat, dried in neat little piles of pellets, and to put it on a flat stone and grind it with another stone until she had a fine dusting of powder which she put on our boots, jackets, and our hats. It masked our scent. She taught me to construct a hunting stand.”
“What exactly is a hunting stand?” asked Rocky.
“They’re different, depending on what you’re hunting and what weapon you’re using. She was a bow hunter, so hers was a small platform of roughly bound branches about fifteen feet up in the lower branches of a tree, a place to wait for deer traffic. She taught me to wait in complete silence when I was ten years old. She claimed that she had never wounded a deer; all of her kills had dropped to the floor of the forest within seconds. It was the surest place to shoot from, both for the hunter and for the sake of the deer.”
Rocky pictured young Hill and his grandmother, covered with dried deer poo, unseen and undetected by the flickering nostrils of the deer that walked undisturbed beneath them until they selected their kill and shot the animals from above. Now Hill stood before her with his hunter’s weapons and she felt like both the prey and predator at the same time, covered with a scatlike covering of insomnia and longing.
Rocky stood up and tucked her hair under a fleece hat. “Let’s catch the last of the light.”
She was glad that they were leaving her house. They had already expanded so fully that the walls of the house were bending outward to contain them.
“I set up a target behind Tess’s house. I never wanted the dog to see me shooting. I didn’t want to scare him,” she said.
They climbed into his truck. “I came as soon as I heard your message. There’s a pile of unopened mail sitting in my kitchen and a refrigerator with bad milk. I got in my truck and came straight here. I’m sorry about your husband. What happened?”
Rocky clicked her seat belt into place and her hands trembled. “His heart. I thought I could have saved him. I tried to, I did CPR as soon as I could get my hands on him. He had this thing that he said, that he married a woman who could save him.”
Hill backed up the truck. “What was that supposed to mean?”
“It was a joke about me being a lifeguard when we met. He wasn’t the kind of guy who needed saving, not like a wreck of a person, you know? That wasn’t it. Only it wasn’t a joke and I really did need to save him and I couldn’t. A couple of months after he died, I came here and then the dog came here and I let him go without a fight, and I want to get him back because he needs me, or I need him. Can we talk about this after we practice? I hate to say this, but I need to shoot something.”
He patted the steering wheel. “Lead on, and we’ll shoot the daylights out of that target.”
They drove the short distance in his truck to Tess’s house. The faded prayer flags settled to a steady sway from a quiet breeze. They were tied on a line from her front door to a rhododendron bush beyond the porch.
Rocky smelled the man scent of Hill’s jacket when he reached over to grab his quiver of arrows and his bow in the truck. Each round molecule of his scent got off on her upper lip and rolled with urgent desire up her nose, dove into her bloodstream, and took the express to her brain. Her body responded in a jet stream of warmth cascading between her eyes and spiraling with alarming speed through ribs, pooling between her hip bones, pausing for a decided message between her legs, gaining speed in flourishing agony down the insides of her thighs and thinning past the knobs of her knees, shooting yellow light out the tips of her boot-covered toes. She reached for the door handle and pulled it open with a click.
Hill opened the gate to the backyard, and it screeched with a heralding cry. He held open the gate for Rocky and she passed through holding her breath, avoiding the chance to inhale any more of him. She pointed to the ringed target fifty yards away, attached to a stack of three hay bales. He had a fresh paper target rolled up in the quiver of arrows that he slid out. “Let’s start fresh,” he said and he covered the old target, tacking it with the pins that held the old one in place.
“You’ve been practicing,” he said. “I can tell by the way you carry your bow. There’s a turning point with students, when they stop carrying the bow as if it will take a bite out of them.”
In fact she had passed over a threshold, faster than she thought she should have, when the arrow, her arm, the bow, and the target all flowed together and when it happened she felt like she had skipped a grade. She had felt her heart beat steady at the command of the bow and arrow. She noted the calmness of the release and the whole thing was over in a few moments and she had wanted it back. She told Hill about it.
He listened as he paced out a distance.
“The kinesthetic memory of your body is taking over. The times of not hitting the target, all the failures, have to be fully felt, again and again to get just one of those moments of flow that you
got. I don’t know why that happened for you this soon. I’ve had students practice for a year before they step into a space where all the parts work. Did it just happen that one time?”
“Yeah, this week. So I shouldn’t count on it happening again soon? I got a peek of something happening in the future, like time travel,” she said.
He put his bow on a small section of stone wall. “I can’t predict how it will go for you. For most of us, those moments are hard earned, inch by inch with a lot of outright humiliation, followed by lagging self-doubt that leaves a taste like rank meat. Then it starts to change. First the arrows hit the outer rings, then a few strays dive toward the center, then that bad-boy voice quiets down to a murmur and a new voice opens up who says to take a breath, release the breath, hold very still. And in the opening between breaths the world opens wider, clear like glass, all seen with excruciating clarity. And suddenly the eye of the target reaches out to you and the archer only has to let go. And I have never told anyone that before.”
He had stepped closer to her with each word and he suddenly reached out and put his hands on the edges of her jaw and into her hair and she wasn’t sure how he had gotten there, whether he had been pulled or he had been shot out of an archer’s bow. Rocky’s hat popped off and she grabbed both of his hands.
“I want to tell you about why I’m here and about the dog and about this woman who was an archer, who used to own him and how she killed herself after something terrible happened to the dog, and now the dog is gone, her parents came to get him and this is such a terrible mistake…”
A look of bewilderment followed by horror came over his face. He dropped his hands and stepped back.
“I can’t believe this. Why didn’t I put this together?” He sank down on the stone wall, put his head into his hands, and then looked back at the stunned Rocky.
“I need to tell you something, and I’m going to do it quickly.” He swallowed hard and pressed his lips together when they had started to quiver. “The world of archery competition in Maine is a small community and the number of women archers is an even smaller piece of the pie,” he said.
Oh, no, thought Rocky, already skipping ahead to a likely conclusion, I am such an idiot.
“The reason my wife and I are separated is because I went to a competition about a year and a half ago in Orono and stayed the night. I met a woman there. I’d never seen her before at any of the competitions and she was good, really good. I couldn’t help but notice her and she had it, she really had something. That flow that we were just talking about? She could step into it like no one I’ve ever seen. Anyone could see she loved everything about archery. I stayed with her for one night at my motel. After that I dragged myself home and Julie knew it the first minute I walked in the door.”
A gust of wind found them and Rocky’s hair blew into her face. She reached down to get her hat and rammed it on her head. “You knew Liz Townsend? Does everyone but me know this woman? Am I suddenly her receptacle for dogs and old lovers? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Tell you what? That I cheated on my wife once and everything went to shit after that? I’m not proud of what I did. And I didn’t want my wife to leave me.”
“No, I mean, yes, you should have said something. But you should have put two and two together about the dog. I told you I had a dog that had been shot. You knew, didn’t you?”
Everything that had opened in Rocky was closing down and it felt like a river was changing course from north to south. How could she have been so wrong about him?
Hill stood up. “How could I have known anything about her dog? She might have mentioned that she had a dog, but we weren’t really talking about dogs then. Rocky, this was a one-night stand. I told her the next morning that we couldn’t see each other again.”
“This whole thing just got too weird for me. Forget that I left you a message, forget about lessons, forget that you ever drove out here,” said Rocky. She wrapped her arms around her torso.
Hill took a step toward her and she wondered how much of a mistake she had made. There was no one else around within shouting distance. Rocky knew she was not a poker face; whatever he saw made him stop abruptly. Hill stopped and opened both his palms toward her as if she were a stray animal that needed reassurance. That’s what she did before she captured a stray.
“Okay, Rocky. I’m not exactly sure what happened here, but try not to blame me for something that happened before you even met me. I did read about Liz’s death, but I never put it together with your dog that was wounded.”
Rocky knew that for the most part, it’s impossible to tell if someone is telling the truth. But she suddenly had zero idea if Hill was telling her the truth or if the world had gone sideways and she was the last to notice.
“You should go,” she said.
“Let me give you a ride home,” he said.
“No. I’m going to stay here.”
He nodded and seemed like he was going to say something else, but then he gathered up his gear and walked away, pulling open the gate with an iron screech. She waited until the sound of his truck faded before she pulled out some arrows, set one in the notch, pulled her hand along her jawline and released. Nothing was right. Her arrows stuck around the outside perimeter of the target as if the center were covered in a glass dome. She tossed her bow on the ground and went to get her arrows. As she approached the target, her eye was drawn to the mark that Hill made on all his targets on the bottom left corner, a stamp that one of his students from high school made for him of a hunter with a fully drawn bow. He sometimes gave students a new paper target.
“Oh, Jesus,” she said. That was what she had seen at Liz’s old place. That’s what had caught her eye when she looked out the window. The target with the stamp on the bottom left corner.
Chapter 27
In Providence, Rhode Island, Liz’s mother smoked the last cigarette in her pack and smashed the stub in an ashtray cluttered with the remains of filtered menthols. Her daughter was dead and she was raging day and night, smoking two packs of cigarettes per day, cauterizing her lungs in the deepest places, and coating them with an anesthetic of tar.
With every breath that she had taken during the two-year strain of not speaking to her daughter, she had imagined Liz and what she’d be doing at any point in the day. Would she take her medication, did she know how angry Jan was, that her mother was right? She had pictured a future when Liz would ask for forgiveness, when the time of punishment would be over, and Jan could have her daughter back. But the side effects of shunning her daughter, not taking her calls, not reading her imploring letters, refuting even her husband when he said, “Come on now, Jan, that’s enough,” was that her world had grown darker and smaller and even the sweetest sounds from birds in her backyard had turned into jagged points of scratching.
She had busied herself with the logistics of death: arranging for the cremation, writing the brief obituary, discovering that the house in Orono had been sold and Liz was only renting it, and suffering the tangle of paperwork that comes with death. The property on Peak’s Island would have to wait for the slow grind of probate court before they could put it up for sale.
Jan pulled another cigarette from the pack and clicked on the plastic butane lighter. The dog was still outside tied to the zip line that allowed him what Jan thought was a perfectly fine run of thirty feet. He had stopped eating his food. He was stubborn like Liz. She’d let him inside when it was time for her to go to bed. The weather report predicted freezing temperatures. She was not impervious to the suffering of others. Liz had loved this dog. Even Jan had seen the cord of connection between Liz and her dog, a braid of fuchsia and green, and fragrant like pumpkin vines, yes something that had slowed Liz’s manic moments in the worst of times.
Jan was drowning in the deep gash created by Liz’s death. This is not how life had started with Liz, this was not the flutter of joy she had felt with her daughter before Liz’s bipolar brain had torn them in half. She closed her e
yes and dared to remember the tender joy of holding Liz in her lap when she was three years old, sniffing her hair and thinking that, like a mother bear, she could smell her own child blindfolded. Hers was the child that smelled like fresh hay, earth, and almond oil.
She felt a flutter near her armpit that was soft like a child’s hair. A tendril of scent caught her attention. It was the musky almond smell of her daughter’s hair when the girl had been small, when the world had been theirs. For one agonizing moment, she felt the cupped palm of a child against her cheek. As if lancing a gangrenous wound, the years of poison released from Jan and the green squirt of liquid shattered. All that was left was the deep ember of mother and child.
Outside in the yard, the dog sat up, tilted his head back and howled as if a fire truck was splitting the night with its siren.
Chapter 28
Rocky hit the redial button. She had already left a message at the funeral home ten minutes ago. She wanted to speak to a person, not a recording. She wanted the phone number of Liz’s parents. The funeral home had been listed in the obituary and that was all she had. The Townsends were unlisted; she’d already tried calling Information. She’d gone into Tess’s house and tried everything to search for them on the Internet. Nothing. Isaiah was still out of town and he had been the only one to talk to them on the phone. As a last-ditch effort, she tried the vet clinic in Orono, but they were closed for two days. “In case of emergency, leave a message for the doctor on call and he’ll get back to you.” Rocky had tried the doctor on call and he said he couldn’t give her information from another veterinarian’s office.
Cooper had been gone for four days and Rocky was frantic. She had never been this clear about anything. She had made a terrible mistake and now she was going to fix it. She hit the redial button for the funeral home in Providence seventeen more times in the next hour. Then on the eighteenth time, a voice said, “Harsdale Mortuary.”
Lost & Found With Bonus Excerpt Page 17
