“Thanks. Sorry to hear about the break-in,” said Rocky. She hoped that somewhere in the universe this counted as an apology.
Rocky waited for Peter’s return. She had never seen obsession dissipate quickly, not with the laser focus that Liz’s boyfriend had. Even a new relationship sometimes failed to dim the target. She locked her door at night and she never left Cooper alone. If she had to go places without him, she left him with Tess or Melissa.
And then there was the matter of Hill. She purchased her own archery equipment to replace what he had loaned her. She took Hill’s equipment back to him. She went to his house midmorning when she knew he’d be teaching. At the last minute, she left him a note. “My dog is back.”
Chapter 32
The first thing Tess noticed about the young man was his shimmering jaw muscle. The two of them were the only people standing outside on the ferry, headed for Portland. January had chased all the other passengers inside. Those bringing cars simply sat in them, hanging on to the last tendrils of heat.
Tess wore a large shearling hat, serious leather mittens that were lined with thick polyester, a sweater and a vest beneath her coat, and boots with wool socks. Winter was a fine time for her; it was the unfortunate people who didn’t know how to dress for the cold who whined in misery until spring.
She guessed he was past a turning point, early thirties, where he imagined he would know something with certainty, and he looked angry that his life was not unfolding in a way befitting him. She glanced at his hands. They were red and sore from the cold. She jumped ahead to a conclusion, she imagined a lover saying to him, “It’s cold out, wear some gloves.” And in the beginning, in the blush of first lust, he’d take it as caring, and he’d say in a blustering way, “Nah, I don’t feel the cold.” Then weeks or months later when she stopped giving as much attention to him in a way that he was sure he deserved, he’d say, “Get the fuck off my back.” And the lover would jerk in surprise and wonder what had changed.
She felt a tug, a draw to the young man and Tess had long since stopped wondering if what she felt was real. Synesthesia had opened up her world of options. She knew the sensation was true enough. She took a few steps closer to him and said, “At this time of year you can almost see my favorite building in Portland. Too overgrown in the summer.” She pointed in the direction of a Victorian house that had emerged from the days of urban renewal unscathed. She knew her small size and her age kept him from being alarmed. Age especially gave her a stealth covering; he would neither feel compelled to strut as he would if she were a younger woman, or engage in territorial battle, if she were a man. Who knew that getting older was going to be this much fun?
She scanned his posture automatically. His head pronated forward as if his brain needed to arrive before his body. Oh, the anxious ones. In her practice, she could help people strengthen muscles, align their bodies into less tortuous postures, but she was frequently daunted by the toll that anxiety took on a person. Living with fear was exhausting. She remembered the days of fear when her husband smelled like oily liquor even when he sat bleary-eyed at the breakfast table with the children. She shook the memory away. Times had changed.
“Cold day to visit the island,” she said. “Were you there for the day?” She hadn’t seen him on the island before, but it was not uncommon to see strangers on the island. The fifteen-minute ferry ride from Portland opened them to the world.
“The cold doesn’t bother me,” he said, pulling his head back in line with his body. He wore a charcoal coat, zipped to the center of his chest. The filling of the coat exaggerated his size, giving him larger shoulders and arms.
“Not much open on the island in the winter, but Stan’s Seafood is open until seven. Everything closes by then. I sometimes wonder what visitors do on the island in the winter,” she said.
As she got one step closer, she thought she caught the scent of something metallic coming off him, the way aluminum tastes if you bite a scrunched up ball of it. She stepped back.
“Business,” he said. “I had business to take care of.” The hinge of his jaw locked shut. She could see his muscles tightening, starting at his jaw and spreading throughout his body. She glanced down and saw that both his hands formed into dry, chapped fists. Finally he said, “I’m working on one of the new houses in town. Lots of building going on there.”
Tess relaxed a bit. Of course, there was a dreadful amount of construction going on. Before you knew it, a stoplight was going to show up one day. She hated being the old woman who groused about change and people moving in. Soon, all of Boston would move here and clog up the tiny roads with their oversized cars. She shook her arms and shoulders with a shudder.
“With every new house, something precious gets sacrificed,” she said.
The man smiled for the first time, his lips spreading like a wet opening to a cave.
“That’s right. Sometimes a sacrifice must be made.”
The ferry jolted as it made first contact with the tire-lined pier. Tess put her hand on the railing to steady herself, looking at the dock. The man turned and walked quickly to the gangway. He stood in line with several people behind him. When the attendants opened the sturdy chain link barrier, he slipped off the ferry and disappeared before Tess could see where he went. She wanted to know, when is a sacrifice needed?
Tess walked to the restaurant to meet her ex-husband for dinner. She worried about hiding the illness from Len. His diagnostic skill had been brilliant when he was young and sober, and not all that bad even when he was in his drunken years. But that was long ago, and he was sober now, and long retired from medical practice. Would he notice that she carried herself differently? The family get-together at Christmas had been the greatest source of her worry, but she had passed through the holidays undetected, or almost.
“It’s the skin,” he once said to her. “And something about the eyes.” He said that he could spot someone with cancer when he looked at them.
For the family visit, she made sure that she moisturized her skin, and at the last minute, she put Visine in her eyes until the sclera were parchment white. Only her little granddaughter, who she had suspected had received the thread of synesthesia through little knotted bunches of DNA, had noticed. She had taken Tess’s hand and whispered in her ear, “Granny, your color has a dent in it. Why is that?” The girl was six and Tess did not want to lie to her.
“What you’re seeing is a tummy ache. Thanks for noticing. I’ll fix it when I go back home. Would you mind not telling the others? We’re having a party, and no one wants to hear about bellyaches.”
Tess did not want to make the child a co-conspirator in silence. That was wrong. She would make it right later, somehow. If it was as bad as she imagined, she would tell the child, “You were the first to notice and you helped me.” Lying to a child was the worst sin, the taste of it reeked of a dead carcass. She would tell the child the truth when the time came. The child had to know that what she saw was real. Tess had to give her that.
Tess’s mind jumped ahead to the dinner with Len. She pulled the flaps of her enormous hat over her ears and walked up the dark hill to the eatery. She’d agree only to surgery, not chemo, not radiation. Sacrifice, she would not sacrifice the end of her life to a drugged and hairless stupor.
Chapter 33
Rocky had purchased a bow with a thirty-pound draw. In the five weeks since Cooper’s return, she had practiced almost daily. Now it was February, and on the few days that were both without wind and above freezing, she practiced behind Tess’s house. On all the other days, she went to the boathouse. On Isaiah’s advice, she asked the club if she could use their storage house. It was surprisingly spacious, with plenty of room down the center, between the boats. She hauled in some hay bales and set them between the rows of boats that sat stacked in neat formation. Rocky stood between the twenty-and thirty-foot rigs on one end and the piles of sea kayaks on the other. The cement floor drove the cold through her shoes after an hour. That was long e
nough for her. Once or twice Isaiah showed up, just to sit and watch, he said, but Rocky didn’t like it when he was there. After two arrows skittered off a hull, she said, “This is like having someone watch you practice the piano or take a bath. I shoot lots worse when you’re here.”
Isaiah wore a leather bombardier hat with flaps over his ears.
“Well, if you’re not going to bring your dog with you, I thought you would like to have some company. I won’t watch. I’ll do some old man thing like whittle, which I’ll have to learn to do eventually as I am getting older.”
Since they’d had a fight and made up, it was like someone had scrubbed layers of varnish off them and Isaiah had grown larger and softer in her life.
“You don’t need to look out for me,” she said. “I think Liz’s stalker ex-boyfriend is gone. It’s been over five weeks. He’s probably gone on to a new girlfriend and has a new set of obsessions. Give me some credit here; I know a few things about the strange entanglements of relationships.”
She set an arrow, drew back, and released. Thwack. Outer ring. Rocky sighed.
Isaiah zipped his coat. “I can see your game is off when I’m here. Either that or you’re just plain terrible all the time, and you’re trying to blame it on me.”
Rocky had her sights set on the forty-pound bow by spring. She felt her arms and back muscles firming. She had returned to swimming at the Y in Portland and her body was beginning to feel like hers again. Last night she had eaten a pile of spaghetti and meatballs.
She guided Isaiah to the big sliding metal door. “You’re right, in a way. I’m not confident enough yet to let people watch me. If I was really focused in the way that I should be, I wouldn’t even notice you sitting there,” she said.
As Rocky watched her friend walk on the gravel path to the parking lot, Isaiah turned and said, “Go get yourself a tune-up with that archery teacher. That’s what you need.”
The door squealed as she pulled it shut. No, she did not want a tune-up from Hill. She wasn’t sure if she trusted him about anything.
One of the overhead fluorescent lights flickered. The thought of spring was a bright speck of light drawing closer. As soon as she could stand it, she was going to start practicing outside again at Tess’s. She looked at the offending light and wondered if she could haul a ladder inside and change the failing tube. The ceilings were twenty feet tall, maybe thirty.
Today was one of the days when Melissa came directly home from school and took Cooper for a walk. Rocky had started leaving Cooper alone for an hour or two; she had to get him used to being alone. She couldn’t be with him constantly.
Melissa. Didn’t she have any friends on the island? Rocky never saw her with another kid. She had seen her several times at the Y, and each time, Melissa had looked uncomfortable, as if she had been caught robbing a bank. Rocky had not said anything to cause a meltdown with the girl since Cooper came back. Could she broach the subject of friends? Was it any of her business? Melissa had looked alarmed when Rocky told her that she was a psychologist and that her husband had died on their bathroom floor.
“Why did you make up a big story?” Melissa had asked.
“Because I couldn’t stand the truth. I couldn’t stand the idea that people would expect me to know what I was doing because I was a therapist. And I knew CPR. When Bob died, it was like all of sudden I was handed a whole new set of skin that was sad and miserable and I didn’t want to be that person. I was sad and miserable and I still am, but now I’ve got a couple of minutes each day when I don’t think of death at the same moment that I’m thinking of my husband. I think of him the way he was, not him dying.”
Melissa hadn’t said anything, but later that night, Melissa returned with a plate of brownies and a note from Melissa’s mother. We are sad that your husband died and that it made you hide from us when you first came here. It is good to get to know you.
Several days earlier Rocky learned Cooper’s leg had gotten as good as it was going to get. His leg and shoulder were stiff when he first got up, and she suspected that the cold weather was tough on him in the site of his injury. She had asked Sam to take another look at the dog and he confirmed the diagnosis. Sam had offered to see Cooper at his house, where he offered vet services one morning per week.
“He’s a good strong dog. Given the extent of his injuries, it’s amazing that the only remaining result is a slight limp. This is where you tell me what a terrific vet I am,” he said.
“You saved him,” said Rocky.
Sam looked startled. “No sassy repartee? Don’t tell me this big guy is improving your personality?”
“My personality needs more help than a canine can offer. But it’s true, you’re a good vet and you saved him.”
Rocky and Sam stood in the entryway of Sam’s house. He turned and yelled to his wife, “Honey, the dog warden is being too nice to me. Something must be wrong; help me. She gave me a direct compliment stripped of irony.”
Rocky heard a rustling sound in another room.
“Don’t get used to it,” is what she thought she heard.
Sam turned up his hands and shrugged his shoulders. “You see what my world is like.”
Rocky and Cooper loaded into the truck. The dog rode shotgun. “We’re both going to be okay,” Rocky had said, trying to be convincing. Cooper had looked over his left shoulder, giving her one of his stunning smiles, full of warm breath and contentment.
Rocky was home for a few moments when she saw Melissa and the dog coming up the road and was startled at their transformation. They both walked with abandon; the girl had dropped her tight control of every bone, muscle, and capillary in her thin body. Once when Cooper stopped abruptly, the girl didn’t have time to catch herself and she tumbled over him. Rocky could swear they were old friends or playmates, apologizing to each other. The dog cringed for a moment and Melissa said something that must have been, “Hey, forget it, my fault.” The black Lab then bounded around her legs and dove off the side of the road to roll in the last pile of snow in a shaded spot, kicking his legs into the air. Melissa squatted next to him, staying clear of his paws that punched the air.
Rocky watched with longing, wishing to ingest whatever it was that they had. They were happy. That was something she had not anticipated. If anything were to happen to her, Cooper would be fine. He’d spend the rest of his life with Melissa. Everybody loved him. Tess and Isaiah treated him like a good brother. Rocky couldn’t stay here on this island forever; her leave from the college would be over at the end of the coming summer. She shook her head; that was the first time she’d thought about the next step, about going home and living her life without Bob, about her lonely bed, about wearing the mantle of widow.
Melissa and Cooper burst through the door. Melissa said, “He knew you were home. He can tell. How do they do that? How do dogs know when you’re driving home even if it’s a different time each day?”
A spigot had opened in Melissa, a faucet for her thoughts and ponderings that had previously been frozen. She didn’t wait for Rocky to answer.
“Their noses are like one hundred times better than ours and their eyes reflect more light than ours do so they can see better at night, and they hear stuff at frequencies that we don’t notice,” she said.
Rocky gave Cooper several hearty thumps on his haunches that sent him into curls of delight. “You’ve been reading up on dogs.”
Melissa stuck her hands in the front pouch of her sweatshirt.
“I’ve been reading about animal behavior on the Internet.”
Rocky made a mental note to pick up a book about dogs for Melissa.
“It’s like they have a different language, like dolphins or whales and we only want them to know our language but we never try to speak theirs.”
The phone rang. Rocky had been mesmerized by the girl who was emerging out of the tight skin. Not that her musings were so extraordinary, but that she was sharing them, she was thinking about something aside from caloric intake an
d five hundred sit-ups. Rocky picked up the phone. It was the post office.
“You’ve got a box here, thought you might want it. It’s from a sporting goods place.”
Rocky paused and tilted her head to one side. “I didn’t order anything from them. Must be a mistake.”
“Well, you need to come and get it. Got your name on it.”
She hung up and frowned. The call from the post office rattled her. Who would send her something from a sporting goods store?
Melissa headed for the door. “I have calculus to do,” she said. Rocky walked the girl to the deck. The girl leapt off, spread her arms wide and yelled, “I do calculus, therefore I am.”
It was the first completely frivolous thing she had seen Melissa do. The leap was crooked and she landed awkwardly, yet she had a lightness that was untouched by the forces of gravity. The moment ended when Melissa caught herself and she resumed her exact and steel-clad posture. Rocky marveled at how swiftly she could go from spontaneous to rigid.
Rocky said, “See you later. Hey, my mother used to say the same thing except her version was ‘I bitch, therefore I am.’”
Melissa gave Rocky a co-conspirator’s glance for two seconds, three seconds, then she turned and sprang off on her young stick legs.
Rocky took the dog and walked the mile to the post office. The package was not from the sporting goods store in Portland, but from an archery company in Nebraska. Rocky checked the name, and yes it was addressed to her. The return address was unfamiliar. Hansen Bow Company, Traditional and Primitive Archery, Allen, Nebraska.
Rocky gave the package back to the postal clerk. “What should I do? I didn’t order anything from them,” she said.
“Could be a gift; maybe you have a secret admirer,” said the postal clerk. The nametag said Marie. “You can always send it back as long as you don’t open it.”
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