We moved from Chicago to Oregon and Poncho was my constant companion for hiking, running through Douglas fir forests, and camping. My husband accompanied me for most camping adventures, but I felt perfectly secure camping only with Poncho. He taught me about loyalty, forgiveness, and the pure joy of reveling in the moment. There were times, as he and I followed animal trails in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains, when I became more dog and he led and I followed. And there were times when he became more human, learning the human rules of an Easter egg hunt and following the traditions perfectly, eating the collected eggs only when I said so. I tried to learn his language: a raised eyebrow, a dropped tail, rear end up, a slight turn of the head, a two-wag instead of a three-wag greeting. And he made every effort to learn my language. He forgave me when I came home cranky and unloving and I forgave him for eating a freshly baked peach pie. We were both contrite, ashamed of our bad behavior. He mended and expanded a part of me. I threw a lot of balls and sticks for him.
The second exceptional dog was a great barrel-chested black lab named Spud that belonged to my sister and brother-in-law. He played soccer amazingly well with my three nephews, visited (on his own initiative) a home day care center to the delight of the children, and as he matured, exhibited what I could only call a heroic personality. Spud weighed over 90 pounds and was clearly a powerful animal, yet he never fought with other dogs, instead he calmed them. He once escorted two ferocious Rottweilers from my sister’s yard by simply herding them in the most congenial manner. He looked like a good-humored bouncer guiding the drunks out to the sidewalk. He continually stayed between my sister and any unknown visitor. He also knew how to be careful around our fragile mother in her later years. Our mother regarded him as the ultimate hero after he deflected the above-mentioned Rottweilers when she was out walking an antagonistic ankle biter sort of dog.
In my stories, and in this novel, animals are a presence and a personality. They are a part of the plot. They may be hero, martyr, or rascal, and in the case of the dog that Rocky finds and saves, they often have their own say. It is understandably risky to give a dog a point of view in fiction. It could potentially go so badly. We hear several chapters from the point of view of this dog, and we get a taste of his inner world and the depth of his emotional sensations. Early readers told me that I simply should not, could not do this. But I could no more deny this dog a point of view that I could refuse the invitation to hurl myself along animal trails with my old dog Poncho. The viewpoint was there all along.
But did I imagine that the dog would take such a front and center role? Absolutely not. Much as dogs do in real life, this dog brazenly walked into this novel and persistently revealed his personality until I paid attention.
READ ON
Have You Read?
Truth, a novel based on the life of Sojourner Truth
“Truth rings as true as the original words of the incomparable Sojourner Truth on which this novel is based. It made the hairs stand up on the back of my neck!”
Christiane Northrup, M.D., author of
Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom
Born a slave, survived a free bondswoman, reborn an outspoken abolitionist, Sojourner Truth died a heroine of graceful proportions. But the story of her inner struggles is as powerful and provocative as her accomplishments and could only be captured in fiction. This emotionally searing novel beautifully infuses the historical atrocities of the 1800s with the psychological speculation of who Sojourner Truth really was, beyond her social and political persona.
In a feat of literary ventriloquism, Sheehan puts the story back in Sojourner’s voice, lending the telling a naked, crystalline quality that transport the reader to a time when survival could mean sacrificing little pieces of one’s soul.
Women Writing in Prison, an anthology
Edited by Jacqueline Sheehan
“If courage is grace under pressure, then these poems are graceful expressions under the real pressures of confinement. Poetry’s acclaimed power to liberate is vividly exemplified in Women Writing in Prison; each poem is at once a private act of escape and confrontation.”
Billy Collins, former U.S. Poet Laureate
After working with women in prison teaching writing workshops, Sheehan edited an anthology of their work. The project is run by Voices From Inside, a group designed to bring creative writing to incarcerated women and to bring their voices to the outside world to increase awareness about the human cost of incarceration.
What do women in prison write about? They write about food, home, family, planting gardens, the men who have beat them, the smell of grandmother’s hair. They make funny rhymes, laugh at old boyfriends, long to pee in a bathroom with a door, and breathe fresh air. They write with honesty and freshness that is only lightly edited to maintain their unique voices. Part of the bondage that many incarcerated women face is drug addiction, and they write about this with searing frankness. The purchase of this anthology funds continuing writing programs for women in prison.
Acknowledgments
I called on the good will and generous spirit of others for their expertise. Suzanna Choi Adams, a superb psychotherapist, read for clinical accuracy. Joann Berns and Joanne Blanchard, both physical therapists, offered insights into their profession. Police Chief Paul Scannell, of Westfield State College, provided information about tasers. Lee King, retired Animal Control Warden of Woodbury, Connecticut, and Carol Hepburn, Animal Welfare Officer of Amherst, Massachusetts, shed light on animal care. Tom Dussault, Agawam Sportsman Club in Massachusetts, tried to give me archery lessons, and Linda Randall, DVM, Cloverleaf Animal Hospital Medina, Ohio, spent hours on the phone correcting my mistakes about dog anatomy. I take all the credit for mistakes in each area.
Special appreciation goes to the members of my manuscript group who read every page: Marianne Banks, Kris Holloway, Celia Jeffries, Rita Marks, Brenda Marsian, Elli Meeropol, and Lydia Nettler. The members of the Great Darkness Writing Group also listened with care: Jennifer Jacobsen, Alan and Edie Lipp, Patricia Riggs, Morgan Sheehan, and Marion VanArsdell. I thank Sharron Leighton for her encouragement and Patricia Lee Lewis for the spaciousness of her international writing retrieats. Thanks to Mary Ellen and Jeffrey Zakrzewski for sharing their dog, Spud, with the rest of us. Carrie Feron and Tessa Woodward at Avon Books and Jenny Bent at Trident Media are a brilliant team of brains and heart.
An Excerpt from
PICTURE THIS
By
Jacqueline Sheehan
On Sale May 22, 2012
Chapter 1
Natalie
Natalie had seen more therapists in her life than she could remember. She couldn’t remember a time without them. Therapists come with the territory in foster care, along with caseworkers and a slew of people who control where you live, where you go to school, and when and if you get medical care. And here’s what they’re good for: getting a kid a new foster family when the kid has been stuck with whack jobs, that’s what.
When she was five, she didn’t know to tell the therapist lady about eating only at school. Her foster family told her those were the rules, and she believed them. Here’s what Natalie figured at five: if you were a floater like her, and you didn’t belong anywhere, you ate at school and no place else. There were always rules in life, and when you were a little kid, that’s what you learned all day long: the rules. If you were a bio kid, if you were born from the parents in the house, you ate dinner upstairs with the parents, instead of sitting huddled in the basement on a cot praying that the next day would come faster so that the churning hunger in your belly could be quenched by school food. Natalie wasn’t the only foster kid in the basement; a little boy who was even smaller than she was slept in the next cot. Sometimes they could smell the food from upstairs, and they knew it had to be the most delicious food on the planet. Her favorite aroma was meatloaf, dense and rich. The foster mother made a meatloaf that smelled so good, Natalie wanted to cry. When the food smells came running down th
e basement stairs, the little boy would stick his hand down his pants and hold on to his penis. Natalie didn’t know how that helped him, but she understood that you take whatever helps, and at least he had something, which was more than she had.
She must have said something to a teacher or to somebody. Maybe it was the boy, because the next thing you know, a car shows up for her and the other basement dweller and the caseworker is looking at where they sleep and they are out of that house before you can say “protective ser vices.” Natalie was delivered to another home, and she never saw the little boy again. With the next family, she learned that in some houses all the kids eat at home and nobody sleeps in the basement. Very interesting. She also learned that therapists were good for something. They could broker a deal, and she needed them.
Between then and now, she had seen every kind of therapist. She was officially done with the foster care system now that she was eighteen, but in her time she had seen enough therapists to earn a P- h- fucking- D. Natalie made a study of therapists, watching what made them respond, what made them cool down to the temperature of frozen fish, and what made them sit up and help. Because they were so busy trying to change her, they didn’t know she was studying them. She was sure of it.
Natalie got sprung out of the foster care system when she was seventeen, legally and all. One therapist helped her do it. Her name was Vivien, and she said it looked like Natalie needed to graduate from foster care. Vivien didn’t see how it was helping Natalie to go from foster home to group home, back to another foster home. Vivien said that Natalie didn’t attach well. What a genius that Vivien was. Attaching to a family was directly linked to trouble. So with a little help from Vivien, she dropped out of high school, enrolled in a GED class, and got a job at Subway because she liked their food better than the other fast- food places’. That’s where she met Franklin. Not Frank, and God help you if you called him Frankie. Franklin, like the president.
Franklin did not use crack, which elevated him to the top rung of her choices. Marijuana, yes, if he was in the mood, and a little X here and there, but no crack. And he was awesome on the computer. Franklin broke through firewalls just for fun. He had graduated from high school and went to college for a year.
“The professors were too slow, babe. It was like being in a special ed class,” he said.
One night lying on his mattress, she said, “Can you find people? I mean, suppose I was trying to find someone and had hardly any information, just a name from long ago. Could you find them? I’m looking for my real father.” She had on his baseball cap and nothing else.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Franklin said. “You just watch me, watch and learn.”
Which is exactly what Natalie did. She studied what Franklin did. It would take time to learn everything that he knew, but she didn’t need to know everything. Sometimes you get lucky or all the stars turn in the perfect direction, and it only happens once every thousand years. And sometimes you’re like Natalie and you know how to find a good man like Franklin, good enough to get the job done.
Chapter 2
Peaks Island, Maine
“Is this Roxanne Pellegrino?”
Rocky’s landline had rung, which almost never happened. Isaiah, her boss, had insisted that she get a cell phone for her job. And who ever called asking for Roxanne? Nobody, except for solicitors from nonprofits and political campaigns. Cooper, her black Lab, regarded a ringing phone as only one notch down from a knock on the door. He roused from his morning nap at Rocky’s feet to heightened attention.
“Yes. Who’s calling?”
Rocky was waiting for a carpenter scheduled to replace some rattling windows in her rental cottage, but a carpenter was less likely to call, more likely to show up.
“You don’t know me. . . .” The voice was young, a girl with her voice stuck in her throat, never hitting the full registers, staying high and timid. An unlikely carpenter.
“Are you calling about the windows?”
“Windows? No. I got your number—”
“If this is for a fund drive or donation, I want you to take me off your call list,” said Rocky. It wasn’t that Rocky disliked donating to libraries or animal rescue organizations, and she considered explaining that to the caller, but she didn’t like being called. She didn’t like the membrane of this fragile, tiny house being punctured by the outer world.
“I’m not selling anything. I’ve been looking for my father, my biological father. If everything that I learned is true, then Robert Tilbe is my father. Is he there? I’d just like to talk with him.”
The floor fell away from under Rocky’s feet and left her dangling in midair with a thudding pain in her chest. The barrel- chested black Lab stood up, ears alert, sensing alarm. It had been well over a year, a year and two months, since her husband, Bob, died. After his death, she had methodically informed Social Security, the banks, the credit card companies, the retirement accounts, the entire world that had documented Bob’s life with accounts and file folders. There had been unending layers of Bob’s identity: alumni associations, reminders from the licensing board for his veterinarian’s license, even the Red Cross still wanted him to donate blood.
But it had been months since she’d had to say to anyone, “I’m sorry. You didn’t know. He died. Yes, suddenly. Thank you. We’re all sorry.” That’s what she had to say to old friends who emerged from his past, people she hadn’t known. Every time she had to announce his death again, the words sliced through her and she was pulled back to the months after his death when she had fallen into a bottomless pit of grief. No one had called looking for a father, until now.
“Who are you?”
“Natalie. Could you leave him a message? Tell him I don’t want anything from him. It’s not like that. I just want to talk to him. If he’s not there, can I leave my number?”
Rocky took a breath and her feet connected with the floor again. “My husband died over a year ago.”
Even as she said it, she knew this would never be enough. The girl had opened a rusty can, and closing it would be impossible.
The girl chugged out a few sounds, hard consonants mostly, unconnected to words, the brittle beginnings of sentences, started and abandoned. The clatter of sounds struck Rocky in the chest. A note, a familiar note among the rest. It was a thread of Bob, a way that he had moved his lips, the way he could make the harshest words sound like a brush of velvet, a way of moving his tongue.
“Where are you? Where are you calling from?”
“Worcester, Mass. Do you know where that is?”
Rocky recognized the adolescent naïveté, the girl thinking that Worcester was an obscure location to someone in Maine, as if it were on the opposite side of the globe.
“Yes, I do know where it is. I’m from Massachusetts. I’m not sure how I can help you. You must have him confused with someone else. My husband never mentioned anything about a child. We told each other everything.” The bile of sorrow rose up her throat.
“Are you just saying he’s dead to get rid of me? Please, he can’t be dead. I promise I don’t want anything, not money, and I won’t make any trouble for you. Maybe he didn’t know. I mean, that happens with men. But I just turned eighteen, so I’m an adult now, and I have some of my records, my birth records, and his name is on one of them.”
Rocky saw a tsunami rising up, reverberating from the shifting of Bob’s tectonic plates. Before a killer wave strikes, the ocean draws out, sucking water, fish, seaweed, all life, including oxygen, along with it. Rocky’s tender hold on the new life she had built on Peaks Island, the one where she didn’t think of Bob every second, was sucked under, and she struggled to find a foothold.
“What do you want?” she asked. She slid down onto the floor, her back pressed against the fridge. Cooper came to her side, pressing into her, and put his head on her shoulder, an uncharacteristic move even for this highly expressive dog.
“I want to know who I am, where I come from. Medical stuff too. Yo
u know, did he have diabetes or something that I need to know about. Um, how did he die? I should know that.”
The certainty of meeting with the girl had solidified before Rocky had exhaled. She had to put a face on the voice. If there was any chance that a part of Bob existed, surely she could tell right away by looking at the girl. If Bob was the father, there would be a hint of him in her eyes, bone structure, the big smile; surely Rocky could sense his DNA. The desire to see the girl was suddenly overwhelming, but a small voice in her head, barely audible above the roar of possibility, urged her to step back.
Using every bit of strength she had, she said, “Give me your number. I promise to call you back. I’m in the middle of something right now.”
Hill had started as her archery teacher, prodding her competitive spirit back to life in the dark months of autumn after Bob’s death. Rocky had dipped and dodged Hill’s steady advance since late winter, and now, by the last week of June, she felt like the full surge of the Maine rivers, bursting with snow-melt from a heavy winter, pounding with new life. They both knew it, and the sweet anticipation was almost too much for her. Before Hill had left for his annual camping trip with his friends, he had said, “I don’t have to go to man camp this year. I’ve gone camping with these guys plenty of times. We drink beer, sit around the fire, stay up too late, eat way too much bacon for breakfast, and only as a sidebar do we actually do any archery. I’d rather be with you.” They had been at his house, one week before the school year ended. Hill had a smaller pile of homework to grade than usual. They sat across from each other at his kitchen table, and he had put both of her hands in his, stretching across the table. His crooked smile was imperfect and glorious, and his voice slid along Rocky’s lean torso. Without thinking, she extended her toes out and touched his shinbone through his pants, her toes sliding up and down.
Lost & Found With Bonus Excerpt Page 24
