“I don’t want to be the cause of canceling man camp. I’ll be here when you get back,” she said. She still found it hard to believe that love, if this was love, was not a finite entity. She had loved her husband ferociously and had never considered that another new love would ever have been possible. Yet here it was, pulsing in their hands, both of them vibrating with anticipation.
“I won’t be able to call you. We go up near the border of Canada, and there’s no cell phone reception. You won’t hear from me for two weeks.” He had stroked her hand, tugging softly on her fingers, one by one.
He was an impossibly strange combination of archer, high school English teacher, and hunter. Rocky’s dormant battery of desire revved up every time he came within ten feet.
“We’ll have all summer to figure this out,” she said, with considerable willpower. Here was a man who did not push; she knew that he wanted more than anything to ask her if she had decided to stay on Peaks, if she had decided about her job back in Massachusetts, and yet he did not. She had stood up to leave, and he walked with her to her car, his arm draped over her shoulder. “I’m not leaving without this,” he had said. He held her face in his hands and kissed her long enough that Rocky felt the last of the distance between them dissipating. She made a sound like a moan/squeak. This was a relationship on the precipice, a launching pad ready to go.
Hill was not due back for another week, and he was exactly whom she wanted to be with at this moment. A phone call from a possible daughter of her dead husband’s was beyond sharing with even Isaiah, her boss and friend, at the moment. He would be rational and deliberate. Her friend Tess lived across the island, and without hesitating, she headed out the door with Cooper, jogging the two miles to Tess’s house, praying that she was home.
Just as Rocky and the dog arrived at Tess’s driveway, she spotted her friend opening the trunk of her black Saab. Tess was nearly seventy and had proven to be a solid friend, with the side benefits of being a physical therapist. “I need to talk with you. Please tell me you’re not headed to Portland,” said Rocky.
“No, I was just over on the back shore collecting seaweed for the garden beds. The seaweed can wait, and I could use an extra pair of hands to spread it on the garden beds later. Come on in.”
Rocky noticed the large garbage can in the trunk with strips of seaweed poking out. Cooper’s tail twirled in appreciation of Tess. He pushed his body along the sides of her legs and wound around her.
“Don’t tell me there’s something wrong with Cooper. I don’t think I could stand that, and neither could you,” said Tess as they walked up to her deck. Her faded prayer flags, strung from two trees, snapped in the breeze. She stepped inside her house and returned with two glasses of water and a bowl for the dog.
“It’s not Cooper. Someone just called me, a girl, who said she was looking for her biological father. She was looking for Bob. My Bob. She thinks Bob is her father,” said Rocky. She heard the waver in her voice and felt her recently established balance tipping precariously. “Her name is Natalie. She said that she has evidence that Bob was her father. The only thing harder than saying this out loud was hearing it on the phone,” said Rocky. She sank into a chair.
“Good Lord, you must be turned upside down. Tell me exactly what the girl said,” said Tess, sinking into a cross- legged position on a cushion. “What did you tell her? How can you possibly know if this is true? Did Bob ever tell you this, or that there was even a chance of a child?”
“No. No to everything. I told her that I’d call her back,” said Rocky. She described the phone conversation, line for line. Tess made her repeat it all twice.
“In the rush of this, we should not forget that Natalie didn’t show up when Bob was alive. It is worth noting that she had a lot of years to look for her biological father. Why now?”
“Because she was a kid and probably she didn’t have access to all her records until now. Because she was probably trying to survive,” said Rocky. Why did she say “survive”? Rocky didn’t know anything about this girl. She didn’t know what she was expecting from Tess, but it wasn’t immediate doubt. Rocky pulled closer to the as yet unknown girl.
“Don’t bite my head off. I’m just saying, here’s something to remember. I’m not sure what it means either. Promise me, in the rush of things, that you’ll remember the odd coincidence of death and emergence,” said Tess.
A cloud blew past, and a sudden ray of sunlight caught Rocky. In the single- minded need to talk with Tess, she had forgotten her baseball cap and sunglasses.
“I heard something in her voice, a catch, the way Bob’s voice broke when he heard that a college friend had been killed in a motorcycle crash, this very guarded place that only showed up once every few years, and each time I heard it I wanted to weep. How could this girl have sounded the same?” Rocky wriggled on the plastic version of an Adirondack chair and pulled her knees up, hugging them as if the temperature had dropped.
Tess tilted her head in response to a sound in the dense brush. “Pileated woodpecker. We don’t get those very often.”
“Tess! I don’t care about the damned woodpecker, pileated or not. Someone just told me that Bob had a child.”
“I know, dear. If I were you, I’d grab at anything that smacked of my dead husband. Given what you’ve told me, you had the kind of marriage that doesn’t come around that often. You miss him unbearably, and you think that you heard a strand of him in a stranger’s voice. What are you going to do?” Tess wore a straw hat with a rawhide tie under her chin. She had tucked her considerable white hair under the hat, exposing her slender neck.
“I feel like my brain is sizzled. I’m trying to sit on my hands so I don’t call her back this instant. That’s why I came here, so you could slow me down and help me think.”
“There you go again, imagining that I’m wiser just be-cause I’m older. I can tell every time this happens. I hate to disillusion you, but age doesn’t make you more brilliant. It’s being willing to step into the unknown that will keep you from premature aging.”
Cooper lay between them on his belly, flicking his deep brown eyes from one woman to the other. Rocky let her hand fall to his favorite spot at the base of his spine, and she rubbed with familiarity.
“I want whatever you’ve got. Help,” said Rocky.
“If you need someone else to say it, then I will. Wait twenty- four hours before you call her back. Can you do that?” said Tess, adjusting the string on her hat.
Rocky sighed. “I can try. But I can’t stop thinking about her voice.”
“Let me give you something else to think about,” said Tess. “Distractions are highly underrated. Isaiah said he’s fielded a complaint about you this week. Something about insulting a guy in the post office.”
“I didn’t insult him. I just described, as the animal control warden, what I’d have to do to his car if he didn’t stop leaving his dog inside with the windows rolled up. That’s not an insult, it was descriptive information. People don’t understand how quickly cars heat up.”
“I believe that’s what Isaiah told him, except more diplomatically.”
Rocky said, “How do you stand it? This was a perfectly good island until the population tripled with tourists. The island is four miles around. How many people can we fit on it before it topples over into the ocean?” Rocky sat up and reached for the water and downed the remainder in two gulps.
“I’ve lived here for fifteen years, so I’ve built up a certain immunity to the summer people. Not immunity, they’re not like smallpox. But their reason for being here is different. Just like yours is different. This is your first summer, so it will be your worst, the same way teachers have to endure their first year of teaching. Teachers catch every cold and flu that blows through their classroom during the first year, until they build up a resistance. But you get used to it. There’s a flow to life here.” Tess slipped off her sandals and dropped them on the deck. “You do realize that you are a newcomer and that
we all had to adjust to you. Some very wonderful people first came here as a tourist. Like me.”
Rocky had not come to Peaks as a tourist, more like a refugee, but Tess was right: she had felt a level of acceptance that was slow and qualified, but acceptance nonetheless. Rocky tapped her foot and frowned. She had been sufficiently chastised, and it had worked its magic. Her brain was now only filled to 95 percent capacity with the strange girl who had called her.
Tess said, “Let’s keep moving. Walking helps to soothe the anxious beast in us.” They walked around her house to her backyard, skirting her piles of rocks, stacked in gravity- defying cairns. The desire to arrange the rocks, smoothed by ocean and sand, tempted nearly everyone.
“The back side of my house looks like an archery range,” said Tess. Rocky used her friend’s backyard for archery practice. A plastic- coated paper target had been tacked securely to a triple pile of hay bales on the far right side of Tess’s yard.
“I should post a sign that says, Danger. You have entereD a weapons area. I used to live in fear that you’d overshoot the target and nail one of my neighbors. Fortunately, your accuracy has improved,” said Tess.
Archery was one of the things that had saved Rocky— the repetition, the rekindling of the desire to challenge herself, to dare to learn something so incredibly hard that her shoulders screamed in the first few weeks. She had found an archery teacher, Hill Johnson, and he had prodded her competitive spirit, which had gone dormant after Bob’s death. She had been humbled by the deceptive simplicity of the action: you pulled back on a bow and released an arrow. Starting on a child’s bow, she had imagined that her swimmer’s shoulders would help her, but her improvements had been microscopic; gradually, however, she had moved up. Now she relished the way she had to still her breath, drop her energy to the soles of her feet, and ease her body into the rhythm of slow, exacting power, projecting her vision to a point on the target, then the release.
Archery practice was the one time when Cooper was banished from her side. When she had first found him, he had been abandoned and left with a nearly fatal injury by an archer. Tess had agreed with Hill: neither of them could bear the thought of Cooper seeing her with a bow in her hands.
“There is a predictability, a cycle to the year, and summer on the island has its own color. In my world, summer is orange and purple, unless you add in the horrible loud music played at the dock on Saturday night, and then you’ve got to factor in the strips of red. Maroon, really. This is what my life used to be like, before my gorgeous synesthesia evaporated,” said Tess.
The phone call had obliterated everything from Rocky’s mind, even the loss that plagued Tess. In late winter, Tess had experienced a medical convergence of appendicitis and bowel obstruction. The emergency surgery had saved her life, but her lifelong condition of synesthesia abandoned her in the aftermath.
“I can’t imagine what it must be like to lose your wonderful multisensory world,” said Rocky. “But remember? Len said that anesthesia does weird stuff to people.” Len was Tess’s ex- husband, a retired surgeon. “It’s a poison, and it ran laps in your bloodstream for five hours while you were in surgery. The docs told you that surgery on your intestines should not change a neurological condition, that your synesthesia could return at any time.” Nothing that Rocky said sounded as consoling as she wanted it to. She hoped that her friend’s Buddhist approach to life might offer a buffer to sadness.
“You have no idea how rich my multisensory world was. This is like seeing the world through a black veil and constantly wearing thick leather gloves. It’s not your fault. There’s no way for you to know. You’re right. I should try not to catastrophize,” said Tess, unconvincingly.
Cooper chewed a piece of wood, securing the stick with one large black paw. He trimmed the stick to his satisfaction and delivered it to Rocky.
“You want me to throw this, big guy?”
Cooper kept his eye on the stick and slowly backed up, bumping into a low stone wall that serpentined through the yard.
She heaved the stick as far into the surrounding woods as possible. It bounced off a tree trunk, and Cooper was there before it even hit the ground. The faded prayer flags suddenly fluttered to a burst of sea breeze.
“Dealing with tourists takes a special kind of finesse with the human condition that you may not currently possess, despite being a psychologist,” said Tess. “If you want to deal with animals, you have to learn how to deal with humans again. May I remind you that you have lived here since last October, and some of these tourists have been coming back every summer for fifty years? They could show you amazing things about Peaks and about continuity.” Tess stretched her arms over her head, and her slender body moved like beach grass. “You look like a storm is hovering over your head, and I suppose it is. Stray children don’t show up every day.”
“I guess we’re done talking about my job and tourists, aren’t we?” said Tess.
“Yes. Did the distraction help?”
“A little,” lied Rocky. Natalie’s voice had already hummed into the marrow of her bones.
She did not remember exactly when Bob had first looked at her, dreamy- eyed from sleep, night crust in the corners of his eyes, and said, “I can see a baby of ours.” It was during the year before he died, in the innocent months when Rocky never contemplated life without him, when they woke entangled, talking of children. The idea had pumped low and insistent in her belly. “I can see a baby too,” she had whispered, and she had pulled his hand to cup the soft pouch below her belly button, where a baby would grow if there was one, which there had not been. If Bob hadn’t died, she would be thirty- nine years old, a baby in her arms, and Bob would be an unbearably proud, strutting father at the ripe age of forty- three. Instead, he was dead. He got to be forty- two forever. She was a thirty- nine- year- old widow. And someone out there in the world believed she was Bob’s daughter.
About the Author
Jacqueline Sheehan, Ph.D., is a fiction writer and essayist. She is a New Englander through and through, but spent twenty years living in the western states of Oregon, California, and New Mexico doing a variety of things, including house painting, freelance photography, newspaper writing, clerking in a health food store, and directing a traveling troupe of high school puppeteers. She is currently the fiction editor for Patchwork Journal, an online journal sponsored by Patchwork Farm, an internationally based writing center. Jacqueline teaches workshops on writing and the combination of yoga and writing. She lives in Massachusetts.
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Also by Jacqueline Sheehan
Lost & Found
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The Comet’s Tale
Credits
Cover photographs by Petography / Getty Images, Dominic DiSaia / Getty Images.
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Excerpt from Picture This Copyright © 2012 by Jacqueline Sheehan
Lost & Found with Bonus Excerpt Edition Copyright © April 2012 ISBN 9780062213129
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