Lost & Found (16 page)

Rocky heard the solid sound of a truck door closing. Everyone was gone until the end of the week. Only the girl, Melissa, was still on the island with her mother. That’s what Eileen had told her when Rocky called to tell her that Cooper was gone. Melissa had already informed Rocky that she had ruined a perfectly good existence by coming to the island. The girl had started to be a regular visitor, but Rocky was sure that if not for the black dog, Melissa would have ignored her with precise adolescent stonewalling. But even in her dark spiral of grief, Rocky could see that the girl was shattered when she learned that the dog was gone.

Rocky was not expecting anyone, which meant that this could be a drop-in call about a missing pet, or raccoons on the prowl. She looked out the small kitchen window and saw Hill hefting his bow and arrows, running his fingers through his hair, squaring off his shoulders, and looking at the little house as if he had already decided something.

She had on the same dank jeans that she had worn for three days. Her hair was unwashed, and there was an empty,
unrinsed can of tuna in the sink. She wished she had on clean underwear, which she did not, and that she had brushed her teeth, which she had not done either. She heard his boots on the deck and without hesitation, the knock.

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 real
ized 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 up
per 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.