Lost & Found (18 page)

First she gave a firm knock on the glass storm door. Then she pressed a doorbell and heard the muffled echo in the house. Knocked again. It was nine o’clock at night, where were these people? Wherever they were, they wouldn’t have taken Cooper with them. She couldn’t picture them taking Cooper for a ride in the car.

Rocky looked at the houses on either side and across the street. The nearby houses had their curtains drawn. She went to the darker side of the house, away from the entrance and the garage and slid around to the outside of the barricade fence and hoped that the Townsends had done the unfriendly thing and presented the neighbor with the side of the fence with horizontal 2x4s. They did not disappoint her. Cooper would have heard her by now. She pictured him with his ears turned toward her and his eyes reflecting green light. She chanced calling to him to let him know it was her so that he wouldn’t bark. She spoke softly.

“Cooper, Cooper. I’m coming in, Big Guy.”

As she got a foothold on the lower 2x4, her nose filled with the smell of fresh lumber. For a moment she was filled with images of her brother Caleb and wished he were with her, giving her a strong boost up with his fingers intertwined into a stirrup. She grabbed on to the top of the fence and hoisted one leg over, felt the top edges of the roughly cut wood grab the inside of her pants. Then she lifted her other leg over and hung ungainly with her legs dangling as the fence pushed hard into her belly.

“Cooper, don’t worry. It’s just me.” She knew he’d recognize her scent as well as her voice. She dropped into the yard.

“Cooper?”

Her eyes adjusted to the combination of night and fil
tered light from a streetlight in the next block. The yard was rectangular and unadorned by anything except several trees and a shed tucked into one corner and doghouse close to the house. She saw the reflection of light coming from sliding glass doors leading to the kitchen. As she approached the plastic, igloo-shaped doghouse, she was swallowed by the total absence of life in the yard. Above the doghouse was the dog lead that ran from a wire strung from the house to one of the trees. A wooden pallet had been placed in front of the doghouse to keep the dog off the ground.

Rocky knelt near the pallet and bent over, sniffing the wood. She smelled his damp wonder, the oil from his skin, and saw the one stick that he had managed to find in the scrupulously groomed yard. It was either a newly acquired stick, or Cooper had been too sad to properly gnaw the stick to tiny bits.

She repeated to herself, “I am not coming home without Cooper.” If he wasn’t in the house, what would she do? She was surprised at how easy it was to decide to break into their house. She went through no moral dilemma, no painstaking choice, just a flicker of concern about possible alarm systems that the Townsends might have installed. This was her moment of redemption for the crime of letting Cooper go and alarms and glass were incidental.

She tried the sliding glass doors. Locked. She had read about how easy it was to break into the average sliding glass doors, but she couldn’t remember the exact method. She tried several aluminum cased windows, and unless she was willing to cut through the tight aluminum screening to get to the inside window, she was roadblocked. She wasn’t opposed to slitting the screens, but she had nothing sharp enough with her
to do the job. She looked at the door leading into the back of the garage and pictured the knob turning effortlessly in her palm, going into the garage, into the house. She willed it so.

The knob did not turn. Why couldn’t they be forgetful like she was, why couldn’t they walk out of their house this one time without locking the house down like the inner sanctums of the Pentagon? It was a simple door with paned glass on the top half. Rocky took off her jacket and wrapped it around her fist, and without pausing, she smashed the pane nearest the handle. The shattered glass sent a muffled sharpness into the air; the glass had hit something thick and absorbent, like a doormat. She shook her jacket and put her hand through the opening until she felt the simple doorknob lock and opened the door. She crunched over the broken glass, noted that the sedan that Jan and Ed had driven to Peak’s Island was gone, and went directly to the door leading into the kitchen, which was unlocked, and she walked into their house. This time she didn’t care. She spoke firmly, “Cooper, come here boy.” She went into every room in case he had been shut in, or stuck in a crate. But she knew he wasn’t there, any dog would have barked by now. She saw no evidence of dog food, no water dish. Everything from Rocky’s ribs down began to crumble. They had gotten rid of him. They wouldn’t have given him to someone else. They would have had him put down. How much could Jan hate her dead daughter? Everything from her ribs up began to constrict and twist.

She walked out the front door. A light across the street went on, and she saw a face look out into the darkness from a front door, peering uselessly from the ocean of light in their house. Rocky got in her car, and as she drove back to Maine, she realized this is what it felt like to lose everything. She
had lost Bob and her life was a continual spiral of losing everyone. Rocky did not think she could face Melissa, but when she ultimately did, she would tell the girl that she had been right; Rocky should never have come to Peak’s Island.

The small bit of New Hampshire that she had to drive through offered her a Motel 6, and by midnight she had slipped off her shoes, wrapped herself in the bedspread, and dove into a punishing sleep. Tomorrow would be her last day on Peak’s.

Checkout time was noon, but Rocky had been awake since seven. She drank a glass of heavily chlorinated water from the tap and thought that New Hampshire didn’t go for things like chlorine. Maybe this part of the state was too close to Boston. Then she sat back on the bed with the spread wrapped around her and planned her departure from the Island. She’d wait until Isaiah returned. He was, after all, her boss. Or she could just leave the truck and the keys to everything at his house. No, she had promised to feed their cat. That was the last attachment that she had left and she was not going to fuck that up.

She heard a voice say, “Feck.
Feck
that up. No need to be vulgar.”

She threw off the blanket and stood up. “Bob? Oh my God, I’m going crazy in a Motel 6.” She knew that it was not uncommon to hear the voice of a loved one who had died. Sometimes the effect was soothing, but more often it was startling, and clearly she was startled. She had been searching for him in her dreams for months, and she had been comforted by the one dream of him that she eventually had,
but the clear tone of his voice in his mock Irish accent shocked her.

When Bob said that something was fecked, there was the barest chance of hope; and one could say it in front of one’s mother. He clearly had not said
fook
, which was a more serious condemnation. Was there hope?

She said to the empty room, “You’ve got to give me more than that. I’m looking everywhere, and hope isn’t in the picture.”

She waited until noon in exactly the same spot, on the bed, in the same position with the bed cover wrapped around her shoulders in case she heard the voice again. The only sound Rocky heard was the coming and going of other travelers, cars starting up, doors slamming, and finally silence. She drove to Maine, picked up the yellow truck in Portland, and headed for the ferry. She had not eaten in over twenty-four hours so she bought a bag of barbecue chips on the ferry and after eating them, wished that she hadn’t. The grease and salt met in an unfriendly tangle in her stomach. She’d pack up quickly before the day was done.

The sky was thick with high clouds, the kind that foretold snow. It was a shadowless day. Rocky wasn’t ready to stop at Melissa’s house yet to tell her that Cooper was now beyond their reach. He’d never be coming back. She would have to work up enough courage to tell Melissa.

It was midafternoon as she pulled up to her cottage. A light was on inside. Oh yeah, she thought, I told Melissa to look after the place. She prayed that Melissa wasn’t there waiting; she wanted a few more moments before she had to tell her. Dread grew in Rocky’s throat and wrapped around her heart. Fook, she thought, Melissa is inside, I can hear something.

As she approached the steps, she turned her head slightly
to one side as she tried to discern a familiar sound. After the startling voice of her dead husband earlier in the day, she was cautious. Rocky turned the knob and pushed open the door. She saw the great black shape of Cooper wagging and twisting toward her with his lips pulled into the biggest retriever smile. Tess and Melissa stood on the far side of the island counter with jubilant faces, eyebrows high, eyes glowing, their cheeks spread wide and high from smiling. Cooper took one huge lunge and put his front paws on her chest and flattened her against the wall. He made a high sound like singing.

“Oh, Cooper! Oh my God, Cooper-Lloyd.” Rocky slid to the floor and dug her fingers into his thick winter fur around his neck. “What are you doing here?” she asked him. Getting no answer, she looked at her two guests. “How did he get here? What’s going on?”

Rocky had never seen Melissa excited before. The girl spoke rapidly.

“I was here bringing in the mail, leaving some cat food out, and this car pulled up. It was those people who took Cooper. They brought him back. I couldn’t believe it!” Melissa said. Her face lit up, and for one second Rocky got a glimpse of how Melissa would look as a grownup, when she was first in love, or standing at the rim of the Grand Canyon.

“You mean the Townsends, Jan and Ed? What did they say?” The dog whirled his way to Melissa and wrapped his body around her thighs. The girl crouched down to get the full effect of his affection.

“The guy said they changed their minds, that’s all. But the woman said they couldn’t do right by Cooper and she wanted to make it right. She wanted to make it right with her daugh
ter. Do you know what she was talking about? Look, they brought all this food and a new water dish and everything.”

Rocky took her eyes off the dog long enough to see that the Townsends had delivered a fifty-pound sack of food and a food dish with little paw prints that looked far too poodle for Cooper. A blue nylon leash sat abandoned near the couch.

“Did you happen to tell the Townsends where I was?” said Rocky, her shoulders falling. The image of Ed and Jan staring at the broken glass on the backdoor mat suddenly bore down on her.

“Since I didn’t really know who they were, I did what my Dad taught me to say. I said you were off on business, or doing business, I can’t remember which I said. But my father said never give people who you don’t know more information than they absolutely need.”

Tess raised an eyebrow at the girl. “Let me guess, dear, your father is a lawyer.”

“Yeah, he is. Did I say the right thing?”

Rocky sighed with relief. “You did great, Melissa. I don’t know why they returned him, but I’m not going to argue with the best thing that has happened since I got to this island.”

Tess slid her jacket on. “I leave this place for five days and the world gets turned upside down. I want to hear about everything that happened, but right now I have to check on a handful of summerhouses. Melissa filled me in on Cooper’s odyssey, but I have a feeling that you have been through hell and back. You look dreadful, if you don’t mind me saying so.”

Rocky hugged the older woman as she left. “I need to talk to you, but I’m ready to drop. Will you come by tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow, late afternoon. I need to make a quick trip
into Portland to stock up on groceries.” Tess turned to look at the two people and the dog. “This place is so filled up with good juju that I hate to leave.”

Melissa stayed longer than she ever had at Rocky’s. The exhausted, well-fed dog dozed on his side and fell into a dream. He whimpered in dream talk, his feet jerking as if he were trotting. Rocky and the girl stopped talking and watched him.

Melissa said, “I think animals dream like we do, but they can’t tell us their dreams, so we’ll never know.”

Rocky paused and looked, really looked at Melissa. This was the first time that the girl had offered something that she had pondered. This was the first of a nest of pollywog thoughts that for some reason at this very moment, Melissa shared. One egg of her self dropped into the air and Rocky took it in. The fragility of the moment was not lost on her; anything that she could say now might be wrong. She tried to remember her old life, when she knew the right words to say to people to let them open up all the dark places on the inside. She stopped trying to think and just asked, “What do you think Cooper is dreaming?”

Melissa tucked one leg beneath her on the far corner of the couch. “Maybe he’s dreaming about running before he got hurt. I heard that people who get their legs amputated always dream with their legs on.”

“I never would have guessed that,” said Rocky. “I would have said food or catching a stick. You’re more complicated than I thought…” Rocky stopped. This could go wrong, she worried that Melissa would retreat again into her thinning bones.

“Melissa, I did something stupid when I was in Providence trying to find Cooper. I broke into the Townsend’s house. I broke a window on their back door. I don’t know what to do. I’ve never done anything like this before.”

Melissa turned her head abruptly to Rocky. “That’s like breaking and entering. You entered, right?”

“Yes, I broke and I entered. What would you do?” asked Rocky. She didn’t want to lose the window that opened with Melissa and she was willing to brace open the portal with her entire body. And she believed that the girl might really know.

Melissa leaned toward Rocky. “Never tell them. Never.”

For her entire career, Rocky had urged all who came to her to tell the truth, be brave, walk through the fear of emotional confrontation, and they would all be stronger for the effort.

Rocky nodded. “You’re right. I can tell a lie in this case.”