Lost & Found (19 page)

Melissa was back at school for a full week before she noticed that she hadn’t gone to the YMCA even once after school. Instead, she took the first ferry home and stopped to get Cooper for a walk. A fast winter storm had dumped six inches of snow and the dog rolled in it like a displaced polar bear.

Rocky had even taken to calling her Lissa and she let her. Nobody called her that except her old friend, Chris. Everything had changed with Rocky once Melissa had helped her through that rough spot. There was a moment when she knew that Rocky truly didn’t understand how to bluff her way through a situation and that Rocky was programmed to confess the tiny little crime of breaking and entering that she had committed. Even the day after Melissa had plainly told Rocky to never, never tell the truth about smashing the Townsend’s window, Rocky had a moment of doubt.

Rocky had said, “I should call the Townsends and confess that it was me who broke into their house. Nothing good can come of lying.”

“No! No! Don’t call them. They don’t know it was you. They live in Providence. My history teacher said Providence
is the crime center of the universe. Why would they think you’d broken into their house? Do not, repeat, do not tell them it was you.”

Melissa couldn’t believe that Rocky would risk losing Cooper again by letting the Townsends know she was a psycho lady crawling around in their backyard.

When Rocky asked Melissa for help, she had looked like some weird kind of kid, or a lost animal, or someone who doesn’t get that being honest is not always the best answer. Before Melissa left Rocky and Cooper, she said, “Now promise me, no calling and making confessions.”

Rocky had promised. And she looked ready to drop on the floor. She had dark circles under her eyes and looked like she was straight out of chemotherapy treatment. Melissa had checked out Rocky’s kitchen before the big dog reunion. Rocky had no food in the house. Okay, two cans of tuna, a greenish loaf of bread, a jar of dill pickles, and milk that said it was best if consumed six days ago. Rocky had terrible eating habits. Didn’t she know anything about nutrition? It had been weeks since she had logged on to the pro-Anna websites, but she remembered the caloric count of every food she had ever encountered.

Melissa rattled through the kitchen at home and found a brownie mix, read the directions, and with exacting measurements, produced a Pyrex pan of brownies. She didn’t mind any of the ingredients except the oil, which if half the high school girls knew was in brownies, they wouldn’t eat it.

Her mother returned home after dark. When she walked in the kitchen, she said, “This house smells unbelievable, Melissa. Did you make something?”

Her mother looked at the tray of brownies, then again at
Melissa and she seemed like she was going to say something, anything, which was going to be too much. Melissa cut her off before she could speak.

“Most of these are for Rocky. I don’t think she knows how to cook. I’m worried about her.”

Her mother sat down without taking off her coat. She slowly pulled off her fleece hat.

“I can’t tell you how good this smells. It’s like our house is beautiful again,” she said quietly. Her mother didn’t say any more and for that Melissa was grateful.

Rocky knew she had been wrong about Isaiah’s intention with Cooper and she left a phone message for him to call her when they returned. When Isaiah called her that night, he said their flight had been delayed from North Carolina.

“Does this mean you’re speaking to me again?” he asked.

“Yes, and it means a lot more than that. It means I’m not going to quit my job, which I was going to do, and it means some really good things happened along with some moderately terrifying things. Can we be friends again? I’m sorry,” she said. They agreed to meet at his office the next morning.

She told him everything, or mostly everything, leaving out the breaking and entering. And she didn’t tell him how confused she had been when Hill said he had slept with Liz, that he had known her. She did say that she was done with her archery lessons.

Isaiah asked her why. “You worried about crossing the bay in bad weather? If the crossing is dangerous, the ferry doesn’t run. And there’s a place to practice in the winter. The VFW in Portland has a crappy banquet hall that they used to let people use for archery way back when. That’s an indication
of how bad the banquet hall was; they had one section with hay and targets.”

Rocky considered telling him everything about Hill, and she knew Isaiah would be the perfect person to tell. He had heard everything when he was a minister, so she wasn’t worried that she’d shock him or that he’d judge harshly. But to her surprise, she had already carved a space for Hill where she afforded him temporary protection. She had told no one about the paper target with Hill’s mark on it that she had seen at Liz’s old house in Orono. Tess had already guessed that Rocky was falling for her archery teacher. She told Rocky that her color was vastly diminished since she’d banned Hill from coming to visit. Rocky quickly switched the topic before Isaiah went down the same road.

“There’s one more thing. Liz’s old boyfriend probably has figured out that I have Cooper by now. I sent him on a false trail, and unless he’s an idiot, he knows what I did. He sounded determined to get him. This guy has no right to Cooper, but he still sounds obsessed with Liz, and now that Liz is dead, Cooper has become his focus.”

Rocky didn’t tell Isaiah exactly how scared she was after Peter drove off. She already saw Isaiah’s eyebrows moving together in a mountain of worry.

“What’s his last name?” he asked.

“I don’t know, but I might be able to find out. I met a friend of Liz’s in Orono.”

“Once you get his name, I can call the Portland police. They’re used to me calling about ridiculous things. But I doubt there’s anything they can do about a man with poor social skills who wants a dog that doesn’t belong to him.” The older man paused.

“Did he threaten you?”

“No, it wasn’t me who he threatened. It was like he was still after Liz, or anything that belonged to her. I’ve worked with a few men who became obsessed with ex-girlfriends, and their ability to stay focused on one person was staggering,” said Rocky.

“I’ve known them too, and I’ll tell you what works with them; a slap on the head. They give men a bad name and we’re skating on thin ice as it is.”

Rocky had still not been able to find out Peter’s last name. Shelly, the receptionist at the Orono Animal Clinic said she never knew it, and she only met him once. When Liz started up with Peter, she left everyone behind.

Peter’s last name came from a surprising source. The Townsends called her to say that Peter had called them right after they got back to Providence. They also mentioned that their house had been broken into and they figured it was Peter. Jan said, “And the nerve of that guy. He called us the next day to see if we had Cooper. I told him he was one sorry son of a bitch and if he came anywhere near here, we’d call the police. He made like he was surprised and insulted.”

Rocky felt queasy. “Well maybe it wasn’t him who broke into your house. Could be a coincidence.” She pressed her lips together to keep from confessing.

“I think you’re right. The police said the same thing. They said the footprints were more like a young boy or a woman.”

Footprints. Rocky decided to throw her running shoes away the next day and get another pair in Portland. She froze and didn’t know what else to say.

Jan’s voice got softer. “How is the dog?”

“He hasn’t left my side except when his fan club is around. He’s pretty popular around here. Thank you for bringing him back.”

“I think Liz would like that. I’ve never been good with animals. That’s probably a sign of me being a defective human being, but I’ve got to be honest with you, dogs give me the creeps. Got bit by one when I was a kid. Eighteen stitches on my thigh. Liz wanted a dog from the time she could speak, but I was terrified of them.”

Rocky pictured Liz longing for the thing that most terrified her mother and she saw how mismatched the mother and daughter had been. And then she remembered that Jan had ostracized her own daughter and she wondered how she would live with that. Given all her options back then, Jan made a lousy choice.

“What made you decide to bring him back?” asked Rocky.

A long silence. Rocky waited, knowing that Jan was struggling with her emotions. “I made mistakes with Liz and I have to live with that. But you were right; she never would have hurt her dog. And he would have protected her at all costs. I can at least let Cooper live with someone who loves him. He deserves that.” Jan’s voice shook. “There’s something missing in the picture about her death and I wish I knew what it was.”

Rocky said, “I know what you mean. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. Jan, did Peter say his last name?”

“I think he did. What the hell did he say it was? Ellis, yeah, like Ellis Island.”

“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.”

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, look
ing 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.