Lost & Found (6 page)

“This is nothing. You should see horses mate. The stud has no other inclination. Every force within him is concentrated
on the focal point of mating. He doesn’t care, I’m sorry to say, that the mare would sooner be eating hay, prancing about the pasture practicing her high jumps. No, he mounts her, sometimes bites hard into her and then has at it,” said Bob.

Rocky always had the same reaction to Bob’s nature lessons; she balanced between arousal and revulsion. “If you bite me, Mr. Horse, I’m sending you out to be gelded.”

No, he was gone; the pillow had even given up his scent. The memory of him had slowed her heart again, numbed it back into sadness, and the dog, who had been in the room the entire time, began to pace as if even he had had enough of this reverie. It was Saturday and she was out of tampons, a realization that announced itself with a dark red splotch on the sheets. She walked the dog briefly and drove down to the small grocery store.

Rocky was in the aisle of feminine hygiene products deliberating over Playtex Multipack nondeodorant tampons or Playtex regular when Rocky spotted Melissa before the girl could duck around the corner.

“Hey!” said Rocky as she put the two boxes behind her back. “Do me a favor and pick left or right. I can’t make up my mind.” This was an effort to be more neighborly with the girl, perhaps redeem her poor behavior from last night.

Melissa looked mortified. “Go on, pick one, I can’t stand the indecision. Come on, left or right?” said Rocky, hoping that her voice was light, that this was perhaps funny, inviting.

Melissa froze, and Rocky knew she was once again going down the wrong path with the girl, but she was unable to stop. Melissa pointed a bluish hand to the right.

“Ah, the variety pack, a tampon for all occasions. Thanks, track star,” said Rocky.

Melissa remained in a state of frozen stupor, and Rocky stared hard at her, first at the blue tint of her hands, then at her face. Rocky pulled in her bottom lip and pressed down with her teeth. She saw the evil sneer of the child’s eating disorder peering at her behind Melissa’s thin shoulders.

“Oh. Your periods have stopped, haven’t they? How long?”

Melissa jolted out of her shocked state. Her eyes opened wide in savage exposure.

“You’re nuts! There’s something wrong with you. You don’t belong here,” said Melissa and she ran out of the store, abandoning what she had come for.

Rocky felt guilt descending on her for coming down so hard on the girl, for slamming her with the weapons that the food-deprived child was not prepared to deflect. She had a big, blossoming eating disorder and Rocky knew it. And the kid thought she was fooling everyone in the drunken state of restricting and hiding and measuring. But it was unfair of Rocky to take a swipe at her if the kid couldn’t fight back.

Still, Rocky was not her therapist, she did not, would not, be so god-awful careful and strategic and firm and fucking nurturing. She was an animal control warden. No one here expected her to be able to fix this kid. No concerned parent or high school teacher or kinesiology professor would call to say, “You’ve got to do something. She won’t eat.” She didn’t have to take the call.

But she did not have to persecute her. Rocky had to do something to even the score on her bad behavior in the store. She called Melissa when she got home and said, “Hey, I think I was kind of too blunt with you the other day. And I’m sorry about today at the store. I can be that way. People tell me that
all the time. I was wondering if you could take care of a dog that I’m fostering for a few days when I’m on the mainland. Yeah? I’ll bring him over with his mountain of food. Could you stop by and bring in my mail? Oh, and put some cat food out for the cat, Peterson. How long? I’m leaving on Friday and I’ll be back on Sunday. Yeah, I’ll give you the key.”

Rocky felt slightly better, as if the cruel stab at the child had been partially erased. She wrote a couple of paragraphs in her journal about how she didn’t wish every day that she’d die in an accident, or in her sleep, or like Bob did, suddenly, brutally and without a moment’s thought to those left behind. She had told clients who were grieving that doing anything sometimes helped: writing in journals, talking, walking, or painting their house. Make some announcement to the universe that you are going to continue and will not give in to the pull of grief. Or become a dog warden. Was everything that she told her clients worthless? When her father had died, he gave them lots of warning. He developed cancer of the pancreas, and although everyone said that he died so quickly, both Rocky and her brother said that it was oddly one of the best times of their lives; they had never felt closer to him.

She gave up on writing in her journal and forgot after a few days, and left it sitting on her small dresser. If Bob had been alive, she would have slipped it into a drawer, as a courtesy to both of them. Without knowing it, she had made an adaptation to living alone.

The visit to her brother’s house was compulsory. Both her mother and Caleb had said that if she didn’t come, they were coming out to the island to see her and she didn’t want that.
She didn’t want this ascetic life disturbed by their caring, by their distress.

Her mother had flown in from California where she had moved several years after Rocky’s father died. “Why California?” she had asked when her mother announced her decision. Her mother, who had been a junior high science teacher all of her adult life, went back to college to study horticulture at UC Davis. She had recently gotten a job at a vineyard in the Sonoma valley.

When Rocky brought the dog to Melissa’s house, she had explained again about the food, about the mail. “Here you go, kid, front-door key. Most of the mail is addressed to Resident and they’re ads for Wal-Mart.” She had handed the key over to Melissa, who had been in the midst of doing homework.

“You do homework on Friday morning?” asked Rocky. It was 6:30.

“I can’t finish it all at night.” She had her game face on, indecipherable, the good-girl look that probably worked so well with her coach. She was ready for Rocky if she said something nasty.

“OK, well Lloyd will park himself somewhere between you and the door. He’s still gimpy in the leg so don’t take him running with you no matter how much he tries to convince you. Dogs will force themselves to keep up with you even if they can’t. Know what I mean?”

“I know how to take care of a dog.”

“Right, sorry. You’ll do fine. Here is Tess’s number in case you need anything. Do you know Tess?”

“I guess so. The old lady with the hair?”

Rocky paused. She hadn’t really thought of Tess in that way, but yes, Melissa apparently did know her.

“That’s the one.” Rocky left after bidding goodbye to Elaine, who stepped into the kitchen, with coffee cup in hand, dressed for work and with a softer look in her eyes than the last time Rocky had blundered into their lives.

The first place Melissa went when she got home from school and the club was Rocky’s house. Lloyd came with her, happy to pee on everything that required his urine-soaked messages to other dogs. He could now balance on his two front legs well enough to once again raise his rear leg. The cat greeted them at the door and instead of wanting food, she dashed out, between Melissa’s legs. Rocky had told her she didn’t know if she should leave the cat in or out. The answer was clearly out.

She took in the mail on Saturday. The animal warden had been right. Everything was addressed to Resident.

It was thrilling to be in someone else’s house alone. She opened the cabinets over the sink; two coffee cups and a couple of glasses. This woman traveled light. All the cabinets revealed the same hollow sparseness. Two pots, one fry pan, nothing matched.

Melissa opened the refrigerator. “Let’s see what she eats.” One quart of milk, a loaf of bread, peanut butter, grape jelly, margarine, a jar of salad dressing, Newman’s Own Vinaigrette.

“Well, she’s one to talk,” said Melissa to the dog, who raised a questioning ear at her.

She closed the refrigerator and moved on to the bathroom. She thought immediately of the girls she knew at high school who threw up. Everybody knew who they were. You can’t throw up after lunch in high school without everybody knowing about it. She hadn’t tried it. She didn’t have to, because she ran. The girls who threw up didn’t get that part, that if you ran and did 300 sit-ups at night in your room, quietly so no one heard you, who needs to throw up? She opened the mirrored cabinet above the sink and inspected each item: ibuprofen, peroxide, rubbing alcohol, boring stuff, no makeup.

Then she went into the bedroom and caught Rocky’s scent on a fleece scarf tossed on the back of a chair. She went straight to the dresser, as if it was meant to be, as if she should find it, and she put her hands on the black journal and opened it.

“Oh, this is good, this is very good,” she said to the dog, reading the first page.

It was a black book, the kind with blank pages. She had received a blank journal for her last birthday and had not used it once. Her grandmother had sent it to her, a pastel blue and yellow book with delicate flowers on the cover. It was so wrong to write in something that her grandmother thought was good. If she lost more weight, she might be able to write in it, but not before.

She ran her fingers along the lightly embossed cover as she read the entries that started last spring. She saw the labored handwriting, erratic spiking and pages that had been scratched, destroyed by a pen dragged fiercely across the page in a tantrum. “I’m sorry…I hate you…I want to die,” was the message in jagged lines. She began to thumb her way
through the pages, slowly, hungrily, savoring each entry and noting the date.

Melissa closed the book. She had been sitting on Rocky’s bed and stood up startled, and dropped the book to the floor. She hurriedly smoothed the blankets on the bed, grabbing the book from the scratched floorboards. Where exactly had the journal been? Which direction had it faced? She would be more careful when she came back tomorrow to read more. She would know everything about Rocky.

On the way out of the bedroom, her eye caught on a silky thing in a green laundry basket, a camisole. Yes, she thought, that’s what it was called. It was red, bordered by lace along the top. She ran her fingers along it and without knowing why, she folded it tight and slipped it into her jacket pocket. The dog looked at her from the doorway.

She knelt by Lloyd. Melissa had one hand on the slickness of the camisole as she ran her other hand over the ridge of
Lloyd’s neck. She felt him press his head into her hand and a tremor ran from her tight and empty belly down the length of her thighs. Her cheeks flared with heat, and even though she was alone with the dog, she turned around to see if anyone had seen this thing that had moved into her.

“Come on, Lloyd,” she said with a sense of alarm.

At home, Lloyd stayed between Melissa and the door, any door, at all times. If she moved to the kitchen he gathered himself up from what looked like a deep sleep and repositioned himself. If she went to her bedroom for another round of science notes, he rose up and took his post between Melissa and the bedroom door. Once, when she walked into her bedroom, she looked at the cross-country jacket that still had the red camisole in the pocket and she ran her thumb and index finger over the fabric, pausing at the lace, letting it imprint on her skin. If she was really, really good, she wouldn’t touch it again and she would bring it back before Rocky returned on Sunday morning.

“I will, I’ll bring it back,” she whispered to the black dog.

But her hand dove into the pocket and pulled out the bit of red and in one moment she draped it across her face and a smell that was complicated and warm and demanding filled her senses. Tonight she would put it next to her when she slept and then she would have to move it to a safer place. Nobody could find this. Lloyd opened his eyes.

“Don’t look at me,” she suddenly growled. He shrank to a sadder size and put his head between his large paws.

This would require more sit-ups than usual. She was permitted to eat if she did the full crunches, which had risen to 400; this trouble with touching the red silky piece of cloth could mean 500. She might be able to eat then. She folded a
towel into thirds the long way to protect her backbone and began the trance of motion, hands behind her head, knees bent for rapid, unrelenting crunches. When she was done, she felt worthy of logging on to her special website. This was something that no one knew about, not even Rocky.

Rocky could spoil everything for Melissa. No one had said a word to her about not eating enough until Rocky came to dinner and blew her cover. That wasn’t entirely true; her mother had begun to make everything that Melissa had ever said she loved to eat, and even took to bringing home Chicken McNuggets from the mainland.

Melissa logged onto the websites for girls with eating disorders. She knew her mother would never think to track where she had been on the Web and this gave her the freedom of a world traveler, disguised as a high school girl, an honor student, track star, but really she was a terrorist. Her camo gear included sweatpants, pristine running shoes, two layers of shirts, and sometimes two layers of pants. When she heard her mother go to sleep, the click of the bedroom light, the outer gear came off and bone girl appeared, skin stretched smooth over bone, enough toned flesh to keep her running. On to the websites. Her favorite was www.annierexia.com. The sites of resistance, the guerrilla fighters of world food. How to do without, to exist on defiance with an apple for lunch, to live on the razor’s edge between perfect brevity of body and the hospital. At all cost, said the Web-page star, do not let them put you in the hospital. As a prisoner of war, they can do anything to you, restrain you, and take away privileges. At the very worst, they will slide a feeding tube down your throat and defile you with a disgusting mixture of blended drinks that no one should have to endure.

Melissa shuddered with pleasure. Her nipples tightened at the heroic Web-page girl. She was ashamed for not being as brave, as strong, as perfectly beyond her body as Annie was. She couldn’t possibly be called Annie, could she? Melissa’s friend Krystal had been her starving partner last year, but now Krystal had a boyfriend and she had lost her edge and lost her time to be with Melissa.

As if by magic, Lissa spotted a new flag on the site that said,
Going Solo
. She clicked on it and the text sprang up.

“If everyone has left you, and gone back to food it’s because you have something that they don’t. You are ready to cross over. I’m not stopping. Are you?”

Her breath stopped, and then she clicked off, suddenly fearful. She had a cooked egg white waiting for her downstairs that she would have to eat by tomorrow morning, but the whole day could stay under 700 calories. She could easily move down to 600.

Was she just average, soft, not special in any way? She had to remember to put tampons on the shopping list on the fridge. She couldn’t let her mother know that her period had stopped. This was the third month and she had nearly forgotten to keep up the pretense. She padded silently down the stairs and into the kitchen.

She pushed the hardboiled egg across the plate, separating the yoke from the whites, and with deliberate strokes, cut the egg white into tiny cubes.

She stood at the kitchen table, refusing to sit. She burned more calories standing. Already, her body was chilled, her skin springing into goose flesh. She looked down at her hands and noted the strange bluish color. This was something new. Just like the lightheaded feeling when she stood up quickly.
She wrote her schedule in small letters, numbering each task, listing the amount of time for each one. The cubes of egg white looked like granite blocks on her plate. She lined them up in grids, a small pile for each direction, north, south, east, and west. After she finished her calculus, she could eat the northern pile. After finishing the calc, she let one pile of cubes plunk dangerously into her belly. She waited an hour before eating the next pile and by then she was done with her chemistry and well into rewriting her history notes. She loved the way her schoolwork looked in the late hours of the night, each pile of work lined up perfectly straight. When she wrote, she used a precisely sharpened pencil, so that errors could be erased, and rubbed clean. By the time she was done with her homework, the books were lined up on the Formica counter, ready to be stuffed in her book bag early Monday morning. Two piles of egg cubes were left, and because her belly did not feel expanded, she pierced the rest with one tine of the fork, careful not to touch her teeth. This last group of creamy cubes had to wait on her tongue, pressing them to the roof of her mouth. The cubes had to compress into flat compliance, then of their own will, they dissolved, traveling the long journey over the rough backside of the tongue, down where throat muscles must squeeze and push and escort the flecks of egg to the unwelcome cavern of the stomach. She knew she had to wait, uneasy, and that she had to count to one hundred several times because she promised to eat, to let the cubes stay in her body. The dog, who labored in determination to come down the stairs to be with her, positioned his black body at her feet. His body glowed with warmth and she placed her feet under the blanket of his belly.