Lost & Found Read online

  She knew it was time to dispose of the ashes and she was sure she knew what Bob would have wanted. Or had he only meant it in jest? Even after eight years of marriage, she sometimes missed the giveaway twitch of his eyelid that meant sarcasm or irony. But she believed he was clear about cremation. He said that he had seen enough bodies: dog bodies, cats, horses, iguanas, cockatiels, all of them, and that when the spirit was gone, the body was done. He had stood in the bathroom, watching Rocky as she bathed.

  “We recycle, right? We bundle up our newspapers, bring them to the recycling center where the big trucks haul them off and they get ground up and made back into some other kind of paper. Make me elemental when I die. Make me into dust, bone meal, plant food.” Rocky had loved watching him orate naked, his soft penis flopping side to side as he gestured with his toothbrush.

  Well, that had been clear enough and she hadn’t been left to decide on her own. She knew. It was the disposal part that made her pause. Had he really meant what he said on several occasions?

  “Toss me in the fooking fake fried clam vats! Wouldn’t that be something? Clog up the machines. Call in the Health Inspectors! I’d be performing a public service.” Bob treated the greasy restaurant like it was a drug dealer; the place was despicable, unless he craved what they offered.

  Rocky drove to Johnny’s Drive-In with the ashes divided into two plastic baggies in the seat next to her. It was midafternoon and the owner, a regular golfer, was just teeing off at the municipal course. It was a well-known fact that the owner rarely worked, and he had bragged to Bob, during a rabies clinic, that afternoons were meant for golfing and not working. She slipped the bags into her jacket pockets.

  “I’m from the health department and I need to make an inspection,” she lied and flashed her university card at the high school boy behind the counter. She walked around the counter and opened up the walk-in refrigerator.

  “Looks good, everything looks fine.” She scribbled notes on a legal pad. A customer came in and the boy turned his attention from Rocky. She walked directly to the deep-fry machine. She had never been this close to one before and she thought it looked dangerous. She considered that the high school kids who worked here were in peril. She pulled the two bags from her pockets and emptied the remains of Bob into the fryer.

  The deep fryers flared when Bob was dropped in. The counter boy turned and looked at her.

  “Everything’s fine back here, just doing a fryer test,” she said.

  Now that the last of Bob was deep-fried, hot and salty, she didn’t want Johnny to change the oil right away. Customers who came for the solace of hot, greasy food would taste the fooking, almighty sweetness of Bob. If they were sad, if their dog had been put down, if they needed the salty sweetness of a momentary cure, they had come to right place.

  It was not until she walked in the side entrance of her house, stepped into the kitchen, and saw the urn on its side on the counter, that she realized what she had done. She clutched the urn to her stomach and pressed hard. Deep howls emptied out of her and jerked her body as if her tendons had sprung loose. Each blast of sound battered her until she wondered if her neck would snap. In the end, Rocky lay on the floor with the urn and saw the boundary land of madness open up before her and felt a seductive pull.

  Chapter 2

  When Bob had died, the brushed cotton sheets had been on their bed for one week. Only one week of precious scents left on their bed, one week of his head pressing deeply into his pillow, leaving an invisible impression. She wished she had not been so concerned about sheets needing to be laundered when Bob was still alive. They had argued about it since the day they had moved in together when Rocky was still in graduate school and for the eight years of their marriage.

  “How dirty can sheets get in one week, or two weeks? We shower, we’re clean people. It’s not like we’re sheep dogs,” Bob had argued.

  Over four months had passed. The new fall semester had started and this was the time of the year that Rocky had always loved. But all she could think of was preserving Bob’s scent on his pillowcase. The sheets had not been the same because her scent, skin cells, and hair were mixed in; it was not pure Bob. She had reluctantly changed the sheets after a month, but Bob’s pillowcase remained unwashed. She panicked at the thought of his scent evaporating completely.

  Every morning, she covered the pillow with white newsprint, pulled from an unused roll she got from the local newspaper. She imagined the skin cells that Bob had rubbed off in his fitful sleep were still there, bits of his DNA, and she was desperate to keep them. She pictured tiny cells, atoms really, all spread out on the pillowcase and she wanted the newsprint to keep them safe. She had her own pillow, but Bob’s pillow was placed next to hers and she chanced a stroke or two in the night, a light sniff to catch his essence during the long hours until sleep came. She dreaded the day that the pillowcase would be empty of his smell. That would be worse than his death, or like dying again.

  She kept three of his flannel shirts and one gray cashmere sweater. The rest of the clothing was stuffed into black plastic bags and taken across the state line into New York. She didn’t want to see any local people wearing his clothes, not that she begrudged them anything, she just didn’t want to see the town suddenly dressed as her dead husband. Dead husband. Not like the live one.

  The clerk at the Salvation Army store said, “Do you want a receipt for taxes?”

  Rocky looked at the four black plastic bags, lumpy with Bob’s clothes. “These are my husband’s things. He died. His heart was bad. I didn’t know about his heart.”

  She wanted the clerk to know all this about the clothes. That they weren’t just clothes that someone got tired of, or grew too fat to wear. The world would never be the same again.

  “Do you want a receipt?” the clerk asked again, with a hint of impatience. The woman shifted her weight to one hip and sighed.

  “Yes I do. I want a receipt.” Rocky felt the crush of the clerk’s coldness start at her brain and then descend like a thick poison throughout her body. She did not leave the house again for three days.

  Fall semester started again and Rocky returned to her job at the university in western Massachusetts. She was a psychologist at the counseling center and she lasted two weeks before the director asked her to come into his office. He asked her if she needed more time. He told her that several students reported that Rocky had gotten up in the midst of a therapy session and stared out the window. One student had apparently stayed for the full fifty minutes watching Rocky’s back, and then left. Rocky told him about the clerk at the Salvation Army. She did not tell him about Johnny’s Drive-In.

  “The strange thing about you is that you expect store clerks to understand your grief instead of opening up to people who care about you. Did you really expect a clerk at Salvation Army to be an empathetic angel? She was probably tired, horribly paid, and afraid of your sadness. We are all afraid of someone else’s grief,” said Ray Velasquez. He was older than Rocky, closing in on fifty.

  Rocky grabbed a hunk of her long dark hair and rubbed it between her thumb and forefinger. “I thought just getting in my car and coming to work was such an accomplishment. But I can’t remember why any of this matters. I can’t remember how I ever did therapy. My brain has been deleted.”

  They agreed that the university could give her a year’s leave of absence. She was guaranteed her job when she returned. “You know that work can sometimes be the best friend after a death,” he said. “It can give you structure. Are you sure about this?”

  “I’m not sure about anything, but I know that I can’t possibly help anyone right now,” she said. She did not add that she was still awake every night until two A.M. and awake again at three A.M.

  She and Ray had worked together for six years. Rocky had interviewed with the University Counseling Center after floundering in private practice for the first few years after graduate school. When the HMOs started haggling with her about how long to treat a person wi
th depression or panic attacks that turned people into prisoners in their home, she knew that she would abandon her career if she had to keep dealing with insurance companies. University counseling centers provided therapy and there was no HMO, no exchange of money between client and therapist. The university paid Rocky a salary, smaller by far than private practice, but the joy of not dealing with the HMOs was beyond price.

  Cutting her hair was the last project before closing the house in the foothills of the Berkshire Mountains and heading east to the coast. She had left it long, partly in defiance of the more professional, crisper look, and partly because she and Bob loved it. It flapped like a dark curling flag when she let it loose. When she braided it, the rope of hair hung powerfully between her shoulder blades.

  Without Bob her hair grew sad. The summer had always been the hardest time for her long hair; it spent most of the steamy months of July and August twisted and knotted on top of her head with several chopsticks. At the memorial service, she wore it tightly braided and it already felt wrong.

  The Honda wagon was packed mostly with winter clothing, her own bedding, and Bob’s pillow. For all of their years as foster pet owners, they had only one full-time pet and that was Gremlin, the cat. This had allowed them to provide temporary shelter to many animals that Bob brought home, all desperate, all injured. Gremlin had helped nurse those animals that could tolerate his rasping lick; his nursing skills were famous at the clinic. After Bob died, Gremlin, who was a stout twelve years old, grew restless and spent longer and longer periods of time outdoors. Finally, in mid-August, he did not return. Rocky suspected that the marauding coyotes had finally nabbed Gremlin, waiting him out, sensing the slimmest change in his ability to run away. Other neighbors on their road put up computer-generated signs about their missing tabbies as well. The coyotes had come in and made a clean sweep. She wanted the coyotes to know that Gremlin went willingly; that they had not been so masterfully cunning. Gremlin was looking for Bob. Animals do that; predators and prey walk mercifully together through life. When deer or cats lose their strength and nimbleness, predators will oblige and give them a swift death. Rocky wondered who would oblige her. She envied Gremlin. As soon as she thought this, she wondered if this is what it felt like to step off the shores of reality—and would there be a way out for her as perfect as Gremlin’s exit?

  Rocky wanted a ceremony of her own to mark Bob’s death. She turned on the light in the bathroom and peered at her reflection. The memorial had been a ceremony, the eulogy by Bob’s business partner had been a ceremony; she wanted a ceremony. Some Native American cultures cut their hair whenever there is a death, a year’s worth of hair, about six inches. She decided that Bob’s death deserved more than one year’s worth of grief. She looked in the mirror and pulled the dark, tightly curled hair with one hand and cut it at jaw level. She held the detached hair in her hand and saw the equivalent of four-years’ worth of grief hanging from her hand. The act of cutting her hair did not alter the metallic taste in her mouth that lingered since Bob’s death, nor the way her senses were changed, as if they belonged to someone else.

  Bob once said that she had African hair. “No, really,” he said. “The Italian part of your family probably has ancestors from across the Mediterranean. It just makes sense.”

  She had to agree, and pictured old sailors in her family tree living on the northern shores of Africa, mingling sweat, sperm, ripe eggs, and genetic coding for hair that would never be straight. Her father had been mildly outraged by the suggestion and unnerved by Bob’s clinical observations of ethnic groups crossing boundaries.

  She cut it all off at jaw length and her dark hair stuck out expectantly, so she cut more, making the top shorter. She did not exactly recognize herself. “I don’t know who you are,” she whispered into the mirror, speaking close enough to leave a circle of fog on the glass.

  She swept up the hair, put it in a paper bag, and released it over her September garden. The weeds in the garden did not tempt her as they had before. She saw them differently this year.

  “I want them to grow from beginning to end, uninterrupted,” she said when her brother had come by for the key.

  The deal was that Rocky would call her brother, Caleb, when she got a place. They were only two years apart and he had hovered since Bob died.

  “Let me drive you out there and you can pack some more stuff,” he offered as he watched Rocky tossing her hair into the garden.

  “No. Everything I need fits in my car. Rent the house if you can, send me half the rent money. I’ll write,” she said, rubbing her newly shorn hair, feeling naked without the weight of it.

  Caleb bent down and yanked a clump of crabgrass that threatened to choke out a thin group of chrysanthemums. “Look, I promised Mom that I’d drive out with you. She’s worried about you. You know how she was after Dad died, and she thinks you’re one step from the loony bin.”

  Caleb sounded uncomfortable with the switch in roles with his sister. She had been the one to comfort him and urged him on through the special-ed classes where all kids got tossed who had learning disorders. She had defended him when schoolyard bullies tried to tease him about the resource room. But in more ways than one, he had inspired her to learn about the brain, how memory works, why trauma takes some people by the throat and other people churn through it like a slow, steady tugboat.

  Caleb had the same thick hair as Rocky, only his was lighter, nearly golden when he had been a child. His lack of facility with arranging numbers and abysmal spelling turned out to be overshadowed by his genius with color and art and a willingness to work hard. In the warm months, he painted houses; in the winter he worked in his pottery studio making clay musicians who wailed on saxophones and trumpets. Rocky took her favorite with her, a woman leaning impossibly far back, hair struck by an invisible wind, fingers spread out on the pads of a saxophone, eyes squeezed shut with ecstasy. Rocky rolled the sculpture in her comforter and put it on the passenger seat.

  “You want me to feel better and I may never be better. This is the way I am now,” she said.

  She put her hand on his sleeve and squeezed his arm. They were too close to hug all the time and besides Rocky had long sensed a discomfort in Caleb when she tried to hug him. Bob had explained it to her.

  “It’s because he probably peeked at you in the shower when he was fourteen and he couldn’t help but fantasize about you in the only way that addled fourteen-year-old boys do. He’s still a little embarrassed. He’ll get over it by the time he’s sixty.”

  Rocky let go of his arm. “I’ll call you when I get a place. I’m staying at a motel until Columbus Day, when the season is over. I promise.”

  She avoided the big roads like the Mass Pike and instead took side roads, ambling east and north to Portland. She had called ahead and made a reservation on the Casco Bay ferry. Taking a car on the ferry was an entirely different matter than just walking on. Reservations were required. She was now one of the purposeful people who drove a car on the ferry, clearly not a tourist, a day-tripper. She knew she appeared to have a reason for being, and the absurdity of her appearance felt hollow. In reality she had no reason to stay, no reason to go and felt so untethered that if she had not held tight to the railing, the breeze could have picked her up.

  She had only been to the island once, long before she met Bob, and the memory stayed with her like a beacon. Her family had driven to Nova Scotia for a vacation. While Rocky remembered little of Nova Scotia at age ten, she vividly recalled an afternoon stop in Portland and an impulsive side trip on the ferry to Peak’s Island. They stayed long enough for Rocky and Caleb to climb on the rocks along the shore and eat hot dogs before heading back, but long enough for Rocky to hear her mother say, “Do you think people on an island ever worry?”

  Her father answered. “They fish a lot. How much can you worry if you fish?”

  The family never returned, and Rocky didn’t know if anyone else even remembered the day the way she did, the way it stood bath
ed in sunlight, full of hope. It was not much to hang on to, but Rocky drove straight off the ferry and into the flicker of memory.

  The few weeks in the motel overlooking the ferry dock disappeared into mist. Rocky walked the beaches and the inner trails and noticed as the days went by that the crowds of tourists thinned, one by one until after Columbus Day, and a quiet settled on the island. The air, as if on command, turned cool and the mornings required a jacket. She read the local paper at Stan’s Seafood Diner. She noticed the job announcement after she heard a waitress point it out. “Animal Control Warden,” said the waitress. “We haven’t had one of those all year. Budgets must be looking up.”

  Rocky folded the paper in half and asked the waitress what she knew about it. She had on a shirt that said University of Southern Maine.

  “You need to talk to Isaiah Wilson, everybody knows him. Tell him you heard about it from me. He and my father are old friends.” Her name was Jill and she looked like the shirt belonged to one of her kids.

  Isaiah was the director of public works on the island, a former Methodist minister, and currently a substitute shop teacher over in Portland, when they were desperate. Jill had supplied the essential background on him. Rocky went directly to his office and filled out an application. She wasn’t sure what she was doing, but she felt like she was peeling off her old self and stepping out of her skin.

  To apply for the municipality on the island, Rocky had to give a reference and a job history. She paused after writing in her name, Roxanne Pelligrino, and held the pen still in the air, and finally wrote the truth…psychologist, and gave Ray as a reference. Isaiah looked at the application and his forehead wrinkled.

  Rocky explained. “Before you say anything, I want you to know that my husband was a veterinarian. When he was starting his practice, I helped him in the evenings with the animals that had to stay overnight in the clinic. I learned how to handle sick animals and I can tell which ones will bite and which ones won’t. But if you hire me, I want my personal life to be private. I don’t want to be a psychologist here. I need to start over.”