Lost & Found Page 4

  “They’re harmless. And useless. He’s an English professor, he told me. He asked me about the oil burner like it was a rocket or something. I’m going over there again to give him another lesson in how to run it. Guess they don’t have those in Indiana.”

  “Thanks. If Mom calls you to check up on me, tell her that you talked to me and I’m okay. Will you do that? I know she’s going to call you.”

  “I should tell her that you sound like shit and you took a job that you know nothing about. Would you at least go get a book that tells you how to recover animals?” said Caleb before he signed off.

  Rocky met Tess in the only bookstore on the island, in the nonfiction section, when Tess turned to her and said, “During the winter people on the island either drink too much or read too much. Which are you?”

  Rocky wasn’t sure she’d do either and wondered if those were her only choices. She had come to the bookstore to get a book on wildlife of the eastern shores, and ended up getting Peterson Field Guides’ Mammals of North America, a broader selection.

  She wondered why this woman would ask such a strange thing. Had she let slip her secret somehow, had she worn it on her face that she might need to drink? Could this woman know that she couldn’t save her own husband when she had the chance, that she couldn’t make him breathe again as he lay on the bathroom floor with shaving cream still thick on his neck?

  “Oh, you’re the new one. Maybe you’ve thought of something else to do over the winter.” She put her hand on Rocky’s arm and squeezed it for a second. No one had touched her since she had arrived, other than Isaiah who had shook her hand. Rocky pulled her arm away.

  “Welcome to the island. People mostly come here for the summer and leave for the winter. Guess that makes you an opposite. I’m a caretaker for some of the houses over the winter and manage a couple of rental properties in the summer. Let me know if I can help you get acquainted,” she said. She wrote her name and number on a sales receipt.

  Rocky took her book home and began to study about the only animal that she had thus far encountered, a cat. Felis catus. The coat is shed and regrown every spring and fall, gestation is fifty-eight days (that part she had known because Bob lamented the reproductive capability of cats) and that cats will refuse to learn something that is not to their advantage. Her own adopted cat demonstrated this by refusing to stay indoors during the day. She arrived at the sliding glass door each evening demanding to be let in and campaigned as heavily each morning to be let out. Rocky obliged.

  The first official call that she got was from Tess. “Some fool from the summer left a cat on the north side of the island. It won’t come to me and it looks like it’s starving or sick. Can you come get it?”

  Rocky called Isaiah, just to check on Tess, to see if she might be some weird old woman who was left here by her family to haunt the islanders. Isaiah laughed when she asked him.

  “You mean Tess? Good God, they don’t come more solid than her, once you get to know her. She’s been out here for years, since she retired. Or she’s mostly retired. If she tells you that a cat has been abandoned, then that’s the truth.”

  Isaiah told her the best way to get the cat. “Start with the Havahart trap. Save the snare as back up. Cats are not as easy as dogs.”

  The snare was an ugly contraption that frightened her. She was afraid that if she started using it, she might get too comfortable with it, and start to act like a prison guard gone bad, the kind who starts out good but who ultimately gives in to the uniform. She couldn’t quite stomach the idea of snaring a cat.

  Rocky thought it was best to wait until early morning. She didn’t want to keep the cat overnight. If she caught it early, she’d still have time to get it over to Portland to the pound. As she lay in bed with her newly found cat purring on the dresser, she considered her options. She would generously bait the trap with wet cat food and hope for the best.

  The next morning she pulled up to the house, several miles north of the dock. She hoped the cat wasn’t peeking from the bushes so she could set the trap unobserved. She pulled the tab on the can and the rich smell of fish byproducts reached her nose. She hoped that this wouldn’t draw every cat in the neighborhood. A black Saab pulled up as Rocky finished her job. Tess stepped out of the car.

  “Let’s go for a walk while the cat meets its destiny. I’ll show you some of my favorites spots along the shore.”

  They walked on the dirt road that ran along the north coast, both of them slapped by the wind, and then they headed for the beach. It was surprisingly easy for Rocky and Tess to fall in step with each other. When they returned several hours later, a tattered cat sat howling in the trap.

  “There’s your first customer,” said Tess.

  Rocky delivered the cat to the Portland animal shelter right in the trap, not wanting to tangle with the very sick looking creature. Tess went along for the ride because she said she needed to buy some fish at the docks.

  Tess was about thirty years older than Rocky, a trim woman whose movements were swift and light, as unattached to earth as a bird. They agreed to meet for walks; Tess claimed to know every trail and Rocky felt less of the bottomless pull when she was walking. Tess reminded Rocky of the image of a wood sprite, a nymph who blended in easily among a pine needle forest floor or the firm grasses that grew on sand. “I’m no wood nymph,” said Tess. “I’m just a retired physical therapist. There’s a difference.”

  Tess had painted a Buddha on her blue bathroom door, and had a Christmas tree of dried deciduous branches festooned with seashells and dried seaweed, which stayed up twelve months of the year. “Well this certainly looks more like the house of a wood sprite than a former physical therapist,” said Rocky.

  Rocky was surprised that Tess so suddenly entered her life. They walked several times a week and before long, she had accompanied Tess on her job of house-sitting for the summer people. The people who didn’t want the hassle of draining their pipes for the winter hired Tess. Tess made periodic checks during the winter, wandering through their houses, opening doors, letting in fresh air, and checking for invasions of mice and chipmunks.

  “Come with me, we have to freshen up one of the houses, blow out the ghosts who think they can take over. We’ll save the big house for last. They have a hot tub big enough for a football team,” said Tess after they had hiked on one of the inner trails for the morning.

  Tess brought her favorite CDs and urged Rocky to dance with her. Rocky awkwardly declined, surprised that movement was so natural to Tess and so alien to her. Tess flitted through the house, running with an assortment of scarves flying with reggae music, chasing out the idle spirits that she swore invaded opportunistically. She had turned on the hot tub in the master bedroom and when she was done shooing unseen things away, they both dropped their clothes and settled into the multi-jetted pool. Rocky thought the older woman’s body looked more like a prepubescent girl, or a fish. Even her breasts, as she approached her 70s, did not hang or point south; they sat like poached eggs on her chest.

  “I read one poem per day,” said Tess. She reached for her canvas bag over the edge of the tub. “I’ll read you the one I picked up today. It’s by Mary Oliver.” And she read a poem about following a river with rapids lurking in the distance. Rocky leaned her head back on the edge and saw herself tumbling over the edge of a watery precipice and shattering as she hit the bottom.

  Rocky’s second call was a skunk emergency. She looked up skunks in the Peterson guide. Mephitis mephitis. Skunks were trash hounds and when tourists left behind their abundance of overflowing trash bins, the skunks became particularly brash until the cold weather set in, which would slow them into a drowsy trance. Mrs. Todd called to say that a skunk was in her garage and that she was unable to leave her house.

  Skunks will spray only as a last resort. They will first stomp their feet, growl, spit, or clack their impressively sharp teeth. This should be warning enough for anyone, except dogs who blunder through and misread all those
warnings. Rocky thought her chances were good of remaining scent free while relocating the skunk with the same Havahart trap and a hamburger patty.

  “Mrs. Todd, don’t go out to the garage and absolutely don’t let your dog out of the house. What kind of dog do you have? Oh, a terrier. Don’t even open the door when you see me drive up because your little terrier thinks the skunk is a big rat and he wants to grab it by the neck. You don’t want that to happen. I’ll be there shortly.”

  Rocky took her time loading the tarp and the trap into the truck. She dawdled in the grocery store after picking up the cheapest grade beef available. Her preference was to give the skunk a good head start and not deal with it at all. She sat in the truck and read in the Peterson guidebook about the skunk. If it was a female, it would be likely to burrow with another female for the winter. Males were more solitary. But they don’t hibernate. Their eyeshine was deep amber. That’s the reflected color of their eyes at night, when they peer at you from the darkness. With nothing left to do, Rocky drove out to Mrs. Todd’s house.

  There was no sight of a skunk, but evidence of trash that was not tightly sealed. Rocky offered suggestions for a new garbage can and offered to pick one up the next time she was in Portland. Solutions in this job were easy.

  For the remainder of October, she rounded up the discarded cats and took them to the shelter on the mainland. They had seven days to be located or rescued before they were euthanized. She pitied the person who had to kill the cats. Bob used to rage about people not neutering their animals.

  He called his neutering clinics Nip and Tuck Day, neutering as many cats and dogs as he could from early morning until seven P.M. He’d said that for every pair of male and female cats that go unaltered, who lived uneventful lives, and if all their descendents lived for six years also unaltered, that would amount to 420,000 cats.

  Rocky had at first scoffed at him. She suspected an urban myth. She wasn’t against neutering, but she saw no sense in exaggerating. Then one day he took her with him to the veterinary school where the cats and dogs were being euthanized in staggering numbers.

  “Nobody wants these animals and they can’t all survive. And some dumb fuck was too stupid and too cheap to get them neutered. Even if two cats couldn’t produce a lineage of 420,000 babies, every one that gets set loose to fend for itself will either be killed by a car, a dog, a coyote, by illness like feline leukemia, or they get the terminator injection. It’s not right.”

  Nip and Tuck Day was twice a year, when it was off with testicles and tucking at the bellies of the females, making them all the last of their line. Bob would call up all his vet school buddies weeks before to see if any of them had fourth-year students who could be trusted with scalpels. If he was lucky, he got at least one who was eager and capable. Bob charged everybody the same fee, $10, which also entitled them to one can of food as a treat for the recuperating patient.

  By the time he’d get home, it would be around eight o’clock. Rocky catered to him on those nights. The rest of the time they both might forget to buy groceries or quarrel about who should cook. But on these nights, she’d forget all about that and order Chinese for them, serve warm sake. His eyes would get bloodshot and his shoulders would sag, and she’d know he wasn’t really noticing anything that she did and wouldn’t really remember details. After eating, she’d coax him out of his clothes and lead him to the bathroom, the one downstairs with the old claw-footed tub. She’d take off her clothes and slide in behind him, making the water go perilously close to the top, gurgling the release valve into action. She’d start at his head and rub and massage him. She knew he wanted to be held, to be the one who had things done to him, not to be the deciding one. She’d wash him from top to bottom, rolling him on his side when she needed to slip her hand under his winter white bottom.

  “Let go, I’ll do everything,” she’d whisper.

  She thought that this was how people loved in war camps, or when ocean liners sank and a few survivors clung to lifeboats; all daily defenses fell away. She knew that he needed to be filled up again with hope and tenderness because all of that had been drained out of him on Nip and Tuck Day. Neither of them would speak much, only bits. “Here, roll over, there, I’ll do that,” was all Rocky would need to say before she’d mount him in the water gone cool.

  Rocky met Tess for breakfast the next morning before she was due to meet Isaiah to talk about additional duties. “He wants me to start documenting any change in erosion along the south beach. I’m not sure how I’m supposed to do that. I mean erosion is change, and that is probably best done over a number of years.”

  “You sound like a scientist. What did you say that you did before?”

  “I worked with kids, young kids, in a day care center,” Rocky said. The lie felt partial and thus tolerable.

  Tess sipped tea. Rocky had gotten her coffee from the self-serve part of the counter where she pumped out something called Morning Ethiopian. It was too early for her to eat. When Rocky bent over to pick up a dropped napkin, she whacked her elbow on the metal strip along the edge of the table. She grimaced, closed her eyes, and let out one prairie dog yelp.

  “That must be pure orange. I can feel that from here,” said Tess.

  “What?” said Rocky, cradling her elbow.

  “When I hit a nerve like that I see orange for as long as it throbs.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I have synesthesia. Two places in my brain go off at once. When I stub my toe, I holler orange, because that’s what I see and feel at the same time.”

  Rocky paused, recalling only vaguely having read about this in a neuropsych journal.

  “I didn’t know the name for it until about ten years ago when I heard a guy on NPR who wrote a book about us. I broke down and cried. I didn’t know I was a member of a club.”

  “Do you see colors only when you hurt yourself?”

  “No. Everything has a color. Like letters, B is light green with a dark base. T is gray and shiny. The days of the week each have their color and shape. Tuesday is a blue cube and Wednesday is muted red globe. Sunday is light yellow and sort of floppy.”

  “You are a multi-media event,” said Rocky as she sipped her coffee.

  “That’s just the half of it. Now that I’ve learned more about synesthesia, I know just how plain and unfortunate your poor world is, I’m sorry to say.”

  “I’ve never thought of my world as plain.”

  “That’s because you don’t know any better. Your name is green because R is green. How old are you?”

  “I’m thirty-eight.”

  “OK. Numbers one through ten go up a gradual slope, then eleven through twenty are on a plateau, twenty-one through thirty turn right and the thirties zigzag back the other way. So now when I think of you, I’ll see a green R zigzagging backwards.”

  “Jesus,” said Rocky.

  “Exactly. Now, doesn’t that make your number system seem a little plain? I’m sorry; I don’t mean to say that your world is plain. It’s just that I’m a synesthete out of the closet. There’s nothing as annoying as the newly converted.”

  Chapter 5

  Tess did not regret for one minute the uniqueness of synesthesia, only that it took her so long to know its name and that she was not alone, that there were others. There were a few kindred spirits out in the world who were touched by the cross-firing of senses, touched by the same tweak in genetics as Tess, and finding them had changed her life. As a child, she was driven to silence when she discovered that none of the other children saw numbers as colors. She would say, “The answer is number four, right next to the red three.” The second-grade teacher tilted her head as if to hear her better and squinted her eyes trying to see her better. “No, Tess. We’re only doing the numbers now, not the colors.” In one horrible moment, built up from a few months of clues, Tess understood that her teacher and her classmates lived in a monochrome world where numbers were only black lines, sad lonely things. Piano notes did not brush
against their cheeks and smell like cinnamon, and most odd of all, when they fell and scraped their knees, they did not shout, “It’s too orange, now red!” They cried of course, as she did, but they could not see the pulse of the pain in great orange splats with a deep red core.

  Tess was a freak and she knew it, hid it from everyone except her mother who said, “You can say it to me, but don’t let anyone else hear you. They’ll say you’re crazy.” Tess did not know until much later that synesthesia is an inherited trait, and that her mother probably struggled with and then hid her own multisensory world. But her mother’s appendix burst when Tess was eight and things got bungled up at the hospital and before Tess knew it, she was staring straight at the colorless body of her mother laid out in the coffin. She had never seen her mother without color before. She had always loved the apricot glow of her mother’s laugh and her warm, smooth touch. A body without color was the most terrifying sight of her life and she had nightmares for years of a monochrome body. Synesthesia didn’t stop for Tess when she buried her mother, but she didn’t speak of it again for over fifty years.

  When she graduated from high school, the war in Europe and Japan had ended, and she begged her father to send her to college. Tess had a huge capacity for memorizing anything and she graduated at the top of her small Nebraska high school. When teachers marveled at her academic abilities, she failed to mention to them that she had a different way of remembering facts and ideas. When numbers and letters each have their own color, shape, and size, subjects like history and math fit into neat packets that Tess could pull out at will; she had constant access to a color-coded file system in her brain. Math was particularly easy for her. She was most fond of the number five, which was a metallic shade of turquoise and had a commanding sound.

  Her father sent her to a teacher’s college, where, in the midst of taking as many math classes as seemed logical for an aspiring teacher, she moved on to biology. When she took a class in anatomy, she was in heaven, at last picturing the heart, the blood vessels, the hard-working liver, all the interiors of the body opened up to her in a splendor that she had not known existed. Other students agonized over the nervous system, forcing their monochrome brains to memorize an unseen world. For Tess, optics nerves were bright yellow and looked exactly like clothesline rope. The nerves that ran down the arms and spread out across the hands were sky blue and smelled like lilacs. Who could not remember them or what they did? Her anatomy professor said, “If you were a young man, I’d say you had all the makings of a fine doctor. But you’ll be married before graduation.”