Lost & Found (3 page)

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.”

Isaiah had a full head of gray hair and his eyebrows had the wild look of men his age. Long strands of hair stuck straight up from his brows and a few flipped up and pointed to the top of his head. His reading glasses sat low on his nose. His skin was dark, and from the slight cadence in his voice, Rocky thought he might be from Haiti.

“Divorce?” he asked looking up at her over his glasses.

“Dead. My husband is dead. Heart attack. He was young and we didn’t know anything was wrong.” Rocky had practiced these facts and this was her trial run.

Isaiah took off his glasses. “I’m sorry.” Rocky saw the min
ister settle in and the public works director receded. “When did he pass away?”

“This spring, the end of the spring.” She suddenly felt like she was in the chaplain’s office and she shifted in the chair.

“‘After the first death there is no other.’ Do you know who wrote that? Elizabeth Barrett Browning? I’m not sure. I remember the first time I heard it and I knew it was true. The first death changes everything, and all deaths afterward bring us back to the first death. I’m sorry; I lost both my parents last year and even at my ripe age, I feel like an orphan. Death changes everything doesn’t it?”

Rocky brushed an escaping tear from one eye. “If you hire me, I’ll do a good job. If I don’t know how to do something, I’ll ask. Just keep all this private, okay? I’m not ready to be a widow yet. I don’t want people to treat me like a psychologist. I need time to work hard and do physical work. I have a year’s leave of absence from my job. I can give you one year, right through next year’s tourist season.”

“I’m a professional secret-keeper. I was a minister for fifteen years and that’s part of what I did. I held secrets. The same as you. Prying secrets out of us takes an act of Congress.”

He stood up and held out his large paw of a hand to Rocky. “Let me show you about your new job and all the fancy extras that go along with it.” She let him take her hand. She knew he wanted to make physical contact with her; that’s what ministers do, they take your hand. “Don’t be overwhelmed by our advanced technology here on the island. You get a truck that can’t pass emission control standards on the mainland and the key to the storage shed. When can you start?”

“Now. I can start right now,” she said.

He nodded. “Are you settled in for the winter? Do you need a place to live?”

“I was waiting for the off-season rates to start before I looked around,” she said.

“I can help you with that. I have a rental house, nothing fancy. In fact, very far from fancy. And the off-season rates just started this minute.”

Isaiah opened the door and a terrible whiff of dead fish hit them. His nostrils flared and his eyes squeezed shut, the opposite of what was needed. “Damn! The last renters left their garbage under the sink. Whatever’s there has been building steam for a week.” It was the smell of death, rotting flesh, and Rocky reeled backward, lost her footing, and fell down the three steps of the deck stairway. She dusted herself off while Isaiah flew to her assistance. “This is no way for my new dog warden to start. Don’t take this as an omen. Just look at it as the best introduction you could have to summer people.”

The cottage was the last on the dirt road. Beach grass, stiff and breeze worthy, surrounded it. “Most people don’t winter here; you’ll see that for yourself. You’re not that far from some of the year-round people. But the back of the house is up against wetlands, so it can’t be built up. That’s the good news. The bad news is that in June and on days when the wind drops off, the mosquitoes will drain every ounce of pleasure along with most of your blood. Stay here while I go grab that maggot-filled garbage and open the window.”

Rocky gratefully stood on the small deck, bleached silver by the salt and sun. The front of the house faced south and east and stared directly out to the expanse of the Atlantic Ocean. Between the house and the ocean was a quarter mile of thick vegetation, held together by a cross-hatching of vines that looked like honeysuckle. A hobbit-sized path wound through it to the rock-covered coast.

Isaiah cursed and Rocky said that the last renters of the season left more than fish garbage. Rocky pulled her eyes from the ocean and headed into the house to give him a hand. She prepared for a disaster within the cottage. She was relieved that disasters were not the sole domain of her life; even good men like Isaiah had unexpected calamities. “Did you bring garbage bags? Let’s just haul all this stuff outside,” she said.

He stood in the midst of a kitchen covered with crumpled papers, cups half filled with butter that had once been melted for lobster, bowls with the hard unpopped kernels of corn on the bottom, paper bags filled with slightly crushed beer cans. “At times like this, I think the whole human race is going to hell,” said Isaiah. The refrigerator revealed bowls filled with chili and sticks of butter left on crumb-coated saucers, an open juice container, and a Tupperware container filled with contents that neither of them chose to investigate. The couch pillows were on the floor and every dish in the house was in the sink, covered with food gone stiff. It was a mess, all right. Rocky hadn’t seen a mess this big in long time.

“I hope you got a huge deposit from these people. Who were they anyhow, small-time drug lords?”

“You wouldn’t believe it. They drove a new Volvo and said they were teachers. That was either not true or our education
system is being sabotaged. And the deposit was not worth the stink that they left. But they won’t ever rent on this island again.”

Rocky and Isaiah opened all the remaining windows, hauled out the trash, and set the dishes to soak. Rocky ran an ancient vacuum cleaner over the floor. She shook the few scatter rugs outside and made a mental note to take them to the Laundromat. The place began to look like someplace where she might be able to take off her shoes. Isaiah left with his truck brimming with black plastic bags of garbage, mumbling about the world ending because of people who can’t wipe their behinds.

Rocky scrubbed the countertops in the kitchen and the bathroom. Isaiah’s wife Charlotte delivered a box of cleaning supplies complete with rubber gloves. She said her husband was so mad that he might never rent again after Rocky. Charlotte was darker than Isaiah, with a sprinkling of white hairs on her temples. She wore sweatpants and a jacket. “Sorry about my scruffy appearance, but I was in the middle of putting some of my gardens to bed when my husband came home sputtering about low-life trash who drive Volvos. Can you handle the rest of this? We won’t charge you for the full month of October.”

After Charlotte left, Rocky examined every inch of the cottage. The living room/dining room had the best view over the top of the dense shrubbery, out to the ocean. Every house on an island faces out like a sentinel looking for ships or whales, storms creeping across the sky. The two bedrooms were small, room enough for a bed, dresser, and chair. Rocky picked the bedroom that had two windows instead of one, which made up for it facing north.

When the cottage was as clean as she could get it and all the signs of the former tenants were removed, including a tied-off condom draped over an ashtray on a dresser, she began to unload her car. By dusk, her sheets were on the bed. They were queen-sized and hung to the floor on either side of the small bed. Her winter clothes were folded in the dresser drawers. She’d brought two electrical appliances from her old life: a boom box and a hair dryer. She arranged her brother’s sculpture on the end table by the couch.

Dusk changed too quickly into night and the completion of her unpacking left her with the sudden despair that comes with darkness when no other footsteps are expected. This was the worst part of the day and getting through it was an exercise of endurance, of sandbags strapped to her arms and legs while foot soldiers pointed bayonets at her dry throat. She prepared for what she knew would be a full night of altered time, thick with grief and self-accusations while she replayed the morning of Bob’s death. The gray wire mesh that fit tightly over her brain began to descend until it squeezed a tight band over her eyes.

How many times had she helped clients with the lightning bolt arrival of grief that kidnapped people from their daily life? Hundreds. Each time, she offered the space to talk about reactions that sounded too bizarre even for the survivor to tell their best of friends. “I saw my father this morning; he walked across the classroom and looked at me. How can that be?” “I can’t help wondering what is happening to her body, what she must look now. Is that grotesque or what? But I think of it every day.” “I want to die to be with her; nothing else matters here.”

But what her clients had not told her was that her own
sweat would smell different, the chemistry of her body would alter until she would no longer know who she was when she looked in the mirror, that food would taste like cardboard, and she would wake up with a full-blown panic attack at three
A.M
. and drive herself to the emergency room two months after her husband was dead. She had been oddly convinced that her heart was exploding and had been embarrassed to learn that she was having her first-ever panic attack. Or had her clients told her, and she listened only with part of her brain, thinking that this is temporary, this is part of grieving, and looked for the first sign of return without fully grasping the horrible landscape of the present? There was something essential and awful that she had missed, and here was one more thing to blame herself for: she failed to save her husband, and she had failed to see the true terror of the land where mourners traveled.

She heard a clear penetrating peal, like a light that pierces the fog. She looked at the sliding glass door and a striped feline face stared in at her from the base of the door. A tabby, eyes wide and insistent, white chest and calico body, had come calling. Rocky slid the door open and the cat dashed past her and leapt on the couch, purring with urgency. The creature paced the couch with familiarity then bounced to the floor and headed for the exact place on the kitchen floor where two saucers had been sitting hours before.

“Oh no, they left you behind,” said Rocky, crouching beside the cat before she knew what she doing. The cat pushed her spine hard into Rocky’s palm, offering her a generous view of her back end. A female, although she had already guessed that by her head size. Bob had always said, “Male cats generally have a bigger skull. But there is no correlation
between head size and intelligence. The brain of a tom is located in his cajones.”

The cat moved in with a shocking level of confidence that Rocky wished she could have patented and injected into several of her old clients, people who were tentative, fearful, and anxious about the invisible audience that judged them from morning through night. The cat lived in a world without audience and expected attention without hesitation or explanation. Rocky immediately saw the irony of the situation; both of them had been left behind and both were pitiful. The cat did not appear to know its pitifulness, did not know the fate that awaited it if she was returned to her negligent owners or to the abyss of an animal shelter.

She did not want the world to treat her like this abandoned cat, in need of food and sympathy. She pictured the owners of the cat driving away in their Volvo, having decided at some point that the rent they had paid entitled them to not touch their own garbage. Being filthy and irresponsible with a rental was one thing, but she could not fathom the decision to leave the cat and hated them for it. Thus she began her career as animal control warden by not looking for the owners of the cat. She judged them harshly and, she believed, correctly. The cat slept on the couch the first night, but Rocky imagined that she heard her purring all night and breathing and padding around the small house. For the first time in months, she awoke not at three but at four
A
.
M
. and she thought that the hour was reason enough to keep the cat.

The first two weeks of the job offered a sampling of island life in the post-tourist season. The island slumped, partly in relief, partly in the crash after an exhausting summer when the island exploded with people ten times the winter population. The dilemma of the love/hate relationship with tourists was temporarily relieved but exacerbated financially for those who had not budgeted well. The sprinkling of conversation that Rocky heard at a local breakfast spot sounded like a family where the obnoxious, cigar smoking, yet wildly wealthy uncle had just left after the annual visit during which your mother made you be polite all summer.

Several places closed immediately: the yogurt hut, the kite shop, the T-shirt businesses, and the fudge shop. The kayak company put up most of the sleek kayaks for the season, leaving just two on the porch for the owner to use on days when the ocean was quiet.

Rocky found a small gang of dogs that were left behind by tourists that had to be taken to the mainland animal shelter. Isaiah and Charlotte invited her to lunch one Sunday and they commiserated on the low-life nature that creeps into a
certain segment of humanity. “What gets me is the elevated way that some people can carry on and then act like such jackasses with creatures that depend on them,” said Isaiah, in reference to the abandoned cat. Charlotte had fixed them huevos rancheros with a robust salsa made from the last of her tomatoes.

Rocky wondered if Isaiah’s promise to not say anything about her past had extended to his wife. She pictured someone telling Bob a secret and asking him not to tell Rocky. What would he have done? He was the gold standard for every circumstance. But Isaiah was a minister, or he had been. And ministers, priests, and the lot of them were bound by confidentiality. Rocky was lost in thought about the bounds of confidentiality when Charlotte brought out a fresh pot of coffee. “Isaiah tells me that your husband died this past year. I’m sorry. This must be a terrible time for you.”

Rocky threw an accusatory stare at Isaiah.

He grimaced. “I apologize. It’s not Charlotte’s fault. She caught me talking to myself when I hauled off the garbage from those idiot renters. I didn’t even know I was doing it. I’ll have to watch myself as I get older and start blathering everybody’s business. Won’t that be the worst-case scenario for an Alzheimer’s patient? I’ll be telling the world all the secrets that people have told me about affairs, scandals, incest and petty jealousies. They’ll have to put me in the solitary confinement zone of the Alzheimer’s home. I could be a national security risk.” Clearly, he was horrified that he had spilled the beans with a person who knew the absolute importance of maintaining secrets. Tiny beads of sweat popped out on his forehead.

Charlotte ignored him and sipped her coffee. “You’re not
ready to say the words yet are you? I was a small girl when my grandfather died. Not long after his funeral, I was with my grandmother at the beauty parlor and she had a new girl working on her hair who kept asking her questions to be polite, and because African-American hair takes longer to work on than the last ice age, we were there for a long time. She asked my grandmother where she lived, did she know so and so, and finally the girl asked her some questions about her husband. My grandmother said, “I’m a widow.” And she hadn’t been ready to say it. Her face collapsed and she looked sadder than the day of the funeral. You don’t have to say the words until you’re ready. And I’ll try and keep my husband from talking to himself in public.”

Rocky felt the outrage melt down her tight neck muscles. She trusted Charlotte never to say a word about this again. Charlotte understood. “Thank you,” she said.

Rocky called her brother as she promised she would.

“I’m fine. I got a job, a very part-time job, probably not more than ten hours per week. It’s on an as-needed basis. And I’ve rented a little cottage,” she said in what she hoped was her most convincing voice.

“Yeah, you sound like shit to me. Where are you again?”

She heard water running on his end of the line, which meant he was washing his dishes and that it had been his wife’s turn to cook. She pictured the thick curling hairs on his hands that grew in patches along his fingers. Her brother Caleb was an anomaly among men: he liked gadgets with extreme selectivity; a cordless phone was as advanced as he went in the department of communications. If gadgets did not have to do with house painting or sculpture, he saw no
reason to bother with them. She glanced over at the sculpture that she brought with her.

“I told you. I’m on Peak’s Island and I’m going to stay for a while. I want to be where nobody knows me, nobody wants to talk to me about the saddest, most horrible parts of their life. It’s an island; people fish and they sell stuff to tourists. Oh, I’m the new dog warden. Except they call it Animal Control Warden.”

“What the hell do you know about being a dog warden?”

“Probably nothing. Ever hear of on-the-job training? How hard can it be?” she asked.

“Oh, this is brilliant. Because Bob was a vet, do you think you picked up special dog-warden skills? You hardly stepped foot in the clinic the last few years. Or do you think that working at the college makes you smart enough to do anyone’s job?”

Rocky was jolted by the mention of Bob. This was going to be the place where no one said his name and she didn’t have to say his name. She felt like she had suddenly swallowed wood chips and now they were going to churn through her body.

“We’re talking lost cats and dogs,” she said.

“Just get a tetanus shot right now, Rocky, and if you see a raccoon that’s foaming at the mouth and walking in circles, shoot it.”

“Shoot it? I’m not supposed to be that kind of dog warden. They didn’t give me a gun.” Sparring usually felt good with Caleb, but she had not been able to spar with him since Bob died. She had tried, but she couldn’t find the right equipment.

“Is everything working out with the renters?” While
Rocky was still at the motel, Caleb had found people to rent her house.

“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.