Lost & Found (9 page)

She spent the next day in Portland searching for an athletic club, signed up at the YMCA and got a trainer to work with her for an hour. The trainer was young and eager. He admonished her to go for a full-body, free-weights regime, and not just upper bodywork as she had requested.

“It doesn’t matter if you used to be fit, you’re starting from scratch,” he said as he wrote down the number of the free weight that Rocky pushed over her head. Rocky stopped, and the two plastic coated, six-pound weights paused overhead like heavy birds. She slowly lowered them.

“You’re right, I’m starting from scratch, aren’t I?” She knew that this happened sometimes, that strangers could speak as sages, pulling truths from the air so deep that it seemed like they were momentarily inhabited by wisdom completely beyond them. Sometimes people get the offer of free advice from the gods, spoken by innocents, and there is always the choice of whether to listen or not, whether to act or not.

“That’s what I’ll do, then. Start from the beginning.”

The track coach was surprisingly easy to fool. He was old, maybe as old as fifty. Melissa knew he was from pre-anorexia times; he just didn’t get it and acted impressed about her well-defined calf and thigh muscles. He even held her up as an example in September when they started training for cross-country.

“Look at Melissa,” he intoned to the team. “She doesn’t have to huff and puff carrying around an extra ten pounds. Remember, picture yourself with a five-pound bag of sugar strapped to each shoulder. That’s what extra weight does to you. Good job, Melissa. I can see you kept training this summer.”

She figured at least four of the other girls went home that day and said they were too full to eat dinner. She could tell by the angry, frightened look in their eyes when the coach spoke. “Let them try,” she thought, “they still won’t catch me. I’m way ahead of them.”

If she could have felt guilty, she would have done so about the depth of the deception with her mother, who was not easily fooled. Her mother asked, just the other day, “Is this going to be a problem? Is food going to be the enemy?” Me
lissa had put on her most shocked and exasperated look and rolled her eyes. “I’ve seen the after-school specials and heard the lectures in health class. You just don’t know what it’s like to take running to the limit. All the runners look like this.” For added emphasis, Melissa put a hunk of cheese, an apple, and a PBJ sandwich in her book bag. On the ferry ride to the mainland school, she threw tiny bits of the sandwich to the seagulls that followed alongside, looking at Melissa with conspiratorial glances. She could hardly wait to throw the cheese into the trash barrel at school. She ate half the apple in history class and half at lunch, so that it appeared to everyone that she was constantly eating.

Chris was in her last class, Chemistry. She had known her since freshman year. Chris was gone for the last month of the freshman year. Everyone knew it was a suicide attempt. Then last year Chris was all GSA; Gay Straight Alliance Club. Melissa said to her, “Of course that doesn’t matter to me. Everybody’s the same to me.” But she worried that if she hung out with Chris, people would think she was gay, too. She just wanted to make sure that people knew she wasn’t gay.

Chris had talked the principal into announcing the GSA meetings over the morning radio station. It was like Chris had decided to become the most out lesbian on earth. Chris had changed in other ways, too. Melissa noticed that she had gained weight. Actually, she could tell exactly how much she had gained with perfect accuracy. Eight pounds. She knew what eight pounds looked like; hips, maybe as big as a size ten. Melissa knew she would never let that happen. Looking at Chris, she planned the 400 crunches she would do silently in her room that night with the lights out, with a towel folded in half beneath her so that she
wouldn’t bruise her vertebrae into a line of vertical dots.

But here was the first big lie. The mere deceptions didn’t count. They were like playacting. But not telling her mother that she was going to the athletic club to work out was a lie. She had told her mother she was visiting a friend after school on Tuesday and Thursday, just for a while, walking around the Food Court in downtown Portland, a safe enough place. She knew her mother, and she knew that if she said she was working out any more that the careful balance she had constructed would collapse and questions would be asked in a more desperate way. Her mother was no fool and Melissa had the tiniest hint of regret about playing her for one.

She had her routine; go right to the Y after school on the days she didn’t have cross-country practice, reserve forty-five minutes on the elliptical, and thirty minutes on the Stair-Master. That’s all. Well, maybe a little run on the treadmill to shake it all out before working on the weights. Thirty minutes on the treadmill if there was no one else waiting. The time of day was right; no neighbors from the island came here, she had already checked for their names. Her mother’s teacher friends all rushed home to take care of their kids, so they weren’t even a possibility.

She walked into the women’s locker room. She had asked for her favorite locker, 266, which was unfortunately taken. She hated it when someone else had it; so she asked for the one that was next to it, number 267. She dropped her bag on the wood-plank seat between two rows of lockers and headed for the toilets. She wanted an empty bladder, to feel as light as possible. She heard one of the showers shut off and the shower curtain shoosh open.

When Melissa came out of the stall and headed back to the
lockers, she stopped short. Seated on the bench was a woman with her back to Melissa, a towel hung loosely around her. What she saw was the perfect asymmetry of a moment, one shoulder blade poking out, the other in, as the woman twisted, paused in her moment of dressing. Her shoulders were wide and the muscles that ran down her back produced long gullies on either side of her spine. A blinding flush started in the recesses of Melissa’s hard, flat abdomen and spread out like a kerosene-fed fire across her breasts, straight up the highway of her neck and pooled in her cheeks. Something had skipped her brain entirely and she felt, for the first time in her young life, a full out blast of lust.

The woman turned her head to the right, so that Melissa could see the profile. Melissa felt another competing rush, this time of loathing and fear. It was Rocky.

Why is she everywhere that’s mine, why does she have to follow me around? Melissa ducked back around the corner, back to the stalls where she stayed with her pounding heart until she heard locker 266 slam shut.

Would anyone be able to tell what she was thinking, that she had been overwhelmed, caught in midair, breathless? The image of what she had to do came immediately and unbidden. No matter what, she was not eating anything tonight when she got home. She would simply tell her mother that she was sick. That would eliminate any dinnertime petitions to eat, or have soup, or please have something.

The thought of food, even not having food, had started the surge of her digestive juices, and she felt the cleansing burn of hunger, which she hoped would last all night and like the self-cleaning oven that worked by extreme temperatures would, with surgical exactness, cleanse her of such terrifying emotions.

She wanted something really awful to happen to Rocky. Maybe she would get bit by a rabid animal, lightning would strike her, or maybe her propane stove would blow up. No, not that. Melissa didn’t want anything bad to happen to Lloyd. She had moments of relief when she was with the dog.

She felt her world begin to split open with Rocky’s dead-aim stare, the way she looked through Melissa’s sweatpants and jacket and hooded sweatshirt. Everything was fine until Rocky got here.

Now Rocky had invaded her secret place. If she could figure out when Rocky was going to come to the club, she could avoid her. But Melissa had a schedule that was perfect. Everything had been perfect, even the way that she showered, grabbed a Diet Coke and an apple on the way out, carried the apple while she was exiting and took two big bites, one while she opened the door from the women’s locker room, chew and swallow, and one bite while she passed the front desk. When she got outside, she could spit the second bite out. Save the rest of the apple for the ferry ride home. Make sure to bring both the Diet Coke bottle and the apple core home, drop them both noticeably on the counter in a way that her mother couldn’t miss. The Diet Coke made the charade believable; her mother never would have believed a non-diet drink.

She was going to make sure that she went to her father’s house this weekend. She needed to become invisible and there was no better place to do that. When she was at her father’s house on the mainland, every other weekend for sure and every weekend if she wanted, he simply didn’t notice. She didn’t have to work as hard with him to keep up the pretense of eating.

Her father had his own body-fat ratio measured and asked her if she wanted to also. “Runners don’t need to carry extra fat around,” he said. Of course he meant his body, not hers, or so he said, but Melissa had already swallowed it like a fish swallowing a hook.

Her father ran every Saturday with his buddy from law school, Alex. She declined their offers to run with them. They were in their forties and she couldn’t understand why they wore such tiny running shorts. She was embarrassed for them and embarrassed to be with them. They looked so old and sinewy.

While her father and Alex ran on Saturday mornings, she prepared her lunch. She woke up thinking about food, went to sleep thinking about food and this worried her. Was she losing her grip, her control? She didn’t want to think of food, but since she still did, she planned to whip it into obedience. One rice cake and cucumber for lunch. The cucumber was peeled, then cut in half the long way, then in half the other way, then she held all the long spears together and chopped those into chunks. She filled a cereal bowl with the cucumbers and threw in one-half cup of nonfat yogurt. By 11:30, her father and Alex were generally in the home stretch. By the time he came in the door, she was seated at the table with the bowl in front of her, a rice cake in hand.

“Eating again, honey? I don’t know where you put it.”

Rocky expected to see improvement; this was the third lesson. She had worked out a deal with Tess to use the old clunker car that Tess kept on the mainland. Often, if people could find a spot in Portland to leave another car they did, rather than paying for the more expensive car ferry. Rocky knew she was ready to move up to a heavier bow and part of her was eager to hear Hill say, “Good pull and release. This is the day to move up to a twenty-five-pound bow.”

She had practiced for two hours each day behind Tess’s house. She stood with her left side facing the target, set the arrow, pulled out and up, right arm pulled back, elbow up, right thumb even with her jaw, sighted the target, took a breath, steadied the body, released the breath, then in the empty space between breaths, released the arrow. When she had first started, the arrows had flown wildly over, under, and to the side of a target, which was the size of a garbage can lid. The first time that the arrow actually hit the target, she was amazed at the thrill she felt.

Tess, who knew nothing about archery but a lot about Qi
Gong, said it was the repetition, through repetition comes freedom.

“Repetition gives the body a chance to expand and be creative. Look anywhere in nature, in concentric rings in sunflowers. Look down from an airplane the next time you fly and look at cornfields in the Midwest in all their wonderfully repeated rows. That lets us see the exception in the change. Your body is getting the hang of this Rocky, even if your brain can’t believe it,” said Tess.

She was anxious for Hill to see the improvement. She had eaten breakfast and lunch and the last time she checked, her energy was right where it was supposed to be, dropped down low in her body. She parked Tess’s car on the street in front of his house. She walked to the backyard after not finding him in his shop garage. He was already pulling back on his sixty-five-pound bow as if it were no harder than the rubber band that secured the Sunday paper. Thwack! He hit as close to the center as an arrow could get.

There was no question of startling him, she knew that. He was a hunter and he listened to sounds like any wild animal. Rocky pictured him noting the sound of her car door closing, the knock on the shop door, and the way she had let the gate slap shut when she came into the backyard. For the first time, she noted that Hill moved his body in a way that was graceful. She had always liked that in a man, whether he was a dancer or a roofer; some men moved with grace and Rocky had an appreciative eye. His shoulders swiveled in perfect opposition to his hips. She had forgotten that she appreciated anything.

She greeted him with sudden shyness, and tried to pull back hard into a sisterly approach with him, as if he was Ca
leb, and she was commenting on one of his sculptures. Hill tipped his head slightly as if he was scanning her for important information. After the general greetings, she unzipped her bow from the canvas bag. She took her stance, and began to slow her breathing. She prepared to pull back.

“Are you married?” asked Hill from his perch on the picnic table.

She crumbled minutely in her core, let her arms drop, and she paused to figure out her answer. She was baffled. Why did people have to ask this? Wasn’t she enough as she was? But as soon as he asked, she was thrown into a whirlwind of decisions. Was she married? Surely she felt the same attachment as someone who was married; every single night she missed her husband’s body next to hers. She had not divorced, she had neither asked for or been asked by another to divorce. But no, of course this was different. Finally, she said, “Not anymore, I’m not married anymore.”

He picked up his bow again and walked toward Rocky. “Tough answer. Simple question,” he said. “I’ve thrown you off. Sorry. Let me take a couple of shots while you recuperate.”

He turned his left side to the target. “Here’s where archery is like fencing. Remember, these are weapons of battle and in battle you want to expose the least amount of body surface to the enemy. No full frontal attacks. Your side can take an arrow, and it’s better if you’re a lefty so your right side faces the enemy. Keeps your heart farthest away and protected.”

“I’m right-handed and left-eyed,” said Rocky.

“I know. You’ll have to watch your heart.”

She wondered if she heard everything as a double entendre, was everything a sign? Why would she have to watch her
heart? All she had wanted this morning was to hear the validating words from Hill that she had gotten stronger, that he could tell she had been practicing. She suddenly hated that she cared what he thought.

The wind started to pick up from the east and tossed Rocky’s hair forward. She still wasn’t used to hair that needed so much training. Long hair had been easier; braid it, tie it up, clip it. But this was different. She armed herself with a pocketful of clips to pull her chin length hair out of her eyes. On the island, she took to wearing a baseball cap for just that reason.

“What did you say you did out on the island?”

“Animal Control Warden.”

He leaned his upper body slightly forward and with one motion he pulled the bowstring back with his right arm and extended the bow with his left.

“I’m sighting the target with one eye. The thing that takes awhile to get is to stop your breath. But you’ve been practicing, right? Your footsteps sounded eager when you came in, not dragging reluctantly like the kid who hasn’t done her piano lessons. Right there, that’s the stillness. Now the winds will want to carry it to the left. Account for that, use it, use all the information that you have, and release.”

His arrow went true to the center of the target. Rocky saw the flawlessness of his movements, the sparseness of motion that comes with practice, where every muscle knows its job perfectly and springs to service. She had a feeling that even if his brain was absent for the moment, his body would remember the pull and release, the pause between breaths.

“What do you hunt?”

“Do you mean what do I kill? Deer mostly. I had a friend who taught me to take down pheasants. I liked that.” He pantomimed by pivoting on his heel, pulled back the arrowless bow, aiming first at a point near the ground then moving with amazing speed to a point forty-five degrees higher, and finally let go. Rocky could almost hear the thud of a pheasant hitting the ground, wings spread wide.

“Have you ever heard of a dog being shot by an arrow?” she asked.

He turned around and faced her. “A dog? Most people don’t take dogs bow hunting because they keep the game away. But I have seen them hit, mostly by accident when a dog is in the wrong place. Why do you ask?”

She unpacked the borrowed bow and notched the arrow. “Because I found a dog a few weeks ago, four weeks now, who had been shot. That’s how I found you, indirectly, asking about traditional bows. Then I got curious about shooting. So here I am.” She took her stand and although she wished that she could erase his presence so that she could concentrate better, she could not. But she did pull smoothly. And the arrow did hit a good mid-zone on the target.

“Do it again,” he said without further comment about the shot. “There’s no bow season on your island. There was a special deer season declared a few years back to bring down the deer population, but it wasn’t a bow season. So who shot the dog?”

“Nobody knows, or nobody is saying. Isaiah thinks it might have been a tourist.”

“Who’s Isaiah?”

“My boss, longtime resident, public works director, min
ister. Older Black man. There’s probably more that he does but I don’t know everything. He’s a little sour on tourists these days. The last renters trashed his house.”

Hill’s jaw muscles tightened and his eyes narrowed slightly. “Anyone who is a skilled archer is not going to mistake a dog for a deer. There’s no excuse for idiots like that who forget that they are working with a major weapon. Or worse yet, someone doing it on purpose. If someone was trying to shoot a dog on purpose and the dog lived, then they were a lousy archer to begin with.”

“The dog is recovering. I’ve taken him in until his owners can be found, but that is looking less likely all the time. Usually, owners are either frantically searching for a dog or they don’t want to be bothered. There’s not much in between.” Rocky paused, suddenly noticing the lack of something at Hill’s house. No dog sounds, no dog barking inside. Wouldn’t a guy like Hill have a dog? And his wife was never here, or if she was here, she was the quietest woman on earth.

“Do you have a dog?” asked Rocky.

Hill picked up the next weight bow with the twenty-five-pound draw, and handed it to Rocky without comment. “Used to. My wife and I are separated and the dog went with her. We had that dog for five years. She was a good strong mutt, smart as anything. Julie said I’m not home enough to have a dog. Let’s see you try that bow,” he said.

She was less accurate with the next size bow, but not bad, and she knew she’d be better by the next lesson. She knew she’d do even better if she could get more sleep, which still eluded her.

The dog’s recovery was remarkable, flesh grew back with flesh, muscle accommodated, bones meshed. He had a limp
that grew less noticeable, his large black body tweaking less to the left. But Rocky noted that his early-morning restlessness continued. She woke everyday by 4:30, pulling herself reluctantly from her dreams where she searched for Bob, scoured the land where souls of the dead live to catch a glimpse of him turning a corner, catch a scent of him. When she woke, exhausted from her journey into the land of death, the dog was always there, standing near her bed, his ears up in alarm, and with a whine coming from his throat.

As soon as she peeled back the covers, the dog appeared to relax, his ears settled down, and he put his nose into her hand.

“You too, big guy? Looks like neither of us can sleep.”

She made coffee and they went outside to walk the beach. Walking brought her back into her body and she knew the dog needed to keep moving to get stronger. Tess had told her that physical therapy for the dog was important and Rocky added in a few more minutes of his walk every day.

In mid-December she left the island for one night, meeting with her brother about details of her house that had been rented out for the year. The temperamental furnace needed to be repaired or replaced. She knew Melissa would be at her father’s house so she asked Tess to keep Lloyd for the night.

“Tess, will you keep Lloyd with you while I’m gone? It’s easier if he stays on the island.” She forgot to warn Tess about the dog’s restlessness. When Rocky came back she said, “You’re probably never going to take him again, are you? He’s a restless guy at 4:30 in the morning. Sorry.”

“What do you mean?” said Tess. “This guy didn’t budge until I got up at seven. I’m not one of those old farts who gets up at dawn.”

“No way. This dog is wide awake every morning at 4:30 when I get up,” said Rocky.

Tess handed the bag of dog food to Rocky. “That’s the hour of the distressed. Why are you waking up then?”

The truth of the situation hit Rocky. The dog woke up because she did. She was the one disturbing his sleep.

When she had been on the mainland, she read a newspaper article about dogs trained to alert people of impending seizures two hours prior to the event. It was speculated that they smelled the chemical change happening in the human. Maybe Lloyd smelled her sadness in a way that others couldn’t sense. Bob used to tell her about the neurotic behavior of dogs who belonged to anxious people. Or of dogs who were overly protective of people who were afraid of everything, who were sure that criminals lurked in every corner. “There’s not much about us that they don’t know,” he had said.

Rocky set the dog food back on Tess’s counter. She knelt by the black Lab. She gave him her hand to sniff. “Lloyd, I think I’m keeping you awake at night. Sorry buddy.”