Picture This

Picture This

Jacqueline Sheehan

Dedication

To the sibs: Frances, Harry, Mary Ellen, and Martha

Epigraph

You will not find the unexpected unless you expect it, for it is hard to find, and difficult.

—Heraclitus (500 BC)

Contents

Chapter 1

Natalie

N
atalie had seen more therapists in her life than she could remember. She couldn't remember a time without them. Therapists come with the territory in foster care, along with caseworkers and a slew of people who control where you live, where you go to school, and when and if you get medical care. And here's what they're good for: getting a kid a new foster family when the kid has been stuck with whack jobs, that's what.

When she was five, she didn't know to tell the therapist lady about eating only at school. Her foster family told her those were the rules, and she believed them. Here's what Natalie figured at five: if you were a floater like her, and you didn't belong anywhere, you ate at school and no place else. There were always rules in life, and when you were a little kid, that's what you learned all day long: the rules. If you were a bio kid, if you were born from the parents in the house, you ate dinner upstairs with the parents, instead of sitting huddled in the basement on a cot praying that the next day would come faster so that the churning hunger in your belly could be quenched by school food. Natalie wasn't the only foster kid in the basement; a little boy who was even smaller than she was slept in the next cot. Sometimes they could smell the food from upstairs, and they knew it had to be the most delicious food on the planet. Her favorite aroma was meatloaf, dense and rich. The foster mother made a meatloaf that smelled so good, Natalie wanted to cry. When the food smells came running down the basement stairs, the little boy would stick his hand down his pants and hold on to his penis. Natalie didn't know how that helped him, but she understood that you take whatever helps, and at least he had something, which was more than she had.

She must have said something to a teacher or to somebody. Maybe it was the boy, because the next thing you know, a car shows up for her and the other basement dweller and the caseworker is looking at where they sleep and they are out of that house before you can say “protective services.” Natalie was delivered to another home, and she never saw the little boy again. With the next family, she learned that in some houses all the kids eat at home and nobody sleeps in the basement. Very interesting. She also learned that therapists were good for something. They could broker a deal, and she needed them.

Between then and now, she had seen every kind of therapist. She was officially done with the foster care system now that she was eighteen, but in her time she had seen enough therapists to earn a P-h-fucking-D. Natalie made a study of therapists, watching what made them respond, what made them cool down to the temperature of frozen fish, and what made them sit up and help. Because they were so busy trying to change her, they didn't know she was studying them. She was sure of it.

Natalie got sprung out of the foster care system when she was seventeen, legally and all. One therapist helped her do it. Her name was Vivien, and she said it looked like Natalie needed to graduate from foster care. Vivien didn't see how it was helping Natalie to go from foster home to group home, back to another foster home. Vivien said that Natalie didn't attach well. What a genius that Vivien was. Attaching to a family was directly linked to trouble. So with a little help from Vivien, she dropped out of high school, enrolled in a GED class, and got a job at Subway because she liked their food better than the other fast-food places'. That's where she met Franklin. Not Frank, and God help you if you called him Frankie. Franklin, like the president.

Franklin did not use crack, which elevated him to the top rung of her choices. Marijuana, yes, if he was in the mood, and a little X here and there, but no crack. And he was awesome on the computer. Franklin broke through firewalls just for fun. He had graduated from high school and went to college for a year.

“The professors were too slow, babe. It was like being in a special ed class,” he said.

One night lying on his mattress, she said, “Can you find people? I mean, suppose I was trying to find someone and had hardly any information, just a name from long ago. Could you find them? I'm looking for my real father.” She had on his baseball cap and nothing else.

“You've got to be kidding me,” Franklin said. “You just watch me, watch and learn.”

Which is exactly what Natalie did. She studied what Franklin did. It would take time to learn everything that he knew, but she didn't need to know everything. Sometimes you get lucky or all the stars turn in the perfect direction, and it only happens once every thousand years. And sometimes you're like Natalie and you know how to find a good man like Franklin, good enough to get the job done.

Chapter 2

Peaks Island, Maine

“I
s this Roxanne Pellegrino?”

Rocky's landline had rung, which almost never happened. Isaiah, her boss, had insisted that she get a cell phone for her job. And who ever called asking for Roxanne? Nobody, except for solicitors from nonprofits and political campaigns. Cooper, her black Lab, regarded a ringing phone as only one notch down from a knock on the door. He roused from his morning nap at Rocky's feet to heightened attention.

“Yes. Who's calling?”

Rocky was waiting for a carpenter scheduled to replace some rattling windows in her rental cottage, but a carpenter was less likely to call, more likely to show up.

“You don't know me. . . .” The voice was young, a girl with her voice stuck in her throat, never hitting the full registers, staying high and timid. An unlikely carpenter.

“Are you calling about the windows?”

“Windows? No. I got your number—”

“If this is for a fund drive or donation, I want you to take me off your call list,” said Rocky. It wasn't that Rocky disliked donating to libraries or animal rescue organizations, and she considered explaining that to the caller, but she didn't like being called. She didn't like the membrane of this fragile, tiny house being punctured by the outer world.

“I'm not selling anything. I've been looking for my father, my biological father. If everything that I learned is true, then Robert Tilbe is my father. Is he there? I'd just like to talk with him.”

The floor fell away from under Rocky's feet and left her dangling in midair with a thudding pain in her chest. The barrel-chested black Lab stood up, ears alert, sensing alarm. It had been well over a year, a year and two months, since her husband, Bob, died. After his death, she had methodically informed Social Security, the banks, the credit card companies, the retirement accounts, the entire world that had documented Bob's life with accounts and file folders. There had been unending layers of Bob's identity: alumni associations, reminders from the licensing board for his veterinarian's license, even the Red Cross still wanted him to donate blood.

But it had been months since she'd had to say to anyone, “I'm sorry. You didn't know. He died. Yes, suddenly. Thank you. We're all sorry.” That's what she had to say to old friends who emerged from his past, people she hadn't known. Every time she had to announce his death again, the words sliced through her and she was pulled back to the months after his death when she had fallen into a bottomless pit of grief. No one had called looking for a father, until now.

“Who are you?”

“Natalie. Could you leave him a message? Tell him I don't want anything from him. It's not like that. I just want to talk to him. If he's not there, can I leave my number?”

Rocky took a breath and her feet connected with the floor again. “My husband died over a year ago.”

Even as she said it, she knew this would never be enough. The girl had opened a rusty can, and closing it would be impossible.

The girl chugged out a few sounds, hard consonants mostly, unconnected to words, the brittle beginnings of sentences, started and abandoned. The clatter of sounds struck Rocky in the chest. A note, a familiar note among the rest. It was a thread of Bob, a way that he had moved his lips, the way he could make the harshest words sound like a brush of velvet, a way of moving his tongue.

“Where are you? Where are you calling from?”

“Worcester, Mass. Do you know where that is?”

Rocky recognized the adolescent naïveté, the girl thinking that Worcester was an obscure location to someone in Maine, as if it were on the opposite side of the globe.

“Yes, I do know where it is. I'm from Massachusetts. I'm not sure how I can help you. You must have him confused with someone else. My husband never mentioned anything about a child. We told each other everything.” The bile of sorrow rose up her throat.

“Are you just saying he's dead to get rid of me? Please, he can't be dead. I promise I don't want anything, not money, and I won't make any trouble for you. Maybe he didn't know. I mean, that happens with men. But I just turned eighteen, so I'm an adult now, and I have some of my records, my birth records, and his name is on one of them.”

Rocky saw a tsunami rising up, reverberating from the shifting of Bob's tectonic plates. Before a killer wave strikes, the ocean draws out, sucking water, fish, seaweed, all life, including oxygen, along with it. Rocky's tender hold on the new life she had built on Peaks Island, the one where she didn't think of Bob every second, was sucked under, and she struggled to find a foothold.

“What do you want?” she asked. She slid down onto the floor, her back pressed against the fridge. Cooper came to her side, pressing into her, and put his head on her shoulder, an uncharacteristic move even for this highly expressive dog.

“I want to know who I am, where I come from. Medical stuff too. You know, did he have diabetes or something that I need to know about. Um, how did he die? I should know that.”

The certainty of meeting with the girl had solidified before Rocky had exhaled. She had to put a face on the voice. If there was any chance that a part of Bob existed, surely she could tell right away by looking at the girl. If Bob was the father, there would be a hint of him in her eyes, bone structure, the big smile; surely Rocky could sense his DNA. The desire to see the girl was suddenly overwhelming, but a small voice in her head, barely audible above the roar of possibility, urged her to step back.

Using every bit of strength she had, she said, “Give me your number. I promise to call you back. I'm in the middle of something right now.”

H
ill had started as her archery teacher, prodding her competitive spirit back to life in the dark months of autumn after Bob's death. Rocky had dipped and dodged Hill's steady advance since late winter, and now, by the last week of June, she felt like the full surge of the Maine rivers, bursting with snowmelt from a heavy winter, pounding with new life. They both knew it, and the sweet anticipation was almost too much for her. Before Hill had left for his annual camping trip with his friends, he had said, “I don't have to go to man camp this year. I've gone camping with these guys plenty of times. We drink beer, sit around the fire, stay up too late, eat way too much bacon for breakfast, and only as a sidebar do we actually do any archery. I'd rather be with you.” They had been at his house, one week before the school year ended. Hill had a smaller pile of homework to grade than usual. They sat across from each other at his kitchen table, and he had put both of her hands in his, stretching across the table. His crooked smile was imperfect and glorious, and his voice slid along Rocky's lean torso. Without thinking, she extended her toes out and touched his shinbone through his pants, her toes sliding up and down.

“I don't want to be the cause of canceling man camp. I'll be here when you get back,” she said. She still found it hard to believe that love, if this was love, was not a finite entity. She had loved her husband ferociously and had never considered that another new love would ever have been possible. Yet here it was, pulsing in their hands, both of them vibrating with anticipation.

“I won't be able to call you. We go up near the border of Canada, and there's no cell phone reception. You won't hear from me for two weeks.” He had stroked her hand, tugging softly on her fingers, one by one.

He was an impossibly strange combination of archer, high school English teacher, and hunter. Rocky's dormant battery of desire revved up every time he came within ten feet.

“We'll have all summer to figure this out,” she said, with considerable willpower. Here was a man who did not push; she knew that he wanted more than anything to ask her if she had decided to stay on Peaks, if she had decided about her job back in Massachusetts, and yet he did not. She had stood up to leave, and he walked with her to her car, his arm draped over her shoulder. “I'm not leaving without this,” he had said. He held her face in his hands and kissed her long enough that Rocky felt the last of the distance between them dissipating. She made a sound like a moan/squeak. This was a relationship on the precipice, a launching pad ready to go.

Hill was not due back for another week, and he was exactly whom she wanted to be with at this moment. A phone call from a possible daughter of her dead husband's was beyond sharing with even Isaiah, her boss and friend, at the moment. He would be rational and deliberate. Her friend Tess lived across the island, and without hesitating, she headed out the door with Cooper, jogging the two miles to Tess's house, praying that she was home.

Just as Rocky and the dog arrived at Tess's driveway, she spotted her friend opening the trunk of her black Saab. Tess was nearly seventy and had proven to be a solid friend, with the side benefits of being a physical therapist. “I need to talk with you. Please tell me you're not headed to Portland,” said Rocky.

“No, I was just over on the back shore collecting seaweed for the garden beds. The seaweed can wait, and I could use an extra pair of hands to spread it on the garden beds later. Come on in.”

Rocky noticed the large garbage can in the trunk with strips of seaweed poking out. Cooper's tail twirled in appreciation of Tess. He pushed his body along the sides of her legs and wound around her.

“Don't tell me there's something wrong with Cooper. I don't think I could stand that, and neither could you,” said Tess as they walked up to her deck. Her faded prayer flags, strung from two trees, snapped in the breeze. She stepped inside her house and returned with two glasses of water and a bowl for the dog.

“It's not Cooper. Someone just called me, a girl, who said she was looking for her biological father. She was looking for Bob. My Bob. She thinks Bob is her father,” said Rocky. She heard the waver in her voice and felt her recently established balance tipping precariously. “Her name is Natalie. She said that she has evidence that Bob was her father. The only thing harder than saying this out loud was hearing it on the phone,” said Rocky. She sank into a chair.

“Good Lord, you must be turned upside down. Tell me exactly what the girl said,” said Tess, sinking into a cross-legged position on a cushion. “What did you tell her? How can you possibly know if this is true? Did Bob ever tell you this, or that there was even a chance of a child?”

“No. No to everything. I told her that I'd call her back,” said Rocky. She described the phone conversation, line for line. Tess made her repeat it all twice.

“In the rush of this, we should not forget that Natalie didn't show up when Bob was alive. It is worth noting that she had a lot of years to look for her biological father. Why now?”

“Because she was a kid and probably she didn't have access to all her records until now. Because she was probably trying to survive,” said Rocky. Why did she say “survive”? Rocky didn't know anything about this girl. She didn't know what she was expecting from Tess, but it wasn't immediate doubt. Rocky pulled closer to the as yet unknown girl.

“Don't bite my head off. I'm just saying, here's something to remember. I'm not sure what it means either. Promise me, in the rush of things, that you'll remember the odd coincidence of death and emergence,” said Tess.

A cloud blew past, and a sudden ray of sunlight caught Rocky. In the single-minded need to talk with Tess, she had forgotten her baseball cap and sunglasses.

“I heard something in her voice, a catch, the way Bob's voice broke when he heard that a college friend had been killed in a motorcycle crash, this very guarded place that only showed up once every few years, and each time I heard it I wanted to weep. How could this girl have sounded the same?” Rocky wriggled on the plastic version of an Adirondack chair and pulled her knees up, hugging them as if the temperature had dropped.

Tess tilted her head in response to a sound in the dense brush. “Pileated woodpecker. We don't get those very often.”

“Tess! I don't care about the damned woodpecker, pileated or not. Someone just told me that Bob had a child.”

“I know, dear. If I were you, I'd grab at anything that smacked of my dead husband. Given what you've told me, you had the kind of marriage that doesn't come around that often. You miss him unbearably, and you think that you heard a strand of him in a stranger's voice. What are you going to do?” Tess wore a straw hat with a rawhide tie under her chin. She had tucked her considerable white hair under the hat, exposing her slender neck.

“I feel like my brain is sizzled. I'm trying to sit on my hands so I don't call her back this instant. That's why I came here, so you could slow me down and help me think.”

“There you go again, imagining that I'm wiser just because I'm older. I can tell every time this happens. I hate to disillusion you, but age doesn't make you more brilliant. It's being willing to step into the unknown that will keep you from premature aging.”

Cooper lay between them on his belly, flicking his deep brown eyes from one woman to the other. Rocky let her hand fall to his favorite spot at the base of his spine, and she rubbed with familiarity.

“I want whatever you've got. Help,” said Rocky.

“If you need someone else to say it, then I will. Wait twenty-four hours before you call her back. Can you do that?” said Tess, adjusting the string on her hat.

Rocky sighed. “I can try. But I can't stop thinking about her voice.”

“Let me give you something else to think about,” said Tess. “Distractions are highly underrated. Isaiah said he's fielded a complaint about you this week. Something about insulting a guy in the post office.”

“I didn't insult him. I just described, as the animal control warden, what I'd have to do to his car if he didn't stop leaving his dog inside with the windows rolled up. That's not an insult, it was descriptive information. People don't understand how quickly cars heat up.”