Picture This (25 page)

A small end table separated their two chairs, and he placed the pages face down on the scratched wood.

“Was anyone hurt?”

“No, but the parents were clearly alarmed, and with a four-year-old child of their own, they said they couldn't take the risk,” he said.

“What else?” asked Rocky, cataloging all the information that Natalie had omitted.

“There's a gap in time with her notes because the caseworker was gone on maternity leave for a year. Keep in mind that these are not the official centralized notes, but her private notes. Natalie was moved to a therapeutic group home at age thirteen. She was also medicated for a mood disorder, then ADD. It looks like she was on a cocktail of antipsychotics and antidepressants,” he said.

Rocky cringed. The entire population of the United States was overmedicated, obligingly gulping down drugs and feeding the wallets of the pharmaceutical companies. “How does a kid go from being in foster care, to potential adoptive parents, to being in a therapeutic group home?”

Levine closed the file. “In essence, her behavior had become too disruptive for foster homes. This must have happened during the yearlong absence of her caseworker.”

“What happened to the caseworker after she came back? You make it sound like she didn't work with Natalie again.”

“She tried to work with Natalie again. But the girl made clear and specific threats against the caseworker and her baby. She had to transfer the case to someone else.”

“What?” Rocky twisted in her chair. “Are you sure?”

“The caseworker was shattered. She had cared deeply about the girl. Yes, I'm sure.”

Rocky tried to picture Natalie threatening her caseworker with bodily harm. Had it been an adolescent throwaway comment, like
I wish you were dead?
Even as she wondered, a dark sense of dread crept up her torso.

Levine cleared his throat. “The files have been tampered with. It is likely that there has been a breach of the firewalls within the agency, and she has either been lying to you or she believes what she has told you. She came looking for your deceased husband, or she came looking for you. Do you have any idea what she wants?”

Rocky looked over Levine's shoulder at the wall clock. It was already 11:00
A.M.
She pushed out of the chair. “No. Maybe. I have three hours to think about this nonstop while I drive to Amherst, and three more hours while I drive back again. I only know what I wanted. If Bob was her father, we could've been a family. I know this sounds naive or delusional, but Bob wouldn't really be gone.”

Chapter 46

Tess

T
ess would never have told anyone, but when she heard his voice in her dreams, she knew immediately: Len was her beloved. The voice came from the steady place within her ex-husband that resurfaced when he spent considerable time nursing her back to health, not the part of him that destroyed their marriage and his career. The sharp thrill of summer had opened up wide, and this evening Tess would resume her weekly trips to Portland, as soon as she finished overseeing the change in renters at three of the houses she managed.

What were they now, Tess and Len? Old, that was one thing. Tess was at the doorway of seventy, Len was seventy-one, and despite the fact that Tess was freakishly agile (as Melissa liked to say), she knew that age was sneaking up on her like a wet dog on a living room couch—sinking down and not smelling so good. Was she ready for the next part of life? Without the comfort of her multisensory wiring, her sweet synesthesia, her ability to see the unique color of every letter and the cinematic blaze of numbers? It was returning in tiny bits, but Tess was not hopeful. When she had sniffed her granddaughter's hair the day before and been enveloped in the visual display of a peach, that might have been as good as it was going to get.

Tess still had a resoundingly spritely body, despite encroaching age. She would have been horrified if anyone ever detected the pride she took in her bodily freedom, her ability to dance without self-consciousness, to strip down naked and slide into the Jacuzzi at one of the rental houses without fear of how she looked from the back. Ego was a bad thing in any department; the blue Buddha on her bathroom door reminded her of that every morning. Still, if she could, she would endow everyone with the physical freedom she felt. So far, the only one who seemed to dance to Tess's drummer was her granddaughter. She was already planning their berry-picking adventure for tomorrow.

The windows were open, and the night air was still sweet in her house. Breezes carried from the Atlantic wrapped around Peaks Island, cooling it, spritzing it with salt water. She still had a few physical therapy patients who had waited loyally for her to return to work. Harold had another appointment next week. She was back to maximum capacity.

But the dream voice, clear and kind, what part of her ex-husband did this come from? Not the tall, blue-eyed man who attended AA meetings three times a week in Portland. Not the young, hopeful man she had married, who seemed to drink only as much as the rest of their college friends. Not the successful physician who drank from the minute he arrived home until he collapsed on the couch, growling in his sleep, or the man who arrived home with blood smeared over his face and shirt, having run his silver BMW directly into the neighbor's new fence, an event that he was unable to recall. It was his elemental self, the small boy with corn-silk hair, or the still-straight-spined man who had long since given up his medical practice and instead worked three days a week at the Portland Chamber of Commerce, helping tourists take in the history of the seaport town and locate B and Bs.

It had been twenty-five years since they divorced, and most of the hard things had already happened and gone by. She had thought of telling him how much she longed for him, yet something stopped her. She would never tell Len that she loved his arthritic hands, the way his knuckles had expanded and twisted in the direction that fingers were never meant to go. As a surgeon, his lithe young hands, his strong, confident, testosterone-fueled hands, were prized above all else. Surgeons bathed their hands like precious lovers, allowed them to grace a table for all to see, with the nails squarely trimmed, the palms devoid of calluses; surgeon hands could be placed in a museum, the prototype of the perfect hands. She had been jealous of those perfect hands when they were married, when they were young. He had loved his hands more than Tess and more than their two children, though not as much as alcohol; he had loved alcohol even more than his hands.

The sober version of Len—the Len she would have killed for in her twenties and thirties—was ever more enticing. All of him shone through his gargoyle knuckles, his swollen fingers, and even his ridged and brittle fingernails. She wanted to press her lips to the tender edges of him that had finally crept out, erupting like a slow earthquake through his hands, forcing bones and cartilage to change, creating a new sculpture of Len.

Tess had a full day of rental management and one physical therapy patient. She didn't have time to dwell on what could have been. She poured milk over two squares of Weetabix cereal and mashed up the mixture for breakfast. She had three houses to oversee today, and she hoped that the two teenage girls she'd hired were up to the demands of cleaning. One of the houses on the north side had a hot tub the size of a minivan, and Tess planned to soak in it before heading to Portland.

T
ess stepped off the six-thirty ferry, her skin tingling, aware that the summer air carried expectations. She met the eyes of every person coming toward her on the sidewalk, looking to see who among them was awake with love. She opened the door to the pub, beyond the summer commotion of the Old Port, and searched the inner perimeter for Len. He sat watching the door, his back to the wall, a seltzer with lemon in front of him. Tess felt the ping in the center of her abdomen. Was this a tug in the stitches, a sign of dreaded adhesions? From the core of the ping she saw a spreading circle of white, then red, spreading out the way a ripple does in a pond. Tess stopped halfway across the room, staggering with recognition, and gripped the back of a chair while she took a deep breath.

How had it found her? How did desire for the formerly disastrous, drunken husband show up now? Had he seen it in her face? Was she pumping out some kind of adolescent hormone from her body? They had made love hundreds of times in that other life when their bodies had been moist and fresh, filled with blood and sorrow.

She slid into the booth across from him and held out her small hands like cups, waiting for him. “Here. Give me your hands. They are so lovely,” she said.

Len leveled his gaze, and his clear blue eyes came forward, emerging from the way station where he had parked his heart for years. “I've been waiting,” he said. He placed his hands in the small cup of her palms and overflowed them. Tess had not touched Len like this since they were young and living in the erupting volcano of their marriage.

She knew his nature, his arrogance as a young man, his rise into the rarefied world of surgery, where drugged patients lay in naked sacrifice to the surgery theater, with all the other doctors and nurses there to assist him. She understood as much as anyone the fire of alcoholism and the way it had burned every layer of self-respect from his bones until nothing was left except sobriety and the few ounces of his true nature that had survived.

“You're still there, aren't you?” she whispered.

She did not want to cry, and yet there was nothing that could stop it. She was nearly as stripped of her glories as he was. If all that she could recover of her synesthesia was the color and scent of her granddaughter's hair and a few squeaks of cross fire here and there, then she would have to live with that. Len had lived with far less. Here was the former surgeon working at the Portland Chamber of Commerce.

“It's me, as best I know me. I've been waiting for you. We could stay here for dinner and play our 307th game of darts, or we could get up and leave. My car is outside. This glaringly sober man could drive this formerly synesthetic woman to his house and they could watch the sunset from his dock.” Len's house was located in South Portland on an inlet that faced south.

Len's chin trembled once. He was still a proud man, despite the loss of his profession, his family, things that some men wear like medals. They had long ago said all the hard and horrible things to each other. His drunken anger had lashed her with hurricane force. And now here he was—all that remained of him.

What is faith if not the act of love, of stepping into midair? The sounds of the pub hummed all around them: generators for the walk-in cooler, the clash of ice hitting stainless steel behind the bar, the soft clunk of a glass set on the polished dark wood, the
whoosh
of the door opening, the chemical whiff of air freshener from the bathroom, the customer at the bar asking,
Can you turn on ESPN?

Tess pulled her hands out from under Len's. She pushed down on the table and stood up. Why now? How did love happen? She had thought she knew everything there was to know about love in her life. She held out one hand to him, timid, like a girl, crazy with expectation. Len smiled and took her hand, slid out of the booth. They walked out of the pub, the sounds and smells parting on either side of them in waves. Len leaned his right shoulder into the door and pushed, creating a space for Tess to exit. The pub had a front step of thick granite. Holding hands, they stepped off, into the night.

S
he hadn't meant to fall asleep at Len's, but then she hadn't meant to slip off her clothes and slide into bed with him either. “There have been others,” she had whispered to him.

“I know,” he had said. “You do recall that I married again after you?” He ran his arthritic hands along her thin torso. She heard a tingling of bells that started in her toes.

She had curled around his body, like seaweed, wrapped around the sinew of his legs. It was morning, and a dam had opened in her brain with the brilliant colors of letters flooding in. The days of the week cascaded in with the soft triangles and cubes. It was a bit much all at once, even for Tess.

“Len, it's back!”

“What's back?” He still quivered, like a machine with electrical currents flaring up in random sectors, sending charges through his thighs and chest.

“My synesthesia! I had noticed tiny sparks all last week, but I thought that was all I was going to get. Now it's back.”

Len reached over and cupped his hand over her small breast. “Let's give it a test. Here, when I touch here, what happens?”

“Oh that,” said Tess, laughing. “That is cool and tangy sherbet. Mango sherbet.”

“It is going to be very hard not to take credit for jump-starting your multiple wiring and I'm fighting a truckload of egotistical urges. But since I do not want to miss one minute of multimedia future sex with you, I'm going to resist the temptation to say that my geriatric studliness was the catalyst,” said Len.

“And yet you managed to say it anyhow,” said Tess, rubbing her lips across the white stubble on his face.

“If only I'd been sober back then. I regret missing one second with you. I regret so many things,” he said.

Len's words rolled like honey over her. She fell asleep again, curled around him. Later, as the sun rose higher with the east light gliding across his bedroom wall, Len's years of loneliness unfurled and his bones softened around her.

Something strummed her brain, a scratching sound like a squirrel trapped in the wall. Her eyes flew open.

“Wake up! Danielle is on the ferry alone. Today is the first time that she is taking the ferry alone. We had planned this in such detail. Her babysitter is driving her to the ferry for the eleven-fifteen. I assured her that I'd be at the dock in Peaks waiting for her. She had begged for weeks,” said Tess. She catapulted from the bed, flush with the unabridged return of her synesthesia.

“Where are my clothes? What time is it? Never mind, I know exactly what time it is, I always do. It's eleven-twenty, Len, for God's sake, where is your phone? Our granddaughter is about to experience her first horrible disillusionment, not to mention fear . . . ,” said Tess, in rapid, uncompromising fire.

Len sat up and swung his legs over the side of his bed. Former surgeons could still come to attention in seconds from a deep sleep; the training never left them. His pants were on the floor, discarded with abandon last night. He pulled out his cell phone.

“We'll call the Casco Bay ferry and tell them that Danielle is expecting you, but you'll be late. We can ask someone to stay with Danielle until you get there. Tess, please slow down. Children are safer on Peaks than anywhere I can think of.”

Tess pulled a T-shirt over her head and stuffed her bra into her pants pocket. “Wait. I'll call Rocky. She can meet Danielle there.”

Len handed her the phone. Tess paused, took a breath. Rocky's phone number flooded into her in a cascade of colors and shapes: a red cube, a blue oval, a rough yellow two.

“Oh, please be home,” said Tess.

The answering machine picked up after four rings. Tess said, “Rocky, are you there? Pick up the damn phone, this instant . . . ,” when she heard a voice. It was Natalie.

“What's wrong, Tess?” asked the girl. “Rocky's not here. She had to go to Massachusetts. Something with her brother, that's all she said. She'll be back late tonight.”

Tess sat on the bed. “Please run down to the ferry, and I do mean run. Danielle is taking her first solo voyage, and I was supposed to be there. I was delayed. I spent the night in Portland, well, South Portland. I'll be there as soon as I can. Will you go to the ferry? Oh thanks. You're an angel. And please call me when she gets there,” said Tess. Surely Natalie could manage meeting Danielle.

Tess collapsed back on the bed. “I feel like I'm sixteen, had sex for the first time in the backseat of a car, and my father just discovered me. He'll have to shoot you, and he won't let me go to college,” said Tess, running her fingers through her discombobulated white hair.

Len leaned back on the bed as well. “Now you and I are far older than our parents were when we were sixteen. Your father is long dead, so I'm safe from assassination. And the last time I checked, you were a partially retired physical therapist. I do agree on one count: I feel like I've had sex for the first time. The quality of completely sober sex should be incentive enough for AA.”