The Art of Floating (18 page)

And back at the
waterfront playground with the jump-jump-jump-ropers:

Sexy, sassy Sia Dane

wrote good books

and found much fame.

Sexy, sassy Sia Dane

lost her husband

what a shame.

(boo hoo!)

Sexy, sassy Sia Dane

closed her house up

down the lane.

The grass grew high.

The grass grew thick.

Couldn't part it with a stick.

When a single shingle blew,

the house cracked open.

Would Sia too?

Sexy, sassy Sia Dane

found a man

perhaps a swain?

Sexy, sassy Sia Dane

how many days

until she's sane?

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

. . .

•  •  •

“Seriously,” Jilly said, whipping to a stop in her Mini Cooper, “how do any of you know what a
swain
is?”

The shortest girl—a redhead—pulled out her iPhone and stuck out her hip. “Duh,” she said. “I have a thesaurus and a rhyming dictionary.”

“I should sign you now,” Jilly said.

The first letter
to Toad arrived via Express Mail three days after Wingnut's spot on the news. It was addressed to “The Silent Man,” c/o “the woman who found the Silent Man on the beach.”

“Wasn't any question where this letter was headed,” Bert said as he handed over the envelope.

“You could have put it in the mailbox with all my other mail, Bert,” Sia said, and as he craned his neck trying to get a glimpse of Toad, she thought about the green gooseneck desk lamp she had back in college.

“Thought this one deserved the personal touch, Odyssia. You know, hand delivery.” As he said it, Bert wiggled his eyebrows.

Sia closed the door, as gently as possible, in his face.

•  •  •

“For you,” Sia said to Toad. She sat next to him and opened the envelope. The letter was written on see-through white paper with scalloped edges and red, hand-drawn hearts in the corners.

Dear Silent Man:

I'm quite sure we've loved one another in a past life. I have been looking for you ever since. Finally I've found you. More soon.

Love,

Lucinda

Sia turned to Toad. He was staring out the window, unmoved by Lucinda's confession of love and devotion. “Hold on, my friend,” she told him. “I have a feeling this ride is just beginning.”

•  •  •

After dark, Jilly's beacon began to blink. Like a fallen star embedded in the sand.

blue

green

red . . . red

blue

green

red . . . red . . . red

•  •  •

“What message do you think it's sending?” Mrs. Windwill whispered to Mr. Windwill from the window in their bedroom.

“That's easy. It's saying,
Jilly is crazy. Your wife is crazy. Odyssia Dane is crazy. All the women in this town are downright crazy.
”

“Go to sleep, old man. What do you know?”

“Odyssia Dane?”

“
Yes.”

“THE Odyssia Dane?”

“Yes.”

“The novelist Odyssia Dane?”

“Yes, ma'am, it's me. What can I do for you?”

“Oh, my God. Wait right here. Don't move. Okay? Promise?”

Sia took a deep breath. She was tempted to flee, but her toasted club sandwich wasn't ready yet. “I'll be here,” she said.

A few moments later, three breathless women in snug sundresses stormed the café.

“Oh, my God. You're right, Stella. It is her! You weren't pulling our legs.”

All three were clutching copies of
Girl Has Wings
with the gold “Hometown Author” sticker on the front cover.

“Mrs. Dane,” the chesty one said, “we drove all the way here from our vacation house in Marblehead to buy ‘Hometown Author' copies of your book. We love this novel. Our book club read it a few months ago and we're still talking about it. Never did we dare to dream that we'd see you in person.”

Sia was backed up against the magazine rack, right between the porn and the souped-up car mags. “Thank you,” she said. “That's good to hear.”

“Now that we have you in our clutches, can you tell us a little something about the Silent Man? Is it all true? Are you writing about him? Is he the subject of your next novel?”

A year ago they would have asked those same questions about Jackson.

Sia circled the women until she was close to the cash register. “I'm so happy you love the book, and I'm delighted to meet you. But I can't tell you anything about Toad.”

The freckly woman glanced at her friends. “It's true. She does call him Toad.”

“But you won't dish on him?” the chesty one said.

“It wouldn't be fair.”

“I knew you'd be respectful,” the third one said. “That's the kind of woman you are.”

The girl behind the counter handed Sia her sandwich in a bag. “Here you go, Sia.”

“Thanks, Sam. Anything else I can do for you ladies?”

“Sign our books?” Freckles said.

Sia paused. She hadn't signed a book since before Jack disappeared. She hadn't even signed a check. Jillian was an excellent forger.

Another deep breath.

“Okay,” she said, and she reached for a pen on the counter. “Who's first?”

Next [click]

•  •  •

Ninety
-two-year-old Hiroshi Aomori disappeared in 1945 at the end of World War II. Sixty-seven years after he was last seen—just a few days after Sia discovered Toad on the beach—he was reunited with his family in Japan. He had been discovered in Moscow.

A young woman found him abandoned on a side street. He was embarrassingly naked and very confused. His ninety-two-year-old weenie scared and shriveled. No one knew where he came from or where he'd been living during those lost years . . . a lifetime for many. Some speculated that he was a prisoner of war, held by Russian authorities for his great knowledge, but his wife, Nyoko Aomori, insisted he had none. She said that he was just a normal man who spoke in loose language. She said there would be no reason for the Russian authorities to hold him.

“What does he know?” she told a reporter. “My husband was the runt in a very big litter and his family had too little food to grow his brain. He is a little bit dumb. Who, besides me, would want a man who is a little bit dumb?”

Someone else said that they might have used him for his brawn. “What brawn?” she asked. “Look at his pictures. Even when he was young, nothing but bone. Skinny arms. Scrawny legs. He could barely lift a stick of wood to put in the fire.

“No one would want my husband for hard work,” Nyoko Aomori said. “He was a shoemaker. Nothing else. Just a shoemaker. Leather and lasts. That is all he could lift. Not stones or bricks. Not sacks of wheat or railroad ties.”

Yet despite his obvious failings, Nyoko Aomori cried when she finally saw him again.

“I did not remarry in all those years. I raised our daughters, and every night I visited Hiroshi in my dreams. He was almost a better lover there than in our real life.

“At night, I dreamed his reality. Each night when I lay down I made him my final thought and then I would go to him in my sleep. We had only been married fifteen months . . . long enough to make two children. One he never even saw.”

Hiroshi returned to Nyoko Aomori in a wheelchair. Broken from the war and from whatever life had engulfed him for so long. Someone put pants on him before she saw him.

“I could have been caring for him,” she said. “All these years, I could have been caring for him. Instead I have been tending an invisible man . . . so much, so much, that I became invisible, too.”

•  •  •

In Shiloh, Texas, there was suspicious activity surrounding the disappearance of a respected banker. An investigation was under way. His wife and accountant were prime suspects.

•  •  •

And as for the man missing in North Dakota? Nobody really wanted to find him anyway. His wife said he was a malignant tumor on her soul and his parents wished him good riddance.

•  •  •

Gumper stood, stretched, padded over to Sia, and nudged her leg.

“What do you think?” she said to him. “Could our Jackson ever be a malignant tumor?” She imagined a blackened, broiled Jack stuck to her soul like a Siamese twin.

Gumper sighed and rolled over onto his back for a belly rub.

“No. No way,” she said, rubbing his furry middle with her foot. “And no, nothing yet about Toad. Lots of lost men, but nothing fits.”

•  •  •

Then, in bright Google-y blue, she saw it:

Jackson Dane

lost, mysteriously, disappeared, without a trace, poof

Sia's innards softened and up she went.

•  •  •

“Up, up, and away,” she said, and then Floating Sia headed straight for the Windwill house, which was gleaming like a hot-pink gumdrop in the midafternoon sun. As usual, Mrs. Windwill was in the garden, trimming rosebushes and pruning morning glories. Her silver hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and she was wearing the stupid green fishing hat that Mr. Windwill always teased her about.

“She's not getting old,” Sia had said when Richard had proposed age as an excuse for Mrs. Windwill's blunder in omniscience. “If anything, her seeing is getting keener.”

After all, two months before Toad's appearance on the beach, Mrs. Windwill had seen Ralph and Rose Winks get into a fight and dismantle each other at dawn, sending both parties to the emergency room and then anger management classes. She'd watched Bud Miller race down Water Street in his brand-new Hummer, drunk as the devil, lose control, plow through the sea wall, and finally come to rest bottom up in the basin. (She'd even swum out to help him back to shore, though she admitted to debating his worth before leaping in.) And just a few days before, she'd seen fifteen-year-old Wendy Nelson run stark naked along Water Street during a slumber party at the Oakes house. “Probably a dare,” she'd told Wendy's mother when she'd called to report the incident. She didn't believe in such nonsense.

But on the day that Jackson disappeared, she'd seen nothing. She swore by this up and down, and even allowed herself to be hypnotized twice by the police psychologist. Maybe she was in the shower, she said. Maybe she was in the basement with a load of clothes. She just didn't know.

And Toad?

No excuse.

“Weepy eye, my ass,” Sia said.

•  •  •

When she was floating, Sia never felt any pain. She didn't feel the fish that seemed intent on flashing its catfishlike fins every time Toad so much as shifted a pinky finger; she didn't feel Jackson's absence every time Gumper sighed or the phone rang; she didn't feel the pain of having overheard that fight between her parents on the day the pork chop got violently dredged. She didn't even feel the Dogcatcher's sadness.

“It's glorious,” she told her therapist.

“Then why don't you stay up there?” her therapist said.

•  •  •

“I see you,” the Dogcatcher whispered, watching Floating Sia soar overhead.

“What's the matter,
sweetie?”

“I lost my pen.”

“Which one?”

“Oh, for God's sake, Jackson, my PEN. You know, THE pen. The one I write with.” Sia wrestled the cushions off the couch and dug her fingers deep into the crevices where pennies usually hide.

“You think it's in there?”

“I don't know.”

“Were you writing on the couch?”

“No, I never write on the couch. You know that. Why are you asking me that?”

Jackson bit his lip. “Then why would it be there?”

“I DON'T KNOW, JACKSON!”

“Okay, okay. Let's think. Where were you writing last?”

Sia stopped and sat on a cushion on the floor. She sucked her lips in so she wouldn't cry, but it didn't work. Little sobs leaked out from between her lips. “At . . . my . . . desk . . .” she said.

Jackson chuckled, grateful they were moving from frantic anger to teary resignation. “It's all right, sweets. We'll find your pen. Let me look.” He disappeared into her office. A few minutes later:

“Look! Your pen!” He held it up triumphantly.

Sia leapt up into Jack's arms. “Oh, thank God. You're the best. You're amazing. The love of my life.” And she grabbed the pen, disappeared into her office, and closed the door.

The thump of Toad hit
ting the floor shook the house, and by the time Sia reached him, he was curled on his side next to the bed, tears silently streaming down his cheeks, nocturnally traveling whatever terrible wave had landed him on the beach. Without waking him, she moved him from the floor to the bed, and once he was tucked in, she rubbed circles on the small of his back like she used to do whenever Jackson had the flu or couldn't fall asleep. She rubbed until their energy blended into one and she could no longer tell the difference between her hand and his back.

•  •  •

While she rubbed, she imagined Jackson, wandering in some faraway land, curled in a mute hollow similar to Toad's, taken in by a woman who feeds and clothes him, offers him a bit of peace, a respite from his journey. The woman's house, Sia imagined, was in the woods, in a clearing much like the ones you might find in “Little Red Riding Hood,” “The Three Little Pigs,” or “Hansel and Gretel.” It was the kind of house—cottage really—that Jackson would have one day built for himself and Sia up in the forests of New Hampshire or Maine, and it was a place where conifers towered overhead and soft, fragrant pine needles coated the ground. Jackson's favorite kind of place.

Sia saw Jackson in this place—silent, lost, confused, not knowing which way was home. In her dreaming, the woman sat behind him on a bed, rubbing circles on his back, beautiful but not willful, and their eventual coming together was not out of her deviousness, but out of Jackson's desire to be found. By someone. Anyone. As Sia rubbed the place between Toad's shoulder blades, she remembered the details of Jackson's body, the extra-long left testicle that hung a good two inches below the right, the squarish mole on his left thigh just below the crease of his hip, the odd outward curl of his baby toe.

Yet there she was, watching this strange man shift slowly from nightmare to sleep, resting her hand on his lower back as his breath evened and his tears dried. She studied the creased scar on his shoulder, a cluster of freckles on his jawline, and the rough scabs on his hands. When she was sure he was asleep, she reached over and touched his hair. Without the clumps of sea salt and sand, it was thick and ropy. Coarse and full. Nothing like Jackson's baby-fine hair. When Toad turned onto his side and the moon hit him just right, she saw the tender pink wound behind his left ear. Like a keyhole, she thought. She pressed her finger to it. Hot, hot, hot.