The Art of Floating (4 page)

One week after Jackson disappeared, Sia closed up their house. She nailed down the shutters and drew the drapes. She sealed every crevice around every windowsill and doorstop with duct tape so that not a pinch of light could sneak in. In the attic, she stuffed steel wool into the holes the mice had chewed. She banished the ants and spiders. She filled pots and pans with water and set them near the windows and doors, hopeful that what she'd heard about water drawing back the ones you loved was true. In the middle of a cloudy night, she climbed a ladder, shimmied across the ridge of the roof, and put a cap on the chimney. The next morning she cursed the sun and the sea breeze.

•  •  •

“Sia,” Jilly said, “it is ninety-five degrees outside. We are going to suffocate to death in here like those old people down in Boston. We need ventilation.”

“Ventilate elsewhere,” Sia said.

•  •  •

Once the outside of the house was properly shuttered, Sia closed the inside, too. She packed away anything that reminded her of Jackson. Their matching bathrobes. A can of lime-scented shaving cream. Photographs of the two of them on rock ledges and mountain peaks. Magazines about prairie dogs. Magazines about aspen trees. Jack's warden uniforms. Those goddamned love notes on the fridge. A way-too-expensive pair of polarized sunglasses that (Jackson said every time he put them on) cut the sun's glare and made sight fishing a heck of a lot easier. Thigh-high waders. A two-inch wooden carving of a plover. Three Hank Williams (Sr.) CDs. His favorite baseball cap that read “Catch & Release.” A stray roll of tippet. His beloved Swarovski spotting scope. Books by Dickens and Twain and Emerson. A Mach-5 razor. Yellow pencil stubs. A faded T-shirt with a picture of Popeye on the chest. A black-and-white photograph of his grandparents when they were first married. And so much more.

When she was done, it looked as if no one had ever loved in the house, and when there were no more things to stuff into boxes and hide away, Sia did what no one ever thought she'd do. She took down every list she and Jackson had ever made together, including the wee little one they'd penned on a bar napkin the night Jackson had proposed . . . the one that listed the top 7 dates they'd had during their courtship.

“Are you nuts?” Jilly had asked when it came down. “Have you lost your f'ing mind?”

Sia hadn't answered. She just reached up and took down the wall-sized list that listed all the trips she and Jackson had taken in their first year of marriage, and then the one he'd written for her twenty-seventh birthday that listed the fifteen things he loved most about her. This was her favorite list, the first one he'd made all by himself:

1. burps like a trucker
   
2. believes in invisible things like fairies, ghosts, hope, and God
   
3. doesn't share her pens
   
4. says
   fuck
   more than me
   
5. cooks awesome curry
   
6. shushes me when she's writing
   
7. prefers hiking boots to high heels
   
8. prefers bare feet to hiking boots
   
9. talks to herself (loudly)
   
10. uses words like
    extirpate
    
11. drinks WAY too much coffee
    
12. doesn't get her eyebrows waxed
    
13. snorts when she laughs
    
14. loves Jilly and Gumper like mad
    
15. loves me
    

“I don't snort when I laugh,” Sia said.

“Oh, yes, you do.”

“Do not.”

“Do, too. I'll prove it.” He pinned her arms behind her with one hand and tickled her with the other until she snorted. “See?” he said.

“Power of suggestion,” she said.

•  •  •

Finally, when it seemed there was nothing else to close, Sia closed herself. She stuffed her wounded, throbbing heart into a small steel contraption that looked something like a birdcage she'd once seen at a garage sale but that she'd considered too inhospitable for a living thing. The thin gray bars were set so close together that nothing bigger than the chirp of a bird could sneak in or slip out. It wasn't an easy task, jamming her heart in there, and even when she'd managed to get the whole thing in, bits and pieces squeezed back out through those narrow spaces between the bars, like bits of a fat lady's foot squeezing out of the sides of a too-small pair of strappy sandals. It wasn't pretty, but it worked.

After that—exhausted, tormented, and woefully brokenhearted—Sia lay down and refused to get up again—except, as she put it, to piss and shit.

She even banished M from the house.

“You're banishing your mother?” Jilly said. “You can't banish M.”

Sia rested her hand over her heart. “I can't take it, Jil. It's too much when she's close. She can come in when Jackson gets back,” Sia said. “Now leave me alone.”

“
You found a what?” Jilly asked after Sia explained her discovery on the beach.

“A man,” Sia answered.

“What kind of a man?”

“A silent man.”

“What do you mean . . . silent?”

“He doesn't talk.”

“Where is he?”

“In the kitchen.”

“There's a silent man in your kitchen?” Jilly stood.

“Yes.”

“You brought a strange, silent man from the beach into your house?”

“I didn't say
strange
.”

“You didn't have to.”

Long pause.

“Are you nuts, Sia?”

“Oh, be quiet. He's harmless.”

“What do you mean? What century are you living in? You can't tote men you don't know into your house. Even I don't do that.”

“It's my house. I can do what I want.”

“Of course you
can
, but it's stupid.”

“Are you done?”

“I guess so, since the guy's already here.”

“Right.”

“Sia, I thought you were going to meet me at the door with an injured seal or a bag of money. Not a man.” Jillian craned her neck toward the kitchen, trying to get her first glimpse. “So he's mute?”

“I don't know if he's mute. It could be that he just hasn't spoken yet.” Sia wedged herself in the hallway that led from the living room to the kitchen and pushed hard every time Jillian tried to shove past.

“Oh, come on,” Jilly said. “Let me see him.” She flattened herself against the wall and tried to squeeze between it and Sia's left hip. When that didn't work, she crouched and tried to juke through Sia's legs. She was like a piping plover—small, skittish, quick, unpredictable. Sia managed to block her, but only because she had height on her side.

Out of breath, Jillian asked, “What's your silent man doing now?”

“Eating, I hope. When we got here, I gave him muffins and milk.”

“Where did he come from?”

“I don't know. I don't have a clue.”

“Do you recognize him?”

“Nope, never seen him before.”

“Could he be an alien?”

Sia rolled her eyes. “An alien? No, Jilly, he's not an alien.”

“Are you sure?” Jilly had a thing about aliens.

“Yes.”

“How do you know?”

“I just know.”

“How?”

“Aliens are ugly things with giant heads and goofy eyes. This guy is handsome, way too handsome to be an alien.” She grabbed Jillian's wrist and held tight.

“Handsome?” Jillian stopped moving. “You didn't say he was handsome, Sia. You said he was soaking wet and disheveled.”

“He was, and is, but it seems he might be handsome, too.”

Jillian tugged hard to loosen Sia's grip. She liked handsome.

“Jillian.” Sia's voice was sharp.

“Okay, okay, what?” Jillian stood still, her arm slack in Sia's clenched fingers.

“This is serious. I think this guy has shell shock or something. He looks, well, how does he look? Different, I guess.”

“Different?”

“Yeah. Something's not right.”

“That bad?”

“Yeah, that bad. You can't go roaring in there. You'll freak him out even more.”

Jillian relaxed. “Okay, okay, I hear you. I'll chill. Just let me meet him.”

“Fine, but take it easy. I think this guy just crawled out of the ocean, and honestly, I have no idea where he was before that.” Sia let go of Jilly's arm and walked down the hall, but before rounding the corner into the kitchen, Sia peeked in.
If Gumper is sitting in there alone
, she thought,
Jilly is going to think I've finally gone over the edge
.

•  •  •

The Dogcatcher crept from between the boulders. She squeezed through Sia's front gate and slipped into the tangle of forsythia bushes. Then she squatted down. Though most people thought the Windwill house was Water Street's finest, she preferred Sia's. Compared to all the other houses along this stretch, it was diminutive . . . a fairy-tale cottage with old-fashioned latticework windowpanes and purple pansies overflowing from hanging pots on the porch.

A few minutes after Jilly shut the front door behind her, the Dogcatcher's left foot fell asleep, but still, she didn't move.

Fr
om her mother, Sia learned that names were far more than randomly ascribed monikers. Like the phase of the moon on the night of your birth, a name could destroy or solidify your fate. It could break a heart or cause a mountain of love to grow where before there was only a pile of rubble. A name could make you beautiful or hideous. It could rain down like a soft shower after a long drought or clunk like the sad coming together of two hollow objects. A name could roll off your tongue like desire, shimmy like the belly of a practiced dancer, or itch like a grain of sand in your sneaker.

Always her mother's daughter, Sia took to naming things at a very young age. When she was only two, she named her favorite tree “Jack,” in hopes it would grow as tall as the beanstalk in her favorite fairy tale, eventually leading to sweets and riches, and just eight months later, she renamed her favorite book. Its original title,
A Golden Walk
, bored the heck out of her, so she renamed it
Tussle and Run
.

As time passed, Sia took on bigger, more serious naming projects, ones that could and often did determine the fate of her subject. Three weeks after getting a puppy for her seventh birthday, she announced her name during dessert.

“Bernadette,” she said, cradling the wriggling pooch like an infant.

Her father was incredulous. “Your dog's name is Bernadette?” he said. Dogs were supposed to be called Rex or Midnight or Fletch, not Betty or Bitsy or Bernadette.

M smiled.

“Yes,” Sia said. “I read that many years ago there was a famous English bulldog named Bernadette who saved three children from a sinking raft. My Bernadette looks exactly like that Bernadette. We live close to the water, so someday maybe my Bernadette will have to save some children too.”

Sia's father shook his head. He didn't think this silly pooch would be capable of saving anything, but when three years later Bernadette dragged a toddler from a snaggle of rough waves, he patted Sia proudly on the back and scratched Bernadette behind the ears.

In college, Sia inherited a guinea pig from a friend who drank away too many Tuesdays and failed out of university after only two semesters. She pondered its name for five weeks, considering the usual criteria: color, markings, gender, size, habits, quirks, genus and species, and so on. But it wasn't until she focused on the obvious that she discovered the animal's true and proper name: Pig.

Sia was delighted and from that experience learned a whole lot about trusting the process and letting go of weighty expectations.

Henry was Sia's favorite plant.

Gramma, her spider plant whose hundreds of babies hung like dreadlocks on a Rastafarian, required the least amount of care.

She had a goldfish named Clever and a statue of Shakespeare she called Herbert because she needed to reduce the brilliant writer to a nerdy, normal, everyday kind of guy so that she could believe that someone like her could eventually write something like he had. Something that would be read for millennia to come.

Most importantly there was Gumper, whose name she'd heard in her dreams many years before she met him.

•  •  •

During her twenties, Sia published two novels:
Bolt
and
Girl Has Wings
, both of which demanded excruciatingly painful naming processes, the first lasting three weeks and the second, three months.

“Oh, for Pete's sake, Sia,” Jilly said, rolling her eyes during the first rigmarole, “here's a short list. Pick one.”

“It's not that easy,” Sia said and tossed the short list in the trash.

During the naming of
Girl Has Wings
, the pressure was on.

“You're famous, Sia,” Jilly said. “Your readers love you. They'll buy this book no matter what you call it.”

“What kind of editor are you? Doesn't it matter that the book has the right title?”

“Sia, I've got to give my boss a title . . . today. It's been months. Each of the titles on this list has been approved. All you have to do is pick one.”

“You'll get a title when I have a title. Tell your boss to stick it.”

•  •  •

A few years after Sia left for college, her father confided to her that although he hadn't shared his wife's fear that they would lose their precious girl before birth, he had been afraid that by giving her such a prodigious name, he and M were setting her up for a more challenging life than necessary. M had disagreed.

“This way,” she had explained to her very young and very handsome husband, “our daughter will always find her way home.”

Though Stuart grew to like the name Odyssia and loved M so much he would have called his new daughter
Muenster Cheese
if she'd so desired, throughout the pregnancy he'd occasionally suggested other options.

“How about Martha?” he offered when Sia was no longer than a tube of lipstick in her mother's womb.

M raised her eyebrows and shook her head.

A few months later, when Sia was approximately the length of a hot dog bun, he whispered, “Lily?”

“No.”

And at the point when Sia was most likely the size of a worthwhile eggplant, he offered, “Daphne?”

M turned, unzippered his jeans, straddled him, and breathed into his ear, “Odyssia.”

•  •  •

Odyssia became Sia to the larger world in kindergarten when Mrs. Kittredge tried to teach her how to write her name on lined yellow paper and failed miserably. Sia did all right with the capital
O
and the lowercase
d
, but after that things fell apart. As a boy named Bob triumphed on her left and a girl named Emma rejoiced on her right, Sia's confidence flagged.

The first time she went home with
Sia
printed proudly on a piece of paper, M's eyes turned black, and the next morning, she accompanied Sia to school to have words with Mrs. Kittredge. Sia didn't know how her teacher calmed her stormy mother, but she did, and by the end of the day, she was Sia at school, on the playground, and in the park. At home, she was always and forever Odyssia.