Authors: Jacqueline Sheehan
R
ocky and Danielle were in Tess's backyard. Previously, archery had been a completely solitary activity, which was how Rocky had liked it. But Tess had been persuasive. “She wanted this for her birthday,” Tess had emphasized. Rocky had given Danielle the rules for watching her practice archery.
1. No talking, singing, or humming while Rocky was shooting.
2. Danielle had to sit behind Rocky at all times, not on the side, and definitely not anywhere near the target.
3. Whenâand only whenâRocky had shot every arrow from her quiver and said, “All clear,” could Danielle get up, dash to the paper target, and help her retrieve the arrows.
Rocky paced off the distance from the target. She set up her equipment: the longbow and the arrows made from osage orange by a traditionalist in Nebraska. Tess had a small wrought-iron table that held the quiver.
Danielle was a froth of electrical movement; her energy level, if properly captured, could have lit up most of Peaks Island. Rocky remained clueless about young children. She only knew academically what a seven-year-old kid could comprehend.
“Let's review a few of the rules. What is the first rule about watching archery?” asked Rocky. Since the archery practice had not officially started, Danielle was free to cavort around her grandmother's backyard in nonstop kinetic abandon.
Danielle stood very straight and brought her right hand over her eye in a salute. “No talking, no making noise, Rocky, sir.” Danielle looked like a mini-version of Tess, whip smart and agile, with the same wayward hair, thick as a sunburst. Was the little girl mocking her? No. Well, yes.
“Very funny. But this is important. And don't do that âsir' thing. What's rule number two?”
“I have to stay behind you so you don't shoot me by mistake like you did Hill. Gramma says it was because you thought he was a bad man, but Hill was really a good man, and then he was your boyfriend. She said it was very sad that your husband died before you moved here,” said Danielle, pirouetting around and around as she spoke. She had on yellow shorts; her matching yellow flip-flops had been tossed aside. Her toes looked like little flower blossoms.
The image of the child's tender legs, arms, or God forbid any other part of her pierced with an arrow sent a shudder up Rocky's neck. How many people could say that they had shot someone? It was true, Rocky had made a terrible mistake last winter and shot Hill in the leg when she thought he was a stalker. He was not. He had said that being wounded in love had given him extraordinary credit with his high school students. For that reason alone she had decided never to enter archery competitions, afraid that she'd be called some catchy nickname like “Special Forces.” Rocky put down the longbow and sat down on the garden stone wall where Danielle would have to sit as a spectator. The girl joined her.
“That's why I made the rules. The only way possible that I could concentrate would be if I knew you were completely safe. The longbow is a weapon, a very serious weapon,” said Rocky.
Danielle stopped her girations, which she could do even while seated. She squeezed in next to Rocky and patted her thigh. Rocky felt the benediction of the girl, the sweetness that she never got from all her angst-driven teenagers and college students.
“It will help you think better about your bow and arrows if I sit still,” said Danielle with a solemnness that startled Rocky. What do people do with young children? Should she tousle her hair, put an arm around her? She felt the pull to do so; her hand even jerked into action, but she pulled back, afraid to touch the child.
“Thank you. I need all the help I can get. Each bow has a certain draw weight. This bow takes thirty-five pounds of effort to pull back, and I've been stuck here for months,” said Rocky. With the midmorning breeze, soft and sweet off the ocean, and the crows cawing back and forth in the trees, she began to relax a little. “If this looks like something that you'd want to try, we can get you a bow to practice on next time.”
Danielle kicked her feet, and as she did she leaned slightly into Rocky to get a bit more traction. “I'm on a soccer team, and I can sort of kick with my left foot, but I have to tell my left foot to remember to kick the ball even when I'm not playing soccer. I tell myself when I'm in bed, when I'm in school, and when I ride the ferry.”
The child smelled like fresh air and salt water. All her bones were tiny, like bird bones. How did people talk to children without talking down to them? Was there a frequency, a certain bandwidth that one had to find?
Rocky stood up. “I'm going to try your technique. When I'm other places, like out walking Cooper on the beach, or in the shower, I'm going to remind my right arm to pull back as if I really am shooting my bow. You just gave me a very good idea. Now, let's see if I can shoot some arrows. Are you ready to keep your butt glued to that stone wall?”
“Yes, I am,” Danielle said with a squeal.
“And what are the magic words that mean you can dash around like a comet again?”
“All clear!” shouted Danielle.
“Very good. And after you have retrieved all the arrows, we can feed the crows. They'll be waiting,” said Rocky.
D
anielle did exactly as she had promised, and while Rocky was impressed with her ability to be quiet and almost motionless on the stone wall, there was something distracting about being watched. The gains that she had been making with the thirty-five-pound bow evaporated; she consistently hit the outer ring, no matter how much she tried to quiet her breathing. She had two more arrows to go. From her peripheral vision, she saw the black swoop of the crow who would soon announce the end of archery and the beginning of crow treats.
Rocky kept her left side to the target, pulled up and back with her right hand, and let her eyes rest on the center ring.
“Natalie!” screeched Danielle with such a piercing cry that Rocky spun around in alarm, and as she did she released the arrow as the little girl burst from her seat to reach Natalie. For one split second, the arrow and Danielle raced to Natalie. Before the arrow even struck, Rocky knew the world could end right then and there. Her beautiful arrow struck the ground three feet in front of Natalie. Everyone stopped moving as if they had been flash-frozen.
Danielle and Natalie began to speak simultaneously. “I got up and I shouldn't have.” “I shouldn't have come back here, I'm sorry.” “I made a noise, I'm sorry, I'm sorry.”
Rocky fell to her knees and dropped the bow. The microsecond of a miracle that saved them all from disaster descended on her, and she put her hands over her face to hide an onslaught of tears. She could have hit one or both of the girls. She could have killed them. She was not an archery teacher.
Rocky felt two tiny hands gently patting her back. She threw her arms around Danielle in a crushing hug. When she looked up, Natalie stood exactly where she had stopped, three feet from the arrow, watching Rocky and the child with a dark, penetrating gaze, head slightly down, eyes focused sharply. Had she been afraid or angry? Was it the sight of Rocky hugging the child?
“I was looking for Tess. Sorry to screw things up here,” said Natalie. She turned and bounded from the backyard.
Despite the near calamity, one crow made his heralding call when she had shot the last arrow, which she forced herself to do for fear she'd never shoot again. She yelled, “All clear,” to help Danielle remember the rules. With the announcement of the end of archery, the murder of crows soared in. Rocky pulled out a bag of dried bread and showed Danielle where to put the food for the black birds. As they stood back and watched the crows swoop and dive at the bread, Danielle said, “It sounds like they say, âRocky, Rocky.' Wouldn't it be funny if they knew your name?”
Rocky blushed. No one had noticed before, and she had not been entirely sure that the conditioning had worked. But yes, one crow had clearly said her name.
T
ess cajoled Rocky into the special Italian grocery store in Portland. “You need to get aired out,” said Tess. “If you're going to live here and take in stray youngsters, you need to know where to buy delicious food, since you're going to be cooking. I don't think I've ever seen you cook. Do you cook?”
Bob had been the one to hover over a savory tomato sauce, reduced down to its regal essence, the one who chopped vegetables with joyful abandon and who even made multiple dishes with eggplants. He'd had the flare and passion for food.
Rocky's parents had had a contentious relationship with food. Her father came from a direct line of Italians for whom food was a daily sacrament, a way of anointing oneself with love and olive oil, washed down with Tuscan red wine. Rocky's mother was a hopeless Irish cook who was an astonishing disappointment to her Italian in-laws.
When Rocky married Bob, her mother had said, “Thank God he cooks. Take my advice: hand over the kitchen to him entirely.”
Rocky pushed open the store's heavy glass door, then followed Tess through the store, carrying a wire basket and feeling like a child who was only there for portage.
“You were rather skeletal when I first met you last year. Skeletal and an unpleasant shade of yellow,” said Tess. She examined two varieties of extra-virgin olive oil.
“What was yellow? My skin? My name? Are we in synesthesia land?”
Tess selected one bottle and put it in Rocky's basket. “Not just your skin. It was all of you. You looked like a houseplant that had been kept in a closet without benefit of photosynthesis, deprived of nutrients. You had stopped absorbing life. Understandable, completely understandable, considering the death.”
For the first few months of living on the island, she had created a flimsy and entirely false identity. She had specifically omitted that her husband had died in a flourish of cardiac disaster. It had been six months since Rocky came clean with her reasons for coming to Peaks Island and confessed that she had been in a desperate escape from the stranglehold of grief. Rocky still flinched if someone said the word “widow.”
“What color is the word âwidow'?” asked Rocky. “I mean, what color
was
it?” She knew that, to the synesthetic, all letters come in particular colors and that the colors of some words are unique. She was sure that Tess would say “black,” because that was what the word felt like to her.
“Green, a dense forest green like the kind you see in old boatyards.
W
's are always green, but it's not just that. Green is the most absorbent color. It sucks the most light out of the spectrum. It fits the word, don't you think?”
Rocky picked up some yellow onions with papery skins and pretended to compare them. “I don't want to be the widow. I hate it. I'm too young. Bob was too young. And now I'll always be a widow. Bob did that.”
Tess took the onions away from her. “It's a powerful word, and it's meant to be. You can't dodge it. And you don't know how to pick out onions.” Tess moved on to the pasta aisle, her back straight and her joints loose. She turned back to Rocky and said, “And personally, I think you've been too rash about Hill.”
The mention of his name gave Rocky an unexpected ache. Was it true that memories and consciousness lurk everywhereâin the palms of our hands, the cells along our necks, the tips of our ears? Does a breast have a memory, an awareness of its own? Her body, wise and primal, had already recorded the warm scent of Hill and made room for him in her bloodstream, the capillaries carrying images of his arm bones and nose cartilage straight to her brain stem. That was where all the trouble was brewingâin her brain stem. Rocky was about to split in half, with her bodily desires seeming to have a spectacular advantage.
Why couldn't the girl be Bob's daughter? She wanted to surge ahead and sweep Natalie into her life. It was as if Bob had sent her, with all her war wounds, right to Rocky's door, and suddenly Hill didn't fit as cozily as he had before. She wanted to marshal all her efforts to scoop up this girl and make a family. Why else would she suddenly buy a house badly in need of renovation? The two events had come together like interlocking gears. How could Hill understand?
As if Tess had been listening to Rocky's thoughts, she said, “He's the best choice for an archery teacher for Danielle. I fully agree with that.”
Tess shook her head and grabbed a bag of penne.
They brought their Italian booty home to Rocky's cottage, and under Tess's tutelage they made a vegetarian pasta dish with a mountain of mushrooms. It was done by midafternoon. They sipped a red wine that the grocery store owner had suggested and finished off the meal with blueberries in cream.
“If Natalie comes back from job hunting, she could join us,” said Rocky. Aside from the brief respite in the grocery store, she had thought of nothing but Natalie all day.
Tess tilted her head back and slid a spoonful of blueberries into her mouth. She hummed with pleasure.
“I saw Melissa the other day, and she looked a little bereft. Don't forget the rest of us. You're some sort of role model for Melissa, although I can't tell you why. It would help her if she saw that you savor food, that you have a passion for it.” Tess rubbed her bare toes along Cooper's spine. He had just eaten the heel of a baguette and lay near Rocky. “I was meant to live in Italy, I'm sure of it,” sighed Tess.
T
he first week with Natalie left Rocky itching and as vigilant as she'd been taking in Cooper when he was an unknown to her, just a dog recovering from surgery. At night she heard every noise from the other bedroom. She woke suddenly if there was a suspicious absence of noise. Was the girl still breathing? Had she come here to die? If she was truly Bob's daughter, then that would be just like him, landing in Rocky's life and expiring. There, she heard the symphonic creaking of the bed; the girl must still be breathing because she'd rolled over.
Cooper stationed himself close to Rocky's bedroom door, as he always did, but something was different about him: a zing of electricity traveled beneath his loose skin, sort of a yellow alert on the domestic terrorism scale. Either the dog had picked up on her anxiety or he was also having trouble adjusting to a houseguest. Cooper seemed a bit edgy. Once, when Rocky peeked at the digital clock, the numbers glowed 2:31. Cooper picked up his head and looked at her, his eyes catching the green of the clock.
“What?” whispered Rocky. “Just because I can't sleep doesn't mean you have to stay awake too.” The dog sighed and rolled completely to one side, stretching out his body to catch whatever coolness he could from the floor. She caught a glimmer of night shine from Peterson's eyes from her perch on the dresser. Apparently no one was sleeping. It was the first week in July, and the nights were filled with a symphony of sound: nocturnal creatures rustled and searched for food, insects heralded each other with mating calls, and even the plant life grew with such abundance that Rocky feared it would shake the cottage.
During the days, Natalie went into Portland to look for jobs and had even looked into the local college just in case Portland turned out to be the place she wanted to live. Rocky understood the permeable, inexact nature of someone her age. Natalie could move anywhere because nothing held her.
“July is a hard time to find a job,” said Rocky when the girl came back empty-handed each day. “Most of the summer jobs were taken back in May.”
They had agreed that Natalie could as easily stay at Rocky's until they found out for sure about her parentageâor more precisely, her paternal genesis. But time had begun to morph and flip over; there was something redemptive about having the girl sleep in the next room, and Rocky didn't want new information, either confirming or denying the paternal line, to disturb the balance.
She had finally stopped listening for every tiny creak in the house and fallen back to sleep, the night sounds having turned into a drowsy comfort. The snap of crickets, the ping of bats, and Cooper's breathing were sounds of well-being wrapped around her. She was suddenly yanked from the depth of sleep by Cooper's wet nose pressed into her face. He had given a high sound to reach her.
“What?” she said, reluctantly reaching up out of her slumber.
The bathroom was between the two bedrooms. When Rocky first arrived on the island, she had been soothed by the plain linear construction of the cottage: rectangular, small, with each bedroom barely large enough to contain the beds and dressers. Rocky heard a sound unlike the crickets or the bats or anything from
Peterson's Guide to Mammals of North America.
Natalie was in the bathroom, and a strange sound slipped under the door, carried by the night.
Rocky sat up and looked at Cooper, who was at full alertânot intruder alert, but standing, ears up, tail in a very slow wag.
“Okay,” she said, getting up to go stand outside the bathroom door, afraid to knock, afraid not to, stuck in a dry, hollow fear of the eighteen-year-old girl huddled in the bathroom. Cooper nudged her hand with his snout. She tapped with one knuckle on the thin door.
“Natalie, we've got lousy acoustics in this house. You sound like something's wrong. Can I come in?”
The crying sound stopped, and Rocky heard only her own heartbeat.
“I guess,” said Natalie. “I guess you can.”
Rocky turned the dented metal doorknob and pushed open the door, gently, as if a baby were in the house and she didn't want to wake it. Natalie sat on the toilet lid, one knee pulled up, her arm crooked around the knee. The tender skin around her eyes was scorched raw and red, scratched up by the salt of crying. Her head rested sideways on the point of her knee.
With her clients, who sometimes cried during therapy, Rocky had learned a steady approach. She handed them a box of tissues and then waited. When she first began her clinical internship, a crying client had instantly ignited tears in Rocky's eyes. She confessed this problem to her supervisor, who said, “You're responding like a friend. They have friends. What they need is a therapist. Don't try to stop the tears and don't hug them. Give them a box of tissues and a space to cry. This may be their only place to cry.”
Natalie was not a client. She was a girl in Rocky's bathroom who might be Bob's daughter. The girl had fallen from the sky, crashed through the roof, and here she was, lighting up a maternal subset of Rocky's organs that had never been tapped before. Rocky had no idea what to do. Tissues were not needed; Natalie had used half of the roll of toilet paper and filled the small rattan wastebasket.
Rocky stepped into the tiny room and sat on the rim of the white fiberglass bathtub. Cooper lay down in the doorway, blocking any last-minute decision to bail out. There had to be something that she could say. The wall clock in the kitchen echoed in sharp clacks.
“Life is . . . ,” started Rocky, searching for a soothing word, a verbal ointment to apply to the girl. Whatever she said was going to be wrong, she already knew that.
Natalie reached out with her right hand and took Rocky's unassuming fist and held on. They sat together in the bathroom holding hands, saying nothing, not looking at each other, while the space inside Rocky where children were conjured long before they were conceived lit up with a soft phosphorescent glow.