Lost & Found - Jacqueline Sheehan [10]
“I hope you got a huge deposit from these people. Who were they anyhow, small-time drug lords?”
“You wouldn’t believe it. They drove a new Volvo and said they were teachers. That was either not true or our education system is being sabotaged. And the deposit was not worth the stink that they left. But they won’t ever rent on this island again.”
Rocky and Isaiah opened all the remaining windows, hauled out the trash, and set the dishes to soak. Rocky ran an ancient vacuum cleaner over the floor. She shook the few scatter rugs outside and made a mental note to take them to the Laundromat. The place began to look like someplace where she might be able to take off her shoes. Isaiah left with his truck brimming with black plastic bags of garbage, mumbling about the world ending because of people who can’t wipe their behinds.
Rocky scrubbed the countertops in the kitchen and the bathroom. Isaiah’s wife Charlotte delivered a box of cleaning supplies complete with rubber gloves. She said her husband was so mad that he might never rent again after Rocky. Charlotte was darker than Isaiah, with a sprinkling of white hairs on her temples. She wore sweatpants and a jacket. “Sorry about my scruffy appearance, but I was in the middle of putting some of my gardens to bed when my husband came home sputtering about low-life trash who drive Volvos. Can you handle the rest of this? We won’t charge you for the full month of October.”
After Charlotte left, Rocky examined every inch of the cottage. The living room/dining room had the best view over the top of the dense shrubbery, out to the ocean. Every house on an island faces out like a sentinel looking for ships or whales, storms creeping across the sky. The two bedrooms were small, room enough for a bed, dresser, and chair. Rocky picked the bedroom that had two windows instead of one, which made up for it facing north.
When the cottage was as clean as she could get it and all the signs of the former tenants were removed, including a tied-off condom draped over an ashtray on a dresser, she began to unload her car. By dusk, her sheets were on the bed. They were queen-sized and hung to the floor on either side of the small bed. Her winter clothes were folded in the dresser drawers. She’d brought two electrical appliances from her old life: a boom box and a hair dryer. She arranged her brother’s sculpture on the end table by the couch.
Dusk changed too quickly into night and the completion of her unpacking left her with the sudden despair that comes with darkness when no other footsteps are expected. This was the worst part of the day and getting through it was an exercise of endurance, of sandbags strapped to her arms and legs while foot soldiers pointed bayonets at her dry throat. She prepared for what she knew would be a full night of altered time, thick with grief and self-accusations while she replayed the morning of Bob’s death. The gray wire mesh that fit tightly over her brain began to descend until it squeezed a tight band over her eyes.
How many times had she helped clients with the lightning bolt arrival of grief that kidnapped people from their daily life? Hundreds. Each time, she offered the space to talk about reactions that sounded too bizarre even for the survivor to tell their best of friends. “I saw my father this morning; he walked across the classroom and looked at me. How can that be?” “I can’t help wondering what is happening to her body, what she must look now. Is that grotesque or what? But I think of it every day.” “I want to die to be with her; nothing else matters here.”
But what her clients had not told her was that her own sweat would smell different, the chemistry of her body would alter until she would no longer know who she was when she looked in the mirror, that food would taste like cardboard, and she would wake up with a full-blown panic attack at