Lost & Found - Jacqueline Sheehan [16]
By the time he’d get home, it would be around eight o’clock. Rocky catered to him on those nights. The rest of the time they both might forget to buy groceries or quarrel about who should cook. But on these nights, she’d forget all about that and order Chinese for them, serve warm sake. His eyes would get bloodshot and his shoulders would sag, and she’d know he wasn’t really noticing anything that she did and wouldn’t really remember details. After eating, she’d coax him out of his clothes and lead him to the bathroom, the one downstairs with the old claw-footed tub. She’d take off her clothes and slide in behind him, making the water go perilously close to the top, gurgling the release valve into action. She’d start at his head and rub and massage him. She knew he wanted to be held, to be the one who had things done to him, not to be the deciding one. She’d wash him from top to bottom, rolling him on his side when she needed to slip her hand under his winter white bottom.
“Let go, I’ll do everything,” she’d whisper.
She thought that this was how people loved in war camps, or when ocean liners sank and a few survivors clung to lifeboats; all daily defenses fell away. She knew that he needed to be filled up again with hope and tenderness because all of that had been drained out of him on Nip and Tuck Day. Neither of them would speak much, only bits. “Here, roll over, there, I’ll do that,” was all Rocky would need to say before she’d mount him in the water gone cool.
Rocky met Tess for breakfast the next morning before she was due to meet Isaiah to talk about additional duties. “He wants me to start documenting any change in erosion along the south beach. I’m not sure how I’m supposed to do that. I mean erosion is change, and that is probably best done over a number of years.”
“You sound like a scientist. What did you say that you did before?”
“I worked with kids, young kids, in a day care center,” Rocky said. The lie felt partial and thus tolerable.
Tess sipped tea. Rocky had gotten her coffee from the self-serve part of the counter where she pumped out something called Morning Ethiopian. It was too early for her to eat. When Rocky bent over to pick up a dropped napkin, she whacked her elbow on the metal strip along the edge of the table. She grimaced, closed her eyes, and let out one prairie dog yelp.
“That must be pure orange. I can feel that from here,” said Tess.
“What?” said Rocky, cradling her elbow.
“When I hit a nerve like that I see orange for as long as it throbs.”
“What do you mean?”
“I have synesthesia. Two places in my brain go off at once. When I stub my toe, I holler orange, because that’s what I see and feel at the same time.”
Rocky paused, recalling only vaguely having read about this in a neuropsych journal.
“I didn’t know the name for it until about ten years ago when I heard a guy on NPR who wrote a book about us. I broke down and cried. I didn’t know I was a member of a club.”
“Do you see colors only when you hurt yourself?”
“No. Everything has a color. Like letters, B is light green with a dark base. T is gray and shiny. The days of the week each have their color and shape. Tuesday is a blue cube and Wednesday is muted red globe. Sunday is light yellow and sort of floppy.”
“You are a multi-media event,” said Rocky as she sipped her coffee.
“That’s just the half of it. Now that I’ve learned more about synesthesia, I know just how plain and unfortunate your poor world is, I’m sorry to say.”
“I’ve never thought of my world as plain.”
“That’s because you don’t know any better. Your name is green because R is green. How old are you?”
“I’m thirty-eight.”
“OK. Numbers one through ten go up a gradual slope, then eleven through twenty are on a plateau, twenty-one through thirty turn right and the thirties zigzag back the other