Lost & Found - Jacqueline Sheehan [18]
Tess often told people that alcoholism is a thief of the worst sort, and it is the camouflage of the monster that throws even the most observant person off guard. By the time Len’s drinking had resulted in the despair of vomit, broken glass, one fractured wrist, two car accidents, and a serious threat to his job security at the hospital, Tess took the two children, by then in junior high, and divorced the man who no longer resembled the sandy-haired boy she met in college. After some urging by a friend of Len’s, she applied to a school to study physical therapy and excelled as if she had never paused from her years at college.
She had been almost sixty years old when she heard a program on National Public Radio about synesthesia. That was ten years ago and she counted most of her time before that as painful and ill spent. She made friends with her ex-husband again and let him get to know her. He had remarried in an alcoholic whirlwind and when he finally sobered up, discovered he had married someone far more addicted to alcohol than even he had been. After losing his medical license Len attended AA five times a week. When Len sobered up, his second wife left him. He summed up his life.
“My first wife left me because I was a drunk. The second one left me because I got sober.”
Tess came out to her grown children. Her two little grandchildren were born knowing that their Grannie heard motorcycles as jagged brown, streaked with battleship gray. If they spotted motorcycles, they cried, “Grannie cover your ears, the brown and silver are coming by!”
She knew that synesthesia had skipped her own children, but her grandchildren had a filtered down version and Tess gloried in it.
And now the new woman on the island, the animal control warden, was keeping Tess busier than she had been in years. Tess was drawn to things that didn’t fit; shoulders that had popped out of their sockets, vertebrae that had squiggled to one side, muscles that had tightened so much that they were unrecognizable, and people who didn’t fit, either in their own skin or because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. She didn’t know if synesthesia accounted for it; she’d seen no evidence of that in on-line chatter from the synesthetes. But she was sure that Rocky did not fit.
Chapter 6
Lift with your knees, not your back. Rocky heard the old tape running through her head. She wondered why some tapes automatically turn on. Other well-worn messages too: be careful of eating fish, you could choke on a bone. She never ate fish without hearing her father’s voice, “Check for bones, this is bony fish.” Her father hadn’t eaten fish unless forced to and sat nervously glancing at his two children and his wife who flirted recklessly with death as they ate. He was Italian and without fear of Italian stereotype, preferred to eat pasta seven days a week. When things went well between Rocky’s parents, her mother gave him ziti when they ate fish. When they were in their bad spells, she slid a bony piece of fish onto his plate and turned her back.
Now Rocky wondered how she could lift with her knees and not her back. Someone had called in a complaint about a black lab sort of dog who had been scrounging the south beach for several days and was acting strange; drooling and limping, bobbing his head. Rocky dreaded the thought that he might have rabies. When she got the call, the dog was last seen by the Dumpster in back of Stan’s Seafood