Lost & Found - Jacqueline Sheehan [28]
When all the food was mercifully taken off the table, Melissa slid her chair back and said she had too much chemistry to do. Rocky tried to salvage the rest of the evening by talking about Lloyd, but the tone of the earlier welcome had cooled, and she made an early nine P.M. departure. She knew that the evening had gone badly.
Sleep had always been a comfort to her, but since Bob had died, sleep was an unpredictable landscape. As she rose and fell through stages of sleep, the dark mask of grief momentarily lifted and cool air rushed beneath and freshened her cheeks, under her eyelids, and up and down the slope of her nose. When was life ever like this? When had she walked so weightlessly?
She woke hard, the sting of morning raked across her skin. The first hint of panic took hold: Had Bob been dead so long that even the ghastly comfort of grief had loosened and he’d moved farther away?
In the first few months after his death, she had dreamt endless versions of the cardiac resuscitation she had attempted with Bob. In one dream she tried to plug his heart into the hair dryer to shock him back to life. He sat up and said, “Stop it! You’re burning us.”
But now, try as she might, her dreams flitted away before she could grab them and she awoke each morning blinded by the complete darkness of sleep. If she couldn’t remember her dreams, would she forget Bob?
She tested herself. What did his face look like? She closed her eyes and the image of him was distressingly impressionistic. Her breath caught and then quickened. Adrenaline fed in a fury throughout her body, quickening her heart. Could she still smell him? She pulled Bob’s pillow into her face and she tried to curve her entire body around it, one leg pulled around the bottom edge as if it were Bob’s leg. She’d been sleeping with his pillow for six months, judiciously at first, only sniffing it lightly, skimming over the polyester-filled sack with her eyes closed, conjuring up visions of him as if she were a witch commanding his spirit back. She flared her nostrils to catch his scent. But the pillow, after months of such work, was giving up the last memory of Bob, his oily skin and heavy aroma, which used to make Rocky put her face on his chest and close her eyes.
Her heart beat too fast and she noticed that her hands were trembling. Is this what a heart attack is like? Should she pray for a secret heart ailment so that she could die too? In the first months after his death, she had tried to find the paths of either impulsivity or resolve that would lead her to suicide, but the connections to Caleb and her mother were too strong and the cords of family would not release her. If she died of a respectable early heart attack, would she find him? She couldn’t stay in the house with the pillow that bore such little scent of Bob, with the dreams that foretold of surfacing farther away from him.
The well-meaning say that the dead are not really gone, they live on in our hearts. Rocky wondered if she ever said that to anyone. She remembered a client, a tough-skinned woman whose brother died of AIDS. “I can’t stop crying in my dreams, I can’t stop wanting him back,” she said to Rocky. Had Rocky said that her brother would live in her heart forever?
She wanted to find the client, go back to her and look her up, call her and say, “I was full of shit, I’m so sorry. The dead are gone. I can’t find my husband in my heart. The dead leave us. Death is unbearable.”
The wind shook the tightly woven nest of vines and trees outside. These trees, shrubs, and vines had adapted to the savage winds off the ocean. Their roots were deep and determined.
If Bob were here, she would have wanted to make love. He was always ready; an easy sell job. “All I have to do is touch you with my pinky finger and you have already decided on sex. How do you do that?” she had asked him on a windy morning like this one. He would have already pulled her to him, letting her straddle his body. He would have put his warm hands on her hips.
“This is nothing. You