Lost & Found - Jacqueline Sheehan [39]
What worried her most was not that she had lost weight, but that she had not noticed it happening. Were other things happening as well?
Bob would have noticed right away if she had lost this much weight. First, his hands would have noticed, a hand on her breasts or her hips. His hands would have paused, retracted from passion to medical analysis. He would have said, “Don’t go skinny on me. I need something to hang on to.” Then later, his eyes would have followed her, tracing her face, and with economical accuracy, her glutes. As she walked by his chair, he would have grabbed her, wrestled her into a playful struggle.
“Rocky, we need healthy mares in this pasture, the kind that eat and whose ribs don’t show from across the road and their rumps are firm and happy, winking at all the studs.” And she would have punched him hard on the arm and said, “You’re starting to worry me with all your horse talk.” But that’s what would have happened if Bob were there. Bob was dead.
The next day was shrill with sunshine and cold wind. She had no place that she had to be; no animal calls had come in, and even Isaiah was gone today so that an impromptu visit at his office was not possible. Then she remembered her body. This was the first day that Rocky truly remembered she had a body. “If I was not in my body, where have I been?” she wondered.
Bob was seven months dead. Her dreams were laden with the exhaustion of searching for him, but as much as she longed to see him again, she feared recrimination for not saving him. When she did find a wisp of him, an echo, or feather touch, she could not bear to wake with the renewed grief of knowing him only in her dreams. Since banishing Bob from her dreams, she could recall no dreams at all.
The winter sun had come in hard and low and touched her arms. The thin hairs on her forearms, invisible at other times, were now backlit and harsh. The winter air was cold and deep. Angry cells from her skin stood up and caught the rake of the sun’s light. “I’m falling apart, I want to be back in my body again. How did I fall out of my body?”
If she were back home, she could get a massage, or cranialsacral something, Reiki, acupressure, deep Swedish massage, anything to put herself back together again before her bones flew apart, before her ears fell off and her skin unzipped. But on the island, there was no one who did any of those things. Well, Tess could but Rocky feared coming undone under her expertise and she wasn’t ready to fall apart in front of Tess. She would have to do the putting together herself.
She stepped out of her clothes and they fell around her like petals. The rental house had a long mirror, but she had taken it down when she first moved in and slid it behind the couch. She pulled it out again, pounded a nail into the living room wall and hung it. She stared a long time at her face, at her torso, her legs, at the uneven trouble of hair in the middle of her body. The first place she could bear to touch was her knees, and she ran her thumb over and around her kneecaps, owning first one and then the other, wondering how to reconstruct herself. The cat and dog watched her from a pool of sunlit floor. Peterson the cat had recently agreed to sit in the same room with Lloyd.
Maybe she had lost weight, so what? It’s not unusual after a death. A spouse might lose weight, gain weight, come down with an autoimmune disease or crash their car in a late-night one-car accident. What truly astounded Rocky was that she had not noticed.