Lost & Found - Jacqueline Sheehan [50]
Her body had changed also. First, after Bob’s death, she had stopped caring about her body; exactly the opposite reaction of the dog. She’d lost interest in sustaining her lonely shell of a body. But somewhere between the dog and archery she had slid back into her arms and legs, wrapped her torso around her heart and lungs, and started making, and eating, grilled cheese sandwiches.
Rocky and Isaiah talked for hours, until his wife called and said where in the world are you at this hour, and he told her. Then they talked more and Rocky told Isaiah everything about Bob, about the way he could put his hand on the small of her back and warm her entire spine, and how he had two free spay-and-neuter clinics every year that just about killed him, and how they talked about having kids and had not ruled out the idea but they both knew it was starting to get late. She told him about tossing Bob’s ashes in the deep fryer at the local restaurant. She stopped and asked him if he had ever in all his years as a minister ever heard of anyone doing that and didn’t he think that she was crazy for doing that.
He rubbed his knuckles with his thumb. “Yes, you were crazy to do that. We often go crazy with death. I hope you didn’t keep throwing things into that poor man’s deep fryer, did you?”
“No, just that once. Nothing else,” she said.
“Go on, then. Tell me what happened next,” he said.
And she did. Lloyd was asleep by her feet. Sometimes his feet danced in dream, running, and she saw his muscles contract in his haunches.
“So now you’re here and you’ve just about worn out the usefulness of pretending that you’re someone else, someone who you must have thought would be less touched by life. Someone who should have been able to save her husband. How’s it working?”
“You sound like the talk show therapists,” she said, pulling her head back in surprise.
“Maybe I should try that career. Me by the woodstove, or better yet, on the porch in my rocker, giving out advice. Let’s make it a call-in show. So how is it working, Rocky?”
They were in the hours of early morning where most pretenses fall away. Dawn was still several hours down the road. The wind had picked up and rattled ill-fitting windows in Isaiah’s office.
“I liked being someone else, or thinking I was someone else. But I never was anyone else. I was still essentially me in a different costume. Do you think that’s what being dead is like? Do you think we shed the body and the essential us continues?”
She prayed that he would say yes, that in fact Bob might just be sitting there with them, listening in on the whole discussion, that he would always be with her. And she would believe anything that Isaiah would say, because this moment was filled with truth and they both knew it. If he told her that Bob was an angel, she would buy it. Anything, just say it.
“I think you’ve gone a long way into the land of the dead. Let the dead ones answer some of their own questions. What is it like to be alive? That’s the question,” he said.
Chapter 16
The throb had started prematurely, because grieving was supposed to take a year, at the very least a year, and she wanted to believe that. Where had she first read that it was a year? She had read it so long ago that it had become accepted and unquestioned.
What about Queen Victoria? She made the entire country mourn with her, wear black, slide their feet along the floor noiselessly, and speak in whispers. She let almost all of Ireland starve and die, horses go unfed, colonies rise up, and all because she held on to her grief like it was sewn into her skin.
Rocky was not prepared for the flutter that she felt when Hill brushed her forearm at their last archery lesson. Her body had arced and sputtered, her battery started up as if AAA had sent out the big-deal charger. Bob hadn’t been dead but eight months and she still searched for him in her dreams.
Hill had said, “Pull your hand back even with your jaw, make it one line,” and he lightly grazed her skin. They had started holding