Lost & Found - Jacqueline Sheehan [58]
Rocky felt naked, like in dreams where she looked down and realized that she had no pants on and she was about to deliver a lecture. And life was happening too fast; she had planned on slowing life down, holding on to every shred of Bob, and now someone had just put a lead foot on the accelerator. Or maybe nothing that she had planned made any sense. She hadn’t considered that possibility before.
Talking to Isaiah about Bob had not been as frightening as she had imagined. Something had loosened in her, as if her swimmer’s muscles were warming up. Of course she could talk with Tess. Why hadn’t she thought of that?
“Let’s talk while we drive,” said Rocky.
They decided to take Tess’s car instead of the truck because Tess refused to ride for three hours with Cooper wedged under her feet, and neither one of them wanted him to ride in the back of the truck. And Rocky was worried about the truck on a long trip. Aside from the fact that it didn’t have an inspection sticker, it had started with great reluctance for the last two days.
Rocky drove the first leg. They pulled up to the dock in the ten-year-old Saab in time for the 9:30 ferry to Portland. They pointed the car inland for an hour, then north. Cooper stretched out on the back seat, and aside from an unfortunate moment of bad dog gas, he appeared completely at home with the car trip.
“Please don’t look at me while I’m telling you this. I don’t want us driving off the road,” said Rocky. This part of her throat was still rusty and it took longer than she imagined to tell Tess about Bob, about the day she was downstairs ordering socks and he was upstairs shaving and his heart seized up solid, and how she tried to force him back to life. Then she told her about the life they had, how finding each other had seemed like the perfect turn of the universe. She kept talking through Augusta and past Waterville.
“You’re a psychologist? Please tell me you don’t work with little children,” said Tess after a much-needed bathroom stop at a McDonald’s.
“No. Why do you ask?”
“When you told me that you were a preschool teacher, I thought, pity those poor children. Some people just don’t have the knack to be with children, and I dare say you’re one. I can’t tell you what a relief it is to know that.”
Rocky thought about being offended, but it was true. She had never been tempted to work with children. Once they hit college age, she could help them navigate around phobias and nightmares, she could understand where they could be stretched, and how they could learn to tolerate the precipitous drop of despair long enough to find the way out again. During the past year, she had even learned to understand and help students who threw up their food. But Tess was right, little children confused her. Her mother said it was because she didn’t have children of her own.
Tess took her turn at the wheel. “Can I ask you something?” said Tess. They were back in the car and the signs on Route 95 said that Bangor was forty miles away.
Rocky sighed and adjusted her seat so that it tilted back slightly without infringing on the dog’s space. “Go ahead. I think I’ve told you everything. Well, not everything. But you have the main highlights.”
“What was the point in telling me you were something that you weren’t? I thought we were getting on pretty well as friends. I never thought to tell you a lie about me; I never thought to hide myself.” Tess rubbed her lower abdomen as if she had a big bellyache. “You are going to have to let me be angry and hurt for a while. I feel tricked and I don’t deserve it.”
“That isn’t very Zen of you,” said Rocky, but she knew Tess was right. “I didn’t mean that in a snotty, sarcastic way, although it might be hard to tell. Could we talk about something else now? I am willing to accept my new status as a defective friend, the inferior model, but will you give me another shot at this? I