Lost & Found - Jacqueline Sheehan [6]
“I’m not sure about anything, but I know that I can’t possibly help anyone right now,” she said. She did not add that she was still awake every night until two A.M. and awake again at three A.M.
She and Ray had worked together for six years. Rocky had interviewed with the University Counseling Center after floundering in private practice for the first few years after graduate school. When the HMOs started haggling with her about how long to treat a person with depression or panic attacks that turned people into prisoners in their home, she knew that she would abandon her career if she had to keep dealing with insurance companies. University counseling centers provided therapy and there was no HMO, no exchange of money between client and therapist. The university paid Rocky a salary, smaller by far than private practice, but the joy of not dealing with the HMOs was beyond price.
Cutting her hair was the last project before closing the house in the foothills of the Berkshire Mountains and heading east to the coast. She had left it long, partly in defiance of the more professional, crisper look, and partly because she and Bob loved it. It flapped like a dark curling flag when she let it loose. When she braided it, the rope of hair hung powerfully between her shoulder blades.
Without Bob her hair grew sad. The summer had always been the hardest time for her long hair; it spent most of the steamy months of July and August twisted and knotted on top of her head with several chopsticks. At the memorial service, she wore it tightly braided and it already felt wrong.
The Honda wagon was packed mostly with winter clothing, her own bedding, and Bob’s pillow. For all of their years as foster pet owners, they had only one full-time pet and that was Gremlin, the cat. This had allowed them to provide temporary shelter to many animals that Bob brought home, all desperate, all injured. Gremlin had helped nurse those animals that could tolerate his rasping lick; his nursing skills were famous at the clinic. After Bob died, Gremlin, who was a stout twelve years old, grew restless and spent longer and longer periods of time outdoors. Finally, in mid-August, he did not return. Rocky suspected that the marauding coyotes had finally nabbed Gremlin, waiting him out, sensing the slimmest change in his ability to run away. Other neighbors on their road put up computer-generated signs about their missing tabbies as well. The coyotes had come in and made a clean sweep. She wanted the coyotes to know that Gremlin went willingly; that they had not been so masterfully cunning. Gremlin was looking for Bob. Animals do that; predators and prey walk mercifully together through life. When deer or cats lose their strength and nimbleness, predators will oblige and give them a swift death. Rocky wondered who would oblige her. She envied Gremlin. As soon as she thought this, she wondered if this is what it felt like to step off the shores of reality—and would there be a way out for her as perfect as Gremlin’s exit?
Rocky wanted a ceremony of her own to mark Bob’s death. She turned on the light in the bathroom and peered at her reflection. The memorial had been a ceremony, the eulogy by Bob’s business partner had been a ceremony; she wanted a ceremony. Some Native American cultures cut their hair whenever there is a death, a year’s worth of hair, about six inches. She decided that Bob’s death deserved more than one year’s worth of grief. She looked in the mirror and pulled the dark, tightly curled hair with one hand and cut it at jaw level. She held the detached hair in her hand and saw the equivalent of four-years’ worth of grief hanging from her hand. The act of cutting her hair did not alter the metallic taste in her mouth that lingered since Bob’s death, nor the way her senses were changed, as if they belonged to someone else.
Bob once said that she had African hair. “No, really,” he said. “The Italian part of your family probably has ancestors from across the Mediterranean. It