Lost & Found - Jacqueline Sheehan [68]
She thought she heard his deep, resonant bark over the wind and the engine as she collapsed to her knees and the ferry carried him away.
Chapter 23
Melissa knew something was wrong when she saw Rocky running, really running, not jogging for exercise. It was not normal for adults to run unless they had on running gear: slick running pants, matching shirts, and windbreakers. But she was quickly diverted from anything that might be happening in Rocky’s life. This was a weekend when her father was going to be away, so she could stay home. She would stay home more often on weekends, but she didn’t want to hurt her father’s feelings.
Her room, and all her stuff, was here; this is the house where she was born. After the divorce, when she had been eight, her father hadn’t really known how to set up a house so that it felt like a home, although he had tried. And her mother had offered to help him at first, buying him dishtowels so that he wouldn’t keep using the same two that he left with. But her bedroom at his house never felt like she could escape into it; she was a guest.
Later in the morning, she noticed Rocky walking back. Rocky looked pissed off in a major way, but oddly shrunken, like she was caving in on herself. Melissa didn’t dare approach her when she looked that mad. She already knew what Rocky was like when she was just being her regular annoying self, and that was bad enough. Melissa tried to think of reasons to ridicule the woman so that she wouldn’t think about the reaction that she had to her at the athletic club, or that she had taken Rocky’s lingerie and kept it for days before sliding it back into the laundry basket on one of her dog-feeding missions.
She waited until late in the afternoon of the next day and knocked on Rocky’s door. Lloyd loved to go with her for slow jogs on the beach and she needed a break from studying. Rocky answered the door in what looked like the clothes she had slept in, dark blue flannel pants. Melissa considered that the woman might be sick. She peeked around her to see the inevitable rush of appreciation from Lloyd.
“I’m going for a run, a slow run, I know you don’t want Lloyd really running until his leg is all the way healed, so I’ll make it a slow jog,” said the girl. “Where’s Lloyd? Can he go with me?”
Melissa didn’t like speaking with adults and her words came out in a rush. Then she remembered Rocky’s journal and the rambling entries and wondered if she was still suicidal because she didn’t look right and she took too long to answer. She wondered if Rocky was crazy and if she was, that somehow made it easier to be around her.
“Oh my God. You don’t know. His name isn’t Lloyd. Melissa, a lot has happened in the last two days. I found out that his name is Cooper. And he left the island yesterday,” said Rocky.
“He left? You mean he’s gone? With who?”
“His owner died, that’s why no one was looking for him. She had died over in Orono. Her parents came to collect Lloyd…Cooper, yesterday.”
Melissa put her hand on the doorframe to steady herself. She had been caught off guard. Despite her best efforts to control her world, she was assaulted by the news, struck hard in her midsection and it felt like her ribs were going to break.
“You let him go? I would have taken him! If you didn’t care about him, then I did!”
“Do you want to come in? I can tell you the whole story. I didn’t want him to go, but they were the dead woman’s parents and Cooper was part of the estate, he was their property,” said Rocky.
Melissa didn’t make a move to come in. Her eyes filled with hot tears and her skin flushed red, starting low on her neck and racing up to her cheeks.
“You have ruined everything! I wish you’d never come here,” she cried and ran off the deck and down the dirt road, her body exploding with the urgent need to fly apart. She took the path to the ocean first. She knew all the paths that twisted and turned, that invariably confused tourists during the summer. Melissa