Lost & Found - Jacqueline Sheehan [7]
She had to agree, and pictured old sailors in her family tree living on the northern shores of Africa, mingling sweat, sperm, ripe eggs, and genetic coding for hair that would never be straight. Her father had been mildly outraged by the suggestion and unnerved by Bob’s clinical observations of ethnic groups crossing boundaries.
She cut it all off at jaw length and her dark hair stuck out expectantly, so she cut more, making the top shorter. She did not exactly recognize herself. “I don’t know who you are,” she whispered into the mirror, speaking close enough to leave a circle of fog on the glass.
She swept up the hair, put it in a paper bag, and released it over her September garden. The weeds in the garden did not tempt her as they had before. She saw them differently this year.
“I want them to grow from beginning to end, uninterrupted,” she said when her brother had come by for the key.
The deal was that Rocky would call her brother, Caleb, when she got a place. They were only two years apart and he had hovered since Bob died.
“Let me drive you out there and you can pack some more stuff,” he offered as he watched Rocky tossing her hair into the garden.
“No. Everything I need fits in my car. Rent the house if you can, send me half the rent money. I’ll write,” she said, rubbing her newly shorn hair, feeling naked without the weight of it.
Caleb bent down and yanked a clump of crabgrass that threatened to choke out a thin group of chrysanthemums. “Look, I promised Mom that I’d drive out with you. She’s worried about you. You know how she was after Dad died, and she thinks you’re one step from the loony bin.”
Caleb sounded uncomfortable with the switch in roles with his sister. She had been the one to comfort him and urged him on through the special-ed classes where all kids got tossed who had learning disorders. She had defended him when schoolyard bullies tried to tease him about the resource room. But in more ways than one, he had inspired her to learn about the brain, how memory works, why trauma takes some people by the throat and other people churn through it like a slow, steady tugboat.
Caleb had the same thick hair as Rocky, only his was lighter, nearly golden when he had been a child. His lack of facility with arranging numbers and abysmal spelling turned out to be overshadowed by his genius with color and art and a willingness to work hard. In the warm months, he painted houses; in the winter he worked in his pottery studio making clay musicians who wailed on saxophones and trumpets. Rocky took her favorite with her, a woman leaning impossibly far back, hair struck by an invisible wind, fingers spread out on the pads of a saxophone, eyes squeezed shut with ecstasy. Rocky rolled the sculpture in her comforter and put it on the passenger seat.
“You want me to feel better and I may never be better. This is the way I am now,” she said.
She put her hand on his sleeve and squeezed his arm. They were too close to hug all the time and besides Rocky had long sensed a discomfort in Caleb when she tried to hug him. Bob had explained it to her.
“It’s because he probably peeked at you in the shower when he was fourteen and he couldn’t help but fantasize about you in the only way that addled fourteen-year-old boys do. He’s still a little embarrassed. He’ll get over it by the time he’s sixty.”
Rocky let go of his arm. “I’ll call you when I get a place. I’m staying at a motel until Columbus Day, when the season is over. I promise.”
She avoided the big roads like the Mass Pike and instead took side roads, ambling east and north to Portland. She had called ahead and made a reservation on the Casco Bay ferry. Taking a car on the ferry was an entirely different matter than just walking on. Reservations were required. She was now one of the purposeful people who drove a car on the ferry, clearly not a tourist, a day-tripper. She knew she appeared to have a reason for being, and the absurdity of her appearance felt hollow. In reality she had no reason to stay, no reason to go and felt so untethered that