Lost & Found - Jacqueline Sheehan [74]
Rocky clicked her seat belt into place and her hands trembled. “His heart. I thought I could have saved him. I tried to, I did CPR as soon as I could get my hands on him. He had this thing that he said, that he married a woman who could save him.”
Hill backed up the truck. “What was that supposed to mean?”
“It was a joke about me being a lifeguard when we met. He wasn’t the kind of guy who needed saving, not like a wreck of a person, you know? That wasn’t it. Only it wasn’t a joke and I really did need to save him and I couldn’t. A couple of months after he died, I came here and then the dog came here and I let him go without a fight, and I want to get him back because he needs me, or I need him. Can we talk about this after we practice? I hate to say this, but I need to shoot something.”
He patted the steering wheel. “Lead on, and we’ll shoot the daylights out of that target.”
They drove the short distance in his truck to Tess’s house. The faded prayer flags settled to a steady sway from a quiet breeze. They were tied on a line from her front door to a rhododendron bush beyond the porch.
Rocky smelled the man scent of Hill’s jacket when he reached over to grab his quiver of arrows and his bow in the truck. Each round molecule of his scent got off on her upper lip and rolled with urgent desire up her nose, dove into her bloodstream, and took the express to her brain. Her body responded in a jet stream of warmth cascading between her eyes and spiraling with alarming speed through ribs, pooling between her hip bones, pausing for a decided message between her legs, gaining speed in flourishing agony down the insides of her thighs and thinning past the knobs of her knees, shooting yellow light out the tips of her boot-covered toes. She reached for the door handle and pulled it open with a click.
Hill opened the gate to the backyard, and it screeched with a heralding cry. He held open the gate for Rocky and she passed through holding her breath, avoiding the chance to inhale any more of him. She pointed to the ringed target fifty yards away, attached to a stack of three hay bales. He had a fresh paper target rolled up in the quiver of arrows that he slid out. “Let’s start fresh,” he said and he covered the old target, tacking it with the pins that held the old one in place.
“You’ve been practicing,” he said. “I can tell by the way you carry your bow. There’s a turning point with students, when they stop carrying the bow as if it will take a bite out of them.”
In fact she had passed over a threshold, faster than she thought she should have, when the arrow, her arm, the bow, and the target all flowed together and when it happened she felt like she had skipped a grade. She had felt her heart beat steady at the command of the bow and arrow. She noted the calmness of the release and the whole thing was over in a few moments and she had wanted it back. She told Hill about it.
He listened as he paced out a distance.
“The kinesthetic memory of your body is taking over. The times of not hitting the target, all the failures, have to be fully felt, again and again to get just one of those moments of flow that you got. I don’t know why that happened for you this soon. I’ve had students practice for a year before they step into a space where all the parts work. Did it just happen that one time?”
“Yeah, this week. So I shouldn’t count on it happening again soon? I got a peek of something happening in the future, like time travel,” she said.
He put his bow on a small section of stone wall. “I can’t predict how it will go for you. For most of us, those moments are hard earned, inch by inch with a lot of outright humiliation, followed by lagging self-doubt that leaves a taste like rank meat. Then it starts to change. First the arrows hit the outer rings, then a few strays dive toward the center, then that bad-boy voice quiets down to a murmur and a new voice opens up who says to take