Lost & Found - Jacqueline Sheehan [76]
“You should go,” she said.
“Let me give you a ride home,” he said.
“No. I’m going to stay here.”
He nodded and seemed like he was going to say something else, but then he gathered up his gear and walked away, pulling open the gate with an iron screech. She waited until the sound of his truck faded before she pulled out some arrows, set one in the notch, pulled her hand along her jawline and released. Nothing was right. Her arrows stuck around the outside perimeter of the target as if the center were covered in a glass dome. She tossed her bow on the ground and went to get her arrows. As she approached the target, her eye was drawn to the mark that Hill made on all his targets on the bottom left corner, a stamp that one of his students from high school made for him of a hunter with a fully drawn bow. He sometimes gave students a new paper target.
“Oh, Jesus,” she said. That was what she had seen at Liz’s old place. That’s what had caught her eye when she looked out the window. The target with the stamp on the bottom left corner.
Chapter 27
In Providence, Rhode Island, Liz’s mother smoked the last cigarette in her pack and smashed the stub in an ashtray cluttered with the remains of filtered menthols. Her daughter was dead and she was raging day and night, smoking two packs of cigarettes per day, cauterizing her lungs in the deepest places, and coating them with an anesthetic of tar.
With every breath that she had taken during the two-year strain of not speaking to her daughter, she had imagined Liz and what she’d be doing at any point in the day. Would she take her medication, did she know how angry Jan was, that her mother was right? She had pictured a future when Liz would ask for forgiveness, when the time of punishment would be over, and Jan could have her daughter back. But the side effects of shunning her daughter, not taking her calls, not reading her imploring letters, refuting even her husband when he said, “Come on now, Jan, that’s enough,” was that her world had grown darker and smaller and even the sweetest sounds from birds in her backyard had turned into jagged points of scratching.
She had busied herself with the logistics of death: arranging for the cremation, writing the brief obituary, discovering that the house in Orono had been sold and Liz was only renting it, and suffering the tangle of paperwork that comes with death. The property on Peak’s Island would have to wait for the slow grind of probate court before they could put it up for sale.
Jan pulled another cigarette from the pack and clicked on the plastic butane lighter. The dog was still outside tied to the zip line that allowed him what Jan thought was a perfectly fine run of thirty feet. He had stopped eating his food. He was stubborn like Liz. She’d let him inside when it was time for her to go to bed. The weather report predicted freezing temperatures. She was not impervious to the suffering of others. Liz had loved this dog. Even Jan had seen the cord of connection between Liz and her dog, a braid of fuchsia and green, and fragrant like pumpkin vines, yes something that had slowed Liz’s manic moments in the worst of times.
Jan was drowning in the deep gash created by Liz’s death. This is not how life had started with Liz, this was not the flutter of joy she had felt with her daughter before Liz’s bipolar brain had torn them in half. She closed her eyes and dared to remember the tender joy of holding Liz in her lap when she was three years old, sniffing her hair and thinking that, like a mother bear, she could smell her own child blindfolded. Hers was the child that smelled like fresh hay, earth, and almond oil.
She felt a flutter near her armpit that was soft like a child’s hair. A tendril of scent caught her attention. It was the musky almond smell of her daughter’s hair when the girl had been small, when the world had been theirs. For one agonizing moment, she felt the cupped palm of a child against her cheek. As if lancing a gangrenous wound, the years of poison released