Lost & Found - Jacqueline Sheehan [87]
She scanned his posture automatically. His head pronated forward as if his brain needed to arrive before his body. Oh, the anxious ones. In her practice, she could help people strengthen muscles, align their bodies into less tortuous postures, but she was frequently daunted by the toll that anxiety took on a person. Living with fear was exhausting. She remembered the days of fear when her husband smelled like oily liquor even when he sat bleary-eyed at the breakfast table with the children. She shook the memory away. Times had changed.
“Cold day to visit the island,” she said. “Were you there for the day?” She hadn’t seen him on the island before, but it was not uncommon to see strangers on the island. The fifteen-minute ferry ride from Portland opened them to the world.
“The cold doesn’t bother me,” he said, pulling his head back in line with his body. He wore a charcoal coat, zipped to the center of his chest. The filling of the coat exaggerated his size, giving him larger shoulders and arms.
“Not much open on the island in the winter, but Stan’s Seafood is open until seven. Everything closes by then. I sometimes wonder what visitors do on the island in the winter,” she said.
As she got one step closer, she thought she caught the scent of something metallic coming off him, the way aluminum tastes if you bite a scrunched up ball of it. She stepped back.
“Business,” he said. “I had business to take care of.” The hinge of his jaw locked shut. She could see his muscles tightening, starting at his jaw and spreading throughout his body. She glanced down and saw that both his hands formed into dry, chapped fists. Finally he said, “I’m working on one of the new houses in town. Lots of building going on there.”
Tess relaxed a bit. Of course, there was a dreadful amount of construction going on. Before you knew it, a stoplight was going to show up one day. She hated being the old woman who groused about change and people moving in. Soon, all of Boston would move here and clog up the tiny roads with their oversized cars. She shook her arms and shoulders with a shudder.
“With every new house, something precious gets sacrificed,” she said.
The man smiled for the first time, his lips spreading like a wet opening to a cave.
“That’s right. Sometimes a sacrifice must be made.”
The ferry jolted as it made first contact with the tire-lined pier. Tess put her hand on the railing to steady herself, looking at the dock. The man turned and walked quickly to the gangway. He stood in line with several people behind him. When the attendants opened the sturdy chain link barrier, he slipped off the ferry and disappeared before Tess could see where he went. She wanted to know, when is a sacrifice needed?
Tess walked to the restaurant to meet her ex-husband for dinner. She worried about hiding the illness from Len. His diagnostic skill had been brilliant when he was young and sober, and not all that bad even when he was in his drunken years. But that was long ago, and he was sober now, and long retired from medical practice. Would he notice that she carried herself differently? The family get-together at Christmas had been the greatest source of her worry, but she had passed through the holidays undetected, or almost.
“It’s the skin,” he once said to her. “And something about the eyes.” He said that he could spot someone with cancer when he looked at them.
For the family visit, she made sure that she moisturized her skin, and at the last minute, she put Visine in her eyes until the sclera were parchment white. Only her little granddaughter, who she had suspected had received the thread of synesthesia through little knotted bunches of DNA, had noticed. She had taken Tess’s hand and whispered in her ear, “Granny, your color has a dent in it. Why is that?” The girl