Picture This, page 7
Rocky had recently added one more element to the routine: changing the sequence of events slightly as an experiment. The experiment was so narcissistic that she was glad the crows couldn’t tell anyone except the other crows. She had routinely said, “Hello, crows,” when she arrived, and “Good-bye, crows,” when she left. Did they have a name for her? Surely there was a special call for humans, although she had yet to decipher it. She wanted them to know her name. It seemed fair at this point in the relationship. In fact, she might have a better shot at a relationship with crows than with, say, a man. A man like Hill, who had said he was single, if separated. And then bam, his wife returns. The crows wouldn’t ever do anything like that. Did they mate for life like mallards, swans, and voles? Maybe the most she could hope for was that after consistently feeding them, the crows would learn her name.
Rocky had long known that food is the strongest way to reinforce an action or a sound, and that food must be solidly associated with the desired behavior to form a well-traveled route in the brain. As she put out the bread, she said, “Rocky, Rocky.” This was a good two-syllable sound for the crows to learn. Who knows? And who knows when and how she would tell Hill about seeing Julie? How would she do it? Would he call her? Would he tell her instantly when he came to her house tonight for their previously planned dinner? Would he reach for her hand, looking glum and guilty, or awkward and pained, and spill it out?
Rocky and Bob had been married for eight years, and they had been together for a few years before that. She honestly couldn’t remember how people break up. She wanted to hate Hill, but there was nothing similar to hate percolating through her. She was filled with wanting and desire, longing for his skin and breath. She wanted to tell him about Natalie, she wanted to be wrapped in his arms while she told him about the sound of Natalie’s voice.
Everything Rocky knew and believed said that she needed to tell Hill exactly what she’d seen and talk it out before her feelings turned into a gangrenous wound. In a fit of passive pouting, she wanted him to bring it up. The image of Hill and Julie from the night before was intruding into her thoughts, her body, and a huge glob of rejection had taken over her heart.
As if nothing had happened, he called and left her a message: “I’m back and I can’t wait to see you. We’re on for dinner? See you after work. I’ll stop at the fish market. Let me know if you want cod or monkfish. Or do you want me to choose?”
The terror of rejection had been as unpredictable as a lightning strike. There is no way to know how lightning will burn through the cognitive circuitry, leaving one victim with a lifelong limp, while another will never be able to smell onions again. Rocky had suddenly lost her senses, her belief in love after Bob, and her ability to say what she was thinking and feeling. Hill was going to leave her, and in the hierarchy of breakups he was going to take the high road—no phone breakup, but a face-to-face, which ranked much higher than a text message or e-mail.
She knew which ferry he’d take and exactly how long it would take him to walk from the dock to her house. When he was within a mile of the house, Cooper stood and went to the door, looking over his shoulder at her.
“I’d love to know how you do that. Is it sound or smell or canine radar?” Rocky asked the dog. “Does the man have a vibrational frequency that you can hear?”
Hill appeared along the dirt road, swinging a white plastic bag. Rocky desperately did not want to let on that her heart had smashed into the windshield as she sat in pulverized awareness in her car, watching Hill and Julie in the house. She hugged him, hands on his shoulders, keeping one iota of control.
“I brought a loaf of French bread from the bakery near the Casco Bay Line. I know you like their stuff. Can I tell you how great it is that school is out and I don’t have a mountain of papers to grade?” His summer job was teaching English as a second language to recently immigrated Somalis, and there was absolutely no grading. He pulled the baguette out of the white plastic bag, which also held his selection of fish. How did he keep that strange rosiness to his cheeks? A mere thirty-two years old, he was younger than her by seven years. If she was trying to accumulate reasons to hate him, being younger didn’t count. Was this the last time she’d ever see him? She took the bread and the plastic bag and tossed them on the counter.
“Come and sit,” she said. All nine hundred square feet of the cottage pressed in on her as if she was out of alignment. She sat on the couch. If she had had an idea of how the night would go, it vanished when Hill arrived. Why wasn’t she using every blasted communication skill that she promoted? Tell the man what she saw, ask for clarification, use “I,” and tell him how she felt. Settle in for an adult conversation. Rocky grabbed the bottom edge of her T-shirt and pulled it over her head.
“Rocky?”
Good. She had startled him, and as if she watched from a distance, she had startled herself. Her sense of equilibrium had come unhinged. She reached in back and unhooked her bra, shrugging it off in front of her. She slipped next to him on the couch and closed her eyes when his hands found her breasts. The air around them softened her throat and the connective tissues that held her together. This was how her house would smell forever with Hill tucked into it: feral, fresh, full of want. She wanted to grab one morsel of how her life with him might be.
Rocky had not counted on loving a hunter, a man trained to mute his intentions as he waited for the inattentive moment with a deer or a pheasant. She had been inattentive, and he had deceived her. This was the last time she’d touch him, and the secret knowledge gave her a drunken edge.
“Are you sure?” he asked, sliding his hands over her ribs, articulating each one.
Her back arched like a sea serpent cresting. “Are you sure?” she asked. This was where he would tell her, his essential honesty coming through.
Hill’s hand cupped her breast, and a sweet gust of breath escaped from his lips. “I have been sure since the first day I met you,” he breathed into her ear.
An unclear and avoidant answer. Rocky slipped out of his arms and curled away from him, wishing that he would be the one to say it, to tell her about Julie. If he would do that, they might have the one-second window of opportunity to save themselves. But she had ambushed both of them with her preemptive strike.
“Weren’t you going to tell me? I saw you with Julie,” she said, her voice still thick and liquid. “You’re going back, aren’t you?” she asked, pushing damp hair from her face. She made a feeble attempt to claw her way out of the pit of vengeful blaming that now threatened to trap her indefinitely. The night air surrounded her, and she felt suddenly naked and unprotected. Foolish.
Hill, far from the land of words, his lips already full and languid, tried to surface with a strong swimmer’s kick. His dark eyes remained dilated, and he froze in the assault of her accusation.
“No. Wait, how did you see Julie? Where? Jesus, what just happened? Rocky, this is not a black-and-white situation. We’re neck deep into divorcing each other, but . . .” He paused, his entire body pulling toward her. He reached a hand out to her cheek and touched the wet that streamed down her face.
“Are you okay? This is not what I wanted to happen, not like this,” he said, his words still heavy and thick.
“I drove to your house and saw you with her. You should have told me she was coming back. I trusted you,” she said, scooping up her bra and shirt, wiping the moisture from her cheeks, wishing she hadn’t cried, wishing she hadn’t already done something that she’d regret. Rocky leapt up with her clothes and ran for the bathroom. She slammed the door.
She wadded her clothes into a ball and hugged them to her chest. Hill tapped on the door. “Go away!” she yelled.
Silence. Hill was not a persuader or a cajoler. He would not beg. If she told him to go away, he would. He mumbled something to Cooper as he passed through the kitchen. He let the screen door slam on the way out. She pressed her forehead against the bathroom door until Cooper whined in protest and she opened the door. The black dog looked at her, then toward the screen door, then back at her. This was a language she could understand. “Oh, shit,” she said to the dog.
Rocky struggled back into her shirt, abandoning her bra, and ran out of the cottage, with Cooper at her heels. The gravel dug into her feet, slowing her usual long stride. She passed Melissa’s house and saw Hill just ahead, near Bracken Road. “Hill, stop,” she called to him. He must have been stunned, she thought, or he would have heard her wincing along. The man could hear a leaf fall from a tree. She caught up with him.
“I want to know why. Why weren’t you going to tell me?” she said.
Hill’s eyes were red, but it was his anger that made her stop. Every protective mechanism in her system told her to back up, danger. He looked like he had been struck with a sharp stick: fists clenched, muscles tight, eyes dark and steady, lips fixed over his immobile jaw. She had never seen him like this.
“I thought you were leaving me, that you were coming here to tell me that it was over, you were going back to Julie. I should have said something. . . .” She extended one hand toward him and then pulled back.
“This is not at all like me,” she said. “I’m in unknown territory. Bob never, I mean, neither of us ever wandered.” Wandered? “I didn’t know I would feel this horrible, it never occurred to me that you would lie.” Her teeth had begun to chatter, and not from cold, even though a breeze foretold rain. She looked over his shoulder and saw a bank of dark clouds advancing on the island.
Hill closed his eyes for a few seconds and his breathing changed; he was struggling for control, fighting against a force that clawed at him.
She knew she was supposed to say how she felt without accusing, labeling, or attacking. She knew everything she was supposed to say—she was the freaking expert at teaching this to young couples when they fell from grace into the first dark pit of fighting. So why was it so hard to say?
“I was afraid,” she said finally. “And now I’m so embarrassed, no, mortified, that it is taking every bit of strength to stand here instead of running away.”
Hill exhaled a long slow breath. She caught a new scent from him, hormone fueled, with an underlay of adrenaline.
“Why didn’t you just say something, ask me? Isn’t this what psychologists do, they communicate?” he said, flexing his fingers, releasing tension. A dim flash of lightning illumined a deep section of the incoming blanket of clouds. The long delay before the rumble of thunder meant the storm was still far off.
“Bob and I went from point A to point B, and we just kept going, we never veered from each other. I never thought of leaving him and never imagined that he’d leave me,” said Rocky.
“And yet he did leave you.”
Rocky nodded dumbly as the words hit her from a new angle, slicing in with discomfort, revealing the core of her fear.
“You’re the widow, I know, the sad one, but have you noticed that I’m going through a divorce and it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done?”
She started to answer until Hill put up his hand. “I know that Bob can never come back. . . .”
“And Julie can come back,” Rocky said.
Cooper, who had been pressed into Rocky’s legs the entire time, turned and trotted off. She heard the quick, young footsteps a moment later.
“Hey,” said Melissa, looking at both of them. “Whoops, looks like I’m interrupting something.”
“No,” said Hill, with a deep weariness in his voice. “I was just leaving.”
“Are we having a fight, or are you leaving for good?” asked Rocky.
“We are having a fight, and I’m leaving to go home and shoot about one hundred arrows into a hay bale.”
Chapter 13
Hill
When he was a child, he assumed that everyone knew about the way to catch anger and pain, that if caught quickly it was nothing more than an ugly thing that lived on the outside of the body, like a crumpled Kevlar shield. He had learned to meet anger and pain head-on, like the rip-roaring dragons that they were, and when he held his ground they changed into whatever lived underneath. His grandmother had taught him this, the very same grandmother who had taught him to hunt for deer and, if they were very lucky, pheasants.
She had warned him about testosterone long before the full effect of it kicked in. They had been up near Canada when he was ten. His grandmother was one of the best archers he ever met. She used a longbow her whole life and would never consider a compound bow, not even when she hit eighty and her arm muscles grew smaller and softer. They had settled in a high tree blind on the first day of bow season.
“I’ve been coming back to this blind for thirty-seven years,” said his grandmother. “Since before your father was born. I’ve repaired it so many times that the birds must think I’m a neighbor.” She sat on a piece of wood five inches off the platform, enough to let her rise with ease if she heard a deer, notch an arrow, pull back, and take aim. She rarely talked.
“If your grandfather was here, he might tell you something different about testosterone. Men like to brag about it, and I’ve never heard a man say one sensible, helpful thing about something so powerful, frightening, and wonderful. But I want you to listen to me. In a few years your thinking is going to get disturbed. You’ll get angry quicker, you’ll want to punch a hole in the wall, other boys will want to pull you into a fight, and if your heart gets broken, you could lose your mind,” she said.
In the distance, they saw a doe and a yearling. His grandmother wasn’t interested in them.
“How do you know I’ll do all those things? I might not,” he said. His feet had gone to sleep, so he shifted and endured the hot prickles as his feet woke up again.
“Because of testosterone. It will feel like someone opened up your skull and poured a drug into your brain, and at first it will be very hard to control. When it feels like someone has hurt you and you get good and mad, there’s something I want you to do to make your brain work again. I want you to get your bow and as many arrows as I hope you’ll always have. You’ll need to steady your breathing first, soften your knees like I keep telling you to do, and let all your focus go to the center of the target. That’s what will work off the anger and pain so you can get underneath it. It could take hours at first. But if you let anger and pain lead you around by the nose, that testosterone will be like throwing gasoline on a fire.”
He heard a crow in the distance. He didn’t think they were going to get a deer today. Grandma was talking too much.
She shifted her weight and opened her plaid wool jacket at the neck.
“You’re going to get nice muscles too, which will help in archery. Testosterone can make you fast. You’ll like that part. I’d buy some testosterone if I could get my hands on some, just for the upper body strength. Have you been paying attention to anything that I’ve said?”
“Grandma, will you still love me when the testosterone comes?” He was suddenly afraid of the future, of smelling like the eight-point buck that they hunted, of losing his mind.
“Oh, we’re in this forever,” she had said, rubbing his hair.
When Hill returned from Rocky’s house, he opened the creaky gate to his backyard, where he kept his target range set up year-round and still taught a few students. He went into the garage and got out his longbow and every arrow that he had. He set up with the bow, steadied his breath, softened his knees, and let his focus stay on the target. He shot again and again, for the longest time that he could remember. When his upper body muscles cried for mercy, he sat down on top of his picnic table and saw what was beneath the anger. He still wanted her. He wanted to be in this forever with Rocky.
Chapter 14
The phone hung heavy in her hand like a gun. Rocky had traced each digit of Natalie’s phone number on a pad of yellow Post-it notes until the number was etched through five layers. The desire to call the girl was unrelenting. Rocky had no choice but to call her again, yet she fought against it, digging in with her full weight, as if by doing so she could stop the force of the girl coming toward her. Natalie had probably regretted calling her in the first place and was long gone. Rocky punched in the numbers.
This time Natalie answered on the first ring.
“This is Rocky. I’d like to meet you and help you figure out if Bob was your father,” she blurted out before the girl could bolt like a wild horse.
“I got your messages. I was afraid of what you’d say. Are you sure? I mean, I know I came out of nowhere and kind of surprised you,” said Natalie.
“I have to transport a dog tomorrow. I’ll be in Portland. I can meet you at the Casco Bay ferry on Commercial Street. I’ll have on a baseball cap that says PEAKS ISLAND. There are benches right along the street. Three o’clock. Can you be there? Is that too far for you to come?” Rocky said, her speech jerky and abbreviated.
“I’ll be there,” Natalie said.
Rocky had to deliver the first canine calamity of the season: a basset hound who had been found howling along Island Avenue. He was only a minor calamity; this was a dog that someone would ultimately claim—if not the owners, then the first people who went window-shopping through the shelter. The dog was huge for a basset hound, shaped more like a walrus, and he was a gentle talker, a smooth baritone with imploring eyes who promised loyalty.
“Good luck,” she said as the hound bayed at her. All hounds sounded like they spoke the same few sentences. I’ve found something right here, I can smell it! Let’s go, times a-wasting. Rocky admired their singular nature and their fresh joy at each discovery. What would she discover on the park bench by the ferry?
She spotted the girl immediately. Natalie looked like one of the lost children out of a Dickens novel. The day was warm, and yet she had on a wool cap, beneath which her shoulder-length hair stuck out in a soft cloud of blond. She looked like the kids in the magazine articles who were tossed out by their families or who ran away and lived on the streets selling whatever they had—sex or drugs—to live. Her socks came up to her knees, and her shoes were silver wedge sandals. Her shorts were rolled up too high, and tender flesh expanded at the edge of the denim roll. Her sweater was impossibly tight. If Rocky had to guess—and she tried very hard not to—she would have said that Natalie’s body language alerted every male from Portland to the Canadian border. Nearly every generation of kids exhibits highly sexualized clothing or behavior in order to notify others of their ilk that they are available for mating. They are members of a tribe, and the tribe calls for a sexual drumbeat, whether the kids are in Ohio or Borneo.
