Isaiah had a full head of gray hair and his eyebrows had the wild look of men his age. Long strands of hair stuck straight up from his brows and a few flipped up and pointed to the top of his head. His reading glasses sat low on his nose. His skin was dark, and from the slight cadence in his voice, Rocky thought he might be from Haiti.
“Divorce?” he asked looking up at her over his glasses.
“Dead. My husband is dead. Heart attack. He was young and we didn’t know anything was wrong.” Rocky had practiced these facts and this was her trial run.
Isaiah took off his glasses. “I’m sorry.” Rocky saw the minister settle in and the public works director receded. “When did he pass away?”
“This spring, the end of the spring.” She suddenly felt like she was in the chaplain’s office and she shifted in the chair.
“‘After the first death there is no other.’ Do you know who wrote that? Elizabeth Barrett Browning? I’m not sure. I remember the first time I heard it and I knew it was true. The first death changes everything, and all deaths afterward bring us back to the first death. I’m sorry; I lost both my parents last year and even at my ripe age, I feel like an orphan. Death changes everything doesn’t it?”
Rocky brushed an escaping tear from one eye. “If you hire me, I’ll do a good job. If I don’t know how to do something, I’ll ask. Just keep all this private, okay? I’m not ready to be a widow yet. I don’t want people to treat me like a psychologist. I need time to work hard and do physical work. I have a year’s leave of absence from my job. I can give you one year, right through next year’s tourist season.”
“I’m a professional secret-keeper. I was a minister for fifteen years and that’s part of what I did. I held secrets. The same as you. Prying secrets out of us takes an act of Congress.”
He stood up and held out his large paw of a hand to Rocky. “Let me show you about your new job and all the fancy extras that go along with it.” She let him take her hand. She knew he wanted to make physical contact with her; that’s what ministers do, they take your hand. “Don’t be overwhelmed by our advanced technology here on the island. You get a truck that can’t pass emission control standards on the mainland and the key to the storage shed. When can you start?”
“Now. I can start right now,” she said.
He nodded. “Are you settled in for the winter? Do you need a place to live?”
“I was waiting for the off-season rates to start before I looked around,” she said.
“I can help you with that. I have a rental house, nothing fancy. In fact, very far from fancy. And the off-season rates just started this minute.”
Chapter 3
Isaiah opened the door and a terrible whiff of dead fish hit them. His nostrils flared and his eyes squeezed shut, the opposite of what was needed. “Damn! The last renters left their garbage under the sink. Whatever’s there has been building steam for a week.” It was the smell of death, rotting flesh, and Rocky reeled backward, lost her footing, and fell down the three steps of the deck stairway. She dusted herself off while Isaiah flew to her assistance. “This is no way for my new dog warden to start. Don’t take this as an omen. Just look at it as the best introduction you could have to summer people.”
The cottage was the last on the dirt road. Beach grass, stiff and breeze worthy, surrounded it. “Most people don’t winter here; you’ll see that for yourself. You’re not that far from some of the year-round people. But the back of the house is up against wetlands, so it can’t be built up. That’s the good news. The bad news is that in June and on days when the wind drops off, the mosquitoes will drain every ounce of pleasure along with most of your blood. Stay here while I go grab that maggot-filled garbage and open the window.”
Rocky gratefully stood on the small deck, bleached silver by the salt and sun. The front of the house faced south and east and stared directly out to the expanse of the Atlantic Ocean. Between the house and the ocean was a quarter mile of thick vegetation, held together by a cross-hatching of vines that looked like honeysuckle. A hobbit-sized path wound through it to the rock-covered coast.
Isaiah cursed and Rocky said that the last renters of the season left more than fish garbage. Rocky pulled her eyes from the ocean and headed into the house to give him a hand. She prepared for a disaster within the cottage. She was relieved that disasters were not the sole domain of her life; even good men like Isaiah had unexpected calamities. “Did you bring garbage bags? Let’s just haul all this stuff outside,” she said.
He stood in the midst of a kitchen covered with crumpled papers, cups half filled with butter that had once been melted for lobster, bowls with the hard unpopped kernels of corn on the bottom, paper bags filled with slightly crushed beer cans. “At times like this, I think the whole human race is going to hell,” said Isaiah. The refrigerator revealed bowls filled with chili and sticks of butter left on crumb-coated saucers, an open juice container, and a Tupperware container filled with contents that neither of them chose to investigate. The couch pillows were on the floor and every dish in the house was in the sink, covered with food gone stiff. It was a mess, all right. Rocky hadn’t seen a mess this big in long time.
“I hope you got a huge deposit from these people. Who were they anyhow, small-time drug lords?”
“You wouldn’t believe it. They drove a new Volvo and said they were teachers. That was either not true or our education system is being sabotaged. And the deposit was not worth the stink that they left. But they won’t ever rent on this island again.”
Rocky and Isaiah opened all the remaining windows, hauled out the trash, and set the dishes to soak. Rocky ran an ancient vacuum cleaner over the floor. She shook the few scatter rugs outside and made a mental note to take them to the Laundromat. The place began to look like someplace where she might be able to take off her shoes. Isaiah left with his truck brimming with black plastic bags of garbage, mumbling about the world ending because of people who can’t wipe their behinds.
Rocky scrubbed the countertops in the kitchen and the bathroom. Isaiah’s wife Charlotte delivered a box of cleaning supplies complete with rubber gloves. She said her husband was so mad that he might never rent again after Rocky. Charlotte was darker than Isaiah, with a sprinkling of white hairs on her temples. She wore sweatpants and a jacket. “Sorry about my scruffy appearance, but I was in the middle of putting some of my gardens to bed when my husband came home sputtering about low-life trash who drive Volvos. Can you handle the rest of this? We won’t charge you for the full month of October.”
After Charlotte left, Rocky examined every inch of the cottage. The living room/dining room had the best view over the top of the dense shrubbery, out to the ocean. Every house on an island faces out like a sentinel looking for ships or whales, storms creeping across the sky. The two bedrooms were small, room enough for a bed, dresser, and chair. Rocky picked the bedroom that had two windows instead of one, which made up for it facing north.
When the cottage was as clean as she could get it and all the signs of the former tenants were removed, including a tied-off condom draped over an ashtray on a dresser, she began to unload her car. By dusk, her sheets were on the bed. They were queen-sized and hung to the floor on either side of the small bed. Her winter clothes were folded in the dresser drawers. She’d brought two electrical appliances from her old life: a boom box and a hair dryer. She arranged her brother’s sculpture on the end table by the couch.
Dusk changed too quickly into night and the completion of her unpacking left her with the sudden despair that comes with darkness when no other footsteps are expected. This was the worst part of the day and getting through it was an exercise of endurance, of sandbags strapped to her arms and legs while foot soldiers pointed bayonets at her dry throat. She prepared for what she knew would be a full night of altered time, thick with grief and self-accusations while she replayed the morning of Bob’s death. The gray wire mesh that fit tightly over her brain began to descend until it squeezed a tight band
over her eyes.
How many times had she helped clients with the lightning bolt arrival of grief that kidnapped people from their daily life? Hundreds. Each time, she offered the space to talk about reactions that sounded too bizarre even for the survivor to tell their best of friends. “I saw my father this morning; he walked across the classroom and looked at me. How can that be?” “I can’t help wondering what is happening to her body, what she must look now. Is that grotesque or what? But I think of it every day.” “I want to die to be with her; nothing else matters here.”
But what her clients had not told her was that her own sweat would smell different, the chemistry of her body would alter until she would no longer know who she was when she looked in the mirror, that food would taste like cardboard, and she would wake up with a full-blown panic attack at three A.M. and drive herself to the emergency room two months after her husband was dead. She had been oddly convinced that her heart was exploding and had been embarrassed to learn that she was having her first-ever panic attack. Or had her clients told her, and she listened only with part of her brain, thinking that this is temporary, this is part of grieving, and looked for the first sign of return without fully grasping the horrible landscape of the present? There was something essential and awful that she had missed, and here was one more thing to blame herself for: she failed to save her husband, and she had failed to see the true terror of the land where mourners traveled.
She heard a clear penetrating peal, like a light that pierces the fog. She looked at the sliding glass door and a striped feline face stared in at her from the base of the door. A tabby, eyes wide and insistent, white chest and calico body, had come calling. Rocky slid the door open and the cat dashed past her and leapt on the couch, purring with urgency. The creature paced the couch with familiarity then bounced to the floor and headed for the exact place on the kitchen floor where two saucers had been sitting hours before.
“Oh no, they left you behind,” said Rocky, crouching beside the cat before she knew what she doing. The cat pushed her spine hard into Rocky’s palm, offering her a generous view of her back end. A female, although she had already guessed that by her head size. Bob had always said, “Male cats generally have a bigger skull. But there is no correlation between head size and intelligence. The brain of a tom is located in his cajones.”
The cat moved in with a shocking level of confidence that Rocky wished she could have patented and injected into several of her old clients, people who were tentative, fearful, and anxious about the invisible audience that judged them from morning through night. The cat lived in a world without audience and expected attention without hesitation or explanation. Rocky immediately saw the irony of the situation; both of them had been left behind and both were pitiful. The cat did not appear to know its pitifulness, did not know the fate that awaited it if she was returned to her negligent owners or to the abyss of an animal shelter.
She did not want the world to treat her like this abandoned cat, in need of food and sympathy. She pictured the owners of the cat driving away in their Volvo, having decided at some point that the rent they had paid entitled them to not touch their own garbage. Being filthy and irresponsible with a rental was one thing, but she could not fathom the decision to leave the cat and hated them for it. Thus she began her career as animal control warden by not looking for the owners of the cat. She judged them harshly and, she believed, correctly. The cat slept on the couch the first night, but Rocky imagined that she heard her purring all night and breathing and padding around the small house. For the first time in months, she awoke not at three but at four A.M. and she thought that the hour was reason enough to keep the cat.
Chapter 4
The first two weeks of the job offered a sampling of island life in the post-tourist season. The island slumped, partly in relief, partly in the crash after an exhausting summer when the island exploded with people ten times the winter population. The dilemma of the love/hate relationship with tourists was temporarily relieved but exacerbated financially for those who had not budgeted well. The sprinkling of conversation that Rocky heard at a local breakfast spot sounded like a family where the obnoxious, cigar smoking, yet wildly wealthy uncle had just left after the annual visit during which your mother made you be polite all summer.
Several places closed immediately: the yogurt hut, the kite shop, the T-shirt businesses, and the fudge shop. The kayak company put up most of the sleek kayaks for the season, leaving just two on the porch for the owner to use on days when the ocean was quiet.
Rocky found a small gang of dogs that were left behind by tourists that had to be taken to the mainland animal shelter. Isaiah and Charlotte invited her to lunch one Sunday and they commiserated on the low-life nature that creeps into a certain segment of humanity. “What gets me is the elevated way that some people can carry on and then act like such jackasses with creatures that depend on them,” said Isaiah, in reference to the abandoned cat. Charlotte had fixed them huevos rancheros with a robust salsa made from the last of her tomatoes.
Rocky wondered if Isaiah’s promise to not say anything about her past had extended to his wife. She pictured someone telling Bob a secret and asking him not to tell Rocky. What would he have done? He was the gold standard for every circumstance. But Isaiah was a minister, or he had been. And ministers, priests, and the lot of them were bound by confidentiality. Rocky was lost in thought about the bounds of confidentiality when Charlotte brought out a fresh pot of coffee. “Isaiah tells me that your husband died this past year. I’m sorry. This must be a terrible time for you.”
Rocky threw an accusatory stare at Isaiah.
He grimaced. “I apologize. It’s not Charlotte’s fault. She caught me talking to myself when I hauled off the garbage from those idiot renters. I didn’t even know I was doing it. I’ll have to watch myself as I get older and start blathering everybody’s business. Won’t that be the worst-case scenario for an Alzheimer’s patient? I’ll be telling the world all the secrets that people have told me about affairs, scandals, incest and petty jealousies. They’ll have to put me in the solitary confinement zone of the Alzheimer’s home. I could be a national security risk.” Clearly, he was horrified that he had spilled the beans with a person who knew the absolute importance of maintaining secrets. Tiny beads of sweat popped out on his forehead.
Charlotte ignored him and sipped her coffee. “You’re not ready to say the words yet are you? I was a small girl when my grandfather died. Not long after his funeral, I was with my grandmother at the beauty parlor and she had a new girl working on her hair who kept asking her questions to be polite, and because African-American hair takes longer to work on than the last ice age, we were there for a long time. She asked my grandmother where she lived, did she know so and so, and finally the girl asked her some questions about her husband. My grandmother said, “I’m a widow.” And she hadn’t been ready to say it. Her face collapsed and she looked sadder than the day of the funeral. You don’t have to say the words until you’re ready. And I’ll try and keep my husband from talking to himself in public.”
Rocky felt the outrage melt down her tight neck muscles. She trusted Charlotte never to say a word about this again. Charlotte understood. “Thank you,” she said.
Rocky called her brother as she promised she would.
“I’m fine. I got a job, a very part-time job, probably not more than ten hours per week. It’s on an as-needed basis. And I’ve rented a little cottage,” she said in what she hoped was her most convincing voice.
“Yeah, you sound like shit to me. Where are you again?”
She heard water running on his end of the line, which meant he was washing his dishes and that it had been his wife’s turn to cook. She pictured the thick curling hairs on his hands that grew in patches along his fingers. Her brother Caleb was an anomaly among men: he liked gadgets with extreme selectivity; a cordless phone was as advanced as he went in the department of communications. If gadgets did not have to do with house
painting or sculpture, he saw no reason to bother with them. She glanced over at the sculpture that she brought with her.
“I told you. I’m on Peak’s Island and I’m going to stay for a while. I want to be where nobody knows me, nobody wants to talk to me about the saddest, most horrible parts of their life. It’s an island; people fish and they sell stuff to tourists. Oh, I’m the new dog warden. Except they call it Animal Control Warden.”
“What the hell do you know about being a dog warden?”
“Probably nothing. Ever hear of on-the-job training? How hard can it be?” she asked.
“Oh, this is brilliant. Because Bob was a vet, do you think you picked up special dog-warden skills? You hardly stepped foot in the clinic the last few years. Or do you think that working at the college makes you smart enough to do anyone’s job?”
Rocky was jolted by the mention of Bob. This was going to be the place where no one said his name and she didn’t have to say his name. She felt like she had suddenly swallowed wood chips and now they were going to churn through her body.
“We’re talking lost cats and dogs,” she said.
“Just get a tetanus shot right now, Rocky, and if you see a raccoon that’s foaming at the mouth and walking in circles, shoot it.”
“Shoot it? I’m not supposed to be that kind of dog warden. They didn’t give me a gun.” Sparring usually felt good with Caleb, but she had not been able to spar with him since Bob died. She had tried, but she couldn’t find the right equipment.
“Is everything working out with the renters?” While Rocky was still at the motel, Caleb had found people to rent her house.
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