“Really?”
“It doesn’t seem possible, does it?”
Richard shook his head.
“She’s useless,” Sia said. “A fake. A fraud. A charlatan.”
• • •
The Dogcatcher watched Richard climb into the black-and-white cruiser. He was kind. He sometimes gave her a new coat or coupons for hamburgers at McDonald’s. In the winter when it got bitter cold, he always came to her spot under the bridge, sat next to her in her cleverly built lean-to, and talked up and down about weather and traffic and his brother until he finally got around to asking if she’d come to the shelter for a good night’s rest out of the wind. Usually she said no, but even then, he always returned with an extra blanket, a hat, a thermos of hot tea, and a couple of sandwiches to help her through the night. A couple of times he even brought a hot water bottle that steamed in the crisp air.
CHAPTER 34
Post-Jackson Word Association
Instructions: Answer as quickly as possible with the first word that occurs in your mind.
THERAPIST: head
SIA: pussy
THERAPIST: narrow
SIA: passage
THERAPIST: stem
SIA: originate
THERAPIST: green
SIA: moss
THERAPIST: hunger
SIA: bear
THERAPIST: to marry
SIA: to lose
THERAPIST: foolish
SIA: me
THERAPIST: to sin
SIA: to love
. . .
CHAPTER 35
Sia’s house was one of the many in town that came with a historic society shingle:
Historic House
Built by Alex Johnson
Shipwright
1840
“What’s a shipwright?” M had asked when Sia and Jackson had first fallen for the house.
“A shipbuilder,” Sia said.
“The soul of a ship,” Jackson said as he looked out to sea.
M smiled. “That’s why we all love you so, Jackson Dane,” she said.
• • •
“Should we buy it?” Jack asked.
Sia nodded. “As long as we can paint it.”
It was yellow.
“Blue?” Jackson asked.
“Yep. Can we afford it?”
“Sure. We can even put in a new kitchen as soon as you sell that third novel of yours.”
Sia smacked his arm. “No pressure, huh?”
Jack kissed her. “Just saying . . .”
CHAPTER 36
Sia lay down on the floor of the guest room and stuck her head under the bed. As she did, a herd of dust mice woke and raced in frantic circles. She reached through them and pulled out a plastic bin marked “J’s Pajamas.” She stood and opened it on the bed. There were three sets: the threadbare dancing bears, the fancy silk, and a plain blue cotton set Jackson had never worn. She had dust mice stuck to her hair and one eyebrow.
• • •
After the late-night news, Sia got up to go to bed. She stood next to Toad for a few moments trying to figure how to wake him. She coughed and cleared her throat loudly, but it was as if he’d fallen into a coma. His breathing was rhythmic and steady, slow, and like everything else about him, silent. His head lolled to the right and behind his left ear, she saw the small star-shaped wound. The skin was puckered and bright pink with a narrow slit through its middle. Bigger than a freckle but smaller than a mole.
• • •
Camouflaged by dark and shadow, the Dogcatcher stood on an upturned bucket. She gripped the window ledge and pressed her nose against the glass. When Gumper-Lady reached out and touched the man in the black suit behind the ear, she slipped away.
• • •
Toad woke the second time Sia touched him. This time on his shoulder. And when he opened his eyes, she almost leaned down to kiss him. He looked so forlorn and sad, all she could think was, Is this how I’ve looked over the past year?
But she didn’t kiss him. Instead she gestured for him to follow her, and a few minutes later, they made their way up the staircase, Gumper thumping along between them. When they reached the guest room, Sia paused. The door was open, and Jackson’s blue pajamas lay folded on the bed. The open window looked out over the sea. A breeze raised the white curtains.
“Better than the police station, don’t you think?” she said. Toad followed her into the room and stood in the center like a totem pole. He stared out the window as she busied herself with the pillows. She handed him the pajamas, then pointed to the bathroom. “You can shower there,” she said, “and you can wear these.” She patted the pajamas. “They were . . . well, it doesn’t really matter whose they were. I’m saying that you can wear them, so you can wear them. They’ll probably be a little short for you, but that doesn’t matter much, does it? They’ll definitely feel better than that suit.” She was rambling. While Toad stood holding the pajamas, she folded down the sheet. When she was done, she moved to the door.
“Gump,” she said, “time to go,” but he had already jumped up on the bed and was settled in near the bottom.
“What? You’re sleeping here?” She didn’t know whether to be hurt by the snub or impressed by his immense sensitivity.
Gumper licked his lips and looked at her.
“Okay, okay,” she said, and then, “Good night, Toad.” It was the first time she’d said his name out loud to him and it felt strange on her tongue . . . even though it felt so natural in her head. He was still looking out the window and didn’t turn when she spoke. She closed the door behind her.
• • •
That night, like many nights since Jackson’s disappearance, Sia couldn’t sleep. She turned like a rotisserie chicken:
¼ turn. ½ turn. ¾ turn. Flip.
Left side. Back. Right side. Stomach.
¼ turn. ½ turn. ¾ turn. Flip.
• • •
In the middle of the night, she fell asleep and dreamed she was standing at the window looking out at the sea. Toad was standing behind her holding her breasts, his thumbs rubbing hard across her nipples. He was wearing Jackson’s pajama bottoms and his bare chest pressed up against her. His hands were large and strong, and her breasts were balls of fire. Somewhere between sleep and consciousness, she rolled onto her stomach, pressed her fingers against herself, and rubbed hard until she came. An orgasm rolled through her like a wave and she cried out into her pillow. Afterward, she breathed her way back to sleep.
CHAPTER 37
“The first time you got lost,” M said, “you were three years old.”
This story always began the same way, and although Sia didn’t remember the incident, she’d heard the story so many times she could see it almost as clearly as M.
“Where were we?” Sia asked.
“You were doodling about in the backyard sandbox, digging for potato bugs. Daddy was at work. I was talking to Mrs. Dixon near the laundry post.”
Sia remembered the laundry post near the cherry tree and the cherry tree behind the pussy willow tree. The sandbox, she knew, was on the other side of the yard.
“I only looked away for a second,” M said. “Truly, Odyssia, only a second.” Her words brimmed with so much guilt that no amount of forgiveness from Sia or the universe would ever rid her of it. For M, it had been a symbol, a sign, like everything else in her life, and from that moment on, she’d known that eventually her darling, golden Odyssia would be lost again. It was just a matter of time.
“When I turned back to the sandbox, you were gone. Your sweet pink shovel and yellow bucket were still sitting right there on the big pile of sand, and your collection of potato bugs was making its escape, but you, my sweet Odyssia? You were gone.”
If the lovely, nutty, muumuu-wearing, best-next-doo
r-neighbor-in-the-world Mrs. Dixon was around when M was telling this story, she always leapt in at this point: “When your mom realized you weren’t in the sandbox, she spun ten times in a mad frenzy trying to catch a glimpse of your bright red shirt in the yard.” Then she’d bend deeply at the knees and spin in wild circles just like M had way back when, her muumuu blossoming around her.
As the realization of Sia’s disappearance deepened, the search became frantic. M and Mrs. Dixon ran around yelling for Sia. “We hollered,” M always explained, “until every mother in the neighborhood ran from her house to help.”
Fear led them to the likely places: the giant sewer pipe at the bottom of the hill where water ran and pooled in places deep enough to drown a fallen three-year-old, the monkey bars in the neighbor’s yard that Sia had learned to scale but not yet descend, and the tangle of forsythia bushes where an angry, scraggly, possibly rabid raccoon had taken refuge just the week before but had so far eluded capture.
Not unexpectedly, Sia hadn’t chosen the likely places. M didn’t even find footprints in the mud near the mouth of the sewer drain.
“It was as if you had evaporated,” M said, “and right then, my whole world collapsed.”
Just as Mrs. Dixon was racing inside to call the police, a woman from three neighborhoods away crossed the Winchells’ yard carrying Sia in her arms.
“Your bright red shirt,” M always said, “gleamed like a peony in the afternoon sun.” Tears would roll down her face as she spoke. “As this woman, my savior, passed you into my arms, my world expanded again. I grabbed you ferociously. Like a mama bear pulling her cub out of danger.”
“She growled and spit, too,” Mrs. Dixon liked to add. “By the time she was done, you were slick as a newborn kitten.”
• • •
Before Jackson’s disappearance, Sia used to laugh whenever her mother showed such passion. Her panic seemed ridiculous. Over the top. But ever since, she just closed her eyes and cried.
CHAPTER 38
On the morning after discovering Toad, Sia woke with a crick in her neck.
Barnacled beast, she thought, eyeing him over her first cup of coffee.
• • •
After breakfast, she poked him in the arm with the end of a spoon. “Are you going to talk to me today?” she said.
Toad stared blankly out the window.
Gumper—quick to do his business outside—nudged himself between the two of them.
“Oh, relax,” Sia said, sipping her coffee. “I didn’t poke him hard.”
• • •
A second cup softened her, and she noted that although Toad hadn’t showered, overnight his face had faded to a paler pink. The puffiness, Jilly would be happy to hear, had gone down a bit. And the cuts on his hands had scabbed over.
The star-shaped pucker behind his left ear?
Same.
CHAPTER 39
“Homer was a woman,” M announced.
“Impossible,” Stuart said.
“Had to have been.”
“How do you figure?”
“So much passion. Romance. Lying in love. Gift giving. Covering of male parts. It reads like an Erica Jong novel.”
“What about all the killing and the turning of men into pigs?”
“Romantic tension.”
• • •
Every once in a while Mrs. Windwill joined M on the tree branch. She stayed close to the trunk, where she could easily hide if Sia happened to glance out the window; she figured she’d done enough damage. Sometimes she even contributed to the whiteboard:
Sigh.
Heave.
• • •
The Dogcatcher took a small notebook and a pen from her pocket. With the pad against her knee, she wrote. A few minutes later she held the page up to the sky.
Gumper-Man
CHAPTER 40
Overnight word about Toad spread and the town swelled with curiosity. “A look of nothing? What do you mean, a look of nothing?” the townspeople asked one another as they passed on the story. In the grocery line. At yoga class. Even in the middle of an appointment at the tax attorney’s office.
In less than twenty-four hours, Toad became more interesting than last year’s political election that put the first publicly acknowledged lesbian into the mayoral office or the annual tug-of-war about whether the refuge beaches should be closed for plover procreation. But interest in Toad should have come as no surprise. Folks were needy and curious in summertime when the heat melted over the town. After all, they were finally warm after spending all those months numbed up from the frigid winds, so cold every last one of them lost their urge for the imagined. From December on, as Mother Nature pummeled them with nor’easter after nor’easter, burying them under piles of snow, creative thought dwindled to a thin stream until mid-January, when it became no more than a frozen trickle. By February, it was solid ice.
But come summer, as folks pulled shorts, T-shirts, and bathing suits from their drawers, they thawed out, and soon enough they were turning over rocks and moving mountains in search of any nub of story that might roll into their corner of the world so that they could grow it into something they could put their hearts and heads around.
Toad was the nub they’d been waiting for.
• • •
In Starbucks, folks shared the story over mocha skim lattes and dried-out gingerbread. By the time Ted Saunders rolled in for his daily tall black house, Ed the hardware guy was howling with laughter at the idea of Sia Dane finding Toad naked on the beach gripping a large satchel of money.
“A naked guy with money,” he said over and over, trying to find a place for the image in his round, shiny head. “A silent, naked guy with money? Only Odyssia Dane could happen onto that one.”
And though Jillian swore she had nothing to do with the growing of this particular naked-guy-with-money rumor, fifteen minutes later, Ed had to redraw the image in his head one more time to include Toad with a twelve-inch tail.
• • •
In the yoga studio not far from Starbucks, Mrs. Houghton—who was sinking for the very first time into cow face pose without worrying the least bit how she would climb out of it—told Philippa James that Toad had a mysterious mark in the center of his chest.
“Not a tattoo,” she insisted, laughing as she discovered a great amount of painful joy in the opening of her hips. “A branding.”
“A branding?” Mrs. James whispered. “What does it look like? Is it the mark of the devil or the mark of an angel?” She was older than Mrs. Houghton by a good twenty-five years and unable, because of her hips, to do much more in yoga class than swing her arms and, on a good day, complete a few almost-deep knee bends. But while she pendulumed her wrinkly, freckled limbs back and forth, her mind ticked away at a phenomenal pace. Unlike most of the women in the class who were trying to let go of thought and worry, she was hoarding as much of both as she could for later in the day when she was alone and lonely in her seven-bedroom Federal on High Street. Unfortunately, Mrs. Houghton needed all the strength and breath she could muster to hold cow face pose, so Mrs. James gleaned no more information about the strange mark on Toad’s chest. The rest she had to make up for herself.
• • •
“Did Mrs. Windwill see this guy appear on the beach?”
“Nope.”
“She didn’t see anything?”
“Nothing.”
“Not even Sia walking down the beach with Gumper?”
“Uh-uh.”
“Oh, shit.”
“No kidding.”
“What the heck was she doing?”
“I heard she took a sleeping pill the night before and slept through the whole thing.”
“A sleeping pill?”
“Yep.”
“Seriously?”
“Mm-hmm.”
“Wow.”
“That’s what I said.”
“So first Jackson, now the man on the beach?”
“Mm-hmm.”
• • •
Toad’s story spread so vigorously that Richard arrived at Sia’s house to retrieve the strange, silent man much earlier than Sia expected. Over coffee, he relayed these stories to Sia, along with the fact that he’d been flagged down four times by curious townsfolk, including Joe and Mimi Laslow, on the rather short drive from the police station to Sia’s house.
“You know, Odyssia, they’re just getting started,” he warned. “And to be honest, they’re swallowing Toad the same way the whale swallowed Jonah. Whole. Unfortunately, there’s not much else going on right now to take their attention, so don’t get your hopes up that they’ll spew him out and let him swim away any time soon.”
Sia nodded.
Richard sipped his coffee. “Well, him . . . and you.”
“Me?”
“Of course you,” Richard said, “and if I’m completely honest, it’s you, Toad, and Jackson.”
Sia bowed her head.
“You can’t tell me you didn’t suspect that was coming. You know this town as well as I do.”
“I was just hoping it might be different this time. Thought maybe they’d leave me out of it.”
“No luck, Odyssia. I wish I could tell you different.”
She nodded.
“Anyway,” Richard continued, “Toad fever is even happening at the station. Look.” He pulled back the curtain and pointed.
Sia looked. A young, fresh-faced policeman was stretching his neck out of the passenger window trying, quite obviously, to snag his first glimpse of the mysterious silent man.
“Who’s he?”
“New kid. He heard about Toad last night while he was washing his uniforms at the Wash Tub. When I got in this morning, he was panting at the door, begging me to bring him along.”
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