CHAPTER 44
“Nineteen inches,” Jackson said.
“Already?”
“That’s what the weatherman’s reporting.”
Another garbage can—freed of its moorings—bashed into the boulders in the front yard, then clattered on down the street. The wind whistle-screamed through the slit under the back door. Icy crystals struck at the windowpanes.
“How much more is coming?” Sia asked.
“At least another eight inches, maybe twelve.”
“Sweet,” Sia said, tucking the afghan under her feet. “Toss another log on that fire.”
“And then?”
“And then come on over here.”
“Is there room?”
Sia pushed Gumper off her lap. He huffed his way to the far end of the couch. “I’ll make room,” she said.
Jackson stoked the fire, then crawled under the afghan with Sia. “I should shovel,” he said.
“Too windy.” Sia kissed Jack’s neck.
“You should shovel.”
“Too comfy.” She kissed his ear.
“He should shovel,” Jack said, pushing on Gumper’s posterior with his foot.
“Too lazy.” Sia wrapped her arms around Jack.
“Someone should shovel.”
“Tomorrow.” She nuzzled his cheek.
“I’m pretty sure this is not leading to a well-shoveled driveway.”
Sia sighed against Jack’s chest. “Probably not.”
CHAPTER 45
The Dogcatcher leapt out from behind a mailbox. “Aha!” she yelped.
Sia jumped.
“There you are!” the Dogcatcher said.
Sia froze. “Yes,” she said, “here I am. You’re looking for me?” She fought the urge to run. Though she wouldn’t have thought it possible, the Dogcatcher was now scrawnier and more hideous than the first time she’d seen her close-up four years before. Bent in places most people don’t bend, with bumps of hard growth sprouting from her body in a random higgledy-piggledy fashion, she was now little more than a bone. An arthritic finger.
“I am.” The Dogcatcher raised her arm over her head and shook a bunch of lost-dog flyers at Sia.
“What are those?”
“Lost souls,” the Dogcatcher said, lowering her arm. Her voice was quiet and sad. Sia felt it deep in her middle. She was surprised that she had room for more with Toad occupying so much space.
Acutely aware of the woman’s appearance, Sia was suddenly and equally aware of her own image in the plate-glass window of the shoe store behind the Dogcatcher.
“You came to see me four years ago,” Sia said. “Right? When I found Gumper? That was you, wasn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“And now you’re telling me that you’re looking for me again. I get the feeling you want something, but I’m not sure what.”
“First things first,” said the Dogcatcher.
“Okaaaaay,” Sia said.
“How is the dog?”
“The dog?” Afraid the Dogcatcher was back to reclaim Gumper for herself or for the original owners, she jigged about in her head for a solution.
Run?
Fabricate?
Fight?
“Yes, the one you hung the sign for four years ago. Gumper, right?”
“Oh, that dog.” Sia thought of Jackson falling out of his chair laughing when she’d shown him the dog-paw business card.
“Well?”
“Why do you need to know about this dog? Was he yours? Do you have some stake in him? Do you want to take him back where he came from? Do you know where he came from?”
• • •
As Sia fired questions at the Dogcatcher, townspeople began to collect around them. They pressed in, gawked, and nudged so close that she suddenly felt like a giraffe in the zoo. Spotted. Elongated. Bandy-legged.
“Giraffe,” Sia was sure she’d heard them whisper. “Giraffe.” She looked at her reflection in the window. Same old her.
The Dogcatcher paid no attention to the growing crowd. She tucked her face close to Sia’s. “I need to know so I can help you,” she said. She wrinkled her nose and sniffed.
“Help me with what?” Sia said.
“With lost things,” the Dogcatcher said.
“Oh.” Sia was confused and curious. “What do you mean?”
“Do you or do you not have lost things?”
Sia looked around her. She was getting that same feeling she got on the beach when Toad looked beyond her, as if there were something going on she couldn’t see. She caught Mrs. Wysong’s eye, thought momentarily about pigeon pose, and then looked back at the Dogcatcher.
“You’re confusing me,” she said. “And you’re being very cryptic.”
The Dogcatcher eased away from Sia. “It’s okay. I can help.”
• • •
As they spoke, Gumper lay on the cool tile of Sia’s back patio, snoozing through the late-morning hours. Every few minutes he puffed out a small sigh and rolled from one side to the other.
• • •
When she couldn’t take any more, Sia turned to the crowd. “What? What? What?” she said. “What do you all want?”
Joe Laslow stepped forward. “Is it true, Sia?”
“Is what true?”
“You found a man?”
The crowd pressed in. No use lying to them.
“Yes, Joe, I did.”
“On the beach?”
“Yep.”
“Was he really wearing a suit?”
“Mmm-hhhmmm.”
“And a strange look?”
“Yes,” Mrs. Spindle said, “a look of nothing is what we heard.”
Sia nodded. “Yes, that’s true.”
“What does a look of nothing look like?” Mrs. Spindle asked.
“Just what it implies, Mrs. Spindle,” Sia said.
“Can you show us?” Mrs. Wysong asked.
Sia rolled her eyes. “Oh, for God’s sake, no, I can’t show you.”
“Well, then, are you sure it wasn’t a look of longing?” Mrs. Spindle asked. She had lost her husband to a stroke a few months earlier, his arteries clogged so thick after fifty years of his high school sweetheart’s extra-special bacon-and-egg breakfasts that they ran thick as tow ropes through his body. Ever since, Mrs. Spindle saw longing wherever she looked. On the face of the parrotfish in the pet store window. In the coffee grounds she tossed at the base of her tomato plants in her garden each morning. In the hitch of the FedEx deliveryman’s step. She even saw longing in the angle of the midmorning sun.
“No, Mrs. Spindle,” Sia said, softening a little, “it wasn’t longing. Though for you, I wish it were.”
“Not confusion, Odyssia?” Mr. Spencer asked. At eighty-eight, he was a little confused himself. Deaf, too. He was leaning on the mailbox.
Sia leaned close to his good ear and raised her voice. “No, Mr. Spencer, not confusion.”
“Fear, maybe?” Sandy the bagger from the local grocery asked hopefully. Her voice quivered as she spoke, reminding everyone that she was frightened of much more than her own shadow, a list that included childish fears like spiders, mice, and the dark, but also unlikely fears like lawn mowers, men with mustaches, and any bird bigger than a hummingbird. Like most people, she felt better if others shared her neuroses.
“It was what it was,” Sia said. “There’s no use trying to make it more romantic or interesting. It was, and is, a look of nothing. Now go away.” She caught a flash of her reflection in the window as she turned away.
Sia turned back to the Dogcatcher. “Let’s start again. You want to know about Gumper.”
“Yes.”
“The dog? My dog? The one I’ve had for the last four years?”
“Yes.”
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“You know I kept him?”
“Of course. Yes, yes. Gumper, Gumper, Gumper.”
“You do?”
“Of course, I see you,” the Dogcatcher said and clapped her hands together. She looked happy, and—for a moment—not quite as hideous.
“This is a good thing?” Sia asked. She was incredulous. “I thought you wanted to take Gumper from me.”
“Oh, no. That dog came from a wretched place from wretched people.”
“How do you know that?”
The Dogcatcher held up the signs. “I did research,” she said. “His family was very bad. I was hoping you’d keep him.”
“Why didn’t you say that four years ago?” Sia asked.
“It’s not my place to change things. I just know about them and keep an eye on them. That’s my job.”
“Your job?” Sia said. “This is a job?”
“Yes,” the Dogcatcher said.
Sia crossed the street, walked to a bench in the town center, and sat down. The crowd grudgingly dispersed when she broke ranks. The Dogcatcher followed her, and when she sat on the bench, her legs didn’t reach the ground. She swung them back and forth like an anxious child.
“Well,” Sia said, “you should have told me. All this time I thought you wanted to steal Gumper away and take him home to his family.”
“Oh, no. Not at all. You are his family. You and Gumper-Man. Though he’s not with you anymore.”
“Gumper-Man?”
“Yes, the man who disappeared.”
“You know about that, too?” Sia looked hard at the Dogcatcher.
“Of course. Everyone knows about that.”
“You also said you know I have lost things?”
“That’s not hard to see,” the Dogcatcher said. “Anyone who looks at you can see that.”
“They can?”
“Well, we’ve settled this,” the Dogcatcher said. She stood. “I can file Gumper away.”
“You said before that you could help me.”
“Yes, yes, I did.” The Dogcatcher was growing agitated again. She scratched at her leg. “But not now.” Scritchedy-scratch. Scritchedy-scratch.
“Then when?” Sia asked.
“Soon,” the Dogcatcher said. And as quickly as she’d appeared in Sia’s path, she was gone. Pumping her arms like the fast-walkers.
• • •
By the end of the day, everyone knew that Mrs. Windwill had been sleeping when Toad appeared on the shore. Whisper, whisper—that’s how it started: “Mrs. Windwill didn’t see . . .”—at first like an (almost) imperceptible wave.
Whisper.
Then?
The flash flood.
“For the second time . . .” they said—as if the two times she’d missed important, life-changing events suddenly outweighed all the lives she’d saved, all the burglars she’d caught, all the human decencies and indecencies she’d witnessed and mourned and shared. But it was the weight of the two events that she missed that caused the loyalty of the masses to falter. Man disappears; man appears. Folks chattered about it over pancakes and during the warm-up exercises at aerobics class; tussled with it at the town council meeting; prayed about it during services.
“Unforgivable,” they said.
But the truth? The hard truth? Mrs. Windwill was getting old. She had to face it. They had to face it. She was, well . . . good question . . . exactly how old was Mrs. Windwill? Seventy? Seventy-five? Eighty? When she’d started this thing, this seeing thing, she was young and saucy. Eyes like an owl’s. Now? Today? She was old. Old. With thick glasses and a weepy eye.
On top of that (and this was the hardest thing to accept) she was only human.
CHAPTER 46
One late August morning, nearly four months after Jackson’s disappearance, Sia’s house cracked open of its own accord. It began with a simple shrug, like the postman shrugging snow from his shoulders, and it continued from there, as if the house itself could no longer stand the cold, dark existence imposed upon it by Sia’s sorrow. The stuffing she had tucked around the edges of the windowsills fell out and disintegrated into dust, most of which was blown away by a great, well-timed wind. The blinds she had secured so carefully with long strips of duct tape swung free, and the sheets of tar paper over the skylights drifted down and settled quietly on the floor. Nails that held the outdoor shutters in place popped free, and the padlocks on the side and front doors gave way and tumbled to the ground. Tired of life on the beach, the mice returned, and within hours they had chewed new holes in the attic rafters and gathered up whatever tufts of stuffing they could scavenge to make nests for their little ones that arrived as regularly as rain.
• • •
Because Sia was sleeping when all this occurred, she missed the soulful cry the house uttered as it shook off its mourning coat. The “Ohhhh, enough already!” It wasn’t easy holding in all that sorrow, especially for a house that had been so full of love. So when Sia woke to sunlight blasting through the window, she was blinded.
“What the hell?” she shouted. “Who opened that blind?” But even she had to admit that the warmth of the sun on her face felt rather good. And this time it wasn’t just Floating Sia talking; it was all of Sia. So she lay there on the bed with Gumper beside her, slowly letting her eyes adjust to the light and her body to the warmth.
• • •
The townspeople were delighted when Mrs. Windwill announced that she’d watched one shutter fall from the third-floor attic window and the tiniest crack appear between a blind and a window frame on the south side of the house. (“She saw that all right,” one especially surly doubting Thomas said.)
“It’s happening,” she whispered in line at the grocery store. “Sia Dane’s house is opening.”
Joe Laslow—sure Sia would have Jilly up on a ladder to hammer the fallen shutter back into place before evening—offered a bet to Lerner Delaney when Lerner challenged his projection.
“No chance of that,” Lerner said. “Sia must be healing up in there. Otherwise the house wouldn’t open up like this.”
“Oh, beans,” Laslow said, “shutters fall off houses all the time.”
Laslow was a skeptic, and though sometimes his skepticism helped to temper the town’s enthusiasm, this time he was dead wrong. That house had intentions. It was no longer content to mourn, and when the next day Mrs. Windwill announced that a second shutter had fallen free and that she’d spotted a legion of mice marching along the roofline, even Laslow had to give in and hand $50 over to Lerner Delaney.
• • •
Two hours after the first shutter fell, Jilly burst through the door and raced up the stairs to Sia’s bedroom. “Don’t be dead. Don’t be dead. Don’t be dead,” she chanted, sure Sia was dead.
But there was Sia, propped on the pillows, Gumper by her side, her eyes squeezed open-shut.
“Oh, Sia!” Jilly threw herself onto the bed.
“Hey, Jil,” Sia said. “Can you get me a pair of sunglasses?”
• • •
The next day, the townspeople set to work. Finally, after all these months, the wives stepped out of the way and let the men follow their instincts, drag their tools from their sheds, and do what they’d been begging to do for the past four months: paint, prune, polish, trim, and hammer.
For the first time in twenty-five years, Joe Laslow left work early, and after pulling the biggest pair of pruning shears he could find from the garage, he trimmed the hedges in front of Sia’s house from the top down. It wasn’t an easy job. Hedges that were supposed to be knee-high had climbed to the top of the first-floor window. Laslow started on a ladder and cut from left to right. When the pile of clippings on the ground was ankle-deep and the first-floor windows were visible from the road, he climbed down, bagged the refuse, and started again left to right. By the time he finished, th
e palms of his hands were blistered and sore, but he didn’t mind. He stood in the driveway and admired his work. There was a lot more to be done, including a new coat of paint, but it was a start.
Rhoda Seaburn weeded the flower beds, though only the hardiest and most creative had survived the neglect. Some pansies and marigolds. Hyacinth and phlox. She trimmed the morning glory vines that threatened to quite beautifully swallow the house and broke up the dirt in the garden. Finally she brought in a few new planters, filled them with autumnal mums, and set them on each side of the front door.
Mason Vireo sang while he steadied the mail post. Lily Keith hummed as she swept the sidewalks after Bosco Turner cut the lawn. Mrs. Wysong polished the glass on the sunroom doors, and although her responsibilities as a plover warden were over for the season, she was wearing her official vest and cap. Joe Laslow was wearing his favorite T-shirt: “Piping Plover Tastes Like Chicken.”
A crew from the next town over was called in to replace the roof tiles that had blown off during the summer’s tremendous storms, and Lerner Delaney ordered a pane of glass for a broken window.
At 2:00, the pizza parlor delivered slices for everyone, and the townspeople opened a bottle of wine.
“A toast!” Lerner called. “To Odyssia Dane!”
As they raised their glasses, the townspeople murmured a series of amens and hallelujahs and it’s about times. They couldn’t have Jackson—they’d mostly resigned themselves to that—but Odyssia was once again within their reach.
• • •
At 11:00 A.M., when she finally stopped sobbing, M, who’d sat in the tree across the lane every day for four months, climbed down, hobbled across the street, and walked into the house on Water Street to give her girl a smooch. Hard calluses had formed on her bottom in the places where the bark was roughest, and her lower back had stiffened from the long stretch of humidity and rain during most of July. But it didn’t matter. Sia was back. The house was open.
When Sia looked out the window later that day, she saw the whiteboard propped on M’s limb in the tree. It said, It is all true. Odyssia is here, she is in the house, just as I tell you.*
The Art of Floating Page 12