“M, what were you thinking?” he said. “You should have waited.”
“Waited for what?”
“For me. For a professional tree company. For a lightning strike. For help from the neighbors. For your sanity to return. For anything.”
• • •
That night . . . light wind, feathery clouds, bright sunshiny moon, clear sky.
After they ate, Stuart turned off all the lights in the house and joined M in the yard. He spread a blanket on the grass and they lay down on it together.
“What do we look for?” he asked.
“I don’t know. I’ve never seen anyone float.”
“I never knew anyone could.”
Each time a bat swooped down from the pine next door, M’s heart jumped. “Odyssia?” she whispered into the dark.
“Just another bat, darling.”
The night settled in and the clouds drifted off until the moon was left alone in the center of the sky.
“Does she float at night?” Stuart said.
“She said she floats when she needs to.”
“What does she do up there?”
“Look for Jackson, I think.”
“Does she think she’ll find him?”
“Maybe she thinks she’ll find herself.” M sighed. “Stuart, what if she doesn’t come home for good, all of her?”
“She will.”
When the neighbors turned off their lights around eleven o’clock, the night shifted again. The sky settled into the earth like a blanket settling over a sleeping child’s body. The lightning bugs gathered in the open spaces beneath bushes.
“Stuart, what do lightning bugs eat?”
Stuart shook his head. M felt it against her shoulder.
“Jackson would know. He knew all that stuff. I miss that.”
“Me, too.”
“Maybe we can look it up tomorrow.”
“That’s a good idea.”
At midnight they thought they saw a shadow that could have been Odyssia. It wasn’t a bat or a lightning bug or a lone wispy cloud. But they couldn’t be sure.
At one o’clock, M fell asleep. Stuart waited until her breath was even and little snores were coming out of her nose. Then he wrapped her in the blanket, lifted her, and carried her into the house. He put her in bed and went back outside. This time he sat in a chair and watched.
CHAPTER 55
And the jump-jump-jump-ropers went like this:
Sexy, sassy Sia Dane
wrote good books
and found much fame.
Sexy, sassy Sia Dane
lost her husband
what a shame.
(boo hoo!)
Sexy, sassy Sia Dane
closed her house up
down the lane.
The grass grew high.
The grass grew thick.
Couldn’t part it with a stick.
When a single shingle blew,
the house cracked open.
Would Sia too?
Sexy, sassy Sia Dane
how many days
until she’s sane?
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
. . .
CHAPTER 56
Once Sia’s house opened, advice from folks all over town poured in:
from the stoner kid in the town square . . .
“Ah, duuuuudddde, hub’s gone. Massive bummer. But you’re a free woman. Sweeeeeet.”
from Mrs. Houghton . . .
“Sia, dear, he’ll be back. Every man needs a little space from time to time. Jack will get his and be back in a jiffy.”
from Mack the butcher . . .
“A couple of rib eyes, Odyssia. Thicken the blood. Strengthen your constitution.”
from Bert the mailman . . .
“Once again, nothing from that no-good husband, sweetheart. But I’m here for you. You got an itch, old Bert will scratch it. You got a need, old Bert will satisfy it.” (wink, wink)
from Joe Laslow . . .
“No use crying over spilled milk.”
from Reverend Carter . . .
“Never would that boy have left you of his own volition. Something went awry. But don’t let sadness rule your home, Odyssia. Jackson’s spirit is alive and well . . . here with us at this very moment.”
from Gumper’s vet . . .
“Anti-depressants. Therapy, too. I know a terrific dog psychologist. Worked wonders on my poodle after I cut his balls off.”
from Slow-Pour Sally . . .
“Double-shot espresso.”
from Jack’s mom . . .
“What would Jack do in your place?”
from Jack’s fellow fish-and-wildlife officers . . .
(hand on heart; head bowed)
from Nils and Harry . . .
“We’ve got your back, Sia. You need anything, call us.”
from her accountant . . .
“Change your passwords. All of them. If that cheating bastard is out running around on you, eventually he’ll drain your accounts. Don’t be one of THOSE women who gets left high and dry and ends up sobbing to a talk show host on daytime TV.”
from the gal at the liquor store . . .
“Tequila. Eat the worm.”
from her publisher (via Jilly) . . .
“Writing is therapeutic. Use your pain.”
from her computer . . .
“Discover the love of your life at Match.com.”
from her yoga teacher . . .
“Corpse pose.”
CHAPTER 57
“Describe it.”
“I’m sitting at a desk in a field. A big, open field. No trees. No bushes. No houses. No birds. No bugs. No nothing. I’m trying to write something. Anything. A chapter. A sentence. A word. One friggin’ letter.”
“And?”
“And do I really have to describe this to you? It’s ridiculous. There’s no mystery here. Unless you’re a bloody idiot, the meaning is obvious.”
“Sia, describe the dream. Get it out.”
Sia rolled her eyes. “Fine. I can’t write. My pen is dead. Dried up. The paper disintegrates. The desk collapses. Next thing I know, I’m sitting on a chair in the middle of an empty field. No pen. No paper. No desk. And then it starts to rain. But it’s not rain-rain.”
Sia’s therapist looked up from her notes. “Rain-rain?”
“It’s not rain made from water. It’s word-rain. The sky is raining words.” Sia started swooping her hands through the air and waggling her fingers toward the ground . . . like rain. “It’s raining fucking words.”
“Mmm.”
“The rest is so cliché it’s pathetic.”
“Tell me anyway.”
“Fine. The words bury my feet. Then pile up around my ankles. I see ecstasy poking out of the pile. Then heart. I grab at the ones falling in my lap and come up with buck/ring/sweep. Nothing else. I shuffle them and try to make a sentence but can’t. Who the fuck can make a sentence with buck/ring/sweep? After that, I’m petrified about what words I’ll see so I close my eyes, but I can still hear them piling up and I can feel them at my chest. They get heavier and heavier. After a while, I can’t breathe. I tilt my head up to try to keep my nose above the letters, but pretty soon I’m completely buried and that’s it.”
“What’s it?”
“That’s all. I wake up.”
“Are you dead? Did you suffocate?”
“I don’t know. I feel dead when I wake up but I don’t know for sure if the words kill me or not.”
“Pay attention next time.”
• • •
The Dogcatcher squatted and tucked herself into a ball behind the mailbox. “D
on’t cry for me, Argentina . . .” she sang in her head as she watched Sia sob her way down the skinny staircase from her therapist’s office.
• • •
Across the street, the sign in front of the Unitarian Church:
The one who tells the stories rules the world.
(Hopi)
CHAPTER 58
True summer on the New England coast lasted only until the end of July. After that, you didn’t know what you were going to get. Both August and September could be mixed-up times. Fifty-five-degree evenings in August. Ninety-degree days in September. Sia preferred the ninety-degree days. Jackson had loved the chilly evenings. It always brought them back to their cheery debate: mountains or beach. They both loved both, just not quite as much as the other. Whenever September prematurely rolled around, Jackson left small gifts for Sia reminding her of the mountain hikes to come. Stones in the toes of her shoes. A few red leaves from the previous year. Her woolly hat.
She did the same for him in May, when she was still wearing her woolly hat and he was prancing about in shorts, proving to all he was a true New England boy. Sand in his shoes. The feather of a great blue heron. His swimming trunks on the end of the bed.
They’d played this way throughout their marriage. Love notes in stones and sand.
She’d always known it was true summer when he bought the first box of Popsicles and put all the grape ones to one side because she liked those best. He’d always known it was autumn when she pulled their packs from the mudroom and changed the batteries in their GPS.
He liked to tease that if she’d had a GPS from birth, she could have saved her mother a lot of hassle. She said if she’d had a GPS for every time she’d gotten turned around, she never would have experienced life.
“If I’d had a GPS, I never would have found you.”
Sia believed in serendipity. Jackson believed in planning.
After he disappeared, she’d found his GPS on the shelf in the mudroom, unused since their last spring hike. She’d wished he’d taken it along, maybe to find his way home.
CHAPTER 59
In the hours between wrangling with Maude and returning to the station, Sia Googled “lost men.” Though she hadn’t touched her computer since the day before Jackson disappeared, in recent months Jilly had kept it busy with Scrabble games and online shopping. While they’d drunk coffee, she’d browsed catalogs and tried to trick Sia into writing—into typing even just one letter.
“Can you type in my shipping info?” she’d say, running out of the room. “I have to pee.”
“Liar,” Sia would say, keeping her seat.
Or, “Sia, my nails are too long. Can you type today? Order me the taupe rain jacket.”
“No.”
“Oh, for God’s sake, Sia. It’s only a few letters.”
“No.”
“You’re a mule, Sia. A stubborn, despicable mule. If you write something—anything—the rest will come back.”
“You don’t get it,” Sia told her over and over again. She couldn’t even describe the nonsense in her head. The ongoing flutter of words that made absolutely no sense at all.
roundabout cringe
sever
weep dicker
sling
and
pitch
gift bone
inherit
tempt swan
How could she make sense of that? There were no articles. Few conjunctions. Nothing but long strings of words she couldn’t even force into order. There was no center. No story.
• • •
Now, with Jilly safely at work, Gumper crashed out a few feet away, and Toad safely stowed at the police station, Sia tapped out the letters using only her right index finger.
L
O
S
T
She paused after lost to pour another cup of coffee and twice used the bathroom before typing
[space]
M
E
N
• • •
Then she stared at the return key, knowing that once she clicked it, Jackson could appear on the screen at any moment. He was a lost man . . . cataloged somewhere in this search. Newspaper articles. Blog posts. Magazine pieces. And so on.
• • •
Instead she took Gumper for a walk.
• • •
When she got back, she poured a cup of coffee and read junk mail.
• • •
Then she took a ten-minute nap.
• • •
Finally—when she couldn’t conjure up any more time-delaying tactics—she sat down again at the computer and hit the return key.
• • •
[return]
• • •
The first entries were innocuous, mostly books and websites about Sir Ernest Shackleton’s failed attempt to cross the Antarctic continent in 1914. Kelly Tyler-Lewis, it seemed, had written a compelling account of the suffering Shackleton and his team endured, and while the journey was harrowing and sad, at first Sia thought that they had to have known that a tragic outcome was possible. It was the Antarctic, for God’s sake, the friggin’ Antarctic. Who ventures to a glacier and thinks crossing it will be a piece of cake? But after spending time at Tyler-Lewis’s website, she discovered that the opposite was true. In fact, about his journey Shackleton himself had written, “This programme would involve some heavy sledging, but the ground to be covered was familiar and I had not anticipated that the work would present any great difficulties.”
Huh? No great difficulties? The man was either nuts or so damned determined to cross that terrific slab of ice he couldn’t see the forest for the trees. He described his upcoming journey in the same way Sia would describe a trip to the dry cleaner.
• • •
The next entry she read highlighted gay men who finally returned “home” to being straight. “A journey to sexual integrity” was the lead line.
• • •
Then (thank God) the phone rang. Richard. He was at the beach.
“Odyssia, I’m at the place where you found Toad. It’s darn hot out here today.”
“Do you see anything unusual?”
“Nothing.”
“Find anything?”
“No.”
“Just gets stranger, huh?”
“Like I told Jillian, it’s mysterious, but we’ll figure it out.”
“Anything from Toad yet?”
“Not a word.”
• • •
After they hung up, Sia discovered that two men had recently been lost in a canyon in Sydney, Australia, stuck after rain filled the bowl they were exploring. After only a day, they were discovered alive and well by rescuers. Their wives, she read, were relieved.
• • •
She read about the half widows in Kashmir whose husbands had been arrested and taken away years before by Indian authorities and who, never knowing if their husbands were dead or alive, waited years, sometimes decades, to see them again or learn of their fate. She read about the 500,000 Indian troops stationed in this little crescent of land that was filled with apple orchards and saffron fields. This was news to her.
• • •
She came to the bottom of the page.
• • •
Next [click]
• • •
She discovered a site where she could buy a CD called Lost Men and Angry Girls, by Audrey Auld Mezera, and an old movie starring Anna May Wong called Island of Lost Men.
• • •
Many men—including four from a Fife boat in the North Sea—were lost in fishing accidents in weather no one should venture into. Each of these stories was well told, and most ended with darkness falling on a close-knit community.
• •
•
She discovered that Ellery Queen had edited a collection of fantastic fiction called Lost Men, and that endless numbers of men were looking for items they’d lost, most especially their wedding rings. Men, it seemed, had a tendency to remove and leave behind their rings in the oddest, most public places—on mountaintops and beaches—distant places where it was wildly unlikely that anyone would ever find and return them.
Subliminal messaging.
• • •
Sipping the dregs of the morning’s coffee, Sia read about two Scottish hikers who lost their way in the jungle in French Guiana and who ate spiders and turtles to stay alive. “Even spiders with a little bit of poison are okay to eat,” one explained. “Just squeeze their heads, close your eyes, pop them in your mouth, and chew.”
“I’d like to do that to a couple of people I know,” Sia said to Gumper.
• • •
She read about survivors of Mt. Hood, Mt. Everest, and Mt. Washington.
• • •
Then she fell asleep. Head on the keyboard. Left cheek pressed to the G-H combination. Hand on the mouse.
• • •
This time the Dogcatcher sneaked up to the patio door.
Tiptoe, tiptoe. Freeze.
Tiptoe, tiptoe. Freeze.
Gumper met her on the other side of the screen. They pressed noses together.
“Sshh,” the Dogcatcher said.
Gumper snuffled.
Then the Dogcatcher turned and went back the way she’d come.
Tiptoe, tiptoe. Freeze.
Tiptoe, tiptoe. Freeze.
Gumper lay down and watched her go.
CHAPTER 60
“A dead otter?”
“Yes, Odyssia says that on the morning she found Toad, she also found a dead otter,” Richard explained.
Mrs. Windwill looked up at the dress she’d just hung on the line. No breeze at all. “Where?”
The Art of Floating Page 14