The Art of Floating
Page 15
“In the middle of the road . . . just outside her house.”
“Before or after she found the man?”
“Before. Gumper ran to it as soon as Odyssia opened the door to head out for their walk.”
Mrs. Windwill picked up Mr. Windwill’s favorite red-and-white striped shirt. It had a too-wide collar for the times, but he didn’t mind the snickers he got from the grandkids. Richard handed her a clothespin.
“How dead?” She clipped the shirt to the line.
“Fresh. Still warm.”
“Car?”
“Odyssia thought so, but she doesn’t remember hearing a car or seeing lights.”
“Her bedroom faces the wrong way for that.”
Richard smiled. “That’s what she said.”
Mrs. Windwill picked up the empty laundry basket and walked toward the back porch. “Still warm, huh?”
“Yes.”
Mrs. Windwill opened the back door and stepped inside. “Blood?”
“No.”
The screen door banged shut.
“So?” Richard called.
“I’ll think on it. I’ll give you a call if I remember anything.”
CHAPTER 61
Sia’s guilt about Jackson’s disappearance was bigger than a button. Bigger than her own brain. Bigger than Mrs. Dixon’s hefty boycat that found happiness in gluttony. And if she wasn’t careful, she got caught up in the what-ifs:
What if she, not Jackson, had gotten out of bed that morning to go for coffee?
What if they had gone together?
What if neither of them were so addicted to caffeine that they thought they’d perish if they didn’t consume their first cup of the day within thirty minutes of waking?
What if they’d agreed on oral sex for both of them?
What if on that day, THAT day, they’d simply stayed in bed together?
“Guilt,” M told her daughter again and again, “will get you nowhere. Not forward. Not backward.”
Sia’s therapist echoed that sentiment, albeit in solid therapized phraseology.
Sia ignored her therapist but told her mother, “I might be able to heed your words if you didn’t spill over with guilt every time you tell the story of my first disappearance.” It was a classic case of Do as I say, not as I do. And on top of that, the truth was that unlike her mother on that sad Tuesday afternoon over thirty years before when Sia passed safely from the strange woman’s arms into M’s, Sia had never been given the chance to demonstrate the ferocity of her love. Jackson had never come home.
• • •
Not long after he disappeared, the townspeople began to murmur that they would never find out what had happened to him. In churlish moments, they suggested that perhaps they hadn’t known him as well as they’d thought. People were complex, after all, and when you got right down to it, they said, you never quite knew a person’s heart. Maybe, they said, Jackson had run off with a waitress or gotten caught up in a gambling debt.
“Gambling?” Yancie Stockton said when asked about the possibility. “I never would have thought such a thing, but you never know what will bite a boy.”
“A boy?” Rhoda Seaburn said. “A boy? Jackson Dane was no boy. He was over thirty years old with a wife. Far too old to be calling him a boy. And gambling? Out of the question. But chasing tail? Maybe. Men get stung with that often enough.” Her own husband had left her for a middle-school math teacher.
But most disagreed with Rhoda.
“Whatever drew that boy away from here had to have been mighty powerful,” Lerner Delaney said over and over again, “but it was no woman. There’s no way Jackson would walk away from Sia Dane. What man in his right mind would do that?” And then all the men within earshot got quiet thinking about the reasons they would never walk away from Sia Dane; of course, no one stated those reasons out loud, but you could hear them from a mile away: great ass, sass-itude, swingy hips, and ooh, that girl could tell a story.
The funny thing was, no matter how much folks missed him, no one believed Jackson would come back. It was as if his energy had been erased from the town where he’d spent most of his life, as if all traces of him had disappeared, and everyone felt it.
• • •
Once Sia broke down and told Jilly that she floated, Jilly tore at it the same way she tore at everything else. They’d be talking . . . just normal coffee-drinking conversation . . . who farted in yoga class, who was going to win American Idol, how much money each was going to contribute to the clean-up-the-landfill fund . . . blah, blah, blah . . . and suddenly Jilly would grab Sia’s arm and holler, “Sia, Sia . . .” a thousand fucking times . . . then, “Are you here? All of you? Or”—and she’d pause dramatically—“or are you”—then whisper—“up there?” And she’d jab her finger at the sky and whip her head wildly from side to side, scouring the heavens for a glimpse of Floating Sia.
CHAPTER 62
Hoping to give the world its first glimpse of Toad, or as she called him, the Silent Man, Melissa Cho, a reporter for a local TV station, knocked on Sia’s door at 1:30. Her head, round through the bottom and sides like a perfectly formed pumpkin, was flat on top as if someone had set a pot there and left it too long to cool. Her mouth, a gaping crater, was nearly as wide as her head, and when she smiled, which was most of the time because the prospect of being on camera made her downright giddy, the bottom half of her face was a smear of gleaming white teeth and shiny wet gums.
“Odyssia Dane?” she said when Sia opened the door.
Her rictus, Sia noted, was as shocking as it was during the 6:00 news.
“Yes?” Sia said.
“I’m Melissa Cho.”
“I see that.”
When she heard the familiar voice, Jilly squeezed between Sia and the door frame. “Oh, my God!” she hollered. “It’s Melissa Cho! Come on in! Sia, look!”
Sia elbowed Jilly out of the way and body-blocked Melissa’s attempt to follow them into the house.
“Can I help you?” Sia said.
“I’m here to film the man you found on the beach . . . the Silent Man,” Melissa said. When she said “the Silent Man,” it was as if the world froze on its axis. Silence fell. And then this crazy-deep voice from the cosmos—God? James Earl Jones?—boomed and thundered:
THE SILENT MAN
Though Melissa had a mind-numbing collection of bright pink and black suits that she alternated between when reporting on the evening news—ones that Jackson often said looked like a toxic spill of Good & Plenty—she’d traded in her normal color blast for a pale yellow suit with stockings and yellow pumps. Daytime attire.
“The Silent Man?” Sia said. She rolled her eyes. The Silent Man. One day and the poor guy had been reduced to a sensational news slogan.
“Yes, the Silent Man is big news, you know,” Melissa said. “All the stations will have reporters on your doorstep by the end of the day. Tomorrow morning at the latest. They’re on their way.”
“Here? Why here? The man is not even here anymore.”
“He’s not? Where is he?”
“The police station.”
“Oh, but he was here?” Her disappointment was palpable.
“He was here all right,” Jilly said.
Sia shot her a look.
“Well, word is making its way around the world fast,” Melissa said, “and people want to know more.”
“Around the world?” Sia said.
“Yep, folks are talking about you two all the way from here to Finland.”
Jillian poked Sia in the back. “Finland? Sia, let the woman in, for God’s sake. Show a little hospitality.”
“Fine,” Sia said. “Come in, Melissa.”
Melissa nearly leapt through the open door. “Can we film?” She gestured to her cameraman to follow.
“Absol
utely not,” Sia said, and she closed the door in the cameraman’s face. Then she asked, “What do you mean, the two of us?”
“Well, you’re already famous in your own right. All that stuff about your husband last year. People are fascinated that you of all people found the Silent Man.”
“Ah,” Sia said, “so the fact that I—the woman who mysteriously lost her husband—have now mysteriously found another man is news?”
Melissa smiled. “Something like that.”
Sensing that Sia was close to tossing Melissa out on her size ten banana-boat slingbacks, Jillian stepped in. “Okay,” she said to Melissa, “here’s what we know about Toad.”
“Toad?” Melissa said. “Who’s Toad?”
“Toad is the Silent Man,” Jilly said. “That’s our name for him.” She looked over at Sia and smiled.
“Toad,” Melissa said as she scratched a note onto her pad of paper. “You’re calling him Toad?” She said it as if someone had slipped a drop of bitters onto her tongue.
Jilly nodded.
Melissa sniffed. “I prefer the Silent Man,” she said, and then she leaned forward on her chair and eyed Jillian. “Ready.”
Jillian opened her mouth, but before she could utter a word, Sia interrupted. “Listen, Melissa, since Toad’s not here anymore, you’re not going to get footage of him. Instead, why don’t we go to the beach? I’ll show you where I found him, tell you what I know, and let you ask any questions that might help get him home. Then you’ll be all done with me and you can move on to the police station. Does that work for you?”
Melissa nearly tripped over the ottoman trying to get to the door. “That sounds perfect,” she said. She hollered for the cameraman to get his ass in gear.
“Hmmmm . . . you’re being unusually helpful, Odyssia,” Jillian whispered as she moved behind Sia.
“Like I said, I have to help Toad get home.”
“Not so fast, you don’t,” Jillian said. “There’s no harm in taking your time and enjoying the man for a while. He is, you know, a very enjoyable man.”
“Oh, for God’s sake, Jilly, he’s not an enjoyable man. He’s a sad man. A very-far-from-home man. And a very-alone man.”
“He’s got you and Gumper now.”
“He does not have me. He does not have Gumper. He has Richard.”
“Besides, you shouldn’t worry so much, Sia,” Jilly said. “Aliens have their own ways of finding one another. Tracking systems and whatnot.” She giggled and poked Sia in the back.
Melissa stopped and turned. She’d heard every word. “Aliens?” she said. “Did you say aliens?”
“Yes,” Sia said, “but she’s kidding. Toad is not an alien, Melissa.” She glared at Jillian. “Quit perpetuating this nutball theory and tell Melissa Cho you’re kidding.”
Jillian grinned and turned to Melissa. “I am only kidding. Can you imagine an alien being such a looker?”
Melissa smiled. “I haven’t seen him yet, but for now I’ll take your word for it.” She still looked suspicious. “Any UFO sightings around here lately?”
“No,” Sia said, “and if you really want to see the spot where I found him, you’ll hush up and move on.”
Melissa snapped her mouth closed and headed around the back of the house to the beach.
“Sorry,” Jillian said. “I’ll stop. At least in front of her.”
Sia walked away. “Come on, Gumper,” she hollered, and in seconds, he barreled out of the house and up the beach.
• • •
The Dogcatcher knew Melissa Cho from the television at the hospital cafeteria where she sometimes ate. But she didn’t follow them along the beach. Too much color. Too much noise. Too many teeth.
• • •
It took a while to get to the spot where Sia had found Toad because Wingnut, as Sia began calling Melissa Cho, was afraid to snag her stockings. Instead of taking off her shoes and barefooting it like any other sane person, she tried to hobble her way down the beach on her heels.
After the third entertaining tumble that landed her mouthdown in the sand, Sia said, “Take off your shoes.”
“I’m fine,” Wingnut insisted, wiping sand from her cheeks.
“Take them off or I’m going home.”
Wingnut took them off.
When they finally arrived, Jillian danced in and around the marsh grass looking for anything Sia might have missed while Melissa and her cameraman set up the equipment for the best shot.
“Well?” Jillian said as they waited.
“Well, what?” Sia said.
“Is anything different?”
Sia looked out at the horizon. It was dotted with boats—big ones, little ones, sailboats, and motorboats. Dozens of people were playing on the beach; three portable CD players pumped out three different beats; and Gumper was romping with three golden retrievers.
“Yep,” Sia said, “everything’s different.” As she spoke, the fish flip-flopped in her belly and lashed its tail. She flinched. “Melissa, let’s get on with it.”
Melissa and her cameraman centered Sia with the marsh grass behind her, and when she got the signal, Sia looked at the camera and explained how she’d found Toad the day before just as the sun was coming up.
“He was standing with his back to the sea and he was soaking wet.”
“Soaking wet?” Melissa asked.
“That’s what I said,” Sia responded. “It was obvious he’d just been swimming or lounging in the ocean. I don’t know anything more than that.”
When Sia stopped talking, Melissa asked a few more questions, smiling the entire time. Where was the Silent Man now? Would Sia see him again? Did he speak English?
“It’s in the authorities’ hands now,” Sia said. “An officer picked him up from my house this morning. That’s all I know.”
She left out the fact that she’d already visited him once at the station and was checking her watch to see how close it was to 4:30.
Melissa closed the spot with a plea. “If anyone knows anything about the Silent Man, please call our station immediately. We’ll have footage of him tomorrow so you can see him for yourself.”
“You will?” Jillian said when the camera clicked off.
“I hope so,” Melissa said, turning her best and brightest smile on Sia. “How about an exclusive in the morning?”
Sia walked away. “You’ll have to ask Richard, Melissa. Toad is out of my hands.”
• • •
“Richard!” Jilly squeaked into the phone. “Melissa Cho was just here!”
Sia couldn’t hear Richard’s end of the conversation, but at the rate Jilly was talking, she was pretty sure he was doing what most people did whenever Jilly started riffing: mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
“Oh, my God, Richard, she’s EXACTLY like she is on television. Big head, big teeth, weird clothes, and that giant mouth. It looks like a crater on the moon. We took her to the spot where Sia found Toad and they filmed it and it’s going to be on the news . . . and . . . What?” Jilly actually paused. “Okay, I’ll come there and tell you all about it. I’d love to tell you in person.” She hung up without saying good-bye.
“Richard is very interested in hearing this story,” she told Sia.
“Richard is very interested in you,” Sia said.
“Oh, shut up. He is not.”
“Is too.”
“Is not.”
“Is too.”
Jilly pulled a lipstick from her bag. “Is not. Toodles.” And she was off.
CHAPTER 63
“Odyssia?”
“Yes, Mom?”
“You okay?”
“Yes, Mom.”
“Are you sure?”
“No, Mom.”
“Is there anything I can do?”
“No, Mom. I wish there were.”
“Okay, sweetie. Where is Snail?”
“Toad?”
“Yes, yes. The man you found.”
“Toad.”
“Yes, where is he?”
“Richard took him to the station.”
“So he’s out of your house?”
“Yes, he is.”
“Are you okay?”
“I don’t know, Mom.”
“Call me if you need me.”
“I will. Thanks, Mom.”
• • •
“Sia?”
“Hey, Dad.”
“How’s my girl?”
“Okay.”
“Your mom told me you found something.”
Sia laughed. “Yeah, I guess you can put it like that.”
“Are you doing okay?”
“So-so.”
“A man is a strange thing to find.”
“And to lose.”
Silence.
“Anything I can do to help?”
“Just talking to you helps.”
“Good. I love you, sweetie.”
“I love you, too, Pops.”
• • •
“Yes, Jil?”
“Whatcha doing?”
“Nothing much.”
“Writing?”
“Nope.”
“How come?”
“Don’t you have work to do, Jil?”
“I’m doing it.”
“You can talk and edit at the same time?”
“I’m having a phone conference with one of my authors.”
“Well, then you should get off the phone with me.”
“It is you, dork.”
“Oh.”
“Are you writing?”
“Gotta go, Jil. See you later.”
Click.
CHAPTER 64
Next [click]
• • •
At www.sermondiary.com, Sia discovered that many men truly live in darkness and was reminded that Jesus was very interested in saving them.
“Amen to that,” she said out loud.