The Art of Floating (14 page)

“De
scribe 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. “Don'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)

True s
ummer 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.

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.

“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?”

“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.”

Sia's gui
lt 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.