Picture This (8 page)

“And Julie
can
come back,” Rocky said.

Cooper, who had been pressed into Rocky's legs the entire time, turned and trotted off. She heard the quick, young footsteps a moment later.

“Hey,” said Melissa, looking at both of them. “Whoops, looks like I'm interrupting something.”

“No,” said Hill, with a deep weariness in his voice. “I was just leaving.”

“Are we having a fight, or are you leaving for good?” asked Rocky.

“We are having a fight, and I'm leaving to go home and shoot about one hundred arrows into a hay bale.”

Chapter 13

Hill

W
hen he was a child, he assumed that everyone knew about the way to catch anger and pain, that if caught quickly it was nothing more than an ugly thing that lived on the outside of the body, like a crumpled Kevlar shield. He had learned to meet anger and pain head-on, like the rip-roaring dragons that they were, and when he held his ground they changed into whatever lived underneath. His grandmother had taught him this, the very same grandmother who had taught him to hunt for deer and, if they were very lucky, pheasants.

She had warned him about testosterone long before the full effect of it kicked in. They had been up near Canada when he was ten. His grandmother was one of the best archers he ever met. She used a longbow her whole life and would never consider a compound bow, not even when she hit eighty and her arm muscles grew smaller and softer. They had settled in a high tree blind on the first day of bow season.

“I've been coming back to this blind for thirty-seven years,” said his grandmother. “Since before your father was born. I've repaired it so many times that the birds must think I'm a neighbor.” She sat on a piece of wood five inches off the platform, enough to let her rise with ease if she heard a deer, notch an arrow, pull back, and take aim. She rarely talked.

“If your grandfather was here, he might tell you something different about testosterone. Men like to brag about it, and I've never heard a man say one sensible, helpful thing about something so powerful, frightening, and wonderful. But I want you to listen to me. In a few years your thinking is going to get disturbed. You'll get angry quicker, you'll want to punch a hole in the wall, other boys will want to pull you into a fight, and if your heart gets broken, you could lose your mind,” she said.

In the distance, they saw a doe and a yearling. His grandmother wasn't interested in them.

“How do you know I'll do all those things? I might not,” he said. His feet had gone to sleep, so he shifted and endured the hot prickles as his feet woke up again.

“Because of testosterone. It will feel like someone opened up your skull and poured a drug into your brain, and at first it will be very hard to control. When it feels like someone has hurt you and you get good and mad, there's something I want you to do to make your brain work again. I want you to get your bow and as many arrows as I hope you'll always have. You'll need to steady your breathing first, soften your knees like I keep telling you to do, and let all your focus go to the center of the target. That's what will work off the anger and pain so you can get underneath it. It could take hours at first. But if you let anger and pain lead you around by the nose, that testosterone will be like throwing gasoline on a fire.”

He heard a crow in the distance. He didn't think they were going to get a deer today. Grandma was talking too much.

She shifted her weight and opened her plaid wool jacket at the neck.

“You're going to get nice muscles too, which will help in archery. Testosterone can make you fast. You'll like that part. I'd buy some testosterone if I could get my hands on some, just for the upper body strength. Have you been paying attention to anything that I've said?”

“Grandma, will you still love me when the testosterone comes?” He was suddenly afraid of the future, of smelling like the eight-point buck that they hunted, of losing his mind.

“Oh, we're in this forever,” she had said, rubbing his hair.

W
hen Hill returned from Rocky's house, he opened the creaky gate to his backyard, where he kept his target range set up year-round and still taught a few students. He went into the garage and got out his longbow and every arrow that he had. He set up with the bow, steadied his breath, softened his knees, and let his focus stay on the target. He shot again and again, for the longest time that he could remember. When his upper body muscles cried for mercy, he sat down on top of his picnic table and saw what was beneath the anger. He still wanted her. He wanted to be in this forever with Rocky.

Chapter 14

T
he phone hung heavy in her hand like a gun. Rocky had traced each digit of Natalie's phone number on a pad of yellow Post-it notes until the number was etched through five layers. The desire to call the girl was unrelenting. Rocky had no choice but to call her again, yet she fought against it, digging in with her full weight, as if by doing so she could stop the force of the girl coming toward her. Natalie had probably regretted calling her in the first place and was long gone. Rocky punched in the numbers.

This time Natalie answered on the first ring.

“This is Rocky. I'd like to meet you and help you figure out if Bob was your father,” she blurted out before the girl could bolt like a wild horse.

“I got your messages. I was afraid of what you'd say. Are you sure? I mean, I know I came out of nowhere and kind of surprised you,” said Natalie.

“I have to transport a dog tomorrow. I'll be in Portland. I can meet you at the Casco Bay ferry on Commercial Street. I'll have on a baseball cap that says P
EAKS
I
SLAND
. There are benches right along the street. Three o'clock. Can you be there? Is that too far for you to come?” Rocky said, her speech jerky and abbreviated.

“I'll be there,” Natalie said.

Rocky had to deliver the first canine calamity of the season: a basset hound who had been found howling along Island Avenue. He was only a minor calamity; this was a dog that someone would ultimately claim—if not the owners, then the first people who went window-shopping through the shelter. The dog was huge for a basset hound, shaped more like a walrus, and he was a gentle talker, a smooth baritone with imploring eyes who promised loyalty.

“Good luck,” she said as the hound bayed at her. All hounds sounded like they spoke the same few sentences.
I've found something right here, I can smell it! Let's go, times a-wasting.
Rocky admired their singular nature and their fresh joy at each discovery. What would she discover on the park bench by the ferry?

She spotted the girl immediately. Natalie looked like one of the lost children out of a Dickens novel. The day was warm, and yet she had on a wool cap, beneath which her shoulder-length hair stuck out in a soft cloud of blond. She looked like the kids in the magazine articles who were tossed out by their families or who ran away and lived on the streets selling whatever they had—sex or drugs—to live. Her socks came up to her knees, and her shoes were silver wedge sandals. Her shorts were rolled up too high, and tender flesh expanded at the edge of the denim roll. Her sweater was impossibly tight. If Rocky had to guess—and she tried very hard not to—she would have said that Natalie's body language alerted every male from Portland to the Canadian border. Nearly every generation of kids exhibits highly sexualized clothing or behavior in order to notify others of their ilk that they are available for mating. They are members of a tribe, and the tribe calls for a sexual drumbeat, whether the kids are in Ohio or Borneo.

The girl wore a ragged green hoodie over the thin sweater, zipped just shy of her breasts. This was Rocky's last chance to observe her before Natalie knew she was being watched. Rocky searched for signs of Bob in the girl's bone structure, her shoulders, the shape of her knees. Rocky gulped in a breath of air. This could be anything: a bad hoax, a desperate kid trying hard to believe that she had a tendril of connection. Or Bob's daughter.

Her hands gripped the steering wheel. More than anything, she realized, she wanted this girl to be Bob's child. More than air, water, food, blood. Please, she prayed, be his child, and I will take you in, and I will tuck you safely into a house in the center of the island. Just in case Bob was listening over her shoulder, as she felt that he did from time to time, she didn't want to entirely let him off the hook.

“Bob, I'm going to kill you if this is your kid. Except you're already dead. Thanks a lot.”

She wrapped her damp palm around the door handle, ready to press down, when a soft buzz vibrated near her ear. Rocky swatted at her head, ducking a bit. The cab of the truck was a small space, and she couldn't find a bee or any other insect to account for the noise. Had Bob turned into this, a wisp of air with a strange hum in a language she couldn't decode? Would she have told Hill about the odd moment when her hand hovered on the door handle? Or had she still kept Bob hermetically sealed from Hill? She felt just as alone as she'd been when she'd arrived on the island eight months earlier, when she had been fresh from a summer of gut-twisting grief. She opened the door.

Rocky stepped out of the truck and realigned her body, the way Hill had instructed her to do during archery practice. She kept her knees soft and let her weight fall downward, extending through the earth.

“Natalie?” Rocky sat down next to her with space enough for another person between them. She was sure the girl could see the pounding of her heart, the way she had to swallow several times before speaking.

The girl held a bag on her lap, stained canvas, one strap hooked around her shoulder. She didn't look surprised. Where had Rocky seen this look before?

Since she had begun practicing psychotherapy, she'd cataloged the first expressions of therapy clients when she encountered them. When she met them in the waiting room of the counseling center, she took in two things: the handshake and the expression. Either their faces were pulled into the hyperalertness of anxiety, muscles tight and hands damp with the sweat of dread, or they were on the other end of the spectrum, their entire corporeal form pulled downward by the weight of depression, facial muscles sagging, eyes daring the world to say one positive thing. She knew that she was meeting people on one of their worst days—why else would they be looking for a therapist?—but still they fell consistently into the two main camps. The handshakes had more delicate permutations, ranging from the constant state of withdrawal of those who dreaded touching another human to the studied firmness of those who were determined to mark their status. The handshake was the only time when Rocky touched a client, and she tried to make the most of it diagnostically. Graduate training had been unequivocal about maintaining physical boundaries between therapists and clients. Rocky relished first contact and envied the massage therapists, reflexologists, and other body therapists who had the entire body from which to understand clients.

A soft breeze lifted off the bay and found the bench. A nearby food cart sold organic, freshly squeezed lemonade and hot dogs. What two things could be farther apart on the nutritional scale? She stuck out her hand to Natalie, who had still not spoken a word.

“I'm glad you could make it,” said Rocky, wrapping her fingers around Natalie's hand. She detected an effort on the girl's part, right after a pause. She could almost hear a voice in the girl's head that said,
Give a firm handshake.

“Now it's your turn to say something,” said Rocky, smiling with encouragement.

The girl pulled her hand back to the canvas bag. “Thanks for coming. This is so important to me. It's weird, like I missed my one chance to find out who my father is and I was too late. He was really out here, I had a father, and I missed him. That kind of fits my life, you know what I'm saying?”

“Hold on, let's back up. What makes you think Bob was your father?” Rocky looked longingly at the lemonade, but she didn't want to break the spell of the moment.

“I grew up in foster care. When you turn eighteen, you can get your own records. I was legally emancipated when I was seventeen. No, that's not right. My caseworker said it wasn't really emancipation, but it felt like it to me. Do you know what that is?”

“I do. It's not easy to go through the court process. I know you had to have a way of proving that you could support yourself financially, which is incredibly hard. Was it worth it? You would have been on your own at age eighteen anyhow.”

“I guess you've never gone through foster care. Yeah, it was worth it.”

The sting of Natalie's words found a tender, unprotected spot in Rocky's chest.

“So again, what makes you think my husband was your father?”

Natalie bit down on her lower lip, as if she was hesitating. “I have two different copies of my birth certificate. One went with my records and didn't list a father. My mother must have refused to list a father. And that's the one that has traveled with me. But then there's this birth certificate. Look at this one.”

Natalie pulled the satchel close to her body and dug into it, extracting a manila envelope. She opened it and slid out a folder. She opened the folder on her lap and peeled off the first page, handing it to Rocky.

The horn on a ferry sounded a departure blast. A man pushed a shopping cart filled with a sleeping bag and a small backpack surrounded by bottles and cans; he rolled to a stop under the shade of a small tree. Two boys jumped their skateboards down the wide, low steps of the park, and the hard wheels smacked the concrete. Rocky took the paper from the girl and pulled it toward her as if the air had turned thick and resistant to movement.

She forced herself to start at the top. “Birth Certificate.” “Live Birth. Eight pounds, three ounces. Female.” She saw that Natalie had just turned eighteen a few months ago. Mother: Paulette Davis, age twenty-one. Father: Robert Tilbe, age twenty-four. Ames, Iowa.

Robert Tilbe. The sight of his name in print, on something official, disoriented her. Rocky took a sharp breath in through her nose and felt the muscles along her neck tighten. He would have been enrolled at the University in Ames when he was twenty-four.

“Why do you have two birth certificates? Can I see the other one?” said Rocky. She gripped the birth certificate with Bob's name on it. She rubbed her pointer finger along his name.

“Here,” said Natalie. “You can look at the original, because that's the one that I thought was right for a long time. Like, my whole life. But when I asked for my records, because I just wanted to see everything that had happened to me and what Protective Services had done and said, and you can't believe how ginormous my file was, that's when I found the one with Robert Tilbe's name on it.”

Natalie slid another document out of the folder and handed it to Rocky. The fingers holding the paper were small and delicate, the fingernails bitten low and jagged. Not like Bob, nothing about him was delicate. Natalie's eyes were wide open and brown.

The other document listed the father as unknown. The girl could have shown her the first document and never let this other one surface. That would have been more convincing. The kid was either scrupulously honest or she was several steps ahead of Rocky.

“Why now?” said Rocky, glancing down at Natalie's hands, the chipped nail polish and the macramé friendship bracelet.

Natalie looked down, suddenly overtaken by a shy wind. When she looked up, her eyes overflowed, and she quickly wiped her cheeks with the back of her hand.

“Because I wanted to know if I had anybody. You know, everyone kind of belongs somewhere, and I wanted to find out if I belonged.”

If he had left her with a daughter, she'd . . . what? What would Rocky do? Would she suddenly belong somewhere too? Would she have somebody?

“Where are you living now? I know you said Worcester, but what are you doing there?” said Rocky.

“I'm kind of in between jobs. And I've rented a room in a guy's house in Portland. I found it on Craigslist. I was going to come to Portland anyhow, so don't think I'm stalking you or anything. It could just be for the summer. He's okay, a little loud when he gets drunk, but he's okay. I know how to take care of myself.”

Rocky pictured the girl living with a guy who got a little loud when he was drunk and all the things that could go wrong. Natalie hadn't said that she was living in Portland when she first called.

“Have you found a job yet? Please tell me you have a job.”

Natalie stuck her chin out in a way that looked new, like she was trying it out. “I'm applying. I have fast-food experience.”

Rocky crossed one sandaled foot over a knee. “You don't have any income, and you're renting from a guy who gets drunk. This is a bit worrisome. Can you get help from any of the foster families you lived with?”

Natalie gathered her papers together, mashing them into her canvas bag. “You have no idea about foster care, do you? When the families are done with you, they are really done. And I didn't exactly leave on the best terms with the last family.”

Natalie got up. If the girl had been a golden retriever, or a cocker spaniel, or a mutt, Rocky would have scooped her up, made sure that she had food to eat and a safe place to sleep. She'd have scratched behind her ears and tried very hard to let her know that not all humans were weirdos who dumped dogs in scary places like an interstate highway. She might have fostered her until a home could be found. She didn't like the idea of Natalie crashing with a guy who drank too much. At age eighteen, the girl would think that she could handle the situation; she wouldn't know about the way things could go sideways.

“Wait a minute,” said Rocky. “There are already about twenty permutations of how this thing could go. We have to find out things that are important to you and to me. If Bob was your father, we have to consider that he didn't know about you. If Bob truly was your biological father, then all of this is new to me. But it might mean something good to you. Or not, I don't know. Maybe it will be worse for you if you find out he was your father. But in the midst of it, I don't think I can stand the thought of you living in a skeezy apartment with a guy who gets loud and drunk.” Rocky took a breath, as if she were going to dive to the bottom of a pool. “I have a spare bedroom that you could use for a very limited amount of time until we get this figured out. If you get a job, you should pay me something for rent.” She did not want the girl to walk away, to live with a drunk guy she found on Craigslist.