Let's Get Lost (24 page)

Her heart skipped a beat as a shooting star swept across the sky, its brilliant streak lingering in the dark like a ghost. She stayed right where she was, a small, uncomfortable pillow she'd bought at a camping-goods store in Fairbanks tucked under her head. She sang along with “Oh Comely” again, making sure that every line passed through her lips, even if there was only one that she really understood. She wanted the lyrics to stick to her memory, the melodies to nestle into the folds of her brain.

When the sky started to show signs of the oncoming sunrise, Leila tried to fight the disappointment in the Lights' absence by remembering the sunrises she'd shared with new friends during her travels. She tried to tell herself that her trip had been worthwhile, if only for those shared experiences. But that was a consolation, at best, and it meant close to nothing if she still didn't have a clue who she was.

She ended up staying for the whole sunrise, until the sun was no longer a watchable ball of red-orange on the horizon but its usual, blindingly yellow self. Then she gathered up her blanket and her pillow and shuffled her way back to her tent. There'd be more nights, she told herself. Sooner or later, the Lights would show up for her.

Outside her tent, she found Dee wandering about in pajamas, her hair in a ponytail. When she saw Leila, her eyes lit up, and she ran to her. “Did it work? Do you remember?”

Leila willed herself to smile as she shook her head no.

Dee pouted. “Not even one day?”

“Nope,” Leila said with a shrug. “But maybe it's because I didn't see the Lights. I'll try again tomorrow.” She waved a sad little good-bye and climbed into her tent to catch up on sleep. She'd been up for over thirty hours, but sleep didn't come quickly. She lay still for what felt like hours, just waiting, tallying up the disappointments of her day.

 

2

LEILA WAS SITTING
with her feet up on Hudson's lap, his strong fingers gently wrapped around her ankles. He had this way of touching her skin, as if he drew energy from it. The air was perfect, pleasant to the point that it could just barely be felt, like a morning caress. A glass of lemonade with mint in it sat on the table, sweating, the droplets running down and forming a slight puddle that made Leila wish for a pool. She watched Hudson smiling with his eyes closed, his head tilted back, lit up by the sun. She had the urge to trace her finger over his lips.

“Happy birthday!” a tiny voice shouted, jolting Leila from her sleep.

Dee's face filled up the partially unzipped tent flap, a conical party hat resting atop her mess of blond curls. She blew a noisemaker that unrolled like a long reptilian tongue. “Happy birthday!” Dee called again, unzipping the flap so it was completely open. The air that came in was cool and lovely, like it'd been in her dream, and Leila found herself searching the tent for Hudson.

“Come on,” Dee said, beckoning her out of her sleepy daze and out of her tent. “We have a surprise for you.”

Leila had fallen asleep in yesterday's clothes, jeans and a sky-blue sweatshirt, both of which were grass-stained and smelled of smoke (she liked it). She pulled off the sweatshirt and tossed it into a corner, then ran her hands through her hair, patting down the cowlicks that had sprung up as she slept. Behind Dee she could see Harriet's skirt, Brendan's linen pants, other pairs of legs she couldn't recognize.

“What's going on?” Leila asked.

“Come out and see!” Dee said, waving as she stepped away from the tent. She blew the noisemaker again, and a chorus of noisemakers outside responded in kind.

From the feel of the air, it was sometime in the afternoon. Leila stretched out a little and cracked her back, then obliged, crawling out of the tent.

“What is this?” Leila asked, smiling at Dee, casting puzzled looks at the scene outside the tent.

“It's your birthday party!” Dee said, gesturing at the gathering of people as if Leila might have missed them. “I know it's not really your birthday, but it didn't seem fair that I can remember most of my birthday parties and you can't remember any of yours, even though you've had more. So at least now you'll have one to remember.”

Harriet and Brendan were wearing party hats that matched Dee's and holding a cake, waving away flies that tried to land on the plain white icing. Liza, the campsite manager, was there, too, holding one of the unraveling noisemakers. A few other people Leila had never seen before were standing around, presumably other campers that Dee had summoned with her adorableness. There was a couple in their twenties, a group of guys who looked as if they enjoyed hunting and trading tips on how not to trim their beards. A scattering of families stood around the picnic tables, the children looking everywhere on the scale of happiness from thrilled to be partaking in a stranger's birthday party to flabbergasted that their supposedly loving parents had dragged them to the middle of the woods and away from civilization.

Leila felt her smile get big beyond control. The dream about Hudson finally left her, replaced by a flutter of giddiness in her stomach. She looked to Brendan and Harriet, raising her eyebrows.

“All her,” Brendan said, shaking his head in astonishment and pride.

Dee took Leila by the hand and led her to the cake. “Mom says that most birthday cakes are chocolate, and so we got you a chocolate cake, in case eating it will remind you of some other chocolate cake you had once.”

The cake's frosting was completely white, a blank canvas. On cue, Harriet raised a number of plastic bags full of different-colored goo. “Dee enjoyed drawing on her cake last year, and she thought you might want to choose how to decorate yours.”

“And make sure you smell the cake,” Dee said, still holding Leila's hand. “Daddy says smell is how people best remember things.”

“That's what I've heard,” Brendan said sheepishly. He smiled, then tugged at the end of his beard. “I hope it's good. It's the only cake we could find on short notice.”

Leila looked around at the other campers, everyone's attention on her. She still couldn't control her smile. “I don't know what to say. This is wonderful.”

“We have a piñata,” Liza blurted out, pressing her hands together and clapping.

“Have you ever had a piñata?” Dee asked, hopeful. Leila shook her head.

“This is going to be fun!” Dee said. “I've never been to someone's first birthday party. We'll hit the piñata, and we bought water balloons. It's not that cold today, and my mom said that if we dry off right after, we won't get sick. Then we can play hide-and-seek, and sardines, which is like hide-and-seek but backwards. One person hides, and everyone else has to look for them, and when you find the person who's hiding, you hide with them, until there's only one person left looking.” Her eyes widened in excitement.

They followed the path that led into the woods, away from the campsite office. The rest of the group tagged along behind, chatting. Harriet was wondering aloud about the proper grammar surrounding piñatas. “Do you
have
piñatas? Use them? Play with them? Just hit them?”

In a hushed tone Leila could hear Brendan filling someone in on her situation. One of the kids, a boy pretty close to Dee's age, complained about the fact that they were walking too far, and his dad, without any anger in his voice, told him to stop whining and enjoy the day.

Soon they were walking alongside the creek in the clearing where Leila had spent the night looking at the sky. If she took just a few steps away from the path, she'd be able to find the exact spot that had been pictured online. The one of this particular clearing had been subtitled with the words:
One of the many great spots for viewing the Northern Lights!

They reached a fork in the path that Leila had not yet had time to explore, and Dee took them left, arriving shortly after at a gathering of picnic tables arranged with decorative paper tablecloths. There were bowls full of potato chips, trays of vegetable sticks with various dips, two-liter bottles of soda. Stacks of paper napkins with
Happy Birthday!
and
Birthday Girl!
written all over them were held down by rocks. Two or three pizza boxes were spread about on each table, the smell wafting to Leila as she approached. A group of three middle-aged men had stayed behind to keep wildlife away from the feast. They were stubbly, sipping calmly on bottles of beer. One of them waved with his free hand; the other two stood from the benches and smiled.

“It's your party, so you get to choose how we start,” Dee said. “We can do the cake first, or the pizza, or the piñata, or the games.” She swiveled her head around the picnic area a few times, her hair bouncing even more than would correspond to the amount of her movements. “Mom! Where's the ice cream?”

“We put it in the creek,” one of the stubbly beer drinkers said. “The water will keep it from melting.”

“Oh,” Dee said. She let go of Leila's hand and walked around, inspecting the rest of the party supplies. Then, content, she looked back at Leila. “So, what do you want to do first?”

Leila bent down and picked Dee up in a bear hug, and the little girl squealed in delight. “Thank you.” She held Dee for a second, then lowered her back down and repeated the thank-you to Brendan and Harriet and the rest of the campers who were gathered around.

She found herself starting to get a little choked up, hardly believing the kindness of these people. Dee's sweet-hearted impulse to throw her a birthday party, her parents' willingness to follow through on it. If anything could shake her memories out of hiding, why not kindness?

“Let's start with the pizza,” Leila said, putting her fingers around Dee's shoulder and leading them to the nearest picnic table.

The birthday party was rich in everything Leila loved about her trip. She wondered if everyone got the same thrill she did from meeting new people, or if it was uniquely enjoyable for her.

The three stubbly beer drinkers, for example, were Ron, Geoff, and Karl, three cousins on a fishing trip. They were born a year apart and barely had to nod at each other to know exactly what the other was saying. The young couple was newly engaged after surviving a four-year long-distance relationship. One of the kids, a reserved twelve-year-old, claimed he was a poet and that a dog had once eaten 250 pages' worth of his work, leading him to quit writing for a couple of years.

Leila wished she could hear every conversation happening simultaneously, but instead she settled for letting her focus drift in and out, so that what she got was a medley of people digging into each others' lives.

An intimacy, however fleeting, formed in the air, and Leila tried not to simply sit back and observe it all happen but to throw herself into the scene. She'd discovered that much about herself: her simultaneous desires to observe others from a distance and integrate herself in their lives.

After pizza, conversation, and creek-cooled ice cream, Leila decided that their next activity would be hide-and-seek. She hid in terrible hiding spots so she could have the pleasure of seeking others. She loved pretending not to see the kids hiding, their stifled giggles as she paused right in front of the bushes they were crouched behind.

When the grown-ups tired of hide-and-seek and retreated to the beer coolers, Leila decorated the cake, then announced that it was time for the piñata. Dee clapped her hands and handed Leila the broom handle that served as the hitting stick.

“I don't want to go first,” Leila said. “I'm really strong. No one else will get a turn.”

Dee shook her head. “Nope, the birthday girl has to go first.”

“I'm serious. It could explode all over the place. I'm that strong.”

Baring that gap-toothed smile, Dee crossed her arms, refusing to take the broom handle back. “You have to go first.”

“Well, if you insist. But you can't blame me when there's no candy left because it all exploded,” she said, containing her smile.

She stepped up to the piñata, allowed Harriet to blindfold her, and after being spun around a few times, made a vaudevillian display out of falling down on her first swing. “Did I get it?” she called out from the ground, the audience of children delighted by the performance. Then she got up and passed the broom handle to Dee, the rest of the children taking twenty-second turns swinging at the piñata, a wide circle spread around them to avoid inadvertent hits. During the twelve-year-old poet's turn, the piñata gave way with a crack that sounded just like a home run, and everyone rushed to collect the candy that rained down.

After the piñata, a tired lull settled into the party. Dee waved Leila over to one of the picnic tables to cut the cake. A single candle stood in the middle of the cake, lit and buried almost halfway in green frosting meant to look like the Northern Lights. The campers crowded around Leila and sang “Happy Birthday,” Dee the loudest of them all. When they were done, Dee said, “Now you blow out the candle and make a wish, and if you wish really hard and don't say it out loud, it'll come true.” She was kneeling on the picnic bench next to Leila, leaning back from the table as if trying to resist the urge to blow out the candle herself. Her cheeks were red from the sun and the running around, and she was wrapped up in a post-water-balloon-fight towel, shivering slightly.

Leila paused, wondering what to wish for. The little flame flickered, wavering in the brisk air. How funny it would be if wishing on a store-bought candle would bring back her memories. She imagined blowing out the candle and the mailman immediately coming up the path, looking for Liza to deliver a handful of envelopes. Among them, a letter from Hudson, or a postcard—anything that would break the silence. She imagined Hudson himself walking up the path. What about wishing for a normal life, one that didn't revolve entirely around what was gone?

With Dee's eyes expectantly studying her face, Leila took a deep breath, remembered that this was just a candle on a cake, not a miracle, then pursed her lips and wished only to see the Northern Lights. The flame disappeared in a wisp of smoke.

Dee leaned into Leila, whispering, “Did it work? Do you remember?”

Leila could only smile. “Thank you, Dee. I'll always remember this party.”

“Who wants a slice?” Liza said, taking over the duties of cutting the cake into manageable squares. Several people responded with yeses, nos, and requests for just a tiny little sliver.

Dee lowered her head. Leila could see tears welling up in her eyes. “Hey, what's wrong?”

Dee sniffled, tightening her mouth. Her bottom lip was still quivering from the cold. “It was supposed to work,” she said. “You were supposed to remember by now.” Then she jumped off the bench and ran toward the path, that curly ponytail bouncing as she disappeared around the bend.

Leila called out after her, but Harriet was already getting up from her seat. “Don't worry,” Harriet said. “She'll be okay. She tends to overreact when things don't go exactly how she wants them to. You enjoy your party.”

Leila tried to do just that, accepting a slice of cake, making conversation with the rest of the partygoers. If Dee was still upset when she came back, Leila would give her a little white lie to appease her. She kept turning to look over her shoulder, wanting to see Harriet carrying Dee back to the party. After about twenty minutes, just as Leila was starting to worry that Dee had taken things a little too hard, Harriet appeared up the path, frantic and in tears.

“I can't find her anywhere!” she cried out. “Dee's gone!”