The Department of Lost & Found (23 page)

“You’re going?” I asked. This Sally had failed to mention.

“Not sure yet.” Then he went quiet. “Lila asked me to come along, but . . .”

“Wow. I didn’t realize.” I started twirling the ends of my hair.

“Didn’t realize what? There’s nothing to realize.” He got up to clear our plates.

“Well, I mean, it seems like there’s something to realize if you’re flying to Puerto Rico to attend weddings with her.” It came out colder than I intended.

“That’s where the ‘but’ comes in.” He sighed and walked back to me from the kitchen. “I didn’t mean for it to get this far.”

“So it’s far? In that case, should I even be here?” I rose to leave, but he grabbed my hand and dragged me back onto the couch.

“It’s not far. At least not to me. But that’s part of the problem.

Anyway, it seems to me that you have some entanglements of your 210

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own.” My cheeks flushed like they’d been bitten by fire ants. I looked at my cuticles and started to pick them. “Why didn’t you mention him?”

I shrugged. “Dunno.”

“I thought that you weren’t available. I thought that’s what you said.”

“I’m not. And I did.” I sighed. “I don’t know. Jake came back, and I’m lonely, and I loved him, and he promised to stay with me, which is all I ever wanted from him when we dated before, and so I just sort of agreed to it.” I paused. “But we haven’t been together
together
yet, so really, I mean it. I just don’t feel available.”

“So he gets a second chance but Lila shouldn’t?”

I stared out his picture window. “It’s complicated.”

“It shouldn’t be.”

“This coming from the son of two shrinks who is presently hanging out with an ex-girlfriend and contemplating entangling himself even further though he suspects that he doesn’t even like her? Thanks for your advice, but I’ll pass.” I got up and walked to the window, staring out at the skyline of the city.

“Where is he tonight?”

“In L.A. Playing Leno. They couldn’t postpone. Then he’s going to Tokyo for a few days since he’s already on the West Coast.

Shorter flight.” I lowered my eyes so he couldn’t see that I felt the sting of Jake’s betrayal.

“But he wants to stick around?” He looked at me. “Is that what you want?”

I picked some dirt from under my thumbnail and raised my shoulders. “I don’t know. Sometimes.”

He sighed and got up to pour himself another glass of wine.

“You know, I didn’t quite tell you the whole story with Natasha, my med school girlfriend. After I’d accepted my residency in
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New York, she changed her mind. Decided that she
couldn’t
live without me, even though I’d finally figured out how to live without her. We didn’t get much time off, but whatever she had, she spent flying back and forth. Each visit, she’d whittle her way back in until after a while, I couldn’t believe that I’d ever let her go.” He took a sip from his glass and let it linger.

“This went on for six months: We were talking about moving to be with each other, planning our future, and eventually, I made my way to the diamond guy my brother recommended. I’d already bought the ring when she called me to tell me that she couldn’t do it anymore. That she just needed to confirm that she definitely couldn’t live without me, and it turned out that once again, she realized that she could.”

“I’m sorry,” I said softly.

“Don’t be.” He waved his free hand. “Even the second time around, I realized that she was right. But my point here is that sometimes people come back into our lives because it’s what they think is good for them. And it has absolutely nothing to do with what’s good for you.”

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Dear Diary,

It’s been a strange few days. To say the least. Jake called
yesterday before he took off for Japan, and by all accounts, his
stint on Leno was a tremendous success. We didn’t talk about
what that meant—what his record company did to promote
bands who were considered “tremendous successes”—but I think
that we both pretty much knew what it involved. The thing about
Jake is that it’s not that he makes promises that he has no intention of keeping, it’s that he makes promises that get in the way of
his other plans.

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When he asked what I thought of the show, I told him that
they were amazing. And they were. They played their new song,

“Miles from Her,” and even Leno came out and said that after
this performance, he was buying the CD. What I didn’t tell him
was that I watched the show at Zach’s. I know, I know. Who am
I to call out Jake on his broken promises when I’m spending lingering evenings with my gynecologist who may or may not be
dating one of my best friends? But I almost couldn’t help it. No,
that makes me unaccountable, so let me rephrase because Janice
and I have been working on that: my taking accountability. Certainly, I could have helped it. Certainly, at any point in the
evening, I could have gotten up, thanked him for the pizza and
the company, and walked Manny the five blocks home. But
what I mean by this, by the fact that I felt helpless, is that for the
first time in a long while, I felt like I belonged in my own skin. I
didn’t worry about the pal or of my cheeks or the bulging shape of
my new breasts that resemble flotation devices on a
747
. In fact,
I barely thought about them at all.

So like I said, Diary, it was a strange thing. Just before Leno
came on, we were shooting the shit, I don’t really even remember
what we were talking about. Something on the local news,
maybe. I couldn’t believe that I’ d stayed up that late, but with
Zach, I wasn’t even tired. It’s like I wanted time to slow down,
just so I wouldn’t have to notice that the clock read an hour that
meant I’ d be wiped out the next day. But anyway, after the news
and just before Leno, I got up to use the bathroom, and when I
came back, he had that look on his face again—the one that I’ve
seen from him before—the one where a guy is thinking something really intimate and personal and perhaps over the line and
debating if he should open his mouth.

“Natalie. I have to be honest,” he said. “I know that Lila is
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your friend, and I know you’re with Jake, but the simple truth of
it is that I think you’re amazing.”

I didn’t know what to say back, so I just thanked him, sat
back down, and folded my hands carefully in my lap. But he
wasn’t done.

“I know that you’re going through a lot right now, and I respect all of that. I’ve seen enough cancer patients to know that
asking someone to make a big life decision right now isn’t fair.”

I nodded and he continued. “So I want to say, and then I’ ll
leave this alone, that what I’m doing with Lila is biding my
time. I know that makes me sound like an asshole, but I’ve told
her that I’ve given her all that I can, so I don’t feel like I’m being
unfair.”

I didn’t ask him to elaborate, Diary, because we both knew
who he was biding his time for. In the face of his honesty, I didn’t
know if I should grab Manny and run, or leap across the couch
and kiss him, but at that exact moment, Leno came on, so we
both just turned our attention to the TV and sat in a sort of
weird, anxiety-filled vacuum during his opening monologue.

After the Misbees played, I told Zach that I should go. He insisted that he walk me home, which was sweet and kind and
wonderful in the way that you want your boyfriend to be.

When we reached my door, he kissed my forehead and told me
to get some sleep. I watched him walk down the block, and when
he turned to look back, I thought to myself, “If something is good
enough the first time around, why would you ever let it go?”

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e i g h t e e n

atalie.” Senator Tompkins’s aide, Brian, sighed into the Nphone. “You know that this is a risky thing to attach ourselves to. Our constituents are from the Bible Belt, and they’re not sure how they feel about it.”

“But it’s the right thing to do,” I replied, as I doodled on the list of names in front of me. Only three more to go, and with my newfound zeal for a cause I actually cared about, I was certain they’d crumble like stale cookies in an arid desert. (Not that stale cookies are often found in an arid desert, but you see my point.) “You know it, and I know it. Look at the national polls: People want to see funding for this research. If we get this bill to the president’s desk, he’s going to have to take a hard look at his policy. That’s what our jobs are all about, aren’t they?”

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“I’ll run some numbers and get back to you,” he said. “I can’t make any promises.”

I hung up the phone and rubbed my eyes. Kyle was in D.C. for the day, so I was working from his (my) office. I surveyed the space. It’s a funny thing, how you can return to the exact same place that you’d spent so much time and yet nothing looks the same. My senior year in college, I went to Disneyland with Sally, Lila, and two other sorority sisters. We wove our way through the crowds, past Mr. Toad’s ride and beyond a live-action figure of Mickey. I looked back as we were exiting the gate to the park, and I remember thinking that it no longer felt like the most magical place on earth like it did when I was seven and my parents gave in to my relentless demands for a visit; now it was filled with whiney, dirty-fisted babies, sweaty, plump mothers, and struggling actors who donned Disney costumes while waiting for their big break.

My office was sort of like Disneyland, only without the ice cream stands and the carousels playing lullabies. I looked around: Kyle, like me before him, had chosen to cover the walls with his diplomas—Stanford undergrad, magna cum laude, Harvard Law—

but nowhere in the room did he give any clues as to what he was really like. There were no pictures of his brother, the one I knew he had because he stood in the corner with a bored, blank expression at our last fund-raiser, or of his parents from whom our assistant, Blair, took repeated messages each week. There were only signs of what he’d achieved, not how he got there or who helped him achieve it in the first place. I stood up and walked over to his Stanford diploma, sticking my nose so close that it almost touched the glass. And from this view, the letters, the honors, the very name
Stanford,
all blurred together—none of it legible, none of it important. I pulled back from my blurry perch and looked at the diploma all over again. Only this time, the only thing I saw
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was the mark left from my hot breath and the way that with each passing second, the steam got smaller and smaller until you couldn’t tell that I’d been there at all.

At that very moment, as I sat in rapt wonder gazing at arguably Kyle’s greatest achievement in life, Zach knocked on the door.

“Hey, sorry to bother you.” He poked his head in. “I know that you work at about a million miles an hour during the day and probably don’t want to be interrupted. But I had a thought.”

“No worries. Sit down,” I said, retreating back behind my desk and waving my hand to guide him to the chair in front of it. “I’ve wrapped up most of my doable work today anyway. What’s up?”

“Wow, listen to you. Three months ago, I didn’t think that you’d ever wrap up work, like, ever.” He laughed. “Okay, now don’t read too much into this, but I have a few days off, and it’s almost the weekend, and I know that Jake’s away and Lila is out of town for work, too, and, well, I made a few calls and . . .”

I squinted up my eyes and shook my head. “Where are you going with this?”

“The question is really, where are we going together. Because if we leave here right now, we can be in L.A. by tonight and in the live studio audience for
The Price Is Right
tomorrow. Separate rooms, of course. I already checked out the Beverly Hills Hotel.”

He smiled slyly. “And to our luck, there are rooms available.”

I exhaled and reached for my calendar on my desk, flipping through the pages because, surely, they couldn’t really be blank.

But they were. I scanned the stacks of papers on my desk, fighting the urge to create mindless busywork just for the sake of having mindless busywork to tackle. Then I pushed my chair back, bit my bottom lip, and grinned so wide that my eyes nearly filled with tears. And then I thought of a million personal reasons why 218

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I shouldn’t say yes. And then I realized that none of them mattered more than the fact that I didn’t want to say no.

“ i
C A N N O T B E L I E V E
that we’re doing this,” I said, as we stood in line outside the CBS studio on Beverly Boulevard, the crystal-line Los Angeles sunshine bursting down on our backs. “This might be the most unlike me thing I’ve ever done in my life.”

“Hey, you only live once, right?” Zach looked my way and smiled, his green eyes shielded by aviator sunglasses that made him look about one hundred thousand times hotter than he already was. As if that were possible. The line inched forward, and he placed his hand on the small of my back as if to guide me along.