The Lost & Found (17 page)

“You're not the one who has to be sorry,” I said finally, struggling to pull myself together, to just make it through the next few seconds until I could get to the car and fall
apart. “It's me. I'm sorry. I'm sorry to have bothered you. We're leaving. Bye.”

I didn't wait for him to respond or object or yell or laugh, I just took Arrow's hand and we walked quickly and without looking back. And when we got to my car, I slid into the passenger's seat and let her drive while I put my face in my hands and cried. Not because Wallace Green wasn't my father, because I couldn't care less about that, but because the one thing my mother chose to communicate to me in the last five years of her life, the one thing she found the most important, wasn't even true. That was the biggest loss of all because it meant my mother was crazy. My mother was crazy, and I wasn't far behind.

T
hat night Willa stayed home again, and I realized it wasn't fatigue, it was a favor. Or, I mean, it was probably some combination of both, because Willa was always tired and she also hated meeting new people and she also, I thought, wanted to give me time alone with Frances.

“Go get 'em, brother,” she said halfheartedly, punching me on my shoulder.

“What am I supposed to get?” I asked.

“Oh, you know. Love or whatever,” she replied.

“Love or whatever. Noted.”

Frances showed up ten minutes late and alone, pulling into the parking lot of Holdem just a little too quickly and
parking crooked in a spot as far away from the restaurant as she could get. I met her at her car. She looked frazzled and upset and like maybe she had been crying. At least—her eyes were rimmed in red and her face looked raw and wiped clean.

“I'm sorry,” she said. “I'm sorry I'm late.”

“It's fine. It's totally fine. Are you okay? You don't look . . .”

I didn't want to imply that she didn't look good so I second-guessed myself and let the sentence slide into the negative space of unfinished thoughts. I reached out and took her hand without really thinking about it, and she launched herself in my arms like a spaceship. And I was the universe, or something. I wasn't really thinking clearly.

She pressed her face against my T-shirt and I thought she was going to cry again, but she just kind of held on tightly for a few seconds and then let go suddenly, pulling away with a smile on her face, a strange smile that looked okay in the twilight but was probably not really okay at all.

“It didn't go well, did it?” I asked.

“Ugh, the opposite of well. It was a disaster. It was really the stuff of nightmares,” she confirmed, almost laughing.

“I'm sorry.”

“I guess I thought this would fix things.” She sat down and leaned against one of her car's tires. I knelt down across from her. “Now I don't even know why I came here.”

“Oh,” I said, before I could stop myself.

She looked up quickly and put her hand on my knee. “Oh, I'm sorry,” she said. “That was terrible.”

“I know what you mean.”

“I didn't mean you, Louis. Of course I didn't mean you. That came out wrong.”

“I know.”

“I mean . . . if I didn't have you, if I didn't have this . . .” She shook her head, trailing off. “All I meant was, I came all this way to prove to myself that my mother wasn't completely gone. Like somehow, in my head, if I proved that Wallace Green was actually my father, then there would be something on this earth that she had left me. I don't know if that makes any sense.”

“It makes sense. I'm sorry it didn't work out.”

“It's okay. I don't think I want to talk about Wallace Green right now. Or maybe I do, you know, but not in this parking lot. Or maybe I don't. Did you know he was gay?”

“Really? No. I've never heard that.”

“So he can't be my father.”

“I'm sorry, Frannie.”

“That's fine. I mean, it was never really about him. It was never really about Wallace Green.” She paused, stood up, leaned against her car, smiled again. She had more smiles than anyone I'd ever met before. I wanted to know what each of them meant. “She was so adamant. In all her letters, she was so adamant. I wanted to believe her for her sake, maybe. Because she seemed so sure. I don't know
why she was so obsessed with it, but it was almost like the only thing she had left. Maybe because she thought nobody would ever be able to disprove it.” Frannie held her arms out, laughed quietly. “She must not have really known me. I'll disprove anything.”

Frannie stepped away from her car and grabbed my hand. “I'm sorry. I don't mean to throw all this at you.”

“It's okay. You can talk to me about anything.”

It was true but it also felt somehow not enough, it somehow fell short of the grand gesture I wanted it to be. It needed to be bigger. I could rent a skywriter and paste it across the clouds:
You can tell me anything.
I could name a star after her or write it out in something valuable, like gold or diamonds. I just wanted her to know that I meant it, and words didn't seem big enough to convey that. Or maybe I didn't feel big enough to convey that. Whatever it was, it was breaking my heart that she looked so sad, that she had come so far and hadn't found what she wanted to find.

Maybe I just wanted to be what she wanted to find.

That might have been the most selfish thing I'd ever admitted to myself.

“I'm not really hungry anymore,” she said after a while, after a silence that seemed impossibly expansive to me, built up and heavy with meaning.

“Me neither,” I said.

“Gosh, are we terrible at dates? We're terrible at dates. I think it just feels too hot to eat anything.”

“Walk?” I said, trying to keep my brain from repeating her word choice over and over and over:
date date date
. I knew it wasn't the most important word she had just said, but I couldn't help it.

She put her hand into mine, and we left the parking lot of Holdem, retracing our same steps of the night before. Except the night before we hadn't held hands, but it seemed like a natural progression.

Frannie was quiet for a long time, so I stayed quiet for a long time because I didn't want to break the fragile air between us. I wanted to be whatever she wanted me to be, and I think at that moment she wanted me to be silent.

We walked until we came to the river that sliced through the city. Frannie pointed out a little sign that said Shoal Beach, and we found a bench and sat with our hips touching. Frannie held her hands on her lap, and I wanted to reach for one but there were too many entwined fingers. It felt like a trap. I wouldn't know where to start. And then I wanted to put my arm around her shoulders but that felt too much like a high school movie theater date, so I folded my hands like hers and kept my arms to myself.

“It's pretty here,” she said. The first words spoken since we'd left the Holdem parking lot.

“It wasn't what I was expecting.”

“Me neither. Or, I dunno. I don't know what I was expecting.”

“Was he nice?”

“Wallace Green?”

“Yeah. I mean, was he a dick?”

“No, he wasn't a dick. He seemed . . . Well, he almost seemed disappointed he couldn't help me more. But it's not his fault, you know?”

“I'm glad he wasn't a dick.”

“He seemed nice. Everything you read about him says he's nice too.”

I didn't know what to say so I said, “It wasn't a waste. Coming here.”

“I guess I've always wanted to do a road trip.”

“Well, sure. I also meant . . .”

I knew what I wanted to say.
I also meant us, together. The Colorado River before us. The stars and moon and black-blue sky above us. My hand in your hand. Skipping dinner and walking until my blisters don't even hurt anymore, because they're too numb. The soles of my shoes black and worn smooth. The smell of the city—something like fire or smoke or the sharp tinge of sulfur.

Frannie reached over and squeezed my hand, and then she squeezed my fingers one by one, almost methodically, like she was working some kind of strange braille on my skin. But it was too complicated to follow, and I lost her message somewhere between my middle and ring fingers.

She stood up and took a few steps toward the water, resting her forearms on a low wooden fence. I put my hand on the bench to push myself up to join her, and I felt something underneath my fingers. I picked up a thick
photograph from an old instant camera. The white borders were yellowed and wrinkled but the image was clear. A woman, laughing, being led out of frame by someone wearing a thick bracelet, silver with a blue stone.

Frannie had once told me she didn't look anything like her father, either the nonfamous or the famous one, that she looked exactly like her mother, as if she were conceived and birthed without the help of any Y chromosomes. I could see it in this picture. I knew this wasn't Frances—the clothes and hairstyle were indicative of another decade—but it could be her in costume. This woman's laugh was Frannie's laugh; her smile was Frannie's smile; her eyes were Frannie's eyes.

I stood up and went to stand next to Frances, handing her the photo.

“Your mom looked really happy,” I said, because Willa always yelled at me if “beautiful” was the first thing I commented on. But Frances's mom was beautiful too, because Frances was beautiful and because they looked like they could be twins.

“She never looked this happy in real life,” Frances said, taking the photo and holding it up to catch the glow of the streetlight behind us. She didn't ask me where the photo had come from, maybe because we had both accepted something was going on that was without explanation, and we'd decided just to allow it to run its course.

“This
was
real life,” I said. “Just a moment of it, maybe, but still.”

“By the time the photograph was developed, she was probably already scowling,” Frannie argued.

“But you never have to know that. There's no proof. Just let her be happy.”

“Louis, you are something I've never encountered before,” she said, slipping the photo into her pocket and turning to face me.

“I like you too,” I said.

We stayed by the river for hours.

I
think we might have stayed by the river forever if we hadn't skipped dinner two nights in a row. We were both starving, and so Louis pulled out his phone and found a place that served tacos. And neither of us wanted to go back to Holdem because (I imagined, I hoped) that meant being close to our cars, which meant being close to leaving. And I didn't want to leave. I didn't want this night to end, because I didn't think we would get a second chance. We lived so far away from each other. I just didn't think it was possible.

We walked with the river on our right. It was past nine
o'clock, and the city was filled with a purple sort of moonlight that reflected off the water and made the world seem like it was born in a fantasy novel. I tried to commit everything to memory, to make everything last, but even as we walked it was slipping away. But maybe the best things were always meant to fade into fuzzy memory. Maybe that's what made them special.

“I don't know what I should do,” Louis said after a few minutes.

“About what?”

“About anything.”

“Me neither. You said once that maybe there are parallel-universe versions of ourselves. I wish we could hire them to make decisions for us.”

“There's no way of telling if they'd actually be smarter than these versions of us,” he pointed out, smiling. “They might do really stupid things.”

“Would you even care? At this point I feel like I need to put all these options into a hat and then just go with whatever I pull out first.”

“That sounds like a terrible idea,” he said, laughing now. He reached for my hand and squeezed it. Then I squeezed even harder, so he couldn't let go.

“What are you thinking about?” I asked. “The university?”

“Yeah, I'm kind of constantly thinking about it. The
tour was nice, you know? Is that a weird word to use to describe it?”

“I don't know. I think nice is a nice word.”

“It was nice. It felt . . . I guess it didn't feel as overwhelming as I thought it would feel. It felt kind of natural.”

“Like it fit?”

“Like it fit, yeah. And I saw the tennis courts, and those were great. And the whole place is really beautiful. It wasn't like I had imagined.”

“It sounds like you've made up your mind?” I asked.

“I don't know,” he said. “Maybe. I keep practicing in my head what I would tell Willa and my parents. Sometimes it goes well, sometimes my mother starts crying immediately.”

“You really don't think she'd want you to go here?”

“I know she'd want to be supportive, but I think she also has this dream that Willa and I will live in Los Angeles forever, preferably taking over the family business and living in our apartment until we both die. On the same day.”

“That's intense.”

“Or who knows. Maybe she'd be proud.”

“I'm sure she's already proud of you.” I wanted to say more, like
it must be nice to have a mother who didn't slowly spiral out of control. It must be nice to have a father who didn't stab you when you were just a kid. It must be nice to have a nuclear family. I think those are overrated, and I'm jealous of you and
yours.
“And I'm sure she'll support whatever you decide to do,” I added.

“Maybe that's it—that this is kind of the first thing we really have to decide, you know? Going to college is this huge choice, and it's so hard to figure out if you're making the right one. You can do research, tour schools, look at course books . . . but it still feels so random. Like you said, picking a choice out of a hat.”

“But it's easier for you. They came to you.”

“That's only another level of confusion. Do I want to go here because I want to go here or do I want to go here because it's easy? Because there's no risk, they've already told me I'll get in.”

“I'd take that option any day,” I said.

We'd reached the taco stand, which was really just a glorified food truck with a few picnic tables strewn out front. A woman in red cowboy boots was sharing a beer with a friend, another table was crowded with college students stuffing queso and chips into their mouths and discussing whether they thought the owner would card them if they tried to buy beer.

I saved us a table while Louis went and ordered guacamole and grilled corn with chili pepper and cheese and lime and tacos stuffed with cactus, cheese dripping out of the sides.

“I didn't know you could eat cactus,” he said, setting
everything down on the table.

“Was it the weirdest thing on the menu? My grandpa always says if you eat somewhere new, you should order the weirdest thing on the menu.”

“The weirdest thing on the menu was definitely the tongue taco,” he said. “But cactus was the weirdest thing that I would actually eat.”

He laughed and slid onto the bench. We each grabbed a taco and clinked them together like they were drinks. Then, the cheese sliding down our knuckles, we took our first bites.

“It's good!” Louis said.

“It's very cheesy.”

“That's probably why it's good.”

I scooped up a small mountain of guacamole on a chip and ate it. It put all previous guacamole to shame. All the guacamole of my lifetime was a pale imitation of this treasure in front of me.

“Wow,” I said.

“The East Coast doesn't have good avocadoes,” Louis said, trying some. “This is really good.”

“Have you ever been to the East Coast? We have better seafood, I guess. But I don't eat seafood.”

“I've never been. And I'm allergic to fish. Have you been to California?”

“When I was little, with my mom. We used to drive all over the place. Everything kind of blended together.”

“Have you been here before?”

“Texas, yes. But I don't know if we came to Austin.”

“I thought there'd be more cowboy hats.”

“She's wearing cowboy boots,” I said, pointing to the woman who was now cleaning up her picnic table.

“I guess that's something.”

I finished my taco and took a bite of the corn, which of course immediately stuck in between every one of my teeth. Louis handed me a toothpick wrapped in plastic that he'd gotten with the forks.

We ate our corn and finished the guacamole and when the paper plates were empty, we were quiet because everything felt so close to being over. Louis got up and threw everything out, and I went and stood by the sidewalk. When he joined me he said, “What's wrong?”

And I said, “We're running out of time.”

“Time for what?”

“For everything. Here. High school. Teenage years.”

“I know,” he said quietly, and took my hand.

Then I didn't know what to say. I didn't know anything except the fact that I didn't want this night to end. I wanted to find a way to bottle it up, to take it home with me and keep it on my bureau, one of those ships that fold in on themselves so you can slip them into their new glass home and then expand them again so they're full and big and so they can't escape. I wanted this night to be my very own ship in a bottle. I wanted to keep it forever on paper waves,
lit by moonlight and drawn in yellow paint.

“Let's stay up all night,” I said without meaning to say it. Then I closed my eyes and looked away from him because I didn't think I could bear it if he said no.