The Lost & Found (4 page)

Besides, I wasn't sure I was ready to tell anybody yet.

For some reason it felt like it had to be a secret, like maybe if I said it out loud it would become real. And so many real things disappeared.

I
slept from ten in the morning until eleven in the morning and then I rolled over and grabbed my phone off the nightstand.

I read a message from Bucker. I closed my eyes and imagined a bouquet of flowers sitting in a vase on my bureau. I wrote him back:

Something appropriate but heartfelt. I like that. I think it speaks for itself. And thank you for the flowers; I think I might be allergic, but it was a nice gesture.

I pressed the button on my phone and said, “Call Arrow.”

“Who would you like me to call?”

“Arrow.”

“Okay. What would you like me to do?”

“Call Arrow.”

“Okay. Would you like to send Arrow a message?”

“Go fuck yourself.”

“That is not a valid—”

I turned off my useless robot and dialed my cousin's number myself. She answered after the fourth ring. Clearly asleep.

“Why did I watch six hours of
Buffy
by myself last night?” she said.

“I have a very good explanation for that.”

“And I would love to hear it in, I don't know, three hours? Call me later?”

“Can I come over? I'm gonna come over.”

“I don't think so. I mean later, sure. Come over later. Right now is not a great—”

“I'll see you in few.”

I hung up on her and got dressed quickly, running a brush through my hair without looking in the mirror.

Arrow lived just next door. I let myself in the back. My aunt Florence was chopping veggies in the kitchen. I felt like my aunt Florence was always chopping veggies in the kitchen.

“Hi, Frances! What a nice surprise.”

I came over every day, multiple times a day, and Aunt Florence was always nicely surprised to see me.

“Hi, Aunt Florence.”

“Did you have breakfast? I have oatmeal made! And all manner of accoutrements.”

Aunt Florence generally used words like
accoutrements,
but she didn't generally cry while chopping veggies, so that's how I knew she knew. She was my mom's sister, after all.

“You know about my mother, huh?” I said.

Aunt Florence put her veggie-chopping knife on the cutting board and wiped her hands on her apron. She always wore aprons, and I had never seen her wear the same one twice, which led me to believe she owned too many aprons.

“Oh, honey. I'm so sorry,” she said.

“I'm sorry too. And I'm sorry everybody lied to me,” I said. Then I shrugged and got a bowl of oatmeal and went upstairs.

Arrow was sitting cross-legged on her bed, her eyes closed and her breathing deep. Morning meditations. I didn't know where she'd picked it up from, but she meditated every morning and night. She said she wasn't herself if she skipped a day. I sat at her desk until she was done. I ate my oatmeal.

Arrow was adopted from Vietnam when she was three
years old. She had short straight hair and yellow-rimmed glasses she used for reading. She was wearing bright-pink shorts and a bright-yellow top. It didn't strictly match.

When she opened her eyes, I said, “You don't strictly match.”

“Well, you're in a fun mood,” she said.

“I am not in a fun mood,” I said. I took the last bite of oatmeal and placed the bowl on the desk.

“Did my mom make oatmeal?” Arrow asked.

“Yeah. Oh, my mother is dead,” I said.

“What?”

“My mother died. She killed herself in an insane asylum. Here. In Easton.”

“I'm not following,” Arrow said.

“My mother never moved to Florida. She was here the whole time. She was committed.”

Arrow thought for a moment. Then she said, “Easton Valley Rest and Recuperation Center for the Permanently Unwell?”

“How did you know that?”

“I wanted to volunteer there, but my parents wouldn't let me. It would have looked amazing on my college application. I couldn't understand why they were so against it.”

“They didn't want you to see her,” I said.

“That is a new level of shadiness.” She slid off the bed and crossed the room and hugged me tightly. I rested my head on her shoulder. Her skin smelled like lotion and soap
and for some reason it made me want to cry. I hadn't cried yet. My chest was knotting up. “I'm so sorry, Frannie,” she said, pulling away. She sat down on the edge of the bed.

“It's okay. I'm okay.”

“I can't believe they lied to us.”

“This whole time, I could have just gone and seen her,” I said.

“I don't get it,” Arrow said. “I just don't get it. I can't believe she's dead.”

“You know, she wrote me all these letters. I always wondered why she didn't write to me, and she had. I just never got the mail.”

Arrow's eyes widened. “The black widow spider.”

“There aren't even black widow spiders in Maryland.”

“You know, I could never picture your mother living in an over-fifty-five gated community in Florida,” Arrow said thoughtfully. “Everybody told me she had some kind of midlife crisis, but my mom has had plenty of those and she's never moved south.”

“I thought she just didn't want me,” I said. My voice broke awkwardly. Arrow looked at me and waited.

“I guess this is better, right? This is better?” she asked.

“She's dead, Arrow. What's better about being dead?”

“Oh, Frannie. Please don't cry,” Arrow whispered. She scooted closer to me and grabbed my hands. She leaned so far over the side of the bed I thought she'd fall off. “I can't remember the last time I saw you cry.”

“I'll cry if I want to,” I said.

“Let's get some more oatmeal. Let's watch a movie. Let me paint your nails.”

“I don't want you to paint my nails. I want to cry.”

“Frannie, please, please, please don't cry. I love you so very much and we can do anything you want to do other than crying, okay? Anything you want to do. Do you want to go to the beach? Do you want to go paddleboarding? You keep saying you want to try paddleboarding!”

Arrow was starting to tear up. I knew she didn't want me to cry because she cried all the time, because even the word
cry
made her want to cry, because she had no control over her tear ducts and considered them traitors to her otherwise stoic demeanor.

I tried to pull myself together. I closed my eyes and took a few deep breaths. When I opened my eyes again, Arrow was staring at me. Her own eyes were wide and nervous.

“They all said the same thing. Her letters. I spent all night reading them,” I said.

“What did they say?”

“I mean, my mother is crazy. Was crazy. So, you know. How much can I really believe?”

“What do you mean? Believe what?”

“She kept talking about Wallace Green,” I said.

“The movie star?”

“She said he's my real father.”

“The movie star?” she repeated.

“Yes, the movie star.”

“Do you believe that?”

“Of course I don't believe that.”

“She really said that?” Arrow asked. She moved an inch away from me and squinted, studying my face. “You don't look like Wallace Green.”

“I don't look like my father either,” I said. In truth, I was the spitting image of my mother. If it was possible for a person to have sex with themselves, to get pregnant by themselves, to have an immaculately conceived baby, then that was me. There was nobody else in my face. Just my mother.

“I brought this,” I said, pulling my mother's last letter out of my pocket. It was dated just last week.

“Is that . . .”

“Yeah.”

I handed it to Arrow and then read it over her shoulder, even though I had already read it a dozen times. I'd read all of them a dozen times.

Heph—Some days are easier than others, some days are almost inbearable. Unbearable? I miss you a lot, but it's okay that you haven't written because you shouldn't have to carry this burden around with you. The burden of words. It wouldn't be fair.

The man in the top hat came back to see me and told me a very important secret about the bedsheets
here. Oh, Heph, I wish I could see you one last time, but I could never get the hang of astral projection. It's unfortunate because it would have been so useful, all those nights I missed you so much I couldn't sleep.

All I wish for you is that you find Wallace Green because I never had the guts to. I was comfortable with Frances the First and thought that following my dreams might only ruin them or worse, I'd come to realize that our dreams are never what we think they are.

You are the stuff of stars and you deserve to have a real father, not a coward who tried to kill you.

All my love. Mom

“Jesus,” Arrow said when she had finished.

“I know.”

Arrow got off the bed. She turned a few tight circles in the carpet and then looked at me, worried.

“Are you going to?”

“Going to?”

“Find him? Wallace Green?”

“Of course not.” I paused, thinking back to my conversation with Bucker. Bucker wasn't his real name. I didn't know his real name because I'd never asked because it didn't matter. He was just a screen name. He could have been a fifty-year-old convicted felon. He could be instamessing me from a jail cell. I think he said once that Bucker was his
cat, but Bucker could just as easily have been his cellmate. “He lives in Texas, I guess.”

“Texas is far from here.”

“Well, yeah. It's halfway across the country.”

“How do you know he lives in Texas?”

“TILTgroup.”

“Someone on TILT knows Wallace Green?”

“Well, he knows where he lives, I guess.”

Arrow was still standing. She was playing with the ends of her hair, making miniature braids and unbraiding them. I'd always been jealous of Arrow's hair. It was stick straight and thick. Even when they'd brought her home (an event I only vaguely remembered, and probably only because it was on videotape somewhere), she'd already had that hair. It grew at an alarming rate. She got a trim every other week.

“I'm really sorry, Frannie,” she said after a minute. “I loved your mom so much. She always had those little butterscotch candies in her purse. I almost choked to death on one because she let me eat them in the car. And she was funny, you know? She was really funny.”

“And she was really crazy,” I added.

“Sure,” Arrow said. “But look around you. Everyone is.”

“You're not crazy.”

“My mom is probably crazy. I mean, they're cut from the same cloth and everything. And you've seen how many veggie platters my mom makes. Like, who are all these
veggie platters even for? What does she do with them? They're there and then they're gone. I certainly don't eat them.”

“She takes them to her book club,” I offered.

“Sometimes I think there's no book club,” Arrow said.

“So where does she go all the time?” I asked.

“Oh.”

“What?”

“Maybe she takes them to your mom,” Arrow said softly.

“Oh.”

For some reason, picturing my mom eating veggie plates in a mental hospital was the last straw.

We cried together for hours, and when we were done crying we went and ate the veggie plate Aunt Florence had left on the kitchen counter, not even because we particularly wanted it but because it felt, in a weird way, like a tribute.

When we were finished, Arrow went to take a shower and I snuck into my aunt and uncle's room. I took the photo album from Aunt Florence's vanity. Arrow and I used to look through this album when we were kids. It was pictures of the two of them, Florence and my mom, when they were younger.

I didn't have any photographs of my mother. She had burned them all one afternoon right before I went to live with my grandparents. We sat in the backyard and she put a
match to every single one. Burning pictures smell terrible. Like something poisonous and wrong.

I removed a photo from the album—a picture of my mother by herself, her hand held in someone else's hand, a man's hand, his arm cut off by the edge of the photo so it was just my mom being led somewhere by someone without a body. He wore a thick silver bracelet with a chunk of turquoise in it. My mom looked up at the camera and laughed, laughed, laughed more than I had ever seen her laugh in real life.

I took the photo and put it into my pocket.

But when I looked for it later, it was gone.

I
t was hot, even for Los Angeles. We were in the middle of a heat wave, one hundred and five degrees in June.

“You need a shot of Freon,” Willa informed me, leaning close to the air ducts in my car. “This is like bathwater. This is like someone blowing on my face. It isn't cold at all.”

“It just needs a second.”

“We've been driving for ten minutes. How much longer does it need? A shot of Freon is three dollars. Go to Jiffy Lube. I'll treat.”

I didn't know what Freon was or whether I wanted it in my car, but I didn't say anything to Willa. She was one of those people who seemed to know everything about
everything, but I never saw her online or reading books or the newspaper so I wasn't sure where she got her information. It was like it appeared, magically, in her brain, and that was annoying, because everything I read or studied or learned, I forgot. She had a better grade point average than I did, and I don't think I'd ever even seen her crack a textbook.

“You don't know what Freon is, do you?” she asked.

“Of course I know what Freon is,” I said.

“What is Freon?”

“I don't have to tell you what Freon is.”

“Because you don't know. I mean, that's fine. Some people don't know what Freon is.”

Freon is a word that sounds less like a word the more you say it.

Freon.

Freon.

“Are you hungry?” I asked. “We have time to stop, if you want.”

“I thought you said we were going to be late. Isn't the appointment at eight? It's five of eight.”

“It's at eight thirty.”

“You lied to me?”

“For your own good. Sally's?”

“Fine, but I'm not going in, because that was deceitful. I want an egg sandwich with avocado. And tater tots.”

I pulled into the diner's parking lot a few minutes later.
We went there a lot. They were fast and clean and close to our apartment.

Willa reclined her seat and closed her eyes. I left the car on for her and stepped out into the blazing sunlight. The air conditioning was definitely working; it was easily twenty degrees hotter outside the car. I started sweating instantly. You would think spending my entire life in Los Angeles would mean I was a little more accustomed to the heat. Nope. I dreamed of snow. I'd never even seen it. I think I would like to ski.

I opened the door to the diner. Benson, the owner's son, was at the host's stand. He was short and stocky; he played football on the school's team. I didn't know anything about football, but I think he was good? People said he was good. He was pretty popular, but one of those popular kids who was also nice. A rare combination.

“Hey, Louis,” he said when I opened the door. He looked behind me and asked, “No Willa today?”

“She's in the car,” I answered.

“Oh,” he said. And maybe his face fell a fraction of an inch, or maybe I imagined it. I thought he probably had a crush on her, but I knew lots of guys who'd liked my sister only to have their hopes dashed when they found out she only had crushes on sleeping and tater tots. And plus—if she liked Benson, I was pretty sure she would have told me.

“Can I put in a takeout order?”

“Sure thing. Usual?”

“Usual would be great.”

“I'll throw in some extra tater tots. I know she likes them.”

Benson scribbled our order on his pad and went to give it to the kitchen.

I pulled out my phone and read a message from Nib. It made me smile—she had received my fake flowers. I typed her back while I waited for Benson. We usually wrote back and forth a few times a day, just checking in, small stuff. But because of what had happened to her mother, I felt even more of a need to make sure she was okay.

It's hot in Los Angeles today. I think this guy in my school might have a crush on Willa, which is very OK with me. He gives us free tater tots! Not just like randomly—he works in a diner. Anyway, hi. Is it hot there? Are you OK? Take an allergy pill for the flowers.

I put my phone back in my pocket as Benson returned with two coffees to go.

“Thanks,” I said, taking them.

“No problem. So where are you headed? The store?”

Willa and I worked part time at my parents' fabric store. It was about as thrilling as it sounded. Willa cut fabric all day, and I was on restock. It was miserable, but our parents were entrepreneurs and had this great need to instill the same drive in Willa and me. We would inherit the shop one day, and my mother had already made it clear she
would come back as a ghost and haunt us until the day we died if we ever sold it. I've heard the “we started that store from the ground up” speech too many times to count.

“We'll be there later on. Willa's got a doctor's appointment.”

“Everything okay?”

“New legs,” I said.

Maybe it was weird how nonchalantly everyone talked about Willa's accident, but despite it being downtown Los Angeles, there was actually a small-town, community feel in our neighborhood. Everyone knew us, everyone knew Willa, and everyone knew my mother was passionate about two things: tulle and normalizing her daughter's lack of legs. Willa was never bullied or treated differently. It maybe helped she had the attitude of a long-haul trucker. Nobody wanted to fuck with her.

“That's great! I know her current ones were getting a little old.”

“Sure. I don't know. I guess these will be the last ones for a while. The doctor said she's done growing.”

Willa would have been tall, had it not been for the accident and subsequent transfemoral amputation. Her torso was long and narrow, and you could just tell by looking at her that she was supposed to be a giant. I was tall, anyway, and we were twins.

“There have been huge strides in prostheses over the last few years,” Benson said thoughtfully.

“I guess. I don't really pay attention.”

“It's fascinating. You should do some research.”

I couldn't think of anything less interesting than researching the kind of fake legs my sister had to wear, but I nodded and tried to look engaged. I mean, clearly Benson was into it.

The order-up bell dinged and Benson went to get our food. “Tell Willa I said hi,” he said, handing me a paper bag. I struggled to carry it with the two coffees.

“Sure, will do. See you soon, Benson.”

I shouldered open the door and was hit with a wave of heat so powerful I was surprised it didn't light the bag on fire. Willa was currently leaning against the window with her eyes closed. I tapped on the glass and she jolted, instantly irritated. She rolled down the window, and I handed her the bag and her coffee.

“Benson has a crush on you,” I said.

She rolled her eyes but not before I thought I saw a flicker of something else. Embarrassment? Disbelief? “Benson does not have a crush on me. Oh, why—did he give us extra tater tots?”

“Exactly.”

I walked around the side of the car and put my coffee on the roof while I pulled the door open.

“Well, that was nice of him,” Willa said slowly, staring into the bag.

“Is everything there?” I asked, sliding into the car and shutting the door behind me.

“Everything's here.”

“Then why are you being weird?”

“I'm not being weird.”

“Why are you staring into the bag like that?”

“I'm not staring into the bag like anything, shut up.”

I put my seat belt on and shifted the car into reverse, maneuvering out of the parking space slowly.

“Maybe I'm being weird because I'm going to get new legs,” Willa said finally. “I've had these ones for years.”

“Well, you said they pinch you.”

“A lot of things hurt, but that doesn't mean you won't miss them when they're gone.”

“How philosophical.”

“I'm just saying. Getting new legs kind of sucks. You have to learn how to walk all over again.”

I shifted into drive and merged into traffic. Willa popped a tater tot into her mouth and then handed one to me. It was really the perfect tater tot. They'd perfected the art of totting taters.

“Did you not get a coffee?” she asked, taking a sip of hers.

“Oh, fuck,” I said.

“The roof?”

“The roof.”

I looked in the rearview window. I was expecting to see my coffee, laying broken and spilled in the middle of the road, but it wasn't there. So I pulled over and looked on the roof, but it wasn't there either. I got back in the car.

“Here. We can share.” Willa handed me her cup.

“Thanks.” I took a sip and burned my tongue.

It was too hot for coffee anyway.

“You have something on your mind,” Willa said after a minute.

“Me?”

“No, the other person in the car I might possibly be talking to.”

“I don't have anything on my mind.”

“You've been acting weird since yesterday. You know, after you fell asleep instead of doing dishes and then looked at my phone like a creep.”

“I didn't look at your phone like a creep,” I said.

“You were counting in your sleep, and I know you only count when . . .” She trailed off. It wasn't easy for either of us to talk about. She had told me once that sometimes when I did it, she could feel something scratching at her skin. Sometimes when I had panic attacks, she could feel herself not breathing.

“I wasn't counting.”

“Your lips move,” she said, and demonstrated. I watched her out of the corner of my eye. “It's okay. You can talk to me about it. You can tell me if it's happening again.”

“Nothing's happening. There's nothing to talk about.”

“Okay, Louis. Just know that I'm here. Or whatever. If you want to talk. Or whatever. I don't even care.”

She ate another tater tot.

I found myself thinking about what Austin might look like. The University of Texas had a campus there and that's where I would go. If I decided to go. I mean, I hadn't decided yet. I had never even been to Texas.

I wondered if it could possibly be hotter than Los Angeles in the summer.

I wondered if I could possibly move so far away from home when even normal things like sleeping and washing dishes were sometimes hard for me.

I didn't know.

But I did know that no, Texas couldn't possibly be hotter than Los Angeles. Any hotter than this and we'd be burned alive.