The Lost & Found (5 page)

A
fter I took the photograph of my mother from Aunt Florence's photo album, I went home to take a shower. I always took really hot showers and I always forgot to turn the fan on beforehand, so the bathroom filled up with steam and my grandpa yelled at me because the wallpaper was peeling off and I was going to cause a mold outbreak. My skin turned bright red and my fingers wrinkled and Grandma Doris complained about the hot water bill.

“It doesn't pay itself, you know,” she always said.

But Grandpa Dick had been a colonel in the army, so I know they're fine with money. His pension is absurd. My grandmother carried Chanel handbags and wore Prada
sunglasses. But all her clothes came from T.J. Maxx, so I guess it evened out.

I took an extra-long shower and toweled off in a bathroom cloudy and wet. I made a circle in the mirror, wiping away the condensation with the palm of my hand. I looked tired and red. I wrapped the towel around me and opened the door. Steam poured into the hallway.

“Frances, really,” my grandmother said. She was standing at the top of the stairs, clucking her tongue.

“You told me my mother lived in Florida,” I said.

“That's hardly related to our water bill,” she replied. But she left me alone.

I went into my room and that's when I noticed the picture of my mother was gone. I had put it on my pillow and now it wasn't there.

I touched the spot where it had been and it felt warm but that was probably because the sunlight streamed in through the window and fell across the bed like an invading army of light.

I got dressed quickly. It was June and hot but the muggy, thick air couldn't make it into our house. Grandma Doris apparently didn't care as much about the electricity bill; we had central air and it was always blasting.

I sat on my bed and opened my laptop. I checked TILTgroup first. After the pen-stabbing incident I had been sent to therapy, where my therapist told my mother I should also be utilizing support groups. Since my mother
was generally insistent we do everything we could possibly do in the name of my mental health (which seems ironic now), she signed me up for my very own TILT account. At first I used TILTgroup for weekly guided-support groups, but now it was more like a habit. I never attended group sessions anymore. I only had a few people I private messaged, and I only really liked Bucker. We had clicked from the beginning, from one of my very first sessions. Most of the other kids there just wanted to talk about their tragedy. They were less like overcomers, Bucker had said once, and more like dwellers. When Bucker talked about his tragedy, he was really talking about his sister, and he was never weird about it. I liked that. He didn't give up his whole life because something shitty happened to him. He didn't surrender his identity to TILT just because some therapist had asked him to. I hoped I was like that too.

TILT.

Tragedy Inspires Love and Togetherness

We found other possibilities for the acronym:

Totally Ignorant Losers Talking

Translucent Illusions Leaving Town

I signed in and went to my messages.

Just one from Bucker about how hot it was in LA.

I wrote him back quickly:

It's hot and muggy here. Is it muggy in LA? It's not, right? You guys are lucky. Mugginess is the worst. I'm trying
to figure out if I should do something really stupid. Like, drive-across-the-country-to-meet-a-movie-star stupid. I keep going back and forth.

I closed my laptop and lay back on my bed. I was glib with Bucker, but the truth was that my stomach had tied itself up in a knot that felt irreversible. The truth was, Arrow and I had cried for a long, long time, but I didn't feel like I was done.

I loved my mother. I missed her. Admittedly, I missed her more five years ago, when it was fresh, when one day I had spent all my time with her and the next day she had vanished, poof, never to be heard from again. I had learned to live without her, but that didn't make the pain any less real.

But I knew even then. I knew after my father went to jail and it was just my mother and me, spending money on stupid things and getting our hair done twice a day at different salons. I knew it couldn't last forever. I was only a kid, but I could see my mother unraveling. I could see the knots in her brain unknotting. She was falling apart. She was coming unhinged.

She burned our pictures and smashed in our TV set to make an aquarium.

“I don't want a TV anymore,” she'd said. “I want a fish tank. Put these safety goggles on, Heph.”

I put the safety goggles on. I stepped back until my butt
hit the far wall and then I watched my mother take a bat to our television. It wasn't a flat-screen; it was one of the old ones.

My mother bashed the shit out of that poor TV and then she stepped back and looked at me like—
eh? Pretty cool, huh?

“I've never seen the inside of a TV before,” she said, bending down and inspecting it. “Come here and look. It's like a science experiment. Don't worry, I unplugged it.”

I went and looked at the inside of the TV. To be honest, it was a little boring.

“What kind of fish do you want?” she asked me.

“Goldfish?”

“How many?”

“Three?”

“Names?”

“I dunno.”

“Heph! They gotta have names.”

“Goldy?”

“Inspired. And the others?”

“Sunshine. Lava.”

“I love those names
so much
,” she said, putting her arm around me. “All we have to do now is saw the top off and get a sheet of glass. We'll go to the hardware store later, how about it? We need a saw and we need some glass and we'll probably need some netting for the top. Like a screen. So they don't jump out.”

We never made it to the hardware store.

I missed my mother now. Her letters were manic and nonsensical and long-winded, but they made me miss her in a way I hadn't missed her in five years. They made her feel so close. I was happy she had thought about me in the mental institution. I was happy she wrote me letters even when the letters were filled with made-up words.

Tole barken!
she wrote in one of them.
Howba goesy!

I wanted to read them again even though I was so tired my eyes burned with the effort of staying open. I'd left them on the nightstand this morning when I'd finally fallen asleep. I reached over to get them, but they weren't there. They had gone wherever the photo of her had gone. They had gone wherever everything went.

I knew I wouldn't find them, but I got up anyway and went downstairs to the living room. Grandma was knitting something on the couch. She wasn't supposed to knit anymore, because of her arthritis, but she didn't listen to the doctors.

“Did you take my mother's letters?” I asked.

“No, dear. Did you misplace them?”

“I know where I left them. Maybe Grandpa?”

“Grandpa's been gone all day.”

“How come you lied to me? I mean, really,” I said.

“Oh, Frances.” Grandma Doris put her knitting down. She took a deep breath and rubbed at her temples. “Do you really want to know?”

“Yeah, I really want to know.”

“I didn't want you to grow up worried.”

“Worried?”

“Your father was a nutball,” she said. “Don't tell your grandfather I said that, but he was a certifiable nutball. After he got out of jail, he tried to get custody—”

“I know all that.”

“And he was laughed at. The judge laughed.
You don't get to stab your daughter with a fountain pen and then file for custody
, the judge said. Your mother got a restraining order, and we never heard from him again. And good riddance.”

“I don't know what that has to do with anything,” I said.

“I didn't want you to grow up thinking you'd go crazy too. With your father being who he is, and your mother in a special hospital . . .”

“Oh,” I said. “You know, it hadn't occurred to me until just now.”

“Well, good. That was the whole point.”

“I read all her letters.”

Grandma rubbed her right hand with her left. “And what did you think?” she asked.

“She says my father isn't my father.”

She nodded slowly, like she knew already, and I realized she had read them all even though she said she had given up after a while. I wondered if my mother had written letters to her too, or if that was reserved for me. “Wallace Green,”
Grandma said after a minute. “I always liked him.”

“But you don't think . . .”

“That he's your real father? Oh, honey. I don't think so.”

I sat down on the armchair. “You're probably right.”

“I'm sorry we lied to you, Frannie. And I'm sorry we kept those letters from you. I hope you know we did it because we love you more than anything.”

“I don't forgive you.”

“Well, I guess I can live with that for a little while.”

“You know she told me she wanted me to find him, right?”

“I know,” she said sadly.

“And you don't think I should?”

“I don't think it would help anything.”

I went back upstairs.

I felt divided. Half of me wanted to believe my mother, to prove her right, because it would show that she wasn't completely gone. It would prove that there was a part of her that was still sane, still able to reach me.

But the other half of me wanted to forget everything she'd told me about Wallace Green. No good could come of it. There was no way he was my father, and that road could only lead to more pain. My mother was dead, and she believed something that wasn't real.

I sat down on my bed.

The letters had not reappeared.

I was always losing things.

But no, it wasn't me.

Things kept leaving.

Things disappeared.

W
illa ate the tater tots in the parking lot of the doctor's office. It was time to go inside, but she was stalling. I didn't think I'd ever seen my sister nervous before and so I couldn't be sure that was what this was. But she ate each tater tot so slowly and she looked at each one so deeply, like it might contain the answers to all the questions of the universe, including the most pressing one of how to stall for time before going into a doctor's appointment.

“Willa?” I said finally.

She looked at me like she'd forgotten I was there. “What?”

“Are you nervous?”

“What would I be nervous about?” she said quickly. She looked into the bag, but I guess she'd finished the tater tots because she crumpled it up and threw it on the floor of my car.

“Uh, your legs?” I said.

“I don't have any legs,” she said, flashing me a wry smile and opening the door.

It was hard for her to get out of cars. She had to use her hands to lift her feet over the door. Then she gripped each side of the doorframe and pulled herself out.

I didn't help her unless she was really tired. It only made her angry.

I turned off the engine and grabbed Willa's coffee cup. It was still half-full. I met her around the back of the car.

“I meant your new legs,” I said.

“I know what you meant.”

“So, are you?”

“Nervous?”

“Nervous, yeah.”

“No, Louis, I'm not nervous about my new legs.”

“So you're nervous about something else?”

Willa stopped walking. She turned her face up to the sky and closed her eyes behind her sunglasses.

“Why are you being so nosy?” she asked.

“I'm just trying to help.”

“I don't know. I guess I'm tired. I don't think I got enough sleep.”

In the waiting room, the receptionist asked her to fill out a new emergency contact form.

“I do one of these every time I'm here,” Willa argued. “Literally nothing has changed. It's still my brother. Somehow, in eighteen years, I've managed to not make any better friends.”

“It's policy, love,” the receptionist said. She knew Willa. She winked at me. “Six months between visits, you gotta fill out a new form.”

“How come you don't have iPads yet? I could do all this on an iPad. It's greener,” Willa complained.

“Okay, love, I'll be sure to give the doctors your feedback:
Willa Johar is tired of paper forms
. I've made a note of it here on my space pad.”

“It's not a space pad,” Willa mumbled, taking the clipboard the receptionist was wagging at her. “It's an iPad.” She grabbed a pen from a black plastic holder and sat down next to me.

“Hey, cranky,” I said.

“This is asinine,” she retorted. “Your phone number hasn't changed. Our address hasn't changed. This is a waste of paper.”

Definitely nervous. I watched Willa fill out the form, noting her severely shaking hands and shitty penmanship. At the bottom of the paper, she wrote,
Go green
. Then a nurse came and called her name and she dumped the clipboard on my lap. I set it on the chair next to me.

I watched her disappear behind the waiting room doors, and I wondered what they'd do with her old legs. I couldn't remember what had happened to the ones before these. Maybe they donated them to people who couldn't afford their own?

I pulled out my phone and opened up the TILTgroup app, which was terribly designed and had zero functionality besides checking times for different support groups and reading your messages (if you were lucky, and it didn't make your phone crash).

I had a message from Nib, a quick one about taking a road trip to find Wallace Green.

I pressed Reply.

Willa had asked me once why I liked talking to someone I'd never met. At first I hadn't known what to say, but it felt like I knew enough about Nib. She told me about her family. I told her all my secrets.

And it was safe too. I couldn't find her. She couldn't find me. She was just a screen name.

Nib—I'm sitting in the waiting room of the doctor's office, waiting for my sister to get her new legs. She got fitted a few months ago, but they take a long time to make. They're state of the art, supposedly, and they're setting us back an absurd amount of money. But my parents' store is doing really well, I guess. They were featured on that reality show about making clothes? I don't know. I
wasn't allowed to be in the episode because I “didn't promote the brand.” That's what my mom said. That's kind of harsh, but I also didn't really want to be on TV anyway. I left my coffee on the roof of my car and then drove away. That is my tragedy for the day. Do you ever feel like everything disappears? I am trying to find a way for my coffee's disappearance to inspire love and togetherness, but really I just feel irritated. Hope you're doing well. Your tragedy of the day is worse than mine, admittedly.

—Bucker

I finished the message and pressed Send, then locked my phone and slid it into my pocket. My sister's appointment wouldn't take long. They'd show her how to put the legs on and they'd make sure she could do it by herself a few times, and then we'd be on our way. My mom was supposed to take her, but then one of our biggest clients had some sort of Egyptian cotton emergency. Willa and I had been back and forth to the doctor's so many times over the years (leg fittings, leg adjustments, general leg health) that we were fine on our own.

I was tired. Willa's coffee was lukewarm, and she took it without sugar. I liked one packet, the brown kind. I had a sip of hers, but it was too bitter. I sat back and closed my eyes.

I didn't fall asleep but I drifted in and out of a weird place until my sister leaned over me and tapped me on the shoulder. She didn't look happy.

“Behold,” she said. “My new transfemoral prostheses.”

I looked at her legs. She lifted her skirt a little to oblige me.

“They look the same, really,” I said.

“They feel weird,” she said thoughtfully. She lifted one leg, then the other, testing them. She swayed a little. I grabbed her arm. “I'm supposed to use a walker for the first couple weeks.”

“Do you want me to get it? Is it still in my trunk?”

“LOL if you think I'm actually using a walker,” she said, rolling her eyes. “I'll be fine. Plus, so what if I fall? It's not like they can re-amputate my legs.”

“Well, I think they look nice.”

“You said they looked the same.”

“They look the same. I mean, they look newer.”

“They are that.”

I stood up. I put my hands on her shoulders. “Wait. Are you taller?”

She smiled and shrugged. “I don't know. Am I?”

“You are! They're taller!”

“Well, if I still had my real legs, they would grow too,” she said. She tried to turn around gracefully and almost fell sideways. I put my hand on her arm. “Did you give that form to the nurse and decide you liked the clipboard too much to part with it?”

“What?”

Willa picked the clipboard up off the chair. It was
empty. Its little clip was only clipping air. She showed it to me, shaking it to demonstrate its lack of paper.

“I didn't . . .” I hadn't touched it. I looked underneath the chair and behind the chair and then I said, “I have no idea. I didn't touch it.”

“Great. Now I have to fill out another fucking form or else face the wrath of the receptionist,” Willa said, rolling her eyes. “We might as well just find a forest somewhere and burn it or something. All this paper. It's depressing.” She took the clipboard to the front desk and filled out another form. She was a little shaky. I helped her out to the parking lot.

She'd described it once as walking on stilts. But they were stilts that were suction-cupped to your body. It was basically impossible to slip out of them, so if you fell, they fell with you. When she'd been fitted for her first pair, she used to worry about becoming detached. But the weight of her body, as she later explained it to me, kept them in place.

It just took a lot of work. You had to lift up one leg at a time. I could see her concentrating. And I knew when she got too tired to do it. She couldn't stand up all day. At school, she took wheelchair breaks. At home, she sat down a lot.

I think that was part of the reason she slept so much. She was almost always concentrating on not falling over. It must have been exhausting.

“I have to get used to you, like, three inches taller,” I told her. We were about the same height now.

“Two inches,” she said. I opened the passenger door for her, and she sat down heavily. She looked exhausted. I moved to lift her legs into the car, but she batted me away.

“I have a portable in the trunk,” I told her. “I'll get it out when we get to the store.” Portable wheelchairs weren't comfortable, though. There might be a better one at the store.

“Only our parents would make me work on brand-new legs,” she mumbled.

I shut her door and walked around to the driver's side. I watched her put her seat back. I knew she wished she could drive, but it was either new legs or hand controls for my Corolla. We couldn't afford both.

We'd tried it once, in the lot of an abandoned warehouse building (there was no shortage of abandoned buildings downtown). She'd only been at it for thirty seconds before she ran my car straight into a telephone pole. Luckily, we'd been going about five miles an hour and she'd happened to hit the exact spot my car had been backed into just a week before (by our probably legally blind neighbor who was ninety and definitely shouldn't have been parallel parking anymore).

My parents would flip if they knew I'd let Willa behind the wheel. But she kept asking and asking and finally I let her.

“Hey, Willa?” I said, ducking into the car.

“Yeah?”

“You know Wallace Green?”

Willa snorted. “Do I know Wallace Green? Do I live in the world? There are posters for that new robot movie fucking everywhere.”

The Day They Came
, starring Wallace Green and Saige Firth. Opening date: July 8. Robots gain sentience. Take over the world. Etc. Something about aliens.

“Yeah. You know that girl I talk to on TILT?”

“Yeah,” she said. “The pen girl.”

“Yeah.”

“What about Wallace Green?”

“Her mother died. The girl on TILT. And I guess she wrote her all these letters insisting that Wallace Green is her real father.”

Willa snorted again. “Okay. I mean, that's hysterical. Wallace Green, long-lost father. I mean, it's obviously not true. Her mother sounds crazy.”

“I don't know. I think he lives in Austin?”

“Again—why do I care?”

“I was just having a conversation with you. This is how conversations work. Each person takes turns saying things.”

Willa looked over at me, but I kept my eyes on the road. Willa was always difficult, but it seemed like there was something else going on now.

“I'm sorry,” she said.

“Whatever.”

The truth was—I wanted to talk about Austin because
that was where the University of Texas was, and that was where I was possibly going to school in one year and two months, give or take, on a full scholarship.

The thing is, I'm really, really good at tennis.

My dad took me on the courts for the first time when I was just three years old. I beat him at singles. He thought it was funny, so he invited a couple friends. I beat them at doubles. And then I kept playing, and I kept beating people. And when I got older, since our high school didn't have a tennis program, they shipped me to the Pacific Palisades, a much wealthier school district (more money = more tennis). I beat everyone in the Pacific Palisades, and then I worked my way up and down the coastline until I had beat everyone in Southern California. And then the University of Texas sent people to watch me play, and those people offered me a very early, very generous, very prestigious scholarship to come and play for their NCAA Division I tennis team.

And the campus was in Austin.

And Wallace Green was in Austin.

And that couldn't help but feel like some sort of divine gift. Or, at least, a pretty cool coincidence.

I had no idea what to do.

Aside from not even knowing whether I'd be able to handle the pressures of going away for school, I was also worried about my parents.

On the one hand, they'd be thrilled.

We weren't poor by any means, but we weren't exactly swimming in money. It was expensive to raise a daughter with no legs, and it was expensive to live in downtown LA, and it was expensive to fly all the way around the world looking for new fabric. And the store was doing well (
Project Runway
? Is that a thing? It had been on TV, I don't know), but sending two kids to college in the same year was really stressing my parents out. I'd heard them talking about it.

So a full scholarship—they'd be overjoyed.

But a full scholarship in Texas—I wasn't so sure.

My mother didn't even like it when I went to the Pacific Palisades by myself, and that was thirty minutes away (or, like, twelve hours, depending on traffic). I couldn't imagine what she'd say if I told her I wanted to go to school in Texas.

And then there was Willa.

I'd never been away from her before.

People talked about twins being spiritually connected or whatever, and sometimes it was bullshit but other times it was true.

Like when Willa fell off the fire escape and lost her legs, I could feel it.

I could feel a tickle in my thighs as the bone saw cut her legs away. My knees got numb and my toes cramped up and I couldn't walk. For one full hour, I sat in the waiting room and couldn't stand. I lost the feeling in my feet. I could tell the exact moment they brought bone saw to
bone. I knew when it was over. I could feel them stitching her up. It might as well have been me.