The Lost & Found (8 page)

F
rances Hephaestus Jameson had dark hair and dark eyes and pale skin. She wasn't quick to smile but when she did, it changed her entire face. Not for the better or worse. Just changed. Like a different person.

Her Facebook was bare. Just twenty or so photos of her, most tagged with her cousin, Arrow Pickering. She'd told me about Arrow.

Take Insane Liberating Trustfalls
, she had said.

So I sent her a friend request.

And a few minutes later, she accepted.

Then she sent me a private message that said,

Bucker?

I wrote her back:

   
At your service.

Louis Johar. Louis is a nice name. You look nice. Our last names both start with J. And you're really eighteen! Unless you have created a truly elaborate fake profile with many fake friends and fake photographs. Either way, I would be impressed!

   
We can't rule it out.

I'm glad to see your face. Is that weird?

   
It's not weird. I'm glad to see your face too.

I'm going to my mother's wake tomorrow. And then they're burying her right after. Closed casket. Just family.

   
I wish I could be there with you.

I really did; I wasn't just saying it. I didn't have many friends besides my sister because so much of my after-school time was spent carting myself to and from the Pacific Palisades. So much of my middle school and high
school life had been given up for tennis. And for being Willa's private chauffeur.

I wasn't complaining. My schedule just didn't lend itself to making friends. That had never been a priority either. I wasn't secretly bitter about it. I liked being by myself.

But Nib—Frances—was a friend. I told her everything. I remembered the first message she had ever sent me, after one of my very first group sessions on TILT.

Are you really my age or are you lying? Are your parents making you do this too?

I had written back:

   
Yes and yes.

It had all started from there.

A new message popped up on Facebook.

I wish you could be here too. I don't have many friends.

   
I don't have many friends either.

You have your sister.

   
You have your cousin.

   
I guess only our family members will hang out with us. I think we might be losers, Louis.

Let it be. We don't need 'em.

   
I have to go. Movie night with Arrow. Text me, if you want to.

And she left her phone number. A 410 area code.

I saved it under
Frances.

Then I googled the name Hephaestus, and found out he was a Greek god, the son of Zeus and Hera. So I read about Greek mythology for an hour and then I went to see if Willa felt like going to the bookstore.

“The bookstore?” she said. She was watching TV, sans prostheses, her skirt pulled up on her thighs to expose where her legs ended. She had the window fan blaring and a Ziploc bag full of ice positioned on the back of her neck.

“What do you know about Greek mythology?” I asked her.

“Not much. I mean, Zeus and whatever. Why?”

“She told me her name.”

“Who?”

“That girl I talk to.”

“Stabbing girl?”

“Well, technically I think she would be
stabbed
girl.”

“That's a big step,” she said, winking.

“Don't wink.”

“I didn't. So what is it?”

“What's what?”

“Her
name
, Louis.”

“Frances Hephaestus Jameson.”

“She sounds like a weirdo.”

“Hephaestus is the Greek god of metalworking. Do you want to go to the bookstore or not?”

“I guess so. Can you push me? Can we get some ice cream?”

“You don't want to walk?”

“I'm tired, Louis. The bookstore is four blocks away. It's hot out. Please push me.”

“It's not that hot,” I said, but what I meant was it wasn't really that hotter than it always was. It was always boiling downtown. So yeah, it was hot, but I could tell I wasn't going to get her to come with me unless I pushed her. I went to get her wheelchair and put it next to the couch. She transferred herself with all the grace of nine years of practice (not that much grace, actually). Then she smoothed her skirt and pulled her hair up into a ponytail and threw the bag of ice on the coffee table (where my mother would find it later and scream about condensation and wood damage for hours) and gestured toward the front door.

We lived in a nice apartment. There were three big bedrooms and a big living room and a big kitchen and lots of sunlight. We probably wouldn't have been able to afford it
now, but my parents had bought it during a housing slump before we were born. They were always planning ahead. Now it was worth about six times what they'd paid for it. The neighborhood had only gotten better over the years. It was, as my father often reminded my mother (because it was his idea), the best investment they'd ever made.

I rolled Willa out the front door and to the elevator. We lived on the sixth floor. There was nothing above us except a garden roof. No swimming pool. We might have been the only midrise in Los Angeles without one, but I didn't like swimming and Willa had resigned herself to a body-of-water-less life. On occasion I could convince her to bob around in an inner tube, but she didn't like getting wet and we were fair, for half-Indian kids, and the water made her sunburn too quickly.

Willa hit the call button for the elevator, and it whirred to life. The building used to have an actual doorman and an actual elevator man, but they'd both been gone for about a decade. I'd never understood the need for elevator help, anyway.

When the door opened, I pushed Willa inside. She had her phone in her lap, so I reached over her and pressed the button for the lobby. I was thinking about Frances, about why she'd decided to reveal her identity now. About how saying it that way made her seem like a superhero. Revealing her identity.

“Aw, she's cute,” Willa said.

I leaned over her shoulder and tried to grab her phone away. She was on Frances's Facebook profile, scrolling through her photos.

“Hands off!” she said. “You're the one who told me her name. What did you think I was going to do?”

“Well, you could have asked. I would have showed you.”

“I'm showing myself.”

She continued to scroll through the photos, pausing on certain ones to zoom in or read the comments.

“Who's this?” she asked, stopping on a photo of Frances and Arrow. The elevator dinged and stopped and the doors opened to the lobby, a 1920s architectural gem (so said both my father and that issue of
Architectural Magazine
).

“Arrow. Her cousin.”

“Hmm. She's cute too.” She clicked her phone off and slid it into her pocket. “They're both cute. Frances is really cute. I like her.”

“I'm glad I have your approval.”

“
You
don't have my approval,
she
has my approval. Why did she tell you her name now, anyway? Because her mom died?”

“I guess so. I think she's thinking about doing something. Like finding that movie star I told you about.”

“Wallace Green? Because her mom said that's her father?”

“That's what she said.”

“Well, fuck. I hope she finds him. Everybody deserves to know who their real parents are. I would freak if Mom
or Dad pulled something like that. Family shouldn't lie to family.”

There was something in the way she said it. But I was probably being paranoid.

I hadn't told anybody about the University of Texas's offer. But I wasn't
lying
. I was omitting.

Willa pushed the lobby doors open, and I maneuvered the chair out of the building. It was seven o'clock and still boiling and bright out. I headed down Hope Street in the direction of our local bookstore. Mom and Dad made a big deal out of shopping local because they were local, and local business paid the bills.

“What do you need, anyway?” Willa asked. “At the bookstore?”

“I thought I'd get a book on mythology.”

“Ohh,” Willa said, a truly annoying singsong quality to her voice. “Doesn't this girl live on the other side of the country?”

“
Frances
lives in Maryland, yes. But I'm not reading this book for her.”

“You're not reading this book because Hephaestus is the Greek god of metalworking? You just randomly happened to become interested in mythology after Frances told you her name? Didn't I say family doesn't lie to family?”

We were passing in front of Sally's Diner. I still hadn't given Benson his fourteen dollars, but I had the money now. I steered Willa to the entrance.

“Hey!” she said. “What are you doing?”

“I need to give something to Benson. You can wait outside.”

“Well, I don't care. I don't care what I do. You can bring me in or I can wait out here, I don't care.”

I stopped her chair outside the entrance and then walked around to face her. “Whatever happened to family not lying to family?”

“Oh, ha-ha,” she said.

I went inside. Benson brightened, looked behind me, dimmed.

“Here,” I said, handing him my debit card. “She's outside. I have to use the bathroom, anyway.”

I spent a long time in the bathroom. I pulled my phone out in front of the wall of mirrors and I went to my contacts to find Frances's number. I wanted to text her, to be able to say I had contacted her in another way. Because each new way—TILTgroup, Facebook—seemed important. I wanted to find her in every single possible way. I wanted to invent new profiles in new social media sites so I could contact her in a hundred different ways. All different versions of myself contacting different versions of her. I just wanted her to know—
I am thinking of you
. That's what I would text her.

I am thinking of you
.

But she wasn't in my contacts. Hadn't I saved her number?

But I knew I had—I knew I'd saved it. I'd written her number and her address into my phone (
In case you want to mail me something
, she'd wrote, sticking a little smiley face on the end, and I'd read everything over to myself again and again, searching Easton, Maryland, and pulling up maps that showed a town on the water, a small town surrounded by blue). I'd put her into my phone but she wasn't there, and I couldn't help but feel like a tiny part of her was slipping away from me, running through my fingers as I tried to grab on to whatever I could. A small burst of panic even as another voice in my head picked up and told me to relax, you could always find her again. You could always ask her again.

So I opened Facebook and I opened my messages and there was her name, but all the messages were blank. Or else they wouldn't load? But that was where she gave me her phone number, and now I didn't have it. And all the things I lost, they didn't make any sense. I mean, they were as important as Frances's phone number or as unimportant as a matchbox car. There was no rhyme or reason.

I wrote her a message.

I put your number into my phone and now it's gone. I know you'll understand; I know you are the only person who could ever understand. Even though my dad saw it with his own eyes, that doesn't make him understand. I just wanted you to know that I am thinking of you, that I
think about you all the time, that I hope you're well. That I wish I could be there tomorrow and I wish I could meet you. I've locked myself in a diner bathroom. I'm pretty sure that guy I told you about really does have a crush on Willa. I'm scared to come out. I wanted to text you but your number is gone. If you give it to me again, I promise I won't lose it. I will write it on my skin in ink.

I sent it before I reread it. She wrote me back quickly.

Be careful: ink stains skin. I'm thinking of you too. I'm thinking of doing something stupid.

She gave me her number again, and I texted her before I could lose my nerve.

   
Me too.

M
y mother's wake was closed casket and so I couldn't even really be sure that she was in there. It was a very small ceremony, just Arrow and my grandparents and my aunt and uncle. The six of us. We coupled up. I did not make Arrow wear black. But she insisted on painting her nails a dark, moody purple, and she kept her arm around me as the priest spoke.

Which was funny, really, because none of us were overly religious. My aunt was the only one who went to church. My grandparents could never be bothered and had never so much as asked me if I wanted to go. If I had become curious about it, I'm sure they would have handed me off
to Aunt Florence. She knew all the prayers, and she kept a rosary wrapped around her wrists now. It looked more like a pair of handcuffs than a religious symbol.

It did not escape me how perfectly absurd the whole thing was.

It did not escape me that the four adults in my life—grandmother, grandfather, aunt, uncle—had all gotten together five years ago and decided not to tell me my mother had been committed to an insane asylum. I grew up thinking my mother had moved to Florida. I grew up thinking there was a black widow spider that sometimes nested in our mailbox. I learned to do without the extravagant wasting of money I had been so accustomed to. I moved into my grandparents' house, and they doted on me appropriately but reservedly. I never wanted for anything.

I wondered if my father—Frances the original—knew my mother was dead. I wondered if he'd read about it in the newspaper. And then I wondered if it had even been in the newspaper, and then I wondered if my father even read the newspaper, and then I wondered if maybe my father wasn't dead too. Who was to say? Nobody had heard from him in years and years and years.

The wake was private, and when it was over we all trudged over to the cemetery and they put my mother's coffin into the ground.

Arrow took my hand. My aunt and my grandmother
held each other and cried. Grandpa Dick and Uncle Irvine stayed to one side.

“Are you okay?” Arrow whispered. We were far enough away from the others that no one could hear us.

“I want to find my father,” I said.

“Why, so he can find another office tool to stick into you? No way,” she hissed.

“Not him. I mean, I want to find Wallace Green. You'll go with me, right?”

“I already said I would.” She paused. “Are you sure you want to do this?”

“Yeah. But, I mean, it's probably not even going to happen. Can you imagine what Grandpa and Grandma are going to say?”

“Are you kidding me? This is the absolute perfect time to ask them. They lied to you for
five years
. They're practically dying for you to ask them for a favor, just so they can say yes.”

“I know they're not going to say yes.”

“They absolutely are. Twenty bucks.”

“Fine,” I said. We shook hands.

I knew my grandparents were going to freak out just like I knew I had to do it anyway. Even if we didn't end up meeting Wallace Green, there was something to be said about the physical journey. It was sixteen hundred miles from Maryland to Austin. I wanted to feel each one. I wanted to watch out the window as they slipped away.

I had already made up my mind. I had already practiced the conversation I was going to have with my grandparents. I had already started packing.

I wanted to find Wallace Green.

And I wanted to meet Louis.

We had talked for hours last night.

Well, first we had texted for hours and then he had said:

   
My fingers are killing me. Can I call you?

And my heart had stopped for a minute and I started panicking a little because he had been so unknown to me for so many years and now he was known, I knew his name, I had seen pictures of him and his sister (who was an absurdly beautiful, unearthly creature with a perpetual scowl on her face), I had texted him on a phone, I knew his phone number. And now he wanted to hear my voice? I have a terrible voice. Grandma Doris always said I talked out of the back of my nose (my grandparents were honest about everything except where my mother had been for the past five years and what kind of arachnids lived in our mailbox).

I was terrified.

But my fingers typed

   
Yes, call me.

before my brain could stop them.

My fingers had betrayed me.

Or, I don't know, maybe they had done me a favor.

Because Louis had a really, really nice voice.

My phone buzzed in my hands, and I answered it with a
hello
that I hoped wasn't too eager or too uninterested. I was going for the perfect blend of each. The perfect hello.

“Frances? Wow. Frances? This is weird.”

I held the phone so tightly in my hand that my fingers hurt. But I didn't care. I only cared about how I could hear him breathe, almost a little out of breath, like maybe he was as nervous as I was. Like maybe his heart was beating just as fast.

“Hi. Louis. This is weird.”

“I can't believe I'm finally . . .”

“I know.”

“You sound exactly like I thought you'd sound.”

“Really? Not too nasally?”

“Not too nasally.”

“You sound really nice too. Your voice is deep, but not too deep.”

And it was true—he sounded exactly like I thought he would sound, quiet and soft-spoken and a little grumbly and
there
. He was
there
, really, on the other end of the line. We were connected through some series of invisible wavelengths and wires and a satellite beaming us closer. We were closer than we had ever been, and it only made me want more.

“Good. Well, hi. It's nice to talk to you,” he said.

“It's nice to talk to you too. Hi.”

“Hi.”

“Are we going to do this?”

“I think we're going to do this. Right? I think we have to do this.”

I'd stayed up too late and now I was tired. My eyes were red and I felt exhausted, like I hadn't slept since my grandparents had pushed a stack of letters at me and told me to start grieving.

A pair of cemetery employees was filling up my mother's grave with dirt. We were supposed to have left by now, but we stayed behind. Just Grandpa and Grandma and me. Aunt Florence and Uncle Irvine had taken Arrow home, against her will, to give us a minute.

“I don't know if I can forgive you,” I said.

“We love you more than anybody in the world,” Grandma Doris said.

“You shouldn't love me more than Arrow. You should love us equally.”

“We do love you equally. Our two granddaughters,” Grandma clarified. “But we helped raised you, sweetheart. So forgive us for being a little attached.”

“Your mother was a great woman,” Grandpa Dick said. He was looking up at the sky, getting teary-eyed in the way that only older men get teary-eyed: with a sense of foreboding and like the end of his life was so imminent and unavoidable.

“Please don't cry,” I whispered.

“We wanted you to remember her like a great woman, and not like the sufferer of a terrible disease,” he continued.

“That was very poetic,” Grandma said. She pulled a handkerchief out of her pocket. I checked, but it wasn't Hank Whitney's. I guess more people than I realized still used handkerchiefs. She dabbed at the corners of her eyes with it and then blew her nose.

“We just thought we had more time. We never would have guessed. . . . It was a tragedy,” he added.

“I was old enough to know the truth,” I said. “You should have told me the truth.”

“One day you'll understand,” Grandpa said.

“We'll do anything to make it up to you,” Grandma said.

That was the magic phrase. That was what I'd been waiting for.

“I actually have something in mind,” I said.

Arrow came over that night. She held her hand out in front of her, unspeaking. I placed a twenty-dollar bill into it.

We left the next day.