The Lost Read online

  “I don’t like them because they bite,” she says.

  “Your reason is better.”

  We reach the porch. Some of the slats in the floor are broken, but overall it seems solid enough. Stacks of old moldy letters, catalogs, and magazines lean against the wall of the house, and cobwebs encase two rocking chairs. I can clean them easily, ditch the old mail, sweep the floor, make it livable.

  The front door swings in the breeze, slapping against the wall. It looks to have a lock and dead bolt, though they won’t do much good since the window in the door is missing. Also, there are other broken windows around the house. We could board them up, I think. Prevent unwanted visitors.

  Claire skips inside as if this place is already home. I wonder what on earth I’m thinking, playing house with a little girl, thinking of home improvements as if I mean to stay for longer than a day. But it might be longer, and the motel won’t take me, the car is uncomfortable, and there are houses to spare. Besides, Claire is happy. I tell myself that it’s okay to be practical, that I’m not running away by staying, that I do want to go home as soon as I can, that Mom is most likely perfectly fine and her stomachaches aren’t part of a relapse, or worse. I don’t need to hide from the truth.

  I follow Claire inside. The entryway has peeling wallpaper with roses so tiny and dirty that they look like bugs. A grimy mirror hangs on one wall. Coat hooks are beside it, and one raincoat hangs on a hook. To the left off the hallway is the kitchen. Claire has disappeared into another room, but in the kitchen, Peter is investigating its cabinets. “Pasta!” He picks up a box of spaghetti and shakes it. Moths fly out the top of the box. He puts it back. “Never mind.”

  “Is there electricity?” I ask, crossing to the refrigerator. I open it, and a blast of sour milk and the reek of rotted vegetables washes over me, but so does cool air. I shut it. “Running water?”

  He tests the sink. It gurgles at first, and then a gush of rust-colored water sprays out. The pipes haven’t been used for a while, but I bet it will run clear soon.

  “How’s this possible?” I ask. “I don’t remember any power lines. All the houses look just plopped in the desert. And besides, no one is here to pay the bills.”

  “People lose power all the time,” Peter says. “And water is wasted every day.”

  “Huh,” I say. “Convenient.”

  Peter smiles a knowing smile.

  I study him for a moment, the Finder, Little Red Riding Hood’s wolf, Sisyphus, whoever he is. “You led us to this house on purpose. You knew it had this.” I wave my hands at the sink with running water and the functional fridge.

  He bows, sweeping his trench coat behind him. It’s an elegant, archaic, and practiced bow. “I am your guardian angel, your fairy godfather, and your knight in shining armor.”

  “Kind of,” I say. And he kind of is. He’s my angel in a trench coat, first saving me from the dust storm and now this. It helps that he’s drop-dead gorgeous, exactly the type I would have picked out of a crowd from the wild-boy smile to the artist-quality tattoos—exactly the type I swore never to date again. Luckily, I’m not looking to date anyone.

  He holds out his hand. “Come see the rest of the house. You’ll like it.”

  I take his hand and let him guide me into the living room. A picture window (sadly broken, a quarter of the glass gone) with a window seat opens onto a view of the desert. Two once-white couches lie under a sheet of dust. Books and cobwebs fill the shelves. The fireplace is full of ash. It’s as if the old occupants simply left. It’s extraordinary that the place hasn’t been found by any scavengers or occupied by wildlife, especially with the broken windows.

  He leads me into a dining room with a wide table and a cobweb-covered chandelier. A tiny pink bathroom is off the side of the front hall, and a second full bathroom with stenciled birds on the wall is between two bedrooms. One bedroom, the master, has a queen-size bed and a wide dresser. The second bedroom has a twin bed, a desk, and a bookshelf. Claire is in the second bedroom. She has a look on her face that is pure wonder, and she is turning in a slow circle to see every inch of the room. “Mine?” she asks.

  “Yours,” I say.

  She beams at me.

  “Come upstairs,” Peter says. His hand feels warm and soft and real in mine, even though all of this is impossible, including him. He tugs me gently out of the bedrooms and toward the stairs. The stairs creak as we climb them, and I notice pictures on the wall. Dust and grime have obscured the faces of the people, but I think it’s a family. Babies. Grandparents. Brides and grooms. I wonder where they are now, who they were, why they lost this house.

  Upstairs...it’s perfect.

  A few birds startle in the peak of the cathedral roof. They dart out the open window. Sunlight streams inside and over the hardwood floors and white walls. It’s a single open room, a studio. There are no easels or paints or pottery wheel, but there could be and should be. It’s exactly what I’d described I wanted.

  In the center of the attic room, there’s a stuffed bunny. It’s a ragged bunny with one eye. Its ear is matted from a toddler dragging it everywhere. I recognize it instantly. Mr. Rabbit, my favorite stuffie from preschool. I’d lost it years ago.

  I let go of Peter’s hand as if it’s burned me. “Tell me how you knew,” I say. “You had no time to find this house between when Claire brought me to you and now. You didn’t know I’d come to you or that I’d need a place to stay. I only just now told you about the studio. And I never mentioned Mr. Rabbit.”

  He’s wearing an enigmatic smile again, and I want to slap it off his face.

  “You set me up,” I say. “This was all...a trap. Somehow. I don’t know how. You sent Claire to find me, to bring me to you. You led me here... Why?”

  “I didn’t.” His voice is serious. He’s dropped the playful veneer that he wears with Claire. I shiver. “But I like that you’re suspicious. It will serve you well here.”

  “Then explain.” I want to believe it’s a coincidence, that he’s my savior, that I’ll be safe here, that I can trust him and Claire, that it will be okay, that I will find whatever I lost and find my way home. But this...

  “I can’t.” His dark eyes bore into mine—beautiful, dangerous.

  “Can’t or won’t?”

  “Both.” He walks to the wide-open window, the one the birds swooped out of. “Besides, you don’t really want to know how the magician does his tricks. It will ruin the show.” He grins, and then he leaps out the window.

  I race to the window and lean out.

  The desert is empty, and the Finder is gone.

  Chapter Seven

  I circle the stuffed rabbit. The fur around his neck is worn so thin that it’s a net stretched over cotton. His head is flopped to the side. His tail is a matted gray tuft. He looks like the toy I remember.

  Which is impossible, of course.

  I lost Mr. Rabbit at the start of college, either in packing or unpacking. In a fit of maturity, I proclaimed it a sign that I was moving on, outgrowing my childhood talismans. Of course, I cried after Mom drove away, and I wished I hadn’t lost him.

  And now he’s found.

  Mr. Rabbit watches me with his one cracked eye. As a teen, I tossed him against the ceiling one too many times, and his left eye shattered into smooth shards that catch the light from the window so that he looks as if he’s winking. Only a few threads hold the eye on. He lost the right eye in the washing machine. Maybe his lost eye is here somewhere, too.

  I want to laugh. I clamp my teeth together so that I won’t. If I laugh, I’ll cry. And I don’t want to cry. I squat in front of the rabbit. My heart thumps fast inside my ribs, as if my old toy is a grenade. “Are you what I lost?”

  He doesn’t speak, which disappoints me. Says something about the kind of day I’m having that I expect this dirty
lump of cotton to spew out answers, or at least a few prophetic riddles in rhyme. But he’s silent. Everything is as silent as dust. I don’t hear wind or birds through the open window. I continue to talk into the silence. “Even if you were, I’d need the Missing Man to send me home, right?” Sitting, I wrap my arms around my knees and squeeze. I feel as if I’m five years old again, pouring out my fears to my scruffy, germ-ridden, favorite toy. “So I’m supposed to believe it’s all true. Every crazy thing that every crazy person said to me today. The motel clerk selling suitcases. The waitress in the diner with the broken phone. The man looking for his lucky penny... Did he really sail here? And Peter? Who is he? What is he? Can I trust him?”

  He still doesn’t answer.

  He’s in a patch of sunlight that’s pouring in the open window. It’s low angled so his shadow streaks behind him across the wood floor. Low angled light means the sun will set soon, and then it will be dark. I think of the broken windows downstairs and wonder if it’s safe to sleep here. Not that I have much choice.

  “You know this is completely fucked,” I tell the rabbit.

  Claire pipes up. “That’s not a nice word.”

  I jump to my feet. I hadn’t heard her come up the stairs, but here she is, staring at me with wide, round eyes as innocent as a doll. She’s not holding her bears. Or her knife.

  “Just talking to Mr. Rabbit,” I say. “He’s heard that kind of language before. He knows not to repeat it in public.”

  Claire nods as if this makes perfect sense.

  Leaving the rabbit, I cross to the window. The sun is fat and low, and the reddish shadows make the clumps of brush and cacti look burnt. I shut the window. Lock it. Don’t feel safer. “Do you think we’re safe here?”

  “Are you asking me or Mr. Rabbit?” Claire asks politely.

  “Mr. Rabbit has a limited understanding of the concept of safety. Unless someone comes at him with scissors, he’s unfazed. Plus, he’s a rabbit of few words.”

  Claire stands next to me, looking out the window at the endless sienna desert and the sunset-rose-wine-stained sky. She slips her small hand into mine. The bones in her hand feel so fragile, but she has calluses on her palm. I wonder exactly how much she’s practiced with that knife. “Most people don’t leave town,” she tells me, “especially not at night when you can’t see where the dark stops and the void begins. So we should be okay so long as we don’t turn on the lights. You can see lights from a distance.” She doesn’t sound like a kid. She sounds more like a soldier, assessing the situation.

  I find that oddly comforting.

  I nod as if it’s perfectly normal to spend the night somewhere you fear to turn on the lights. No night-light for me. “Just in case, I want to board up the broken windows downstairs, the one in the front door and any others with holes large enough to crawl through.”

  “Okay.” Releasing my hand, Claire pivots and traipses downstairs without any further questions or conversation. Following her, I leave the stuffed rabbit in the patch of dying sun.

  Claire is out the front door without pause. She scrambles onto the junk pile as if she’s part-cat, scaling the side with ease. But I hesitate on the porch. A heap like that could hide rattlesnakes. Or poisonous spiders. Or rabid wildebeests that like to rend the flesh of the recently lost. Certainly there are sharp rusted objects. But none of that stops Claire from scurrying over a broken tricycle, a dozen twisted coat hangers, an old microwave, and mildew-coated cardboard boxes that could hold anything from books to bandicoots.

  As Claire climbs to the top of the heap, she disturbs a desk drawer with her foot, and paper clips tumble out in a metallic waterfall. They spill onto the ground, which is already littered with buttons and pennies and nails. It sounds like rain.

  At the top, Claire lifts up a stop sign. It’s nearly as tall as she is, and she wobbles as she holds it. “How’s this?”

  I want to yell at her to duck down. Anyone could see her, perched on top of the pile. But I don’t. I could startle her, and she could fall. Or someone unfriendly could hear my yell. Besides, she wasn’t the one who’d attracted the pissed-off mob. It’s me they want. Then again, they saw her rescue me... Keeping as low as possible, I creep up the side of the pile and take the sign. She scrambles off the heap past me and holds the front door open as I carry the sign inside. I prop the sign against the living room couch and study the window. I think it’s been broken for a while. Dust and debris have blown in, and the floor feels like a beach after a storm. “We’ll need to nail it over the window.” I hadn’t thought about the mechanics of boarding up the windows. It’s not something I have experience with doing. I need tools...

  “Be right back.” Claire scampers outside again. Examining my sign, I wonder if there’s a street somewhere experiencing terrible accidents due to the lack of a stop sign. Before I can decide whether or not this is something I need to feel guilty about, she returns with an armful of tools—hammers, wrenches, clamps, an assortment of nails and screws and washers, and a car jack. She dumps them on the couch.

  “That was quick.”

  She beams at me as I select a hammer and a few nails. “People lose tools a lot. Much harder to find other things. Like cupcakes. No one ever loses cupcakes. I miss them.” Her smile fades. “We used to have cupcakes on our birthdays. Our neighbor Mrs. Malloy baked them. She put sprinkles on top. But she died, and I saw her sprinkles in the trash.”

  A howl rips through the air.

  I feel every hair on my arms stand up. My fingers tighten around the hammer. Claire, perched on the arm of the sofa, swings her legs back and forth, seemingly unconcerned. “You sometimes find lost cookies. People drop those behind couches and stuff. And I’ve found tons of French fries. But not cupcakes. Or ice cream.”

  “Did you hear that?” I ask. It lingers in the wind, the howl stretching out like the tail of a comet, fracturing and eventually dispersing.

  “It can’t hurt us,” Claire says. She considers her statement, her face screwed up as if she’s making intense calculations. “At least, it can’t after we seal the windows.”

  “Right.” I lift the sign up and examine it. It has holes where it was bolted to its post. I position the holes over the window frame and nail it on, using washers to widen the size of the nail head, which makes me feel clever. The sign covers about a third of the bay window and nearly all of the section without glass. I face the “Stop” side out, in case any of the predators can read. The human ones can, I think. “Maybe we should board up all the windows.”

  Claire shakes her head. “Then we can’t see them coming.”

  Her statement makes me think of a half-dozen zombie movies, which is not comforting. “You need to work on your bedside manner.”

  “What?”

  “Never mind.” Continuing to hammer, I try not to focus on how this isn’t where I’m meant to be, how I should be home with Mom in our familiar apartment with its functional window locks, and how surreal and wrong all of this feels to the point where I wonder if I am having some highly vivid nightmare brought on by too much kung pao chicken. But I’ve never had a nightmare like this.

  I have nightmares about Mom. In them, she’s in the hospital again with tubes stuck in her and a monitor counting her heartbeat as if it’s counting down to zero. Standing beside her, I feel a choking weight in my throat, but I can’t scream or cry or speak.

  The thing that’s most horrifying and sad about my nightmares is that they’re banal, like scenes from a bad TV movie, fraught with melodramatic sadness and entirely generic. There’s nothing truly Mom in them. Lying in the crisp white bed, she’s in a washed-out pale blue hospital gown, and all the color is faded from her face and hair and eyes. On the windowsill there’s a row of bland sympathy cards beside a vase of plasticlike calla lilies. In real life, she hates phony cards and fake flowers. She loves to grow her own flowers: fat peoni
es that droop on their stems, roses that are riddled with holes from bugs, daffodils that shrivel within a week. When she moved into my apartment, she could only bring a fraction of her plants, but still her flowers have overrun the apartment and the tiny corner of the yard that the landlord granted us. She also loves handwritten notes. She keeps stationery, rich thick ivory paper, that she fills with her swooping handwriting any time a card is called for. Thinking about her ridiculous notes makes my throat constrict. I swallow hard and follow Claire outside again.

  Around us, the light is failing fast. The sky is auburn-colored in the west and dusty dark blue in the east. Everything is beginning to look gray and muted, as if the sinking sun is siphoning the colors out of the world as it sets. I pull the desk drawer, the one that held the paper clips, off the junk pile, and I cart it inside to cover the bottom half of the kitchen window.

  As I nail the drawer over the missing window panes, I wonder what Mom is doing right now. She’s most likely home, cooking herself dinner, worrying about me, with the TV a low-level hum in the background so that there are other voices in the apartment. She’ll be shredding fresh basil to top a tomato. She’ll have the window open over the sink (rather than nailed shut with a desk drawer), and her herb collection on the sill would be swaying in the breeze. She has a healthy collection of basil and sage and rosemary, due to the fact she always remembers to water her plants. I’d thrown out my last Christmas cactus—the only plant I was responsible for—because it was a desiccated husk. I wonder what she’d think of where I am, of this house, of Lost, of Claire, of Peter. I’ll tell her about it when I’m home, I promise myself. Maybe it will distract her from thinking about what a horrible person I am for leaving in the first place.

  We have one window left that I want to cover, the one in the door. It isn’t large, and we find a sign from a deli to cover it. I hammer it on, driving a nail through a painted pickle. It feels satisfying to bash the nails as hard as I can.

  “I’m hungry,” Claire announces.