The Department of Lost & Found (20 page)

I woke up to a light knock on my door.

“Carol, come in,” I muttered under my breath. But the knock-ing continued. I mustered some more strength and reached for the pack of gum on my nightstand to beat back my dry mouth. “It’s
open.
I’m
awake
. Come in.”

I heard the hinges on the door creak, and without looking up, held out my arm for her to take my blood pressure and draw whatever blood she felt like drawing this time. I was practically a human pincushion, why stop now?

“Natalie,” a voice said, a voice that shot my nerves clear to the sky.

I looked up, and it wasn’t Carol at all.

It was Jake. And he was back.

R o u n d F i v e

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January

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f o u r t e e n

D
ear Diary,

I’m so glad that I threw you into my bag at the
last minute when packing for surgery. Who’ d have
known that a stupid diary—and I mean no disrespect by that,
but really, when I started out with this writing project, I sort of
figured that diaries are for eight-year-olds and women who
watch too much
Oprah
—but who’ d have thought that a diary
would become such a security blanket?

It turns out that I didn’t have to track down Jake, the next one
on my list. Maybe the only one who mattered. He found me.

You know how it’s every girl’s nightmare to run into an ex
when she’s just heading back from kickboxing class or on her way
home from a facial when her face resembles the pepperoni pizza
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from Famous Ray’s? Wel , clearly, I can one-up them. Imagine
running into your ex—and clearly, that’s a very loose phrase,
since I was quite obviously running nowhere—after just having
lost both breasts and enduring surgery that left you with breath
no better than a fish’s and skin as pasty as raw dough. Except
that I didn’t have to imagine it because that’s exactly what
happened.

Diary, I don’t have much energy to write—in fact, things
that have never throbbed before in my life are presently throbbing
as if they’re dancing to an electronic orchestra—but just wanted
to update you.

So I’ ll just say this: I hoped and I wished and I would have
done just about anything to bring Jake back to me. Funny that I
had to go and get cancer to bring him home.

T H A N K GO D I ’M wearing my wig
. That was literally my first thought. Thank God I’m wearing my wig because if Jake saw me bald, I don’t know what the hell I would do. When you’ve just undergone surgery, surgery that both saved your life and took something from it, and your ex-boyfriend, feasibly the only man you’ve ever truly, organically loved, walks back into the room, into your life, one would think that your first thought would not be about your hair covering. And yet, there it was.

“Natalie,” he had said, and I looked up, expecting Carol with her various needles and gauze.

“Jake,” I said back, my hand instinctively rising to my hair, as if I were holding it in place. I opened my mouth to speak again but found myself entirely out of words.

“Oh my God,” he said, moving toward my bed. “Why didn’t you call me?”

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I looked away. “How did you find out?”

“Your mom. She e-mailed me from Australia. She found an Internet café and wrote with the news. I think she didn’t want you to be alone.”

Figures,
I thought. There goes my mom again, alpha dog to the rescue. My parents, needless to say (and I say that this is needless because when you’re diagnosed with Stage III breast cancer and your mother takes the time to track down your ex, it’s pretty obvious how she feels about him), adored Jake. He was, as my mother once put it after he and I had spent a weekend in Bryn Mawr, “the perfect antidote to you.” I sulked for an hour after her comment, but when I told her I was more than a bit insulted, she just shushed me and said that I misunderstood. “What I mean, darling, is that you are each other’s perfect complements. He knows how to handle you. No one else has ever done that,” and then she breezed into the dining room to offer him a scotch.

“I came straight from the airport,” Jake said, as he hovered near the wall and stared at me in the hospital bed. Then I noticed his suitcase by the small foyer that led to the door.

“You shouldn’t have. I certainly didn’t mean to inconvenience you.” After all this time, it was still the same thing: Jake’s life was always in flight; I needed him on the ground.

He shook his head. “Don’t be ridiculous. It worked out well: We’d just finished opening for Dave Matthews, and I’d planned to head back anyway.” He paused and his voice grew soft. “But I would have come here regardless, whenever, if you’d just called me. I would have left the tour, done whatever you needed. But I didn’t know.”

“I didn’t expect you to know,” I said flatly.

“But I would have liked to.” He dug his hands into the pockets of his perfectly worn jeans.

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“That stopped being your concern approximately two years ago.”

After we’d been together for seven months, the Misbees got their big break. He called me at the office on a Tuesday, his voice at a near fever pitch. “They’re gonna sign us!” he screamed.

“They’re fucking going to sign us!”

The “they” in question was Sony records. Their scouts had been following the band for a few months, and that weekend, when Jake crawled into bed with me, waking me up after he got home from a Saturday late show, he told me, “I think we nailed it.

I think that this is it.” I had rubbed the sleep from my eyes and gotten up to crack open a bottle of champagne.

And it
was
it. But nothing was ever the same. Now, before you start judging me, telling me that I wasn’t supportive of my boyfriend’s career or didn’t cheerlead his fame, let me clarify. There was no one, I repeat, no one, who was more proud of him. From our first date, Jake inhabited me. He swept me up so completely that there were days when it ached just to be apart. When I’d find myself staring into my computer monitor and wish that time would speed up so that I’d be back home with him. I coveted him more than anything else that had ever come into my life. So before you suspect that I didn’t wish him raging success and multiple Grammy nominations, know that. Know that of everything I’d seen and felt and breathed in my twenty-five years, Jake was what I loved most.

And now, he was back.

“How did this happen?” he asked, as he pulled a chair over to my bedside. Its legs squeaked against the linoleum floor like chalk on a blackboard. “I don’t understand. How can you—I mean, you were so healthy—how do you go from that to this?”

I told him about how Ned found a lump. And I reminded him
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about my grandmother. “Bad luck.” I shrugged. “You can’t outrun bad luck.”

“So where is he? Ned? Why wasn’t your mom e-mailing him, not me?”

“He dumped me,” I said matter-of-factly. “Just when I found out about the cancer. Dumped me for some bitch he met in his office in Chicago.” I reached up for the four-leaf clover that lay around my neck and caught myself, so I tried not to sound so bitter.

“And to think,” Jake said with a smile. “I was always the one who you hated going out on the road.”

“Yeah.” I sighed. “Go figure. I’d never pegged Ned for that . . . he was just so . . .” I paused, choosing my words carefully. “Different from you.”

I looked right at him. The same floppy blond hair that would curl into ringlets if he didn’t get it cut in time. The same penetrat-ing blue eyes. The same desire rising inside of me.

“Sometimes, it was easier,” I continued. “To not have to struggle, not have to feel like it was a fight to tie him down. Ned was happy to be tied. He was my beta,” I explained. “And it worked.”

“Until it didn’t.”

“Funny how that happens,” I said.

Jake and I started to become unhinged after about a year. It took nearly two more years for us to fully break, but the year mark is around when I saw the first clear signs. Before Sony made the Misbees into superstars in the United States, they decided to sell them abroad. Jake packed up his duffel bag, made love to me twice the night before, and let himself out to catch an early flight at dawn the next morning. I heard him whisper “I love you,” before he left, but I think I was too tired to manage one in return.

He was gone for nearly six weeks.

The first time he left it didn’t bother me so much. The next 186

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time, later that fall, it wasn’t as seamless. My grandfather had died; I wanted Jake home. But we both knew that he couldn’t be—

Prague was too far gone to fly back for a day—so I didn’t place blame. But it’s hard to keep building a life together when “together”

isn’t really part of the equation.

Every time that he’d come home, I’d fall in love with him all over again. His returns were like my drug: I fantasized about them, fed off them, and ultimately told myself that they were enough to keep us alive. He’d bring me chocolates from Switzer-land or roses from Austin, and he’d swear to me that he couldn’t bear to be without me for another day. He’d pour salve on both of our wounds and at least for that hour, it would be enough. As we neared our three-year anniversary, his road trips grew more frequent and our silences grew longer. The distance he put between us was more than literal: It penetrated every layer of our love.

When I sat down on our couch and told him that I was broken, he tried to talk me out of it. But I shook my head no, and instead, on the day before our third anniversary, I helped him pack up his things, the things that collect over time in a relationship and become so much a part of your living space, it’s hard to imagine that there was a point when they weren’t there, and then we said good-bye. Before he left, he asked me again to take it back. I started crying and told him that I couldn’t.

“I love you, Natalie,” he said, right before he closed my front door.

“That’s not enough,” I answered, and watched him drag his suitcase down the hall.

Two years later, I lay in my hospital bed with my chest wrapped in bandages and drugs running through my body to numb the pain. Only now, as I stared at Jake underneath the jarring lights of Sloan-Kettering, it felt as if the wounds that lay below my chest,
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the ones that had been carved around my heart, were the only ones that were beginning to heal.

“ h e ’ s s tay i n g i n town,” I said to Sally, who had taken my 911

call and immediately rushed to my bedside. I’d decided that if my physical exhaustion from the surgery didn’t kill me, perhaps my emotional exhaustion would.

“He is NOT! Oh my God, what did he say?”

“That he wasn’t going anywhere this time. That it was his turn to choose to stay instead of having me ask him.” I tried to fight back a smile.

“But you
didn’t
ask him, did you? I mean, wait, how has this happened so fast?”

“No.” I shook my head. “I didn’t. In fact, I very firmly told him that I was
fine
. That showing up here two years later acting like my knight in shining armor was a fine costume for him to slip into, but that the act would get old after a while.”

“And what did he say?” She leaned in toward my bed.

“He told me that it wasn’t an act. That he’d been thinking of me these past few months and that he was doing everything he could not to call me. And that when my mother e-mailed him, he took it to be a sign.”

When Jake left after we split up, I asked him not to be in touch.

He ignored me initially, still calling once a week or so, breaking up my thoughts on the tail end of a meeting or as I was unwinding from a draining day at work. He’d call but have nothing really to say. The first few times, he’d try to convince me to undo what I’d done. By the fourth or fifth time he called, he stopped asking, but I’d feel just as empty, just as scattered when we hung up as I did when he was still here. Every time we spoke, he drew me back into 188

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his web again. If he did it often enough, I’d never be able to untangle myself. Finally, I told him to stop calling at all.

“Do you believe him?” Sally asked, as she got up to change the water in the flowers that the senator had sent over. “That he was thinking of you before this happened?”

“Sure. Why not? I was dreaming about him—literally having dreams, so why shouldn’t I believe that he was doing the same?” It was true. I was having that dream again: the amusement park one where I was nearly suffocated with clowns and sand and claustrophobia. Only last week, when I looked up to see who saved me, who outstretched his hand to pull me out, it wasn’t a faceless blur, it was Jake.

“So now what?” She plunked down on the foot of my bed.

“Now he stays.” I looked at her and felt my nose tingle and my chin quiver. “Maybe it took cancer to bring him back to me.”

“And you’re okay with that? That after two years, he’s sliding back in?” She put her hand on top of mine.

“He’s not sliding. There’s no sliding. He loves me. And I could use someone in my corner right now.”

“I’m in your corner. And besides, didn’t he love you back then?” she pointed out.

“He did,” I conceded. “But maybe this time, it will be enough.”

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