The Lost (29 page)

I’ve decided to tell Mom before we leave L.A. It’s her life, and it should be her decision. But I’m not telling her in the hospital. I want plenty of time to explain myself as we drive. If she says no, we turn around, and I take care of her in the apartment, like I told the hospital I’d do. I won’t force her. But I hope she says yes.

I’m not planning on telling William at all. His remarkable understanding must have limits, and I’m aware of how crazy my plan sounds. The more days that pass, though, the more convinced I am that I have found the perfect solution.

Inside the hospital, I check in at the front desk. My heart is thumping fast. I press the button in the elevator and ride it up. It seems infinitely slow, as if it’s being pulled inch by inch. I’m ready to claw my way out when the doors slide open with agonizing slowness. I wave at the nurses at the nurses’ station. One of them rushes around the desk to intercept me.

“You can’t go in there right now,” she says.

She isn’t a nurse I know well, but I recognize her. She always wears earrings the size of my palms. Today they’re oak leaves that rival actual leaves in size but are made of tin. “Why not? I’ve seen everything—”

The door to my mother’s room slams open, and she’s wheeled out on a gurney. An oxygen mask is strapped to her face. Her eyes are closed. William is with her, as well as a fleet of nurses.

I try to run to her. But the nurse is surprisingly strong.

“You have to wait, Ms. Chase.” Her voice is kind. “They’ll take good care of her.”

“What happened?” My voice is shrill. “She was leaving today! Why did this happen?”

Oh, God, it’s my fault. I pushed too hard. She wasn’t ready to leave. Her body wasn’t up to the stress. And then another thought: I’m too late. If I’d tried to bring her to Lost earlier, if I’d found a way to leave Lost earlier...

The nurse guides me to a chair. Someone presses a cup of coffee into my hands.

“We’ll let you know as soon as we hear anything.”

Chapter Twenty-Seven

In the waiting room, I draw sketches of her. Her, in the hospital bed. Her, at home with her plants. Her, at the kitchen table. Her, on the beach. Her and me with our toes in the ocean. In Maine. In California. In the woods. At the movies. The nurses keep feeding me paper, and I don’t look up except when I need the next sheet.

One hour passes, two, three.

Out of the corner of my eye, I see a doctor enter the waiting room. William. He crosses to the nurses’ station, speaks to them, and then walks toward me.

I shoot to my feet, and the sketches scatter across the floor. I search his face for a hint. His face is kind, sympathetic, and my hands begin to shake. I clasp them together.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “There’s nothing more we can do. She’s not in any pain right now, but all we can do is keep her comfortable. It won’t be much longer.”

It feels as if the earth has quit spinning. Everything feels hushed, as if it’s holding its breath. Or maybe that’s only me. I can’t breathe. I nod as if what he’s saying makes sense, as if it even sounds like words.

“You had better go in now and say goodbye.”

I am still nodding, as if I’m a marionette and my head is on a string. Bending, I scoop up my drawings and clutch them to my chest, and then I feel my feet walking toward her door. I think William is beside me or behind me, but I don’t look. My eyes are only on her door, partially ajar. It feels both infinitely far and much too close. Like the void. It gapes at me. I reach it and push it open, and I walk inside.

Mom lies on the bed. Her eyes are closed. She has an oxygen mask on her face, and it makes her look shrunken around it. I focus on her chest, and I can’t see the rise and fall, but I hear the
beep-beep-beep
of the heart monitor. Each beep seems to wait a painfully long time until the next one. I drag the chair close to her bed, and I take her hand.

Her eyes flutter open. I see her smile under the oxygen mask as she turns her head and sees me. Her fingers curl around mine, but it seems as if that takes all her strength, because she releases and lets her hand simply rest in mine, limp.

“Hi,” I say.

It’s all I can think of to say. Hi.

“I drew you some pictures.” I fumble for the papers. I’ve been clutching them in my hand, and the edges are rumpled. I smooth them out and hold them up one after another so that she can see. She points to the one of her and me by the beach.

“Yeah, that’s my favorite, too,” I say. “Mom...” There are a million things I want to say, but only one of them is important. “I love you.”

“I love you, too, Lauren.” Her voice is muffled under the mask, but I can hear it fine. She has tears in her red eyes. I stroke her hand and she stares at me as if drinking me in. Softly, slowly, she then says, “If I had any sense of timing, I would have died after saying that.”

I smile because I know she wants me to. I can’t make myself laugh, even for her. I lean forward so only she will hear me, though we are alone. “I wasn’t taking you home. We were going on one last road trip. You were going to come with me to Lost.”

“That would have been nice. Can’t make it right now. Pressing engagement elsewhere. Can I take a rain check?” Her words are staccato and breathy, so soft and light that they float like bubbles in the air.

This time, I do laugh, but it’s a choked strangled sob-laugh. I can feel the tears pressing against my eyes and heating my face. But if I break down in tears, I can’t talk, and I desperately want to be talking to her. “Can’t take a rain check in Lost. I never saw it rain. But the ocean is amazing. I told you about the dolphin, right?”

“You know it wouldn’t have worked, right?”

“I think it’s real, Mom. I know that sounds crazy, but—”

“I couldn’t have gone.” Mom smiles, the barest upturn of her lips, as if even that movement costs her. “I’m not lost. Even on the day your father left, and everything I’d planned and dreamed of went up in smoke, I was not lost. I had you. Knowing you, loving you...I couldn’t...I can’t...be lost.” Each word is slowly delivered, as if she’s wrapping and packaging them to give to me. “I told him that, too.”

“Who? Dr. Barrett?”

She beckons me closer. I lean in as she says, “You aren’t lost, either.”

I nod because she wants me to, not because I believe her. “I don’t know who I am without you.”

“Liar,” she whispers.

I take a deep breath and then let it out. It’s never calmed me before, but it helps now. My mom watches me breathe as if I’m doing something alien and interesting. Her breaths are shallow and ragged, as if through a crushed straw.

“You will be okay,” she tells me. “Maybe not at first. Maybe not for a while. But you will. And if you ever feel lost again...promise me one thing.” Her voice is very, very faint. Her words are carried on her breath, the slightest bending of her breath. “Kiss that tattooed boy of yours for me.”

I laugh. A real laugh. But then her eyes flutter closed. “Mom?”

“Talk to me,” she whispers. “Tell me about Lost, about your Finder, about the Missing Man.”

I tell her everything, every detail I can think of, every word that was said. I tell her about the red balloon that always floats over town, about the buttons and socks and keys and glasses that overflow the gutters, about the stacks of luggage, about the houses, about the diner and the motel, about Claire and Peter, about Victoria and Sean, about the barn with the lost masterpieces. Sometimes nurses come in. Sometimes William. Every time one does, I pause talking and Mom murmurs for me to continue. So I do. When I run out of stories about Lost, I switch to my memories of us, the times we shared in both California and Maine, childhood memories and teenage memories and recent memories, happy and sad and embarrassing and silly and good and bad. And she listens with a smile on her face and her hand in my hand.

She dies at 2:34 in the afternoon.

Her hand is limp in mine. Her breath falls and doesn’t rise. The beep becomes a shrill, steady alarm. Doctors and nurses rush in. I back away as they try to revive her. Her body arches as the paddles shock her, and I turn away and focus instead on the sketches that fill the wall until my ears blur. After a while, I hear the monitor shut off. And silence.

I feel a hand on my shoulder.

I cover William’s hand with mine.

There isn’t anything to say. I’ve said it all.

* * *

I arrange for the funeral on a Saturday, and in the obituary I list her favorite flowers so that the funeral home will be full of them, and it is. I throw away any fake flowers. I hang the sketches of her on the wall between the peonies and lilacs and irises and gerbera daisies and roses, along with some of our favorite photographs.

I stand next to the casket and greet people: far-flung cousins, my condescending uncle, her coworkers from the library, my coworkers Kristyn and Angie, our neighbors, a few of her childhood friends, a few of mine, some of the kindest doctors and nurses. I’ve put a blank book by the door for them to write a memory of her if they want, and a lot of them tell me a memory as they shake my hand or hug me. Some of them are stories that I’ve never heard, and I drink them in.

Outside, in the cemetery, I read poems that she liked. My voice doesn’t crack. Afterward, my supervisor from work is the first to hug me. “Take as much time as you need. Your position will be waiting for you.”

“I won’t be returning,” I say, “but thank you.”

She clearly doesn’t believe me, but I mean it. That life is done for me. A few of our family friends and cousins speak to William, assuming that he’s with me. He accepts their sympathy gracefully. I’m grateful that he’s there to deflect some of the people, especially the aunts and uncles whom I’ve never met and the uncle whom I never liked. Theoretically, I’m grateful that they came for Mom’s sake. In reality, I’m tired inside and out.

As the line of well-wishers dwindles, I glance around me to see how many people remain. Only a few are left. A man with white hair in a suit is walking away from the gravesite. He carries a suitcase and a cane with a black handle. My heart begins to thud faster. “Excuse me,” I say to William. “I’ll be back.”

I walk after the man.

He looks as if he’s only walking, but the distance between us lengthens. I sprint after him. “Missing Man? Missing Man, wait!” His stride lengthens and he doesn’t look back. “Please, stop!”

He rounds the corner of a mausoleum near a grove of trees. Catching up, I race around the corner, and he’s gone. I skid to a halt beside a gravestone, and I look across the cemetery. There’s a curl of dusty mist around a few of the gravestones, and then it dissipates.

Gasping from the chase, I sink down into the grass.

And I let myself cry.

Things I found:

a sketch of my mother, sitting on the rocks with a book in her hand by the ocean in Maine, half watching me decorate a sand castle with broken shells and bits of seaweed until I have a palace fit for a mermaid princess—later, she'll put down her book and help me dig a moat to protect my masterpiece from the encroaching sea, but the tide takes it anyway

Chapter Twenty-Eight

After the burial, William drives me home. He offers to stay with me in the apartment—as a friend. He says he doesn’t want me to have to be alone. He wants to help me like my mother helped him, to help me sort through her things if I want, to find closure. Parked outside our apartment, I study him. He’s been beyond kind...and I have been using him. “I’m not who you think I am,” I say softly, gently. “That girl doesn’t exist. You invented her, your manic pixie dream girl, out of the stories my mother told you and the things you imagined while I was in a coma. You don’t really know me at all.”

He swallows, and I see that I’ve hurt him. “I want to know you.”

I smile because it’s exactly what I’d expect him to say, exactly what the kind of perfect, sweet, wonderful man he is would say. But there isn’t any reply I can make that wouldn’t hurt him further.

“Can I bring you dinner later?” he asks.

I shake my head. “I have casseroles from the neighbors, enough to feed a small army. Everyone wanted to be sure I wouldn’t starve. Odd, since the only time they ever spoke to me was to scold my parking.”

“I’d be happy to volunteer to help you eat them.” He pats his stomach and then turns serious. “But if you really want to be alone... It’s just...I didn’t. So I thought you wouldn’t.”

“I might take a trip,” I say. “To sort through some things.” I dig into my purse and pull out my mother’s copy of our apartment key. I press it into William’s hand. “If I’m not back in time to water her plants...” I can’t say any more. I blink hard.

“Of course, I’ll take care of them. But where are you going? Are you sure you’re... You know you’re not alone, that people care about you. There are grief counselors at the hospital. I can make an appointment for you with them, if you aren’t comfortable talking with me or someone you know.”

“I’ll be okay. Maybe not right away. But I will.” I know I’m echoing my mother, and it almost makes me smile and then it almost makes me cry. But I’ve cried enough for now.

He’s frowning at me. “Are you sure? I don’t like leaving you alone. And to take a trip so soon...”

“Just somewhere Mom and I meant to go. I’ll be fine. Please. Don’t worry.”

He smiles at me, a forced smile, but I appreciate the effort. “I always worry. They teach us that in medical school.”

I lean across the car and kiss his lips lightly. “I’m lucky I met you.”

“Then why do I feel like you’re saying goodbye?”

Because I am,
I want to say. But I can’t bring myself to form the words. Maybe it’s cowardly of me. Or maybe it’s because I think he might stop me. “Don’t overwater the Christmas cactus. I’ve made that mistake before, and it wasn’t pretty.” I then open the car door and step out.

He calls after me, “I’ll call tomorrow, okay?”

I wave and then head inside.

Inside the apartment, it’s too quiet. I switch on the TV, exactly as Mom used to do. No particular channel. Just for noise. I sort through the mail, separate out the bills and the sympathy cards. I put the cards on display with the others on the bookshelves. It’s unnerving how many have pictures of calla lilies on them. I feel bad for the flower. It’s a perfectly striking, lovely flower that could be associated with movie stars on the red carpet, but instead it’s featured on sympathy cards over and over.

A moment later, I take all the cards down and sit on the floor with them. I fetch a pair of scissors, and I begin to cut, excising all the flowers and separating the words. When I have them in pieces, I reassemble them. I don’t have any blank easels in the apartment, but I don’t need one. I choose one of the paintings on the wall, a seascape, that I did years ago. It’s of the beach that Mom used to take me to, on the Pacific Ocean, where I first learned how to swim. I glue the bits of cards to the painting, assembling them so they become beautiful in their repetition.

When I finish, it’s late. I crack open one of the casseroles in the refrigerator and heat a bowl full of cheese, chicken, and broccoli in the microwave. I eat it in front of the TV, not watching what’s on, trying not to think too much. Finishing, I head to the bedroom, intending to change into pj’s and try to sleep.

In my room, on the bed, is a ragged stuffed rabbit with a shattered eye.

“Hello, Mr. Rabbit,” I say.

He doesn’t respond.

I sit on the foot of the bed, far from the rabbit. But the pressure on the bed causes him to topple over onto his side. Sideways, he looks at me with one black button eye.

“All right,” I say, “I’ll leave now. And maybe...maybe Claire will come with us.” If she wants to. If she’s real. If I can find her.

I don’t search for her right away.

Instead, I drag up a huge supply of empty boxes from the basement of the apartment building, and I box and label things as best I can: clothes, dishes, artwork, books. I toss all excess toiletries in the trash, and I leave unspoiled food in the refrigerator, hoping William will either eat or donate it. I fill the car with a supply of whatever food won’t perish on the drive, as well as two suitcases of my own clothes, books, toiletries, and mementoes. I also take some, but not all, of my art. I leave the sympathy collage on the wall. And I take one of Mom’s hardier plants, one that I think I can manage to keep alive. I strap it into the passenger seat, along with Mr. Rabbit.

The apartment isn’t perfectly clean, but at least William won’t have to sort through all my and Mom’s things. It should make his job easier, or the landlord’s, or whoever’s. Taking some more of the casserole, I sit in front of Mom’s computer, which I didn’t unplug yet, and I search online.

I don’t know Claire’s last name.

I don’t know her hometown, where she was lost.

But I know enough. As the search results scroll down the screen, I feel my eyes water. The screen blurs in front of me, and I blink fast to clear my vision. The Scottsdale local news was abuzz for several days about a young girl who’d been missing for three years, presumed dead, who took a bus by herself from Flagstaff and showed up on her family’s doorstep in a princess dress. One has a photo of her, my Claire, in front of her new elementary school. I stare at the photo, touch the screen as if I could touch her, and then I jot down the school address and stuff it into my pocket.

As sunrise tints the sky lemon-yellow, I lock the door to Mom’s and my apartment one last time. I look at the key and consider sliding it under the door, or under my landlord’s door, but in the end, I stuff it into my pocket. After all, there’s always the chance that I’m totally wrong about this and that even if I find Claire, we won’t be able to find Lost again, and then I’ll feel pretty stupid explaining to William or the landlord why I need the key and why my apartment is all boxed up.

My belief in Lost is firm. My belief in my own abilities to find it...decidedly less so.

I’m nervous as I get into the car. I put my hands on the steering wheel. They’re already sticky, even though the morning is still cool from the night air. I check the gas. It’s close to full. Enough to get me to Scottsdale and farther. I put the car into Drive. And I leave.

* * *

It’s six hours on Route 10 from Los Angeles to Scottsdale.

I drove this way before, must have, on my way to Lost, but I don’t remember it. The view out the window had been a blur. Now I watch each cactus and highway sign. I loop around Phoenix, ask for directions at a gas station, and find Laguna Elementary School in Scottsdale. I park on the street.

It’s a flat reddish-tan building, the same color as the dirt here. Two tall palm trees flank the entrance, next to two equally tall flagpoles. The playground is enclosed by a chain-link fence. Kids are swarming over it. I step out of the car and lean against the door.

The wind picks up crumpled paper in the street, bits of dirt from the grassless ground, and the shouts and laughter of the kids on the swings and slides. A group of girls is clustered on a stretch of black pavement. Hopscotch.

But I look for Claire to be one of the loners, like the boy on the swing or the girl curled with a notebook near a rock. I don’t see her.

My hands feel slick with sweat. I wipe them on my jeans. She might not be here. She might not exist, no matter what the articles said. I could have hallucinated them all—the articles, the rabbit, the puffer fish, the diner menu, the Missing Man.

I don’t believe that.

She’s here.

I know she is.

And then, I see her. My Claire. She’s in the middle of the group of girls. She’s broken from the pack to toss a rock onto the hopscotch squares. I watch her hop on one foot. Her blond hair bounces. Her hair looks longer. She looks taller. Older. I realize she must have been in Lost for several years, not aging except on the inside. Balancing on one foot, she leans over and scoops up her rock. She’s steady, as she would be after months of scrambling over rooftops and through alleyways. She smiles triumphantly at the other girls, and then she hops back and passes the rock to a curly haired girl. Her friends cluster around her again, and she disappears from view.

I don’t move from the car.

She’s real. She’s alive. She’s happy.

I watch until the bell rings. Claire runs with the pack, her legs stretching, her lope as smooth as a deer. The other girls jostle around her, some keeping up with her, some falling behind, and they gather in a pack in front of the teacher. They jostle into a single line, my Claire in the lead. She doesn’t look back. Doesn’t see me. Doesn’t hesitate as she marches into school—
her
school.

I can’t take her from this.

This is where she’s supposed to be. And she’s well, and she’s happy.

I am crying as I climb back into the car and restart the engine. Mr. Rabbit watches me from the passenger seat as I pull away from the school and drive out of Scottsdale. I don’t watch the street signs as I leave. At the traffic light that leads back into a snarl of freeways, I don’t turn. I drive straight. And I don’t stop.