The Lost & Found (2 page)

I
t was two forty-five in the morning, and I had just finished dusting our entire living room.

This wasn't that strange. I've never really been good at sleeping.

Even before the accident, I didn't sleep much.

My mother joked that we had gotten things mixed up in the womb. Willa could sleep twelve, thirteen hours at a time, easily, and I was up at one in the morning building Lego sets or finishing homework assignments or reading the Chronicles of Narnia for the fortieth time (in publishing order, sometimes, chronological order other times).

After the accident it got worse.

What had become normal sleeplessness for me was replaced by a frantic kind of awakeness, a state of constant consciousness. Now, instead of reading, I lay in bed and counted my breaths or went up to the roof and counted stars or went into the kitchen and counted jars of spices. Sometimes I did chores. Nothing too loud. No vacuuming or laundry. I loaded or unloaded the dishwasher, cleaned up the living room, took the recycling down to the lobby.

And because nobody in my family seemed to be able to remember that the mail comes six times a week, I checked our box in the lobby of the building.

Which is how, just before three in the morning, I opened a letter addressed to me from the University of Texas. I read it with the mailbox door still open, the other bills and flyers and coupons lying forgotten and unimportant, some spilling out to land on my feet and on the original tiled floor of the building that had been featured, once, in an issue of
Architecture Magazine
.

Delighted to inform you.

Accepted.

Full scholarship.

Division I tennis.

I put the letter into my back pocket and gathered up the rest of the mail.

I read the letter again in the elevator.

I read the letter again in the kitchen after dumping the rest of the mail into a basket my mother kept on the counter for just this purpose.

I read the letter again and again, making sure I was getting it right, making sure it actually said what I think it said.

I read it so many times that finally, for the first time in a week or two, I felt really, genuinely tired.

I fell asleep in an armchair in the living room, the acceptance letter taking up too much space in my back pocket, like it had somehow grown in size since I'd found it in the mailbox.

I woke up panicked from a dream about a helicopter.

I'd been hanging off a fire escape by just the tips of my fingers. A toy helicopter buzzed around my head and every few moments dive-bombed my hands, trying to dislodge my grip.

I had this dream a lot.

When I opened my eyes, Willa stood in front of me in the living room, a dish towel thrown over her shoulder. She cocked her head and stared at me, concerned.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

“Bad dream,” I said.

“You were counting in your sleep.”

“No I wasn't.”

“Yes you were.”

My childhood therapist had taught me to count through moments of anxiety. I guess the conditioning ran deep; I was doing it in my dreams.

“You're supposed to be helping me wash the dishes,” she continued.

“Where is everybody? What time is it?”

“It's early. Like, too early to be awake in the summer, except Mom woke me up and told me I was wasting my life sleeping and if I didn't get up immediately she was going to send me to live with Auntie Anta until September. They're at the store, by the way. You're supposed to be helping me.”

“I'll dry,” I said, and stood up.

Willa stared at me. She wore some chambray dress (our parents own a fabric store, otherwise I would not know what chambray was) that stopped above her knees so you could only see her fake legs and no part of her real legs. Every few seconds she reached down to scratch some spot on her thigh where the old, too-tight prosthetics kept rubbing.

“Are you coming?” she asked.

“I'll be right there.”

“I'm almost done, anyway,” she said. She went back into the kitchen.

I shook my head, trying to clear away my grogginess, and then absent-mindedly felt my back pocket to make sure the acceptance letter was still there. I half expected it
to be just another dream, but the paper crinkled through my jeans. Real.

Willa's phone buzzed on the coffee table. I picked it up and read the caller ID.
Benson
.

“Why is Benson calling you?” I asked her.

She stuck her head in the doorway. “What?”

“Benson from the diner is calling you.” I walked into the kitchen and started drying the sizable pile of dishes next to the sink.

Willa looked at me sideways. She finished washing the last pan and handed it over. “We only know one Benson, so you don't always have to say
Benson from the diner
.”

“But he
is
from the diner.”

“But he's also from, you know, school. Life. Our AP algebra class.”

“Well, Benson from our AP algebra class is calling your phone.”

She dried off her hands and made a face that was almost impossible to read. It could mean a lot of things. Like:

I should have put my phone on silent,
or

I know you were counting in your sleep,
or

I'm glad you still have bad dreams, Louis, because I blame you for everything. This is all your fault.

Except what they told me over and over—what they insisted—was that my sister's accident was nobody's fault. And sometimes that made it better and sometimes it made
it worse. It made it worse because there was no one to blame and I ended up blaming myself a lot of the time. It made it better because it was just as much her fault as it was my fault. Maybe even more her fault because I think she said it first, I think it was technically her idea (although I've never confirmed this with her for obvious reasons), I think the words left her mouth first—
Let's hang out the window, Louis; let's go out on the fire escape.

It was really hot. We were eight. I was playing with a toy helicopter, and Willa was fanning herself with a magazine. My mother was cooking dinner in the kitchen, and we didn't have air conditioning so the hot air from outside mixed with the hot air from the stove and we baked alive in the living room for as long as we could stand it and then Willa had the idea to go out on the fire escape and so we did.

We were never explicitly told not to go out there. My mother had neglected to specifically forbid us and that is the loophole we found when Willa came up with the idea and I agreed to it and we opened the living room window and pulled our small bodies onto the ledge and sat with our legs dangling off the side over traffic. I had my helicopter in my hand and I kept buzzing Willa's head with it, and it was cooler and there was a breeze and we were happy, happy, happy. . . .

Until we weren't.

Until Willa twisted wrong and lost her balance and
went over the side and landed on the ground below with a sound I often hear in my nightmares, a sound that wakes me up at night and follows me into the shower and whispers me awake in the mornings and breathes into my ear during breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Every waking moment I hear the heavy, deep crunch of Willa hitting the ground, landing half on the street and half on the sidewalk. And then that sound is followed by the sound of the skidding tires, the squealing brakes, the aggressive pops from Willa's bones as the small navy-blue Honda Civic rolled over her legs in quick succession. One after the other. But that part didn't hurt her, she later told me, because she was already gone. She was floating up above her body. She was next to me on the fire escape. She was watching me watch her die.

My sister, Willa, was born three minutes and eleven seconds before me.

She did not die when she hit the pavement.

She did not die when the car crunched over her legs and hips, crunch, crunch.

She died
a little
in the ambulance, rushing to the nearest hospital where they would try and fail to save her legs, eventually cutting them off with a bone saw I was not allowed to see but imagined to be enormous, cartoonish, taking two doctors to work, one on either side of her pulling and pushing back and forth.

She died for three minutes and eleven seconds, and that has always been the strangest coincidence I can think of. Like somehow she timed it on purpose. Like somehow she was fucking with me.

Willa woke up three days after the accident. She had no more legs. They'd been sawed away.

It was only me in the room at the time.

My mother kept leaving to call my father, who was trying to make it back to Los Angeles from a buying trip in India. My father is Indian, and he and my mother (who is not Indian) own one of the biggest fabric stores in the garment district downtown.

Willa woke out of an induced coma. They stopped giving her the drugs to keep her under, and they told us she'd be along shortly. I thought that was a truly strange way to put it:
she'd be along shortly
.

When she woke up, she looked at me and then she looked down at her body and then she said, “Something's missing.”

“Willa, it wasn't my fault,” I said.

We were eight, and that seemed like an important point to establish.

“Arms,” she said, raising her arms an inch off the bed.

“You had an accident,” I told her, which is what the doctors had told me to say.

“Legs,” she said. I could see her concentrating on something. Her brain was telling her legs to move but her legs were gone and nothing was happening. She raised her head a little, and I knew she saw where her body ended now, where the sheets dropped dramatically after her thighs.

“It was a really bad accident, but you're okay now.”

“I know what's missing,” she said. Like she had figured it out.

She fell back asleep for a few more hours.

The doctors told my mother the fall wouldn't even have hurt Willa that badly, but the Honda Civic fractured her femur, which severed a major artery, which required the placement of tourniquets, which required her legs to be cut off, one after the other.

The next time Willa woke up we were all there, my mother and my father, who had finally made it back to Los Angeles and smelled like an airplane when he hugged me. I wanted to say,
I'm fine, Dad. It's her you need to worry about.
But I didn't. Because then Willa woke up and we were all hovering around her bed and the first thing she asked was what had happened to the lower half of her body, thanks very much.

“They saved your life,” Mom said.

“They took my legs,” Willa said.

“My poor little baby. I'm so happy you're okay.”

“I'm not OKAY,” Willa said. “I DON'T HAVE ANY MORE LEGS.”

The nurse came in and gave her medicine through a tube in her arm.

She fell asleep again.

“It's for the best,” the nurse said.

“You can't make her sleep forever,” I said.

Or at least that's what I think I would have said, if I could have caught my breath.

My sister had to learn how to walk again. Her first pair of prosthetic legs was small and looked fake—like a child's drawing of what prosthetic legs might look like. The doctor taught her how to put them on and take them off and then gave her a pair of crutches with half circles that went around her arms to help her manage them.

“I don't like these at all,” she told me later, kicking the legs off. They landed with a thud on her bedroom floor.

“Why not?” I asked her.

“They're not fooling anybody,” she said. And then she lay back on her bed and fell asleep. I picked up her legs and felt their weight and smelled them and they smelled like a new car, or like plastic, or some combination. I stood them up but didn't like how they looked and so then laid them down carefully next to the bed.

I left her alone and had my first panic attack on the floor of our guest bathroom. Of course I didn't know it was a
panic attack at the time. It felt like I was dying. It felt like my lungs were burning up inside my chest. Every breath was sharp and impossible.

It felt like something I deserved.

Years later, when Willa had fully adapted to life without legs and mostly got around with prostheses and sometimes, if she was tired, a wheelchair, we were sitting on her bed.

It was hot. Summer.

She showed me a picture in a magazine.

A girl surfing.

“That looks fun,” she said. “I wonder if I could do that.”

And I said, “I wish it was me. I wish it was me instead of you.”

The first time I ever said that.

And she said, “No you don't. Because I've never been relieved it was me instead of you.”

She bumped me with her shoulder.

I thought how maybe it wasn't good, how honest we were.

I thought maybe it was sometimes better to lie.

I remember the day my sister lost her legs in almost perfect clarity. The sounds and the smells and the spinning lights of the ambulance and my mother crying and calling my father's phone over and over, even though he was on a plane to India and couldn't answer.

But what I remember most is the toy helicopter I brought
onto the fire escape. I remember that it was there and then it wasn't there. In an instant. My sister lost her legs, and I lost a plastic toy.

I wasn't that concerned at the time, but as the years went by I realized that was only the first of many things I would lose.

After that . . . sometimes it felt like everything I touched was bound to disappear eventually.

A
fter I found the bill for the coffin, I went inside and handed it to my grandfather, who was watching TV. Then I went into the kitchen and poured myself a glass of juice. Then I texted my cousin, Arrow (who lived next door), and told her I didn't really feel like coming over to eat the artisanal popcorn her mom bought while watching the
Buffy
marathon on FX. I waited for her response until I felt eyes on the back of my head.

They were both there, my grandparents, watching me, nervous, their hands darting around and touching various parts of their bodies because they didn't know what to do with them. Their hands looked like birds. I wanted
to punch each of them in their faces, and this shocked me, because I generally considered myself to be nonviolent.

“Frances,” Grandpa Dick said. He held the bill from Easton Valley Rest and Recuperation Center for the Permanently Unwell in his hands. He also held a stack of letters. They were bound together with twine.

“You better have a real fucking good explanation for this,” I answered.

Grandma burst into tears. She left the room. She came back into the room. She left again and came back again and then did it so many times in a row that I just forgot about her and turned my attention to Grandpa Dick.

“Listen, Frances,” he said. “It's not what you think.”

My grandmother came back and sat down at the table next to me. She put her hand on my hand and smiled weakly.

“We are so sorry that you had to find out this way,” she said.

“You told me my mother moved to Florida,” I said. “You told me she bought a condo in an over-fifty-five gated community.”

“We were trying to protect you. We thought it was the best thing,” Grandma said. “We did everything wrong. We did everything backward. I can see that now.”

I saw the stack of letters in Grandpa Dick's hands. “What are those?” I asked, pointing.

“These belong to you,” Grandpa said. He pushed
the letters across the table. I untied the twine and sifted through them.

“Read them in order,” Grandma said.

“These are from my mother,” I said.

“Yes,” Grandpa Dick said.

“My mother wrote me letters?” I said.

“Yes,” he said.

“My mother wrote me letters, and you didn't let me read them?” I noticed they were already open. “But you did?”

“For your own good,” he said.

I looked at the stack of letters. I turned one over. I turned another over.

They were all addressed to me. They all had the same return address.

“My mother wrote me letters from an insane asylum,” I said. It felt a little bit like my brain was processing things too slowly.

“They don't call them that anymore, Frannie,” Grandpa said, proud, like he knew something PC that I didn't.

“Rest and recuperation center,” Grandma whispered.

“And then she died,” I said.

They looked at each other.

“When did she die?” I asked.

“Two days ago,” Grandma Doris said. “We were waiting for the right time to tell you.”

“You never get the mail,” Grandpa said. “How come you got the mail?”

“How did she die?” I asked.

“Frannie, I hardly think that's—”

“
How did she die?
”

“She hanged herself,” Grandpa said.

“Oh, Frannie,” Grandma said.

I tried to say something, but my voice caught in my throat. Not a sob really, but something harder. “I could have gone to see her,” I whispered.

“It was complicated,” Grandpa said.

“It doesn't seem complicated,” I said.

I stood up. I stacked the letters on the kitchen table. In the correct order. I didn't think I wanted to read them yet.

But I took the bill with me. It felt like I had earned it.

Later, Grandma Doris came into my room and sat on the edge of my bed. Grandpa Dick stood in the doorway. He had the letters in his hand, but he held them away from his body. Like he didn't want them close.

“I should have known,” I said.

“You couldn't have known, Frannie.”

“My mother hated Florida,” I said. “She refused to take me to Disney World. All my life I just wanted to go to Disney World and she wouldn't take me.”

“We'll take you to Disney,” Grandma offered. “We'll take you and Arrow. I never knew you wanted to go.”

“What about the spider?” I asked. “There wasn't a spider, right?”

“We didn't want you to get her letters, Frannie,” Grandpa answered. “Your mother was a very sick woman. We thought you'd had enough crazy parents for a lifetime.”

“I'm really, really mad at you,” I said.

“We just love you. And we were only trying to do the best thing for you,” Grandma said, patting me on the knee.

“Did you ever read the letters?” I asked.

“Oh, they all say the same thing,” Grandma said. “We used to read them, Frannie, but there's only so much we can take.”

“And now she's dead. My mother is dead,” I said.

“My daughter is dead,” Grandma said.

“My daughter-in-law and my stepdaughter is dead,” Grandpa Dick said.

The weird thing about my grandparents is that they are both my paternal
and
maternal grandparents. In a nonincestuous way. Grandma Doris is my mother's mother and Grandpa Dick is my father's father and when each of their respective spouses died twenty years ago, they cut their losses and married each other. Which is weird, sort of, and maybe not weird, sort of.

“What was wrong with her?” I asked. “I mean what did she . . .”

“Schizophrenia,” Grandma said. “Late onset. She had a psychotic break. She never recovered.”

I couldn't help picturing my mom in a straitjacket, in a hospital bed with straps holding down her arms and ankles.
A small mound of pills placed into a tiny white paper cup.

“Can I have some time alone now?” I asked.

“Of course you can, sweetheart,” Grandma said.

“Take all the time you need,” Grandpa said. Then he paused and looked a little sheepish and said, “Did you take the bill? I'll trade you.”

He held the letters out to me and I reached for the bill, which I had put on the nightstand, but it wasn't there.

This didn't surprise me.

It was just another thing that disappeared into the void. It was there and then it was gone. It had melted away or else poofed into smoke—I don't know. I had never actually seen something vanish.

“I don't think I have it,” I said.

Grandpa put the letters on my nightstand and then they shuffled out of the room, one after the other.

I leaned back on my bed.

I took the first letter out of its envelope.

Dear Heph. Ugh, what a drag. They search EVERYWHERE when you get here. Not sure it's even legal, I'm looking into it. I have a very good lawyer, and he is telepathic like me! Maybe love?

I put the letter down and considered my options.

I could throw the whole stack away. I could pretend my mother was still living in Florida. I could pretend today
was a day like any other day. A normal, whatever day.

But of course I couldn't do that.

My mother was dead and she had written me all these letters, and now I had to read them.

Oh! By the way! I never told you this, but your father isn't really your father. Your father is Wallace Green, the movie star. They don't have any of his movies here, which is a downright shame. I think
Nightingale at Midnight
is my favorite, but then again,
Charming Town
is also very good.

You're probably wondering why I never told you this and of course the answer is: I didn't want you to think less of me. I cheated on your father with Wallace Green, one blur of a weekend spent living like somebody I wasn't.

Of course I entertained the idea of not going back to your father. At that point I knew he couldn't have kids (he didn't know; I tore up the test results) and I really, really wanted one. I wanted you, you know, although I didn't know what you would look like or how you'd come out or what you'd be like or who you'd love or how you'd like to wear your hair. I didn't know anything about you, but I felt you even then, this little ball of potential inside of me that I couldn't give up.

That's why I cheated on your father, I think, or
at least a part of it, because back then I still did love him and I really hoped with all my heart that they were wrong and he could give me a baby and we could figure out a way to live the “happily ever after” dream that I so wanted for myself.

In the end I think I went back to him because I was scared. I didn't know how to leave him. I didn't know how to start over. And of course, Wallace Green wasn't offering me a new life either. He was just offering me a weekend, and I took that weekend with everything I had and made it last so I could replay it in my head whenever I was feeling blue.

But then just about two months after those two days together I figured it all out. . . . The sleepiness, the missed periods, the bloating, the cramps . . . And then YOU, seven months after that. And you were everything I wanted, Frannie, really. More important than the Hollywood dreamboat or the piles of money, more important than how I was beginning to discover, even then, Frances Senior's nasty temper. Oh, Frannie. It was all about you, from the very beginning. I hope I made that clear enough before I had to go away.

Anyway, I love you very much and hope you're being good. I'll write soon! —Mom

Oh. Okay. No big deal. It was only a posthumous letter from my mother telling me my father was actually a famous movie star. If anything, her letters would probably shine some light as to why exactly she had been committed to the center. I could deal with that.

I carefully set the first letter down on the bed and picked up the second.

Heph—I have to apologize for my last letter. The doctors here are very nice but a little tricky. And I told them I didn't want medication and they told me I should probably have medication but instead of swallowing it I only hid it under my tongue. Like Wallace Green did in the movie
Patient Thirteen
. Remember we watched that together so long ago? I probably shouldn't have let you see it because it's a little scary. But you were always hard to rattle.

But it turns out I SHOULD have taken the pills the doctor gave me because I was, as they have explained to me, in a “manic state,” which makes it hard to tell if the decisions I'm making are the right decisions or the wrong decisions. I'm referring of course to telling you that Wallace Green was your father. I mean, I think you have the right to know, but maybe I should have eased you into it.

At any rate, I'm sorry, but it is true. Wallace Green is your father. He is a very nice man, or at
least he was when I knew him.

I guess sometimes I wish I hadn't married Frances at all. I wish I had married Wallace, and I wish we had raised you together on a ranch somewhere in the middle of nowhere. I wish we had given you a brother or a sister, and I wish we could spoil you into the ground, pour money over you until you were buried in it.

I don't think Frances ever knew about my weekend with Wallace Green. I was always very careful to keep it a secret from everybody because I've known from a very early age that you can't trust anyone.

Oh, Frannie. I don't know. Maybe I should have stayed with Wallace. Maybe I should have buried you in money. You know they say that money changes things. But it wouldn't change how much I love you because I love you an unchangeable amount. —Mom

They went on like that for pages and pages.

I kept reading till dawn.