The Keeper of Lost Things

by Jamie Campbell

  I ignored them.

  They would get the karma coming back to them.

  I would just help it along a little. The blonde one on the right had lost her cell phone a couple of weeks ago. She left it on the shelf above the sink in the girls’ bathroom.

  There were a bunch of things I could use it for.

  Revenge would be sweet.

  Much sweeter than they were.

  A smile spread over my lips, perhaps it wasn’t the worst day ever.

  I started scanning the room like I always did at lunchtime, looking for things that might be lost. The cafeteria was always a good place.. Kids would be too distracted with all the food to care about what happened to their possessions.

  It was only early so everything still seemed to be with their owner. By the end of the break there would be at least something left behind, it was almost guaranteed.

  Frankie sat across from me, placing his tray on the table like he had permission to sit with me. “Hey, Em. How’s it going?”

  My eyebrows arched in question. “What are you doing?”

  “Eating lunch. What are you doing?” He grinned, thinking we were playing some game.

  We weren’t.

  “My Uncle Marvin said I can’t talk to you anymore.”

  “That’s because he hasn’t met me. If he did, he would know how awesome I was and be fine with it.”

  “He doesn’t acknowledge the word ‘awesome’.”

  Frankie shrugged and picked up his burger with both hands, shoving it into his mouth to take a bite. He chewed with his mouth closed, at least he had manners.

  “You’re not going to leave, are you?” The realization was hitting me. Nothing I could do or say would make Frankie leave me alone. It should have angered me.

  It didn’t.

  And he was going to get me into trouble one day.

  “We’re friends, why would I want to leave and eat with people I don’t know?” He took another bite of the burger, dipping it in ketchup first.

  I wasn’t going to argue with him anymore. Instead, I was going to change to a topic that made me even more uncomfortable. “I’m going to my father’s house after school today. Will you come with me?”

  “Of course. Is he still missing?”

  “Yes. The police asked me where he was today.”

  “They sound like they’re thorough. That’s a good thing.”

  I guessed it was.

  I wondered how they had come to know of my existence. Was it through government records detailing my birth and forever linking me with the missing man? Or did the stepmother I never knew existed tell the police my name?

  It would be interesting to find out.

  “Are you going to go up to the house today and talk to the people inside? Or are we purely on a staring mission?” Frankie asked with a smile. I suddenly wished I hadn’t told him about my first visit to the house.

  “I want to talk to them.”

  “Sounds like a plan.”

  Yes, it certainly did.

  Chapter 8

  My hand was shaking when I knocked on the door of 23 Huxton Street. Every part of me was saying it was a bad idea. I didn’t know these people and they didn’t know me.

  I stood in silence with Frankie while I held my breath and counted to ten repeatedly. My feet wanted to run, my brain agreed. If she didn’t answer the door when I reached nine in my next count, I was going to leave.

  Unfortunately, she answered on eight.

  The door swung open to reveal a woman in her forties, brown hair that was obviously dyed, eyes too wide open, and clothes that were probably designer knock-offs.

  She stared at us.

  We stared at her.

  “Can I help you?” she asked.

  Frankie nudged me while I tried to gather some courage. “Are you married to Marshall Gabrielle?”

  “Yes.” Her eyebrows narrowed as she squinted. “Wait a minute. Are you Emmeline?”

  “I go by Em.” Wait for awkward pause. “This is Frankie.”

  “Hey.” Frankie waved and smiled.

  Her face relaxed into a smile. “I’m Samantha. Come in, please. It’s so lovely to finally meet you.” She stood back from the door and gestured inside like a gameshow model.

  Against all my better judgement, I followed her deeper into the house until we reached a pleasant living room. I tried to find a reason to hate it but I couldn’t. The house was actually quite lovely.

  “Can I get you something? Are you hungry, thirsty? I’ve just baked some cookies.”

  “No, thanks.”

  “Cookies would be great,” Frankie said. I shot him a disapproving look. Did he learn nothing from fairytales? You don’t except food from what could be a wicked witch.

  If she threw us in the oven to eat later, I was going to kill Frankie.

  The woman—I couldn’t think of her as my stepmother–fetched some cookies and milk and laid them out on the coffee table in front of us. Frankie immediately helped himself.

  She sat across from us. “Your father talked about you a lot. He would call you his little Emmeline.”

  “I’m surprised he remembered I existed.”

  “He loved you, Em.” Turned out I wasn’t the only liar. “I always hoped we’d meet one day. You look so much like him. I just wish it was under better circumstances. I take it you are here because of his disappearance?”

  “I saw it on the news.”

  “The police are working very hard but I fear they don’t have any leads that have proven helpful.” She seemed sincere but I wasn’t going to be lulled into a safe place where I could trust her.

  “Do you know what happened to him?” I asked, watching her carefully and searching for clues that she was lying. I would work out her telling trademarks soon. Then I would always know when she wasn’t being honest.

  Samantha shook her head. “No, I don’t. I thought everything was fine and then he just didn’t come home one night. He had been stressed in the days beforehand but that was nothing new. Your father was an uptight kind of person.”

  “Please stop calling him that. You can use his name, Marshall. He hasn’t been my father in a very long time.”

  She shifted with discomfort. “Sure, honey.”

  I almost said ‘Don’t call me that’ but stopped myself just in time. I wanted information from Samantha, not to make her hate me within the first ten minutes of meeting me.

  “He really did talk about you a lot,” she continued. “He wanted to reunite with you but feared too much time had passed. He said you were happy with your uncle. He didn’t want to interrupt that.”

  “He was thinking about that for ten years? Because that’s how long he had to forget about me.”

  An awkward silence followed, only broken by Frankie’s jaw as it chewed on the cookie he’d stuffed in his mouth. I was trying really hard to be nice to Samantha but it was difficult lying to her. For once in my life I was actually telling the truth.

  Go figure.

  Footsteps padded somewhere else in the house before a little girl appeared at the living room entrance. She stared at us, quiet and wary of the new people in her home.

  The kid was about eight, if I had to guess. Her hair was the same dark brown as mine, cut at a similar length halfway down her back. But it was the eyes that got me.

  They were exactly the same as our fathers.

  I should know, I had the same ones.

  “Come here, baby,” Samantha said, cooing to her daughter. “I’d like you to meet someone very special.” The girl warily skipped over to her mother and curled up next to her. “This is your sister Emmeline.”

  “Em.”

  “Sorry. This is your sister Em. Em, this is April.”

  “Hi,” the kid said.

  “Hi,” I replied.

  What was I supposed to say to this miniature human that was related to me but spent all her life never knowing of my existence? I doubted Marshall would have informed her of the daughter he h
ad lost.

  Frankie sat forward on the plush lounge suite. “April is a really pretty name. Do you get lots of attention in the month of April? Everyone would be saying your name all the time.”

  The kid giggled. At least one of us knew how to wrangle one of those creatures.

  “Do you go to school?” he asked.

  “I’m in fourth grade. I like it when we have art and I get to draw with paint.”

  “An artist, hey? You’ll have to paint something for Em one day. I bet she’d like something to hang on her wall.”

  They all stared at me while I got that deer-in-the-headlights expression. Diving out the window was looking like a safe option to escape this place.

  “I, uh, yeah. That would be nice,” I lied. She was hardly going to be Picasso.

  “April, honey, why don’t you take a cookie and run along? We’ve got some things to talk about,” Samantha said. April nodded and waved a goodbye before she left.

  So that was my half-sister.

  I wasn’t sure if I liked having names to match with the faces I’d seen on the news. I couldn’t just pretend it was a serial drama and not real life.

  Samantha smiled at us once the kid was gone. “April takes a while to warm up to people. Once she knows you, it will be impossible to get her to shut up.”

  “Kind of like Em,” Frankie laughed, bumping shoulders with me. I was so glad he was there. If he wasn’t we’d just be staring at each other across the coffee table.

  Literally just staring.

  Like it was a competition.

  Enough of the family bonding. It was time to get down to business. “What do you think happened to Marshall?”

  Samantha sighed, buying herself some time. “I don’t know how much I should say.”

  “Tell me everything.”

  She was still conflicted, her Botox-laden forehead trying hard to frown. “Your father, I mean Marshall, he took on a job a few months ago. It wasn’t his usual thing, he normally accepted contracts from little old ladies and working parents. But this client worked for someone else and he would never say who.”

  There was a special kind of sting in knowing I didn’t even know what my father’s occupation was. “What did he do for a living?”

  “He worked in IT, fixed computers and networks and such. Most of his business came from referrals, people so happy with the work he did that they told their friends who then came to him.”

  “Was the new contract for fixing computers?”

  “Marshall never went into specifics. All I knew was that he was turning down other work for a few months in order to fulfil this new contract. He worked day and night, I was so worried about him.” A few daring wrinkles managed to break through on her forehead. “My gut is telling me his disappearance has to do with that contract, I just can’t think of anything else.”

  “Was he acting weird or anything that day?” I asked, a theory of my own starting to curl up in my brain.

  “He was just exhausted. I know it sounds silly, but it felt like something was wrong that morning. When he kissed me goodbye–he always does that when he leaves for work–he held me extra tight. When he didn’t come home for dinner I knew my intuition was right.”

  A psychic stepmom.

  Great.

  I suddenly stood, I’d had enough. “Thank you for the cookies but we have to go.”

  Frankie and Samantha both shot me a curious look before standing. My stepmother hurried to a desk by the corner and rifled around in the drawer for a few moments before pulling something out.

  She returned and held it up for me to take.

  It was a picture of my father.

  Not from ages ago like the one pulsing with a heartbeat in my attic, but from recently. “You should have this, it was taken only last Christmas.”

  Marshall Gabrielle, the man biologically my father, was smiling like he didn’t have a care in the world. It was a different grin from the photo in my attic. This one had seen more of the world, took problems onto his back until it weighed him down, and yet refused to be negative.

  My father was handsome.

  His eyes hadn’t changed. Still blue as the sky and catching the light until they looked like two pools in the middle of his face. I should have been able to look at the photo and feel nothing, it had been ten years since he lost me.

  Still…

  He was one half of the only family I had ever known. And when the other half was Uncle Marvin, it was important to feel something besides contempt.

  A sharp pang of regret rushed through me, slicing me in two like a cleaver. I had a father that lived only a few bus rides from my own home. For all these years we had been so close and yet a world away from one another.

  And now he was gone.

  My opportunity to know him, to get answers about why he did what he did, and maybe include him in my life was gone. Vanished. Kaput.

  “Thank you,” I muttered, remembering the others around me.

  “Can I have your phone number? You know, just in case I need to contact you.”

  “Um, yeah, okay.” I reeled off my number while Samantha programmed it into her phone.

  I thanked her again before leaving with Frankie. The moment I stepped outside I felt like I could breathe again. Being in a house with so many ghosts of the past was uncomfortable. I didn’t even know Samantha and April existed until the other day.

  I had to get out.

  The story seemed all too familiar.

  My father had been exhausted and working all the time in the weeks leading up to his disappearance from my life, too. He had insisted he was going to work on the night he walked out and never came back.

  What if he did the same to his new family?

  April was only a little older than I was. Perhaps his new family weren’t living up to his expectations and he decided to lose them, too?

  I wasn’t prepared to dismiss the theory.

  We started walking in silence toward the bus stop.

  “She seemed nice,” Frankie said.

  “Nice enough.”

  “The kid was cute.”

  “Cute enough,” I replied.

  We reached the bus stop and paused to wait for the number 17. As we did, Frankie did something completely unexpected and terrifying.

  He hugged me.

  Chapter 9

  Nobody had hugged me since I was lost. Just imagining Uncle Marvin’s arms around me was funny enough. Matilda was the only other creature that would cuddle me.

  But Frankie’s arms had wrapped around my body and he had hugged me.

  Hugged me.

  Hugged me.

  I didn’t know what to do so I just patted his back, hoping that would be socially acceptable to him and the people watching while they waited for a bus.

  One woman smiled at me.

  It was a bizarre day.

  When Frankie took his arms back, I was colder without them. I had enjoyed the hug. Already I wanted another but I would have to settle for just one.

  “What was that for?” I asked. Every part of my body felt wrong now, like I was too angular and sharp. I wanted to be soft and gooey, have a reason for people to hug me spontaneously.

  Frankie shrugged, shoving his hands into his pockets. “I figured you needed it.”

  I did.

  I needed someone to find me.

  The bus arrived and broke our silence. Frankie wanted to ride all the way to my house but I managed to talk him out of it. If Uncle Marvin saw Frankie at the house again he’d have a screaming fit.

  I didn’t feel like dealing with his tantrums today.

  We said goodbye when his stop came on the route. I only had another few before reaching my house. I gave Mrs. Justice a wave as she watched me arrive home through her kitchen window.

  Hugging.

  Waving.

  What was wrong with me?

  Uncle Marvin was in the kitchen when I walked inside. It was his night to cook, which meant we were probably having ma
caroni and cheese. Either that or canned soup.

  I went straight upstairs to my room, needing a few moments to myself to gather my thoughts. Melancholy was settling over me as I thought about my father.

  If he spoke about me like Samantha said, why didn’t he ever come to visit me? Uncle Marvin never moved, he knew the address. He’d lived in this house, he could probably find it blindfolded.

  My fingers dragged across the shelves of lost things. I had rescued so many items and they were each as precious as the next. They were all beautiful in their own right.

  I stopped when I reached the huddle of cell phones I had rescued. I didn’t intend on finding the original owners of any of them, even though it wouldn’t be hard. All I had to do was call one of the numbers and find out who it belonged to.

  Frankie’s phone was the newest. I placed it gently in my palm and held onto it for a few moments. It was warm when I slid it into my backpack.

  Perhaps I would break my rules just once.

  The next cell phone once belonged to Gina, otherwise known as the blonde who had taunted me at lunchtime while I innocently sat in the cafeteria.

  I pressed the power button and the screen lit up. She was smart enough to have a password protect the phone, but she wasn’t smart enough to use a word other than her actual name.

  Typing in her super clever and secret password, her boyfriend’s face blinked up at me as her wallpaper. She was sickeningly a walking stereotype.

  My thumb waved over the photos file and I flicked through everything she deemed worthy enough of taking a picture of.

  About ninety-nine percent of them were selfies.

  Gina in her car.

  Gina in her bathroom mirror in a bikini.

  Gina pretending to smooch her boyfriend.

  And on and on until I wanted to get the past few minutes of my life back from the endless void I’d fallen into. It was clear Gina loved herself.

  Which would have been fine.

  If she wasn’t a bitch.

  I stopped flicking when a photo of her in the tiniest bikini possible flashed onto the screen. I tapped it to copy and then went to her text messages.

  I started a new one, sending it to every one of her saved contacts. Attaching the photo, I sent a lovely little message gloating of my awesomeness–as Gina, of course.