The Lost

by Sarah Beth Durst

  Claire hops off the bed. She spins me so she can examine me from all angles. Bits of ribbon dangle at the edges of my vision. “Claire...” I’m not certain how to delicately break it to her that I don’t want to look like a half-wrapped present—or that I’m not sure I can “save” people. I don’t know how I found the ring and the newspaper.

  “You look wise,” she says. “They need you to look wise. If they even think you can help them, even if you can’t, then they won’t kill you. Lauren, this is your chance to win them over, to fix what happened in the diner.”

  Oh. That...makes sense. I nod slowly. “Okay, go ahead.”

  Claire smiles.

  “What?”

  “You really trust me.”

  “Sure.”

  “I told Peter from the start that you’re different.” She sounds very satisfied with herself. “Most grown-ups wouldn’t listen to a kid.”

  “You’re not an ordinary kid.” But I can’t argue with the sentiment. I had an uncle who liked to talk to me as if I was no smarter than his pet Maltese. Less smart, in fact. I had on occasion contemplated biting him on the hand as he patted my shoulder and told me how cute it was that I liked art, or how sweet that my mother still kept my artwork on the wall, even though I was well out of elementary school, as if the paintings I’d labored over and poured my heart into were no better than the drawing that I’d scrawled when I clutched a crayon in my hand, still plump with baby fat.

  He was Mom’s older brother, and he’d talk to her that way sometimes, too. He’d notice what she hadn’t cleaned—the dust on top of the refrigerator, the eggs inside that had expired a week ago, the mail that hadn’t been sorted, the shoes that were scuffed, and he’d gently remark about how it was such a shame she was so busy, or how his wife miraculously juggled it all, even though they were married and childless and she didn’t work, unlike Mom. Mom always tolerated it. She let it roll off her back like water off a plastic tablecloth. Or at least she seemed to. It was one of those things we didn’t talk about, like my father, like her father, like why she never went home for Thanksgiving, like why I broke up with that boyfriend that everyone thought was better than sliced bread. He wasn’t. But he thought he was, too. And he took my best pair of sunglasses when he left. He didn’t respect me. Certainly didn’t respect my dreams. He might have respected my sunglasses.

  Claire hugs me. “I trust you, too.” She releases me and skips out the door.

  The dress that Claire picked out for me has a pocket, and I slide a knife into it. The weight makes me feel marginally better, even though I can’t imagine stabbing anyone with it. Following her, I head toward the front door.

  I hear the crowd before I see it, a low buzz like a hornet’s nest, and I contemplate jumping out a window and swimming away. I could do it. I’m a strong swimmer. Or I used to be. I can find a new house, scavenge for new things. Claire would be fine, and eventually I could sneak back and fetch her and Peter. I’ve learned enough about how to survive here that I think I could make it on my own, at least for a little while. But Claire has a grip on my hand.

  She flings open the front door. In a dramatic voice, she says, “She was lost, and she suffered. But she has forgiven you and is here to heal your soul!” I hear voices, rising in excitement—they’ve seen Claire’s glow.

  Pulling my wrist, Claire yanks me outside.

  I plaster a smile on my face and hope it looks more like a kind, benevolent smile, rather than maniacal, which is what it feels like. This is a terrible idea, I think. I’m no savior. I’m glad that Peter is watching from the roof. I force myself not to look up and give him away as I walk onto the porch. At least a dozen men, women, and kids are perched and lounging on the porch and junk pile. They’re rattier-looking than either Victoria or Sean. One man is dressed in a coat sewn entirely from socks. One of the boys is wearing rags with so many holes and stains that it looks as if a stiff breeze will blow it off his body. Another woman is in a sequin dress and draped with diamond or rhinestone necklaces. Every finger is covered with enormous rings, three on each finger so that her knuckles cannot even bend. Seeing me, all of them unwind from where they lay, and they rush forward.

  Claire steps in front of me, at the top of the porch steps, and puts her hands on her hips. “One at a time!” She claps her hands for attention. “You know she can’t work a dozen miracles at once! Go in the order you arrived. I’ll give you numbers.” She marches off the porch. The crowd breaks. Some are glaring at her, some are glaring at me. A few look at me in what looks like awe. One lies on his back and counts, clouds I assume, except the sky is clear. He could be counting dust particles.

  A young woman shoulders her way to the front. She wears a lacy hippie shirt, a bandana around her head, and Mardi Gras beads. Her eyes are sunken in with deep bruiselike circles under them, as if she hasn’t slept in aeons. Or as if she is on drugs. “I first.” She glares at me, and I shrink back.

  Claire marches down the step and puts her hands on her hips. “You aren’t ready,” she announces. I stifle a smile. As my new self-appointed manager, Claire is acting more like a forty-year-old diva than a six-year-old little girl. Granted, she is older than she looks, and being on her own has aged her... My urge to smile fades. This place is robbing her of her childhood. How long has she been here? A year? Two? Three?

  The woman switches her glare to Claire. “You don’t know anything. Just because you have the glow—”

  “Come back later.” Claire points instead to a boy with a backward baseball cap and shorts that ride three inches lower than the waistband of his boxers, which are bright red with blue rocketships. “You first.”

  The kid shrugs and saunters up to the steps. “I’m ready.”

  I don’t know what he expects me to do. Everyone is watching me. I clear my throat. Claire is beaming up at me, her eyes wide and face expectant, lit by her glow. I wonder what Peter is thinking from his perch above me. “What did you lose?” I ask.

  He shoots a look over his shoulder.

  I think of Victoria, how she said no one asks about the past. “How about you come inside?” Stepping aside, I indicate the door. “Claire, let me know if...” I trail off, not certain how to communicate that she should let me know if any of the crowd shows homicidal tendencies. I’m also tempted to take her inside with me, my six-year-old bodyguard.

  The boy peers into each of the rooms as I lead him inside. I take him to the living room and point to one of the chairs opposite the face of the steam engine. I sit nervously on the edge of the couch. I can see the ocean out of the window, also the void.

  He nods at the water. “What’s up with the ocean?”

  “I think it’s mine.”

  “Sweet.”

  “Thanks.” I look out at it, more for a safe place to look than anything else. How exactly did I get myself into this? Oh, yeah, I trusted a six-year-old. “Do you know what you lost?”

  “Yeah. It was after school. A Thursday. Not that that matters. Girlfriend just broke up with me. Rightfully so. She wasn’t what I lost. Cheated on her. Totally deserved it. I was a douche-bag boyfriend.” He talks fast, clipped, the words popping out of him as if they’re shooting out of his mouth.

  “That’s...good of you to realize.”

  “Ran across some guys from school. Just hanging out, you know? Anyway, there was this pack of girls. You know the type. Pretty girls. Perfect hair. Swish when they walk. Not sure how they do that without falling over. The kind that want you to look at them but then yell when you look, you know? As if you don’t have the right to have eyes?”

  I nod. I do know the type. I wasn’t one of them, but they never really bothered me. I ran with the artsy crowd. We considered ourselves superior because we’d mastered the art of publicly angsting over cultural decay, even if we were privately angsting over the basketball team.

  “I
was sick of them looking down at me. Sick of all of it. The guys were joking... Long story short, I singled one out, one that looked a lot like my ex, one with the superior smile and that look in her eyes, and I started talking about her. Lies. But detailed lies. And it spread. Got back to her. She denied it, but no one believed her. And so I thought I’d hit on a great way to bring them down to our level. Stop them from looking so superior, or something. It was stupid. It was petty. I knew it at the time. But I was the Robin Hood of the social order, you know? Restoring fairness to the high school hallways.”

  He’s flushing fiercely as he talks. His neck is bright red.

  “How did you wind up here?” I ask.

  “That girl, the first girl, the one that I started with telling lies. She killed herself. And after that...I didn’t go to the funeral. Didn’t think I had the right. Stood outside the church, though, and when the family came out, I...took a walk. And kept walking until I was in this part of town I didn’t recognize. Turns out it wasn’t a part of my town at all. It was here.” He shrugs. “And that’s pretty much it.”

  “Okay.”

  He looks at me. “So, can you help me?”

  I take a deep breath and meet his eyes. “You pretty much just confessed to causing an innocent girl’s death. I don’t know what I can find that will fix that.” He hangs his head, and I wish I hadn’t been so harsh. He’s a kid. He screwed up, yes. But he’s a kid, and what the hell kind of right do I have to judge him? Besides, maybe there’s more to the story. More gently, I ask, “What will you do if I succeed?”

  “See if the other girls are okay,” he says immediately. “I keep thinking...I can’t undo it for her. But those other girls, yeah, maybe. I owe something, you know? And I can’t pay it back here.”

  I nod. “I’ll see what I can do. No promises. I’m new to this. If there’s any hint you can give me as to what you expect me to find...” I can hear a voice inside my head screaming at me that this is not my responsibility! This is not my problem! I have my own problems, thank you very much. But Claire’s right—if I can win over the townspeople, I’ll be safer. And I did find the star sapphire ring and the 1986 newspaper.

  “Her.”

  I’m not sure I heard him correctly. “She’s dead.”

  “So are some people here.”

  I think of Tiffany. “But...” I don’t know how to phrase it nicely. I don’t even know if I’m right. “But if she intended to die, then she wouldn’t be lost. She’d be exactly where she wanted to be. Dead dead. Not lost-dead.”

  He shook his head so hard that his bandana slipped. “She can’t be. She has to be here. I need her to forgive me, or else I can’t ever return. You have to find her.”

  I don’t know that she’ll be willing to forgive, even if I could find her. After all, she killed herself. That’s about as unforgiving and stuck-in-pain as it gets. But I don’t say that. His eyes are so pleading, so young, so hopeful and helpless and hopeless all at the same time. “I’ll try.” I rise. “I need...”

  “What? I’ll get it for you. Anything.” He jumps to his feet.

  “Just...need my bathing suit. Wait here, okay.”

  He sinks down.

  I scurry into my room, shut the door, and change as quickly as I can. I then head to my window and open it. I look out at the ocean, the empty boats, the blur on the horizon. I can’t do this. What was I thinking? A shape swings down in front of my window. Jumping backward, I bite back a yelp as Peter, upside down, grins at me.

  Opening the window, I let him inside. He swings in and lands on his feet. “So...you’re saving them now?”

  “Am I being stupid?”

  He shrugs. “If you are, then I’m stupid, too.”

  “Why me?” I ask. “Does the void like me? Or—”

  He curls his hand around my cheek, his fingers in my hair, and he kisses me. Instantly, the rest of the world dims and fades, and the only sound I hear is the crash of waves hitting the back of the house. He tastes like the salty air.

  I’m kissing the ocean, I think.

  He releases me and then launches himself out the window without another word.

  Wrapping a towel tight around me, I walk back to the living room. I lift the window and climb out. I drop down into the sand softened by the waves. The water curls around my toes. “Hey, what’s your name?”

  “Colin.”

  “Seriously?”

  “My mom really liked The Secret Garden.”

  “Mine read me that book, too,” I say. Mom used to read to me all the time, through a lot of elementary school. We both liked to read. Spent a lot of high school curled up on couches side by side reading books. We’d trade them back and forth. I used to keep a steady supply of bookmarks in the house because she liked to grab whatever was nearby to mark her place—a tissue, a napkin, a straw, a plate, a pencil, her glasses. I wish she were here, reading on this couch, in our little yellow house.

  “Yeah, stupid book,” he says. Quickly, he adds, “Unless you like it. Been a long time since she read it to me. Maybe it’s good.”

  “Help yourself to any of the books on the shelves. Just use a bookmark.”

  “Right. Okay. Good luck.”

  I toss the towel over the windowsill and wade into the water.

  “Hey, what’s your name?”

  I pause. For some reason, I don’t want to tell him. Maybe it’s what Claire said, about needing to seem wise and mysterious. Or maybe I just don’t want to share. “I’m the one who’s going to help you. I think that’s good enough for you to know, don’t you?”

  “Uh, yeah, sure.”

  I immediately feel like that was totally cheesy and want to shout back that my name is Lauren, but I don’t. Instead, I turn my back on him and hurry into the water. It splashes around my legs, and I lurch forward to belly flop into the surf. A second later, I think I should have done that more gracefully if I’m impersonating some kind of oracle or savior, but whatever.

  A minute later, I spot the familiar silver dorsal fin in the water. I swim to it with overhead strokes that I remember from the summer I thought I might train to be a lifeguard, until it occurred to me that lifeguards spend most of their time out of the water, watching, when what I really loved was being in the water and tuning out the world. I swim to the dolphin, and I stroke its side. It chitters at me. I grab its dorsal fin, and it shoots through the water. I feel the waves splash into my face. Salt water sprays into my eyes, nose, and mouth. I taste the salt as I breathe. Closer to the void, I release, and the dolphin veers away to safer waters. But I keep going. I swim directly into the void.

  The water fades, and I lower my legs. It doesn’t feel quite so lonely this time. It’s oddly peaceful. The dust wraps around me, warm and soft on my skin. I walk through it. It’s not unlike pushing through water. I focus on Colin, think of his story, wonder if he’s told me everything, if it’s really forgiveness that he needs, and what happens if he never gets it. If I fail here, with all those people outside...I don’t think they’ll be forgiving, either. I try not to think about that, and instead I picture Colin, his face, his eyes. He did a horrible thing that had an even more horrible consequence, one he didn’t intend of course and maybe there were other factors in this girl’s life that led to her quitting life, but I believe he was a factor. More important, he believes it.

  But if forgiveness isn’t possible for him...

  I don’t know.

  I quit trying to guess. Instead I just walk and think of Colin, whom I’ve known for all of five minutes but want to help and not just because if I fail, it will be bad for me. But because he sat in my living room—me, a total stranger—and tried to articulate where his life had gone wrong.

  I can articulate when mine went wrong: Mom’s first diagnosis.

  She came to my apartment after work and broug
ht Chinese food. She set the table as I unpacked the food. As I unpacked it, I began to notice she’d ordered every single appetizer on the menu. No lo mein or fried rice. But fried dumplings, spareribs, egg rolls, crab rangoon... This is a woman who never orders appetizers at all because she doesn’t believe the cost-to-food ratio is worth it. If you want small portions, she’d say, you order regular and save the rest as leftovers. “We’re either celebrating or mourning,” I said.

  “Just wanted something special tonight,” she said.

  “Why?” I asked.

  Why hadn’t I let it lie? Why had I pressed it? She would have told me when she was ready, when she thought I was ready. This was for herself. She wanted this nice meal with me. But I didn’t let it go. I was like a dog that had grabbed one of those spareribs. I teased, begged, cajoled, pestered, and demanded.

  Ovarian cancer.

  “Surgery works for many, many people,” she said after she told me. Her voice was so bright that it was brittle. I’d been eating a crab rangoon, and I bolted to the bathroom and threw up. I didn’t come out until much later to find that Mom had transferred all of the food into plastic containers and stored them labeled in the refrigerator. She was sitting in front of the TV. The TV wasn’t on, but the remote was clutched in her hand. She smiled brightly when I came into the room.

  “You’re going to be strong for me, aren’t you?” I said as I flopped onto the couch next to her.

  “One of us has to be.” She pointed to my nose. “You’re a terrible crier. Makes you look all splotchy.”

  “Your genes.”

  “Sorry about that. And sorry if you inherit this.”

  “Mom!”