What We Lost

by Sara Zarr

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  Trouble is I’m so exhausted

  The plot, you see, I think I’ve lost it

  I need the grace to find what can’t be found

  Over the Rhine,

  “Long Lost Brother”

  Day 1

  Saturday, early August.

  The whole world is wilting.

  Shriveling. Giving up. Dying.

  Maybe not the whole world. Somewhere, I guess, it’s not ninety-one degrees at four in the morning. I would like to be in that place. I would like to be somewhere, anywhere, that life feels possible and not smothered under a layer of heat and hopelessness. I’m tired of waking up every two hours in a puddle of sweat, and tired of every day discovering there’s something else that’s ruined or broken or falling apart. Yesterday it was the TV. Today, it’s the ceiling fan in my room, the brokenness of which I discovered when I woke up wondering where the air went. I slipped out the sliding glass door into the backyard hoping for a miracle of something below eighty, and I now realize I can add the yard to the list of minor tragedies that make up my life these days.

  The solar luminaries my dad put in last summer give just enough light that I can see the disaster it’s become in this heat wave. Except I can’t completely blame the heat. Honestly, it’s looked like this for a long time. Dad’s momentary burst of involvement via the luminaries and also painting the lawn furniture was just that—momentary. For about seventeen minutes last summer our family worked the way it’s supposed to. The problems with the yard are just a symptom, really.

  Everything out here reminds me of something. I can almost see the outline of my mom crouched at the base of the apple tree, mulching the roots, her blond hair held back with a blue bandanna; the curve of her neck, elegant. Even just a few months ago, when she was passing-out drunk, she still had that elegance. Classy is the word for my mother.

  The clothesline strung up between a fence post and the metal eyebolt my dad screwed into the tree makes me think of the way he looked at her, laughing, when he said, “I can just imagine your undies flapping in the breeze on this thing, for all of Pineview to see. Your bra size will end up in the church newsletter if you’re not careful.”

  “That would be funny if it weren’t true,” my mom said, but she smiled, too, and I know she liked it, Dad teasing her that way.

  “Dad,” I said, acting embarrassed. “Please.” But I liked it, too.

  That summer it wasn’t too hot, and when the heat did climb there was iced tea on the back porch, my parents playing cribbage together after the sun went down, the game board balanced on my mom’s tan thighs and my dad laying cards down on the arm of the chaise.

  None of that lasted long. Probably all my good memories of the last year add up to three days.

  I walk through the yard, making a mental checklist of what needs fixing. The two butterfly bushes have grown into each other and taken over the spot where my mom once had an herb garden, back when she still cared about things like cooking. The Mexican sage has completely run amok. The hollyhock plant that looked okay a few weeks ago has fallen over from its own weight, and lies across the flagstone path like a corpse. I step over to it, sweat trickling down the inside of my tank top and to the waistband of my pajama shorts. I try to get the hollyhock to stand up and stay up, but it flops back down over my bare feet.

  I’m glad my mother isn’t around to see this.

  Instead, she’s got the residents’ garden of New Beginnings Recovery Center, neatly xeriscaped with drought-resistant plants that never ask for more than you can give them. Her room is neat. The cafeteria is neat. The visiting area is neat. She’s been lifted, as if by the hand of God but in truth by the long arm of the law, out of this messy life.

  I could make this yard look like the one at New Beginnings. All it would take are some supplies and time and maybe a book from the library telling me how to do it. Then, when she comes home, she won’t have to see the same dead and dying things that were here when she left.

  Ralph is hunkered down in the kitchen sink when I come in, cool porcelain all around him, and meows at me as if there’s something I can do about the heat. I’d sit in the sink, too, if I fit. I lift him out and put him on the floor where he paces and meows and rubs his gray fur against my legs.

  There’s no cat food. There’s barely any people food. I tear a few pieces off a leftover rotisserie chicken in the back of the fridge and toss them on the floor for Ralph, then pull an envelope from the stack of mail on the counter and start a grocery list on the back of it.

  Soon I hear Dad up and moving around, and within a few minutes he appears under the archway to our open kitchen. I lift my head and he’s rumpled and sweaty, his thick hair sticking up every which way, and staring at me like he’s thinking of how to form the words that will make whatever it is not sound so bad.

  “What,” I say. It’s not a question, because I know it’s something. Every day it’s something.

  “Bad news.”

  I wait for it, thinking of some of the information that has recently followed that statement.

  Grandpa’s surgery didn’t go like we’d hoped.

  We’re not sure if we can pay the tuition at Amberton Heights Academy next year.

  Your mother’s been in an accident.

  “The air conditioner is on the blink,” Dad says.

  Of course.

  He reaches down to scratch Ralph’s head. “At least, I can’t get it cranking. On the up side, the TV seems back in commission. I’m not sure how, but we’re getting a picture again.”

  “My ceiling fan isn’t working, either.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No. And we need to buy groceries today.” I hold up the envelope I’ve been writing on. “I’m making a list.”

  He comes close, smelling like someone who lives in a house where there is no air, and takes the envelope, turning it over to look at the front. It’s a bill of some sort. “When did this come?” He rips into it.

  “I don’t know. The mail has been sitting here…” For a while. “Don’t mess up my list.”

  He pulls out the bill, looks at it for half a second, and stuffs it back into the envelope. “I guess I should go through all of this,” he says, looking at the pile.

  “Yeah.” There are a lot of things around here I can take care of, a lot of things I have been taking care of for a long time, but being fifteen and unemployed, money isn’t one of them.

  Dad searches through a pile of paper on the other end of the counter. “Doesn’t your mom keep coupons around here somewhere?”

  “Mom hasn’t clipped coupons in at least three years,” I say. I know, because it was my job to sit at the counter with the Sunday paper while Dad was at church getting ready for the service. I’d scan the coupons and deals, while Mom had her weekly anxiety attack about what to wear, and what to make me wear. She hated Sundays. Eventually I realized she wasn’t even using the coupons, and I figured I’d be of more use helping Mom get dressed and ready and calm. “You look perfect,” I’d assure her. And she always did.

  Dad, of course, was never here for any of that, so he has no idea. He stops rummaging through the papers and looks at
me. “Well, what is all this, then?”

  It’s stuff from the last four months that she was scared to throw away: old phone messages, flyers for events she was afraid she’d forget about, bank deposit slips. She used to like a neat house, everything in order, so the fact that she let that stuff pile up should have told Dad something. Obviously, he’d barely noticed the kitchen counter until right this moment.

  “It’s Mom’s,” I say. “Just leave it.” I don’t want her coming home from rehab and feeling like we went through the house, erasing her. “Can we stop at the hardware store when we go out?” I ask. “I want to get some stuff for the yard.”

  “Maybe I can find the part for your ceiling fan and get that working.” He stares at me in that meaningful, fatherly way I can’t bear anymore so I have no choice but to turn away and pretend to look in the fridge. “What else do you have going on today?” he asks.

  “Nothing.” I move an almost-empty carton of milk two inches to the right and close the door. “Unless you want to start our driving lessons?”

  He shakes his head. “I can’t today. I think you should make a plan. I think you should call Vanessa, or Daniel. Get out of the house. Go see a movie in an air-conditioned theater.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Sammy, it’s not a suggestion. Okay?”

  I nod. We’ve discussed this. Me being home alone too much, a habit I developed when I started to get afraid to leave Mom by herself. But she’s not here now, so.

  “I’m going to hop in the shower,” he says.

  I nod again, and watch him walk away, through the airless living room and down the hall.

  Main Street in Pineview has exactly six not-so-creatively-named businesses:

  Petey’s Ice Cream

  The Casa Nova Mexican Diner (only open three days a week)

  Main Street Coffee

  Main Street Gas & Garage

  Main Street Bar & Grill (the “grill” part closed down years ago)

  Main Street Hardware

  We’re two hours south of Medford, six hours north of Sacramento, and a day west of Denver, which puts us exactly… nowhere. We have parades on Memorial Day, Fourth of July, and Christmas. The Ten Commandments are still inscribed on a monument outside City Hall even after three lawsuits. Once a year people from all over the West come here for the Migratory Bird Festival. There’s one public school for all grades, one private school (where I go, or went, I guess), one post office that’s really a trailer off the pass, one library, and one grocery store where the whole town shops except for those who drive thirty-eight miles to the new Dillon’s Bluff Wal-Mart. And seven churches, including Pineview Community, where my dad is the pastor.

  Everyone knows him. Everyone thinks they know us, me. Everyone is wrong.

  Even as we drive through town now, people in other cars and kids playing near the road recognize us and wave. Probably a third of the town’s population helps pay the lease on our Taurus and the mortgage on our house, which gives them the right to say things to my dad like, “I see you got new tires there, Charlie. Are you sure the steel-belted are really worth it? They can’t be cheap…” or “The front lawn at the house is looking a little ragged—do you need to borrow a mower?” Whenever I get new clothes I can almost see some of the women at church calculating how much we spent.

  Everyone knows exactly how much my dad makes, and they think it’s enough. Some think it’s too much.

  One time I was out with Mom when we ran into a congregant who owns his own tech company and gives a lot of money to the church. Mom was holding on to her cell phone, which she’d just upgraded to one of those that does everything so that I could have her old one, and this guy, this congregant, made a comment about it. “I guess you can keep your grocery list on that thing, if nothing else,” he said. His big, jokey smile didn’t hide what he was really saying: Why does a housewife need a fancy phone, especially when the church basically pays the cell bill, and shouldn’t we use that money for new pew Bibles or an ad in the county yellow pages?

  “Yes,” Mom said, smiling back, drawing a perfectly but modestly home-manicured finger through a piece of hair that had fallen across her face. “It does wonders with grocery lists.” But when the guy was gone, Mom said to me, “I guess we’re not supposed to live in the twenty-first century,” and tucked the phone into her purse, out of sight.

  There’s a lot of stuff like that we deal with. Those are just examples.

  Now Dad pulls the car right in front of Main Street Hardware, and as he turns off the engine there’s a little rattle coming from under the hood. I look at him. He’s pretending not to hear it. After Mom’s accident, and everything else, the last thing we need is car trouble.

  The bells on the door of the hardware store jingle as we go in. A wave of air-conditioned air feels too cold at first, raising goose bumps on my arms, but then it’s like heaven.

  “Charlie, hey.” Cal Stewart, who owns and single-handedly runs the hardware store, greets us. Or I should say he greets my dad and nods politely at me. “What can I do for you?” I like Cal, even though he never remembers my name. He’s got woolly dark hair that’s just starting to go a little gray, and wire-rim glasses that make him look smarter than most people in Pineview, and he’s a lot nicer than the old couple he bought the store from a few years ago.

  Dad and Cal discuss the ceiling fan issue, and I take advantage of the chance to walk the aisles of the store, running my hand over the different-size chains that hang from spools, looking into bins of glittering loose nails in every size, examining a dozen kinds of spackles and glues. There’s something to make or fix or connect everything.

  When he’s done talking to my dad, Cal walks by the other end of the aisle and catches sight of me.

  “Can I help you find something?”

  “I’m thinking about doing something different in our backyard.”

  “Let’s go to the outdoor section. Near the front.”

  My dad is up front, too, talking on his cell, something about the music for tomorrow’s service.

  Cal asks me, “So you want to do something different. Different how?”

  “It’s so hot,” I say. “Everything’s kind of… dying.”

  He leads me to a spinning wire rack of thin gardening books, many of them dusty and with pages that are starting to yellow from the sun. “Here’s one on desert gardening. Technically, Pineview is high desert and not true desert, but it’s got a lot of info on plants that don’t need much water.”

  “Xeriscaping.”

  “Right.” He hands me the book. “Is this for 4-H?”

  “No,” I say, surprised that he remembers. “Just for my house.”

  The last time I came here was to get wooden dowels. I dropped out of 4-H before I finished that project, which was supposed to be me and Vanessa teaching crafts at the Dillon’s Bluff Senior Center, but my mom wasn’t doing so well the day she’d promised to drive us to do the setup, and my dad was busy with church, and instead of telling the truth I told Vanessa that I’d given my mom the wrong date and Vanessa got mad and I dropped out rather than let her down again. Anyway.

  “You’ll probably need some of this,” Cal says, leading me through the store to a pile of black plastic sheeting.

  “What for?”

  “To smother those water-greedy plants you’re trying to replace.” He hands me a bulky, folded armload of it.

  “Ready, Sam?” my dad asks, eyeing what I’ve got and, I’m sure, calculating the price.

  I nod. Cal rings us up and Dad pays with a credit card. We both exhale and try not to look too surprised when it goes through.

  In the grocery store, Dad doesn’t approve of my list. “Your mother lets you eat like this?” He puts a bag of chocolate-covered pretzels back on the shelf.

  I stare at him.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.” Just that you sound like a weekend dad who’s been divorced for years, I think, not someone who allegedly lives in the same house as me
.

  He pushes the cart down the cereal aisle and throws in a box of cornflakes, the store brand that’s always on sale and is not so much cornflakes as corn dust. To stop myself from complaining I turn on my heel and go off to the pet supplies, where I run right into Vanessa and her mom struggling with a twenty-pound bag of dog food.

  “Sam!” Vanessa drops her end of the bag to the floor and hugs me.

  It’s only been a little over a week since I’ve seen her, but she looks like a whole different person to me. True, she’s gotten her hair cut, and maybe she’s a little bit more tan, but I mean she feels like a stranger—her voice, her soft arms around my neck, like it’s been ten years, not ten days. I pull back, and wonder if she thinks I feel like a stranger, too.

  “Didn’t you get my messages?” she asks.

  “I—” Whatever I say won’t be true. How do you admit to avoiding your best friend?

  Mrs. Hathaway, still grasping her corner of the dog food bag, saves me. “We wanted to invite you over for dinner sometime this week, if that would be okay with your dad.”

  She knows about my mom being gone, that’s obvious, because normally she would have said, if that would be okay with your mom. Which makes me wonder how many other people from church know and when Dad is going to officially announce it so that I can stop playing the “I don’t know if you know” game every time I run into church people, which is pretty much every time I leave the house.

  “Yeah,” Vanessa says, bouncing a little bit on the balls of her feet, “you can spend the night.”

  “I’ll make your favorite Chinese chicken salad,” Mrs. Hathaway coaxes. She always makes me feel like one of the family, as if she and my mom are still best friends and we all practically live at each other’s houses, even though that hasn’t been true for years.

  “Come on, Sam.” Vanessa is practically begging. I could make both my dad and Vanessa happy by simply letting the word yes come out of my mouth.

  But I don’t want to.

  I don’t want to be with people. I don’t want to talk to people. I don’t want to answer questions or pretend to be interested in conversations or activities.