The Beautiful Lost

by Luanne Rice

  I shook my head. “I’m coming with you.”

  He stuck the screwdriver in his back pocket. We went out the back door and crossed the narrow strip of beach grass between the cottages. My feet sank, and sand got into my sneakers. The weathered stairs led to a small porch, and I noticed there were several small towers built of beach stones—the largest and widest on the bottom, narrowing to the tiniest stone at the top.

  I thought there might be another key hidden here, but instead Billy pulled an empty garbage can close to the house, turned it upside down, and hopped up. He jimmied the screwdriver around the window frame, removed the pane of glass, and reached in to unlock the window. Easing up the sash, he crawled inside.

  I felt two ways: nervous that he was so good at breaking into a house and admiration that he knew his way around tools and woodwork. When he opened the back door he grabbed my hand hard and pulled me in fast. I stumbled and fell against him.

  “We really can’t be in here,” he said. “My grandparents’ house is one thing, but this is different.”

  He let go of my hand, but my skin tingled as if electricity had run from his fingers through mine. My heart thumped, and I had to steady myself after crashing into his chest. I was glad the sun had almost set because these windows were not boarded up, and I wouldn’t want him to see my cheeks—they felt hot and I knew they were bright red.

  He stood still for a minute, looking around the kitchen. I tried to see what he was seeing; even in the fading light the bright colors struck me. A turquoise table, yellow chairs, white curtains with red ball fringe. A light fixture hanging over the table by a chain; the shade was stained glass, a mosaic of jewel colors in the shape of dragonflies. There were more stone towers, smaller than the ones on the porch, on the windowsill over the sink. Someone who loved her family had decorated this kitchen.

  “What are these?” I asked, pointing at the stones.

  “They’re called cairns,” he said. “My mom and I always picked up stones on the beach and built them.”

  I walked over to the refrigerator. On the wall next to it were five framed drawings obviously made by a child: a house, a family of three, a boat, a bridge, and a big fluffy dog. Each was signed Billy, and an adult had penciled in dates. The most recent was ten years ago, when Billy would have been about six. There were also framed snapshots of Billy at different ages: skating at Rockefeller Center, in front of dinosaur bones at the American Museum of Natural History, in Central Park by that big fountain with the angel.

  “New York City?” I asked.

  “She loved Manhattan,” he said. “It was her favorite place.”

  I thought about that. While my mother loved whales and wild nature, his mother had loved the city.

  “How about you?” I asked.

  “We had good times there,” he said, his gaze lingering on the photos. In one, in front of the Statue of Liberty, Billy and a little golden-haired girl waved at the camera. They were about seven, and grinning. In another photo, taken outside the Village Vanguard, they were teenagers.

  “A jazz club,” he said, noticing my curiosity.

  “It looks cool,” I said. But my interest was really about the girl—she was totally chic in skinny jeans and a black leather jacket, big square glasses, straight yellow hair, and red lipstick. “She’s pretty,” I said. “Does she live in New York?”

  “No,” he said coldly, shutting down any more questions.

  He headed toward the stairs, and I followed him, but we stopped short at the foot. There were scraps of yellow tape, the kind police use at crime scenes, still attached to the wall. Billy pushed aside a braided rug, and I gasped. People had cleaned it up, but there was a big white splotch on the dark fir floor.

  Billy took my hand again and walked me around the spot—I had the feeling it wasn’t to help me, but to protect the area itself. The shiver that ran down my spine told me it was where his mother had died.

  “Were you here?” I asked.

  “I was,” he said. “And this is my first time in the house since that day. Since I found her, right there.”

  “Why … why did you want to come back?”

  “Because this was our house,” he said. “It’s our home. And she … there was nothing I could do to help her.”

  He stared down for a long time. Then he shook his head as if dislodging memories or a scene he’d rather forget.

  “We’ve got to get my money,” he said. “If the police didn’t find my hiding place.”

  We stepped over the stain and went upstairs. It felt strange going into his bedroom; it looked so normal, with posters of racing sailboats, a desk, and bookcases filled with the Harry Potter books, The Golden Compass, Artemis Fowl, The Book Thief, Looking for Alaska, Eragon. I’d read them all, too.

  There was a poster of the New York Public Library, and tacked to it a snapshot of Billy, his mother, and that same little blond girl standing next to one of the lions on the wide front steps.

  “They’re named, you know,” he said.

  “Who?”

  “The lions. Patience and Fortitude. My friend and I called each other after them. She was Pat and I was Fort.”

  “Where is she now?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Billy said. His voice didn’t invite further questions.

  A billow of fine orange cloth hung over his bed like a canopy.

  “Is that …” I began.

  “A spinnaker,” he said. “It’s a kind of sail, made for light air. It was on my grandfather’s boat.”

  I nodded. “We sailed, too,” I said.

  “We were happy on boats,” he said, touching the spinnaker, making it flutter. Then he climbed onto his bed and reached onto the ledge above the window. He felt along the top, caught hold of a piece of fishing line. He grinned, pulling up a leather pouch hidden in the wall. “Score,” he said.

  “Looks like a lot,” I said, admiring the thickness of the pouch.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I saved up.”

  “Birthday money?” I asked, thinking of my meager wallet.

  “I had a paper route starting when I was eight, and then I worked on the beach crew, raking seaweed and painting the benches along the boardwalk. And my grandfather paid me to help with his lobster business. I hauled pots all summer, scraped barnacles off them in winter. I’d catch fish for bait.”

  He sat on his bed and gestured for me to sit beside him. I did and the springs creaked beneath us and I could barely catch my breath. I stared at his hands. They looked strong. I wanted to put my palm against his to compare the size. Or maybe I just wanted to touch his hand.

  He counted out two hundred and seventy-six dollars and gave me half.

  “In case we get split up,” he said.

  “We won’t,” I said.

  “You don’t know,” he said. “You can plan to stick together as tight as you want, but people lose each other when they least expect it. Whenever my mother and I got on the train to New York, she made me stick a twenty-dollar bill in my shoe. You have to plan for emergencies.”

  “Okay,” I said. It made my heart race to have him confide in me this way, share his money with me, as if we were really in this together.

  He filled a canvas bag with clothes, a big manila envelope, a flashlight and extra batteries, and then we headed to the stairs. He looked around as if wondering if he’d ever come back to this house again. When we got to the big white blotch, he stopped. I knew without asking that it had been made by bleach, or strong cleaning fluid, that it had burned his mother’s blood out of the floor, from where she’d landed when his father had pushed her.

  He crouched down, put his hand palm-down on the floor. He sat that way for a long minute. When he lifted his hand, he kissed his fingers. The sight of him doing that made my eyes sting with tears. I had the feeling of intruding, and I turned.

  When we walked out of the house, it was dark. We worked fast. If Billy was impressed by how I could lift the truck’s heavy wheels off the pallets where
they’d been stored, by how I knew how to use the jack, crank the truck—its body lacy with rust—up off its blocks, by the way I knew how to use a wrench, how to fasten the lug nuts quickly and in the dark, in the tiniest sliver of light from the streetlamp on the dead-end street, he didn’t show it. My mother had taught me to lengthen my grip on the wrench for more purchase, to tighten the nuts with one, two, three strong pulls. I knew my way around tools.

  It took over an hour, but we did it, we got all four wheels on the truck. The battery was dead so we used my mother’s car for a jump. The engine fired right up. Billy went back into his grandparents’ house to grab the rest of the canned food. I took the time to drive my mother’s car back under the portico, to hide it from anyone passing by.

  The car still smelled like her, a combination of the leather seats, her lemon-sage shampoo, and paper: the books she read, the notebooks she filled with observations and drawings of whales.

  Instead of feeling sad or on the edge of depression, thinking I might never see her car again, I felt elated. For the first time since she’d left us, left me, I was on my way to her. And I was going there with Billy.

  I got out of the car just as he came outside, carrying bags of food and supplies. He stuck them behind the seat with everything he’d brought from his house. I noticed the manila envelope sticking out of his canvas bag.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “My birth certificate, some pictures, a couple of cards from my mom.”

  We climbed into the truck and drove away from the houses. He didn’t go past the boat basin this time; he took a different road and idled in front of a cottage with lights blazing and the blue glow of a television.

  His gaze was hard and steady. He’d said he didn’t want anyone to see us, but stopping out here felt so defiant, as if daring the people inside to come out and see us. If they did, our trip would be over before it started. He was gripping the steering wheel so tightly, his wrist felt taut like wire when I touched it, to remind him we had to get back on the road.

  “We should leave,” I said. “Before anyone sees us.”

  He didn’t reply and he didn’t take his gaze off the house. There was a streetlight overhead, and I saw his eyes glinting—bright with sadness or anger or both, I wasn’t sure.

  “Who lives there?” I asked.

  He was silent another minute. “No one,” he said. I had a really strange feeling—it was the way he stared with such intensity. I wanted to press him, to find out who was in that house. But the look in his eyes let me know I shouldn’t, so I kept my questions inside.

  Then we drove away.

  I woke up suddenly, out of the deepest sleep ever, with Billy’s head on my shoulder.

  OMG, OMG, this is real, not a dream.

  I remembered that we’d fallen asleep on our own sides of the truck, sitting up and leaning away from each other against the doors. Now I was wedged into the corner, and Billy was dead weight against my left side.

  We had parked in a shipyard in the seaport town of Mystic, to catch some sleep before really getting on the road. Now the sun was rising, just peeking over the boat sheds. I hardly moved, partly not wanting to wake Billy and partly because I couldn’t—I was trapped. My left arm had pins and needles, but I didn’t stir; I wanted this to go on forever.

  I’d been sleeping next to Billy. Our shared body heat felt like a furnace, keeping us warm in the chilly dawn air. I shook my head to clear the cobwebs away—he was so close, right here with me; he’d found his way onto my shoulder. I couldn’t believe it. I flexed my numb hand a little.

  “Hey,” he said, waking up, but not opening his eyes. “You tickled me.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I couldn’t feel my fingers.”

  “I forgive you.” He stretched, moving to his side of the seat. I wanted him to come back, warm me up again. But he opened the truck door. “Breakfast,” he said.

  He bent down to pull his wallet out from under the front seat.

  My heart was pumping so hard. I took the chance to quickly palm my pills when he wasn’t looking. I gulped them down. They nearly choked me, but I couldn’t take the chance of waiting till we found breakfast and a glass of water. One thing was for sure, I’d never let Billy know I was on medication.

  We had a long way to go on this trip, and I knew we had to make our money last, but my stomach was growling. We followed the smell of coffee to a silver diner a half block away. The early shift of boatyard workers had jammed the booths, but we found two stools at the counter and ordered bacon and eggs. I had rye toast, he had white, and we both had coffee.

  “Okay, why did we come to Mystic?” he asked. “You started telling me last night.”

  “I have to figure out exactly where my mother is,” I said.

  He nearly dropped his fork. “I thought you knew.”

  “In a general way,” I said. “She always sent photos, and I know she lives on a fjord, so once we get there, I’ll recognize the exact spot. But I write to her at a post office box in Tadoussac. Not an actual address. It’s a big area.”

  “Where’s this big area?”

  “Canada,” I said. “Across the Saint Lawrence River from Maine, a couple of hours east of Quebec City.”

  “Maia, I don’t have a passport.”

  “I think you only need a license. Or any government ID.”

  “You think?”

  I nodded. “I thought I was going alone,” I said. “And I always carry my passport in my backpack, just in case I hear from her and she wants me. I didn’t plan on you coming.”

  “Well, I’ve got my license and birth certificate,” he said, frowning. “I guess I could go with you as far as the border. And if I can’t get across …”

  “You’ll get in,” I said with more assurance than I felt.

  We finished breakfast and walked along the water toward the Seaport. Kids were waiting for the school bus. They stared at us, and I realized how out of place we looked, walking in the opposite direction. Sun glinted on the Mystic River. The tall dark masts of the ship Charles W. Morgan looked stark against the blue sky. I felt nervous and paused on the stone-and-pebble-strewn path.

  Crouching down, I found the largest, flattest stone and placed it on the wall that ran along the river. Billy leaned down beside me and balanced the next biggest stone on top of mine. Without saying a word, we kept doing that till we had a cairn. We grinned at each other, left our tower where it stood, and kept walking.

  It seemed ironic, my mother loving whales so much but working part-time as a researcher here at the Seaport. She’d been a specialist on the Morgan—a hundred-and-six-foot-long ship built for whaling in 1841. She had raised me to love whales, from my earliest days, and the first time she took me belowdecks and showed me the tryworks, large cast-iron pots set into the furnace to render the blubber of the whales they hunted, I cried.

  “Why did they kill the whales?” I asked.

  “Back then they converted their fat into whale oil,” she said. “And it was used to light people’s houses, streetlamps, whole cities.”

  It made me sick; I swear I could smell the dying whales, and hear them crying, and I threw up on her shoes. She didn’t get mad. She just hugged me.

  “My sensitive girl,” she said, rocking me back and forth. “My fellow Cetacean Maven.” Sometimes she said “cetacean” instead of whale—it was their scientific name, from the clade Cetacea.

  I remembered that moment as I led Billy down the paths of the reconstructed nineteenth-century maritime village. The houses and buildings were real, and old. They’d been transported from all over, set down here to attract tourists and school kids. When the Seaport opened, the “town” would come alive with people dressed in costumes as blacksmiths, riggers, coopers, and sailmakers.

  I pulled my phone from my pocket. I hesitated—what could it hurt, turning it on for just a minute, to take a couple of photos? It was so early, my father and Astrid wouldn’t be awake yet.

  “Hey,�
� I said to Billy. He turned to look, and I snapped a shot—his wide mouth half-open, hair falling in his eyes, ship masts behind him.

  “You gotta turn that off,” he said.

  “One more,” I said. I raised the phone, but he took it from me. His arm came around my shoulders, and he extended it, took a selfie. I couldn’t believe it. When he handed me the phone and I saw us smiling on the screen, it took everything I had to not post it to Instagram. All I wanted was for everyone to know I was with him. Instead, I just tucked my phone back into my pocket.

  I’d assumed we couldn’t get into the Seaport before the gates opened, but Charlie the security guard recognized me and waved.

  “Hey, Maia!” he said, walking over. “Look at you, all grown up. What are you doin’ here? Taking a walk down memory lane?”

  “Sort of,” I said, my mouth dry. I was relieved to know the word hadn’t spread to Charlie to be on the lookout for me. Maybe my dad figured the Seaport was too much in my past and that I’d be heading somewhere more pertinent to the future.

  “Don’tcha have school?”

  “Not today,” I said.

  “Ah, okay. You decided to bring your friend here, show him around?” he asked, sizing up Billy.

  “Yes. He’s never seen whaling ships,” I said.

  “Well,” Charlie said. “Why don’t you wait in the ticket office till we open up? We’ll let you in no charge, of course. But you can’t be wandering around before the full staff is here. I’d letcha, but rules, you know.”

  “Charlie,” I said, my heart pounding so hard I thought it would burst. “Could we wait in the Seamen’s Library instead? That was my favorite spot when I was little. I loved all the books.”

  He squinted, deciding. “Sure,” he said. “Busy yourself in there. A good place to wait till opening time.”

  “Thank you,” Billy and I said at the same time.

  Charlie glanced at his watch, then led us to the little one-room yellow building. The sign above the door said SEAMEN’S FRIEND SOCIETY READING ROOM. My fingers twitched, wanting to grab the exact volume that would tell me what I wanted to know. He unlocked the door with a master key.