The Lost Ones

by Sheena Kamal

  I spy the green landscape turning snow covered before my very eyes the farther north I go.

  There are few gas stations on this road, so the necessity is always to fill up when you see one or else you’ll be stranded on the side of the road with an empty jerry can, cursing your stupidity and relying on the kindness of strangers. At the next fuel stop, just outside of Merritt, I park behind the station and wait. I think about Whisper and wonder if she’s happy with people who can give her more than I can. Fine, upstanding people like Seb and Leo who take things like proper nutrition and regular checkups seriously. I imagine her sprawled in front of their fireplace—even though I’m unsure as to whether they even have a fireplace—sleeping peacefully. Seb passes and gives her a little belly scratch while Leo takes her supine position as an opportunity to wrestle a brush through her mane. The thought of Whisper being groomed and cuddled is so appealing and I almost lose myself in this fantasy except . . . except.

  Except because of Bonnie, I know better. I know that the only way to make sure that someone is safe and warm and happy is to have eyes on them at all times. Do not trust caretakers, no matter how many hopeful letters of recommendation they bear. That I have left Whisper to Seb and Leo is an act of faith, but faith only goes so far.

  About fifteen minutes later, I see the silver sedan pull away from the station and get back on the highway. I pull David’s car around, fill up my own tank, the price of which leaves me feeling unsettled and violated the way only being overcharged can do to a person, and then ease onto the road. I speed up until I see a speck of silver in the distance ahead and then slow until it is out of sight again. No need to be too eager here. It’s always easier to be the hunter than the hunted. I know that I will catch up to my prey. This road is too long and bare for games.

  Just as dusk falls and the needle approaches empty yet again, another gas station appears like a mirage, nestled at the foot of a mountain, and the road leading toward it is shaded by trees. I slow to a crawl and through the glass I see that there is only the attendant in the station itself. Parked in the back is the silver sedan. I take a picture of the license plate, text it to Leo, and, on second thought, also send it to Brazuca. Then I rummage through the SUV for supplies. Thank goodness for David’s road safety preparedness. After finding the journalist dead, a girl can’t be too careful.

  I approach the back of the building on foot. There’s a single light on over the bathroom door. Just as I reach it, the door opens and a man emerges from the dimly lit single bathroom, eyes on the illuminated screen of his phone. I have one quick second to approach but before I start, he pauses, mutters “Shit,” and turns back to flip the switch.

  Then I move.

  The tire iron glints in the dim light the moment his hand hits the switch. My face and outstretched arm are eerily captured in the mirror for one brief, frozen moment, but he has no time to figure out an escape or room to maneuver in the tiny bathroom. He falls against the automatic hand dryer, knocking it off the wall. It crashes to the ground. He groans and writhes around on the floor in the darkness. I turn on the light again, mostly for his benefit. No one should roll around on a gas station bathroom floor blindly, without at least having some idea of the germ content.

  He pulls himself into a sitting position, back against the wall, legs stretched toward the small sink, and clutches his head. I take a deep, fortifying breath in.

  The man is Brazuca.

  2

  “For fuck’s sake, Nora,” he says after a minute of us staring at each other, him squinting in the harsh glare of fluorescent lighting and me trying to hide my surprise.

  But it’s late at night and I’ve been driving all day so all I manage is a half-assed glare. “Why are you following me?” This comes out as an accusation, but it isn’t my intention to push him away just yet. For some reason, I’m absurdly pleased to see him, that he’s the one that I find underneath my tire iron.

  “Because I’m worried about you!”

  “You should worry about yourself.” The blow was hard enough to send him to the ground and leave a nasty bruise, but not enough to do permanent damage. At least I don’t think so, but really, what do I know? I’m hardly an expert.

  “Yeah, no kidding.” He tries to get to his feet but his legs are jelly and won’t hold. I tuck the tire iron into the waistband of my jeans and help him up.

  “If you’re concerned I’m relapsing—”

  “Oh, just shut the hell up for a minute. Jesus. You hit me with a goddamn tire iron.” He clutches his head and groans.

  “I could have hit you harder.”

  “But you didn’t because you wanted information, right? Bloody hell. You thought you were being followed and you snuck up behind me, hit me with a fucking tire iron, but not hard enough to maim me, no, because you’re not afraid that I’ll get back up and go batshit on you. You’re not afraid of getting hurt. All you want is information! Do you have no bloody human compassion in you at all, woman?”

  I stare at him with undisguised fascination. I’ve never heard him curse this much before. In my experience, sponsors usually have been quite responsible with their language. With his hair standing on end, his eyes bloodshot, and a nasty bruise forming at the base of his skull, Brazuca looks like a madman. A line of spittle dribbles out of the corner of his mouth and he swipes at it with his sleeve.

  I lead him to the sink, where he scrubs at his hands and his face with soap and hot water. I keep a hand on his back to steady him, and feel that there are no holes in his wool coat. Two very discreet zippered pockets add an element of style to the ensemble. I keep a hand on his back because he is also a survivor, like me, and it inspires just a brief moment of tenderness toward him. A survivor of alcoholism, of a bullet wound, of divorce and now a vicious attack with a blunt instrument. He needs all the support he can get in the world.

  “Why are you following me?” I repeat, after I have given him a minute to recover.

  He sighs and looks at me in the mirror. “Just get me some ice for my head and I’ll tell you all about it.”

  The gas station attendant has been patiently waiting for me to show my face and purchase goods from him. I get a bag of ice, the smallest I can find, and an energy drink, and prepay for a tank of gas. The time I take to pump the gas clears my head. When I return to the bathroom with the ice, Brazuca seems to be more himself. Leaning on the edge of the sink and watching me with tired eyes. There is a small smile on his face and I wonder what the hell he could be amused at. Being assaulted by a woman half your size doesn’t seem to be particularly funny to me.

  He takes the ice, wraps it in a white T-shirt that I assume to be his undershirt, freshly removed, and then arranges it over the back of his neck. “Ah, that feels good.”

  “Get hit a lot, do you?”

  “Mostly by women.”

  “That shit’s supposed to end when you get divorced, you know?”

  He laughs, but it’s just a bit pathetic coming from him.

  “I got you the ice,” I say, locking the bathroom door behind me. “Your turn.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “No, that’s not how this works. You first.”

  There’s more silence, more staring deeply into each other’s eyes. It would be romantic if I hadn’t just assaulted him with a weapon that I stole from my brother-in-law’s SUV, also stolen. “WIN Security reported a break-in last week,” Brazuca begins, turning away from me.

  I pick his phone up from the floor, touching it with only the tips of my fingers, and slip it into his coat pocket, along with his car keys. And pause for a moment there, my hand resting lightly just above his hip. Then I remove it. He hasn’t noticed the hesitation or the touch. “So?” I say.

  “So when I heard it was the same company you were looking into I asked a buddy of mine on the case to show me the tapes.” He looks away for a moment. There’s something odd about the way he says this. Maybe he feels guilty for checking up on me or maybe he’s got a concussi
on. Whatever it is, the moment soon passes. “The intruder on the security cameras looked a hell of a lot like you dressed up like a bike messenger. I didn’t know you could sing.”

  I wave the comment away. “Doesn’t explain why you’re here. Why you’re following me.”

  He sighs. “You were looking for information on why they’re staking out that house, right? Looking for a client list, a case file? Did you find anything on that laptop?”

  “No,” I admit. I am suddenly tired of playing these games with Brazuca. The long day of driving has taken its toll and I want nothing more than a cold compress for my ankle, a hot shower for the rest of me, and the greasiest pizza I can get my hands on. He is what stands between me and my few creature comforts in life.

  “Well, sometimes the only way to find what you need is to look straight into the horse’s mouth.” He smiles and relaxes back into his normal charming but effusive self. His teeth are pristine and white, shining out at me from at least two days’ worth of stubble. Dental hygiene must be very important to him if this is the kind of fluorescence he can achieve and still be a coffee addict.

  “I thought a break-in would accomplish that.”

  “Nope.”

  “No?”

  “Didn’t help, did it? This is a security firm we’re talking about. Half of what those companies do is off the books and borderline illegal.”

  His method of making a point using rhetorical devices has become tiresome. I cross my arms over my chest and wait for him to continue.

  “So, sometimes, before you look inside the horse’s mouth, you should probably also have a little chat with the guy who the horse belongs to, just to get an idea of what’s going to be in there. When it comes to WIN Security, the guy you want to talk to is either one of the owners. James Whitehall or Lester Nyman. One of them is going to be up at that fancy new ski resort they built just past Kamloops in a couple days. The big chalet. WIN is working a small, exclusive business function. A few heavy hitters. Might be some people worth talking to over there.”

  “I’m not good at talking to people.”

  “Then you’re in luck, because I am.” He says this without a shred of modesty.

  “Which one will be there, Whitehall or Nyman?”

  “What’s the difference? I don’t know for sure, but I hear that one of them has to go to shake hands or kiss ass, or something in between.”

  You learn some valuable lessons in foster care. Eat everything on your plate. You never know when they will feel like feeding you again. Beware of footsteps outside your bedroom door. For obvious reasons. Don’t trust people who are nice to you and ask nothing in return. These are the people who want something and usually you have to figure out what it is. So I stare at him and wonder what he wants. I don’t know what his angle is and consider the possibility that perhaps he doesn’t have one. Nothing he’s said has read as an outright lie. Then I consider what he’s offering. A Sherlock and Watson scenario. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys. A partnership. Someone to help share the burden. I look at him, with his gimpy leg and his tired eyes, and I am all at once moved and frightened by this unexpected show of support. In the past half an hour we’ve exchanged more words than we had in the first year that he was my sponsor. This time he’s not trying to talk me off a ledge; he is offering to climb onto the narrow precipice with me. Out into the cold.

  “Come on,” he says, staring at me with eyes so kind that I can’t look away. “What do you have to lose?”

  I nod to the makeshift compress he has strung over his neck, which has started to turn soggy. “Take care of that, will you? I’ll wait outside.”

  He grins. “Okay, I’ll be right out.”

  When I’m clear of the door, I take a deep breath and run my fingers over the car keys that I have snatched from his pocket. After a moment’s hesitation, during which I think about the shitty person I have become and weigh my habitual suspicion against the desire for company on a road trip, I throw Brazuca’s car keys deep into the woods bordering the little gas station.

  As David’s SUV kicks up gravel from the road leading back to the highway, I feel a momentary twinge of disappointment. In myself, mostly, but life has a role to play in this as well. Hopefully the treacherous connector highway will be open for me and closed for Brazuca. With the stiffness in his bad leg and the head trauma from my blow, he’s probably an unsuitable candidate for this kind of journey, anyway.

  But I hope he makes it out of here okay. You know, from one survivor to the next.

  3

  Identity is a slippery thing. You think you have a hold on it and then whoops, it slides right out of your hands and shatters on the ground in front of you. And no matter how much you try to put it back together again, somehow the pieces don’t seem to fit. I saw from Bonnie’s pictures that she was happy as a child, but as the years went by, her smiles became thinner, more guarded. Maybe self-awareness affected her ability to make good choices in life. Or maybe she just became a teenager and, the natural extension of this, a hormonal little bitch looking to get back at her family by running off to be with her boyfriend. Whatever it is, the more I learn about her, the more of myself I see, and it scares the hell out of me.

  Tommy Jones strides out of school dressed in black, with longish hair that falls over his brow and an easy, confident gait. I know it’s him from the video on Mandy’s phone, which doesn’t do him one lick of justice. This is a good-looking kid and a clever one, too, considering that he’s only been back to his hometown for a few weeks and is already flagrantly skipping school and saluting the teacher who watches him go from the window. If he can get away with that bullshit, it is about more than looks. He’s the kind of trouble that teenage girls love, but hopefully grow out of before they get pregnant and move with him into his mother’s basement.

  In the cold SUV that has been waiting outside the school for a good three hours, I watch him take off in the old pickup truck that he arrived in. There’s only one high school in Enderby and, by some stroke of luck, he just so happened to show up today to make my life easier. So I won’t have to go searching in town for a single mom and her teenage son, and possibly Bonnie hiding out in his bedroom.

  This town has only one main road, and it leads out to the highway. The exit is clearly demarcated. But Tommy isn’t heading for the highway or for his house. He crosses the Shuswap River and drives down Mabel Lake Road. I know now where he’s going from a map that I picked up at my last gas stop. He’s going to the cliffs. From what I know of small Canadian towns like these, this is where kids go to drink beer, smoke shitty weed, and lose their virginities. It’s also, I remind myself, the kind of place that bears go to forage when they’re hungry.

  When I get to the private lot at the trailhead to the cliffs, I drive by the old pickup. Tommy isn’t in it. I park at the opposite end of the lot so as not to draw too much attention and take the path deeper into the woods. I have clothes for Vancouver’s mild, wet winter, but nothing that holds up to the frigid air that drifts down from the cliffs and settles like a blanket on me now. I am cold to my bones, and through them, too. Surrounded by wilderness, away from the grimy streets that have become my home, I feel out of my element. I wonder why I’ve kept going and think about Bonnie, this girl I don’t even know. Am I looking for her because I care or because I think no one else will?

  If I’m completely honest with myself, this question has been rattling around in my brain since I found the not-cop watching the Kerrisdale house and I’m no closer to an answer. In all likelihood, grilling Tommy Jones about Bonnie’s disappearance won’t bring me closer to the truth about what’s going on inside me, but maybe it’ll help me find her. Maybe I’ll find the answer then.

  Less than fifty yards in, I hear the sound of a gun cocking from a stand of firs to my right. I crouch and move quickly into the tree cover to my left.

  “Just tell me who the fuck you are and I just might let you live,” comes the voice of a teenag
e boy, trying to sound older and tougher than he is.

  I weigh my options and decide that I’m going to have to come clean, because young men with guns should never be ignored. “Just want to ask you some questions, that’s all.”

  “Yeah? Well, I don’t want to answer your questions, lady, so stay the hell away from me! Stop following me! You and those other assholes!”

  So the not-cops are here, and he’s noticed. It makes sense now why my presence at his school tipped him off. He knows that he’s under surveillance and thinks that I’m part of their game. “I’m not with them, I swear.”

  He fires into a tree nearby, the shot so loud it rings in my ears for several seconds afterward.

  “You gonna shoot your girlfriend’s mom, Tommy?” I shout back, careful to keep still. This is the second time I’ve called myself Bonnie’s mother in front of one of her friends. There’s no denying that the panic is still there, but the gun pointed at me might be a contributing factor.

  The silence that follows that statement sits for almost a full minute, until I hear rustling from the trees he is hiding behind and boots crunching on snow. He’s trying to be quiet about it, and would have been successful if we weren’t alone in a forest, less than fifty feet away from each other, judging by the sound of the gunshot. I slide farther into the woods and double back around. I am smaller than he is; quieter, too. He doesn’t see me come up behind him, is too busy creeping up to where he thinks I am. I’m in the periphery of his vision too late for him to do anything before I grab his gun hand and slam my elbow out and into his face. The gun goes slack and I pull it away from him before stepping back. It’s a Browning 9mm, and feels familiar in my hands.

  His nose is sitting at an odd angle on his face, but I feel no remorse. I hate guns, even though I’m not bad with them, and there is an irrational anger building inside me that this boy had the nerve to point one at me. To fire one in my vicinity. Tommy looks up at me with blood pouring down his chin. A few crimson drops stain the snow in front of him. “You broke my nose, lady!”