The Lost Ones

by Sheena Kamal

  And then it hits me. That Bonnie may feel the same way about me.

  I walk away. Simone follows and then steps in front of me to block my path. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean that but hell, Nora. What about Whisper, eh? You think she deserves a person who’s too drunk or hungover to take care of her?”

  It’s a cheap shot, but Simone has never been one to mince words. “I gave her away.”

  Simone’s jaw hangs open just a little bit. She shuts it and I can almost hear the snap. “I see. So you’ve given up on the one being that loves you more than anything in the world. The one who chose you.”

  What I love about Simone is that she’s never reduced Whisper’s presence in my life to simply one of a pet. She’s recognized her for what she has always been to me: a lifeline.

  “She deserves better,” I say.

  “Yeah, and if everyone got what they deserved this world would be pretty damn unrecognizable. But that’s not life. We stick with what we know and Whisper isn’t going to be happy anywhere else. Did you drop her off at a shelter?”

  “What?” I reply, offended. “Don’t be ridiculous. She’s with people I trust.”

  “Well, that’s a relief, anyway. But you should have come to me before it got this far.”

  At least I’ve done something right here. It was talk of Whisper and her ratty little terrier, Benedict, that initially brought the two of us together. Simone knows how important Whisper was in my path to sobriety and is using her as leverage in this guilt trip. Damn it to hell. It’s working. Even though I’m wasted, I feel the edges again. So we sit in her car and I tell her about Bonnie and what I discovered at the luxurious ski chalet up in the mountains, on the road there and in the city when this all started. Bonnie, Starling, the not-cops . . . Ray Zhang. Jia and Dao. Dao.

  Simone is the first to speak after that information overload. “I’m glad I was sitting down for all this.”

  “I’m glad I didn’t have to hit you with a tire iron first.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.” Just the way I share information, apparently.

  “But what I don’t get is how they found her in the first place. And how did they get their hands on your cord blood? Fifteen years ago, this research was brand-new. We didn’t have the private facilities that we do now where families could pay a premium and bank the blood for later. We didn’t even have a public bank. I’d imagine that there were research facilities that needed the blood, but you’d have to consent to that, Nora.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “I don’t see how that’s possible.”

  “Don’t you?”

  Simone sighs. “Yeah, you’re right. I guess I do.” When you’re on the fringes, like us, people do what they want and assume you don’t know what your rights are. With Simone, they’d be wrong. “Okay, so they somehow get their hands on her cord blood, red market style—”

  “What?”

  “The red market. That’s what they call the black market for blood and organs. Body parts.”

  “Oh.”

  “So,” she continues. “It means that she was a match for someone important because they had to use subterfuge to get it. They’d have to if it wasn’t a legal donation scenario. And now they want more because the sample is too small to do much and they need a close match. Increases the chances of the body accepting the transplant. They trace the sample back to her.”

  “Somehow.”

  “Somehow,” she agrees. “They figure she’s the child that was born from that night all those years ago and find her. Could be the adoption records? I don’t know. Maybe they watch her for a while. Maybe they’ve found out that she’s prone to running off whenever the going gets rough. This time it’s about the boyfriend and they grab her as she’s on the way to meet him. They figure they have some time before anyone comes looking for her, but she was already gone a couple of weeks before the parents approached you, right? And you found those security guys watching her house.”

  “Right.”

  “So, if they have her, why watch the house?”

  “They lost her.”

  “Or she ran away from them.”

  “Because that’s what she does.”

  She nods and for a moment seems lost in thought. When she speaks next, her words are slow and measured, as if she herself is trying to grapple with their meaning. “She knows they’re looking for her, she knows she’s important and maybe she can identify them, so it becomes about more than the blood for them, it becomes about managing the situation. Finding her and tying up the loose ends. That’s why they’ve pulled out all the stops. Going after you. Killing the journalist, shooting at a kid in the woods . . . that’s just crazy.” She looks at me, her liner-enhanced eyes dark and wet. “The stakes are high for them, Nora. This whole situation has gotten completely out of hand—and this is coming from me. You know I’m usually the one to appreciate the drama in life. I hate to say this, but—”

  I see where she’s going with this. “No cops. They won’t believe me. You know how this sounds.”

  “Not even—”

  “Not a chance.”

  I haven’t told her about Brazuca and I never will. Whether he is still tied to a fancy bed with one hell of a hangover or back at the WIN offices is a mystery to me. I refuse to think about him, though, because liars don’t deserve my pity.

  “So,” Simone says, after a while, “what are you going to do?”

  I remain silent. I don’t know what I can do.

  “This is so fucked up.”

  “You’re telling me.”

  “Hey.” Simone puts her hand over mine. I flinch, a habitual, unconscious shrugging away. “Sorry,” she says, removing the hand. “Didn’t mean to upset you. Nora, this isn’t your fault. What happened to you all those years ago, what happened to Bonnie. None of it is on you. I want to hear you say it.”

  I shake my head. There’s no telling what would happen if I open up that door. “I need you to help me find out where Zhang lives in Vancouver.” I get out of the car then and walk away. I know she’s disappointed in me, or else she would have followed.

  The basement feels empty without Whisper. It’s as if when she moved in with me, she brought a kind of fullness and peace to my life, and without her here, I don’t know how I was able to stand it before. I’m coming off a buzz now and I’m so very tired. I push Whisper from my head because it hurts too damn much and I bury myself under the covers. I put my secondhand MP3 player on shuffle and the first song that comes on is “Ain’t No Sunshine.” At first this makes me think of Whisper again, but then I start to wonder. Has it stopped raining since Bonnie went missing? Maybe I’m just too drunk to remember it clearly, but I don’t think so. Nimbus clouds have hung overhead like a protective shield, diffusing light and spewing precipitation. It might just be my imagination, but I don’t think the sunshine has broken through since she disappeared. Not once.

  When I wake up I check my email and see that Simone has sent me some reports with the subject line: This happens. Two reports are of private cord blood clinics, one in Hong Kong and the other in San Francisco, that have had donor information stolen through employee breaches, and one leads to a chat site about brokers and rogue operators in medical communities around the world that hawk pilfered organs and blood on the red market.

  This happens?

  No shit.

  2

  When I surfaced from a deep sleep all those years ago, it was with a head that felt as though it had been bludgeoned like a seal pup and a swollen belly that protruded so far out from my emaciated frame that it announced its arrival into a room a full second before the rest of me followed. My broken bones had been reset, my motor functions were slowly being restored, but my mental state was cause for concern and the doctors refused to release me. They thought I would hurt the child, and I can’t blame them. Also, my silence on the matter didn’t help clarify things. After I tried to escape twice, one of these instances bizarrely chalked up to a suic
ide attempt, they transferred me to a small psychiatric hospital to be closely monitored.

  Starling visited me often, but he was the only one. We spent the time sitting on opposite sides of the room while he tried to convince me to get in touch with my sister. It would make for a touching feature, siblings reunited in the face of tragedy. I told him to shove it, but his professional commitment to my health, and my story, was unwavering.

  In my tiny room, I would stand at the window overlooking the back entrance and watch as the doctors and nurses snuck out for a smoke. Only the tops of their heads were visible from my vantage point, but I could always identify my doctor because his hairpiece would wave at me in the security light over the back entrance. Once a day he came to my room smelling of cigarette fumes and Old Spice to check my chart and ask me how I was doing. I’d say, “Would be better with some vodka,” and he would smile his bland smile in response. This was our little dance and it never wavered in the three months that I was held hostage.

  Fifteen years have passed since I last saw him. The day that Bonnie was born. They put me to sleep while they cut her out of me and I woke once again to find my body changed. Emptied of the life that it carried, the vessel now bloody and hollow. The baby was born sometime in the early hours of the morning and after I woke, I lay there stunned and exhausted while the day crept on. It was dark when he led me outside, dressed in street clothes from the lost-and-found box, and told me that there would be a bus at the stop across the street in the next ten minutes. He handed me bus fare and an extra ten dollars for good measure. He also told me that I needed to make different choices in life, and this was the time to start.

  “You want to go, right?” he said, in the brief second that I hesitated.

  The pause wasn’t about having second thoughts of staying at that place; it was because I thought that I was dreaming and it was time to wake up. I wanted to give myself a minute to let my conscious mind take over, but his impatience unnerved me. We stood there for a moment that could have spanned a lifetime for all I could grasp of it. And then I was across the hospital’s parking lot and at the bus stop. We stared at each other from either side of the dark, slick street and then he went back inside. A few minutes later, the bus showed up and I went to a shelter I knew.

  It’s astonishing to me how much of this I remember.

  Now I look at him and the memories blow right past until one of them sticks to him. At first he doesn’t remember me from that day but he is forced to take a closer look because there’s something familiar about me. Something he can’t quite put his finger on. And I am, after all, leaning against his car. The parking lot is small and shaded by trees. There is no one else around and Eric Zakarian is clearly uncomfortable by this unexpected development in his day. His eyes dart from me to the building’s entrance. It’s too far for him to run. The years of being a smoker and thirty extra pounds have done nothing for his cardio.

  “My God,” he says, when he finally recognizes me. He can’t hide the sudden fear in his eyes. Good. Welcome to the club.

  He looks at the entrance again.

  “You’ll never make it,” I tell him.

  “What?”

  I nod to the door. “You’ll never make it back inside before I catch up.”

  “Wha-what are you doing here? Look, if you want to talk, we should go somewhere else.” He’s trying to hide his fear, but not doing a very good job of it. He has forgotten that I know what calm looks like on him. That I saw him every day for months and, though it was a long time ago, I can still read his moods.

  “No,” I say, patting the hood of his BMW. I lean against it casually, mostly to take the pressure off my ankle. But he doesn’t have to know that. “I think we should talk right here.”

  “What do you want?”

  “I want to know where the blood from my umbilical cord went after you chased me out of this place.”

  He turns pale and sweaty, all at once. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. You should go before . . . before I call the cops!”

  “Sure, let’s call the cops. I’ll tell them that while I was under anesthesia, you harvested my cord blood without permission and sold it to some broker.”

  His jaw trembles, which only happens with men like him when they’re confronted with the truth, and then, predictably, he denies it. “I’ve never done any such thing! Besides, they’ll never believe you. A pregnant hooker who gets herself into trouble doesn’t exactly know what she’s talking about, now does she? Now get away from my car.”

  I don’t move. Hooker?

  He seems to be gaining confidence the more he speaks. “Get lost! I told you, nobody’s going to believe you. Look at you,” he says, squinting over at me. “Haven’t changed a bit. Go clean yourself up and leave me alone.”

  I sigh. Drinking vodka mixed with lemonade from a glass bottle has not improved my mood. I’m feeling abnormally violent tonight. I smash the empty glass bottle against his car and hold up the jagged remainder of it. His denial was all the confirmation I needed that my cord blood was harvested, but for some reason, at this moment, confirmation just doesn’t seem good enough. The jagged edges of the bottle make a loud screech along the driver’s side door of his BMW.

  Zakarian stands there and watches me defile his car. He has been frozen into place, eyes wide with fear, ever since I smashed the bottle. “You’re next if you don’t tell me exactly what I need to know. I know you’re lying because my cord blood was used.”

  He licks his lips. “What do you want?”

  “Why would someone need it?”

  “Stem cells,” he says quickly, confirming what I already knew from Starling’s research. “Leukemia, sickle cell disease, immunodeficiency, lymphoma, a host of diseases, really . . . The research is still progressing, but stem cells from the umbilical cord are more malleable than those from an adult. Problem is, there’s not a lot of it so it’s not the Hail Mary some people make it out to be. When the research was starting, samples were hard to come by.”

  “Could it treat an elderly man?”

  “I don’t know . . . depends on the man and the disease. Look, this isn’t exactly my specialty, okay?”

  I take a step closer. “Why did you take it?” Even if Zhang and his people had read the article and connected me to Mary, the woman found in a ditch, who turned out to be pregnant, it wouldn’t make sense that Zhang had anticipated an illness and then waited fifteen years to snatch Bonnie. There had to be another motive for him.

  “My wife at the time was involved in some research and there was this source that contacted her, a broker of sorts . . . They needed donations but people weren’t giving them up easily, not when private clinics were just starting to offer parents the opportunity to store the blood for their children’s health down the road. The source was paying, but not a lot—not as much as you’d think—” He licks his lips and stares at me. “Please don’t hurt me.”

  Another step. “Go on.”

  “She knew about you, that I was treating you, and she said her source would be interested in the sample—for research! But the research didn’t get funded and, I think, the blood stores they had ended up changing hands. I don’t know where it went.”

  I feel sick to my stomach, which, thank God, is empty. If there was anything in it, the contents would be spewed onto his hundred-dollar wing tips. I would make sure of it. I take another step closer. “You stole from me.”

  He remains silent. I take another step. Now there’s just a foot of space between us. “The child that you helped deliver all those years ago, she’s been kidnapped because of what you did.”

  He blanches at the smell of alcohol on my breath. There’s nothing more terrifying than being attacked by an unhinged drunk, unless it’s an unhinged junkie. “It was for research! To help save lives.”

  Okay, now he’s full-out lying. Even he can’t actually believe that. I press the bottle to his face and a bead of blood blossoms at his cheek. He whimpers, stumbles back against
the car. “Save lives? You endangered a child.”

  “No, I swear, I never wanted anything bad to happen! I just . . . it was exciting research and the broker, he was paying.”

  I laugh. It’s not a pleasant sound. “And you thought I’d never find out.” I draw a thin line from his cheekbone to the top of his jaw.

  He gasps and tears roll down his cheeks. They are not tears of guilt or shame or sorrow. There is no apology in them. No, these are tears of fear. “Please,” he whimpers. “Please just leave me alone.”

  The blood doesn’t gush, it trickles.

  “Sorry isn’t good enough,” I say, my voice barely a whisper. “I’m leaving now, but don’t get too comfortable because I’ll be back and you’ll pay for what you did.”

  I won’t, but he doesn’t have to know that.

  “It wasn’t just me!” he shouts at my back as I walk away. “My ex-wife, her name is Amanda Notting. Why don’t you make her pay!”

  Amanda Notting has no idea that her ex would give her up to a deranged drunk. Marriage. What’s the point?

  I continue to walk away. I feel reckless, unhinged. Alive. If only there was an available face around . . . but no, I have crossed lines there, too.

  3

  The diner on Hastings isn’t much to look at from the outside, but the coffee is only a dollar and they’ll microwave a breakfast sandwich for you at any time of the day. Whether or not this is a good idea is debatable, but it allows them to keep the lights on and the doors open. It’s now just after 9 p.m. and the grease of the eggs and cheese is dangerously close to turning my stomach. It’s the only solid food I’ve had all day, though, so I force myself to keep it down. The effort I have to put into this simple activity almost makes me miss the beginning of the crawl on the twenty-four-hour news channel on a screen mounted just above the counter.

  Body found in Stanley Park. No identity has been confirmed by the police yet, but witness reports allege that it is possibly a child or a small woman.