The Lost Ones

by Sheena Kamal

  And that does it. The grease wins out.

  I barely make it to the alley just off the diner before the bile comes spewing out. An older couple, out for a night stroll, glance my way in disgust as they walk past me heaving my guts out. “Goddamn drunks,” says the man, just before he’s out of earshot.

  I lean against the wall, harsh breaths seizing my throat. The dampness in the air almost suffocates me. The man is not wrong, but alcohol is not the sole reason that I’m in an alley bringing up my only meal of the day. From a wealth of past experience with this kind of thing, take it from me, it’s always better to upchuck out in the street rather than a toilet that isn’t in your own home. Nobody wants to clutch a porcelain bowl that the public has had access to. Outside there will be no other patrons banging on the door, no disgusted employees giving you the stink-eye when you exit because they have to clean up after you. Out on the streets, the rain will wash away what it can and whatever remains is no worse than what was already there to begin with.

  I could take a bus to Stanley Park, but from where I am the easiest way to get there is to just follow the seawall. I walk as quickly as I can and then throw all caution into the wind and start running. There are usually plenty of joggers along this route; sometimes running the seawall resembles something closer to a stampede, but people normally don’t do it this late at night wearing boots and a rain jacket. I get a few stares, but I can’t be bothered. The memory of the man I’d found in the park all those years ago lingers, along with Starling’s face as he sat in a tub full of blood. And now I can’t help but imagine the teenager in the photos sprawled on the ground, her eyes looking sightlessly up at the night sky.

  The police are near Second Beach, by a dense copse of trees. Locating them was as easy as listening for the sound of human voices carried over the tops of the trees and then finding the lights that the police have set up around their barricade. There is a crowd gathered because, despite the drizzle, the weather is quite mild tonight and the discovery of a body in one of the biggest tourist haunts in the city is a big deal.

  A bystander, a young woman in her twenties, stands apart from the rest and it’s to her I go first. I don’t much like being in crowds, or near them, and this seems to be a woman after my own heart. She’s wearing hiking boots and a raincoat, dressed for the terrain and the weather. Her sensibility appeals to me, and her clothing is dark so that none of it catches the light and hurts my eyes. I’m feeling faint after the run on an empty stomach. She could still be batshit crazy, but I’ll take my chances. If it’s Bonnie’s body on the ground, protected by a privacy screen and further shielded by a cluster of cops, I might as well know now.

  “Did you see the body?” I ask the woman.

  She is too focused on the scene to spare me more than a sideways glance. I keep a few feet between us as a buffer so she doesn’t smell the vomit on my breath, so she won’t turn away before I get my answer. “No, just got here about ten minutes ago. Nobody seems to know much of anything, except for that guy over there.” She points to a man in hiking boots, holding on to a dog on a leash. He’s speaking with a police officer by a patrol car some distance away. “He found the body.”

  I hang about at the edges of the crowd, waiting to see what will happen next, waiting to see if someone will say something about the body behind the protective shield. Whenever the man with the dog is finished talking to the police officer, I’ll try to find a way to get to him, but they’re chatting comfortably and there’s no sense that he’ll finish up there anytime soon. There’s no Brazuca here to give me an inside tip . . . but, then again, he wouldn’t be here, would he? He would be hanging out with his buddies at WIN Security.

  Just as the crowd thins and people start trickling away, there’s a commotion on the far side of the copse. I see a man pushing through the crowd.

  What I loved about singing the blues is that it cuts straight to the heart of a thing. You come naked with your soul lying carved open and exposed on the slab or you don’t come at all. Give it real or keep it to yourself.

  That kind of raw, that kind of honest you don’t often find in life. I see it now as Everett barrels through the bystanders, Lynn trailing behind him like a pale, confused toddler who has just woken from a bad dream and can only focus on putting one foot in front of the other. Her luxurious hair is swept off her face and into a bun that is sagging at the side and coming apart. Everett has gained about ten pounds since I last saw him, but the weight doesn’t suit him. It sits mostly near his neck and his gut, but everything else is thinner than I remember. These two have been falling apart for a long time, but now they can’t hide it anymore.

  “Is that my daughter?” Everett shouts at the first cop he sees. “Bronwyn Walsh. I filed a missing person’s report—”

  The cop flinches and holds a warding hand out to keep Everett from coming closer. A few other officers stir, coming to the first cop’s side. “Sir—”

  “Is it her? Please . . . please help m-me,” and here Everett’s voice breaks. Everyone stares at the father whose child this could possibly be because they can’t help themselves, because it’s part of the reason they came here. To witness a human tragedy. It’s not something you can look away from.

  The officer sees Lynn behind him for the first time. She has her hand to her throat and is gazing at him with frightened eyes. A tiny, birdlike gasp emerges from her mouth, attempting to sound like a word, but failing miserably. There is so much despair writ plainly on their faces. I move closer to them while the other bystanders edge away. There is too much emotion there; they’re afraid it will spill on them and mess up their shoes.

  “Sir, we’re not in any position to identify the body right now—”

  “I’ll take over from here, Ray.” A plainclothes detective pats the cop’s shoulder. He looks at both Everett and Lynn. “I’m Detective Lee. You say your daughter’s missing?”

  Lynn can only nod, while Everett gathers his courage.

  “Yes,” says Everett. “Bronwyn Walsh. She’s fifteen years old, about this tall.” Everett gestures at roughly chest height. “Dark hair, dark eyes. Please, please just tell us. Is it her?”

  Lee’s voice lowers so that it’s almost a whisper. I have to step in to hear. He puts a hand on Everett’s shoulder and squeezes. “I answer and you’ll go straight home? Let us do our work here?”

  “Y-yes.” It’s Lynn who speaks now. She has found her voice, and it is stronger than I expected. “We won’t bother you anymore.”

  The detective nods. “From what you described, it doesn’t sound like a match. I can’t say any more, okay?”

  All the air goes out of Everett’s lungs and he staggers. “Thank God. Oh, thank God.” He reaches out blindly for Lynn’s hand, but she doesn’t even notice. He is left to flounder with nothing to hold on to. No anchor. Adrift in his own emotional turmoil while his wife stands next to him, lost in her own thoughts. I watch a change come over her. Whoever died here tonight, it wasn’t her daughter. And for the first time, I glimpse what her love for Bonnie is. Complicated by circumstances, but no less real.

  The detective is watching them as closely as I am. “You said you filed a report?”

  Lynn nods. “Bronwyn Walsh.”

  “How long has she been missing?”

  “Going on three weeks.”

  Lee hesitates for a moment so brief that I think I’m the only one that notices. He takes down their info, scribbling on a little notepad that he pulled from his back pocket. “I’ll look into it. All right then, off you go.” He waits for them to leave, the expression in his eyes shuttered.

  Lee eyes the crowd, skipping past me like cops always do. He’s looking for anyone or anything that stands out and, on that front, I’m safe. At some point in the next several hours, the body will be identified—it usually always is—and Lee will have to break the news to some relative or friend that there’s been a death. In that moment, as the detective looks right at me and then past, not really seeing me at al
l, I feel a sudden, blinding terror.

  How many people looked past Bonnie like that? What if she is invisible, like me? And what if I’m her last hope?

  What a terrible thought.

  4

  I ran away from foster care just after I turned fifteen, after Lorelei and I had been long separated. I always knew where she was, and knew that she was doing a hell of a lot better than me. I lived mostly on the street until I applied for the Forces. They wanted a GED, and that wasn’t so hard to get. But after my disastrous attempt at military life, I was back on the streets. Back busking, singing. Lorelei had laughed, when I had the bad judgment to tell her on one visit up to her dorm room in college, and I never mentioned it after that. She was right, in a way. What was someone like me doing singing music that held its roots so far away, singing on the streets for money?

  This is how powerful culture is.

  A music born out of the dregs of slavery in the Mississippi Delta, a sound that echoes the pain of disenfranchisement, institutionalized racism, and abject poverty of an oppressed people, can travel past Confederate borders, beyond national borders, to the continental western coast to be played on a scratchy record after choir one day to a roomful of children, to a girl for whom life had given nothing good but a strong, clear singing voice. Most American music has its roots in the blues. I know that now. Usually twelve bars. Usually rhythmic lyrics. Gospel, rock, jazz, country, folk—all pull from it. But all I heard back then was John Lee Hooker’s magical voice coming through the record player. I didn’t understand much of what he sang about, but I didn’t need to. The choir was the only thing then that kept me going because every now and then Pastor Franklin would feel generous and put on a blues record for us after practice and we would hear what it was like to connect with someone else’s soul. I didn’t have the same capacity for hope that the spirituals required, so the blues suited me just fine.

  And I wasn’t bad at it, either. I went up north to plant trees, and with some of that money, and the busking, I was making enough to rent a space in a room and get by. I didn’t mind it all that much because singing was all I liked to do anyway. Back in that first foster home, the only thing that made that place bearable was they used to take us to church and I sang with the choir. It stuck with me.

  After I moved out west I started to go to open mikes. What can I say? I was stupid.

  When I did these gigs, I usually wore a bright color just in case someone wanted to find me afterward and give me money or buy me a drink. Lighting was not the strong suit in these establishments. Sometimes a T-shirt or sweater, sometimes a hat or a scarf. The night that ended all that for me, it was a yellow baseball cap. I got up, strummed the guitar I had stolen from another busker the week before while he took a nap, and sang “Hound Dog,” the Big Mama Thornton version (not that swiveling Elvis stuff), just to get the crowd singing along, and then I transitioned immediately into “I Just Wanna Make Love to You.” I used to enjoy that kind of thing, and those songs worked well in a crowd. Nobody does it like Etta James, but I know that it worked for my voice. I also managed to get off a few bars of “Baby Please Don’t Go” before they kicked me off the stage, but I’m no Big Joe Williams . . . even though I’ve got a fair hand at the guitar.

  Now, looking back, I know that I should have been more careful, that I should have never worn that yellow cap that was like a spotlight, that I should have left right after the set. I shouldn’t have been a drunk, even back then, and I shouldn’t have dared to dream anyway. There were about a million should-haves and could-haves that raced through my mind over and over again in the years afterward and, for the most part, they all led back to me singing these flirty songs in a basement dive in the wrong part of town.

  Like I said, the lighting wasn’t good.

  I remember thick black hair and almond-shaped eyes so dark that they rivaled my own, and that he was handsome. Or maybe that’s just how he seemed after a couple of beers. What we talked about that night remains a mystery to me. I can’t imagine it was all that interesting, or else he wouldn’t have had to drug me. Or maybe he was going to do it anyway. I do recall thinking that with his fancy shoes and expensive watch, maybe he knew some people who could help me. It wasn’t anything other than my voice that brought him to the stool beside me and maybe, just this once, my voice would be enough for someone to reach out a hand.

  Like I said, I was stupid.

  I do remember a hand, though, but it wasn’t outstretched in friendship or to initiate any kind of professional relationship. No, it was on my shoulder, caressing the inch of skin just under the sleeve of my T-shirt. Did I mind it, then? I can’t really say. I just don’t remember. All I know now is I despise the color yellow and I rue the day I ever took that hat off a bubbly coed who shared my dorm in a hostel that one time, back when I was still naive enough to sleep in a room full of other people without keeping one eye open.

  5

  My mother is a mystery to me.

  I was too young to remember her when she left, and Lorelei was just a baby, but I knew that she didn’t die like our father used to say, because he could never tell us what she died from. After our father was gone, our aunt would refuse to respond to any questions about our parents. I overheard her once on the phone with one of her friends, calling our mother a foreigner, her lips pinched with hatred. But she never said from where and I never caught her talking on the phone like that again. I just knew that she was alive, because you don’t hate the dead. Not like that. Then when our aunt got sick and gave us up, I just had Lorelei.

  After I woke up and shared my story, Starling wouldn’t let up with the reconciliation line. “You need support,” he persisted. He sensed my reluctance to reach out to my sister, which I was too hormonal to hide. “She can’t refuse you. She wouldn’t refuse you, Nora, not after what you’ve been through.”

  I don’t blame him for thinking that way and pestering me with his amateur bullshit psychology. Everyone and their cousin think they know something about the human condition and I blame the self-styled gurus on television. In a perfect world Lorelei would fall into my arms and whisper platitudes of sisterly love in my ear, but a perfect world this one ain’t. Starling just didn’t know her. He didn’t know how cruel beauty like hers can be. How it can make someone think that she is better than everyone else, better than you, who have always taken the licks for her and love her all the same.

  I sit at her kitchen table with my stomach in knots and wait for her to wake up.

  David comes down the stairs first and pauses in his slippered feet when he sees me. I’ve only met him once, on the porch when I stopped by to see Lorelei when I got my first chip. They got married when I was in the coma, and she still doesn’t know where I’d been all that time. She was too embarrassed by me to check and it must have been a relief to her that I never popped back into her life for the wedding.

  David stares at me now like I’m a specter from a horror story brought to life. Worn as I look, I don’t blame him for taking a cautious step back. “You ruined my car,” he says, after a while. He turns on the coffeemaker and busies himself with making breakfast while he gets his bearings.

  “You had insurance, right?”

  He frowns. “Let me get your sister.” He goes, leaving the breakfast fixings, padding down the hall and up the stairs. I can see the appeal of David. At first, I’d wondered because Lorelei could do so much better than a blandly handsome environmental lawyer, but now it is obvious. David is good, hardworking, and utterly predictable in his devotion to her. He goes grocery shopping on the weekends, fishes on Vancouver Island in his spare time, and drinks Bud Lights. I hear he has Nuu-chah-nulth ancestry. That some of his distant relatives still live on the island and that was what attracted her to him in the first place, but what has kept her at his side is likely the same unruffled nature that, within a matter of seconds, went from being shocked at an unwanted family member breaking into his house to starting breakfast because people have to eat and he li
kes to cook.

  A few minutes later I hear her small feet fly down the stairs. She stops at the doorway barefoot and wearing only one of David’s T-shirts, her hair in a disheveled halo framing her heart-shaped face, her eyes blazing with an unholy fire. David trails behind like he’s attached by a string, but all of my attention is on her.

  She stares at me, furious.

  Something inside me dies.

  There are resident orcas that live off the west coast and have some of the highest toxicity levels of marine mammals in the world, with pollutants swimming about under layers of blubber, keeping them warm and hazardous. Sometimes they wash up on the beach but their carcasses are so poisonous that people have to stay far back from the toxic PCBs they release. Why they stay somewhere so bad for them is a matter of pure speculation, but perhaps these waters are like family to them. It’s the orca equivalent of home. Familiar, even if it is killing them slowly. I understand that because I moved west, from Manitoba, where we grew up, to be closer to the sole familiar person that I have in this world. No matter where she goes, I have followed her because should something happen, I’d like to be close. Or maybe I need to make sure I’m here if she needs me. Not that she ever would, and not that it would ever be the other way around. Whatever it is, I understand these orcas and why they’d choose a hazardous ocean over cleaner waters somewhere else. It’s what they know.

  I see now that this visit was a mistake, that whatever I’d hoped to accomplish here—reconciliation, understanding, a word of kindness—it was never going to happen.

  “You’re drinking again.”

  I’m not surprised she noticed. The boozing hasn’t improved my appearance. There are bags under my eyes and my skin is sallow and drawn. I’ve been living off candy bars and pizza for too long and my clothes are still so old and worn that even I have become aware of their shabby state.