Let's Get Lost

by Adi Alsaid

  “The problem was that she could see it in everyone else, too. All the lives people weren’t living. The teacher with the heart of a warrior. The farmer with the imagination of a writer. Time went by. With every visitor who came to see the girl, she just got worse. She wanted to tell them what was happening, but her tongue was too heavy to speak. Then one day, it was finally too much. There were too many lives for the girl to keep inside any longer.”

  “What happened?” Dee asked, leaning forward on her mom’s lap.

  “There was a flash,” Leila said, opening her palm the way she knew her dad had done when telling the story. “The brightest flash that Earth has ever seen, and it took this girl and all the lives she’d been carrying inside her to the sky. That’s what the Northern Lights are. All the lives that we’re not living. Not just the girl’s, but everyone’s.

  “According to the legend, the first time you see the Lights, your true path is revealed to you.”

  Dee giggled and clapped, and her parents joined in on the applause. Brendan nodded and smiled in approval. Something in the fire popped, and Leila stared at the flames as if waiting for something to emerge. This was the first time she’d spoken the story out loud. She was exhilarated by sharing it with someone else but terrified that speaking it might make it leave her memory, the way confessions unburdened a sinner of his crimes.

  Still allowing herself to be lazily combed, Dee, in that way that children have of bringing questions out of thin air, asked Leila, “Where’s your family?”

  Leila hesitated, grabbing a twig near her feet and picking at the bark. She looked at Dee, who’d asked so damn innocently that Leila couldn’t even feel her usual urge to deflect the question.

  “Actually, Dee, I don’t really have a family anymore. About a year ago, I was in a bad car accident,” she said, waving away the smoke from her face. She could see the parents’ expressions soften, eyebrows angled in sorrow. Harriet stopped combing Dee’s hair.

  “They’re dead?” Dee asked, not stepping around the word.

  “Yup. I have an aunt and an uncle who took care of me after the accident, but my parents and my sister all died.”

  “That’s sad.” Dee picked up a nearby twig, poking it into the dirt and not making eye contact.

  Leila thought she saw a flash of color in the sky and turned to spot it, but there was nothing there. “Kind of. But, the truth is, I can’t remember them at all.” Her hand unconsciously touched the scar that ran from just above her nape to the top of her ear. It still gave her chills to touch it, even through the hair that had grown over it. Each time she felt the scar tissue, she’d imagine the piece of glass that they’d removed. She pictured tons and tons of blood, even though she couldn’t remember a single drop of it. “I couldn’t recognize them in the pictures or remember the days that those pictures were taken on. It’s all gone,” she said, trying to sound dismissive, not wanting to traumatize Dee.

  “Amnesia?” Harriet breathed, holding Dee closer to her. “That actually happens, huh?” She twisted at the silver ring in her nose, adjusting it for comfort.

  “The doctors said they can’t tell how much of it is physical trauma and how much is caused by post-traumatic stress. Only time will tell how much of my memories I’ll get back, or if they’ll come back at all. The only thing I remember from before the accident is that story about the Northern Lights.”

  “You don’t remember anything?” Dee asked, scrunching her eyes, trying to imagine such a thing.

  “Nope.” Leila shrugged.

  “What about your birthday parties? I always remember birthday parties. Last year, I had a cake with strawberries inside, and Mommy and Daddy let me draw on the cake with the frosting, so I could put as much as I wanted, which was a lot. Then we went swimming, and I got three books.” Her eyes shimmered with the memory. “And that wasn’t even my best one! Seven was a really good one. You can’t remember your seventh birthday?”

  “I can’t remember any of them,” Leila said, “but I bet seven was a really good one for me, too.”

  “What else can’t you remember?”

  “Honey,” Brendan said, putting a hand on top of Dee’s head, “maybe Leila doesn’t want to talk about all this.”

  “No, it’s okay. It feels good to get this off my chest.” She thought about Sonia, Elliot, and Bree, how she’d pushed them to unload their troubles, and she couldn’t help but smile. She made a mental note to check the campsite office for mail before heading out again. It was possible the letter from Hudson she’d been hoping for would be waiting for her.

  “Since the accident, I’ve had no idea who I really am. There were bits and pieces: my old diary, the contact list on my phone, pictures. Friends came by the hospital in tears, hugging me, but I had no idea who any of them were. I went back to school after a couple of months, but it was just too weird. Like I’d been inserted into someone else’s life. I couldn’t even recognize myself in the mirror. It was bizarre to have strangers know who I was more than I did. And still, nothing came back. Just the story about the Lights.

  “I can’t remember any of my birthday parties,” Leila repeated, trying to make it sound just like another item on a list. “I don’t remember when I learned to ride a bike, or if I even know how to. Although I do know that I once learned how to swim and that my body still remembers how to do it.” A pleasant shiver went down her spine as she thought about her swim in the Mississippi. She could feel the goose bumps forming on her arms.

  “I can’t even imagine what that would be like,” Harriet said softly, Dee’s hair still laced around her fingers. “How do you go back to living your old life after something like that?”

  “I don’t know,” Leila said. “I didn’t. I moved from my home in Austin to Louisiana, where my aunt and uncle live. But that didn’t help at all. It just made things feel more foreign. When the insurance money came in from the accident, I decided there was nothing keeping me there. There was only one thing I wanted to do, one thing that I thought could actually help bring back my memories.” She looked up at the sky again, for the moment thinking not of the Northern Lights but of Hudson, the way the sky had looked that night, full of stars.

  They fell quiet, even Dee, the crackling fire and a nearby creek the only sounds in the air. It was just now getting noticeably darker, the sky a deeper shade of purple, more stars revealing themselves. There were no clouds around to block out the sky. Leila felt a rush of adrenaline flow through her.

  “I’m hoping things will change tonight,” Leila said. “There’s got to be a reason why the only thing that stayed with me was that story about the Lights. That’s why I’m on this trip.” She looked at Brendan and Harriet. They met Leila’s eyes, compassion coming through in their expressions. Then they both looked down at Dee at the same time. “I’m hoping that seeing the Northern Lights in person will jog my memory, that it’ll bring back some of the details of my life, maybe even bring them all back.

  “I’m going to stay up for as long as it’s dark and wait for them to show.”

  Dee, who had been entertaining herself by tossing nearby things—leaves, twigs, pebbles—into the fire, rose to her feet and crossed to where Leila was sitting on a log. Without hesitating, Dee threw her arms around Leila’s shoulders and hugged her tightly. “I hope you remember your birthday parties. Especially your seventh.”

  * * *

  Leila had been listening to the song on repeat for nearly an hour now. It was that one line that got to her, the relevance of it so striking, she could hardly believe it every time the singer sang it. “Chasing the only meaningful memory you thought you had left,” the singer of Neutral Milk Hotel nasally but beautifully whined through Leila’s earphones. She’d discovered the song on the drive into Alaska, and though the rest of the lyrics had nothing to do with her, she’d flashed forward to the exact moment she was having now, lying on a blanket on the grass, looking
up at the northern sky, waiting for the Lights to come up. It would have been a lot more satisfying if the Lights had actually shown up. But it’d been hours, and nothing. The sky was going to lighten up soon, and it made Leila feel helpless. She wanted to reach up to the night and dig her fingers into it, beg it to stay just a little bit longer.

  The adrenaline was wearing off, sleepiness starting to set in. She couldn’t decide which was more disappointing, this or the mailbox at the campsite office being completely empty. Somehow, it felt like different versions of the same thing: the Lights’ refusal to make an appearance, Hudson’s failure to respond. Clearly, Hudson wanted nothing to do with her.

  It all felt so anticlimactic. At that very moment, her whole trip seemed useless. When she’d left her aunt and uncle in their little town outside of New Orleans, she’d felt like a nobody. Less than that, if such a thing was possible. A nonentity, negative space. Now what was she? A nonentity who had driven a few thousand miles and had a handful of good nights mixed in among all the lonely ones. The friends she’d made, if she could call them friends, barely knew anything about her, because there was nothing to know, nothing to tell them. Even that story she had told Hudson about the ants in her hometown: that wasn’t her memory at all, just something that she’d read in her diary and repeated, pretending or hoping that, in saying the words out loud, they would feel like her own.

  Her heart skipped a beat as a shooting star swept across the sky, its brilliant streak lingering in the dark like a ghost. She stayed right where she was, a small, uncomfortable pillow she’d bought at a camping-goods store in Fairbanks tucked under her head. She sang along with “Oh Comely” again, making sure that every line passed through her lips, even if there was only one that she really understood. She wanted the lyrics to stick to her memory, the melodies to nestle into the folds of her brain.

  When the sky started to show signs of the oncoming sunrise, Leila tried to fight the disappointment in the Lights’ absence by remembering the sunrises she’d shared with new friends during her travels. She tried to tell herself that her trip had been worthwhile, if only for those shared experiences. But that was a consolation, at best, and it meant close to nothing if she still didn’t have a clue who she was.

  She ended up staying for the whole sunrise, until the sun was no longer a watchable ball of red-orange on the horizon but its usual, blindingly yellow self. Then she gathered up her blanket and her pillow and shuffled her way back to her tent. There’d be more nights, she told herself. Sooner or later, the Lights would show up for her.

  Outside her tent, she found Dee wandering about in pajamas, her hair in a ponytail. When she saw Leila, her eyes lit up, and she ran to her. “Did it work? Do you remember?”

  Leila willed herself to smile as she shook her head no.

  Dee pouted. “Not even one day?”

  “Nope,” Leila said with a shrug. “But maybe it’s because I didn’t see the Lights. I’ll try again tomorrow.” She waved a sad little good-bye and climbed into her tent to catch up on sleep. She’d been up for over thirty hours, but sleep didn’t come quickly. She lay still for what felt like hours, just waiting, tallying up the disappointments of her day.

  2

  LEILA WAS SITTING with her feet up on Hudson’s lap, his strong fingers gently wrapped around her ankles. He had this way of touching her skin, as if he drew energy from it. The air was perfect, pleasant to the point that it could just barely be felt, like a morning caress. A glass of lemonade with mint in it sat on the table, sweating, the droplets running down and forming a slight puddle that made Leila wish for a pool. She watched Hudson smiling with his eyes closed, his head tilted back, lit up by the sun. She had the urge to trace her finger over his lips.

  “Happy birthday!” a tiny voice shouted, jolting Leila from her sleep.

  Dee’s face filled up the partially unzipped tent flap, a conical party hat resting atop her mess of blond curls. She blew a noisemaker that unrolled like a long reptilian tongue. “Happy birthday!” Dee called again, unzipping the flap so it was completely open. The air that came in was cool and lovely, like it’d been in her dream, and Leila found herself searching the tent for Hudson.

  “Come on,” Dee said, beckoning her out of her sleepy daze and out of her tent. “We have a surprise for you.”

  Leila had fallen asleep in yesterday’s clothes, jeans and a sky-blue sweatshirt, both of which were grass-stained and smelled of smoke (she liked it). She pulled off the sweatshirt and tossed it into a corner, then ran her hands through her hair, patting down the cowlicks that had sprung up as she slept. Behind Dee she could see Harriet’s skirt, Brendan’s linen pants, other pairs of legs she couldn’t recognize.

  “What’s going on?” Leila asked.

  “Come out and see!” Dee said, waving as she stepped away from the tent. She blew the noisemaker again, and a chorus of noisemakers outside responded in kind.

  From the feel of the air, it was sometime in the afternoon. Leila stretched out a little and cracked her back, then obliged, crawling out of the tent.

  “What is this?” Leila asked, smiling at Dee, casting puzzled looks at the scene outside the tent.

  “It’s your birthday party!” Dee said, gesturing at the gathering of people as if Leila might have missed them. “I know it’s not really your birthday, but it didn’t seem fair that I can remember most of my birthday parties and you can’t remember any of yours, even though you’ve had more. So at least now you’ll have one to remember.”

  Harriet and Brendan were wearing party hats that matched Dee’s and holding a cake, waving away flies that tried to land on the plain white icing. Liza, the campsite manager, was there, too, holding one of the unraveling noisemakers. A few other people Leila had never seen before were standing around, presumably other campers that Dee had summoned with her adorableness. There was a couple in their twenties, a group of guys who looked as if they enjoyed hunting and trading tips on how not to trim their beards. A scattering of families stood around the picnic tables, the children looking everywhere on the scale of happiness from thrilled to be partaking in a stranger’s birthday party to flabbergasted that their supposedly loving parents had dragged them to the middle of the woods and away from civilization.

  Leila felt her smile get big beyond control. The dream about Hudson finally left her, replaced by a flutter of giddiness in her stomach. She looked to Brendan and Harriet, raising her eyebrows.

  “All her,” Brendan said, shaking his head in astonishment and pride.

  Dee took Leila by the hand and led her to the cake. “Mom says that most birthday cakes are chocolate, and so we got you a chocolate cake, in case eating it will remind you of some other chocolate cake you had once.”

  The cake’s frosting was completely white, a blank canvas. On cue, Harriet raised a number of plastic bags full of different-colored goo. “Dee enjoyed drawing on her cake last year, and she thought you might want to choose how to decorate yours.”

  “And make sure you smell the cake,” Dee said, still holding Leila’s hand. “Daddy says smell is how people best remember things.”

  “That’s what I’ve heard,” Brendan said sheepishly. He smiled, then tugged at the end of his beard. “I hope it’s good. It’s the only cake we could find on short notice.”

  Leila looked around at the other campers, everyone’s attention on her. She still couldn’t control her smile. “I don’t know what to say. This is wonderful.”

  “We have a piñata,” Liza blurted out, pressing her hands together and clapping.

  “Have you ever had a piñata?” Dee asked, hopeful. Leila shook her head.

  “This is going to be fun!” Dee said. “I’ve never been to someone’s first birthday party. We’ll hit the piñata, and we bought water balloons. It’s not that cold today, and my mom said that if we dry off right after, we won’t get sick. Then we can play hide-and-seek, and sardines, which
is like hide-and-seek but backwards. One person hides, and everyone else has to look for them, and when you find the person who’s hiding, you hide with them, until there’s only one person left looking.” Her eyes widened in excitement.

  They followed the path that led into the woods, away from the campsite office. The rest of the group tagged along behind, chatting. Harriet was wondering aloud about the proper grammar surrounding piñatas. “Do you have piñatas? Use them? Play with them? Just hit them?”

  In a hushed tone Leila could hear Brendan filling someone in on her situation. One of the kids, a boy pretty close to Dee’s age, complained about the fact that they were walking too far, and his dad, without any anger in his voice, told him to stop whining and enjoy the day.

  Soon they were walking alongside the creek in the clearing where Leila had spent the night looking at the sky. If she took just a few steps away from the path, she’d be able to find the exact spot that had been pictured online. The one of this particular clearing had been subtitled with the words: One of the many great spots for viewing the Northern Lights!

  They reached a fork in the path that Leila had not yet had time to explore, and Dee took them left, arriving shortly after at a gathering of picnic tables arranged with decorative paper tablecloths. There were bowls full of potato chips, trays of vegetable sticks with various dips, two-liter bottles of soda. Stacks of paper napkins with Happy Birthday! and Birthday Girl! written all over them were held down by rocks. Two or three pizza boxes were spread about on each table, the smell wafting to Leila as she approached. A group of three middle-aged men had stayed behind to keep wildlife away from the feast. They were stubbly, sipping calmly on bottles of beer. One of them waved with his free hand; the other two stood from the benches and smiled.

  “It’s your party, so you get to choose how we start,” Dee said. “We can do the cake first, or the pizza, or the piñata, or the games.” She swiveled her head around the picnic area a few times, her hair bouncing even more than would correspond to the amount of her movements. “Mom! Where’s the ice cream?”