How to Be Lost (3 page)

I
GAVE
M
ADELINE
her first cigarette when she was thirteen. “Now, tap the pack,” I said, demonstrating against the inside of my own wrist. She did as I told her, her forehead creased with concentration. Her white hair fell against her cheek. “Take one out,” I said.

She looked up. “Which one?”

“Any one, nerd.” From the floor, where she was sitting on her knees and turning the pages of Miss Nelson Is Missing, Ellie giggled, and I saw the space where she had lost her first tooth. She was five, much younger than us. She should have been in bed, but could not sleep when the screaming began.

Madeline took a cigarette from the pack (we were smoking Winston Lights, the brand James O’Hara smoked) and clamped it between her teeth. I took a match and held it underneath her cigarette until the paper caught. “Now breathe in, but just into your mouth,” I said.

Madeline did as she was told, her eyes widening as the smoke burned her gums. She took the cigarette from her mouth, using all of her fingers in a fist. “Ow,” she said, her voice wavering.

Ellie looked at me, fear like a flame behind her blue eyes. She was so fragile, not yet bruised. From downstairs, something slammed against a wall. My father’s voice rumbled, and Ellie made a frightened sound.

“Oh, Jesus,” I said, taking the cigarette from Madeline. I stubbed it out in a teacup, yanked the window open, and threw the cigarette. The wind smelled of rain and grass, and the clouds were swollen. The leaves outside were a vivid green. My parents were on the patio now, or the lawn. Something smashed against the side of the house, something glass. My mother: oh Joseph, Joseph! Her voice thin and desperate.

Madeline, looking down at the rug, her fingers snaking through the aqua plush. Ellie, hands pulled into fists, her breathing ragged as she willed herself not to cry.

It began to rain. A car driving by, the sizzling sound of tires on wet road. My father, his face red, his breath stinking of expensive Scotch. My mother, skinny as a skeleton in high-heeled sandals. Joseph, pleeease! Her voice like steam, rising into nothing.

We slept together in the closet that night. Madeline practiced smoking in front of the mirror, and became passably good, although I told her she couldn’t inhale until her birthday. I showed her how to hold the cigarette between her first and second fingers, and explained how to exhale, how to make smoke rings. Ellie fell asleep on the floor before we did, curled around herself like a snail. Madeline and I changed into our pajamas and brushed our teeth in the bathroom. We were always listening for footfalls on the staircase: rapid running meant my mother in hysterics, and steady, creaking steps meant my father.

Even though we hid ourselves deep in my walk-in closet, I lay awake and waited, wanting to be ready. There had been nights when hours of peace gave way to the heavy footsteps coming up the stairs. The slurred and needling voice, Girls?

I stayed awake. I whispered my favorite word to my sisters to take their mind off things. “LaGuardia,” I sang, “LaGuardia, LaGuardia, LaGuardia….” The name of our airport sounded like a creek bubbling slowly over stones. We chanted our homemade lullaby and fell into sleep, snuggled in Laura Ashley comforters. I listened to the rain outside our million-dollar house. The rain fell on my mother’s Oldsmobile, on my father’s company car, and on his Alfa Romeo. It fell on the garage downtown where James O’Hara worked, and on our treehouse in the woods. It fell on Holt, and New York City, and maybe even as far as New Orleans.

Wet streets. The smell of tar releasing heat. A morning, leaves against the kitchen window. My mother is asleep, her hair across the pillow, shut the door. My father, gone already to catch the train, his glass rinsed and waiting in the kitchen sink. Blue bowls laid out on the kitchen table with cold spoons beside them. A newspaper wrapped in plastic. Orange juice, the arrival of Mrs. Lake and the carpool. What a storm, hey girls? Wow—did you see the lightning? Maddy, your hair looks adorable!

I have checked: my sisters and I look perfect, hair and shoes and clothes as clean as if we had parents. Mrs. Lake backs down our driveway, gravel crunching under the tires, and for seven hours we are free.

*

Ellie looked like a normal five-year-old—wide-eyed, awkward—but she was courageous. “I wanna be a runaway,” she said, after dinner one night, as we were watching Beverly Hills, 90210 in Madeline’s room. She put her hands on her hips. My mother and father were downstairs, but nothing had happened yet. Ellie pointed to the television. “None of them have parents,” she said. On the screen, a blond girl drove a convertible to an ice cream shop, where her friends greeted her with great enthusiasm.

“A runaway!” said Madeline, furrowing her brow. “Where did you even hear that word?”

Ellie pushed Mute on the remote control. Her face was animated. Madeline had pulled Ellie’s hair into pigtails, and they stuck out above her ears. “We can all be runaways,” she said.

Madeline let out a nervous laugh. “Oh yeah, and where would we run to?” she said. She stopped painting her toenails.

“I wanna run away,” said Ellie again. She said it slowly, gravely, and she looked into my eyes.

“OK,” I said.

“Caroline,” said Madeline, with barely disguised alarm, “We’re just kids!”

Ellie smiled. That smile, the gap where a tooth had been. I dream of her, still: Ellie at that moment, before it all went wrong.

Madeline ran from the room, and from downstairs ice crashed into a crystal glass, and on the television a girl in a red sweater slapped a boy.

*

The idea of running away was just that—an idea—until James O’Hara. I first noticed James the day I got my braces off. After the wrenching removal and Polaroid photo session (my picture was tacked up on a thumbtack board of perfect smiles, right between Arthur Waldenstein and Jenni Woods), I began to walk home. Though I had learned to drive the summer before, taking the Oldsmobile out into sparsely populated areas and making wide turns while my mother gave me directions, I wasn’t yet legal.

My mother was at a Twig meeting, so I was supposed to take a cab back to Holt High School. I was wearing a denim miniskirt and the sun was out; I decided to walk instead.

I put one Treetorn in front of the other, a slight sway in my hips that I had never felt quite able to pull off before, when I had a mouth full of metal. Suddenly, there was nothing standing between me and adulthood, I thought. I had gotten what I needed from my parents (I knew that orthodontia and piano lessons were expensive) and could now move forward in the world.

I passed Mimi’s Café, Stride-Rite, and Baskin-Robbins. I passed the deli where my sisters and I had bought a 12-pack of Jolt Cola and drank it in an hour, spinning and reeling from the thrill of it, running barefoot across the lawn and feeling the breeze in our hair before the nausea took hold and we had to go inside and tell our mother we were sick. I passed the Liquor Barn.

And then there was Ray’s Fuel, the local gas station and body shop. We stopped at Ray’s all the time, when my mother needed the car filled (I didn’t know until I went away that you could pump gas yourself; Holt has no self-serve pumps). I had never really looked inside the body shop. It seemed a secret place, full of oily-smelling things that wouldn’t make sense to me. I suppose I had never thought about who worked there, or anywhere, for that matter. All I knew of work was my father with his briefcase and his bitter smell, the way his mouth tightened when he had to write a check for anything. My father worked on Wall Street, in New York City. People gave him money, and he invested it for them. Sometimes he made lots of money, like the time he bought my mother some land on Martha’s Vineyard. But sometimes he lost money, like the year afterward, when he had to sell the land and my mother had to sell her family’s house in Savannah, too.

My father gave my mother an allowance, and if I needed anything, I had to write a proposal, outlining what amount of money I needed and why, and he would decide if it was worthwhile. Five dollars for the spring formal was not worthwhile, so I stole the money from my mother’s Gucci purse.

I was fifteen with straight teeth and a denim miniskirt and I looked inside that dusky place behind Ray’s Fuel, and I saw James O’Hara.

I know now that a boy in oil-stained coveralls looking for love is a cliché, but the sweet shock James sent through me was like a drug. He was cleaning a wrench with a red cloth, and he turned around as I walked by. He smiled in a shy way and I didn’t just smile back, I stopped.

“Hey,” said James O’Hara, and I said, “Hey.”

I didn’t see him again for another few months, but I asked around about him. I did not have many friends—my sisters and I tended to spend our time together—but I was able to glean that the new mechanic at Ray’s Fuel was named James and was an orphan. He was supposed to be a senior at Holt High School, but I never saw him there. Maybe he was a dropout.

I developed a full-blown obsession. I explained to my mother I wanted to walk home every day. Her distracted driving was enough of a reason, but I told her that I was training for a March of Dimes Walk-A-Thon. Relieved, I think, she told me to take my sisters with me. We could use the exercise, she said, and she would have more time to write in her journal. “I have stories, you know,” she told me, raising her eyebrows and holding my gaze until I felt uncomfortable.

I didn’t say that I had already heard all her stories: the one about her rich fiancé Bernard, the one about her aborted modeling career. I was sick to death of her stories. They all ended the same way: a depressed woman sitting alone in an expensive kitchen.

My sisters fell in love with James O’Hara, too. We knew about the orphanage in White Plains (there were dances at the yacht clubs to benefit the orphanage, and bake sales), but we had never met a real orphan before. To me, it seemed romantic to be alone in the world, with no parents making you miserable. We stopped every day to get bags of Gummi bears or Cokes from the snack shop at Ray’s Fuel, and sometimes James came out of the garage and we’d see him. He always smiled at me, and once even asked my name. I felt as if he watched me while I picked out candy or a soda. He watched me in a way that was new to me, a way that made me feel powerful.

Madeline pronounced him cuter than Kirk Cameron.

A long time went by with things just like this: Skittles and Twizzlers and Gummi bears and Jolt Cola and hoping for a glance of the orphan. Things at home were both boring and terrifying. Days would go by slowly, the air in our house sour with the sadness of a dying marriage. But then an argument would ignite my father’s anger, and we would try to hide in the backyard or my closet until the tornado of his frustrated hopes had passed.

Later, I wondered who my father might have been without the alcohol in his blood. He had swept my mother off her feet, charmed her with his intellect and rugged looks. I knew this because she had told me, and yet it was hard to believe. Sometimes, I caught him gazing at me as if I was a beautiful object he had forgotten he owned.

But more often, he was angry. We never knew what might set him off, so we hated inviting anyone to our house. After Ellie went to kindergarten and my mother let the nanny go, my sisters and I were alone.

And then James called.

“Hello?” said my mother, one sunny Saturday. Saturdays (and Sundays, for that matter) filled me with dread. So much could go wrong. I usually spent the day practicing, hoping that if I filled the house with piano notes, there would be less room for yelling. I tried to lose myself in the music, tried to fill the corners with light.

This Saturday, my father was mowing the lawn, having had a glass of wine for breakfast. My mother had put on her tennis skirt and visor with the pretense of going somewhere and doing something, but then fought with my father about the wine and lost her steam. Slowly, my father’s volatile personality had alienated her from her friends, and now she rarely made plans at all. She was sitting at the kitchen table staring into space when the phone rang.

“Oh,” said my mother, putting her palm over the phone and turning to me. “For you. A boy,” she whispered, raising her eyebrow and winking lasciviously. Her thighs, underneath her tennis skirt, were bony and gray. She had fixed her hair carefully, curls tumbling over the visor like a waterfall.

I was playing Colecovision with Ellie, Donkey Kong. I took the phone, my heart thumping. “Hello?” I said.

“Is this Caroline?” said a voice that was low and adult.

“Yes.”

“This is James, um, from Ray’s Gas Mart?”

“Yes?” My first thought was that it was a joke, but I held the phone to my ear and looked at the kitchen floor: stripped pine.

“I was wondering?” There was a pause, and I heard someone talking in the background, the clang of metal. A vision of James came to me: his thick eyebrows and heavy-lidded eyes. The smell of car exhaust and oil. His hands holding something heavy, a tool, the murky light of the shop with only a dirty window to let Saturday in. The pay phone on the wall, and James’ black boots with the band of leather around the ankle fastened by a tarnished buckle.

My mother was staring at me, opening her palms, mouthing who is it, her face glowing.

“Yes?” I said into the phone.

“Would you…like to go out for some pizza? With me?”

“Yes,” I said. Warmth filled me—I could actually feel my veins expanding.

“How about next Wednesday at, um, six?”

“Yes.” I hung up the phone, and my mother said, “Well? What is it?”

Ellie was still playing Donkey Kong, her thumb hitting the red button and making her little man jump, but I knew she was listening. I could have turned to my mother and told her about the boy. Boys were something she loved to talk about, her old loves, her glory days. But I did not confide in my mother. It was too late by then.

“Nothing,” I said, and I went outside to sit in the hammock and savor my secret like a hoarded Godiva chocolate. Madeline was in the hammock already, reading a Nancy Drew, and Ellie soon joined us.

Behind the hammock was an expanse of wooded land. We had made a secret world there, one filled not with trees but with chic apartments and restaurants where we went on dates. Madeline, who was called Moo, had a job as a teacher and a boyfriend named Renaldo. Ellie, who called herself Laurel, was a busy actress. And I, as Candy, had a career as a famous musician. (In the real world, I took piano lessons three times a week.) James O’Hara had been my imaginary boyfriend for months; now I had a real date to plan for.