The Department of Lost & Found (3 page)

From that same shelf, I pulled out a Martha’s Vineyard T-shirt.

the black dog, it read. Ned and I had spent a week there earlier in the summer. He started in on me in April to set aside a week in July for “just the two of us,” and given the desperation in his voice, maybe I should have sensed that the lives we were carving out around, not with, each other, weren’t enough. He brought it up again when I was dashing out the door to begin a weeklong trip through Europe with the senator, and in my haste, I agreed, which is how I found myself begrudgingly enjoying a lazy week in a quintessential beach house on the Vineyard. That week, I boiled lobsters for dinner because they were his favorite, I indulged him in renting a kayak, and I stayed up far later than I liked just to sit on our rented porch and listen to the lapping of the waves and hold his hand and stare at the stars.

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I held the Black Dog T-shirt out in front of me and almost tasted the homemade donuts that we’d eaten each morning that week. Tangy, sweet, cinnamon, soft, and crusty. Ned would dunk his into his black coffee, and I’d eat mine slowly until it literally melted in my mouth. Maybe I should have savored more than just the donuts, it occurred to me just then. I pulled the shirt into my face and inhaled, as if I might still be able to smell the salty air or breathe in the hazy sunsets or capture those moments—the moments of my former life—in the deep gasp of my breath.

But there was nothing. So instead, I wiped away the solitary tear that had weaseled itself out of my right eye and careened down my cheek, and with sheer brute force, grabbed the neck of the T-shirt and tore it right down the middle. It would make a good dust rag, I figured, when I needed to do some cleaning up.

◆

◆

◆

From: Miller, Natalie

To: Richardson,

Kyle

Re:

Please Call Me

K—

No word from you. The
Post
has this splattered all over the front page, of which I’m sure you’re well aware.

Call ASAP.

—N

It was hardly an ideal thing to wake up to: your boss’s dirty laundry airing out for all to see, complete with the headline, “Dupris Is Duplicitous.” Lovely. The truth was that I didn’t know the particulars of this sticky tax problem. And as her senior adviser, I probably should have, but even I, future Madame President, wasn’t
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immune to the occasional dropped ball at work. And besides, dirty laundry is simply part of my job. In politics, it’s not the dirt that bothers us, it’s the chance that someone might pick up our reeking scent. If you can manage to wring everything through the laundry without the evidence being spotted, well, hurrah to you.

In the early spring, Kyle, who was my age but still a notch below me in seniority, which didn’t always foster the warmest of relationships, brought the senator’s endless list of gifts—including a Fabergé egg from a Russian diplomat and carved ivory elephants from ambassadors—to my attention.

“I don’t think this is legal,” he said, taking a deep sip of the grande coffee that I wasn’t sure I’d ever seen him without. “Have you ever looked into this? I mean, she gets thousands of thousands of dollars of gifts. And I think it could be an issue.”

“Go away,” I said, waving my hand and squinting at my computer, dismissing him in the way that a queen might shoo a fly. I stopped to readjust the elastic band in my hair and pulled my highlighted brown locks into a bun at the nape of my neck.

“Natalie, I’m serious. I think that this campaign might get ugly, and I really think that this could be an issue. I took a look at some of the stuff that she’s declared in the past, and . . .” He paused.

“Not everything is there.”

I rubbed my eyes. “
Everyone
fudges, Kyle.
No one
reports everything. Not our senator, not anyone else’s.
No one
cares and
no
one
gets caught. It’s just SOP.” I sighed and softened my voice.

“Look, I’m fucking dying here trying to write this proposal for the birth control bill—those assholes from Mississippi are threatening to block it—as if offering women the right to insured birth control is somehow a threat to their own testicular power. So I trust that you can handle this. I handled it for years before you, and I’m sure you can handle it now. If you have further concerns, call Diane in 22

a l l i s o n w i n n s c o t c h

Senator Kroiz’s office; though she’ll be relatively hush-hush about it, she’ll tell you this is SOP, too.”

I turned back to my computer just as I saw his face turn perfect cherry tomato red. Despite his tailor-made suits, crisp pocket handkerchiefs, and polished Prada shoes, Kyle was not nearly as composed on the inside as he was on the out, and his emotional constitution was perhaps his one weakness. After all, in politics, you never let them see you ruffled. (Unless, of course, it helped your poll numbers, in which case, they saw you ruffled, rattled, and rolled.)

“Fine.” He huffed dramatically, his voice registering about two decibels louder and dripping with disdain. “But you heard it here first. I think this is a red flag, and I
thought
that, you know, as her
senior
adviser, you’d want to know.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t. It’s never been a problem in the past, and I’m sure it won’t be now. So clean it up however you need to. Alter the returns, fudge this year’s gifts, whatever.” I kept typing.

“So that’s your final word? Do whatever I need to do?”

Rather than answer, I flicked my hand in his direction as his cue to leave.

I heard him snort as he spun around to leave, and under his breath he muttered, “Senior adviser.
As if
.”

“Kyle?” I called after him, ceasing my work and looking up at him. He swiveled his neck over his shoulder rather than give me the courtesy of turning. “I’m sorry. I’m just overworked and on a deadline, and I truly can’t deal with this right now. I’m putting it in your court, so handle it.”

He raised his eyebrows. “You? Natalie Miller. Sorry? I don’t buy it for a second.”

“Fair enough,” I said, half-smiling. “I’m not really sorry. But I figured that you’d stop bothering me and go about getting your
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23

job done if you thought that I was.” I turned back to my computer.

“So go get it done. And keep me out of it.”

So really, as I stared at the
Post
and popped the first of my morning pills, I could hardly blame him for ignoring me now that his theory had hit the fan. Turns out, I’d preemptively ignored a very large and seemingly looming time bomb. I flipped on the TV.
The Price Is Right
was coming on in fifteen minutes and even though I never envisioned a time in my life when this would be part of my daily scheduling, there it was.

I dropped the remote on the couch and went to the kitchen to prepare a bowl of oatmeal. If there were any good news of the day, it was that I was actually feeling semidecent. When I first met with Dr. Chin, when I sat in his dignified mahogany-walled office decorated with Persian rugs and leather chairs, he had told me that there were three stages of chemo recovery. The first week, you feel like your insides are on fire, like the chemicals rushing through you might kill you if the cancer doesn’t. The second week, you sense that you might survive; it’s not that you feel normal, but you feel the absence of the afflictions that plagued you the last week, so in that way, it’s like you won the lottery. And the third week is the one where you can’t believe that you ever felt like such a steam-ing mound of shit. Chemo? You’re thinking. That’s the best you can dish out? Because that, my darling cancer gods, I can take without blinking an eye. The sick part of this pattern, which I’m sure you’ve already figured out, is that just as you’re on the cusp of returning to your everyday life, right as you press your nose up to healthfulness and start going about your business as you did before the disease mowed you down, you have to start it all over again.

At the time, Dr. Chin flipped through my chart, ignoring his assistant, who kept paging him over the intercom, and explained that we’d be doing six or seven months of chemo, a round every 24

a l l i s o n w i n n s c o t c h

three weeks, and based on my reaction to this treatment, we’d proceed from there. At some point along the way, either in the middle or at the end, they’d perform a mastectomy. They would take my breasts from me.

He also spoke about what I could expect: fatigue, nausea, and the thing that I dreaded most—hair loss. “The aim of chemother-apy is to kill the fast-growing cancer cells,” he explained. “But what also happens as a result is that healthy cells are killed as well.

So, for example, your hair follicles are, in effect, shut down. Fortunately, the human body is resilient and smart enough to know how to grow them back when we’re done.” He said all of this in the kind of tone that he’d clearly perfected after years of treating depressing cases such as mine. He was firm yet still reassuring, regretful yet still commanding. I sat in his office and stared at his numerous diplomas and awards and medical society memberships, and I simply nodded my head, a small acknowledgment of the inevitable, of resigned acceptance. It’s not as if I had a choice.

What I didn’t tell Dr. Chin, when he asked how I felt, because surely he was referring to my physical maladies, not the emotional ones, was that I was gutted. That the fear that ran through me was nearly paralyzing. That the sheer terror of his words, “you have cancer,” caused my breath to leave my body, and that nodding my head in resignation was all that I
could
do. Anything more simply would have been impossible, because, you see, I was frozen.

I was thirty. I was the future ruler of the free world. And yet . . . this.
I was thirty, and I had cancer. I was thirty, and I had cancer
. I replayed it over and over again in my mind because it didn’t add up; it
couldn’t
add up. This. Could. Not. Be. My. Life. And yet . . . it was. So I sat in his office, and I tasted the horror that comes from discovering you’re not invincible, and maybe it was the cancer, but
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more likely, it was the spine-chilling terror of my diagnosis, but I literally wanted to curl up and die. Because the sum of Dr. Chin’s words led me to believe that I might just do that anyway.

Before I got up to leave, he pressed a card into my hand. “At some point, you might want to go see her.” I looked down and read
Mrs. Adina Seidel. Master Wigmaker
. Dr. Chin offered me a thin smile. “She’s the best that there is. And many of my patients find the process cathartic.” I met his eyes and wondered how a pile of fake hair could ever make someone feel more complete. But rather than reply, I took the card into my shaking fingers, thanked him for his time, and told him that I’d see him in a few days. As I left his office, I remember thinking that I couldn’t feel my legs.

That I was walking, yes, surely, I was shuffling down the linoleum-covered floor and through the dimly lit corridor, but how I was doing it, I don’t know. I remembered back to high school biol-ogy, when my teacher, Mr. Katz, lectured us on the “fight-or-flight” syndrome: that when an animal is put in peril, any unnecessary part of his brain function shuts down, that his body responds in a purely visceral way, doing what it must to survive the threat. But my own body, when faced with such a threat, was seemingly retreating. Rather than gathering its army to face the hell to come, it was already abandoning me. Already shutting me down. My legs were just the beginning.

But now, as I wrapped up the last few days of my first chemo round, things were indeed looking up. At least as far as my vomit/

nausea/exhaustion/dizzy problems went. That, I supposed, was something.

I stared at the
Post
while stirring my oatmeal, waiting for it to cool. I reached for the cordless phone on my white Formica counter and considered calling Kyle but figured that I could at least wait 26

a l l i s o n w i n n s c o t c h

until the end of
The Price Is Right
to harass him. (I was getting quite adept at homing in on the prices of nearly all of the electronics the contestants had to bid on, though admittedly, the groceries still threw me off my game.) Besides, I rationalized, Kyle was probably in his morning meeting. He’d definitely e-mail me as soon as he was done. So instead, I dialed Sally, who promptly agreed to meet me for an afternoon walk. Dr. Chin had recommended that I stay as active as possible without crossing the line to where I actually did more damage to my weary body.

By the time Bob Barker had awarded the showcase showdown (a vacation to Tahiti! Was this really just an excuse for
The Price Is
Right
girls to wear bikinis onstage? I wondered), there was still no word from Kyle. There was, however, word from the senator. Or her assistant, Blair, to be more precise.

From: Foley, Blair

To: Miller,

Natalie

Re:

The BC bill

Hi Natalie!!!!!

I hope you’re doing well!!!! We’re all keeping our best thoughts with you and know that if anyone can beat this, it’s you!!!!

Anyway, the senator asked me to alert you that she is no longer moving forward with her push for the birth control bill. She told me to thank you so much for all of your hard work (she’d tell you herself, but she’s about to dash up to Albany), but that she doesn’t want to get into it with the Mississippi contingent, and she also said “I don’t think this matters very much right now,” in case that helps you
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understand. I think she meant that in the nicest way possible!!!! As in, we don’t need to worry about this for now!!!!

Great news, right?

Hope you’re feeling great!!!!!!!!!

Blair

From: Miller, Natalie