The Lost & Found (19 page)

T
he car felt smaller on the way home. And hotter—like the heat of Austin had gotten trapped in the fabric of the seats, the fake leather detailing, the steering wheel, the rearview mirrors. Willa didn't complain but tilted the vents to blow cold air on her face. Her hair whipped around her until eventually she put it into a ponytail.

“I don't want to stop along the way,” she said when we passed the city limits and left Austin behind us, a memory in the span of an instant.

I didn't mention that I'd already been up for twenty-four hours (Willa hadn't woken up when I'd gotten back to the motel room that morning) because, to be honest, I
wasn't tired at all. I felt awake in a way I hadn't in years—a healthy, natural awake. Like I had woken up from a two-hour nap on the heels of a full eight-hour night of sleep. I knew I could drive to Los Angeles just like I knew that when we got there, finally, I might be ready for some sleep.

I drove away from Austin and my sister fiddled with the air vents and I felt the passing of time like it was a physical thing. Like every minute was slipping through my fingers, every hour was ripping itself out of my chest and taking part of me with it.

When I was younger, I would get panic attacks if I watched a clock for too long. It never seemed fair that we were only given one opportunity, one chance, and that even in the second we completed a task it was already behind us. We could never reach it again. We could never test whether it had been the right decision or not. We could only pick a direction—left or right—and commit to it blindly, jumping off into the proverbial deep end. Sometimes it was nice, cool water. Sometimes it was shit.

It had helped when I cut myself.

I'd started after Willa's accident, and I'd relished the release I felt.

But it was a fake release, I knew. It was something I'd made up in my head to prolong the inevitability of facing my problems. I'd worked through it in therapy, and I knew now that I had to go back. When I told Frannie I thought
I needed something more, I meant—no more TILTgroup, no more half-assed group therapy sessions on the internet. I had to go back to real-life, one-on-one sessions. I had to tell Dr. Williams that I had wanted to hurt myself again. I had to tell her the urge had come back in a motel room in the middle of nowhere and I had come really close to losing that battle. I had to tell her that I had no idea why it had happened when it happened. Maybe it was random. Maybe it was being so far from home. Maybe it was the fact that for the first time in my life I had stopped focusing on all the things I was losing, and I was starting to go out and find the things I wanted for myself.

Willa was watching me. I saw her out of the corner of my eye.

“It's a twenty-hour drive,” I said.

“We can go to a drive-thru if we get hungry.”

“I mean, I'll have to pee.”

“Well, obviously we can pee. I just want to sleep in my own bed, Louis.”

It was one in the afternoon. We would arrive in Los Angeles around eleven in the morning the next day.

“I guess we can try,” I said, but I already knew I could make it. Willa would fall asleep and wake up a dozen times, napping her way to Los Angeles, and I would drive and drive and drive until we got home.

“That's your problem, Louis,” she said, forcing her words through a yawn. “You can never commit.”

“Speaking of commitment, what are you going to do about Benson?”

She straightened up in her seat, stretching her hands out in front of her before answering. “Are you asking me whether I'm ready to lose my virginity?”

“In as many words.”

“Well it's not really any of your business.”

“To be fair, you're the one who brought it up.”

“You tricked me. And anyway, I don't know.”

“You don't have to know right now.”

“What are you, a psychologist? Geez.”

“I'm just trying to fill up our twenty-hour drive with some conversation.”

“Let's fill it with naptime. Not for you, though. You have to watch the road.”

I drove for six hours before my legs started tingling. Willa slept for two and then woke up and mostly alternated between changing the music and staring out the window despondently. I didn't know what she had to be despondent about. She and Benson lived in the same city. She had a choice that I didn't have.

Every minute of the six hours was filled with Frances.

We had gotten to know each other over the course of years. She had told me everything about her life, so much that before I saw her picture I knew what she looked like, and before I talked to her on the phone I knew what she sounded like, and before I ever touched her I knew what
she would feel like. So many times in those six hours I wanted to slam my foot on the brake, turn around, drive to wherever she was, and take her in my arms again, hug her close to me so she couldn't escape.

But something kept me on the path. On my path. I had to go back to Los Angeles so I could leave it again when it was the right time. I had to tell my parents I was going to Austin after graduation; I had to finish high school and get grades good enough to keep my scholarship. I had to figure out a way to pack up my things and move them halfway across the country. I had to figure out a way to do all of this while knowing that Frances was in the world and I couldn't be with her.

I stopped the car by a restaurant in the middle of nowhere. I liked it because there were cows grazing on the front lawn. Willa had fallen asleep again, and when I turned the car off she jerked awake.

“Where are we?”

“Someplace called Kent. We're still in Texas,” I said.

“Oh. I thought we might be home already.”

“It would be impressive, even for you, to sleep for twenty hours.”

“I was trying,” she said. “I'll try harder next time.”

We ate a quick dinner and got back on the road. The closer we got to Los Angeles, the quieter Willa became, like the city would only let her back in if she was still. We stopped again around ten at night and stocked up on
snacks at a seedy gas station. Willa got bananas and potato chips and an enormous container of unsalted cashews. I got a can of soda for the caffeine, a bag of pretzels, and three apples. We feasted in the parking lot and then snacked the rest of the way to the city, passing into Los Angeles just before noon.

My legs were useless when I finally pulled up next to our apartment building. I rubbed my thighs to get the blood flowing again. Willa reached over and slapped my knee.

“Now you sort of know how I feel, except no amount of rubbing will bring that feeling back,” she said. When she said things like that, I didn't know how to respond. I didn't know if maybe saying nothing was my best bet. I was generally really good at saying nothing, except I'd just driven for twenty-one hours and felt a little sentimental for a variety of reasons. So I grabbed her hand before she pulled it away.

“You know when I said I wished it was me? Years ago, I don't remember when. You brushed it off, and I never knew how to tell you that I meant it. I really meant it. I wish it was me. I wish we could switch. Or I wish we could share.”

“Like we each had one leg?” she asked, beginning to smile.

“Yeah. I wish I could give you one of my legs. I wish I could share my body with you. Not in a weird way.”

“It sounds pretty weird,” she said, but now she was smiling widely.

“I mean it so much, though. I think you're the coolest person I've ever met,” I continued.

“Louis . . .”

“I'm being serious. And if Benson can't see that, or if you can't see that—if anyone has trouble seeing that from now until the end of our lives, you can give them my number. I will show them the error of their ways.”

“Geez, Louis, we should take road trips more often. You've never been this nice to me.” But she wasn't smiling anymore. She looked almost sad. I let go of her hand, and she shook her hair out of its ponytail. It had a ridge running through it where the elastic had been. She wrapped her hair around her fingers and then let it go and then took it up again. She looked like she might cry, but I didn't know what she'd be crying about. And I didn't think I'd ever seen my sister cry.

Finally she said, “I was lying too. When I told you I never wished it was you. Because sometimes I did.” She took a deep breath. “But I was young and bitter, and I didn't know why this had happened to me. I was too young and bitter to realize that some things happen for no reason at all. Some things hold no meaning. Accidents are accidents, and it doesn't help to continually wish for something different. I will never be able to go back and not crawl onto the fire escape. No matter how much I lied to myself, I will
never actually believe it was your idea. It wasn't your fault. It was just a stupid thing. Kids do stupid things. Sometimes they backfire and you're left with no legs forever.”

She patted her knees, and I tried to remember them when they were real, flesh and bone. But knees are something you rarely pay attention to. It was hard for me to picture Willa whole. Instead she was in pieces. Removable legs. Torso.

She wrinkled her nose and opened the passenger door. I became aware of how incredibly tired I was, how my eyes were closing even as I struggled to keep them open. I hadn't slept in two days and my systems were shutting down. I got out of the car and used Willa's wheelchair to stack our suitcases so we'd only have to make one trip. I wheeled it in front of me. Willa brought up the rear.

Our apartment smelled like home in the way it only did after such a long time away. I rolled the wheelchair into the kitchen and stumbled into my bedroom, kicking off my sneakers before I threw myself on the covers, almost flattening Bucker, who was curled up on the pillow. He put one paw on the back of my head. When I woke up later to smells of lasagna filling the apartment, he was gone.

I was still tired; my eyes were heavy and dry, but my desire to go back to sleep was trumped by my desire to eat dinner.

Someone had put my suitcase in my bedroom, and I almost tripped on it in the dark. I felt along the wall for the
light switch and clicked it on. I put my suitcase on the bed and opened it up. I wanted to put in a load of wash before I ate. I took out dirty clothes and piled them on my floor, then set my tennis racket carefully on my bed (I didn't know if my dad was in the country, but I couldn't wait to show it to him—I would tell him I'd found it in a closet, he would not know whether to believe me and he would shake his head slowly, up and down, many times before he shrugged and decided to let it be) before checking the inside pockets of the suitcase to make sure I hadn't forgotten anything.

One of the pockets had a folded piece of paper in it so I took it out and smoothed it open on my bed. I thought it might be the permission slip from Willa's doctor's office, but this was something else. A bill for something.

A coffin.

The bill came from the Easton Valley Rest and Recuperation Center for the Permanently Unwell.

I wondered what sense they made, these things we lost and then found again. What was the point? What was the correlation? What did my tennis racket and the bill for Frannie's mother's coffin have in common? What did anything have in common? What was the thread that linked everything together?

I crumpled the bill and tossed it into the wastebasket. They would send Frannie another one and another one until her grandparents finally paid the fourteen hundred
dollars. You couldn't really lose a bill. It would just keep multiplying forever. There were bigger things to lose. A stack of letters or a pair of sunglasses you really like. A cup of coffee or a phone number—those weren't things to worry about.

My sister stuck her head into the room. “Louis, dinner's ready. Also, you look like a shower wouldn't hurt you.”

She left my door open. I joined her and my mom at the table and wondered if it was over now, if I wouldn't lose anything ever again, or if that was too much to hope for.

I ate slowly and when I was done I called Frannie. Her voice sounded far away but it helped if I closed my eyes. I listened to her in the dark.

A
rrow drove for twelve hours straight. We ate the last of the banana nut bread and spent the night in Nashville, Tennessee. Arrow was so tired she forgot to put her sleeping bag on the bed, and she woke up in the middle of the night from a dream about bedbugs.

“There aren't any bedbugs in Tennessee,” I whispered in the darkness.

“You don't know that. You don't know anything about bedbugs.”

“I know a lot about bedbugs.”

“How do you know so much about bedbugs?”

I didn't know anything about bedbugs, but I did know
how to calm Arrow down, so I told her I'd seen a certificate in the lobby from an exterminator that presented the motel with a clean bill of bug health. I was particularly impressed with that lie. Arrow went back to sleep, and I stayed awake looking at the ceiling and then looking at my phone, turning the brightness down so it wouldn't wake her up again.

Louis hadn't texted me, but I hadn't texted him either. I wondered if he was still finding things I had lost along the way or if maybe that was finally over.

I wondered if maybe everything was over.

And then I wondered if I would ever see him again, and if I did see him again, would it be like it had been in Austin or would it be different? Would we be different?

And then I fell asleep thinking about the way he held my hand and the way I had only known him for days or for years, depending on how I did the math.

I woke up tired and a hundred years older, and it was my turn to drive. Twelve hours straight and we got to Maryland near ten o'clock at night. I drove through my hometown like it was the first time I had ever been there. Arrow had fallen asleep with her forehead against the glass, and I turned the radio off and rolled my window down and let the night air flood the car. It was miraculously not muggy, and the air was thick with the smell of the ocean. I pulled into my driveway and turned off the engine. Grandma Doris was sitting in her rocking chair on
the front porch. She raised a hand when she saw me. She was not wearing black.

I left Arrow in the car and went to hug Grandma. She wrapped her arms around me, and I felt the boniness of her arms like she was something too fragile to hold. Something too fragile to last. I don't know why I cried, but she smoothed down my hair and held me for a long time. When I finally pulled away, she was smiling.

“You look so much older,” she whispered.

“I don't ever want you to die, okay?”

“Okay,” she said. “But I think instead of hoping for the impossible, we should probably be thankful for the time we have now. And live every moment like it might be the last moment we have together.”

“Wow, Grandma.”

“Sitting shiva has done wonders for my outlook, Frances. I highly recommend the practice.”

“Okay. I guess when you die, I'll sit shiva.”

“Oh no. Don't be silly. I'm never going to die.”

She hugged me again and then went to wake up Arrow. I took her place in the rocking chair and tried to feel thankful for the time I had now.

After a minute my phone rang. I took it upstairs and talked to Louis until I fell asleep.

The next morning my grandfather woke me up by sitting on the side of my bed heavily, collapsing onto the mattress
with a small sigh. I squinted my eyes and tried to focus on him.

“Grandpa, it's really early,” I said.

“It's actually noon,” he replied. “And I'm only waking you up because you have a gentleman caller, as it were.”

“A gentleman what?”

“Frances, there is a man here to see you,” my grandmother said, bursting into the room.

“A what?” I asked, sitting up in bed. My heart was suddenly racing. I had just talked to Louis. Did he take the red-eye to come see me? That didn't make any sense. Did I even want that? I didn't know if I even wanted that.

“A
man
,” my grandmother said. She looked strangely agitated.

“Why does she look like that?” I asked my grandpa.

“He landed in her rosebushes,” he replied. He patted my leg and left the room before I could reply.

He landed in her rosebushes?

I got out of bed and dressed quickly, brushing my teeth and smoothing my hair into a ponytail. I had mascara underneath my eyes and I licked my fingers and dragged them across my skin.

“So pretty,” I whispered to my reflection. My reflection looked slightly terrified in response.

I went downstairs slowly because the front door was open and I could hear voices outside. I could hear a very specific voice outside. I could hear a very famous voice
outside. Anybody in the country would be able to identify that voice.

I reached the front door and stepped onto the porch.

Oh.

He had landed in my grandmother's rosebushes.

That's where his helicopter was parked.

My grandmother was yelling at Wallace Green and his helicopter pilot while also managing to look sort of smitten with the idea of having Wallace Green and his helicopter on her front lawn. She kept looking up and down the street like she was checking to see if any neighbors were watching.

Wallace Green saw me and waved his hand hesitantly, and then he leaned toward my grandma and whispered to her. She stopped yelling and started smiling. She shrugged and laughed and went back into the house, brushing past me.

I walked up to Wallace Green and said, “You didn't fly that all the way from Austin, did you?”

“Well, no. I rented it in DC. I took a private jet and then my pilot convinced me to rent a helicopter instead of a car only because I think he likes being in the air more than he likes being on the ground,” Wallace Green said.

“Oh, of course Wallace Green has a private jet,” I said.

“He also has a private pilot,” Wallace Green added.

“He also speaks in the third person, apparently.”

“He does not, actually.” Wallace Green stuck his hand
out to me. “I'm Anthony Green.”

I looked at his hand but didn't shake it. “I'm sorry?”

“I'm Anthony. Anthony Green. Wallace is my brother,” he explained.

He took his wallet out of his back pocket, fished out his license, and handed it to me. It said
Anthony Green
and it listed his birthday as December twenty-fifth (everybody knew Wallace Green's birthday was on Christmas, that's the only reason I checked).

“You're Wallace Green's brother?”

“Yes.”

“Twin brother?”

“Identical twins, yes. It's nice to meet you.”

He held out his hand again, and I shook it only because I wanted him to stop holding out his hand and that seemed like the fastest way to get that to happen.

“Oh God,” I said, because I suddenly knew where this was going and I wasn't ready for it. I had driven to Austin and prepared myself for it the whole way and then I had driven home and unprepared myself for it and now I was here and everything was going wrong. This was wrong.

“I take it you're catching up,” he said, his mouth an unreadable straight line.

He rubbed at his chin, and that's when I saw the bracelet on his wrist. It was big and silver and fitted with a thick chunk of turquoise.

I sat down on the grass, cross-legged, and he sat across
from me, keeping almost exactly one foot of space between us. I felt sick to my stomach, like something was going wrong inside my body, but at the same time there was a quiet refrain that played through my head to the beat of my heart, an unsteady rhythm that pulsed and grew inside me, and all it said was
she wasn't crazy, she wasn't crazy, she wasn't crazy
over and over until it stopped and I realized he had said something.

“What?” I asked.

“I said—I have so much to apologize for. I went through a very dark time in my life, and I made many, many terrible decisions.”

It was remarkable how much he looked like Wallace Green. I didn't think I'd ever actually met identical twins before. There was something in me that didn't want to believe it, that tried to pretend this was really Wallace Green disguised as—well, as himself—but I knew that wasn't the truth. There were subtle, minute differences. Anthony Green looked smaller, somehow, either skinnier or a half inch shorter, I couldn't tell. And he looked like his natural resting face was apologetic, like he'd found a lot to be sorry for in the course of his life.

“I promise, Frances . . . I swear I didn't know about you,” he continued. “I promise I didn't or else I would have . . .” He trailed off and looked out over the lawn, past our house to where the Miles River divided Easton from its other half.

“I know,” I said. “She told me she never told you. Or, I guess, she told me she never told
him
. Sorry. This is all a little . . .”

This was so many things. I couldn't choose just one. Bizarre. Ridiculous. Unbelievable.

“I can't apologize enough. I was such a . . .” He paused again, laughed. I felt almost sorry for him but then, you know, didn't. “A lying asshole,” he finished. “I did such terrible things back then, and I never imagined I would still be living with the consequences.”

“You're calling me a consequence?” I whispered.

“No, that's not what I meant!”

“Look, I don't want a father figure. That's not why I went to Austin. My mom just died, okay, and she wanted me to find him. You. Him. Whatever.”

“Wallace told me your mother passed away, and I am so sorry for your loss.”

Behind him, Anthony Green's pilot was reading a magazine in their rented helicopter. It was actually kind of funny, funny enough that I had to fight the urge to laugh. I guess maybe that's how I knew I was going to be okay. Because I still felt like laughing, even though my real father was a liar who'd impersonated his twin brother in order to get my mother to sleep with him.

“Were there others?” I asked suddenly.

He didn't have to answer me. He just shook his head and said, “I'm so sorry. And I want to do everything I can
to make it up to you. I wish I'd met you sooner, Frances. I wish I'd done so many things differently.”

“I think I need a minute,” I said.

“Sure.”

“Could you just stay here, please?”

“Are you going somewhere?”

“I'll come back. Just stay there. Okay?”

“Okay, sure. Sure, I'll stay here.”

I stood up and walked next door to Arrow's back door. Aunt Florence was chopping vegetables in the kitchen. When she saw me she said, “Oh, Frannie! I've missed your face around here. Arrow's still sleeping, but you can go ahead upstairs, of course.”

“Thanks,” I said, trying my best not to look like everything was crumpling inside me. I walked up the stairs and opened the door to Arrow's room. She was sleeping on her stomach with one leg off the bed, like a cartoon. I crawled in next to her.

“It's too early,” she mumbled.

“Arrow,” I whispered.

“Frannie? What are you doing here?”

“I have something to tell you.”

Arrow opened her eyes properly and rolled over to face me. “What?” she asked.

“My mom's not a liar. My father is,” I said. I could feel the smile spreading across my face.

I started laughing and then I started crying and then Arrow started crying, and I left my father waiting for a really long time but when I finally went back, he was still there.