The Lost & Found (6 page)

We had never been apart. We had never talked about what we were doing after graduation. We'd be starting senior year soon, and I had no idea what Willa wanted to do after that.

For eighteen years it had been her and me.

I didn't know how to tell her it might not be that way forever.

And just thinking about the possibility was making it hard to catch my breath.

I pulled into the parking lot behind our parents' store, into one of three parking spots marked Private, No Parking. I turned the engine off and reread the message from Nib as Willa let herself out of the car.

Was it the stupidest idea in the world, to travel across the country to meet a girl I hadn't even seen a picture of? Was it the second-stupidest idea? If it was the second-stupidest idea, what was the first stupidest? Thinking I could move across the country to play Division I tennis at one of the best schools in the country?

I kept going back and forth. They seemed equally stupid, I thought. And maybe not stupid at all. If I was honest, they seemed maybe a little perfect.

But were they
too
perfect?

Ugh. I couldn't trust my brain to be positive for more than a few seconds at a time. I got out of the car and took
Willa's portable wheelchair from the trunk. I wheeled it around to the passenger side; she grumbled when I woke her up, but then let me help her into it.

“You're counting again,” she said as I pushed her toward the back entrance of the store.

She was right.

Lately I was counting a lot.

Lately I couldn't seem to catch my breath.

I
had not yet decided whether I would go to my mother's wake.

I knew I should, but it was hard to talk myself into it. It would be small, just me and Grandpa Dick and Grandma Doris and Arrow and Aunt Florence and Uncle Irvine and my mother's coffin being lowered into a plot in a local cemetery that apparently she had purchased twenty years ago, because that is a thing people do that I didn't realize people did. But it made sense. I mean, you can't buy a burial plot when you actually need it.

Two days had passed since I'd found the bill for the coffin (the bill had never turned up, but I had no doubt
they were already printing another one), which meant my mother had been dead for four days and the local funeral parlor was putting pressure on us to make a decision. I knew this because they called at least once a day, feigning sympathy for our deceased loved one and saying things like “Sometimes the best way to begin the healing process is to go through with the burial rites.”

I was still angry with my grandparents, but I was beginning to understand their reasoning.

Bucker and I had been talking a lot, exchanging multiple messages a day and debating the pros and cons of driving halfway across the country to meet each other while attending to our own complicated quests.

Just a few minutes ago I'd gotten this:

Maybe we can actually call it a quest, though? I think that would help. I think that would make it cooler.

I'd responded:

I think that would make it nerdier.

I felt my phone buzz now and took it out to find a picture he'd sent me: Gandalf in full wizarding gear. I wondered if Bucker was maybe a forty-year-old man with a sizable collection of Games Workshop armies. (I mean, not that I was complaining. I kind of liked that idea.)

I wrote him a message:

Are you more down with regular Warhammer or Warhammer 30,000?

He wrote back immediately:

It is Warhammer 40,000, and none of the above. I obviously like the Tolkien series the best.

I was drafting him a reply when the doorbell rang. I found Arrow on my doorstep in running clothes. It was seven o'clock in the evening and getting dark. She had a nylon backpack with running clothes for me, spandex shorts and a sports bra and a thin tank top. She pulled my hair into a ponytail and handed me a terrycloth headband.

“I don't particularly feel like running,” I said. I sat on my front steps and laced up my sneakers. “I feel like we've had this conversation before.”

“I usually run with Addison, you know. But she's away for the summer. I don't like to run by myself. Safety in numbers.”

Arrow had always been very concerned with safety. She watched a lot of crime shows on basic cable.

We ran.

I hated to run, and after only thirty seconds it was a struggle to convince my legs to keep moving. Arrow might
as well have been in the bathtub for how relaxed she looked.

“You're doing great,” she coached. “Just focus on the next step. You can always, always run just one more step. Don't think about anything except for that next step.”

But what was the next step? Did I agree to have a wake for my mother? Did I want my last visual memory of my mother to be her lying in a casket? Or did we have a closed casket?

My knees protested the exercise, and my lungs started to burn. I was out of breath and we hadn't even been at it for two minutes.

“Decrease your speed, but
don't stop
,” Arrow instructed.

I decreased my speed.

I missed Addison.

“The goal is to keep your heart rate up while finding a maintainable pace,” Arrow continued.

“I think my maintainable pace might be
stopped
,” I said. I decreased my speed again. I'd developed a sharp kink in my left side. I held my ribs while I ran.

“It takes practice,” Arrow said. She was running backward now, facing me.

“I'm sorry,” I gasped. “It must be really annoying to have to go so slow.”

“I don't mind,” she said. She turned sideways and started doing weird skip-steps.

“Are you not even breaking a sweat?”

“I don't sweat that much,” Arrow said, shrugging. “But
you know, Frannie, we all have our things. I'd love to be able to draw.”

“I'm not even that good at drawing,” I said. “I hardly do it anymore.”

“You're not doing anyone any favors by selling yourself short. You're an amazing artist.”

“Maybe,” I said. I was panting.

Arrow smiled and said, “Come on. Let's go back. We'll do some cardio in the front yard. Do you have a jump rope? I can get one from my place.”

We ran by the light of the streetlights. We were maybe ten minutes out and I forced myself to speed up again, to match Arrow's pace. Arrow turned backward, sideways, skipped and sprinted ahead, circling back. She could be reading a book. She could be cooking dinner. She looked utterly unchallenged.

We fell silent. I thought about my mother, about my father(s), about Bucker and his sister. I thought about tragedy, I guess, how unfair it was that we weren't doled out the same amount. How some people get so much and some people get none at all.

That's what I was thinking when I saw the figure dart up behind Arrow and grab her around the waist.

Arrow screamed—I screamed—but then Arrow laughed and I stopped so suddenly I tripped and fell down, hard, on my knees and wrists.

“Ow,” I mumbled into the sidewalk.

“Oh my gosh—
Frannie
!” Arrow shrieked, doubling back and dropping to the ground beside me.

I was panting but Arrow looked practically serene. The shadowy figure skipped over to us.

“Use the four steps,” I whispered. My hands were warm and wet; I was bleeding.

“The what?” Arrow asked.

“The four steps to disarm your opponent. Like we learned in gym class.”

Arrow laughed. “It's just Hank.”

“Hank?” I said.

“Hank Whitney,” Hank Whitney said.

“Oh. Hi, Hank Whitney.” I vaguely remembered Hank Whitney from Arrow's track team but didn't think we had ever actually spoken before. He always seemed to be running; I would have had to yell.

“Hi, Frances Jameson,” Hank said, grabbing me around the wrist and heaving me up before I could protest. “You're bleeding.”

“Yeah. I guess I am.” I put my hands on my knees and bent over. “I am also out of breath. I am possibly suffocating.”

Hank was wearing running shorts and sneakers and a white T-shirt. My heart, beating a hundred miles an hour with exertion and the sudden positive fear I was about to be murdered, struggled inside my chest. I breathed in through my nose and then tried to breathe out through my mouth but only ended up coughing.

“Here,” Hank said. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a perfectly clean, perfectly white handkerchief. He used it to staunch the blood on my palms, which was sort of substantial.

“You run with a handkerchief?” I asked.

“For sweat,” he said, shrugging.

“Ah. Arrow doesn't sweat.”

“Well, we're not all biologically perfect creatures like Arrow,” Hank said. “She's basically like a cheetah.”

“I'm like a tortoise,” I offered. “A slow, bleeding tortoise.”

“Do you think you need stitches?” Arrow asked, taking the handkerchief from one of my wrists and moving my arm around until it caught a beam from a streetlight.

“I think she's fine. Just some soap and Band-Aids,” Hank said. “Keep the handkerchief. Sorry I scared you, Frannie. Can you make it home okay?”

“Sure, Hank,” Arrow said.

“Thanks, Hank,” I said.

He saluted us goofily and turned on the spot, running away with the sudden speed and grace of a cat.

“He's kind of creepy, right?” I asked.

“He's not creepy,” Arrow said. She let go of the handkerchief; I pressed my wrists together to keep it secure. “Can you walk?”

“He's sort of—”

“He's just out running. We see each other all the time.”

“A handkerchief?”

“That your blood has now undoubtedly ruined. So you sort of owe him one.”

We started walking back to my house.

“But I mean—who carries a handkerchief on a run?”

“You're right. Actually—do you have your cell phone on you? We should really alert the proper authorities. Man with a handkerchief and running shoes, undoubtedly up to no good.”

“Oh. You're mocking me now.”

“Yes,” Arrow said. “I am mocking you. You are being easily mockable.”

“Great. I get it.”

“Hank Whitney is nice,” Arrow said, shrugging.

“What?” I said. “Oh my God, do you love him?”

“Yes, I love him. We've been having a secret romance. It's all very clandestine.”

“Well, you think he's cute. You're kind of blushing.”

“I don't
blush
,” Arrow said, like it was something distasteful. “He's a nice guy, I'm just not really interested in anything like that right now.”

Arrow had never really been interested in anything like that. I guess I hadn't either. It had never seemed important.

And then when I
did
get the inclination, he ended up living across the country from me.

Which didn't seem all that fair.

Silence. The dusty glow from the streetlights and the buzz of mosquitoes and moths. I was dive-bombed by a small
flock of no-see-ums. My hands and knees were burning. I wondered if someday I would wake up just knowing how to be a decent, productive member of society. I wondered if someday all of this would make sense to me. Everything that had happened. Everything my parents did. I wondered why my grandparents lied to me. I wondered if their excuse was good enough. If they deserved my forgiveness. I wondered whether I would have been better off finding an actual black widow spider in my mailbox. One quick bite and then one long paralyzing rush of poison and they'd find me beyond help. Already dead on the driveway.

“Frannie?” Arrow said.

“Yeah?”

“Are you going into shock? From loss of blood?”

“Oh. I don't think so. It's mostly stopped.”

“That was super graceful, by the way.”

“I was scared. I thought we were about to be murdered.”

“Seventy-five percent of murder victims have a relationship with their killer. So I am much more likely to murder you than Hank Whitney. And Hank Whitney is much more likely to murder me than you.”

“When you put it that way,” I said.

“And of that seventy-five percent, nearly thirty percent are family members,” she continued.

“So what you're saying is, I'm actually lucky my mother is dead? Because that lowers my risk of being murdered?”

We had reached my front steps. Arrow sat down heavily, sighing as she did.

“That's terrible, Frannie. That's not what I meant at all.”

I sat down beside her. “I'm sorry. I don't know why I said that.”

“You're deflecting,” Arrow said. “You're using humor to distract yourself from the mourning process.”

“Did you hear that on TV?”

Arrow shrugged. “It makes a lot of sense.”

The door opened behind us, and Grandma Doris poked her head outside.

“Girls? Is that you? Frannie? Are you bleeding?”

“Jogging accident,” I said, showing her my battle wounds.

“Well, you better use some antibiotic ointment. And give them a good wash. Dinner's ready. Arrow, of course you're more than welcome.”

Grandma Doris shut the door.

“What do you know about Texas?” I asked her.

“Wallace Green?” she said.

“Wallace Green.”

“Do you think . . .” She trailed off, but I knew what she was going to ask. Did I really think there was a chance Wallace Green could be my father?

“I don't know,” I said.

“So why do you want to go?”

“Well, I'm not sure if I want to go. But if I
did
want to
go . . . it wouldn't be for him. It would be for her. She asked me to find him, you know. In her last letter.”

“I know,” Arrow said. “So—what's your plan? If you decided to go, I mean.”

I thought for a minute and then said, “‘Hi. My mom says you're my father. Will you agree to a paternity test?'”

“Your approach could use a little work. But I'm in if you're in.”

Arrow stood up. She reached for my hand and helped me to my feet.

“Thanks,” I said.

“It's not like we have anything else to do,” Arrow said. She was right. Our plans for the summer included binge-watching old television shows and learning how to sew.

“I'm thinking about it.”

“Where'd the handkerchief go?”

I'd been holding it in my hand.

I
just
had it.

But the handkerchief was gone.

Everything I touched was disappearing.