The Lost

Chapter Twelve

I blame the lost masterpieces for the stuffed puffer fish. After I saw the Rembrandt and the Degas, I may or may not have made a stray comment about how I didn’t think it was possible to find anything more unexpected in the garbage heap that was Lost.

Peter took that as a challenge.

So did Claire.

Over the next several days, he came back with a carousel music box, a locket with a dried rose petal inside, and a half-used notebook filled with mirror writing and sketches of helicopters that I refuse to believe was da Vinci’s. She brought vintage Barbie doll heads, diamond dog collars, and fuzzy dice with lipstick stains, as well as a World Wrestling champion belt from 1991. This, I’m convinced, blows them all out of the water.

I make a mental note to remember to say that, since I like the pun.

Gingerly, I unwrap the T-shirts around my prize, and I lay the fish in the center of the dining room table. The fish’s eyes are wide and its mouth puckered, as if it had died surprised. Its torso is swollen like a balloon. It’s clearly old. Its spines are as brittle as the prickles on a desiccated cactus, but I think there’s something beautiful in its fragility. It shouldn’t have survived the trip here in the tornado of dust, but it did, wrapped in layers of shirts. I only found it because I was looking for shirts to paint in. Not art. There’s no time for that. But I can add a few illusions to the shades to make it look like no one lives here. And then maybe I can repaint the interior: a nice yellow for my bedroom and a pink for Claire’s, if I can find enough.

I tuck desert blossoms around the puffer fish so it lies on a bed of petals, and I add a few flowers to the spines, as well. I hum as I work. It’s one of Peter’s tunes. He constantly hums or sings, usually songs that I don’t recognize. Lost music. Stepping back, I admire the fish. He looks like he floated here out of a fantastical picture book. I should name him...but maybe Claire will want to do that.

Since Peter and Claire aren’t home yet to admire my find, I head to the living room and pluck a book off the shelf. Peter collects books like a squirrel hoards nuts, and I’ve been adding to his collection with books that I’ve found, mostly library books. Settling into the couch between a dozen mismatched throw pillows, I glance out the bay window, still partially blocked by the stop sign—

Dust.

It’s all I see.

Brown-red, blotting out the desert and the sky. It’s as if a pastel were smeared across the world, blurring everything together. Spilling the book onto the floor, I run to the window.

I see blue sky immediately overhead and red desert in front of me—it isn’t all dust. I can breathe again. I thought...I thought it was all gone, and I was alone, stranded in this house, an island in a sea of dust. But no, there’s sky and there’s earth and there are mesquite trees and there’s a tire, a hat, and several cell phones strewn between them. I even see a bird flit across the blue. It veers toward the dust and then sharply away, angling over the desert, as if it, too, knows to avoid the unnatural dust storm that squats instead of swirls.

Still, I can’t relax. I can’t return to my book. I can’t do anything but stare out the window, trying to calculate the distance between the house and the void.

Half a mile, I think.

It’s never been this close. I’m sure of it. Mostly sure. I pace in front of the window, trying to see it from different angles. Usually, it’s a smear on the horizon like haze over pavement on a hot day. It’s never filled a portion of the sky before.

Behind me, I hear the click-click-clack of our homemade lock on the front door, followed by bounding footsteps in the hall and then Claire’s voice from the dining room. “Wow! Porcupine fish!” She coos over the fish with exactly the enthusiasm I wanted, but I don’t move from the window.

Peter’s feet are soft on the carpet behind me. “Well played.” His voice is musical, amused. Five minutes ago, I would have loved to hear those words.

I point out the window. “It’s closer.”

He’s silent. At last, he says, “Yes.”

“Much closer?”

“Much closer.”

I stare at the dust. It seems motionless.

He perches beside me on the window seat. Out of the corner of my eye, I see his face, serious, even sad. His eyes are deep black pools as if he’s in shadow instead of the bright daylight.

Hugging my arms, I picture the dust cloud creeping closer and closer, spreading and swallowing everything in its path. “Why is this happening?”

“‘If you believe,’ he shouted to them, ‘clap your hands; don’t let Tink die.’ Many clapped. Some didn’t. A few beasts hissed.” Peter traces circles in the dust on the window. I wonder if it’s desert dust or debris from the void or if there’s a difference.

I shake my head. “I don’t—”

“‘What we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.’ The beasts are hissing with the pain of their unfed hope. But they should clap instead.” He sounds as if he’s earnestly imparting wisdom, but he’s not making sense. I don’t think he’s teasing me. There’s no humor in his eyes. I wonder if he slips into the cryptic speak when he’s afraid. It’s an unnerving thought, and I hope I’m wrong. Peter enters and exits the void all the time searching for lost people. He couldn’t be afraid of it.

“What happens if it reaches the house?” I want him to say that it will pass by, or that it wouldn’t reach the house, that it will stop just beyond the town, but it’s so vast that I can’t imagine any structure blocking it. “Peter, what will happen?” My voice rises.

Claire pads into the room. “Oh. She noticed?”

“Yes,” Peter says simply.

“Told you she would.”

“I need an explanation, a clear explanation, please.” I think my voice is remarkably calm, given the situation. “Why is it closer? Is it closer everywhere? Is it contracting around us? Is it swallowing us?” I am shouting. I clap my mouth shut so hard that it rattles my jaw. Suddenly, it occurs to me that I don’t need them to answer the last question. I can see for myself. Pivoting, I march to the bike behind the couch.

Claire trails after me as I pull the bike through the hall and carry it outside. Out of the corner of my eye, I see that Peter has followed, too. He stops on the porch. Claire launches herself off the steps and climbs onto the back of the bike behind me. She wraps her skinny arms around my waist and leans against my back. I’m on the tip of the bike seat, but I don’t object.

I look at Peter. He looks oddly lonely standing on the porch of the house, the front door swung open wide behind him. His face is carefully blank, as if he’s hiding sadness or fear or some other emotion darker than either of those.

Leaving him, I ride with Claire out of the yard toward the dust.

The sun beats down, and I feel sweat prickle my back where Claire clutches me, her arms tight around my stomach. My hands are slick on the handlebars. Last time I rode out to the border, it took an hour. This time, I reach it much, much faster.

I don’t know how I failed to notice how strange the dust is on the day I came to Lost, but I am very aware of it now. The air is clear where I am and then only a few feet away, it’s choked with dust. The dust hangs in the air, barely stirring, as if it’s suspended in a liquid.

Claire continues to cling to me as I turn east and follow the edge of the void. I never thought to measure its distance from the houses before. I didn’t think it could move. Never thought to ask. Peter warned me to avoid it, but he never said it could come to me. I imagine it rolling in like the tide, sweeping over the desert and then the houses and then the heart of Lost, erasing everything like it erased the horizon.

A half a mile later, I hear a scream.

I skid the bike to a stop. “Claire?”

“Not me!”

“But where?”

She points past my shoulder: up ahead in the direction we’re headed, near the void.

I could flee. I should flee. Whoever is screaming is most likely my enemy. Certainly my enemy. It would be safer, better, smarter, not to let whoever it is see me. But I can’t. There’s no one else out here to help, and the scream hasn’t stopped. It’s such a raw scream that it pulls me forward.

“Claire?”

“Yes?”

“Hang on.” Leaning into the handlebars, I pedal faster.

The dust storm looms beside me and ahead of me, and I don’t see... No, there! A figure. A woman. I pedal harder. It’s a woman in a waitress uniform, screaming at the void and hurling anything she can reach—boxes, shoes, jackets, hats, kites, spoons, forks, notebooks—into the motionless beige wall. Closer, I hear words in her scream. “Give him back! You can’t take him! Give him to me!” The rest dissolves into curses. Tears are streaking down the woman’s face, smearing her mascara on her cheeks.

Victoria, I think. I’m surprised that I recognize her. I’m even more surprised that I remember her name. But then, she is the one who first kicked me out, who first hated me. I slow and then brake. I don’t know what to do. Do I run? Do I speak? Do I help? She seems to be doing a fine job of hurling things and curses into the void on her own. But she’s close to the dust, too close.

Victoria lifts up a toilet seat and hurls it into the dust. I don’t hear it land. I realize I haven’t heard any of the things she’s thrown land. It’s as if the void has swallowed them.

Before I can decide what to do, Claire jumps off the back of the bike and runs toward Victoria. “No, Claire, wait!”

Victoria stops, turns, and sees us.

She won’t recognize me, I think. I hope. I wish I were wearing a wig or had made an attempt at a disguise—I left too suddenly for that.

Her eyes widen and then narrow. She straightens as if she’s backed against a wall. “You!” She imbues that word with such anger, hatred, and revulsion that I shiver.

So much for not recognizing me. “I heard you scream...” I try to explain.

Reaching her, Claire tugs on her sleeve. “Back up. Please. It could come closer.”

Victoria yanks her sleeve out of Claire’s tiny fingers. She steps backward, and her pointed black high-heeled shoes are only inches from the void. “Let it come. It took my Sean.”

“Oh!” Claire sounds like a squeezed bird. “No! Not Sean! How?”

I look at the mass of reddish-brown that swallowed every item she lobbed at it and imagine it consuming a person. A man named Sean. I don’t know who that is. Husband? Brother? Friend?

“We’d been careful. We knew the limits. It shouldn’t have grown so fast!” Victoria gulps in air. She fixes her eyes on me and begins to stalk toward me. “It should be you in there. Nothing like this ever happened before you came!” Claire jumps in front of her and puts her hands on Victoria’s stomach. She braces herself as if to hold the woman back, but Victoria pushes past her.

On my bike, I tense. Everything inside me screams to turn the handlebars and pedal hard and fast in the other direction. But Claire...I can’t leave her. Victoria advances on me as I dither. “The void left us alone. It didn’t move. But then, you came to town...”

“Peter! The Finder...he can find him. Sean. He can find Sean!” Straightening the bike, I put my foot on the pedal—

Victoria kneels and then rises, holding a shotgun. She aims it at me. I’ve never had a gun aimed at me before. It’s an odd sensation. Part of me, the sensible part, is screaming, It’s a gun! A gun! But another part of me sees a hunk of metal, a toy, a water pistol, a thing, and it doesn’t feel real. “Don’t move,” Victoria says, her voice too calm for a woman with a gun. She should be shrill or hysterical, not alert and cold. “You caused this, you ran, and now you want to run again. And you won’t. You caused this. Besides, the Finder won’t help us. He hates us.”

Claire slides her knife out.

“Claire. Don’t.” My eyes are glued to the gun. Again, I feel split: part of me wants to run, doesn’t believe she’ll shoot or thinks that the bullets will fly on either side of me as if I’m the heroine of an action movie. But the other part of my brain keeps me in place. I like that part of my brain. I think it’s keeping me alive. “The Finder doesn’t hate you. He saved you. He brought you out of the void. He hates that you all blame him for being here when all he did was help. And he can help again, if you’ll let me get him.”

Victoria isn’t listening. “You deserve to be in the void. You deserve to dissolve into nothingness. You deserve...” She chokes on her words and swallows hard, but the gun doesn’t waver and I think, She’ll shoot. She’s not calm and cold anymore. She could squeeze the trigger. She may feel sorry later. She may feel sick. She may feel guilt, regret, horror, but that won’t help me.

“I’ll go in,” I hear myself say.

I don’t know what part of my brain said that.

Go in?

Claire echoes me. “Go in?”

Victoria lowers the gun by an inch. “Sorry?”

Slowly, I step off the bike. I spread my hands in front of me. “I trust Peter to find me. And once he does, I’ll make sure he finds Sean. Claire, please get Peter.”

“You cannot be serious,” Victoria says. “That’s insane. You can’t voluntarily—”

“She can!” Claire pipes up. Her eyes are shining. “She’s been in there before and come out! On her own!” She scampers to the bike and climbs on. Her feet don’t reach the pedals. She frowns at her feet and climbs off. And then she runs. She’s fast, a swirl of pink tulle.

“No one comes out of the void, not without the Finder,” Victoria says.

I look at the void and remember how I drove in and out of it again and again. A fluke? Or was Victoria wrong? “I want a guarantee of safety.”

“The void will destroy you. I can’t guarantee—”

“After,” I clarify. “After Peter finds me. You can’t shoot me. You can’t knife me. You can’t sic a lynch mob on me. You can’t tell anyone you saw me.”

Victoria’s eyes widen and then narrow, as if she’s calculating. At last, she shrugs. “Fine. Bring me back Sean, and I’m not your enemy.”

“It’s not my fault the Missing Man left. I did nothing wrong. I don’t know why he left. And I hate living in fear because of something I had no control over.”

“That’s nice.” She waves the gun at the brown-red dust. “If you intend to go in, then go in.” She doesn’t believe I’ll do it. I can see it in her eyes. She thinks it’s a trick or a bluff or... But she doesn’t have other options.

It’s no big deal, I tell myself. After all, I drove into the nothingness over and over when I first tried to leave Lost. It didn’t hurt me. The car didn’t disintegrate. It’s only dust. But it isn’t, and I know it isn’t. I’ve been deliberately avoiding it as I scavenge through the items it disgorges. I can’t delude myself into thinking it’s a patch of bad weather.

It’s a servant of despair, Peter said once. It will destroy you if it can.

God help me, but I believe him.

If I delay long enough, Claire will return with Peter and then I won’t have to enter the soul-destroying nothingness. On the other hand, if I delay long enough, Victoria could lose her sense of rationality and squeeze the trigger. She’s fidgeting, and she’s pointing the gun at me again.

The gun promises instant death. The void...I know from driving through it that its death won’t be instant. I’ll have a little time. And in that time, Peter will find me. It’s what he does. He’ll find her lost friend, and I’ll buy myself some safety, at least from one crazy gun-toting waitress, which is a start.

I walk into the dust.

It melts around me. I expect grit in my eyes, but I don’t feel any. The air feels soft on my skin. It’s like diving into water, except it’s neither hot nor cold. I don’t remember it feeling like this when I drove into it. It had felt like dust then, hadn’t it? I look behind me, but the dust has closed around me. It looks the same in every direction. Everything has blurred into reddish-beige. “Sean? Sean, can you hear me?” My words don’t echo. They’re absorbed by the void as if it’s a sponge. It deadens sound.

I continue to walk, though I have no sense of direction in this soup. Even up and down feel arbitrary. It’s more opaque than night because even though it isn’t black, there’s no light to cast any shadows or create any depth. It’s like soaking underwater with my eyes closed. It reminds me of how I used to spend hours every summer immersed in the ocean. I’d swim out beyond the white-crested breakers, I’d float on my back, my ears underwater, and I’d look up at the crystal-blue sky until I fuzzily heard my mom calling me from shore. She’d slather me with sunscreen every time I returned, and then I’d wriggle away and run laughing toward the water again.

In those moments, I felt like I had all the family I needed. It didn’t matter that I’d never known my father or that I had no brothers or sisters like other families on the beach. With my mom, on the beach and in the water, I was complete.

But here in the void I am very incomplete. By now, I’ve probably been fired.

Or pronounced dead.

Or at least missing.

Maybe I am missing. Maybe this won’t end. I won’t escape. I won’t find Sean. I won’t find a way home. The Missing Man is still gone, and there’s no sign that he’ll ever return.

Stop it, I tell myself. I have to think positively. To do otherwise... I can’t do otherwise. I have to believe that I’ll escape someday. But maybe there is no hope.

Maybe it’s over.

Maybe I’m in hell.

Or purgatory.

Maybe I’m dead.

Maybe I can never return.

Maybe this is it.

Slowly, I stop walking.

I don’t see the point in continuing to walk. I’m not walking toward anything. I haven’t seen anyone or anything. The odds of my finding Sean are... Well, I can’t. I’m not a Finder. I can’t find anything. Not Sean. Not Mom. Not myself.

Mom will die without me. Maybe she already has. The test results had to be bad. They asked her to come in; they wouldn’t tell her over the phone. The cancer was back, and worse. I knew it, even if I didn’t let myself think it. Sure, I told myself over and over: think positive. But thinking positive can’t change facts.

Mom is sick.

I am lost.

But I couldn’t face the truth. That’s why I left, why I drove straight, why I left Mom alone to face the news by herself, why I let myself play house with Claire and Peter. What kind of person does that? A person who deserves this. A person who deserves to lose what she treasures. I deserve to be lost, to never see home again, to never swim in the ocean again.

I feel as if the ground is dissolving under me. I look down, and my legs look oddly transparent. At first, I think the dust is merely enveloping me, but then I spread my hands in front of my face. I can see through them.

Oh, God, what’s happening to me now?

This isn’t what’s supposed to happen! I’m supposed to find Sean, wait for Peter, and prove to Victoria that I can be trusted, maybe earn a little good will to help me survive longer until the Missing Man returns so I can return to Mom and tell her that I’m sorry that I left her when she needed me most and I won’t ever leave again. I picture Claire waiting for me in the desert, and Victoria beside her, waiting for her Sean...

My hands waver, and then suddenly they’re solid again. I look down, examining my legs...and I see a glint of silver from near my feet. I bend down and pick it up. It’s a ring. I examine it. A dark blue opaque stone mounted on a silver band.

As I stick it in my pocket, I hear a loud noise. It sounds, oddly, like a train. It chugs louder and louder, and I hear a whistle. I can’t tell what direction it’s coming from—it seems to be from everywhere at once. The dust whips around me, and sand flies in my eyes. Squinting, I block my eyes with my arms. Around me, the dust grows brighter. I peek through and see a light heading straight toward me.

Is that...

Holy shit, it is a train.

I don’t see tracks. I don’t know which way to move. If I move left, will I be hit? If I don’t, will I be hit? I freeze. And the train barrels out of the dust toward me.

I have to move. I can’t not move. Suddenly unfreezing, I lunge to the left. And I feel myself yanked off my feet. Strong hands hold my arms. I’m pulled onto the train. Wind whips past me. The train is screaming, crying, howling, as it thunders through the void. The whistle blares, obliterating the silence.

“Hold on!” Peter shouts in my ear.

He releases me, and I cling to a metal bar. The train is a black steam engine, the kind from an old movie. I see bits and pieces of black iron through the dust. I’m holding on to the side of it, near where the engineer should be but isn’t.

Peter climbs onto the top. He holds his hand out.

He wants me to climb?

No. No, no, no. That’s insane.

He crouches and holds his hand lower. He’s grinning wildly, and I feel my face curl into a smile. I can’t resist the look in his eyes. It’s full of joy, infectious, wild joy. It reminds me of waves crashing onto the beach.

I take his hand, and he pulls me up. I crouch on the top of the engine. He whoops at the top of his lungs, and the whistle blares as if answering him. He’s standing. His feet are firmly planted on the top of the train. Slowly, I stand beside him.

And we ride the train out of the void.