The Lost

Chapter Sixteen

I walk into the ocean.

I could walk east or west and enter the dust on foot, but I can’t resist the pull of the water. Tiffany has brought me a bathing suit. Even though the motel’s pool is cracked concrete coated in algae and filled with scummy water, she says she still finds new swimsuits, tossed into the bushes, draped on the diving board, bunched on the rusty deck chairs. She thinks they’re drawn there, and she isn’t interested in any theories why. She presented me with several sizes and styles, and Claire insisted that I try them on and fashion-model them for her. She selected a hot pink bikini, but I vetoed it in favor of an athletic-looking blue one-piece with a green racing stripe on the side.

I’d had a swimsuit like this once. Mom had bought it for me in high school when I’d decided to join the swim team. I’d quit after three weeks. I liked the swimming; I hated the accessories. I loved to swim as fast as I could, but I hated the pools and the stench of chlorine and the slimy feel of the showers and the odor in the locker room and the feel of the swim cap and the nose plugs and the goggles. So I took my racing swimsuit and lazed in the ocean with my waves and blue sky instead. I’m sure that this swimsuit isn’t that same one. Fairly sure. My high school swimsuit wouldn’t still fit. But this one reminds me enough of it that I can’t help feeling as if I am stepping into my old skin as well as my old suit.

Up to my hips in the ocean, I scan the waves, searching for my dolphin, but he doesn’t appear. I dive under the water, feeling it flow around me, and then I swim. I haven’t used my arms like this in years. It comes back fast, the stretch of my arms, the power of my legs kicking through the water, the feel of sucking in air in between the splashes. I don’t have the strength or stamina that I used to have, but my muscles remember that they are supposed to. My side cramps, but I keep swimming. The water is so very cool and sweet on my skin. I lose track of time and distance.

After a while, the water is replaced by dust, and I am swimming through it. Oddly, I don’t fall to the ground. It’s as if I’m still in water, but I know I’m not. I am swimming through the air. I keep going, not sure what will happen if I stop, not sure if there is a ground to stand on.

Eventually, though, my arms shake and my legs feel like rubber. I slow and feel my body drift down. My feet touch ground that I can’t see. Water drips off of me. I look in every direction. Like before, it all looks the same.

I don’t know what I was thinking coming back here.

It will swallow me.

Absorb me.

Destroy me.

Stop it, I tell myself. Stay focused. Help Tiffany. I picture Tiffany, her prom dress, her Goth outfit, her pile of suitcases. I think of her prom night. It sounded like it began like any other. I don’t know what could have changed to cause her to end up here. But something must have happened that night. Maybe someone was cruel, and she left the prom upset and wandered here. Maybe someone hurt her. I don’t know why she can’t remember, though. I can remember every instant of my drive here from the moment I chose to go straight through that light to the moment I ran out of gas inside the dust storm. Maybe Tiffany fell and hit her head. Maybe she was drunk and passed out.

I pivot slowly in a circle, looking in all directions. I don’t think it matters which way I go. Or if I go at all. Choosing a direction, I walk.

I had fun at my prom. Close friends. Bright future. All that. I’d worn a hideous yellow dress that was supposed to be a bridesmaid’s dress, though I hadn’t realized it at the time. It squeezed me so tight that it cut my breathing in half, and every picture of me has a half smile, half grimace. My friends and I had split the cost of a limo to drive us the three quarters of a mile to the high school. If we had to have our prom in the school cafeteria, then we were at least going to arrive in style. The prom organizers had laid out a moth-eaten red carpet (a prop from one of the school musicals) and decorated the cafeteria with life-size stand-up cutouts of movie stars and strung cardboard yellow stars from the cottage cheese ceiling. Toasting the fruit punch, we swore that we’d never drift apart and that we’d never become our parents and that we’d be stars or change the world or whatever our dreams were...I see a hint of color up ahead. Yellow. I pick up my pace and then I’m running toward it. I stop. It’s a pile of yellow fabric. I pick it up, and my hands are shaking.

My prom dress.

I feel shivers creep over my skin, as if a thousand eyes were watching me. It read my mind, like it did with the ocean. God, what the hell is this place? It’s...incredible.

“Um, thank you?” I clutch the dress.

I don’t know when I lost it. I’d assumed that it had been dumped with other clothes that I’d donated when I moved out of Mom’s and into my own apartment. But maybe it had stayed in the back of that closet, forgotten, until it ended up here...until my thoughts summoned it. I wish it could summon my old friends, as well. I’d let so many friendships slip when Mom got sick and life got difficult. It was too hard to balance everyone’s needs, too hard when they didn’t understand and equally hard when they did.

“I’m looking for Tiffany’s memories, not mine. Do you have a memento from her prom?” I try to picture her prom, everything she told me that she remembers. “Maybe a photo? Her corsage? Something to help her remember? It was 1986.” She looked the same age, and I remember her joking about being a perpetual teenager. I try to imagine that for a moment, never growing a day older than I am right now. Maybe never dying, at least not of old age.

I think of Mom.

If the void can produce whatever I think about...

Deliberately, I think about Mom. Last summer, we had movie nights every Saturday. We made popcorn, the kind in a popper not in a microwave, and we melted real butter. Mom always ate the pieces with butter first, carefully selecting her kernels, leaving the naked and plain pieces for me. Drove me crazy. You should grab a handful and eat what you get, buttered or not. We took turns picking the movies and often ended up choosing the same ones. We must have watched When Harry Met Sally at least a dozen times, also The Princess Bride. Also, every episode of Gilmore Girls.

Mom and I were always close. Maybe because it was her and me so much. My dad ditched us shortly after I was born, and we didn’t live close to many relatives. So I never did the teenage rebellion thing. Or at least when I did, it was a halfhearted attempt that only made me feel stupid. Mom would look at me with her patented you’re-being-an-idiot-but-I-still-love-you expression and somehow I’d end up not only apologizing but cleaning my room. Not that I ever actually got it clean. My walls were filled with art prints, so many that they overlapped, and my desk drawers and bookcase shelves overflowed with art supplies, each in its own labeled container: oil paints, watercolors, pastels, pencils, clay. An easel took up most of my floor space, and a bulletin board filled with sketches obscured the door. Sometimes I wish I hadn’t thrown away those sketches.

Maybe I’ll find them here.

No. I didn’t lose them. I threw them away.

I remember Mom seeing them in the trash. She hadn’t said anything, and I was grateful that she hadn’t. She’d watched me work every Saturday during high school at the museum gift shop to pay for art classes. She’d watched me take course after course in college: sculpture, collage, animation. She’d put up with me for the first few years after college while I immersed myself in the starving-artist image. I wore clothes from thrift stores that I splattered with stray bits of paint. I left the apartment with paint caked in my hair. I was convinced that if I acted like an artist, I must be an artist. I lugged my portfolio to galleries and to job interviews, and I had coffee at a dingy café filled with aspiring musicians. Through all of it, Mom supported me and never complained about how selfish and self-centered I was. Or at least she didn’t complain much. She’d only listen to my soliloquies about the creative life for so long before she’d stick a cup of coffee in front of me and say, “Just do your work, Lauren.” And at the end of my art “career,” she never asked me why I gave it up. Maybe she knew.

I don’t like the direction my thoughts are taking. I lift my hand up and examine it, searching for signs that I’m fading. I still look normal. But I think I should save musing on Mom and art for some time when I’m not in the void. Certainly doesn’t seem to be helping me find her. I suppose she needs to be lost first. Or maybe only the Finder can find people.

With a conscious effort, I drag my thoughts back to Tiffany and her prom and continue to trudge through the dust storm. Seconds later, I find the newspaper.

It lays folded in front of me, as if it were waiting outside a hotel room door. I kneel and pick it up. It’s dated May 24, 1986. My hands start to shake. I swallow hard, my throat feels like chalk.

I did it, I think.

Or the void did it, more accurately.

I don’t know how it will help Tiffany, but I want to be out of this dust now before it leeches more thoughts from my head. I don’t want to wait for Peter to find me. I want to go, go, go, now, now, now.

Clutching the newspaper and my yellow prom dress, I walk quickly. And then I run.

I burst out of the dust and stumble onto the chopped-up sagebrush-covered desert floor. My knee lands hard on the caked dirt.

Getting to my feet, I scramble away from the void. I don’t stop running until I’m a quarter mile away from the looming mass of reddish-beige. My knee is throbbing. Stopping, I sit on a rock and massage it. My still-damp swimsuit is coated with dust.

I did it! I left the void. And I found things. I don’t know how or what it means, but right now, that doesn’t matter. I didn’t fail or fade.

I unfold the newspaper and flip through it. The death toll in the Beirut bombing rose to nine, eighty-four injured and three still missing. U.S. and Britain vetoed sanctions against South Africa. A woman killed her former son-in-law in a courtroom and then killed herself. Locally, a man was arrested after falsely reporting a shooting. A woman sued the city over an issue with her dog. A teen was killed in a car crash... Oh, God.

A teen was killed in a car crash on the way to her prom. Three other friends were injured. The driver of the other vehicle was in critical condition and had a blood alcohol level well above the legal limit.

There’s a photo by the article of a smiling girl in a pink satin dress. She has a corsage on her left wrist that looks like a butterfly is attacking her. Her date is behind her, his hands near but not touching her waist. They’re standing on the front steps.

I feel like vomiting.

She died on impact.

She died.

She’s dead.

I shake myself. Maybe it’s a mistake. After all, I talked to her. She’s walking, talking, breathing, alive. It’s a mistake, a terrible mistake. She was lost and presumed dead. Maybe there was a car accident, but maybe she injured her head and lost her memory and wandered away from the scene and ended up here... Yes, that’s much more plausible.

Clutching the newspaper, I get to my feet. I’ll show her the newspaper and maybe seeing the article will jog her memory about what really happened. I trudge toward the house.

Both Tiffany and Claire are sitting at the edge of the ocean. Claire has her toes in the surf. Tiffany has her knees drawn up to her chest. Despite Claire chatting at her, Tiffany looks utterly alone.

I hesitate. Maybe it’s better if she doesn’t see the article. Maybe she doesn’t remember because the accident was too traumatic. On the other hand, if this will help her...

Claire sees me first. She points.

Tiffany gets to her feet.

It’s too late to change my mind. She’s seen me. I’m holding the newspaper and my yellow prom dress. It’s only seconds before the two of them reach me, running across the desert sand. The crash of the waves drowns out the sound of their steps.

Tiffany grabs the newspaper out of my hands. She drops down on the ground and opens it. I watch her as Claire tugs on my arm, demanding to know what happened, ecstatic that it worked. I give her the prom dress.

I watch Tiffany as she reads, and I know the instant she reaches the article. Her face drains of all color. Her makeup is stark against her bloodless face. She reads it once, twice, three times. She carefully folds the newspaper.

Claire skips from foot to foot. “What’s it say? Do you remember?”

“I’m dead,” Tiffany says simply. She stands up.

I want to tell her that she’s not. Of course she’s not. She’s right here talking to me. But the emptiness in her eyes... Words die in my throat. I think of when I first met her. One of the first things she said was she wanted to step in front of a train. Later, she fashioned nooses out of rope. A part of her must have known.

She looks at Claire. “Scottsdale. Your parents are in Scottsdale, Arizona.”

She doesn’t say anything else. She takes off at a run toward town. I watch her and don’t try to stop her. I feel Claire’s hand slip into mine.