Lost and Found
By Carolyn Parkhurst
Little, Brown
Copyright © 2006
Carolyn Parkhurst
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-316-15638-8
Chapter One
LAURA
By the sixth leg of the game, we have accumulated the following
objects: a ski pole, a bishop from a crystal chess set, a sheet of
rice paper, a trilobite fossil, an aviator's helmet, and a live
parrot. Our backpacks are overflowing. I drop the chess piece into a
sock to keep it from bumping against anything and chipping. I fold
the rice paper into a guidebook. The helmet I put on my head. I hand
the ski pole to Cassie. "Ready?" I ask, picking up the parrot's
cage.
"Like I have a choice," she says. Our cameraman, Brendan, grins. I
know he thinks Cassie makes for great footage. "Okay, then," I say.
"We're off."
We leave our hotel room and walk down the hall, Brendan walking
backward so he can film us; our sound guy trails behind. In the
elevator, the parrot squawks.
"We should give this guy a name," I say to Cassie, holding up the
cage.
"How about Drumstick?" Brendan smiles behind his camera. He's loving
this.
"How about Milton?" I try. "He looks kind of like a Milton, don't
you think?"
"Fine, Mom," Cassie says, staring up at the lighted numbers.
"Whatever."
The doors open onto the lobby, and we step out. There are only seven
teams left, and the other six are already here. I pretty much hate
them all by this point. Wendy and Jillian, the middle-aged flight
attendants from Milwaukee, are sitting on a sofa, feeding little
bits of bread to their parrot, while Carl and Jeff, the funny
brothers from Boston, sit next to them, poring over a guidebook.
Justin and Abby, whom a few people have dubbed Team Brimstone (or,
occasionally, Team Shut-Up-Already) because they won't stop talking
about how the power of the Lord rescued them from homosexuality and
delivered them into the loving grace of Christian marriage, are
praying. Juliet and Dallas, the former child stars, who are standing
(not coincidentally, I think) next to a large mirror, are staring at
them with naked malice. Riley and Trent, the young millionaire
inventors (they're wild cards - brilliant, but not so good with the
everyday stuff, and everyone wonders what they're doing here anyway,
since they don't need the money), smile at Cassie as we walk past,
but she turns away from them and goes to sit next to Wendy. Wendy
says something to her, and Cassie actually smiles and reaches out to
touch the feathers on their parrot's head.
The only seat left is next to Betsy and Jason, the former high
school sweethearts who have recently been reunited after twenty
years apart. They seem to be having a fight; they're sitting beside
each other, but his arms are crossed, and their commitment to not
looking at each other is very strong. I sit down next to Betsy,
balancing Milton's cage on my lap.
"Morning," Betsy says, turning her whole body away from Jason. "Did
your parrot keep you guys up all night, too?"
"No, we just put a towel over his cage and he went right to sleep."
"Lucky," she says. "We tried that, but it didn't work. Ours was
freaking out all night. I think we got a defective one."
"A defective parrot. I wonder if there's any provision for that in
the rules."
"Yeah, maybe they'll let us trade it in. Otherwise, I'm gonna put it
in Barbara's room tonight."
There are two camerapeople filming this conversation. One of the
producers, Eli, steps to the middle of the room and claps his hands.
"Quiet, everyone," he says. "Here comes Barbara." The front door
opens and the host of the show, Barbara Fox, walks in with an
entourage of makeup artists and even more camerapeople. She's small
and rigid with short blond hair and a frosty smile. She's one of the
most unnatural people I've ever met. I don't know how she got a job
on TV. We're not allowed to approach her. "Good morning, everybody,"
she says, turning her glassy smile to each of us in turn.
"Good morning," we say like schoolchildren, except less in unison.
Her crew sets her up in front of a large mural of the Sphinx.
Filming begins. "I'm Barbara Fox," she says, "and I'm standing in a
hotel in Aswan, the southernmost city in Egypt, with the seven
remaining teams in a scavenger hunt that will cover all the corners
of the earth. Ladies and gentlemen, this ..." - dramatic pause
here, and a strange little roll of her head - "is
Lost and Found."
Throughout this process, auditioning for the show, going through
rounds of interviews with the producers, providing background for
the viewers, we've been asked over and over again to "tell our
story." The story I've told them goes something like this: I raised
Cassie mostly on my own; it hasn't always been easy. She'll be
leaving for college next year, and I wanted a chance to travel the
world with her before she's gone. Cassie's version is considerably
terser. We tell the story like that's all there is, like we're any
old mother and daughter doing our little dance of separation and
reconciliation. Oldest story in the world.
The story that doesn't get told begins like this: Four months ago,
on a warm and airless night, I woke up to find Cassie standing over
my bed. I couldn't see her very well in the dark, and for a moment
it was like all the other nights, scattered through her childhood,
when she'd come to get me because she was sick or scared. I'm a
sound sleeper - I guess it's important to say that - and it took her
a few minutes to wake me.
"Mom," she was saying. "Mom." "What is it?" I said. "What time is
it?" "Mom, could you come to my room for a minute?" "What's the
matter? Are you sick?" "Could you just come to my room?"
"Okay," I said. I got out of bed and followed her down the hall.
She'd moved her bedroom into the attic the previous year, and as we
climbed the stairs, I could see that the light was on and the
bedclothes were rumpled. I noticed a funny smell, an odor of heat
and sweat and something like blood. There were towels everywhere - it
seemed like every towel we owned was piled on the floor or the
bed. Most of them were wet, and some of them were stained with
something dark.
"Is that blood?" I said. "Mom, look," she said. "On the bed." I
looked at the tangle of linens, and it took me a minute before I saw
it. Saw her, I should say. There, in the center of the bed, lay a
baby wrapped in a yellow beach towel.
"What ..." I said, but I didn't know how to finish the sentence.
"Cassie ..."
"It's a girl," Cassie said. "I don't understand," I said. My mind
seemed to have stopped working. The baby looked very still. "Is she
... okay?" "I think so," Cassie said. "She was awake at first, and
then she went to sleep."
"But ..." I said, and then I didn't say any more. I reached out
and unwrapped the baby. She lay naked and sleeping, her body smudged
with creamy smears of vernix. Several inches of umbilical cord, tied
at the end with a shoelace, grew out of her belly like a vine.
I looked her over, this child, my granddaughter. Tiny. Tiny. There
is no new way to say it. If you could have seen her. The translucent
eyelids, the little fingers curled into fists. The knees bent like
she hadn't learned how to stretch them yet. The feet wrinkled from
their long soak. You forget how small they can be. Tiny. I picked
her up, and she stirred. She opened her eyes and looked up at me. A
lurch inside me, and I loved her, just like that. It didn't even
happen that way with my own daughter, not quite. I held her close to
my chest and wrapped the towel around her again.
"I didn't know how to tell you," Cassie said. "I don't understand,"
I said again. "You had this baby?" "Yeah. About half an hour ago, I
guess." "But you weren't pregnant."
She gave me a look. "Well, obviously, I was," she said. "And you
didn't tell me? For nine whole months you didn't tell me? Who's the
father? Dan? Does he know?"
"Can we talk about this later?" she said. "I think maybe I should
see a doctor." She lowered her voice and looked downward. "I'm
bleeding," she said, her voice like a little girl's.
I wish I had said, "My poor baby." I wish I had said, "I'm so sorry
you had to go through this alone." But I was tired and bewildered,
and I was beginning to get angry. What I said was, "Yeah, that'll
happen when you give birth." And I didn't say it very nicely.
Cassie turned away from me and balled her hands into fists. "Well,
you don't have to be so mean," she said, and I could hear that she
was trying not to cry. "I've been through a lot tonight. It hurt a
lot, you know, really, really a lot."
I took a deep breath and tried to calm myself down. "Okay, Cassie,"
I said. "I'm sorry. This is just kind of a shock." I reached out to
take her arm, but she shook me away. "You're right," I said. "We
should go to the hospital."
I looked at the baby, who was lying quietly in my arms. "We have to
wrap her better," I said. "This towel is wet."
"I think she peed," said Cassie. "I didn't have any diapers. I
didn't know they could pee so soon."
"Well, they can," I said. "Let me go get some blankets." With great
care, I put the baby down on the bed and went down the stairs to the
linen closet. My mind felt thick, as if my head were filled with
clay. I tried to understand this new information, to lay it on top
of the things I already knew and to read my memories through it.
She'd been wearing loose clothes lately, I'd noticed that much. I
thought she'd been gaining weight, but I didn't want to upset her by
bringing it up. She'd been sleeping a lot and she was moody, but so
what? It's not like that's exactly earth-shattering behavior for a
seventeen-year-old.
I opened the linen closet and looked inside. I picked out a quilt
that my grandmother had given me when Cassie was born; her own
mother had made it for her as a wedding gift. It had been Cassie's
favorite blanket in childhood, and she'd kept it on her bed until
she reached adolescence.
As I picked it up, I was already imagining the things I would say to
this baby one day. I would tell her, You were born under
extraordinary circumstances. I would tell her, We wrapped you in a
quilt that was older than our house.
I brought the blanket into Cassie's room and spread it on the bed.
"But that's my blanket from Nana," she said. Her voice rose like a
child's. "What if she pees again?"
I laid the baby on the quilt, the small, miraculous lump of her, and
swaddled her as well as I could. "If she pees, she pees," I said.
"Do you think we should bring this to the hospital?" Cassie asked,
picking up the wastebasket by her desk. I looked inside at what it
held. It was the placenta, dark and slick as a piece of raw liver.
"I don't think we need that," I said. I tried to think back to the
books I had read before Cassie was born. "Wait, maybe we do. I think
they need to check it to make sure the whole thing came out. I don't
know."
"I'll just bring it," she said. The baby started to cry, a high,
pure kitten-screech of a sound. We both looked down at her.
"She's probably hungry," I said. "I wonder if you should try to
breastfeed her."
"No," she said, and her voice was hard and steady. "I don't want
to." And I think that was when I knew we'd be giving her up.
The rules of the game are simple. For each segment, they fly us to a
new city where we follow a trail of clues through various exotic
(and, presumably, photogenic) locations until we're able to decipher
what item we're looking for. Then each team sets out to find an
object that qualifies. Every item we find has to remain with us
until the end of the game, so the items are usually heavy or fragile
or unwieldy; it adds to the drama. Losing or breaking a found object
is grounds for disqualification. The last team to find the required
object and make it to the finish line gets sent home.
At the end of each leg, Barbara interviews the team that's been
eliminated, and she asks the following question: "You've lost the
game, but what have you found?" I know the producers are looking for
cheesy answers like "I found my inner strength," or "I found the
true meaning of friendship," but that's not always what they get.
The first ones eliminated were Mariah and Brian, a
brother-and-sister team from San Francisco. Brian began acting
strangely almost immediately; we found out later that he was
schizophrenic - he was fine while he was taking his medication, but
he'd stopped at some point during the game. (So much for all the
producers' elaborate background checks.) The race ended for them in
a museum of natural history in Quebec. We were looking for
trilobites, but Brian became very agitated by a giant dinosaur
skeleton that was on display, and he began to pelt it with trash
from a nearby garbage can. He had to be forcibly removed from the
premises. Afterward, Barbara found the two of them outside, sitting
on the ground like children. Mariah was cradling Brian in her arms
as he rocked back and forth unhappily. Barbara walked up to them - you
have to give her credit for determination - and asked them her
question. Brian looked up at Barbara, his face a frieze of misery.
"I've found out you're a motherless dog," he said before Mariah
waved the cameras away. I'd like to see how they're going to edit
that.
I don't think there's much of a chance Cassie and I will win the
game, but I don't really care. Secretly, this is the moment I'm
looking forward to most, the moment when Cassie and I stand before
Barbara, and she asks me what I've found. Cassie and I will look at
each other and smile; I'll reach out and touch her arm, or her hair,
and she won't move away. I'll turn back to Barbara, and the cameras,
and all the TV viewers of the world. I found my daughter, I'll say.
I found my little girl.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Lost and Found
by Carolyn Parkhurst
Copyright © 2006 by Carolyn Parkhurst.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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