The Legacy of Lost Things

by Aida Zilelian

  She left the bus and went looking for the bathroom, but mostly to regain her composure. She had been certain he had taken off and taken her belongings with him. She let the water run hot enough that it was scalding and washed her face vigorously. When she looked in the mirror she was even more embarrassed—the entire side of her left face was bright pink from sleeping against the window and although her hair was still in a ponytail, there were sloppy knots in her hair at the crown of her head.

  As she boarded the bus, she saw that the woman was still sitting in one of the front seats and felt her glare as she made her way back to the seat.

  “I hope you said you’re sorry,” Casey said, his voice full of mocking.

  The bus driver made a brief announcement stating that the bus would pull into the Philadelphia terminal in approximately eight to nine hours. Cecile braced herself, waiting for Casey to ask her again. Instead, he took out his book and began reading quietly. She wished the choice were more obvious. She had always prided herself on making quick decisions and found that she rarely regretted them. It would have been easier if Araxi had been with her now; they would have gone to New York with no hesitation. She tapped her heels on the floor impatiently as if waiting for the right answer to come to her. The road ahead of them felt too long and Casey’s sudden withdrawal left Cecile feeling that the decision was truly up to her. Part of her wanted him to continue coercing her. The burden would seem less weighted.

  Araxi had probably bought a bus ticket back to Santa Fe and was staying with Kyle again. Although Cecile was glad to have untangled herself and was headed back to New York, she didn’t feel any better about it as she thought she would have. Her parents, uninvolved as they were, had for years impressed upon her the idea of attending a prestigious university once she graduated from high school. She supposed she could thoroughly disappoint them and travel for a while, but even that idea seemed bland and unappealing. She thought of Meursault, the character in The Stranger who had led a life of indifference where no decision was better or worse than any other. By the end of the novel, he had been found guilty of murder and was sentenced to death.

  She looked at Casey from the corner of her eye, hoping he wouldn’t notice. He was resting his chin in the palm of his hand and it was obvious he was completely absorbed in his book. She stared out the window, accepting the long stretch of time that lay ahead and letting her thoughts wander. As the hours passed, the clouds shifted over the bright sun and Cecile felt lulled by the tedium of the day. Finally, the blueness of the sky faded, and the bus exited off the highway. She had never been to Philadelphia and noted how similar the streets were to Manhattan, although they were smaller and more quaint.

  Casey had fallen asleep and she was tempted to nudge him awake to tell him they had arrived, but she resisted. The bus groaned to a stop and many of the passengers stood up to collect their belongings and leave.

  Cecile watched Casey as he opened his eyes and dragged his hand over his face. “Are we in Philly?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” she said. “The bus just pulled in. Looks like only a handful of people are riding it out to New York.”

  “Huh,” was all he said. He stood up and stretched, trying to wake himself up. He pulled his duffel bag from underneath his seat and tossed his book inside.

  “Hey,” Cecile said. She could feel her heart pounding so steadily that she could barely speak.

  “Hey,” Casey said, studying her face.

  “I’m coming, too,” she said, and without giving him a chance to see her face redden once again, she leaned over, removed her bag that was sitting by her feet, and stood up. “Let’s go,” she said. “And I’ll be honest with you—I don’t know if I’ll be going with you to New York after this.”

  The sounds of the city greeted them as they stepped off the bus. Taxi horns blared; horses clomped along; a random group of teenagers ran around each other, hooting and yelling with laughter. In the midst of all the liveliness neither of them spoke. Cecile felt the warm evening air on her skin and allowed herself, once again, to become lost in a new place with no thoughts of home.

  Araxi

  “I will. Yes. No, my husband says not since that day. I told you, Mrs. Gradore … Penny, that one of us will call if we hear from her.” Tamar hung up the phone and stood in the middle of the kitchen feeling numb. The girl’s mother had been calling almost every day since the last conversation with Levon, which was almost three weeks ago.

  “Levon!” she called out. “It was her again. You have to talk to her next time. She sounds crazy.”

  She sounds crazy—well, we’re all crazy at this point, he thought to himself as he stepped into the shower. The three weeks that had passed since Cecile’s last phone call had left them all despondent. It was as if Araxi had just left and the silence in the house, the silence between Leon and Tamar and Sophie, felt as if he were living in a tomb. He lay awake at night trying to control the mania of his thoughts as the terrifying possibilities of Araxi’s whereabouts ran amok inside him. He sensed that Tamar was also awake, lying next to him and saying nothing. One evening he had searched for her hand under the bed-sheets and had gingerly placed his palm on top of hers. She hadn’t resisted or pulled away. They had stayed awake together, aware of each other’s breath, in silence.

  It had been a long time since he had thought about the morning they discovered Araxi gone. He was in the shower, the same as now, when he had heard Sophie’s small voice behind the shower doors. She never entered the bathroom when he was in the shower, and he had immediately known something was very wrong. Tamar had been asleep as usual, and he supposed Sophie sensed that she would have been useless during a moment of crisis.

  “You checked all the rooms?” he had asked as he grabbed a towel and walked out of the shower covered in soap.

  Sophie was still wearing her pajamas. She nodded, hiccuping as she spoke through her tears. “I checked. And there are clothes missing from her drawers.”

  “Tamar!” He had gone over to her and shaken her until she awoke.

  The police had arrived an hour later. They filed a missing persons report, although they were informed that nothing could be done until a forty-eight-hour period had passed. After two days, Levon had gone to the police precinct and they were able to declare her missing. Now he remembered the endless ringing of the phones as he sat next to several other grim-faced gentlemen. He wondered if they were also there for the same reason, the likelihood seemingly implausible. He also wondered how often teenagers ran away from home and if he was doomed to live in a perpetual state of abandonment. Anoush had died, Tamar was completely withdrawn and now his daughter had left.

  Araxi had been missing for seventy-three days. If she were home she would begin school next week. Levon sat on the bed in his bathrobe, absorbing the very real possibility that he would never see his daughter again. Out of the corner of his eye he saw his reflection and then looked away, remembering the awful evening when Araxi had run into the room and found Tamar on the floor with her back embedded with shards of the mirror. He had been too angry to face either of them and had turned away, the fury and shame churning in his stomach with the knowledge that what he had done was irreparable.

  Sophie lay on her bed, recounting her conversation with Adrian from the previous day when he had rung her doorbell to say good-bye. Despite his efforts, she had managed to avoid him since the morning he had told her that he would be moving. She had kept herself hostage in the house, sitting in the backyard that was surrounded by a tall fence, where she knew he couldn’t see her. Many times he had come at night tapping on her window. She had pretended to be sleeping and lay with her back to the window, forcing herself to remain still.

  Yesterday, when she answered the door, she had been completely surprised.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Hey.” Once again, she was struck by his shy smile and tall, lanky gait.

  “I’m leaving and wanted to say good-bye,” he said.

  “Oh. Thanks,
” she said. She wished she hadn’t seen him one last time. His cheeks where pink from being under the sun and his hair was longer and sloppier, and she knew she would always remember him because he was completely unaware of his impending handsomeness.

  “I tried visiting you,” he said, “but you were always sleeping.”

  “They still haven’t found my sister,” she said, “and I’ve been down.” She was ashamed of using Araxi’s disappearance as a reason for her cowardice.

  “That’s terrible,” he said. “I hoped she would come home by now. School starts soon.”

  “I know,” she said, feeling her lips tremble despite her best effort to keep from crying. “I’m going to her school. She was going to graduate this year. They have a junior high there. We were going to go together …” She tried not to cry, remembering the first time they had met and walked home together, how she had collapsed on the pavement in hysterics. Without warning, Adrian stepped toward her and slipped his arms around her waist, hugging her tightly against him. He smelled sweet and clean, like laundry detergent.

  “I wish you had been around these last few weeks,” he whispered into her neck, still holding her. “I’m going to miss you.”

  “Me too,” she said and let go.

  He stepped away. “I’ll talk to you soon,” he said. The bright morning sun highlighted the light brown streaks in his hair. She stared at him dumbly. She didn’t know if she should take his words literally.

  “Okay,” she said. “Talk to you soon.”

  She watched him walk away down the narrow path that led toward the street and he finally turned to give a last wave. She waved back.

  She tried to focus on the upcoming week and the new school she would be attending. She could not imagine riding the school bus alone, knowing that Araxi would have been with her, helping her acclimate to Seton. Her parents hadn’t mentioned anything about withdrawing her sister’s enrollment or alerting the school that she was missing. She imagined sitting in class on the first day and one of the teachers recognizing her last name and asking if. She would be ostracized and referred to as “the girl whose sister disappeared.” These thoughts spun around in her head, multiplying in waves as each new fear gave way to another anxiety that she could not seem to quell or control. As a result, she had been unable to sleep. Hearing the soft tap against her window at night, knowing Adrian was on the other side and so close in reach had been sheer torment. She could not imagine letting him in, sharing more of herself with the knowledge that he too, would be gone for good. All she had left were her parents, who were oddly at peace when they were in the same room; the tension between them had seemingly evaporated. Perhaps they were tired of fighting.

  Shoushan and Anahid still called Tamar weekly to ask about Araxi. Cecile’s phone call to Levon had given everyone hope that Araxi would inevitably return.

  “I don’t think she’s going to come back,” Tamar had said to Levon recently.

  Sophie was in bed and Tamar and Levon were sitting at the dining room table, each nursing a drink. It was uncharacteristic of them to be drinking, especially in the same room together.

  “I don’t think so, either,” he said, feeling sick as the words formed on his lips. “Why did that goddam girl call?” he said after a few moments. “And her stupid mother calling almost every day—it’s too much. I almost wish I hadn’t heard from her at all. Esh. Jackass. Goddam Americans.”

  “I used to have nightmares,” Tamar said. “In the beginning I had nightmares and they would scare me. And now … I have dreams that I’m going to her funeral and although her body is missing they are lowering her casket into the ground.”

  Levon remembered Tamar’s screaming during the first few weeks Araxi had been gone. She would sit up in bed shrieking uncontrollably until he would grab her and shake her awake.

  “I don’t want to tell you where my thoughts go,” he said gravely. He took a long swallow from his glass and set it down firmly. He wanted to be drunk enough to put his head to the pillow and snuff out the world.

  “That one is super cute!” said the girl. She was sitting at the bar with her friend and their new companion. They had met her on their way to Las Vegas and they liked her name. Roxy. She and her friend had thought it was a sexy name and told her so.

  The girl was wearing denim shorts and a midriff tank top. The shorts were low-waisted enough that they revealed the top of the girl’s purple underwear and short enough that the cheeks of her buttocks were visible.

  “Uh-huh!” her friend chimed, who was wearing a similar outfit. “He is cute. Let’s go over and say hi,” she said and slid off the barstool coyly.

  Her friend caught her arm. “No. Wait. Let’s see if we can get him to come to us. We don’t want to be too obvious,” she said, and then turned to their new friend. “Hey, Roxy, that guy’s cute, right?”

  The girl had been stirring her drink and sitting quietly, as if the two girls were strangers. “Which one?” she asked.

  “The one with the long brown hair and the brown suede jacket.”

  Araxi took a sip of her drink and looked across the bar. When she spotted the man she began choking. She took long gulps of air and tried to breathe more evenly. Neither of the girls bothered to help by patting her back or asking the bartender for a glass of water. They laughed in unison, entertained by Araxi’s coughing fit.

  “Wow,” the girl with purple underwear said, “I guess you think he’s cute.” The other one laughed.

  Araxi had met Lori and Vanessa on her way to Nevada. She had no money. After Cecile left, Araxi had walked around the town of Flagstaff, unsure of where to go. She had thought of returning to New Mexico, trying to imagine Kyle’s reaction upon her return. Somehow the idea of going back had made her feel empty and desperate. Her sudden freedom felt paralyzing. A car had pulled over and a young woman had offered her a ride going west.

  “Where are you headed?” the young woman had asked. She seemed to be only a few years older than Araxi, had just graduated college, and was driving to Sacramento to meet her boyfriend.

  They hadn’t spoken much. The windows had been rolled down because the air conditioner was broken, and the warm breeze had lulled Araxi to sleep. When she awoke, the car was parked at a gas station and the young woman was standing outside filling the car with gas.

  “Change of plans,” she said when she saw that Araxi was awake. “I’m not going to Sacramento after all.” There was something businesslike and detached about the abruptness of her words. “This is your last stop right here.”

  The heat and fatigue hadn’t given Araxi much time to respond. She nodded tiredly and collected her things, thanking the woman for the ride and not bothering to ask where they were. She stood in front of the gas station noticing the rugged hills in the distance, stretching for miles along the road, and the quiet emptiness of the landscape. It felt utterly otherworldly compared to the area where she had grown up. She hadn’t thought about it since she left, and the image of her neighborhood came to mind: the green lawns, her tidy brick house sitting in a row among six more on her block, the weeping willow she could see from her bedroom window.

  Although there seemed to be no person in sight, she knew there had to be at least someone in the vicinity since she was at a gas stop. The old man behind the counter had his eyes closed when she walked in. The faint sound of a bell tinkled behind her. He watched her from the corner of his eye as she weaved through the aisles to find a bottle of water.

  “Seventy-five cents,” he said dryly when she set the water down on the counter.

  He waited patiently as she stuck her hands in her pockets, turning them inside out. Finally she opened up her bag, rummaging through her belongings frantically. The last time she had felt this same panicked feeling was when she woke up in the hotel room in St. Louis and realized that Cecile had left her. The girl had obviously robbed her, which explained why she was so eager to leave Araxi at the gas station.

  “That’s alright, honey,” the old
man said when he realized her dilemma. “You can have the water. It’s hot out there,” he said, nodding towards the door.

  “I really had the money,” Araxi started to explain.

  “I’m sure you did,” he said.

  “That girl that dropped me off … She took my money while I was sleeping.”

  He shook his head sympathetically, making gentle sucking noises with his teeth to convey his disapproval, “Damn people,” he said.

  “Damn people,” she repeated, feeling dizzy. “I have to sit on the floor,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

  If the man minded, he didn’t say so. He sat back down on the stool. He could hear her taking deep breaths and whispering something over and over. After a while he realized she was saying “Oh God, Oh God.”

  “Honey, do you need a doctor?” he asked, peering over the edge of the counter.

  “No,” she said, choking out the words. “I need the five-hundred eighty-five dollars she took from me,” Araxi said, visibly crying. “I can’t go back home. I just can’t.”

  “Where’s home?”

  “New York,” she said.

  He let out a low whistle. “That’s a long way from here,” he said.

  “Good,” she said. “I was hoping to have gotten further than this, but my stupid friend … Forget it,” she said, cutting herself off. “She’s not even a friend. Where am I, anyway?”

  “You’re in Kingman,” he said. “A little over two hundred miles from Death Valley.”

  The bell tinkled again and from Araxi’s vantage point, she saw two pairs of feet walk in, both wearing worn-out cowboy boots.

  “Do you have Twinkies?” she heard a girl’s voice above her. She sounded bored and slightly impatient. She looked down and saw Araxi. “Hi there.” She waved casually as if there was always a girl sitting on the floor of every convenience store she walked into. Feeling foolish, Araxi stood up and zipped her bag, getting ready to walk out.