She leans into the trash can and I throw myself at it, folding my torso over the edge, silently trying to catch her attention. Her hands close around a half-full bottle of water and her nails are clipped short except on her pinkie, where the nail has grown into a talon, and when she straightens, she looks surprised to see me flapping around on the other side of the trash can.
She wiggles the bottle and breaks into a smile that settles deep into the lines connecting her eyes and nose and mouth. She is wearing what looks like a little girl’s pink shirt with flowers stitched along the scoop neck and a few of the flowers have gone missing, and her shoes—they are high-tops like mine but in blue, and laced tight so that the sides touch.
“One more, one more,” she chuckles, and I take a deep breath and prepare to ask her about the Book and then, without warning, she buckles and my questions vanish and her legs twist under her like they have turned to pipe cleaners, and she squeezes her eyes shut and her gapped grin is gone.
“My leg,” she wails with a yelping edge of pain, and the bottle rolls away and into the path of a rushing taxi.
I duck under her arm and help her hobble into the empty doorway of what used to be a hole-in-the-wall pizza joint. She puts a hand on the wall and slides down with her leg stretched in front of her, and she leans her head back and closes her eyes again with a grimace. I nudge Milton to her side and shove the cart next to her and dash across the street to the pharmacy.
When I return, her eyes are open and she is rubbing her leg with one hand and scratching Milton with the other. I twist the cap on the bottle of water until it cracks, and then I hand the bottle to her. She cackles with appreciation, nodding her head and sipping. She pats her leg and lets it rest, and she heaves a sigh.
“Leg not so good now. Sometime, work too hard and stop working, feet bleed. Collect all night, before sun up, go to bar at closing time and they put out bin filled with bottle.” She makes a face and says wryly, “A lot exercise.”
We grin at each other and I ask her where she lives by pretending to sleep on a pillow of my hands.
“My home in Chinatown near bottle machine, can walk there, not too far. But you are right, that is only place I sleep. Home very far, very far. Home in China, where daughter is. But I stay here, make bottle money, send bottle money home to help her. Or home with husband, but he die. So I go now, bye-bye.”
I offer a hand to pull her up and her hand is tough and compact in mine and she tests her leg and limps toward the cart and I follow her, eyeing the piles of bags and longing to sift through the cans to find the Book.
I hold out the flyer as she faces forward and grips the cart handle, and I ask her if she has seen the Book but she only grunts in response, preoccupied with the task of restarting the cart, and she continues leaning her weight into the handle and the cart is not budging.
She grunts again and applies more force to the handle, and the imposing bulk of the stack rises above her, swaying to the right, and despite the toughness of her hands she looks so small and insignificant and I focus on repeating the question but my throat clogs with worry.
I clear it, reminding myself that she knows where she is going and it’s not too far away—but at the same time China is on another continent and her husband is gone, and she can’t travel into the future or the past so she will never make it home, especially when her legs are starting to fail her.
That makes me afraid, how easily she can become lost, and I see her throwing her slight weight forward and the cart pitching over onto its side and taking her down with it, and her ankle trapped underneath and cans rolling haphazardly into the gutter and the blue of her high-tops fading to gray like the street, and it is impossible for me to blink that image away and forget.
So I place one hand on the handle and she bows her head and says, “Unh,” and shuffles to the side, and I will go with her, then, to make sure she reaches the place where she sleeps, and when we are there I can ask her my questions and find the Book, because the sign is pointing to her and as long as I go with her I will find my answers.
Together we heave and the broken wheel screeches against the sidewalk and the cart slides forward, and with me on the right and Milton trailing, we travel east into the sun.
Once the cart is rattling merrily along, blue-white sparks flaring as they touch down on my shoelaces, I let go, pull out my notebook, and scribble, MANY MILES, FORGOTTEN ROAD; BUT HOMEWARD-BOUND, WITH SPIRIT.
The cart slows and lists toward me and I put my notebook away and restore my grip on the handle. Up close, I see other items hidden between the bags of cans—a flashlight, a glove with a hole in the tip of the second finger, a plastic watch, a doll made out of rags with a red yarn mouth—but no Book, not yet.
“I make for my daughter many year ago,” she says, squeezing the doll’s protruding foot. “Carry with me when look for bottle, can look for bottle longer.”
We walk under a scaffolding that smells like urine and the clatter of the cart and Milton’s panting fills the tunnel. A mother and her daughter are entering on the other side and as we pass the mother quickens her step and draws her daughter in and whispers, “Not too close,” and her whisper echoes. I give her a look that she does not see and they are gone by the time I have marshaled a series of words and they wither away on the back of my tongue, a stinging reminder.
“You quiet, like me when I first come with husband,” the can collector muses. “Not know English, embarrass to talk. Make life very hard. First day go out and do chore, get lost. Walk for hour but not find way back, still too embarrass to talk in bad English. Make you alone, because have no friend here, miss family and friend too far away, over many ocean.”
That strikes me as a sad life indeed; I have Lucy and Milton and when I am not in school I have the shop and the people who work in it and visit it, and I have my finding and the people who have lost something, and that is enough for me.
“Not only no friend—if I don’t talk, I don’t make living. Earn money that time is hard to do. When husband and I come here, we come with nothing, we hold hand and have each other. Then we start business—wash clothes. One day, customer take dry clean and will not pay. Ohh, I am so angry. He leave, I follow. I am so angry I begin to talk, and when I start, no stop! Practice more, English better. Some good person see you try, they try hard, too. Who care if one or two person laugh, no big deal. Who can tell you what matter, you keep try and do for yourself, that is what matter. Maybe you laugh with them and share joke.”
Speaking is hard for her like it is for me, although in a different way because for her it is a different language. I think about how when I used to try, the confusion or disinterest or casual cruelty reminded me that my island was even farther away than I imagined. My attempts yielded nothing except fatigue from the effort, and no one cared about effort after all; it was just proof to me that I did not belong and was not there.
But the can collector is also transparent, invisible behind a cart, and yet she is still trying and pressing forward with small brisk steps and speaking the words she can. This time, today, I am listening, but there are other times and days when no one is listening and she practices and speaks anyway. Is there a purpose simply because these words and small triumphs belong to her? Maybe her small battles and unheard words did not become meaningless when they were batted aside by everyone else, because now when she speaks, imperfectly and on any day, she can test the strength of her edges and remember the many miles she has journeyed, the vast distance she has come.
My jaw aches to think about it, and I wonder how far I could have gone had I not fallen silent and stood still.
Two other people are in line at the recycling machine, which is behind a grocery store in Chinatown where they keep the Dumpsters.
“My place is right there. You go-go,” she says, and I decline and stay because I need to ask her about the Book.
We maneuver the cart to th
e back of the line and the can collector peruses the items on offer in the vending machines as we pass.
“Sometime my husband surprise me with Caravelle bar at dinner. Even though not much money, he know I like the taste. Taste good, very sweet. After husband pass, shop close—cannot run it just me. Candy bar disappear from machine. I cannot find in store, either. You look—not here, right?”
I shake my head to say that I can’t find a Caravelle bar in the machine, either, and I hand her my flyer and ask her if she can do the same and take a look. She leans in, blinking rapidly as if clearing her vision, and we look down at the rendering of the Book and the anticipation takes on a metallic tang in my mouth.
“This your book?” she asks, stepping up to the bottle machine and pushing a button, and I nod vigorously like shaking a soda, the contents of my head fizzing. “I find at beginning of week, in trash can when look for bottle. The one from before, where you and I meet.”
The sounds and movements around me fade out and the world slows to white. I clap both hands over my mouth, fumbling for words that are big enough to contain this moment of finding, and my mind runs in circles and plows through all of them. How did the Book end up in that trash can on the corner of a street? If someone had taken the trouble to steal it they wouldn’t throw it away, so perhaps it was an accident after all and it does not matter anymore now that the Book is found.
“I pick up to give to old lady next door. As gift,” she continues, untying a trash bag and feeding bottles into the mouth of the machine. “But have no more, no more. Bad man, he steal my bottle, my cart, he run away. I see him again but no good, bottle gone, only cart left, he bang into tree and wheel break.”
I realize that the clue meant the Book was here on its journey to becoming lost, not that it is here now, and it is not the end of the trail as I thought, but just the start.
The can collector closes and opens her eyes and says, “I see this book very important book to you. I am sorry. There is one thing. Something that fall out of book, stick to cart, so maybe you want.”
She finishes depositing and in exchange the payment machine churns and ejects a single twenty-dollar bill. She takes it and lines up the ends, folds it carefully in half.
“I am Lan. You come with me?”
Lan lives near the grocery store in a housing block with a few narrow windows striped with iron bars like a prison.
“Watch, light here no working.”
We climb up the dark stairwell and the stairs creak under our feet, and by the third flight of stairs Lan’s breath sounds raspy and I wonder about her leg and offer her my arm. She waves me ahead and pauses to rest against the rail. Milton looks back at her with his ears perked and when she does not continue climbing, he waddles down the steps and stands next to her and barks like cheering her on.
“Yes, yes, one more,” she tells him, and hauls herself up the last flight of stairs. She reaches the hallway and points to the right.
“First thing, say good morning to old lady next door,” she says, bobbing her head and grinning. “She come from Russia. Not speak much English but I can see, must have many story to tell, when young, must be beautiful. Now she have many beautiful hat. She has good hat, I like her hat, but she very thin. I think she need protein. I save sunflower seed and give to her in morning. Do for close to twenty year now. Protein! Crack the seed, also give you something to do in day.”
She knocks and the door opens immediately with a wheeze, and it is a woman in a wheelchair with toothpick legs. She sees me and Milton and then she sees Lan and she breaks into a toothless grin. Almost self-consciously, she touches the wide brim of her hat, which is velvet and purple and tilted to one side, with a spray of purple flowers over her ear.
“That is splendid hat,” Lan says.
The woman gives her hat a final pat and cups her hands together and lays them on her lap, and Lan puts her hand in her pocket and opens the bottom of her fist so that the handful of sunflower seeds trickles out into the woman’s hands. The woman closes her hands over the sunflower seeds and Lan squeezes her shoulder. They don’t exchange words and I’m not sure how it happened but however they managed it, that single thread has worked to keep them together all this time.
Lan unlocks the next door over and steps inside and sighs like letting the air out of a tire. She waits for me to follow and turns on a lamp. Her apartment is shaped like an I. At one end is a two-burner stove with a stool next to it, and a discolored refrigerator and a television with bent antennae sitting on an upturned cardboard box. She has arranged a strand of artificial flowers on top of the television. At the other end is her bedroom, a mattress on the floor and a tall vase in the corner, and the vase could be out of place but it is made all the more beautiful by the lived-in simplicity around it.
Milton is not sure where to put himself and after banging around the kitchen for a while he squeezes ahead and curls up by the bed. I concentrate on making out the details of the vase, clay painted with blue dragons and blue flowers, and the dragon eyes are incandescent with mother-of-pearl inlays. Lan sits on the stool and unlaces her high-tops and slips into sandals with buckles that are stretched out of shape, and I raise my hand as if to touch the vase even though I am too far away.
“You want come look,” she says, walking over to the vase, and I follow. It reaches my waist and the top is sealed, and I bring my face closer to look into a dragon eye.
“Use jug to make jiang. Paste made of soybean. I eat all day when I am young girl. Now I make one time per year in spring, take one year to make. That way, taste better.” Lan sits on the bed and kicks her feet out of her sandals and rubs her leg.
“My mama teach me right way to make. Need patience.” She closes her eyes and says in a placid voice for reciting, “Take soybean and boil. Cook in slow pot of water for whole day. Sit on floor and pound bean until bean turn to mushy paste.”
With her eyes still closed, she mashes the air with an imaginary pestle. “Shape paste into square. Dry in sun like brick. Wrap in paper and tie with string. Hang on wall for eight week. Unwrap and put in jug. Mix with liquid, put in salt and season. Open lid and stir every day for many more month.” She stirs and snores and taps her foot.
“When finish, can eat with lettuce leaf, with rice, with onion.” She pretends to crunch on an onion or a lettuce wrap. “Stinky for you, but for me, give me some taste like home. Important to me like I see book to you. Wait here.”
She leans over the bed and rifles through a stack of papers and bills. It’s making my jaw ache again, thinking of her year of unknowing, leaves crisping as winter crept closer and spread its slow burn, and rain and snow and gasping cold until spring sprouted up again.
I look to Milton imploringly and he looks back at me, and his eyebrows move as he reads my thoughts. If something goes wrong with Lan’s jiang-making, too much oxygen or not enough sun or stirring and the pungent flavor takes on a few sour notes, then it will all be wasted, that year and that mother-of-pearl vase and the effort and hope fermenting inside it. But her hands are tough as leather, and she would pick up the pestle and try again.
I had not been able to do the same. There was no point in trying or thinking that my efforts to communicate could produce something meaningful, when I know by now what would happen every time—I would find nothing but a stinking mess in the end, and it wouldn’t taste anything like home.
Suddenly, all I want is to go back to the shop and shape croissants with Lucy and forget. If this was any other case, I could go back to the shop right now and know that I could keep searching later, for as long as it took to find the lost thing, because I do not close a case without seeing it through to the end. There is no giving up on a lost thing, even if it has been twelve going on thirteen years, and even in the cases where I find that the lost thing is gone, the owner is able to move on after getting the closure.
But with this case I cannot go back y
et and even worse, I could search all day and all night and still not find the Book. I have never searched for that long at once before, and the more I speak without resting the more exhausted I become and the harder it is to talk. The shop has never seemed farther away. I wish the Book was safely in its case. There was no wondering then; the Book in its case meant a world suffused in magic and certainty and a place to belong.
How long will I have to be away from the shop and how far will I have to go, and what if I tire out and can’t concentrate enough to say the words I need to, and what if I fail and it is all for nothing?
I do not have much time. Perhaps I should rush back to school before they realize I am missing. The situation will snowball once that happens, the school notifying Lucy and Lucy notifying the police and the police launching a net for their own search. I do not know if I am brave enough for all of that.
Milton yawns wide and bored as a lion. I touch my nose to his and search the brown pools of his eyes. They are warm and uncomplicated, and they see to the heart of the matter and remind me, See? Easy.
He looks away to see why Lan is still rummaging through her papers. With the Book gone, I have to be brave enough; there is no other choice. If I go back empty-handed everyone will be disappointed—Lucy and Flora and José and Mrs. Ida Bonnet and anyone else who relies on the shop in one way or another, who has woven it into their life. Unlike my other cases, there will be no comfort in the knowing this time, just Flora with her empty cupboards, clipping coupons against the faded rose wallpaper of her home, and Junior’s tumor ripening like a tomato on the vine and José not bothering to hide his teeth because there will be no need for smiling anymore, and I will know that I could have changed everything.
I think of Lan, and her courage reminds me to find my own. I have to see this through to the end, and when the day has spun away we will see where things have landed and go from there.
She sits up now, holding a yellowed piece of paper with ragged edges. She turns it around so that I can see the illustration—grasping walls like a forest of weeping woody trees, twisting toward a girl lying limp on the floor, her dress and her hair fanned out around her, stark haloes of light in a grieving room.
The Luster of Lost Things Page 9