The Luster of Lost Things

by Sophie Chen Keller

  For all her strong words, I look into her eyes as she watches Roman and I see the telescoping of her pupils like looking at something far away, beyond her grasp, and I know what she’s looking for is a bridge, like the ex-agent who’d lost his old identification card.

  He was quiet and unassuming and if it weren’t for the card, I would not have believed his former role in the CIA. He lived with his daughter’s family and as his Alzheimer’s progressed, his daughter took on more, helping him shave and eat and bathe and use the toilet. His identification card was outdated and useless, but he kept it under his pillow and it reminded him of his past life and the things he had been capable of doing.

  Lost things are bridges. They are connections to some other time or place or person or feeling, and for the ex-agent, the identification card was a bridge to the person he knew himself to be. I ended up finding the identification card in the daughter’s wallet; it had fallen off the bed and she picked it up off the floor and pocketed it, mistaking it for one of her own cards.

  Sammie has not lost a thing but she is far away from Roman, and she needs a bridge to help her reach him. Milton returns and drops the knight in my lap and watches it intently so it doesn’t disappear, and I look away to give Sammie some space for herself and to think. Our clock winds down, forgotten, while the other games proceed at a frantic pace, and at the next table a girl with a severe bowl cut knocks over the white king and her mother captures the moment with a practiced point and click.

  I tell Sammie that I will be back, and I walk over to the extreme sports tent.

  “Anti-fog kit for your sunglasses? Paragliding boots?” the owner bellows at me and everyone and no one.

  I point at a knife.

  “Two hundred eighty five,” he responds immediately like an auctioneer.

  I shake my head and pick up the knife, unfolding it to give myself time to prepare my words and concentrate. I take a breath.

  “For ten minutes?” I try, and he says, “Ten . . . ?” and I point at his watch.

  “Ten minutes? You can borrow this one.” He unfolds his own pocketknife and hands it to me and I sit down at the picnic table and clear the chess pieces, try to pick up the board, and Sammie does not let me pick it up until I say, “One more try?”

  She watches me closely and releases the board. “One more try.”

  I set the point of the knife against a corner square and push the knife through and saw in a circle like removing chocolate turtle cakes from their ramekins, and I imagine running the blade along the inside of the ramekin to loosen the edges, and the dark, decadent surface of the cake, and the knife completes a full revolution and a black round pops free.

  I hold the board up and blow away the cardboard-dust and peer through the hole. I grab a pawn and push the base into the hole and the hole is too small. I push the knife through and widen the circle, and when that’s done I elevate the chess board by placing it on the chess box, one end on each box-half to create Sammie’s bridge. I push the base of the pawn through the hole and it squeezes through and catches around the next ridge, and now the piece is planted firmly in the hole.

  Sammie touches the top of the pawn. She pulls it out and trades it for a queen and when that fits too, her smile grows broader than her shoulders. “Nieto, look at the surprise our friend has made.”

  Roman reaches for the board. His mouth puckers like tasting something tart and sweet and he pushes his palm against the queen Sammie wedged into the board and it does not fall over.

  He yanks the queen out and plunks it back into the hole and he grips the edges of the two boxes and shakes, and with his hands he sees that the queen is still standing.

  His face opens, mouth widening and eyebrows rising around his dark glasses. “It works,” he says.

  I hand the knife to Sammie and she takes it and presses the point against the next square, and then she puts the knife back down.

  “You’ve earned this, amigo.”

  She slides the page under the chessboard bridge and I take it, looking down at the illustration—the door opening, light falling across the page and pushing the menacing squall to the edges and corners, and within the idyllic glow of the doorway are a few simple lines to denote the shop’s tables and chairs.

  Overhead, the clouds part and rays of sun fall across the table in warm patches and I watch the patterns of light dancing across my chest like looking into a swimming pool, and this must’ve been the feeling of seeing a new door opening. The light leaps down my arms and ripples over my hands and held there, in my palms, is the seventh page of the Book.

  “Board ready?” Roman wants to know, balancing on his knees and tipping into Sammie’s side.

  Sammie glances down at his unruly brown hair and the slash of her mouth quirks apart at the unfamiliar angle, and I understand why it was hard for her to part with the page before—it reminded her to keep trying until Roman opens the door and gives her a chance to come in, and now she does not need it anymore. I take out my notebook, thinking of the strength draining from her massive shoulders. It must have hurt when she tried and Roman pushed her away and each time the space between them grew.

  Even without the page, though, she would have gone on trying all the same, and what did she know that kept her from giving up? I poke my head under the table to look at Milton and he scrapes his tongue up my face like he does when I lie on the floor and pretend to sleep, and that reminds me of the simple reason—AT THE END, A DREAM WORTH WAKING FOR—and that is how I felt after sharing Walter Lavender Sr.’s story with Junker, and the moments that matter are the ones I need to remember.

  “The board will be ready soon, nieto,” she says.

  She saws out round after round and the air darkens as a cloud blocks out the sun. I have been bold and I have been a part of the game and I have found another page because of it, and now it is time for me to continue my search.

  Before I leave the tent, I ask Sammie what she knows about Ruby Fontaine.

  “These days, not much. It’s been a long time since we played chess—besides bumping into her this week, it was months since I last saw her. Sorry,” she says, and I mean it when I shake my head to tell her that I am not, and I stand and Milton stands and stretches his back, arching and exhaling and holding the pose like a yoga instructor.

  With the page in my pocket, I leave the flea market, heading west now, striding purposefully toward Rudolf Steiner. The possible places sing in my eardrums, pound against my chest—Ruby, school, home; locker, desk, backpack—and still I can’t help peering into windows, looking through the breaks in traffic, waiting for the moment to come, watching for the sign.

  18

  Down Seventy-eighth, past Park and Madison, strings of lights have been wound around tree branches, red bows affixed to streetlamps, pinecone-studded wreaths and fluffed snow arranged in display windows. Milton and I trot down narrow streets lined with brownstones and trees and wrought-iron fences, past smart awnings and mild doormen and spiral-shaped bushes.

  The school is housed in a four-story limestone building, easily identifiable by the white flag hanging over the second row of windows. As I make my way up the block toward the mansion, a woman in a gray blouse comes out of the arched doorway and down the steps and her hair is the same shade of gray, cut above her shoulders. She pops a cigarette in her mouth and sits on a red bench.

  A teacher? An administrator? Immediately my steps drag and my mind races and Milton bumps into me. What will this woman assume if she sees me outside the school at this hour, accompanied only by Milton?

  Even if she concludes that I am not an escaped student of the school and therefore none of her business, I will become her business if she sees me snooping around the building or attempting to enter, and that will be the end of it.

  The woman cups her hands around her mouth and there is a flare of light and she inhales and exhales smoke that is gray too.
She rests her hand on her knee and smoke curls over her head and she gazes like a watchful dragon in the other direction. She inhales again and turns and I can tell by the way her head tilts that she has spotted me.

  I drop my eyes and keep them trained on my high-tops as I walk toward her, trying to look like I am doing exactly what I should be doing, and I can feel her watching me when I pass and the air between us pinches but she is not saying or doing anything and I am coming up to the doorway now, and maybe I have misjudged and she is just a visitor and does not think anything of me. I steal a look at her and she looks like she is trying to solve a sudoku, and when she sees my brief pause in front of the steps she pushes Milton’s nose away from her gray tights and stands.

  “Walter Lavender?” she says uncertainly, watching me for confirmation.

  Smoke burns through my nose and the alarm in my head blares. Do not answer, I instruct myself. That is not you.

  I put my chin down and rush forward, telling Milton, Come. I speed-walk to the end of the block, hurrying away from Ruby Fontaine and the Book but also away from the gray woman, and Milton lopes after me and I take a peek over my shoulder. The woman is not running after me but she has taken a few steps forward and stopped, held back by her indecision.

  I speed-walk on, pushing a silent message back to her, It is nothing, it is nothing, and hoping she does not throw her restraint to the wind and give chase. After the woman finishes her smoke break—after she flattens the cigarette under her gray shoe and climbs the steps and disappears into the building—only then can I return and venture inside.

  The cramped, car-lined street opens into the wide boulevard of Fifth Avenue and the east wall of Central Park. I cross the street, weaving around tourists and cars. On the other curb, I chance another glance over my shoulder and jump at the gray blur, but it is just a double-decker bus and I try to laugh even though my stomach is still coiled in ropes.

  That was too close, and on this street corner it is still too easy for us to be found. We need to lose ourselves. Before us is the vast expanse of Central Park, and so we move west and up, slipping through a maze of sinuous paths alongside bikers and joggers and strollers, and over ponds and lakes on stone bridges, and across grassy meadows strewn with leaves and tripods and blankets, and trees everywhere grasping for the sky, gossamer-wild and stark as ink lacework. The city falls away and my jumpiness turns soft and muffled and distant too.

  We stumble onto a great lawn and Milton senses the open space and breaks away, racing across the swath of pasture with his ears flapping in the wind until he is a speck against the gray-green grass. The speck lingers for a moment and then it grows larger and resolves into Milton again, frothing and heaving like a racehorse as he slows and pads in a circle around me.

  I stick to the border of grass and path, walking past a bundled-up woman lying on her stomach flipping through a magazine and two men with a baby cuddled between them and a group of people playing field hockey, and the grassy ground is better suited for the sport now than in the spring or summer. A blister is forming where my little toe rubs against the hole in my high-top and hunger is scooping a concave hollow in my stomach and I wonder how long I have to walk before going back. A few more minutes, to be sure.

  I am cutting across a secluded corner when I catch a smell like fresh wet stone and feel a slight give under my feet like the ground has turned to mud underneath the tough surface.

  I investigate, a little embarrassed at first to be walking in on someone’s sorrow, but there is no one to be seen, just a large tree with a hulking kite propped next to it, a long bag with a zipper down the middle lying twisted underneath one wing. The ground sinks more as I move closer to the tree and I halt and prod the strange soft earth with my toe, and I guess that the source of the tears is behind the tree.

  RAINY DAY REFLECTIONS, I add to my notebook, and then I sidle toward the tree to check on the person behind it.

  Lucy liked to tell me, with a shake of her head and a half-smile, that Walter Lavender Sr. always seemed to be at the right place at just the right times, like when she almost went over the ship’s rail or when he found the man who needed an electrician crying on the corner. There was also the time he walked by someone’s parking meter right as it expired and a uniformed woman pulled up on a scooter and he stopped to drop two quarters into the slot, and the time he stood behind a woman in the checkout line who flushed red when three of her cards were declined and he told the cashier that the bread loaf and eggs were his, actually.

  When Lucy told me these things—about his knack for appearing right when he was needed—it never seemed like the time to interrupt and remind her that he wasn’t, not always, or not when he crossed his heart and said he would be.

  Still, Walter Lavender Sr. was not one to look the other way, and so I knock three times on the trunk and turn around to wait, and Milton watches a dimpled white ball roll past as a field hockey player in red kneesocks sprints over and hooks the ball and slaps it back and sprints away.

  No one emerges from behind the tree and so I peek around it and there is a man sitting there, calmly eating a sandwich with his legs stretched out in front of him and his head resting against the trunk. Next to him is the kite, and it is banded in black and red and yellow. Milton’s heavy breathing fills the air and the man sits up and twists to the left, his mouth going slack around a mouthful of bread when he sees me.

  His face is dry, tired, and behind frameless square glasses his eyes look limp and wrung out too; he is not distressed, or not anymore. I wave apologetically and pull back to leave him alone. Beside me, Milton perks up at the sight of the sandwich and by the time I react, grabbing for his collar, it is too late and he is lunging forward.

  He bumps the man’s knee with his nose and sits up soldier-straight, watching the man solemnly until he surrenders the rest of his sandwich, stripping off the plastic wrap and turning it over onto the ground.

  I reach for Milton, sputtering apologies, and I hear from somewhere behind us the ear-splitting crack of a field hockey stick connecting with the ball, and Milton strains against my pulling and gobbles up a slice of roast beef.

  “That is okay,” the man says in brusque, flatly accented English. He is thin and angled—elbows and knees and pointed nose—and he wears a turtleneck with a tweed jacket over it.

  “Actually, I have packed quite a lot of food. It is a little much for me. Would you like to have some lunch?” Vood, he says, tapping the dent in his chin. His brown hair is greasy and parted in the middle and he pushes it out of his face to study me better, and I release Milton and the man nudges aside a can of paint and unzips his cooler.

  “Today I have a Spanish-inspired roast beef, with marinated artichoke heart, stuffed olives, red pepper, and provolone on focaccia.” He unwraps a sandwich and hands me half and takes a bite of the other half. My stomach growls.

  “This is a nice recipe. I will have to repeat it sometime,” he says, swallowing. Milton tosses a chunk of focaccia into the air and grapples with the roast beef like it is trying to escape. I give the man an emphatic nod around a mouthful of sandwich.

  “It is—how do you say—a new leaf.” He adjusts his glasses and leaves an olive oil slick on the lens. “Every day for seven years, I have been eating sandwiches with turkey and Swiss cheese in a ratio of two to one. That is what I like. My wife hated making that boring sandwich all the time. Since she—ach—”

  He makes a gruff, sad noise like loosening the regret stuck to the back of his throat.

  “Last year, she left—I have been trying some different things in my life. Such as, for example, new lunch sandwiches. Yesterday was ham and mango with Dijon and parsley on a wheat roll. That one was not so delicious. I think I will not make it again. Tomorrow I have scheduled roasted turkey and cream cheese on a cranberry-walnut loaf. Ah—” He removes his glasses and polishes it with a cloth. “I forget that we are still strangers. I am
Karl.”

  I find the words for introducing myself and before I can think too much I throw myself into them, saying, “My name is Walter.”

  “Pleased to meet you,” Karl says.

  Encouraged, I add, “This is Milton.”

  “Pleased to meet you as well,” Karl says.

  “I am looking for this.” I hunch over to show him the flyer.

  “I see a lot of books, but I have not seen that one,” he says between chews.

  “A girl. Ruby Fontaine?”

  “I apologize to be so totally unhelpful,” he says, shaking his head. “I will look out for your book and your Ruby Fontaine when I am in the air.” He points a thumb at his kite.

  I take a bite from where I am standing and he takes a bite from where he is sitting and I chew and consider the kite. It looks like a bird on the verge of flight, poised on a metal triangle with its nose pointed up and its canvas skin stretched in an inverted V over metal wing bones.

  I finish the sandwich half and brush the crumbs from my hands. The gray woman should be gone by now, leaving the coast clear to sneak into the school.

  Time to go try again, I think, looking down at Milton, who has flopped onto his side for a nap, and then at Karl, to say thank you and good-bye, but Karl has forgotten that his mouth is full and is staring with a hard-focused pain into his sandwich like he has bitten into a fly.

  He lowers the sandwich and notices me looking.

  “It is strange,” he says, swallowing with difficulty, “to miss something you never had.”

  His words run me through, a piercing blaze like headlights in the dark, and I am exposed. How could he know this about me, and does that mean he has seen right through me and what else does he know?

  I want to dart away but my body stays pinned to the spot, and he continues, “These days, I have the thought—you would say, out of the blue—for example, would my son or daughter like this sandwich we are having, if she had been born?”