The Luster of Lost Things

by Sophie Chen Keller

  He is talking about himself, I realize. It could just as easily be me only he doesn’t know that, and that is good and safe and relieving.

  And yet—I cannot be content with that. I journeyed through the tunnels and now that I have made it back, I know that it is not enough to learn something essential only about him; that kind of connection is unequal, lopsided.

  The pressure behind my forehead is hard to ignore, like someone tapping incessantly against a door, wanting to be let out. This longing for what never was—it is one part of who I am that I guard closely. But I want the chance to forge a connection that endures beyond losing and finding, and I think I want him to know this essential thing about me and I think it would help him too—that his missing is something we share.

  I uproot a blade of grass and shred it, searching for the right words, and when I find them they flow through me, strong and unafraid. “I do not think it is strange. When it happens to me.”

  “What is this something you miss, that you never had?” Karl hangs his sandwich over Milton’s nose like smelling salts and watches as Milton revives and snaps at it, and I pull up another blade of grass and it is like straw, flammable, and so is my throat.

  “My dad. What he would teach me. All I do not know.”

  Karl makes a noise of assent and says, “I think if I had become a papa, I would learn quite quickly that there are even more things I do not know.”

  I wonder about this and he continues, “Of course, I have also thought of what I would teach him or her. You should like physics but not too much, you should at least understand condensed matter physics but you do not need to be a particle physicist. You should know about love and . . .” He makes a flourish with his hand. “Well, I would not say it like that. I would say it in a better way, such as—” He deepens his voice so that it reverberates in his chest and tells his sandwich, “Nothing lasts forever but my love for you will. Then I will teach, Do not waste money or time. Do be proud of who you are.”

  And I hear the truth in what he is saying, about the way a father loves. The whole time I have been worrying about measuring up and always falling short, and maybe all Walter Lavender Sr. really wanted was for me to be proud of myself.

  Milton whips his tail across the grass so that it thumps against the Book in my pocket—You should be—and I am awash in something bright and deep like peace, thinking about the search I have embarked on and the people I have met and the voice I am finding. Milton goes back to sleep and I think about waking him, wondering if it is the right time to go back and search the school—

  I am startled by a chorus of shouts and a wooden slap, and Karl flinches and hunkers down like the ball is going to hit him. It comes nowhere close but it does send him scrambling into action, unzipping his cooler and rooting through it.

  “Excuse me. Did you want another sandwich?”

  I unwrap the plastic and he gets up and stretches his back and moves to stand under the kite-bird, kicking aside the long zippered bag, and I join him and we look up at the canvas wings.

  “She is a super hang glider, no? The smallest details have to be perfect for her to fly, especially around the wings. It is hard to believe, but for weeks this building has consumed me more than my physics research ever has.”

  He steps out from under the wings and points at the letters stenciled along the inner edge of the right wing where it is banded in yellow—CARRIE—and he says, “Today I completed the naming. Carrie, for my wife.” The letters themselves are a little lumpy but the alignment is precisely parallel with the aluminum rib.

  I run my hand along the metal triangle and Karl points at the bottom leg of the triangle. “That is the control bar. With the control bar, I will maneuver the hang glider by shifting my weight left and right. Leaning forward to speed up, leaning back to bleed speed.”

  I gape at Karl when I realize he means to fly with the hang glider, and he says, “Forecasted conditions tonight are ideal for launch, with wind speed around thirty kilometers per hour, although I will have to wait and see to make sure.”

  I tap the bar and it makes a weak ting and he is unconcerned about that as he informs me that it is made of aluminum tubing and stainless steel cable. He points at the straps and metal rings hanging from the top point of the triangle and says, “This is where I will be suspended, flying like Superman.” He runs a hand along the wing. “The sail—made of woven polyester fabric, polyethylene terephthalate. The sail and the frame, it is constructed to be light yet strong.”

  I put both hands on the control bar and try to lift the hang glider and it rises a little off the ground. It feels like a fifty-pound sack of flour—not heavy enough to be strong, not light enough to fly. I imagine being suspended in the harness, facedown to the earth so far below, and my stomach swoops and the strength drains out of my hands, oozes through my palms and turns them clammy, and I scrape them down the sides of my jeans.

  “This is the cool part.” Karl points at an instrument attached to a side leg of the triangle. “An airspeed indicator, to measure and record how fast the hang glider is going. It took some time to order it and to wait for the delivery, but—ah, it is worth it.” He takes out his polishing cloth and caresses the indicator, wiping micro-specks of dust from the surface.

  “Think of the data I will collect,” he says, and the expression on his face relaxes into something easier, more natural, and it is obvious why he is a physics professor. “The fact is, with the flying, I am not so sure I will do it right. This is the aspect I can be sure—I will do it right.”

  I lean forward to examine the airspeed indicator and it looks like a thermometer set inside a test tube, and there is a crack like wood splitting behind me and someone bellowing, “Look out!” and the field hockey ball hurtling toward me like a comet. Before I know it I am springing back, my arms shielding my head, and the ball bounces off the hang glider instead and lands on the ground with a compact thump.

  “Sorry,” a man yells as he races to beat Milton to the ball. I lower my arms and my hands are shaking with adrenaline and I hide them behind my back.

  “Ach—” Karl’s voice climbs high as a yowling cat and he dives and it hits me that the ball might have damaged the hang glider because I moved out of the way instead of trying to knock it off its path. I rush forward but there is no fixing what happened, and he finishes collecting the pieces of his airspeed indicator and a shard of glass cuts him and draws blood and I feel the stab, the bloom of guilt.

  He tries to meld the largest pieces together and they fall apart when he lets go. He tries again and stares down at his hands. “It is broken,” he says, dumbfounded.

  “Sorry, sorry,” I babble as he juggles combinations of pieces and tries repeatedly to fuse them together, and I have ruined the one thing that he could be sure about and look forward to. I think about the hang glider he labored over, named for the wife who left, and his missing for the son or daughter he never had, and my guilt spreads like a stain and I rub my hands frantically.

  His movements slow and then stop, and he opens his hands to let the pieces drop into his cooler. He zips them in with the sandwiches and stands with his head bowed in mourning over the cooler, which sits leaden and gray as a tombstone on the grass.

  “It is true that I do not have to have it,” he says distantly, like it is someone else reassuring him. “That is that.”

  “Sorry, sorry,” I am still saying, and he shakes his head and says in a stronger voice, “There is no need for sorry. As long as the weather holds up, I will fly without it. We will at last have the chance to see what Carrie and I are made of.”

  So he has been waiting for this for a long time, and my guilt sinks deeper and the damp of it prickles and itches. I wonder what it means, his preoccupation and anticipation and the regret lodged in his throat, and why did his wife leave last year when they were in love?

  It is a question that I know well. I t
ell myself that Walter Lavender Sr. did not want to leave and become lost, but with each passing year of the same waiting and looking, I find that there are more times when I am angry and blame him, or ashamed and blame myself—although, after what Karl said, I am more certain that Walter Lavender Sr. is not trying to stay lost on purpose. It doesn’t seem like Karl’s wife would want to leave, either, and I have to know if she is also lost and needs finding and so I ask, “Where is she?”

  On the wing of the hang glider, her name glistens black as midnight silk.

  “She’s dead,” he says, and the smell of wet stone rises into a stench and my guilt over the broken indicator shrinks against the vast ocean of his, and his is a grief that could swallow me whole like it is nothing.

  He sags against the tree. “Because I forgot about her,” he says, and then the grief and the guilt wash over him and pull him under too.

  I sit on the other side of the tree and shift to make room for Milton, who has roused himself to follow me. He believes that he will fit under the tent of my legs if he wriggles enough, and I lift my legs and let my feet dangle so that he can continue to believe it.

  It doesn’t matter that I can find lost things. There is no looking for Carrie when my search for the Book is over, or ever.

  The unsettled churning in the pit of my stomach intensifies and even though I know Carrie is really gone, I wish that I could go back and catch the ball, and why didn’t I think to deflect it before it was too late?

  Karl has fallen silent and I look around the tree and he is poring over a page covered in formulas with the same hard anguished expression as before. I take a closer look at the page, at the diagrams of hang gliders and wind arrows and the labyrinth of boxes. They look like the jumble of stalls in the flea market and I feel a swing of excitement between my ribs.

  “I know where. You can find a new one,” I say into the tree.

  “I would have to order it. I do not need it,” he says without moving, and I explain about the flea market and the extreme sports tent, and there is a chance that among the boots for paragliding and the helmets for skydiving and the kite pumps for windsurfing, the owner will have an airspeed indicator for hang gliding.

  There is a rustling and Karl appears in front of me and says, “Where?” and I slide my feet off Milton’s back and offer to show him. I can spare the time even if it means starting my search for Ruby Fontaine fifteen or thirty minutes later. The indicator is broken, and I can’t go back to change that but I can ensure that Karl doesn’t miss the tent.

  “Lead the way,” Karl says, handing me the can of paint and slinging the cooler across his back.

  I ask him if he will leave the hang glider here and he says, “The first time I did not lock my bicycle, I saw someone ride it away through the window. No, there is a lab close by that I use to store Carrie.”

  He dismantles parts of the hang glider and folds the wings like an accordion and puts them all in the zippered bag, and he takes one end and hoists it over his shoulder and I take the other and place it on my head like carrying a canoe, and the three of us march single file through the trees to Karl’s lab.

  Karl swipes us into the basement of a building crusted in vines and rusted air-conditioning units, and I step into the dim hall, where the air is still and contained and smelling thickly of morning breath, and it makes me long for the shop before the Book became lost—fresh air and light swirling over the displays and tables and shelves and chandeliers.

  “Not many people use this place anymore,” Karl says, leading us down the hall and unlocking a door. He balances the hang glider bag on his shoulder and turns the knob and pushes the door open with his knee. “It is a perfect place for me to work on Carrie without disruption.”

  He must have forgotten to turn the lights off on his way out because they are already on, and I tread over a Welcome mat and there are three pairs of shoes lined up along it, a pair of slippers and a pair of boots and Milton stuffs his nose into a river shoe that is too small to be Karl’s, and also the webbed toes are hot pink.

  “She was always the adventurous one,” Karl says, nodding at the shoes. “All these interests, hiking and Patagonia and human rights and Marilyn Monroe and so forth. I am just the professor with his nose in the proofs.

  “This way,” he says, and we walk down an aisle of long counters littered with books and pizza boxes and stamped with sticky rings. I step over soda cans and at the end of the counter there is a sink, and next to it, two toothbrushes slotted into a repurposed ice-cream pint.

  We set the bag down on the floor. Karl straightens and rolls his shoulder and gestures down the aisle, and as I walk past him, I notice a cake on the opposite counter. It is small and crammed with candles, and I move closer and see that it’s a plain vanilla cake with a rosette of gray mold growing on the side, which does not make sense because the candles are unlit, the cake untouched.

  “She would be thirty-six,” Karl says, stopping beside me. “I know that she is not here to see, but it is that—it is that when she turned thirty-five, I did not notice.”

  I count the candles, thirty-six of them, and I take in the pile of blankets under the counter and the Marilyn Monroe pop art mug on top of it—as if his wife might suddenly stumble through the door and recognize the things that are hers and know that this room is theirs. I can guess at how much time Karl spends here, under the buzzing of the wan fluorescent lights, just him and Carrie and the depths of his grief, and I have only waded into the shallows.

  Slowly, I ask, “What happened to you and Carrie?”

  He does not understand me and I try again with easier words, kneeling and putting a hand over the folded hang glider.

  “Why?”

  “The hang glider? I have been building it since it came to me in a dream.” He tugs on his turtleneck and looks sideways at me as if giving me permission to laugh and I do not. He kneels next to me.

  “It is the night of the faculty reception at the Cloisters,” he says in a low voice, lifting the hang glider out of the bag. “One month before that, we woke up on sheets that were heavy with red. They were clotted with blood. Bright red.

  “She got up and made a turkey and Swiss sandwich. I went to work, stayed late, to the normal time. Like other things, we did not speak about this one, either. But on the night of the reception, she looked beautiful and happy and had taken extra time for curling her hair and red lipstick. I thought she had recovered from the miscarriage and I was relieved.”

  There was a woman who lost the tube of 99 Pirate she wore the morning of her wedding. From my interviews with her, I know the way a swipe of color can evoke particular emotions and mind-sets. I picture Karl’s wife painting her lips red with a sure hand and it makes me uneasy.

  “In my dream, though, the next parts are different,” Karl says, unfolding the wings across his lap. “I notice and I tell her she looks like Marilyn Monroe. She is drinking, we both are, and late in the night she needs some air. There are prominent professors I want to stay and talk with, but I go outside to find her anyway.

  “It is a balmy night, and it sounds like trees and fast cars. I call her name, no answer. I follow the path. It climbs higher, tracing the Hudson toward the Heather Garden. At last, I see her on the overpass. She is standing on the stone wall with the cars whistling far underneath and the river at her fingertips. Somehow, she slips.

  “It looks easy, graceful. It could have been an accident. I am running toward her and somehow I am running on a cliff above the overpass, running so fast my feet don’t touch the ground. There is a weight on my back, and I look overhead to see that wings have sprouted out of my shoulder blades. I run straight off the edge of the boulder, to save her.”

  Karl finishes reassembling the hang glider and flicks away a leaf stuck to the freshly dried paint. “Tonight I am ready to launch from that same cliff, as I have dreamed. Tonight,” he repeats, thumping the sp
ine of the hang glider. “Together with Carrie, I will soar high above the city lights.”

  He braces himself against the frame and stares past the sail. Standing in the sickly white-green light, in the strange quiet of pizza crusts and long counters and mold roses and unworn shoes, I see something else in his angles, so sharp they could tear through the last of his tattered faith. He wants to make this gesture for both of them, but it is all he can do to stay afloat.

  Carrie is not the one who is lost, not anymore. I can see the way Karl moves without moving and all the ways, big and small, in which he is trying to navigate the grief and the guilt, and this, the hang glider, the biggest one of all.

  Milton returns to me, satisfied that he has sniffed out the mysteries of the room, and sits in front of me to watch for his next task. I think to him, It happens more often than you would think, people losing themselves. He tilts his head up at me, chewing meditatively on whatever he has found. Humans are weird sometimes.

  It is similar to my cases but it is not the same. I cannot find a person who is lost, but Nico has taught me that I can sometimes help them find themselves again. The Book tugs at me and the clock on the wall points to 1:40. The afternoon bell is at 2:30 and if I time my arrival for right before the bell rings, I can meet Ruby Fontaine under the arched doorway when she is on her way out of the school. That might be a more effective plan than creeping through the hallways, looking over my shoulder for the gray woman.

  I look at Karl and see the hollows in his cheeks where he is starting to collapse and sink, the grief rushing in to overtake him.

  I cannot leave him to wander alone with his doubt growing heavier, the holes in his faith getting wider. We have crossed paths on our lonely searches, and if it’s forgiveness he is really looking for, I can find some reassurance for him to hold fast to on his way there, to keep him from drowning.