The Luster of Lost Things

by Sophie Chen Keller

  I nod and she stops under an awning that extends all the way to the curb and says, “This is it,” and a doorman pushes open the golden grates of the double doors.

  “Good afternoon, Miss Fontaine and guests.”

  Milton drags his bottom along the red carpet inside the entrance and the doorman scowls and pulls at the turkey skin under his throat. Milton does not notice and he flicks his paws and his hips sway as he ambles ahead into the lobby, a quiet hall with shiny wood floors and paintings in gilded frames and chairs with curved arms and legs like thrones, and rising up in the middle is a marble platform overflowing with flowers both real and sculpted.

  At the end of the lobby there is an elevator bank. We step into the wood and warmth of the elevator and ride up, and Ruby unlocks the door to 1442 and Milton pushes past our legs and keels over at our feet like a round-bellied ship. I step over him and look around the apartment, and I don’t know what to make of it.

  I have seen enough homes to know how different and hard to predict they can be. There are always places to sit and sleep and hold things like books and plates, and it is also true that in more cases than not, the homes I visit are in some state of disarray, because that’s when things are more likely to slip through and become lost. But besides that, I have no expectations.

  Sometimes, people live in their homes and the homes soak up some of who they are, like the big-game hunter who lined the hall with framed animal heads like portraits of deceased family members. Other times, people’s homes are a contradiction, like the palm reader who had a taste for minimalism and white although she wore swathes of mystical jingling fabrics and a bindi that looked like the eye on a peacock tail.

  Ruby’s home is full of open space and windows that look like walls and plump damask sofas and my feet sink into the carpet. The flat surfaces are decorated with vases and asymmetric bowls and the kitchen space to our right is made of glass and steel. Then there are the other details, and they are the ones that render me speechless.

  “Forty-five degrees,” Ruby says from behind me. “Don’t mess with the angles or else Debbie will have an uncontrollable fit when they get back.”

  I guess that she is talking about the wall of silver cabinets. There are maybe twenty cabinets in total, and every door is cracked open to the same angle, lined up in perfect gleaming rows like soldiers. All the drawers are pulled halfway open, exposing their insides, knives and cutlery and tubes of wrap and scissors. Cookie tins and mailing boxes are scattered throughout the kitchen and living room, standing or lying on the floor or leaning against furniture legs.

  “Stay,” I whisper in Milton’s ear, and he sighs and slumps onto the floor behind the door. I suck in my stomach and take cautious steps like the floor might detonate, and Ruby flounces past me.

  “What is it like?” I indicate around us, careful not to disturb the cabinets or the drawers or the minefield of square containers.

  Ruby cracks up and intones, “Welcome to the Twilight Zone.” Her bun stops bobbing and she taps her cheekbone. “Here’s my first memory of Debbie,” she says. “Mama and Daddy bringing her home. She’d been at the hospital for ages and still had some tubes coming out of her, but I could see her fist poking out of the blankets. She was just the smallest thing but I could tell she wanted me to hold her hand. Sister telepathy. I just wanted to tell her I would take good care of her but Daddy said, No touching yet, and Mama took her into the other room with Grandfather and Grandmother. They shut the door and I had to wait outside, wishing I could go in and get Teddy.”

  She thrusts out her chin. “Anyway, I kept my promise. I know how to take care of her now. I help with the feeding tube. You have to take the button off right or acid bubbles out of the hole the doctors cut in her stomach.”

  My belly button stings and I forget and walk into a side table and the cookie tin propped against it tips over, and I look down to see a rotund snowman with a carrot nose. I right the fallen tin and check to make sure that it’s positioned the same way, and I continue making my way across the floor.

  “I’ll learn how to make things better for her. I’ll be an artist and a doctor. It might take a long time to go to medical school and do a residency and pass the board, though, so right now I’m mastering the art of patience like Grandfather suggests. . . . Get that switch, will you?”

  She points to my left. A spotlight above the coffee table turns on. “That light needs to be on. How’d you lose that book anyway?” she asks, abruptly changing the subject. “That’s dumb.”

  I clench my teeth. “Taken,” I correct, feeling cross.

  “Touchy subject,” Ruby says.

  “The shop died. If I do not find the pages. It will close.” I can’t bring myself to elaborate on the next part, after the shop is closed forever, and what will we do and where will people find their everyday magic and where will Walter Lavender Sr. find his way back to, if the shop he knows Lucy planned to open is no longer there?

  “I didn’t know,” Ruby says. “That’s serious.” She touches the tasseled side of a hanging tapestry, looking hard at the birds of paradise. “If it was stolen it was the thief’s fault. I hate thieves.” The word sizzles behind her teeth and she spits it out.

  In the hallway, she checks the door on the linen closet. “This door has to be closed. Come on, my room’s over here. We’ll get your page.”

  She tosses herself onto the bed and I breathe easier and allow the weight to seep back into my feet.

  “Is it hard?” I cross the room and perch at the foot of the bed, sitting on my hands.

  She retrieves her art journal and looks through it, fidgets with the pages. “Like I said, she’s an angel. She’s pure. She finds joy in the stuff I don’t even see. Rain drumming on the window. Holding hands. The veins on an orchid. Smiling when someone else smiles. She reminds me that I wish I could do that—she notices what matters and not the other stuff. She just can’t eat the same way.”

  “You notice things,” I say, pointing at her journal and a sketch of a mourning costume, the oversized brim of the bonnet undulating and beckoning, shrouded in mystery. She snaps the journal shut.

  “Just death.” She jumps out of the bed. “Now, what you came here for . . .” She skips to her dressing table, white and curved with an oval mirror like a fairy tale. On it is a gold box shaped like a heart and a model sailboat with a tall triangle sail trimmed in lights. She picks up the boat and turns on a switch and the sail lights up and the gold box shaped like a heart lights up at the same time, even though the gold box is not trimmed in lights.

  “It turned out pretty well, didn’t it? Grandfather and I built it for the Light the Night Boat Race—that’s the fund-raising event tonight at Conservatory Water, raises awareness for children with mental disorders.”

  She swaps the boat for the gold box and the slow weight of expectation drags me down like wet sand. She plunks herself onto the bed and opens the lid and unfolds a sheet of paper with ragged edges.

  “I don’t want to let this go,” she says, studying the picture and chewing her lip. She looks away and pushes the sheet of paper at me and says, “But it’s yours.”

  I take it and I know that it is a page from the Book without having to turn it over and look—it throws a spray of sparkling light against the wall like a gift pendant unwrapped and held up to the sun, and I tilt it to the right and to the left as I inspect it and of course Ruby would choose to keep the second page of the Book: the girl free as the wind and searching for adventure, thundering in from above on storm clouds that entwine with her cloak to form the sky, the snow, the sleet.

  I flatten the page against the wall and iron out the wrinkles with the bottom of my fist and fit it back where it belongs inside the Book, and now the only missing page is the sixth one. I close the Book and the sparkling light goes out. Ruby stares into her lap and her hands are inert as dried butterflies.

  “Thank
you,” I say solemnly, to fit the mood.

  As I wait for her to bounce back and tell me where the sixth page is, I map out the possibilities and there are three of them—lost, given away, and sold, which I don’t think is likely, and then Ruby says, “Okaaaaay—so—don’t freak out, but I have good news and bad news.”

  She gives me a stricken look and I think that must be it—she must have lost the last page—and she draws in a large breath and says in a rush, “I gave the other two pages away and the good news is I know where to look for one of them today and the bad news is we have to wait until Sunday for the other one—it’s with this old chess master I used to play at the Chess and Checkers House, Center Sammie—I ran into her after the little birdman gave me the pages, and I didn’t know they were yours and it seemed like the right thing to do at the time—she got choked up just looking at the page and Grandfather and I hadn’t stopped by the Chess and Checkers House in a lot of Sundays—but anyway, it’s not really bad news because we’ll just wait and on Sunday, we’ll go and get—”

  I tap her arm and she stops talking, her face alight with determined energy, and it is hard to picture her playing chess, her leg jiggling under the table, the chess board shaking. I show her the seventh page, Sammie’s page, already reunited with the Book.

  “Oh,” Ruby says, losing steam. “Great. Just the good news, then.”

  The front door slams shut and she raises her head and says, “They’re home early. It was probably one of the better visits.”

  Plastic bags rustle and keys drop onto the counter and then comes a stomp . . . stomp. . . . Ruby’s oval mirror vibrates. Stomp! The ponderous stomping pauses somewhere in the hall and I look at Ruby.

  “That’s Debbie,” she supplies. “She likes to know where her feet are. Hey, Deb.” She slips off the bed and says, “Walter, in case you were going to, don’t even think about crossing your ankles.”

  I imagine my legs as railroad tracks and glue them to the side of the bed as Ruby opens the door and kneels with her arms open. A tangle of limbs pummels the air and a body barrels into her, and Debbie lifts her face and it ripples with laughter, naked, elated.

  Ruby hums the opening bars of a Van Halen song and Debbie collapses onto the floor and her mouth peels apart and at first it just sounds like keening and then I notice the breaks, how they repeatedly fall somewhere around Ruby’s breaks, and her fists punching the floor like fleshy drumsticks. Her eyes roll around and come to a rest on me, and they are a transparent lens—there is no filtering, no layer of processing and judging and concluding. She simply takes me in and beams at what she sees, and it is impossible to not smile back.

  “This is Walter. I met him at school,” Ruby says, and Debbie pushes back onto her feet and stomps away. Ruby’s grandmother appears in the doorway and inclines her head.

  “How do you do,” she says, combing her fingers through the fur of her collar. I wave. “It’s a treat to see a friend of Ruby’s visiting.”

  “Grandmother,” Ruby says. “It’s not my fault the other kids aren’t very interesting. I see them enough during the day, five days a week, thirty-six weeks a year.”

  “I think you like being difficult,” Ruby’s grandmother says, and Ruby gives her a wicked smile. Ruby’s grandmother turns to me and says, “Make yourself comfortable, Walter— Oh, pardon me, not so fast, Debbie.” She hurries past Ruby’s room and Ruby eases the door shut and rests her cheek against the wood.

  “Where do I look?”

  Ruby bats the question away with a flip of her wrist. “I’ll look with you. I’m the one who gave them away, I should help you find them. Plus two is faster than one—how long have you been looking?”

  “All day. I know it is crazy. To miss all of school. But it is the one crazy thing—”

  “You’re not serious. You’re twelve and that’s the only crazy thing you’ve ever done? It isn’t even crazy. You are so boring,” Ruby says, and her head is pulled back by the weight of the drama and her giant bun.

  “It . . . is not?”

  “It is not acceptable!” Ruby barks. She grabs my hand and yells, “Get up, Milton. We have work to do.” Yanking me along, she rushes to the front door and rouses Milton just as her grandfather is attempting to enter.

  I expect him to ask her where she is going and who I am like Lucy would but instead he says, “Your shoes. Remember to put on your shoes. As the Egyptians donned sandals of papyrus to protect their feet from the scorching sand, so, too, must we shield ourselves from the Manhattan sludge.”

  I hesitate, and in case I am supposed to answer the unspoken question, I clear my throat and start to tell him, “I am Wal—” and Ruby shushes me.

  “They trust me. Debbie needs most of the attention and I need my freedom.” She squeezes us around his wool-encased midsection and flutters her hands at her slippers. “Did you know the ballet shoe was perfected by Bill Nye? His toe shoe delivers an upward force to counterbalance the downward force of gravity to support dancing en pointe.”

  The elevator dings. Her grandfather rumbles with genial interest, “You don’t say. The Science Guy.”

  20

  Ruby steers us into Central Park, and that is where she loses us too.

  “How does anyone ever find what they want in here? What I need is a way to see where we’re at,” she grumbles.

  “I can help. Where is the page?” I ask her.

  “We’re not looking for the page right now. We’re looking for the Carousel and fixing your grossly well-behaved ways.”

  I don’t know what she means but I do not want to do whatever that is if it doesn’t lead me to the last missing page, and I feel a clench of worry and shake my head. No, I start to say, and Nothing could be more important, and Let’s go now, but she takes me by the sleeve and pulls me along the path.

  “We have to wait for mail time to look for the page. How dumb would it be to sit around and do nothing while we wait?”

  I think about it and her logic is not wrong and when I don’t respond she says, “Smart, for a boy,” and considers the trees around us with a glint in her eye that makes me queasy.

  “You can help by finding a good climbing tree,” she says.

  I have no desire to climb a tree; as far as I know, the only thing worth considering when leaving the ground is the risk of falling, arms and legs and spines crunching like the twigs under my feet. I inspect a trunk, the bark scabbing off in hard platelets, and I am not sure how to assess the tree for climbing potential. Trees are for shelter and for storing the secrets and trinkets of time, and they are not for climbing to high places.

  Ruby halts under a tree with branches that begin above her head.

  “A mature beech. Stout branches,” she mutters, stepping back to better eyeball the tree. “Lateral. Balanced, evenly spaced.”

  To me, it looks like it hadn’t been able to decide whether to grow up or out and so it sent an army of branches to do both. Ruby takes a running leap at the lowest branch and manages to skim the bark. She sizes up the tree again and puts her hands on her hips and rises to the balls of her feet.

  “This one will do the trick. You’re tall enough to get up on your own but give me a boost first. Once we’re up there, I can see which way we need to go.”

  The skin under my wrist withers and the veins throb. “Pie. High.” I put my hands down and back away and Ruby rolls her eyes and throws up her hands.

  “Just give me a boost, then,” she says.

  Grudgingly, I help her up and she grips the branch and walks up the side of the trunk. She flips onto the first branch and Milton snuffles around the trunk for squirrels and gophers, and I breathe in and the breath whistles through my nose like a plaintive wind. She stands and reaches for the second branch and my legs feel feverish. I decide to stop watching her and collect leaves instead, gathering them into a pile under her just in case.

 
Milton romps unannounced a few times through the pile, each time stopping and looking back at me, panting, to show how enjoyable it is. Despite his efforts to entice me, I continue building up the pile and then I run out of leaves in the immediate vicinity and there is nothing left to do but to look up. My gaze travels up the tree, jumping from branch to branch, and Ruby is perched like a bird at the top, utterly unafraid, surveying the small world fanned out before her.

  It does not make sense. With everything that Ruby has seen and experienced with her parents and sister, I would expect some kind of avoidance response. That was the term the zookeeper used when we found Jerry the penguin in the walk-in freezer where the zoo kept beef shanks and horse heads for the lions. After the zoo posted the Lost flyers, they received calls from people who had seen Jerry paddling for freedom up the Narrows and various other bodies of water, including the swimming pool at the top of The Standard hotel.

  Instead of starting with the leads, I visited the zoo’s penguin exhibit to see if Jerry left any clues behind. I looked past the penguins doddering around on their rocks and zooming through the water tank, and I saw the blockade in front of the cave entrance, the edges and cracks slathered in a glowing ice like cement.

  “We’re renovating it,” the zookeeper said. “We had to carry Jerry out of there. He’s shy.” I learned that Jerry became noticeably distressed when there were too many people around him and too much noise; his habit was to stay in the cave, away from the crowds, until closing time, and I couldn’t imagine him bobbing amid blustering boats and ferries loaded with passengers. He would be somewhere cool, and dark, and quiet.

  We opened the freezer and the zookeeper moved some meat around and there Jerry was, rested and round as a beach ball.

  “Why didn’t I think of that,” he said. “He had a scare a while back with some kids being rowdy, throwing stuff at him. Avoided crowds since.”

  Remembering that now, I feel a surge of empathy for Jerry; I had done the same thing, after all. Fear and avoidance—but not Ruby, and not only is she unafraid of brushes with death, but in an unforeseeable twist, she is fascinated by them and seeks them out. She is defiant and daring and she has something to prove, and so she taunts, and she moves closer. I open my notebook—DEFIES DEATH BY STARING HIM IN THE EYE.