The Luster of Lost Things

by Sophie Chen Keller

  Ruby looks down, straight through the branches, and my palms begin to sweat as if I am the one with a long way to fall. She kneels and swings herself to the branch below and I put my notebook away. She reaches the lowest branch and hangs under it and then she drops and leaves go flying everywhere. Milton bounds in after her and she pops up in the middle of the flattened pile, throwing an armful of crumbling red and yellow and orange into the air.

  “I saw it thataway, slight right. Follow me,” she says, pointing, but then a couple in complementary fall outfits saunters into us, embracing and posing for their photographer. Ruby hauls me off to the side and Milton stands in the middle of the path and wags his tail.

  “That’s it,” the photographer says. “Tell me why you love her.”

  “One look from her fixes up a shitty day,” the man says, and his grin collides into his ears and the photographer says, “Good, good, give me more.”

  The couple makes a kissing bridge over Milton and he pants at the camera, and I take a moment to study the woman who can fix a bad day. There is no breeze but a shudder runs through her and her hair sweeps back and up like dancing in the wind—A HEADY RUSH OF HAPPINESS, I jot—and I put away my notebook and wonder about her remarkable power, because it’s a tall order to fix up everything that goes wrong.

  Even the Book couldn’t fix everything for me, although I convinced myself that it could fix most things about a bad day when it helped me forget. It could wake a shop and become the twinkle in someone’s day but it could not transform one-sided bonds into living friendships and keep me from being alone. But it will still save the shop and that is the most important thing, and I think again of the customers whose lives we have become a part of, and I think of Flora and José, who depend on their jobs at the shop, and I think of Walter Lavender Sr. and Milton and Lucy, and I wonder how many people are out looking for me now and I hope I can find the last page before they find me.

  The couple separates and we move back onto the path. Milton pads after me and Ruby speeds up, pulling me along so quickly that I feel like I am trapped in a moving vehicle.

  “We should be close . . .” she is muttering to herself, and then she flings out an arm and cuts me off. We come to a halt in front of a building shaped like a gazebo, nestled amid the trees. It is made of rust-red brick striped with ivory, and doorways and windows are cut out of each slanted side but right now warehouse doors are pulled down over them. The ticket booth is shuttered.

  The Carousel is clearly closed, and who knows what Ruby had up her sleeve but I am relieved I don’t have to find out and more than ready to resume the search as planned.

  Ruby slides a pin out of her bun and says, “Cover me.”

  “Why?”

  “What you don’t know won’t kill you,” she says sagely, sliding another pin out of her bun, and she skips forward and kneels in front of a padlocked door.

  An agitated Moo builds up inside me and I swallow and look to Milton for support and he pokes his nose into Ruby’s back—This looks fun—and I scowl.

  “Stop that,” I hiss. She bends a hairpin and inserts it into the lock anyway, and then she takes the other hairpin and pulls it apart. Feeling jumpy, I shove my hands into my pockets and look around, wishing I could whistle, but the people who stray past do not really see us since we are just two kids.

  “It’s in the wrist. Deft. Delicate enough to feel out each pin,” she says, holding the lock with one hand and levering at the keyhole with the second hairpin. When it gets stuck, she rotates her wrist.

  “Click,” she says with satisfaction, and the hairpin sinks into the lock. She stands, rolling the door up with her, and disappears inside with Milton. I hover near the entrance until her hand shoots out and grabs me and yanks.

  She slips away and I focus into the shadows and an inky shape emerges in the center. The lights switch on and I shield my eyes against the stabbing brightness—the sound of gears groaning and wood creaking and then music bubbles out, a lulling organ melody and the rat-a-tat-tat of a drum. In the temporary blindness, my other senses fill in the memory of savory-sweet batter frying and the crisp chew of funnel cake between my front teeth, and the hiss of hot oil and the clink of the ladle when Lucy fishes out the puffed spiral nest.

  The light becomes less painful and I lower my hands and blink a few times.

  “Isn’t it wonderful,” Ruby says, sidling up to me and bobbing on her toes, and I watch the Carousel turn on its axis, the horses outfitted in jewel brights, rising and falling, gentle and peaceful. Entranced, I step forward. On closer inspection, their heads are reared back, nostrils flared, mouths twisted in endless terror, and they revolve against a backdrop of clowns strapped to rockets and cherubs shooting down chicken-goblins, and it is a fantastic candied nightmare.

  “I counted fifty-seven horses the first time Grandfather and Grandmother took me here,” Ruby is saying, trailing me and Milton as we walk along the perimeter of the speeding Carousel. “The first carousel ran on real horses, walking in circles in a pit under the platform . . .”

  Her voice unravels and horses gallop by, faster and faster until they merge into a blur of windy color, and a rush of euphoria sweeps through me and takes me away from myself so that I am no longer just someone with a disorder and without a dad. Ruby accepts these as parts of me, like this is how I am supposed to be. Maybe being Debbie’s sister shaped her; maybe that is how she has always been. But she treats me like a regular kid and I realize I have stopped thinking about what I want to hide and what I want to show. With her, I can simply be someone who already belongs.

  I break into a run and whoop. Grabbing a standing pole, I cycle my legs harder and take a flying leap and I land in a heap on the spinning platform, and Ruby tumbles into me and we dart around the galloping horses and collapse into a chariot and finally haul ourselves onto a horse each, and the world tilts with color and Ruby’s laughter and turns round and round and round, crazy.

  We bray and lean off our horses with our arms outstretched, and the most crazy part is that since I met Lan and started this search—the first one that forced me to truly leave behind the certainty and safety of home—I feel like I have been walking toward this moment, the final movement of some opus of existence in which I already experienced love and fear and anger and loneliness, and along the way I found courage and vulnerability and connection and conviction, and all of it adds up to this—a counterpoint, sweet and true and simple as the calliope march cranking out of the Carousel.

  I look at Ruby’s horse and she is not on it, and I turn to my other side and see her crouching on another horse’s back, preparing to leap off, and my breath hitches when she lets go and jumps. The Carousel shudders as she lands on the stationary carriage.

  “Did you see that?” she yells immediately, looking around for me, and I catch her eye and celebrate the small victory with her, my sunflower seed friend.

  The music plays on and the carousel top spirals, and in no time at all the Carousel is slowing and Ruby says, “That concludes your first lesson in fun.”

  She waits for the spinning in her eyes to slow too, and then she jumps off the platform and releases the handle, and the music comes to a stop.

  Outside, Ruby snaps the lock shut and my ears ring. We glance behind us and everything looks the same, people striding past, and we exchange grins like sharing a secret.

  I have seen secrets pass between other kids, the covert whispers exchanged behind hands like walls, eyes darting and flashing like minnows, nimble and bright, folded notes slipped between loose fingers and birthday invitations tucked inside opaque envelopes. I know how secrets are supposed to look and how they are supposed to sound but I didn’t know how they were supposed to feel. I watched the others hand off invitations like batons, and I wasn’t on any of their teams.

  After Vara Mae, the others were polite but content to let me be unless I spoke first, and when that t
ook too long they didn’t linger to squander their limited recess minutes. A few weeks before my sixth birthday, I watched a boy pass out invitations cut like race cars to some of the other kids and as usual he skipped over me because he didn’t know that I liked race cars too. I thought about my upcoming birthday and considered throwing a party of my own and inviting the entire class, and that would give the others a reason to gather and stay and then they would see that I wanted to know them and that we had things in common, once we got to talking.

  But the more I thought about it, the more nervous I became, and I was uncomfortable being the center of attention and what if no one came for me and I remembered—Stop talking. You’re making it worse—and I decided it wasn’t worth it. My birthdays were little celebrations with Lucy and Milton and Flora and José, splitting an ever-growing maple mille crêpes round with my name looping across the top.

  Now, as Ruby and I exchange grins, I know how secrets are supposed to feel, like cinching a drawstring and the two of us pulled closer together by our shared knowledge, and suppressing an urge to laugh until my sides hurt.

  “Hey, kids—you two all right there?”

  The gravity inside my body cuts out. I see the dark gleam of a wide belt, pouches and holsters and a radio crackling with code words and static, and I realize it is exactly what cannot happen—the person who caught us is a police officer.

  Terrified, I twist my head away to hide my face and Ruby elbows me in the ribs, hard, and says, “Yes, Officer,” smiling with all of her teeth as I gasp for breath, thinking, Don’t look this way—the search is not over—I cannot be found.

  The policeman looks from me to her and says, “Well, okay then. I saw you two huddled over here and wanted to check to make sure you weren’t lost. Run along—” and suddenly Milton gags and a brown lump plops onto the sidewalk and I pray that the policeman did not notice, and then Milton burps out a pool of grassy foam.

  It trickles toward the policeman’s shoe, impossible to ignore. He takes a second and harder look at Milton and then at me. “Hold on.” His eyes flit up to inspect something in the corner of his mind. His hand creeps toward the radio on his belt and I cannot allow this to happen, not now, not when I am one page away, and I seize Ruby’s hand and we bolt.

  Around a curve, I send Milton into the bushes and I take one tree and Ruby takes another and I hold a finger to my lips and we stand as straight and narrow as we can and even narrower when the policeman strides past. I count and when I reach two hundred Mississippi, I peek around the tree and go light-headed with relief and send Ruby and Milton the all-clear.

  Ruby hoofs it down the path, and Milton is thoughtful in hanging back next to me except he runs at a slant to stay close and ends up pushing me off the path. We catch up with Ruby and a raindrop shatters against my temple and it is cold and startling.

  “The last page,” I say, breathing heavily, thinking, Before I am out of time.

  “Mail time,” Ruby says in response.

  21

  Ruby tugs on my elbow and we continue running, and the patter of the rain weaves in and out of our footsteps.

  Fifth Avenue is a knot of umbrellas and traffic, and rubber tires sizzle on wet pavement. Rain courses through my hair and rolls down my nose. Ruby steps off the curb and her bun seems to have absorbed the rain and expanded, and she bounces on her toes and stretches her arm out as far as it will go but most of the taxis are already whisking other people away.

  “Finally,” Ruby huffs as a taxi pulls over in front of us. We sprint toward it and just as I reach for the door handle, a man lunges forward and wrenches the door open and backs into me and I get a mouthful of wet jacket and cologne and something else salty-sharp. His heels crush my toes and Ruby rams into his hip like a bull and her eyes are flame-bright but he releases my toes without noticing; he ushers in a jangling woman and swats her bottom and she grabs his shirt and they topple into the backseat.

  “Rude! R-U-D-E—” Ruby smacks the window to punctuate each letter but they do not hear her and the window fogs and the light turns green. When the next taxi pulls up in front of us, we rush the door with abandon and Ruby snaps her address. Milton bounds in and I slam the door soundly shut behind him, and we are sealed into a gray cocoon and the only sounds are the rain drumming against the roof and the head-nodding hip-hop coming from the radio.

  “Over thirteen thousand taxi medallions issued and they practically evaporate into the storm clouds,” Ruby says, slouching into her crossed arms. Her limbs spring apart and she whirls around and it is a good thing Milton has chosen to perch in the middle seat, big and content and unflappable. “It’s time! You’re about to get all your pages and then yooooou’re safe.” She scissors her arms like an umpire.

  Some of my searches take minutes to solve, the ending presenting itself immediately and unexpectedly, and other cases take longer and the ending is slow and I can see it coming, like the half-dollar submerged in a frozen pond. I looked into the bottom as the days warmed and the ice thinned, anticipating the end. I have one more page to go in my search for the Book and I have that nervous-full feeling in my chest of being on the verge of finding, a silver-blood taste in my lungs like running too hard.

  I ask Ruby who she gave the last missing page to.

  “Our mailman.” She picks her nails and won’t look at me. “I gave it to him yesterday because he—he wasn’t whistling. I passed him in the mail room and he was ashy and out of breath, sort of hugging the boxes.”

  The taxi driver slams on her brakes and dumps Milton onto the floor, and I narrowly miss bashing my head into the divide. The driver bangs on her horn and curses with vigor and keeps the horn depressed for good measure as the offending car clears the intersection.

  “Look, I haven’t known him long but something was wrong with him,” Ruby continues when the driver releases the horn, and she stops picking her nails and looks at me. “So even though he said, ‘There y’are, Mizz Ruby-angelo,’ like usual, he looked like he should be in bed with someone making him chicken soup, and he wouldn’t listen to me when I told him that. Grandmother said to him, You’re a real catch, what’re you still doing on your own, and he just laughed. I thought the picture could scare him into finding someone to make chicken soup for him. Tough love,” she adds helpfully.

  I twirl a finger through Milton’s fur and gather more information for the finding. “Will he give it back?” I ask.

  “He’ll make sure you get your page, you’ll see when you meet him—he’s the nicest man. That’s why Grandmother’s started saving cheesy biscuits for him. He checks on Debbie already.” Ruby bunches her mouth and a wispy whistle escapes. “He whistles to her and she about explodes with excitement, and Grandmother was saying how Marybeth Gallagher slipped and fractured her leg three weeks ago and couldn’t call for help, and he buzzed her apartment like she told him to whenever she had a package, and when she didn’t answer the doorman went up and found her wadded up on the floor, and it’s a good thing he comes around each day with a smile and a care.”

  That is more than I can say for the shop’s new mailman, and instead of a face all I can conjure up is the sound of the mailbox closing and the snick of the envelope opening and Lucy turning as pale as the letter paper.

  “Sounds like a con man,” the driver says.

  “Who asked you?” Ruby says, but the driver has bumped up the volume and is stomping her foot and flapping her arms and pouting in the mirror.

  The light turns green and she lowers the volume and puts both hands on the steering wheel to concentrate on her turn, looking out of the windshield, looking as hard as I am, as anyone is, and I know Lucy is out there too, looking for me, and I silently tell her not to worry; it is mail time and not long to go until I can return home, and I will have the whole Book with me and the shop will wake and people will come. Even when it rained, the shop was packed, people closing their umbrellas and squeezing forwar
d until no one else could fit into the door, and they dug their spoons into the blueberry corn bread trifles I recommended to soak up the wet cold in their bones.

  The windshield wipers swish and fat splotches of rain distort and worm their way up toward the roof and the driver curls her lip in disgust. She jerks the wheel toward the curb and Ruby careens into me and I am sucked into the door. She pops up none the worse for wear and says brightly, “We’re back.”

  I push the door open and stick my head into the rain and hastily collapse back into the car to avoid clipping a speeding bicycle. The door opens again and the doorman’s face appears under the dome of a dripping umbrella.

  “Welcome back,” he says, and flinches when Milton leaps out of the cab and lands in a puddle with a messy splash.

  “Mail’s getting delivered?” Ruby asks.

  “Not yet,” the doorman says. “You’re not the first to ask. Mrs. Gallagher called down, your grandmother, but so far no one knows anything. I’m saying it looks like weather delays.”

  “Maybe,” Ruby says dubiously. She pans over the gray gloom, the cars jammed at the mouth of the street, beads of people sliding up and down the sidewalk. “In that case, we should check farther up.”

  We borrow the doorman’s umbrella and totter out onto the sidewalk, crammed under our portable roof with an indecisive Milton tangling his four legs with our four legs. A dissonant symphony rises up from the clumped cars, horns blasting and muffled shouting and rain. People clomp around us in boots with their heads down, intent on ignoring their leaky surroundings, and I look around to find the target of the honking, a mail truck not really parked in a curbside space, its backside still sitting in the lane. A middle-aged man, compact and dressed in a blue uniform, is facing the side of the truck and holding himself up against it with his cap falling into his face.