The doorman opens the door for me and I walk into the lobby hallway, where faint classical music pipes in from secret speakers, and I find Ruby sitting on the floor in the corner, behind an armchair. She is surrounded by scrunched paper, and Milton gazes at her intently with his edges tinged in paint, the tips of his ears and nose and the straggly hairs under his belly, like he is starting to turn into a rainbow.
“Stop staring, Milton. I’ll tell Walter on you.”
Milton huffs and paws at the carpet.
“Yes, yes, I know, it's done,” she insists, smudging a line.
They have not noticed me yet. I study the drawing over her shoulder, her portrait of the city on a dark and stormy night. Her version is wild, like the original—with echoes of her own frenetic energy, barely constrained by the paper, and her theatric flair in the details. There’s the stormy sky, and there’s the city beneath, and there’s the water—and that is where the picture changes.
In the original, the sky was enormous and the water was a black mirror along the bottom, a continuation of the dark city. In Ruby’s version, the water—the reflection in it—is the centerpiece, and it erupts with a glorious riot of color, fire-reds and bottomless-blues, pinks like salmon and coral and clear greens like glass. It is pure brightness, brimming with verve, and it is like she knows, now, what the glamour and allure of that is too.
I look at the page and I am not looking at a city of the lost; this is also a city of the living.
I tell Ruby it is perfect, and she screams and swings around with her paintbrush raised. I hold up the Book. She recovers from the shock and says, “About time,” and then I can’t see anything because Milton is desperately licking my face. My sleeves are muddy so I drag the bottom of my fleece across my eyes and when I open them, Ruby has climbed onto her feet and is holding out the picture with a rare bashfulness.
“For you,” she says.
And so, her page completes the Book. It also makes the first gift I have been given from someone who is not Lucy, and she clears her throat and I do not have the chance to tell her this.
“Don’t thank me yet. You have to see if it works first,” she says.
The doorman is too eager to flag down a cab. Milton gets stuck in the door and the doorman hauls him up with uncanny strength and slings him onto the backseat. I roll down the window.
“Let me know how it turns out. Good luck!” Ruby skips alongside the cab as it pulls away and shows me crossed fingers, and the engine splutters and the cab carries Milton and me to the end of a long day indeed.
The taxi stops outside the shop and we squeeze our way out because there is a pole in front of the door and the door can’t open all the way before bumping up against it. A damp flyer is taped to the pole, and I can tell before reading it that it is a Lost flyer. They have a distinct look, different from flyers that advertise garage sales and fund-raisers and performances. HAVE YOU SEEN and MISSING and REWARD, they proclaim, like a crime has been committed, and the colors are alarming, the block capitals ringing with shrill insistence.
I tear off the flyer instinctively and look down at it, and I see my own face looking back at me, the same picture I saw on the library computer, and this time I can take a closer look. I am posing for a school portrait, arranged like a starched shirt with my shoulders angled and my hands folded, and the backdrop is crimson and my face reveals nothing. Next to the picture is a block of text that describes me in letters and numbers. Will not respond verbally to questioning, the description notes, and May be accompanied by 100 lb golden retriever.
The sign on the shop says CLOSED but the lights are on and Lucy is pacing, appearing in the window then the door and back to the window, her eyebrows knitted in a fierce V like they are in the funeral pictures, and a reddish-brown stirring spoon is clenched in her hands and Flora and José sit at a table, keeping vigil. I do not have to knock. As I approach, the door flies open and orange light bathes the doorstep. Lucy envelops me in her arms and sobs into my hair and it smells like pumpkin pies and a melting release in the fibers of my body, the feeling of coming home at last.
“You’re here, you’re here. You’re home,” she weeps, and Flora and José surround us with their arms so that we stand together like one tree.
Over their shoulders, the case for the Book stands bare and wrong, and there is nothing as heavy as the empty space of a lost thing except maybe the leaden air of the dead shop. Lucy presses her hands into my cheeks and shoulders and arms and when she has convinced herself that I am really here, she releases me and I walk to the case and pull the rubber band off the Book and lay the Book down on the velvet lining, and I open it to the wintry night and there is a sharp intake of wind at once pained and relieved like a baby’s first breath. Lucy presses the door shut under her palms.
“Good dog,” she murmurs to Milton, depositing the caramel stirring spoon onto the floor. “And you, young man—where on God’s great earth have you been?”
I take a breath.
“I missed you,” I say, and from the look on her face, no one could have said the words more perfectly.
26
I wiggle my toes. The sun falls across my eyelids and turns the space under them rust red.
“Mmm.” I snuggle deeper into the covers.
Finally rising some minutes later, I put on a sweater and socks and brush my teeth and tighten the laces on my high-tops. I sail down the stairs, which creates something of a ruckus, and I can feel the slap and thump of Milton behind me.
Ping! goes the oven when I enter the shop, and the refrigerators hum and the ground vibrates. I grin at a tray of steamed treacle sponge cooling on the counter, and they sit in motionless golden rounds and dread gathers in my cheeks and my grin wavers. I slink toward the counter and bend close until I can see the sides of the little golden cakes swelling and contracting, breathing with the even, steady rhythm of sleep. I suppress a cheer and creep away so that I do not wake the slumbering sponges.
Lucy is sitting at a table with a steaming mug and a half-eaten tart. “Good morning, darling,” she says. “I spoke to the landlord earlier. He’s drawing up the new lease. Try this and tell me what you think.” She pushes the plate forward. “Espresso mousse, crushed walnut graham cracker crust, cranberry compote on top.”
I slice off a piece with the edge of the fork, making sure to get some of everything in one bite. As I chew, the espresso mousse washes the gritty bits of sleep from the surface of my brain and I hear something in my ear—very small, very curious—and I look down at my shoulder and a vol-au-vent mouse waves.
I watch it scamper down my arm and leap from the table to the top of a chair. It runs down the chair and a clean sugared breeze rushes in from nowhere and everywhere—the fireplace, the high ceiling, the jeweled displays, the arched kitchen doorway—pushing the mouse forward, faster, and it races across the shop and everywhere it passes the floor ripples like a lake of liquid stars and the air turns bright and clear as the ringing of a bell, something lighter, even, than happiness.
I beam through a mouthful of mousse and swallow, and the dream I had last night flickers through my head.
A red-and-white plane—single engine, four seats, a Cessna 172. A shrinking shoreline, an ocean below—a disappearing fin. Walter Lavender Sr. in the pilot’s seat, Lucy next to him, me in a backseat—Milton’s seat empty because he is squeezing onto my lap.
“I came up with the idea after waking one morning. I knew I’d had the most wonderful dream, but I couldn’t, for the life of me, remember what it was,” Lucy says, and her new dessert also reminds me of a thought I had, just yesterday.
I take out my notebook and flip through it, searching for the entry.
AT THE END, A DREAM WORTH WAKING FOR, I had written as I watched Sammie and Roman, and I tell Lucy about it now, reading my observation aloud to her.
“What else did you think of?” she says.
>
I look at the next entry and read, “Rainy day reflections.”
“I’ve been trying to figure out how to keep the gluten-free gingerbread cake from drying out,” she says, taking the fork from me and scooping up some mousse. “What if we had a cloud following it, raining simple syrup? It would also be good for gazing at and contemplating.” She passes the fork back to me and says, “That is exactly what I’ve been looking for.” She taps my notebook, smiling broadly.
Before, when she looked at my notebook, there was a subtle shift in her eyes as she was reminded of the unbridgeable distance that remained between us. Now, with the last gap bridged, she sees something else in my notebook: inspiration, and a new way to grow closer. Junker would be pleased; the disjointed thoughts I hoarded and deemed pointless were finally being taken out and shared and put to good use.
She runs a hand down her apron and stands. “The lava cupcakes should be done cooling. Are we ready to frost them?”
I know she has been waiting for me to wake before piping the frosting because the task calms and restores me at the end of each week. After coming so close to losing the shop, I thought I would never want to voluntarily leave again, but now that I am back and the shop is too, there is something I want to do and it isn’t staying in the kitchen and frosting cupcakes. Even though it is my home, and it tells the story of who I am and where I came from and what I love, I made it my refuge and quietly, at some point, it became my prison, only by then I didn’t see it that way.
I tell Lucy that I will be back before the shop opens and Milton races ahead and places his paw against the door and concentrates on it, because that is what precedes the door opening. I push the door open and he removes his paw and follows me out, and we take the train to see Ruby.
“Top of the morning to you,” Ruby says over a series of muffled thumping sounds when she sees me, and she holds the door with one hand and her hair with the other, and she trades wide yawns with Milton.
“As the Irish say,” finishes her grandfather, who is on his hands and knees, looking under a table, and Ruby’s grandmother and Debbie are also under the table although they are drumming on the carpet with wooden spoons and don’t appear to be looking for anything.
Debbie tries to drum on the underside of the table and hits her grandfather with her spoon, and he makes a bongo noise and she howls with laughter.
Ruby rises onto her toes. “So? Did it work?”
“Come to the shop,” I say, and my excitement says it all and she jumps and squeals and looks at her grandfather, and he nods and peeks into a cabinet.
“Wouldn’t miss it,” Ruby says, still holding her hair. “Just need to find my hair elastic and we’ll be ready to go.”
“It’s not in the kitchen,” her grandfather says, pushing his hands into his knee to lever himself to his feet.
“My first rule of finding,” I say, tapping my wrist, and Ruby lowers the hand that is holding her hair.
“There you are,” she scolds the hair elastic, like it is a misbehaved charge that has snuck away, and she yanks it off her wrist and wraps her hair into its giant bun. Her grandfather reappears in pants that are lavender with turkeys on them in honor of the visit and the season, and we say good-bye to Ruby’s grandmother and Debbie and pile out the door to a drumroll send-off.
As we approach the shop, a bell trills and José pulls up on his delivery bike and the sticker on his helmet says, Proud Parent of an Honor Student.
“You should’ve seen me flying down here after Lucy called,” he says, taking off his helmet and wiping his forehead. He places his hand on the doorknob and his mouth stretches until I think I can almost see a glimmer of tooth. “Let’s see how it looks, man.”
He pulls the door open and we enter, and I see that Lucy has finished piping the frosting and the cupcakes are bubbling away in their display. Ruby’s bun stirs as all around us the shop lifts and the flavor of the air brightens with sweet ruffling breezes of lightness and goodness.
José heads into the kitchen after our handshake and I guide Ruby and her grandfather through the shop, pointing out the chip in the floor where I dropped a can of preserved lemon and the lazy Susan I painted with Lucy and the wooden giraffe Lucy picked up in South Africa, and Ruby is astonished to see three mice jumping double Dutch with licorice ropes and her grandfather exclaims over the tray of sleeping treacle.
One of the cakes startles awake and, with a flounce of irritation, squirts him with syrup, and Ruby snorts and collapses into giggles until he picks up a cake and it squirts her too. Lucy comes out of the kitchen and I introduce her to them before we sit, fanned out at the table near the Book in its case.
“Next weekend,” I begin, folding and unfolding the corner of a notebook page and thinking about the birthday party I never had, “we could have a. Party for the Book. Coming back.”
It would be a way to get the word out that the Book has been found and the shop saved, and a way to celebrate the people who have helped me on my search, and the last one is mostly for me—a way to bring people into my world, because I am starting to believe that I don’t have to be the only one in it.
“You surprise me, Walter Lavender,” Ruby roars. She opens her art journal and turns it toward me so I can watch her sketch out extravagant ideas—a five-piece band, a raft of balloons as big as the shop—and I suggest we stick to posting Found flyers. Lucy catches my eye and grasps my hand under the table, squeezing as tightly as she can until our fingers start to slip, and then she lets go.
The week seems to fly by with the weight of the missing Book lifted, and maybe things look a little different after you come close to losing them but the shop seems even brighter than before, like everything is new—even Flora, who has taken to wearing the apron Lucy gave her instead of her old blue gingham. She dropped a spoonful of red wine reduction onto her lap when the croissants inflated at her station on Monday morning, blowing buttery flakes into the air like leaves, and after she switched aprons she learned that yellow gingham wasn’t so bad after all.
The day before the party I make a recording of myself telling the rest of the story that I left To Be Continued, and I abandon it in a distant moldy corner of the 6 train so that Junker might scoop it up during one of his junk-gathering expeditions. The next morning, we receive five inches of snow and it blankets the sidewalk in loose powder like confectioners’ sugar because it is too cold for sticking. Before the shop opens, Ruby and I put out plastic utensils and paper hats and festive napkins and Lucy and Flora hang streamers and José inflates balloons, and then he locks himself in the bathroom to figure out his bow tie while the rest of us sit and wait at a decorated table.
My excitement grows with the line outside and I press my face into the glass and crane my neck and still I can’t see where the line ends with all the people waiting in it, here for the desserts, mostly, but I hope that dotted throughout, waiting to be seen, are the people from my journey, and that they are here for me.
We do not have to wait for long. Lucy gets up to turn over the sign and the door tinkles as she pushes it open and gloved hands reach out to open it the rest of the way. People stomp their feet and fluff hat-matted hair and trill with excitement as the shop fills.
For the first hour, I am kept busy restocking and wiping and greeting and rearranging. I notice empty cups piling up around a bookcase and go over to harvest them, and I straighten and stretch my back and with a pleasant jolt I see Nico standing nearby, chatting to Lan. The buttons on her coat are shaped like cat heads and most of them are broken in half. Nico glances up and sees me and extends a fist.
“Little man,” he says, and I bump my fist into his.
“No backpack,” I observe.
“Good for me. Not even room to breathe in this crowd,” he says, pretending to melt. He grins and jabs me in the shoulder. “Get this. Directors loved Silence Is Golden. Drooled all over it. Anyway, knapsack is
on the couch. I’m crashing with a buddy who’s also at the theater club while I get some things sorted.”
“It is very good for you,” I say.
“You’re gonna be happy to hear—paid Lan back, plus interest. Been setting aside the theater’s nightly haul for her. I’m talking Dumpsters fulla bottles and cans.” He puts his arm around Lan and her hand lashes out and pinches and twists and he yowls.
“My nipples,” he wails, clutching his hands to his chest. “Lady, how could you?”
“To steal, still no good,” she says crossly.
I tap on her forearm and bend a thumb toward the back, and we weave across the shop and slide behind the counter and into the kitchen, which is also busy but in a more purposeful way.
The Caravelle bar is in a drawer, crushed and sticky on one end from its journey. I push it into Lan’s hands and she is confused. I guide her hands to her face so she can see what she is holding and she blinks and shakes her head.
“Where you find? Take much work? Too much work for old lady like me,” she says, but she can’t help herself; she is tearing off a corner of the wrapper and her hand trembles and she unshells the rest, stows the wrapper in her pocket. She turns the bar over in her hand and considers it.
“I never forget taste. Good taste. You see why if you try,” she says.
I take one end of the bar and she keeps hold of the other, and on three we break the bar in half and as we struggle with the bar, stretching and twisting it, she cackles and I join her and tenacious strands of caramel cling to each other, connecting our halves, just like the wrapper promised.
With a final joint cackle, we make our way out to the front of the shop. Nico reappears at Lan’s side and directs her to a chair, and I notice that the red velvet fudge samples are running low and Lucy is saying, “Hello, Ida—do come in, you must be frozen stiff—” and so I pick up the gilded tray to replenish it.
The Luster of Lost Things Page 25