Lost and Found

by Chris Van Hakes

  “I told you, I don’t want you to get attacked.”

  “So you running with me is going to protect me?”

  “Yes.” He puffed out his chest. “I’m intimidating. And strong.” He flexed a bicep and then I couldn’t stop laughing. “You’re trying to emasculate me.” He frowned.

  “I’m just not quite piecing together why you want to protect me, Your Maleness.”

  “Because. You’re not at all concerned for your safety and I am, and I’m on stupid night shift so I heard you running down the steps and just…followed.”

  “Right.” I tried hard to picture Oliver caring about my safety to the point of listening at the door for my footsteps, and failed. “I’m sorry, but you don’t even like me most of the time.”

  He shook his head. “You know that’s not true. You have no idea how much danger you could be in,” he reiterated.

  “Oliver, trust me, I’ve seen danger and there’s none out here at five thirty.”

  “Then it won’t do you any harm if I run right next to you.”

  “I’m not talking to you, you know.” I picked up an ear bud. “And I sing. Loudly. And badly.”

  “You said you didn’t even listen to music,” he said.

  “I lied.”

  “So, are you saying you’re going to embarrass me?”

  “Yes.”

  “In front of the hordes of people?” He gestured to the empty street in front of us.

  “Yes, the ones who are going to rape and murder me, Oliver.”

  “What would your mother say if she knew you were running out here on your own?”

  “She’d probably tell me running made my thighs too bulky to attract a man. Or maybe she’d be horrified that I let anyone see my patches.” I pointed to my legs and Oliver said, “I never noticed the ones on the back of your knees.”

  “Yeah. Tights most of the time. I didn’t think anyone was going to see me today, so I wore shorts.”

  “Tights,” he said. “Your mom and my mom sound like they’d get along.”

  “Great. Maybe they can date. Then we’d be siblings,” I said and he looked horrified at this realization. He reached over and touched the ugly spot on my forehead tenderly, and I tried to hide the shiver that ran down my spine. He pushed my shoulder lightly, smiled and said, “Now run.”

  To his credit, he didn’t stop once. To mine, I only ran three miles that morning, because every time he brushed up against me, my stomach dipped.

  Oliver insisted on running with me after that, and my resolve was too weak to argue with him.

  As I sat on the lawn outside the Victorian a few weeks later, I attempted not to stare at Oliver stretching right next to me, his shirt riding up to expose a sliver of taut, flat belly as he raised his arms overhead.

  “Hmm?” I said in answer to something he’d said to me that I apparently hadn’t heard. I was definitely not staring at him.

  “Your phone is ringing,” Oliver said again, and I blinked and realized he was staring down at me, looking right at the screen showing on my armband. I turned the band around to see the caller ID. Cliff calling. Cliff calling. I hit ignore as I saw Oliver tilt his head sideways to read the screen.

  “So, am I ever going to find out the details of you and Cliff?” Oliver asked as we started our run, and I simply shook my head and put in my ear buds, but a minute later, the music on my phone was interrupted by a phone call. I stopped and saw the screen again, and then bit my lip.

  “I better go. He can be persistent. And it’s three AM in LA, so he’s probably a little drunk.” I turned and started to jog back, waving Oliver to go on without me, but he was by my side almost instantly, coming back into the apartment building.

  “Cliff’s the ex-boyfriend, right?” he asked again, a little brusquely, and with a tiny frown line appearing between his eyebrows.

  “Hmm,” I said, looking down at my phone, now in my hand, scrolling through my missed calls. Cliff hadn’t left a voicemail or a text. And then the phone started ringing again and I ducked down into the lower stairwell, saying, “Hey Cliff. What’s going on?”

  I saw Oliver staring after me, bewildered, until I closed myself in the basement storage area so I couldn’t see his face.

  Oliver

  “Seriously,” Avery said, looking up at me as I pushed buttons on the vending machine. “If you break that thing, I am going to be furious when I need a Nutter Butter.”

  I slammed down on the “A” too hard. “I’m not going to break it.”

  “You’ve been moody for days. What’s your problem?” Avery said.

  “Nothing,” I mumbled, grabbing my Snickers bar from the tray. I unwrapped it and bit into it.

  “Is this still about your brother?”

  “No,” I said in earnest. I hadn’t thought about Brad and Mia in a while, even though I still hadn’t figured out how to call him and explain my absence at the wedding. It had meant weeks of ignoring my mother’s phone calls about it, too.

  “Trouble with a girl? Did one of them finally get to you?” I paused mid-chew, and Avery said, “A ha! That’s it! You’re having lady troubles!”

  “You make it sound like I’m having particularly heavy flow.”

  “Who is she?” Avery said, coming over to the table where I sat. When I didn’t answer, she pulled my candy bar away and took a bite. “Hey!” I said.

  “You talk, you get this back. Otherwise, it’s mine.” She took another bite.

  “By the time I’m done talking, you’ll have eaten it all.”

  “Not my fault they make these things so small,” she said. “So, talk.”

  I rubbed my palm over my face. “It’s ridiculous. I’m not even—she’s not—we’re not—”

  “Oh. So is it a lady from the bar who finally trapped you?”

  “God, no.”

  “I thought maybe one of them showed up saying you were her baby daddy,” Avery said.

  “I know how birth control works. I only sleep with women intelligent enough to also know how it works.”

  “Could have fooled me,” she said. She took another bite.

  “It’s my neighbor. Delaney. We’re not involved, and I don’t see her like that, but she seems to be stuck in a relationship with this loser guy. They broke up, and she moved halfway across the country to get away from him, and he still calls.”

  Avery squinted at me Clint Eastwood style. “How do you know all this about her ex-boyfriend? Has she cried on your shoulder about him?”

  “No. My cousin is friends with her. She told me everything. Well, I asked and then she told me. Delaney would never talk about herself willingly.”

  “So you pried, and now you want to pry some more, but you’re not involved, and you don’t like her?”

  I shook my head. “Definitely not. She’s nice, too nice. A doormat. I’m just worried about her.”

  “Who was the last girl you were worried about?” Avery said with a smile. I thought immediately of Mia, and then I said, “Shit.”

  “Wow, I can’t believe anyone ever lets you near live patients with that IQ.” Avery ate the rest of my Snickers bar.

  “Hey,” I said.

  “Sorry,” she mumbled around the chocolate. “I was hungry.”

  I glared at her and went to buy a new Snickers, and just my luck, I thumped my forehead against the glass when I realized I’d broken the vending machine.

  Avery walked past me, patting my shoulder as she said, “Don’t worry. You’re a fixer. You can fix it.”

  “I really have no idea how to fix the vending machine.”

  “Not the vending machine. Delaney. That’s your schtick, right? You’re a fixer,” she said as she washed her hands. I stared at her, confused, and she continued. “All doctors are, on some level. We’re either egomaniacs who think we can be heroes, ergo the surgeons of the world, or we’re fixers. We want to fix something that went wrong, and we can’t, so we go out and fix other things. People.

  “I did really well
on my psych rotation,” she said.

  “That explains so much,” I said, curling my lip.

  “But honestly, women love fixers, which is why most men are fixers. Men fix leaky pipes and drywall and, in your case, human bodies.”

  “That’s sexist.”

  “A little bit, yeah. But in my case, also true.”

  “I don’t think I’m a fixer.”

  “Oh? Why’d you become a doctor again?”

  I was silent, and she said, “Exactly,” and I said, “Damn it, I hate you,” and she left the doctor’s lounge and sing-songed, “You lo-ove me!”

  Delaney

  “I was thinking maybe this?” Ursula held up a black bandage dress. Pressed up against her, it barely grazed the top of her thighs.

  “For a first date? In a bar?” I frowned, and then went over to her closet and started rifling through her blouses.

  “It’s the Saturn—the bar across from the hospital. It’s apparently where he used to do his rounds when he was a resident, so he and Oliver have been there a lot. He did rounds, Delaney. Rounds!” She collapsed on the bed behind her, the dress still clutched to her body as she fell into a heap of happiness.

  “Yeah, Oliver still works there,” I said. I wrinkled my nose as I pulled out a periwinkle button-down. “Have you liked him this whole time because he’s a doctor? Because that seems kind of, I don’t know, wrong.” I bit my lip, trying not to think of all the girls who trailed out of Oliver’s apartment.

  One morning during a run, I’d been too tired to filter my brain and had asked, “I don’t get it. You’re good looking, but you’re not that good looking. How do you get all those girls?”

  He’d laughed and waggled his eyebrows at me. “You think I’m good looking?”

  I threw my water bottle toward him with purposefully bad aim. As it clunked on the ground next to him, he picked it up, uncapped it and took a swig before handing it back. I said, “You know what I mean. You know you’re good looking. You don’t need to hear it from me.”

  “Do you have a little crush on me, Lane?”

  “No,” I said. “Trust me, I am allowed to state the obvious. You’re objectively handsome. You have a head of thick dark hair—”

  “Thinning at the temples,” he said, pulling back his hair to reveal his receding hairline.

  “You’ve got nice, clear eyes, a face with a strong jaw, you’re tall and fit and young. You might not be everyone’s type, but I can hardly call you ugly.” The awkwardness engulfed us as my last word hung there. Ugly.

  “Delaney, listen—”

  I ran ahead of him. “Can’t hear you!” I’d had enough of his apologies, which had dwindled of late, because he’d been nicer of late. He was friendly and open and fun and respectful, probably because he respected me. I didn’t want his pity anymore, now that we were friends, and I certainly didn’t want to witness another fumbling apology, if that’s what was coming. I was tired of it.

  “Delaney!” he shouted at my back. “Slow down!”

  I did, and fell in step next to him on the trail. “Like I was saying, you’re objectively good looking.”

  “Delaney, I wanted to—”

  “Do you disagree with my analysis?”

  His shoulders sagged and he was quiet for a bit before he said, “I’ve heard that before.” Then, with renewed confidence he added, “It’s true, I am.” He smiled a charming, evil smile.

  “And I’m also allowed to tell you, again, that I don’t date. Ever. And so I don’t have crushes, and I am a passive observer, not someone hitting on you.” It was only a tiny lie. Crush wasn’t quite the word that described how I felt for Oliver, although I couldn’t think of what word would describe my feelings for him.

  “Do you have a crush on Cliff?” he teased, but there was an edge to his voice.

  My mouth slackened. Ever since that early morning phone call from Cliff, Oliver had often asked me about him. I refused to tell Oliver anything, partly because I had no idea what was going on with Cliff. Cliff called and talked like we were still dating. He told me about his work problems and the LA weather (sunny and hot, a shocker), and I realized that he never asked about me. He never had. I was just a dumping ground for him, and I always had been. I don’t know if I ever even loved him, or if I had just been supremely flattered that such a gorgeous man had picked me.

  I stopped running and when Oliver realized I had, turned and jogged back to me, then stopped and stood in front of me. “I definitely don’t have a crush on Cliff.”

  “Are we still not allowed to talk about him?” He tilted his head at me and pulled on a loose strand of my hair, brushing it behind my shoulder.

  “We’re never allowed to talk about him. And you successfully avoided my question. How do you get so many girls?”

  He shook his head and said, “It’s easy. I tell them I’m a doctor. Sometimes I don’t even change out of my scrubs.”

  “Scrubs are an improvement on your other clothes.”

  “I know.”

  I raised my eyebrows in disbelief. “That’s it? There’s no more to it?”

  “Well, it used to be the house I lived in. My parents were rich, relatively speaking. Not Warren Buffet-Bill Gates rich. Just run of the mill, casual alcoholic, Republican rich. That was all it took in high school and college. Girls were curious about it. Now, it’s the doctor thing. Women are turned on by the possibility of being with a doctor.”

  “But you’re just sleeping with them for one night!”

  He shrugged. “Sometimes I date them for longer. They’re the ones who lead, anyhow, but it never works out. It’s a lot less fun and more tiring than it looks, I promise.”

  “And you’re okay with that?”

  “Of course I’m okay with it. I get sex out of it.”

  “Less fun, more tiring?”

  “Mediocre sex,” he clarified. “But mediocre sex still trumps no sex.”

  “So, you date them a few times, it turns out you have no chemistry outside of drunken bedroom shenanigans, and you leave it at that?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “And you’re okay that they don’t want to know more about you? That they’re only sleeping with you because you’re a doctor?” I scoffed. “Because that’s just low.”

  “It’s mutual. It’s not like I know that much about them.”

  “Do you want to?”

  “It would be nice, but I’ve never met a girl in a bar that wasn’t more than a girl in a bar.”

  I sat down in the dewy grass and crossed my arms, newly angry at the women who used Oliver. “I could be a girl in a bar!”

  He sat down next to me. “No. You definitely couldn’t be a girl in a bar.”

  That stung, but I didn’t let him see it. “I still can’t believe you use yourself like that, and they use you like that.”

  His smile softened. “Hey, do you want to go back and watch something?” He pulled out a clump of grass. “There’s this great NOVA documentary on Netflix I’ve been meaning to watch.”

  “NOVA?”

  “Yeah, on bombing Hitler’s dams. It’s supposedly this carefully engineered attack during the war on—”

  “You like NOVA?” I stood up and started to head back to our building, and he quickly followed.

  “I like documentaries.”

  I wrinkled my nose. “Documentaries seem kind of boring.”

  “No. Fiction is boring. It’s all the same, totally predictable.”

  “What? No. Definitely not.”

  “And there’s nothing at stake. It’s all made up.”

  “So with the Hitler documentary you’re biting your fingers because you don’t know if the Allies will win?”

  “Well, real life is messy. Fiction isn’t. It’s neat and there are good guys and bad guys. It’s orderly.”

  “Only sometimes. But I like fiction that’s orderly. I even like the predictable novels. I want the same formula over and over, no deviation. Like Law & Order. I always know exactl
y how it’s going to go.”

  “That sounds boring.”

  “Comforting. An escape. I know what I’m getting into. So why do you like documentaries?”

  We reached the Victorian before he spoke again, and as he held open the door for me, he said, “I think I like documentaries because I like learning about something wildly different from my own life.”

  “Pretty deep for a judgmental jackass,” I said as we climbed the stairs.

  “You’re the one who told me I had layers,” he said. “So, how about it? NOVA?” He opened his apartment door and waited, smiling at me, and I went in.

  He sank down into his sofa and patted the spot next to him, warmth in his eyes. Of course I sat down right next to him, leaning into him. I couldn’t help it. He was Oliver.

  I blinked back to Ursula in her bedroom, lying on her bed amongst twelve date outfits. “It’s not that he’s a doctor,” she said in defense. “I like him. I’ve liked him since he and Oliver were in med school. He’s cute and he’s nice and he’s kind.”

  I narrowed my eyes and said, “And he’s a doctor.”

  She sat up. “Yes, and he’s a doctor. It’s nice that he’s not the Xerox repairman whose pants keep falling down as he leans over the machine and winks at me, okay, Delaney?” I winced, thinking of her last very, very bad date.

  “Okay. And he’s a doctor. I get it. But not because.”

  “But not because,” she nodded.

  I held out a pair of slim fitting black capris and a gauzy coral cap-sleeve blouse. “These. This is something you could wear to work, and then rush to meet him in, but still looks like you’re going on a date.” I handed her the clothes as she eyed them.

  “You’re right. Thank you. You have good taste,” she said in surprise. She eyed my floral shift and gray leggings, bird scarf, hoop earrings and orange ankle boots.

  “I know this outfit’s a little over the top,” I said.

  “A little. But it’s bright and colorful,” she said too forcefully. Then she asked, “I have one more favor.”

  “Anything.”

  “Will you come with me?”

  My mouth dropped open. “On your date? You want me to come with you on your date?”