All the Lost Things

by Michelle Sacks

  “It’s morning,” I said, VERY LOUDLY. “Wake up.”

  Dad opened one eye and groaned. “Wake up,” I said. “It’s time to go home.”

  “I gotta get some more sleep,” he said. “My head.”

  “Stupid Dad.” I threw one of the pillows to the floor.

  “He was very drunk,” Clemesta said. “Alcoholic and drunk.”

  “I know.”

  “That’s not responsible grown-up behavior. Not at all.”

  I nodded.

  “That’s DISGRACEFUL DISGUSTING behavior. Mom was right. We shouldn’t be around that.”

  I pulled the covers over my head so everything would be dark. “Now I’m a butterfly inside my caterpillar cocoon,” I said. “I’m about to be born fresh. When you see my wings, you have to gasp because they’re so beautiful.”

  Clemesta tugged at the covers. “But Dolly, don’t you understand?”

  I went silent in my lovely dark and warm cocoon. It was quiet and peaceful and it felt nice to be a safe and snug little caterpillar instead of a girl in the middle of the worst and strangest parts of America.

  “Something isn’t right,” Clemesta said. “I feel it.”

  She knocked my cocoon with her hoof. “Dolly. Remember we saw that sign on the ice-cream truck last week? It said, ‘If you see something suspicious, report it.’”

  “Mm.”

  “I think this adventure is suspicious. Suspicious is bad. Dolly!”

  I cracked open my cocoon and climbed out. My beautiful wings were broken forever and they would never ever fly. “You spoiled it, Clemesta!”

  She made a sorry face but it was mixed with a worried face.

  I found my hairbrush and combed out my hair. “I’ll do yours too,” I told her.

  “Ouch,” she said. “You’re brushing too hard.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I’m in a thundercloud mood.” I looked at Clemesta’s shining mane and her little horse bones underneath. I made her tail into a braid. I tried not to pull. “That’s very beautiful,” I said. I picked her up.

  “Anyway, we’re going home when Dad wakes up so everything will be good again soon.”

  Clemesta bit her lip. “I don’t think we can.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t think Dad wants to go back. I think he’s too mad. And, something else too.”

  I shook my head. “My brain hurts. My stomach hurts too. I bet it’s the scurvy, from all the JUNK and NO NUTRIENTS and just sitting in the car all day long. Or maybe it’s the homesickness disease.”

  Clemesta held her stomach with her horse-hoof. “I feel a little sick too.”

  I looked over at Dad. I didn’t feel sorry for him anymore. I felt sorry for Mom, for having to live with him and Mr. Angry Bear inside his chest. And now he had taken me away on an adventure and she was back from her girls’ weekend and we were still gone. Probably when I got home she would say, “OH DOLLY, MY HEART, I missed you every second.” She would go on her knees and say, “I’m so sorry for my silly-stupid plan and I’ll never do anything like that ever again and now everything can go back to how it was before.” Then she would hug me and I’d smell her Mom smell HONEYSUCKLE MARSHMALLOW and her hair would tickle my cheek and she would give me a million kisses and I wouldn’t feel sick anymore, I would feel like I was floating on a cloud.

  I shut my eyes tightly so I could send her some telepathic love puffs, which are zaps that go straight to her heart. They say, “Dolly loves you” and they make Mom very happy.

  “I wonder what Mom is doing right now,” I said. “Probably her fitness. Then making herself beautiful for the day and taking a picture to put on her phone so everyone can write STUNNER and GORGEOUS and OMG. I bet it will be a good day with lots of messages and burning fire pictures. She likes those.”

  Clemesta was staring into OUTER SPACE.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.” She shrugged. “I’m trying to solve a puzzle.”

  DISGRACEFUL DISGUSTING Dad’s snoring was getting louder. His breath smelled of strong medicine. ALCOHOLIC rhymes with FROLIC rhymes with BUBONIC. That was a plague and it killed millions of people and they all got chucked onto a cart and thrown in the fire to be burned.

  Dad would sleep for one million hours and I would have nothing to do all day long, not even play on his phone which was thrown into the bushes like a banana peel because that’s how ridiculous he was. I sighed loudly.

  “BORING,” I said to Clemesta. “Snoring is boring.”

  Dad didn’t budge.

  I found the remote and switched on the TV. I turned it up EXTRA LOUD. The channels were all news and more news and commercials. I flicked back to one of the talk shows because THAT BITCH was sitting on the chair laughing with her whole mouth open. THAT BITCH used to be Mom’s best friend in Hollywood but then she went and STOLE A ROLE that Mom was meant to get. It was a famous TV show with eight seasons so far and Mom already had a contract but THAT BITCH stabbed her back with a hundred knives and took it. Now she wins prizes on award show nights and Mom glares at her through the screen trying to make her trip on her way up the stairs.

  I like those nights because Mom and I dress up in her prettiest Florida dresses and she does my makeup and hair and I get to wear some of her jewelry and we pretend that we are also invited to the theater. We applaud when nice actresses win but we boo for THAT BITCH and say how ugly she is and how she is losing her looks and getting too old and also running out of boyfriends.

  Dad doesn’t play the awards night game. He hardly plays any of our games. He just plays the dad. When he sees me in Mom’s makeup and sexy sparkly dresses he gets mad and says it’s INAPPROPRIATE. Mom says, “What do you know about appropriate?” and he leaves the room and sometimes the house.

  I didn’t want to see THAT BITCH anymore. I flicked off the TV. I had nothing to do. If I was back home in my bedroom I would have a million things to play with, like my collection of archaeological discoveries from the backyard, from the cavemen and the dinosaurs, and my seashells from the beach and my jar of BEST TREASURES and my leaves that have secret messages written on them that only I know how to decode. One leaf comes from the Planet Nefaria, and it says YOU HAVE BEEN CHOSEN. I have to wait for the next one to find out the rest.

  I also have my whole doll’s house, which Savannah says is better than her Lego Hotel because it’s special and the only one of its kind in the whole world. Dad built it for me out of pieces of wood because Mom said there wasn’t money to buy the real one in the toy store that I saw and put on my Christmas wish list for EXTRAORDINARY GOOD BEHAVIOR. That one was made from plastic and it had a pink house and a white roof and it had lights that could switch on FOR REAL.

  Dad took forever to make my wooden one because he is good at being DISAPPOINTING. He only did it after a big fight with Mom and after that, he set aside a whole weekend and didn’t come out of the basement until it was done. The house has two stories and four rooms and one day when Mom was being a BEST MOM, she made all the furniture inside. She used little pieces of card, and she painted the windows with flower boxes and she stitched cushions and curtains from scraps of her old clothes. That was a good day and I didn’t need to do any vanishing tricks.

  Inside my house, I have a Mom and a Dad who are actually Monster High Vampires from last year’s birthday. I also have a little girl who is a beautiful Barbie. There’s no magical horse queen because we didn’t find one yet, so instead I cut out a horse head from a catalog and stuck it onto a pair of Lego man legs. That’s only TEMPORARY so Clemesta doesn’t mind.

  The Mom and Dad in my house kiss and make smooching sounds. They don’t ever fight and they never have to pay any bills because everything is free. Everyone plays hide-and-seek together and the little girl is excellent at tennis and reading books. Every night before lights out, I put them into their beds and close the curtains so they will have sweet dreams. They don’t have a dream catcher but they never get nightmares anyway. They won’t have had a
nyone to tuck them in for so many nights and probably they are crying all day long. That’s Dad’s fault too.

  I threw off the covers and climbed out of bed.

  “I guess I will have to entertain myself.” I said it very loudly. I went over to the Walmart bags and emptied them all out onto the carpet. I scrunched the bags so they would make lots of annoying noise. I took out the notepad and the pencils and I drew a picture of a bald eagle and another one of a tiger biting a man in half. I gave the man sad brown eyes and a VALUE MOTORS badge. If Mom was with me she could have helped. She is very good at making pictures and we like to do them together. She calls them our COLLABORATIONS. She is excellent at drawing hands and shoes and animal faces and I am excellent at the rest.

  My first-best collaboration of ours is called MAGICALAND and we spent two whole weeks making it. We colored the pictures and sprinkled glitter into some of the flowers for fairy dust and we stuck paper beaks onto the toucans and it was so beautiful that Mom put it inside a frame beside her bed. Probably so she could look at it on her CAN’T GET OUT OF BED days and feel cheered up because it’s impossible to stay sad or mad if you stare at glitter long enough. The sparkles jump into your heart and make you feel shiny, but I didn’t have any glitter with me or actually ANYTHING that could cheer me up.

  The tip of the red pencil broke off. I couldn’t finish coloring the blood of the man the tiger was eating. I took all the other pencils and broke their tips too. They were dumb pencils anyway and nowhere near as nice as my ones at home.

  I looked at all the new clothes Dad had bought me. I didn’t like any of them. I just wanted my old ones. I picked out my purple leggings and put them on, even though they had chocolate smudges on the front and they didn’t smell of fresh flowers anymore.

  I spotted Dad’s map lying on the floor beside his duffel bag. I tried to read it. Somewhere called Toluca was circled.

  “That’s Mexico,” I whispered to Clemesta.

  Her eyes went wide. “That’s a whole other country.”

  “Well, we can’t go there. It will take forever.”

  Dad’s duffel bag was on the floor. It was unzipped and I could see a shirt peeking out and also one of my sweaters from home. I pulled it out. It smelled of home, of Mom and the laundry detergent she uses for our clothes. I gave it a hug. I wished Mom was here to give me a hug too.

  I looked inside the bag, and my eyes went wide. Dad had piles and piles of money rolled together in bunches.

  “That’s a million dollars,” I said.

  Clemesta took a look. “Why does he have all that?” Her worried face got even more SUSPICIOUS. “What else is in there?”

  I put my hand inside and felt something hard. I pulled it out. It was the framed photograph of Dad and Mom and me as a baby that normally lives on the bookshelf in our living room, next-door neighbors with a bowl I made in pottery class when I was five. “Why did he bring this?”

  Clemesta looked at the photograph and then looked away. “He wants to keep the memory close.”

  “Mom is so beautiful,” I said. The shower started dripping suddenly and it gave me a fright. I put the frame back.

  I went over to the other Walmart bag instead. “Look,” I said, “I forgot all about the tutu.”

  I pulled it over my head and did some dance practice to see how it would feel wearing a floaty skirt.

  “You look like a professional ballerina,” Clemesta said. “But I want us to focus on remembering something else.”

  “I still can’t do an air split.”

  “Probably you’ll do one next week. But Dolly, listen to me.”

  “Not now,” I said.

  I did ten jumping jacks and ten sit-ups. Mom usually does one thousand and that’s why people call her SMOKING.

  Dad opened one eye and looked at me. “You’re great,” he said.

  SHUT UP, I said to him in my head. He rolled over and went back to snoring.

  I walked around the room but there was nothing interesting to do. I finished the last of the Twizzlers. I went to brush my teeth. In the mirror, I could see the loose tooth getting more and more wobbly. I bet the tooth fairy would be mad if the tooth fell out in the stinky motel, because then she’d have to come collect it. Probably she’d only leave a few small bills and her note would say PLEASE NEVER STAY IN DISGUSTING MOTELS AGAIN. PS: YOUR TEETH ARE EXCELLENT AND HEALTHY, GRATEFUL THANKS.

  Dad sounded like a pig who belonged in a pigsty instead of a bed. He didn’t deserve any love or kindness from me and I kept it all to myself. You can do that and no one can force you not to. Like no matter how many times Mom BEGGED me to be friendly to YOU KNOW WHO when I saw him, I just made myself into a tiny frozen block of ice every time.

  “She’s adorable,” he told Mom, but in my head I was actually chopping him into pieces with an invisible and deadly sword.

  He wasn’t even supposed to be a person in our lives but then we went and bumped into him in Manhattan one day on one of our TOP SECRET MISSIONS. The elevator doors opened and he said “Anna Kalina!” and Mom’s eyes nearly popped out of her head.

  “Well, my goodness,” she said. “It’s been forever.”

  She smiled hugely with all her white teeth and her eyes sparkled and we went into the lobby so that YOU KNOW WHO and Mom could chat. I drank a soda and tore the pieces of the coaster that it came on into confetti. Mom was laughing and tossing her hair and leaning in very close the whole time to touch his knee and afterward YOU KNOW WHO gave her a big hug and held her in his arms for a hundred minutes and said, “I’ll call you,” and Mom said, “Please, don’t say that if you don’t mean it.”

  On the train home, Mom was floating on a faraway cloud and shining big smiles at everyone. “Oh, Dolly,” she said, “wasn’t that just fate working its magic!” I didn’t think there was anything magical about YOU KNOW WHO but I pinkie promised when Mom said, “It’s going to be our special secret.” Then I shoved the secret into the secret-secret box but first I spat on it because already then I knew he was a BAD OMEN, like a curse or a plague that steals away your precious beloveds or makes them do stupid things.

  I looked at the clock on the table by the side of the bed. It said 11:17. My stomach was hungry even though it was also a big hard ball from no number twos.

  Dad had left a bunch of bills on the table, all scrunched up like old tissues. Next to them was a pack of cigarettes with half missing and probably sucked up into his lungs. They would be black and rotten forever. SERVES HIM RIGHT.

  “I’m taking some money,” I said to Clemesta. “There’s a vending machine downstairs. We’ll have to have more JUNK for breakfast but if we don’t we’ll starve to death.”

  “SHAME ON HIM,” Clemesta said. She narrowed her eyes and stared a curse into Dad’s skull.

  The motel hallways smelled of ashtrays and dirty carpets with lots of things stepped into them, like gum and beer and pus. There was an ice machine at the end but someone had stuck a note on it saying OUT OF ORDER. Everything around here looked broken so I wasn’t even one inch surprised.

  I walked down the stairs to the main office. The clerk from last night was wearing the same too-tight T-shirt from before and talking to a woman who was yelling and trying to shush her crying baby at the same time.

  “I already told you,” the clerk said. “You gotta check out every twenty-eight days. Law’s the law.”

  “We don’t have anywhere to go,” she said. “The baby. The fuck am I supposed to do with the baby?”

  The clerk shrugged and the woman kicked over the trash can and stormed out with her suitcase and her baby dangling from her hip. I went up to the desk.

  “Um,” I said. “Do you have a vending machine?”

  “There.” The clerk pointed. He came over to pick the trash off the carpet. When he bent over, his butt made a face at me. I shut my eyes and walked away very fast.

  I stood in front of the machine and tried to push the bill into the slot. It spat it back out. I tried again and it did
the same thing, like someone sticking their tongue out at me.

  “It won’t take such a big bill,” a voice said.

  I looked around. There was a girl standing watching me. She had her arms folded and she was leaning against the wall. Her ponytail was in her mouth and she was sucking on it like it was a piece of candy instead of ratty old hair that Mom would call MOUSY-COLORED. Mousy is the exact opposite of lustrous and chestnut-colored hair, and probably it shouldn’t be found on people, only mice.

  “I’m Crystal,” the girl said. “I can help you change that bill for something smaller if you want.”

  I stared at her. She was skinny-bony and she was wearing pointy shoes that were too big for her feet and her knees were grazed like she had fallen on gravel and bloodied them up.

  “Well, come on,” she said, “I don’t bite.”

  I thought of Dad upstairs, snoring and being revolting and not even caring about hurting our best love with lies and broken promises AGAIN AND ALWAYS. It would serve him right if he woke up and I wasn’t there. It would serve him right to be worried and scared like I was last night. Dad gets FLAMING MAD if he thinks that he’s going to be left alone so HA and SO THERE and SO WHAT, because that’s exactly what he deserved.

  “But it’s not responsible,” Clemesta said.

  “Who cares?” I slipped her under my arm. “Nobody in this whole family is being one inch of responsible.”

  I followed Crystal outside into the parking lot. She was walking very quickly, even in the too-big shoes. Her knees turned in as she walked, like they were trying to kiss each other. There were a load of cracks in the sidewalk and I tried hard to keep my toes away from the trolls.

  “You here long-term?” Crystal said. Her ponytail bounced as she walked. “We’ve been here since November. It’s better now that it’s getting warmer.”

  “What’s long-term?”