All the Lost Things

by Michelle Sacks

  I looked down at his hand. The word tattooed on his other knuckles was F-E-A-R.

  “Why are we camping?” I said. Dad and I climbed back in the car, and he set off down the narrow path.

  “We need a place to sleep,” he said. “And I thought you’d like it here. It’s nice and quiet, with no one around.”

  “I never went camping before.”

  “I know.”

  “Did you ever?”

  “Yeah. Not far from here actually. It was a long time ago. I was just a kid.”

  We arrived at the cabin, which was really just a pretty house made from stone and wood and set in the middle of trees instead of a street. There was a porch you could sit on to watch the stars, and a fireplace ready for building a fire and right on the doorstep there was the forest and nature. It was very still and you could hear the birds chatting to each other and the bugs scratching away in the leaves. I liked it much better than anywhere else we had been since the Chambersburg Comfort Lodge, and Dad must have felt the same because he stood at the door and looked around and breathed in the air and smiled for the first time that whole day.

  Inside the cabin it was exactly like a real house but tiny, with one room that had the bed and the kitchen and the table and a very small bathroom with a tub that was only the size of a shower. I raced inside to pee. It was very yellow, which was probably Cap’n Crunch’s fault.

  After we unpacked the supplies, Dad pulled out Travis’s map and looked at the different trails.

  “How about we explore a little?” he said.

  “Really?”

  “Sure, it will be fun.”

  I smiled. “Yes, let’s go back to having fun. And can I keep the map for a souvenir? I want to keep it with the Dollywood map and your driving map and then I will have all the maps of America and I’ll always know how to find all the places and all the people in the country.”

  Dad’s face scrunched up with lines.

  “What?”

  “You’re wonderful,” he said. “That’s all.”

  The hiking path was rocky in some places and smooth in others. I set my shoes inside Dad’s footprints. I looked around in all directions. We climbed up a steep path and then we went winding around in a circle and then we stopped to tie my laces.

  “This is a good part of the adventure,” I said.

  “I think so too.”

  “You can say DITTO. It means ME TOO.”

  Dad smiled.

  “Is it like when you were a kid?”

  Dad squinted his face back at me. “I’m not sure,” he said. “Things always seem so different in your memories.”

  “How different?”

  “Sometimes better. Sometimes just far away.”

  I stepped over a fallen rock. Everywhere smelled of soil and wood.

  “Who took you camping?” I said.

  “My parents,” Dad said. “Your grandma and granddad. And Joshua came along, of course.”

  “Did you have fun?”

  “Yeah,” Dad said. “It was one of the best things we ever did. We stayed a week, went hiking and swimming in the lake and had cookouts and roasted marshmallows and watched the stars. Me and Joshua walked every inch of the park. We pretended we were pioneers.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Like, that we were discovering the country for the first time. That everything was unspoiled and possible and just for us.” He looked out at the view of the valley. “Those were good times.”

  “Why didn’t you ever come back?”

  “I don’t know,” Dad said. He bent over to pick a branch off the path and threw it into the trees. “I moved away for college. Then I stayed away. That’s life, sometimes. It runs away with you.”

  He went quiet.

  “You never tell me stuff about when you were a kid,” I said.

  “Mm,” Dad said.

  “Didn’t you like it?”

  “I did,” Dad said. “I just wanted so badly to get away. To have a different kind of life from how I grew up.”

  We had climbed to the top of a steep hill and he was out of breath. I still had lots. I took his hand to pull him along.

  “Why different?”

  “I don’t know…better. I wanted the kind of opportunities other people had. The kind of life I’d be proud to have, instead of just….” His brown eyes looked very light in the sun.

  “I can spell opportunities.”

  “Because you’re so smart.”

  “Advanced. Yeah.” I thought about what he’d said. “Will I have to leave home for my opportunities too?”

  Dad gave me a smile, but it was a sad one and far away in another time. My stomach rock sank a little more.

  “Look over there.” Dad pointed.

  Like magic, we were standing above a beautiful and sparkling lake, a pool of blue shimmering in the sunlight, and spotty with the reflection of the trees.

  “Wow,” I said. “It looks like paradise or something.”

  Dad smiled. “It sure is beautiful.”

  I stood at the edge and held out my arms. “Hello America, your loveliness!” I yelled, and the noise echoed all the way into the clouds.

  Dad laughed and took my hand to help me down to the shore. Around the lake, it was full of tiny round pebbles. Dad’s face lit up. He looked real happy, not just pretend-happy like usual.

  He started pulling off his shoes and his jeans and his shirt. “Come on.” He left everything in a heap.

  “I don’t have a bathing suit!”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Dad said. “No one’s here to see us.”

  He was right. It was like we were the only people on a deserted island, or at the end of the world.

  Dad waded into the water in his boxer shorts. His skin prickled from being scared of the cold but he kept going.

  “Wait for me.” I undressed and held out my hand so he could help me over the stones. We walked deeper and deeper into the cool water and then we flipped over on our backs and floated, staring up at the sky. It was as big and wide as forever.

  Dad shut his eyes. He held out his arms and drifted on the water and I watched him start to float away from me. I touched a hand to him and he took it and held me so that we could stay together.

  We will always stay together, I said in my head-voice.

  I closed my eyes but not all the way. I watched the sun flicker on my eyelashes like little diamond sparkles. The water smelled of salt and it was silent apart from the ripples of the fish below us swimming back home for their dinner.

  Dad and I floated and floated, like two snow angels on the water.

  I saw Dad flip over. He put his head under the water and when he came back up, he let out a scream. It was so loud I clapped my hands over my ears.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Joshua and I used to do that,” Dad said.

  He sank under and splashed up and screamed again, and the noise jumped off the water and came flying back at us. “Try it,” he said.

  “But what are you screaming about?”

  “Everything,” Dad said. “Everything.”

  He screamed again and I screamed too, and Dad’s screams and mine mixed together until you couldn’t tell whose voice it was, it was just one long cry that the forest would keep forever like a secret in the trees.

  The sky started to turn hazy. We climbed out of the water and shivered on the shore and Dad used his shirt to dry me off. He sat down to put his shoes back on and waited while I tied my laces. He scratched his hands in the pebbles.

  “Look,” he said, “this one is shaped like a heart.”

  He put it in my fingers. “You should keep it. I bet it brings you luck.”

  He looked at me with that funny-strange expression on his face, not exactly happy and not exactly sad. Somewhere in the middle of good and bad.

  “Doll,” he said, “being your dad makes me the happiest man in the world. You know that, right?”

  My heart felt warm and happy and only a l
ittle afraid.

  “I hope you’ll always remember it,” Dad said. “That you’re my whole world, and the best thing I ever did in it.”

  I touched his face. “Your eyes look funny,” I said. “Watery.”

  He wiped them with a finger. “They’re okay.”

  “You look soft.”

  “Soft?”

  “Yeah, like you’re melting.” His eyes crinkled up in a smile and then he looked at me again and made them wide. We locked eyes for a staring contest and I giggled and we held them tight and I stared into the brown and the sad and the melting-with-love for as long as I could.

  Afterward, I slipped the heart-stone into the pocket of my shorts, and we followed the trail back to the cabin.

  It was almost dark when we arrived. Dad built a fire with the wood we’d bought from Travis and then opened a soda. We sat on the porch and laid back our heads to look at the stars.

  “Stars make shapes in the sky called constellations,” I said.

  Dad smiled.

  “That’s Orion’s Belt. And there’s the moon. It’s very, very far away from us, even when it’s so big. We can’t reach out and touch it, not even from an airplane. I wish we could.”

  Dad looked up. I watched his eyes. The light from the fire made his whole face shine.

  “And there’s a man in the moon, but you’ll never get near him either,” I said. “He only watches you. He watches over all of us and he’s lonely because he’s by himself with no one else there. He eats cheese. Every day he wishes on shooting stars. His wish is to get to earth and have a wife and a daughter and friends and a pet Doberman. I think he used to be a mortgage broker too.”

  Dad reached over and laid a hand gently on the back of my head.

  “I wish we’d done more of this,” he said.

  “What?”

  He stood up.

  “Just this.”

  He went inside and came back out with the tinned beans and a metal pot and a spoon. He showed me how to hold the pot over the fire without burning my fingers, and I stirred the dinner until it was ready.

  “Beans have to be cooked al dente,” I said. “I learned that on a cooking show.”

  We ate our dinner from the pot. Dad drank another soda and I drank a bottle of water because of being healthy and responsible and trying to stay hydrated.

  After we scraped out the last of the beans, Dad said it was S’MORES TIME.

  “This is the best part,” he said.

  He taught me how to roast the marshmallows spiked on a stick, and then how to build them into a sandwich with the crackers and the chocolate squished inside so it could all get melty together.

  “My mouth is watery,” I said.

  “Wait till you taste it.”

  They were hot so we blew to cool them and then I licked the melty oozing chocolate part and the melty oozing marshmallow part and then I ate the whole thing. It was the most delicious of everything I ever ate in my whole life and that is one hundred percent FACTUALLY TRUE.

  “One more,” Dad said, and we made second helpings, and then one more after that and then we stopped so no one would explode with throw-up again from too much junk.

  We sat and watched the moths fly into the light. I listened for the sounds of the animals calling out to each other, the owls and wolves and rats who are NOCTURNAL because they like the nighttime better than the day.

  The fire was making my skin warm and my eyes droopy.

  “Is this the part where we tell campfire stories?” I said.

  Dad yawned. “Or maybe it should be bedtime,” he said. “It’s been a long day.”

  “No, stories,” I said. “Like when you were a kid. It has to be the exact same.”

  He smiled. “Do you have a story for me?”

  “You have to tell me one.”

  “I don’t know a good one.”

  “Tell me something more from when you were a kid.”

  “I can’t remember all that.”

  “Try!”

  Dad laid his head back against the chair and closed his eyes.

  “Okay,” he said, “I have one. Joshua and I used to race cockroaches.”

  “What?”

  “We used to find them in the house and put them in jars, then we’d line them up in the bathtub and race them.”

  “How did they know when to start the race?”

  “Well,” he said, “we’d give them a little poke and they’d take off.”

  “Tell me another one.”

  “I used to shoot at pigeons with a toy pellet gun that I won at the state fair. I’d build a fire in the backyard and cook the birds up for me and Joshua to eat for lunch.”

  “Ew!”

  “It was really good,” Dad said. “I might make it for you sometime.”

  “NO!” I yelled, even though I knew that Dad was just kidding around. He was smiling and relaxed and it made me think he should probably always live out in the woods. Then we could all be happy like this the whole time, Mom and Dad and me.

  “Was this the best place?” I said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “For the adventure. You said we were going to the best place. I think it’s this.”

  Dad nodded and smiled and then went quiet.

  “Don’t be sad,” I said. “We can come back soon. We’ll bring Mom next time.”

  Dad nodded again. He closed his eyes a minute, like he was making a wish, or sending Mom a telepathy kiss and a message. I LOVE YOU, ANNA. I LOVE YOU TILL THE END OF ALL TIME.

  “I liked your stories,” I said. “I wish you could tell me all of them.”

  “Not all my stories are good ones.”

  “Why not?”

  Dad rubbed his eyes. “Sometimes life was tough.”

  “Like how?”

  “Just, tough. For our family. We didn’t have much. After your grandad got laid off we…well, we survived, I guess. We were so poor, one year I didn’t have money to buy new shoes. My feet wouldn’t fit any of the old pairs, so I tried to steal a pair from Mr. Hobson’s store in town.”

  “Stealing!” I said. I didn’t like thinking about Dad doing bad things that were AGAINST THE LAW. I didn’t like thinking that he could steal shoes because then maybe he could steal other things too. Like people.

  His feet kicked the dirt. “Anyhow, Mr. Hobson caught me with the sneakers under my jacket. He let me keep them, but I had to come by to clean his floors every Saturday for three months.”

  “Was your dad so mad he had smoke coming out of his ears?”

  “I never told him,” Dad said. Then he went quiet again. He tilted his head back and finished his soda.

  “I never met any of them,” I said. “And all of them are dead. Everyone from your life is dead except Mom and me.”

  Dad stared at the fire.

  “Why don’t you ever want to talk about them?”

  Dad sighed. “I don’t like thinking about all the things that are gone.”

  “Like Joshua.”

  “Especially Joshua.”

  “Why?” I said.

  Dad cracked his jaw. “Because I’m to blame.”

  “For what?”

  “For everything.”

  “Like what?”

  He sighed again. “I was the one who brought him out to Florida to work with me. Him and his fiancée, Karlee. I taught him how to—how to do things that weren’t totally honest. You really want me to tell you all this?”

  I nodded.

  “A lot of people lost their homes,” Dad said. “Their savings. We lost everything too. Joshua owed a lot of money. He’d taken money from Karlee and her sister and her folks, and there was talk of fraud charges—”

  “What’s fraud?” I said.

  Dad shook his head. “It’s like telling big lies. It was all a mess, see? Everything.”

  I looked at him. “Then what happened?”

  “Joshua couldn’t face it, he just couldn’t.” Dad rubbed his eyes. “But you know that part.”<
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  He stared into the fire, not even blinking. The wood crackled and a piece broke off. Everything turned to ash.

  Dad shook his head, and then he turned to face me. “You look like him,” he said. “I see him every time I look at you. It’s like he’s right there.”

  I pressed my hands together. Dad kept looking at me. The sad in his eyes was bigger than the brown.

  “I only ever wanted to do right by my family,” Dad said. “Instead…” He shook his head.

  I turned to watch the last lick of flame try to keep itself alive. It flickered twice and died.

  In the trees, the owls were hooting. That was a warning for all the animals to go and hide. It meant the NIGHT PREDATORS were getting ready to catch their dinner. They have glow-in-the-dark eyes exactly for finding you in the night.

  I was happy to go inside and shut the door.

  I changed into my pajamas and brushed my teeth. Dad stood next to me and brushed his too. We spat at the same time.

  “Let’s see that loose tooth,” he said.

  I opened my mouth to show him and he felt it with his finger.

  “I bet it comes out soon,” he said.

  “Maybe it will get stuck in an apple. Or maybe I’ll sneeze and it will shoot right out. Like ACHOO, PLONK.”

  Dad smiled. He stroked my hair.

  “Joshua didn’t get to have kids of his own,” he said. “But he sure would have loved to know you.”

  He pulled back the covers and we climbed in. I gave Clemesta her good-night kisses.

  “Eskimo, Butterfly, and Mom.”

  She smiled but not with all her teeth. “That’s nice,” she said sadly.

  Dad switched off the lamp and lay against the pillow.

  “We didn’t get to call Mom,” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said. He closed his eyes. “Tomorrow.” Then he was snoring.

  Clemesta nipped at my ear.

  “What’s wrong?” I said.

  “Everything,” she replied. “Everything about this whole adventure.”

  Dad’s body was warm in the bed and I touched a hand to his chest. I could feel his heart beating, alive and warm and full of blood.