The Luster of Lost Things Read online

So Lucy left the door open and carried me into the kitchen. With her one free hand she melted dark chocolate in a saucepan and whisked in milk and cornstarch, and over the slow simmer and the hush of blue flame she heard a door shutting, a chair scraping, and she let out a breath. When the hot chocolate was thick enough to coat the back of a spoon, she added a pinch of salt and a dash of vanilla, and then she joined the woman at the front of the shop.

  They sat at a table together and drank from bowl-cups and watched the blizzard blow through the emptied streets. The hot chocolate seemed to course through Lucy’s arms and surely the woman’s too, until their veins grew strong and thick as vines and it was good to be there and alive, to see the ruthless beauty of the night freezing over into a stark dawn.

  That day there were no customers, and Lucy was glad for the company even though the woman didn’t speak as she sketched and smudged in a leather book. At closing time, she gave Lucy the book, and at the sight of the first page, Lucy’s heart stirred and the hairs on the back of her neck stood straight up. She closed the book and said, “This is too much,” but the woman told Lucy to take it. It was a gift. It was a story—the woman’s own, that she did not want to go untold.

  Lucy turned the pages, moved, and by the time she looked up to thank the woman, she had slipped out without a word. That moment would stay with Lucy: the woman looking up to reveal her face, her eyes incandescent in the haze of twilight, and the book in her outstretched hand.

  Lucy put the book on a shelf and locked up the shop, and the next day she rose before dawn to mix and flavor her batters in the usual way, unaware that the shop had changed. It didn’t take long, though; she checked the first batches and all thoughts of testing the centers and trimming the edges fled because what she saw was unbelievable—unmistakable.

  The shop came alive that very morning. The desserts yawned awake after they baked or rested, as if the ovens and refrigerators had sighed hot and cold and breathed life into them except it was the Book driving the magic, assuming its place at the heart of the shop, at the center of my world.

  “Then,” Lucy liked to tell her enraptured audiences, “like flicking on a switch, people started coming in. The ones who could look past the surface and see a little magic.”

  Customers talked and word spread, but people also had their routines and their lists and the Herculean weight of a hundred worries and fears bearing down on their shoulders, so not everyone came looking, and not everyone who looked found the shop, and not everyone who found the shop had been looking.

  The initial finding was a mystifying thing. Neither of us could decipher what sort of logic the shop followed; all I knew for sure was that sometimes, when a particular person came by and they were looking and discovering and probably a little hungry, the shop decided that it wanted to be found. Before signing the lease, Lucy learned from the landlord—an energetic man with ink-stained hands and a hairy face—that the building had been around since the nineteenth century, protecting the secrets of smugglers and lovers and underground protesters, and it made sense to me that the shop would understand that in order to survive, it would need to know how to hide and how to be found.

  The shopfront was small and plain, a solid gray-blue that your eyes wanted to skip past. But on the right day, when you finally saw it, you’d step through the door and take in the brass trimmings and the saucer chandeliers, the black-and-white checkered tiles and the gleaming glass cases, and you would be transported.

  Inside the shop, it smelled like whipped butter and light and sugar, and a happy breeze seemed always to be dancing through. Dazzling mirrored displays encased little desserts like gems, and dark polished surfaces were offset by battered accents collected by Lucy on her early travels with Walter Lavender Sr., here a dappled giraffe carved from a jacaranda tree in South Africa, there an embroidered scroll arrayed with the colors of Tibetan folklore.

  But the most extraordinary thing was that something happened in the slice of time when the vols-au-vent baked in the oven or waited to be dressed, because when they appeared finally in the displays, stuffed with fig mascarpone cheese and outfitted with chocolate whiskers and ears and tails—before they were chosen and eaten, the undersized treats sniffed endearingly at each other and squeaked and sometimes stood on their hind legs and bounced.

  It wasn’t just the mice, either, that awoke with distinct personalities. There were lime custard tartlets topped with sour cream that struck poses in the mirror behind the display, admiring their pleated key lime skirts, and there were amaretti biscuits that hovered over whirlpool coffee cups and every so often dipped themselves enticingly into the ever-steaming liquid, and pear and ginger upside-down cakes that flipped forward and back into layouts and tucks, and crispy rice squares that snapped and popped when they stretched lazily like cats.

  There were rum-infused black-and-white penguin cookies that waddled and tipped over each other and competitive chestnut tortes that galloped across the display and trampled the molasses pecan cinnamon rolls, which glided sedately along, and there were desserts with other unique qualities, too: pumpkin five-spice ice-cream bombes that didn’t melt until you ate them and wedges of salted-butter country apple galette that trickled into your knotted muscles to relax them and towering squares of fizzy angel food cake that rendered you just a bit lighter and monogrammed petits fours that reminded you of the places you came from and lemon verbena chiffon cupcakes that freshened you up and chilled lychee puddings that slowed time and made you breathe deeper.

  Naturally, our customers crowded around the desserts, drawn in by the lively displays, but they also gathered over the display near the window, which contained only an inconspicuous leather book—slim, with seven pages that were heavy and yellowing and loosening from the spine like old teeth.

  It was the Book, the gift left for Lucy because of her kindness. Returning customers knew how important it was and that was why they gathered to look at it, displayed in its case, open to the first page: “It was a dark and stormy night,” against a wintry hand-painted sky alive with wild stars and tumbling ribbons of light and whorls of wind and whimsy, and spread below it was the city, darkly alluring and diamond-sharp, made of steel and water and concrete, a labyrinth of streets and reflections and shadows that dared you, with each shifting, multiplying line, to look for an end.

  Before I turned two, it was easy to believe that everything had worked out. Walter Lavender Sr. was not there, but when I opened my eyes they were just like his, tracking closely the sounds of life—heeled footsteps approaching or the kettle whistling or the hinges squeaking. Yet something about me was different anyway. It was just emerging, barely noticeable.

  There was no way for Lucy to peer into my brain, into the neon-bright streams winding through its passages, and pick out the sets of signals that twisted down deviating or truncated pathways, becoming lost and arriving at different times in my jaw and lips and tongue or never arriving at all.

  The first pediatrician patted Lucy’s hand and said, “Not to worry, dear. Even Einstein didn’t talk until he was three.”

  The second pediatrician shrugged and said, “He’s a late bloomer. Boys are like that, you know.”

  Months passed and I did not speak or even babble. The neurologist suggested autism and the preschool teacher said, “Give it time,” and the developmental pediatrician said, “Intellectual disability.” There were blood tests and brain scans and evaluations and checklists, and finally there was the speech pathologist saying, “Speech disorder—some standard speech therapy will do the trick.”

  So I started attending therapy sessions three times a week with ten other kids and a therapist who looked terrified and resigned at the same time.

  “Fish,” she would say, holding up a flash card.

  Fish, I told myself, and the group chorused, “Fish,” and I heard myself say, “Shh.”

  “Again,” said the speech therapist.

 
Fish, I reminded myself, and the voice in my mind said, Fish, but in the same moment I heard, “Fih.”

  This was accompanied by the disembodied feeling of being torn in two, my mind humming underwater with a voice that was loud and close and mine, while hearing at the same instant the sounds that were flattened and shapeless—distant, other. My brain shouted, Fish, FISH, and the outside voice that was and was not mine honked, “Fuhhh.”

  Progress was slow, laborious, but at least it was there. One afternoon, after three years of silence and an ocean of lost words, I woke from a nap and somewhere in my brain, as signals flared and flew, one stream of signals banked and connected and I opened my mouth and gurgled, suddenly, “Dada?”

  Lucy dropped the sugar corkscrew she was holding and let out a breath that lasted a long time.

  Even with the apparent progress, the sporadic words, connections failed to come easily and saying nothing remained the easiest of all. The right diagnosis came eventually but by then I was eight, and comfortable in my silence. Dr. Winkleberker looked young and distinguished, and I called her Doc because her full name was a series of jumbled vowels and consonants, impossible for me to say. She only had to interact with me for five minutes before she put her pen down and looked Lucy square in the eye and said, “He knows exactly what he wants to say, but his muscles aren’t listening.”

  She explained that our brains formed pathways to transmit signals for everything we did, but for signals to be successfully sent and received, all the pathways involved had to be fully intact. When they were, talking happened seamlessly, unconsciously. But my pathways were deviant—missed connections, short circuits—and so my muscles did not hear my brain, and they did not know how to produce the sounds I wanted.

  She called it a motor speech disorder, and we learned that my group therapy sessions were good for children with stutters or lisps but not for me. Those were years that I could not get back, Doc said, but new pathways were constantly being formed and old ones rerouted as new connections were forged and strengthened through the right kind of repetition, so we should try, of course, and expect what was realistic and hope for the best.

  Lucy tried to wait until we were home but halfway through the subway ride she found herself sinking in a slick of guilt, and she started to cry.

  There was no wailing or sobbing, just tears the size of quarters and half-dollars pattering onto the floor. For two days she cried and made meringues, and on the third day she put away the mixer and dried her eyes. She told me that I was more than she could ever want and she loved me more than I could ever imagine, and then she recounted my favorite story, about the boy who met a mermaid and escaped his oceanside prison.

  As the years passed, it was no longer just the two of us standing in the door frame. Flora puttered across the shop, wiping the tiled floor smooth, and our golden retriever, Milton, plunged into the crowds, whipping his tail joyfully, punishingly, against everyone’s legs, and José biked past the window, heading out for a delivery.

  He made all the deliveries except the special Sunday ones because those belonged to me. They were for our most devoted customers who had been with us from the start, like Mrs. Ida Bonnet, who had not forgotten any of her three children and six grandchildren even though they had begun to forget her. On one particular Sunday ten months ago, I was headed out on a delivery to her and it could have been any other Sunday, but it was not exactly the same. It was the twelfth anniversary of the shop’s opening and it was also when my story—this story—began.

  Up until last year, my stories always belonged to someone else. Walter Lavender Sr. had his story and so did Lucy and so did everyone who lost things, and they were a million points of light in my solitary darkness: these stories like stars, illuminating the silent nights.

  But for the first time in my thirteen years, I have a story of my own to tell and I am the one who will tell it, and it began on that particular Sunday ten months ago.

  So there I am: waiting at West Fourth Street for the A train to arrive and carry me to Fourteenth, and I’m scuffing my red canvas high-tops against the platform with Mrs. Ida Bonnet’s delivery box balanced in one hand. The box is layered with sweet vanilla wafers with sea-salted caramel filling, a new product Lucy developed to commemorate the anniversary, and I am careful not to jostle the wafers because they are delicate and because a whiff will fill my nose and chest with a pleasant nostalgic ache and there is no time for that when I have a job to complete.

  The platform is empty, which means that I have just missed the previous train, and I pull out my notebook and lay it open on top of the delivery box and pass the time by watching other people trickle in. I see a woman in yoga pants drinking a bottle of green mud, and a fair family of four speaking rapid French, and two young men carrying portfolios, wearing suits, sharp and fresh-faced. There is no sun to cast shadows here but I see bruised smudges following them, mimicking their confident movements.

  PROUD BROADCAST OF EXHAUSTION AND IMPORTANCE, I add in my notebook.

  Someone pushes past me and I slip my notebook back into my pocket and look up. The boy’s shirt is rumpled and the buttons are in the wrong buttonholes, which means that an extra button flaps against his Adam’s apple, and a plume of distress rises over him as he rips off hunks of tape and slaps flyers onto every other green column.

  MISSING!

  That is my cue. I tear off a flyer and hurry after the frantic boy, bracing my arms in front of me so the delivery box does not bounce. When I catch up to the boy he is picking up some flyers he dropped. His black hair sticks to his forehead in stringy waves; in the pictures on the flyers fanned out on the platform, he is wearing a short-sleeved button-down shirt again but his hair is slicked back from his forehead with gel.

  MISSING! BEAUTIFUL BASSOON, MAPLE.

  In the picture, he is holding a bassoon that is almost as big as he is although he is taller and older than I am. In the picture, he looks whole. I pick up a few flyers and we stand up together, and I take a focused breath and steel my thoughts.

  “I find lost things,” I say. The words sound straight enough, almost perfect and paced normally, because it is the phrase I am most familiar with and the first phrase I practiced with Doc.

  Since then, I have used it countless times, and it is how I always introduce myself in a new case and the only way I can introduce myself at all. The musician doesn’t say anything in response but I can tell by the recognition in his eyes that he has understood.

  I give him a card for The Lavenders and again with great care I gesture at the delivery box and say, “Not now. Tomorrow after school?” and hold up four fingers. His eyebrows pinch skeptically but two or three rumples on his shirt relax as he nods, and the train announces itself in a screech of wind and juddering metal.

  During five years of finding, I have learned that everyone loses things, musicians and non-musicians alike—the elderly when they forget and the young when they don’t pay attention and the middle-aged when there are too many things to do. In the things they look for, parts of people turn clear as glass and you can see into them and what they are made of and how they live, without needing to exchange so many words. There was the long-ago transplant who lost a piece of Maine driftwood, and there was also the man with lupus who lost an unused barber kit and the tattooed biker who lost a picture of his grandmother and the teenager with scarred wrists who lost George and Martha.

  I keep finding because it is a way for me to be part of something bigger, even if it is only for a while. Whether it is for a Lost camera in Nikon bag, sentimental family photos, or a Runaway cat, tough sweetie with a spot under her right eye, or a Missing heirloom, buttons and badges from the Civil War, people are willing to share pieces of their lives with me, and when I patch these scraps of information together I catch a glimpse of who they are.

  Usually when I speak, people have trouble understanding and before I can finish one sentence they are
already turning their toes away, shuttering their ears, assuming that whatever I have to say will not be worth listening to. But finding is different, because of the meaning that drives it—the lost thing. It makes people want to hear me and knowing this makes it possible for me to speak. With just a few phrases, two or three questions, I will know enough to understand someone, because people only bother looking for the things that matter. There is also something that forms when a lost thing is returned, a feeling of belonging like coming home to the shop except with finding it is something I have created. In those moments, I do not miss my voice so much.

  Beyond that, I have discovered some rules in the course of my finding, and this is the one that keeps the rest in motion: the more you persist in searching, the more likely you are to stumble across something unexpected. In looking for someone else’s lost thing, I am also looking for mine—some sign that will lead me to Walter Lavender Sr., and tell me what happened to him.

  At Fourteenth Street I take an extra moment to join the little bronze man at his bench, leaning over his round head and picking off some bubblegum stuck to his cartoon bag of money. Outside, the city is cool and shiny-bright as a coin. Mrs. Ida Bonnet is accustomed to my silence and my steady gaze; she does not say much, and I hear the ticking of the clock and the wafer snapping dry and crisp between her teeth like a small bone. The room fills with the gentle ache of vanilla and the sound of the sea, and she closes her eyes and lays a wrinkled hand over her heart and smiles at the memory of things I cannot see.

  2

  The next morning before the shop opens, I lug the olive oil out of the supply closet and pick my way to the front window, sidling around tables and chairs to avoid stepping on Milton, who is so occupied with watching my face and peppering me with questions—Where are you going? What are you doing? What are you holding?—that he does not realize when he gets in the way.