Lost and Found

Even though she had approached this specific counter, and countless others like it, more times than she could remember, her body always forgot what her brain knew. The hiccupping heartbeat, the compulsive need to clear her throat, the inability to look the counter-attendant directly in the eye, the urge to press both palms flat on the cool countertop—her biology betrayed her every time.

She couldn’t remember exactly when she started haunting Lost and Found counters. She only knew it was after the accident. Only two things had ever happened to her in her nine years of life—the accident, and everything else. The details of accident day were seared into her brain—like the branding iron singing hair away on a hobbled calf. They made their unmistakable mark, and now they owned her. The details of everything else were hazy.

She did remember that she’d been sitting cross-legged on the floor in the school gym, surrounded by other kids waiting for their parents to come pick them up. Only she was waiting for her babysitter. Because Mom was working long hours now. While the other kids’ mouths made a chorus of bubbly chatter punctuated by laughter and shoulder slaps, she stared. Her eyes fixated on the small, rectangular sign on the wall outside the gym coach’s office door—Lost and Found.

She had lost something. Maybe he was right here. Maybe he was just taking a short nap in the pile of cast-off sweatshirts and winter jackets that were obsolete now that the punishing cold of winter was retreating. Maybe he got distracted by one of those games everyone was addicted to on a phone that had been placed on a bleacher at a ball game, and never picked up again. Maybe he was perusing the piles of jewelry, trying to pick the perfect piece to bring home to surprise her. Maybe.

She started seeing signs everywhere after that, like someone with a giant, fluorescent highlighter had graffitied her world while she slept one night, slashing thick stripes over only those words.  In the community pool dressing room—Lost and Found. Tucked in the grimiest, dimmest corner of the bus station—Lost and Found. On the towering telephone and light poles in her own neighborhood—Lost Dog, Lost Cat. In the lobby of her mother’s work building. In the concession stand by the soccer fields. On the bulletin board above the drinking fountains in Walmart. Missing, missing missing. Lost, lost, lost.  

It was the “found” part of the phrase that she was trying to get to. It seemed so simple. Only a one-word bridge to traverse. Three short letters. She was the best speller in her grade, and it was such a babyish word. She could have spelled it when she was four. A stellar speller he had called her, delighting in the crisp rhyme he had created. But those three letters might as well have been as wide and terrifying as the monsters’ smiles in tha picture book that had given her nightmares when she was small. One slip and she was sure to be swallowed up.  

Nevertheless, whenever she spotted a Lost and Found counter, she didn’t resist pilgrimaging to it, like the bugs in her front yard at night that succumbed to the pull of the porch light. She would approach the attendant, cast the seeds of a small lie, and wait to see what grew. She’d misplaced her water bottle. It’s turquoise with a pink, plastic lid.

“I think I left it in the cafeteria?”

She was wondering if anyone had turned in a mechanical pencil? It’s blue. Kind of special because it was the same pencil she’d been using since October and she didn’t want to break her streak.

“Do you have any BFF necklaces back there? I lost mine and my friend is worried because now no one has a match to hers and we can’t be Best Friends anymore.”

What she really meant was, “He’s been gone since December. I last saw him being wheeled away.” The frantic pulsing of the blue and red lights had matched the pace of her own heartbeat. “His eyes were closed. I kept screaming for him to open them and look at me. He wouldn’t look at me.”

Sometimes she imagined that if she asked the attendant for the exactly-correct-mystery-item, it would be as if she had uttered the magic words, and he would come bounding out from behind the counter, a beaming smile on his face.

“Ding! Ding! Ding! You guessed it!” he’d say. Just like when they used to play Catch Phrase together.

Or, maybe he was smooshed inside one of the lost items, like the flamboyant genie in Aladdin, and she had to touch the exactly-correct-mystery-item in order for him to be released from his cramped, coffin prison. Or, perhaps she needed to find the right counter attendant. Then, even if she guessed the wrong item, the benevolent attendant would be able to divine what she had really lost, and bring him out anyway. Just like the carnival fishing scene in the old Hayley Mills Pollyanna movie, when Pollyanna’s friend, Mrs. Snow, knows that the wooden horse is all wrong and attaches the doll with the painted face to the fishing line instead.

Of course, she knew he wasn’t at any Lost and Found. Just like she knew she had buttoned her cardigan askew right before her turn at the piano recital last Christmas. Yes, it was wrong, but she was still shivering from the walk through the parking lot, the cathedral was drafty, and her nervous fingers were too shaky to unbutton everything in front of everyone and start over. Better to be slightly off than to expose herself to the merciless chill of the air or the audience. So, she played on. And now, in the brief moment after the attendant turned their back to her—intent on finding the pretend item she had described—before they came back empty-handed, she could believe that he wasn’t lost, he was just being found.