When We Were Lost

A stunning female head and neck emerge from the cab of the Ford pickup; corn tassel hair, sea foam eyes, smooth skin glowing rose in the setting sun. Diamond studs wink in perfect earlobes.

“Anders, where the heck is the flashlight?”

“I don’t know. You had it last night.”

“God, Anders, you’re always moving things. We have four square feet here, you’d think we could at least keep track of our crap.”

The man is almost as beautiful as the woman, but his profile is softer, his attractiveness more muted. “You would think,” he replies, with exaggerated calm, and sits down at the picnic table, where he turns his attention to spreading a thin layer of peanut butter on a Triscuit.

“Well, aren’t you going to help me look?”

“I’m going to finish eating.”

The woman’s head retreats into the pickup with a sound like a snort.

At this moment, a little girl of about five appears around the cab of the truck. She carries a flashlight; its beam, weak in the fading sunlight, scans the dusty ground. “Daddy,” she says mournfully, “I lost my lizard.”

Emotions flip across the man’s face — surprise, embarrassment, affection. He beckons the little girl to the picnic table and boosts her up to sit beside the Triscuit box.

“Did you, honey? Well, I bet he found another lizard to play with. Lizards are wild, you know. I never was able to keep one as a pet.”

The little girl’s eyes widen. Her irises are the same sea foam green as the woman’s. “You had a pet lizard, Daddy?”

“Well, for about a day and a — ”

“Okay, Anders, I have looked everywhere. We need to — ”

The woman tumbles out of the pickup’s passenger door, sees the little girl, and stops.

“It’s okay, Emily, Hope had it.”

The girl holds out the flashlight. “I was looking for my lizard,” she explains. “But Daddy says lizards aren’t good pets.”

Annoyance drains from the woman’s face, pushed outward by a deep sigh. She smiles — the smile makes her face even more beautiful — and sits down on the picnic table next to the girl.

“Thank you, sweetheart,” she says. “Your daddy is probably right.”

I was almost three when my parents started traveling. By the time I turned five, we had overstayed the length-of-stay limit at every campground on the west coast. Our worldly possessions rode along in the covered bed of the pickup, which my parents referred to, jokingly, as “the apartment.” Sometimes when I’d beg for some large item — a kitchen play set, a child’s rocking chair, a stuffed elephant big enough to ride on — they’d gently tell me, “no, honey, that won’t fit in the apartment.” And then all three of us would laugh.

They liked quiet, out-of-the-way places. My mother sold her sketches and photography at the Sunday farmers’ markets, charming would-be customers with her stories, her confidence, her willingness to teach and learn. My father wrote long feature pieces about the American small-town economy and shipped them off to magazine editors; sometimes, if we moved on too soon, we’d miss the check that came in response, leaving thousands of dollars bouncing from PO box to PO box.

I taught myself to read by scrutinizing newspapers picked up during our occasional stops in the bigger cities. Poring over the personal ads, I fixated on phrases like “Girl seeks girl for occasional play” and “Boy seeks girl for companionship and conversation.” That’s me, I’d think, and wonder how to find these people. I had few friends. Not because we moved around so much — my mother always had friends, made them within hours and kept them with postcards — but because I spoke rarely, and hid behind my parents in the company of strangers.

I would not say we were poor. It would be more accurate to say we were lost — three people rolling in our glass bubbles through the world, holding hands through the broken places, enduring the pain of our own raw edges against our arms.

My father and I shared a love of animals. He embraced my parade of adopted pets — lizards, stray cats, and once, a mouse that I claimed to have tamed by feeding it apple juice (it later came out that the supposed apple juice was actually a half-finished bottle of champagne that had gone flat in the picnic cooler). From my father I learned to reel in a caught fish so slowly that it never suspected anything beyond the normal motion of a live fly, and to pull the hook so gently from the tiny piscine mouth that not the slightest drop of blood spilled into the stream. Once, during one of our lessons, I threw a terrible cast and tangled the fishhook in my curly brown hair. Dad panicked and hacked away half the curls with his Swiss Army knife, extracting the hook and incurring a tearful diatribe from my mother, who could stand neither the real sight of my shorn head nor the imagined sight of a fishhook lodged so close to my eye.

I freed my catches even more gingerly after that, running my fingers through my butchered hair and wincing when I found the place where the metal barb had grazed my scalp.

My mother and I shared a love of orderliness. Sometimes on a foggy morning she’d clamber into the bed of the pickup, crouched under the camper shell, and peer around with an artist’s glint in her eye. “It’s chaos in here,” she’d announce. “Let’s overhaul the apartment, Hope.”

She’d take me to Home Depot or Lowe’s or the local hardware store equivalent, and we’d buy cartloads of cleaning supplies, nails, and plywood. We’d spend the day at the edge of the store’s parking lot, pulling everything out of the truck bed and scrubbing the inside with Simple Green. Mom gave me the job of sorting and pruning our belongings, creating tidy piles in the adjacent parking space and toting the duplicates, the broken things, and the unused items to the dumpsters. In the afternoon we’d devote ourselves to cutting and pounding plywood, fine-tuning an ancient network of crates and shelves that held back the creep of entropy in our crowded pseudo-home. We measured meticulously before every swipe of the handsaw and swing of the hammer, scratching marks in the soft wood with an empty mechanical pencil.

At the end of the day, each pile of stuff fit perfectly into its assigned cubby in the truck bed. I loved watching those piles move seamlessly into place, loved aligning books and tools on shelves just so, sorting my socks by color and rolling each pair into a recycled paper towel tube. We always left a wide empty space down the middle of the truck, and when we’d finished moving everything back inside we’d lie down full-length in that empty space, toes hanging out the tailgate, sharing a king size bag of peanut M&Ms and basking in the smell of Simple Green.

We are relaxing in our nice clean living room, I’d think. And we have our feet on the porch.

“Good work, sister,” mom would say, and slap me a high-five.

Usually it would turn out that we’d tossed something that dad, often inexplicably, had wanted to keep — a disposable camera, an empty notebook, an unworn tie. And usually for days after the cleaning spree none of us, including me and my mom, could find our pajamas or our coffee mugs. I’d tire of rolling my socks into perfect cylinders, and resume shoving them into an empty grocery bag. But I lived for those sunset moments, the bag of M&Ms, the quiet hum of order in the universe, the word “sister,” and the sharp ache where mom’s palm landed against mine.

The sunlight is almost gone. The man works at building a fire, growing frustrated but stubbornly refusing to show it as match after match snuffs out without lighting the wadded newspaper in the grate. Finally, a fluttering page flares and ignites a neighboring clump of moss; the moss crinkles into a ball of sparks that jump to a spindly twig and then to a larger branch. The man grins, his face an odd mixture of conceit and relief.

The woman and girl move gratefully into the warmth. The girl still clutches the flashlight, and glances up hopefully at every noise in the scrubby grass. Maybe my lizard will want to come sit by the fire, she thinks.

A guitar appears in the man’s hands, drawn from some perfectly fitted crevice under the pickup’s camper shell. He plucks at the strings a little and then begins to sing, and the girl joins in immediately:

From this valley they say you are leaving
We shall miss your bright eyes and sweet smile
For you take with you all of the sunshine
That has brightened our pathway a while

The woman gazes into the fire. Her lips move faintly to the tune of the words, but no sound escapes beyond the steady rhythm of her breathing. Flames lick at a page of newsprint near the edge of the fire; at its edge, the words Boy seeks girl begin to char and smoke.

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