Lost And Found

by Carolyn Parkhurst

Genres: Literary Fiction

Synopsis

What do a suburban mom and her troubled daughter, two recently divorced brothers, a pair of former child stars, born-again Christian newlyweds, and a couple of young millionaires have in common? They have all been selected to compete on Lost and Found, a daring new reality TV show. In teams of two, they will race across the globe, from Egypt to Japan, from Sweden to England, to battle for a million-dollar prize. They must decipher encrypted clues, recover mysterious artifacts, and outwit their opponents to stay in play.What starts as a lark turns deadly serious as the number of players is whittled down, temptations beckon, and the bonds between partners strain and unravel. Before long the question is not only who will capture the final prize, but at what cost.

Release date: June 13, 2006

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 304

Sample

ONE

Laura

By the sixth leg of the game, we have accumulated the following objects: a ski pole, a bishop from a crystal chess set, a sheet of rice paper, a trilobite fossil, an aviator’s helmet, and a live parrot.

Our backpacks are overflowing. I drop the chess piece into a sock to keep it from bumping against anything and chipping. I fold the rice paper into a guidebook. The helmet I put on my head.

I hand the ski pole to Cassie. “Ready?” I ask, picking up the parrot’s cage.

“Like I have a choice,” she says. Our cameraman, Brendan, grins. I know he thinks Cassie makes for great footage.

“Okay, then,” I say. “We’re off.”

We leave our hotel room and walk down the hall, Brendan walking backward so he can film us; our sound guy trails behind. In the elevator, the parrot squawks.

“We should give this guy a name,” I say to Cassie, holding up the cage.

“How about Drumstick?” Brendan smiles behind his camera. He’s loving this.

“How about Milton?” I try. “He looks kind of like a Milton, don’t you think?”

“Fine, Mom,” Cassie says, staring up at the lighted numbers. “Whatever.”

The doors open onto the lobby, and we step out. There are only seven teams left, and the other six are already here. I pretty much hate them all by this point. Wendy and Jillian, the middle-aged flight attendants from Milwaukee, are sitting on a sofa, feeding little bits of bread to their parrot, while Carl and Jeff, the funny brothers from Boston, sit next to them, poring over a guidebook. Justin and Abby, whom a few people have dubbed Team Brimstone (or, occasionally, Team Shut-Up-Already) because they won’t stop talking about how the power of the Lord rescued them from homosexuality and delivered them into the loving grace of Christian marriage, are praying. Juliet and Dallas, the former child stars, who are standing (not coincidentally, I think) next to a large mirror, are staring at them with naked malice. Riley and Trent, the young millionaire inventors (they’re wild cards—brilliant, but not so good with the everyday stuff, and everyone wonders what they’re doing here anyway, since they don’t need the money), smile at Cassie as we walk past, but she turns away from them and goes to sit next to Wendy. Wendy says something to her, and Cassie actually smiles and reaches out to touch the feathers on their parrot’s head.

The only seat left is next to Betsy and Jason, the former high school sweethearts who have recently been reunited after twenty years apart. They seem to be having a fight; they’re sitting beside each other, but his arms are crossed, and their commitment to not looking at each other is very strong. I sit down next to Betsy, balancing Milton’s cage on my lap.

“Morning,” Betsy says, turning her whole body away from Jason. “Did your parrot keep you guys up all night, too?”

“No, we just put a towel over his cage and he went right to sleep.”

“Lucky,” she says. “We tried that, but it didn’t work. Ours was freaking out all night. I think we got a defective one.”

“A defective parrot. I wonder if there’s any provision for that in the rules.”

“Yeah, maybe they’ll let us trade it in. Otherwise, I’m gonna put it in Barbara’s room tonight.”

There are two camerapeople filming this conversation.

One of the producers, Eli, steps to the middle of the room and claps his hands. “Quiet, everyone,” he says. “Here comes Barbara.”

The front door opens and the host of the show, Barbara Fox, walks in with an entourage of makeup artists and even more camerapeople. She’s small and rigid with short blond hair and a frosty smile. She’s one of the most unnatural people I’ve ever met. I don’t know how she got a job on TV. We’re not allowed to approach her.

“Good morning, everybody,” she says, turning her glassy smile to each of us in turn.

“Good morning,” we say like schoolchildren, except less in unison.

Her crew sets her up in front of a large mural of the Sphinx. Filming begins. “I’m Barbara Fox,” she says, “and I’m standing in a hotel in Aswan, the southernmost city in Egypt, with the seven remaining teams in a scavenger hunt that will cover all the corners of the earth. Ladies and gentlemen, this . . .”—dramatic pause here, and a strange little roll of her head—“is Lost and Found.”

Throughout this process, auditioning for the show, going through rounds of interviews with the producers, providing background for the viewers, we’ve been asked over and over again to “tell our story.” The story I’ve told them goes something like this: I raised Cassie mostly on my own; it hasn’t always been easy. She’ll be leaving for college next year, and I wanted a chance to travel the world with her before she’s gone. Cassie’s version is considerably terser. We tell the story like that’s all there is, like we’re any old mother and daughter doing our little dance of separation and reconciliation. Oldest story in the world.

The story that doesn’t get told begins like this: Four months ago, on a warm and airless night, I woke up to find Cassie standing over my bed. I couldn’t see her very well in the dark, and for a moment it was like all the other nights, scattered through her childhood, when she’d come to get me because she was sick or scared. I’m a sound sleeper—I guess it’s important to say that—and it took her a few minutes to wake me.

“Mom,” she was saying. “Mom.”

“What is it?” I said. “What time is it?”

“Mom, could you come to my room for a minute?”

“What’s the matter? Are you sick?”

“Could you just come to my room?”

“Okay,” I said. I got out of bed and followed her down the hall. She’d moved her bedroom into the attic the previous year, and as we climbed the stairs, I could see that the light was on and the bedclothes were rumpled. I noticed a funny smell, an odor of heat and sweat and something like blood. There were towels everywhere—it seemed like every towel we owned was piled on the floor or the bed. Most of them were wet, and some of them were stained with something dark.

“Is that blood?” I said.

“Mom, look,” she said. “On the bed.”

I looked at the tangle of linens, and it took me a minute before I saw it. Saw her, I should say. There, in the center of the bed, lay a baby wrapped in a yellow beach towel.

“What . . .” I said, but I didn’t know how to finish the sentence. “Cassie . . .”

“It’s a girl,” Cassie said.

“I don’t understand,” I said. My mind seemed to have stopped working. The baby looked very still. “Is she . . . okay?”

“I think so,” Cassie said. “She was awake at first, and then she went to sleep.”

“But . . .” I said, and then I didn’t say any more. I reached out and unwrapped the baby. She lay naked and sleeping, her body smudged with creamy smears of vernix. Several inches of umbilical cord, tied at the end with a shoelace, grew out of her belly like a vine.

I looked her over, this child, my granddaughter. Tiny. Tiny. There is no new way to say it. If you could have seen her. The translucent eyelids, the little fingers curled into fists. The knees bent like she hadn’t learned how to stretch them yet. The feet wrinkled from their long soak. You forget how small they can be. Tiny.

I picked her up, and she stirred. She opened her eyes and looked up at me. A lurch inside me, and I loved her, just like that. It didn’t even happen that way with my own daughter, not quite. I held her close to my chest and wrapped the towel around her again.

“I didn’t know how to tell you,” Cassie said.

“I don’t understand,” I said again. “You had this baby?”

“Yeah. About half an hour ago, I guess.”

“But you weren’t pregnant.”

She gave me a look. “Well, obviously, I was,” she said.

“And you didn’t tell me? For nine whole months you didn’t tell me? Who’s the father? Dan? Does he know?”

“Can we talk about this later?” she said. “I think maybe I should see a doctor.” She lowered her voice and looked downward. “I’m bleeding,” she said, her voice like a little girl’s.

I wish I had said, “My poor baby.” I wish I had said, “I’m so sorry you had to go through this alone.” But I was tired and bewildered, and I was beginning to get angry. What I said was, “Yeah, that’ll happen when you give birth.” And I didn’t say it very nicely.

Cassie turned away from me and balled her hands into fists. “Well, you don’t have to be so mean,” she said, and I could hear that she was trying not to cry. “I’ve been through a lot tonight. It hurt a lot, you know, really, really a lot.”

I took a deep breath and tried to calm myself down. “Okay, Cassie,” I said. “I’m sorry. This is just kind of a shock.” I reached out to take her arm, but she shook me away. “You’re right,” I said. “We should go to the hospital.”

I looked at the baby, who was lying quietly in my arms. “We have to wrap her better,” I said. “This towel is wet.”

“I think she peed,” said Cassie. “I didn’t have any diapers. I didn’t know they could pee so soon.”

“Well, they can,” I said. “Let me go get some blankets.”

With great care, I put the baby down on the bed and went down the stairs to the linen closet. My mind felt thick, as if my head were filled with clay. I tried to understand this new information, to lay it on top of the things I already knew and to read my memories through it. She’d been wearing loose clothes lately, I’d noticed that much. I thought she’d been gaining weight, but I didn’t want to upset her by bringing it up. She’d been sleeping a lot and she was moody, but so what? It’s not like that’s exactly earth-shattering behavior for a seventeen-year-old.

I opened the linen closet and looked inside. I picked out a quilt that my grandmother had given me when Cassie was born; her own mother had made it for her as a wedding gift. It had been Cassie’s favorite blanket in childhood, and she’d kept it on her bed until she reached adolescence.

As I picked it up, I was already imagining the things I would say to this baby one day. I would tell her, You were born under extraordinary circumstances. I would tell her, We wrapped you in a quilt that was older than our house.

I brought the blanket into Cassie’s room and spread it on the bed.

“But that’s my blanket from Nana,” she said. Her voice rose like a child’s. “What if she pees again?”

I laid the baby on the quilt, the small, miraculous lump of her, and swaddled her as well as I could. “If she pees, she pees,” I said.

“Do you think we should bring this to the hospital?” Cassie asked, picking up the wastebasket by her desk. I looked inside at what it held. It was the placenta, dark and slick as a piece of raw liver.

“I don’t think we need that,” I said. I tried to think back to the books I had read before Cassie was born. “Wait, maybe we do. I think they need to check it to make sure the whole thing came out. I don’t know.”

“I’ll just bring it,” she said.

The baby started to cry, a high, pure kitten-screech of a sound. We both looked down at her.

“She’s probably hungry,” I said. “I wonder if you should try to breastfeed her.”

“No,” she said, and her voice was hard and steady. “I don’t want to.” And I think that was when I knew we’d be giving her up.

The rules of the game are simple. For each segment, they fly us to a new city where we follow a trail of clues through various exotic (and, presumably, photogenic) locations until we’re able to decipher what item we’re looking for. Then each team sets out to find an object that qualifies. Every item we find has to remain with us until the end of the game, so the items are usually heavy or fragile or unwieldy; it adds to the drama. Losing or breaking a found object is grounds for disqualification. The last team to find the required object and make it to the finish line gets sent home.

At the end of each leg, Barbara interviews the team that’s been eliminated, and she asks the following question: “You’ve lost the game, but what have you found?” I know the producers are looking for cheesy answers like “I found my inner strength,” or “I found the true meaning of friendship,” but that’s not always what they get. The first ones eliminated were Mariah and Brian, a brother-and-sister team from San Francisco. Brian began acting strangely almost immediately; we found out later that he was schizophrenic—he was fine while he was taking his medication, but he’d stopped at some point during the game. (So much for all the producers’ elaborate background checks.) The race ended for them in a museum of natural history in Quebec. We were looking for trilobites, but Brian became very agitated by a giant dinosaur skeleton that was on display, and he began to pelt it with trash from a nearby garbage can. He had to be forcibly removed from the premises. Afterward, Barbara found the two of them outside, sitting on the ground like children. Mariah was cradling Brian in her arms as he rocked back and forth unhappily. Barbara walked up to them—you have to give her credit for determination—and asked them her question. Brian looked up at Barbara, his face a frieze of misery. “I’ve found out you’re a motherless dog,” he said before Mariah waved the cameras away. I’d like to see how they’re going to edit that.

I don’t think there’s much of a chance Cassie and I will win the game, but I don’t really care. Secretly, this is the moment I’m looking forward to most, the moment when Cassie and I stand before Barbara, and she asks me what I’ve found. Cassie and I will look at each other and smile; I’ll reach out and touch her arm, or her hair, and she won’t move away. I’ll turn back to Barbara, and the cameras, and all the TV viewers of the world. I found my daughter, I’ll say. I found my little girl.

TWO

Cassie

So today we’re in Egypt, which I guess would be kind of cool if I weren’t here with my mom, and we weren’t on a fucking game show. It’s not like we have time to explore all these different countries; we just rush through and do the stupid game stuff. We got to Aswan last night and Mom made us come straight to the hotel, so pretty much all I’ve seen of Egypt is an episode of The Love Boat dubbed into Arabic.

Barbara’s finishing up her little spiel and giving out the clues. They come in white envelopes sealed with gold wax. We all open them at the same time. There’s a little poem inside, written in nice calligraphy:

A great king toppled in the sand,

Three others looming higher,

Contain a monument less grand—

The name of Godfrey Wire.

Each of the teams start whispering among themselves, trying to guess what the clue might mean without giving away any hints to anyone else.

“I think I have an idea about this,” Mom says softly, flipping quickly through her guidebook. “I know I saw something in here about a temple with four statues, but one of them has lost some pieces. I’m trying to remember what it’s called.”

“Godfrey Wire doesn’t sound very Egyptian,” I say.

“No, it doesn’t. Maybe it has to do with the keyword.” The first part of every segment is called the Keyword Round. Once you get wherever you’re going, you have to use the clue to figure out what word the judges are looking for. Then you’re supposed to go over to Barbara, who’s standing in this stupid-looking soundproof glass box, and tell her what you think it is. If you guess wrong, you get a ten-minute penalty before you’re allowed to guess again, which can give the other teams a chance to get ahead.

Riley and Trent (inventor weirdos) have gone to consult with the concierge; Juliet and Dallas (TV babies) are making a phone call. Justin and Abby (freaks) have already figured everything out, apparently, and are heading for the door. Everyone else is looking through books like we are.

“Here it is,” Mom says. She leans close and whispers in my ear—we’re miked, so they’ll be able to pick it up anyway—“The temple of Abu Simbel.” She shows me a picture of a giant cliff with these four big pharaoh guys carved into it. One of them is missing his head and chest; the broken pieces lie in front of him on the sand. Brendan leans in to get a shot of the guidebook.

“That’s got to be it, don’t you think?” she says.

“Yeah, I guess so.” I pick up the parrot’s cage, and he lets out this annoying squawk. “All right,” I say, “let’s get on with it.”

Over the past four months, my mom has said “We’ve got to talk about this” so many times that she probably repeats it in her sleep, but every time we do, she doesn’t have the slightest clue what to say. And I guess I don’t really feel like helping her out. So she doesn’t know my side of the story at all.

I got pregnant at Greenstone Village—it’s one of those lame “ye olde” places where everyone pretends it’s the 1700s, and they act like making candles is the most fascinating thing in the world. We were on a field trip for AP history, which was fun, because once you’re in high school, they don’t do those much anymore. It made us feel like kids again, handing in our permission slips, getting on the school bus. We were all doing silly stuff like putting our heads and arms into the stocks and trying to get the people who worked there to admit they knew what television was. (“A box with pictures that move? I know of no such sinful appurtenance.” Yeah, yeah, we get it, you’re so authentic.)

We had this handout we were supposed to fill out, and the teachers were pretty much letting us wander around on our own. My friend Mia and I were walking around together, with a couple of other friends; our boyfriends, Reece and Dan, were trailing behind us. It was September, and there was a crackly feeling to the air. I was saying something that was making Mia laugh, and I couldn’t stop looking at her. It was a little bit chilly, and her cheeks were pink, and her dark hair was blowing around her face. All I wanted for the rest of my life was to keep making her laugh like that. Sometimes our arms brushed against each other as we walked, and it was like I could feel the touch for minutes after it happened.

Then Reece stepped up between us and put his arm around her, and she reached around and curled her hand to fit the shape of his waist. I looked at her hand there, her long fingers resting on his side, her silver fingernails, which I’d helped her paint on the bus, shimmering like coins on the dark fabric of his jacket. I felt like someone was squeezing me from the inside.

Dan took my arm and held me back a little, so there was some distance between us and everyone else.

“Come on,” he said.

“Where?”

He gestured with his head to the woods that ran along one edge of the village. “Over there.”

“Dan,” I said. “We can’t. What if we get caught?”

“We won’t.”

“What if the teachers see us go back there?”

“Are you kidding? They’re all sitting in the bus, smoking and talking about what they meant to do with their lives.”

I smiled. I liked Dan, I really did. I looked at the group of our friends walking down the muddy road ahead of us. I looked at Mia in her big gray coat, her dark hair blowing in the wind. She was laughing and talking to Reece; they were holding hands. She hadn’t even noticed I was gone.

“Okay, but we have to be quick.”

He raised his eyebrows. “Sorry, babe,” he said in a fake-macho voice. “Quick is not in my repertoire.”

We walked back into the woods until we could no longer see the buildings of the settlement or hear the voices of the other students.

“How’s here?” Dan asked, pointing to an empty patch of ground.

“Fine,” I said.

We sat down, and Dan leaned over to kiss me. I could feel the dampness from the dirt seeping into my jeans.

Dan moved his lips to my neck and ran his tongue along my collarbone. “I’ve been thinking about doing this all day,” he whispered.

“Me too,” I said. It didn’t sound very convincing, but he didn’t seem to notice. I put my hand under his shirt and ran it over his chest. I moved downward and reached into his pants. He was already hard.

“Let’s lie down,” he said.

He unzipped my jacket and reached under my shirt. He stroked my nipples through my bra. I closed my eyes and thought about Mia. I imagined that we were in her bedroom, trying on clothes. I pictured her in a slinky black dress, cut low in front so that the tops of her breasts were visible. “My bra is showing,” she was saying to me. “Could you help me take it off?”

Dan had unzipped my jeans and was reaching into my panties. “God,” he said. “You’re so into it today.”

I imagined slipping my hands beneath Mia’s dress and touching her soft skin. I imagined that as I unhooked her bra, she spun around so that my hands were cupping her bare breasts.

Dan was taking off his pants. I reached over and pulled his penis out.

“Wait,” he said, and reached into his pocket. “Ye olde condom.” He opened the packet and put the condom on, then climbed on top of me, pressing me into the damp ground. My hands were on Mia’s breasts, and our faces were close enough to touch. “Kiss me,” she said.

“Kiss me,” I said to Dan.

He put his mouth on mine and I plunged my tongue inside. Mia and I were kissing, and she was letting her dress fall to the floor. “You’re so beautiful,” she was whispering, and she was pulling my clothes off, and we were both naked on the floor of the bedroom . . .

Dan pulled out and looked down. “Shit,” he said. “It broke.”

I sat up. “It broke?”

“Yeah.” There was panic in his voice.

We both stared at the latex wreckage on his penis for a long moment.

“What do we do?” I said.

“I don’t know.”

We were silent. I glanced down at myself and saw what I looked like; I was wearing a down jacket and no pants. I suddenly felt cold and ridiculous. I began to put on my clothes.

“Probably nothing will happen,” I said finally.

He nodded. “Probably not.”

I tried to remember when my last period had been. I didn’t know for sure. “I don’t think it’s even the right part of my cycle.”

“Okay,” he said. He didn’t sound convinced. “Good.”

We stood up and adjusted our clothing. We started to walk back to the village. I could smell smoke from the blacksmith’s shop through the cold air.

“If anything does happen,” Dan said, “I’ll be there for you.”

“I know,” I said. He took my hand, and we walked out of the woods toward the low-slung buildings.

It’s a four-hour bus ride to the temple, and there’s no air conditioning on the bus. Every time I move, I have to peel myself away from the vinyl, and then I start thinking about how many layers of dried sweat are probably festering away on this seat. I’m so hot I feel sick; it reminds me of morning sickness, which makes me think of all kinds of stuff I don’t want to think about. On our way out of the city, we get to drive past all the things we’re not going to get to do; we see sailboats floating down the Nile, and guys on the street selling falafel, and people in a bazaar buying . . . I don’t know, whatever they buy there. We’re not allowed to go. It really kind of sucks that all we get to do is ride on a bus with a bunch of screaming parrots.

Then we’re in the desert. It’s flat and sandy; just your basic desert, I guess. Kind of cool in theory, but it gets boring pretty fast. Every now and then we pass a car, and once we actually see a guy riding a camel, but mostly there’s not much to look at. There are two teams who aren’t on the bus with us—Abby and Justin, and Carl and Jeff—and everyone’s talking about what happened to them.

“Maybe they’re going to some other temple,” Jason says.

“Or maybe we’re all wrong, and it’s not a temple at all,” Trent says. “Maybe there’s some symbolism we’re missing. Four kings—maybe we’re supposed to find a deck of playing cards.” I roll my eyes, which nobody can see because I’m wearing sunglasses. These guys are supposed to be smart; they invented some kind of important cell phone technology that they sold for a bazillion dollars, and now apparently everyone uses it. But they’re always coming out with stupid shit like this.

“Watch out, my friend,” Riley tells Trent. “I do believe you’re overthinking this one.”

“Maybe they teamed up to share a cab,” Betsy says, and everyone looks nervous. We only have a certain amount of money to use in the course of the game, so you have to be careful about what you spend, but if they’ve decided to splurge on a cab, they could easily be there before the rest of us.

The two former child stars, Juliet and Dallas, are sitting across from me and Mom, not taking part in the conversation. It’s still so weird to see them here, hanging around like they’re these normal people. There’s not a single person in the world who knows it, but Juliet Jansen is the first girl I ever loved. I used to watch the sitcom she was on, Best Friends. Juliet played this girl named Tracy, and she had a friend named Amber. I forget who played the other girl. It was supposed to be that Amber was the pretty one, and Tracy was the smart, funny one, but really they were both pretty, just in different ways. And of course, it was a sitcom, and they both got the same number of jokes, so it wasn’t really like one of them was funnier, either. It was definitely a show aimed at kids—there were no parents in the show at all, which seemed cool to me at the time.

Every episode would start with Tracy and Amber on the phone with each other, talking about what happened at school that day, and then there’d be flashbacks to the scenes they were talking about. They’d always show two versions of what happened, Tracy’s version and Amber’s version, and they were always totally different, which is where most of the humor came from. And, of course, there would be some misunderstanding, and then it would all get cleared up, and the show would end with some disembodied mom voice yelling “Amber, get off the phone” or something like that, and then the girls would say good night, and then Tracy would sneak in one last joke before they hung up. Okay, maybe it wasn’t a great show, but I was only twelve when it went on the air, and back then, I didn’t really know that there were good shows and bad shows. I sort of thought that everything on TV must be equally good from some neutral, universal standpoint.

I remember Dallas McKinley’s show, too, although I didn’t watch it as much. It was called President Scooter, and it was about a ten-year-old boy who gets elected president. I forget how it happens exactly—I think he gets nominated by mistake, but when people see how corrupt the grown-up candidates are, they start thinking it’s not such a bad idea. So the whole show was about how his parents tried to make him a good little president, and he had this power-hungry uncle who kept trying to get him to do evil things.

I had a history teacher who really hated this show; he was always going off about how inaccurate it was, and how there’s a minimum age requirement, blah, blah, blah, as if we were all sitting there taking this absurd sitcom seriously. The show was on Wednesday . . .