Department of Lost and Found Read online

  You wouldn’t notice the wig shop unless you were looking for it. In fact, we were looking and walked right by two times. Crammed between a kosher bakery and a tailor was a window full of bodiless mannequins topped off with more hairstyles than an ’80s band. A bell rang as we opened the door, and an enormously bosomed, apron-clad woman with graying hair that was pulled back into a tightly wound bun emerged from behind a sea of manes.

  “Ah, you must be Ms. Miller.” Both my mother and I nodded our heads. “Oh my darling,” she said in a heavy Yiddish accent and beckoned us with her arms. “Come, come. Let’s give you back a head of hair today.”

  She pulled me over to a swivel chair in front of a mirror and clapped her hands.

  “So! Let us begin. What are you looking for? Something to match your old hair?”

  I thought of my chestnut locks, strands that I’d always wished would be more interesting, straighter, shinier. Now, I just wished that I had them back.

  “I’m really not sure what I want,” I demurred.

  “Okay, well, let’s take a look at your face.” She stood behind me and ran her fingers over my skin and cupped my cheeks in her hands. “So beautiful, you are. Cancer has not changed that. High cheekbones, wide eyes. Perfect.” She looked over to my mother and smiled. “You did a nice job, you know.” She clapped her hands again. “Okay! We will start with a few options, and you can narrow as you go.”

  She ran into the back, behind a curtain, to grab some choices that conceivably could redefine me. While she was gone, I looked around the shop. It was immaculate. Literally, not a hair out of place. On the counter, near the front, was a desk calendar in Hebrew that sat next to a beige phone that you might have seen in 1987. And beside the phone was a box for tzedakah: where patrons could donate money for the less well-off. I glanced out the window and watched passersby scurry past on the sidewalk, all of the women in matching bobbed wigs, long skirts to cover their skin. I wondered if their faith in God would be enough for them to get through an ordeal like mine. If they would read the Torah and sing at synagogue and trust in Him enough to pull them through. Or if He didn’t pull them through, if they would accept their fates as acts of His will, quietly resigned to the fact that God dictated this path, even if it was not one they would have chosen for themselves.

  Mrs. Seidel emerged from the back with a flourish. “My darling, here are your first few choices. We will narrow from here until we find just the right match.”

  The first one I tried was too ordinary: It looked just like the molded hair I’d seen on the sidewalk minutes before. The next was too red: My pale skin looked even more wan next to it, and for a second, I was reminded not just of the fact that I was buying a wig, but the reasons for it in the first place. I waved off the third before even trying it on; a brunette version of Little Orphan Annie, I was not. With a quick turn of her heels, Mrs. Seidel was off again to the back, returning with more bounty.

  We got it right on the seventh try. In my past life, I was an ordinary brunette, my quick flirtation with fiery red aside. My hair fell squarely on my shoulders, and Paul dutifully trimmed the ends every six weeks so it neither wandered too long nor grew too unwieldy. It was, in essence, the perfect haircut for politics: It was there because it had to be, neither offending nor impressing, flying under the radar, and getting the job done. So when Mrs. Seidel adjusted the seventh wig, muttering in Yiddish under her breath as she pinned it on and brushed it out, even I was surprised to discover that I had to have it. The rich chocolate, nearly black, locks cascaded down my back, landing just below the bra strap that crossed under my shoulder blades. When I turned my head side to side, the layers flowed effortlessly over one another, the light from the ceiling bouncing off them as if in an Herbal Essences commercial.

  “This is it,” I said. “This is the one.”

  “Natalie,” my mom said. “It’s so different from before. So…I don’t know. Showy.” She paused, and I searched her voice for criticism, but found none. “Not that anything’s wrong with that. But are you sure? For your line of work?”

  Mrs. Seidel fluffed out the hair in her hands, and I swear, it felt as if she were combing out my own. I stared through the mirror and wondered if, in just a moment, you could reinvent yourself.

  AS WE WERE leaving, after she’d shown me how to maintain the wig and after she’d run my mother’s credit card through, Mrs. Seidel grasped my hand.

  “You are Jewish, no?” she asked.

  “Yes, well, partly.” I gestured to my mom. “She is, so I am, too.”

  “I thought so. This is good.” She paused, holding her finger to her chin. “I look at you, and you are so beautiful. Too young for this disease, it is true, but still beautiful. But you do not seem to have much faith.”

  I wanted to run. It was like my bat mitzvah lessons all over again. My tutor, Ms. Goodstein, called my parents in for a meeting six weeks before I was due on the bimah.

  “She is a good learner,” she explained to my parents, while I hung my head and folded my hands in front of me. “She has memorized her parts, she can sing clearly and even beautifully.” She stopped. “But she has no passion. She doesn’t seem to even want to learn. She has no connection to what she is supposed to be telling the congregation.”

  My parents looked at me, and I shrugged. I’d only agreed to go along with the bat mitzvah thing because it hadn’t been phrased to me as a question. When I was twelve, my mother announced that I’d start my lessons in a few months, and before I had a chance to explain that I wasn’t sure about my faith, her office called, and she stepped out of my bedroom as quickly as she stepped into it.

  “Is this true?” my mom asked, as she unconsciously cracked the knuckles on her fingers. “Are your lessons boring you? Would you rather not be a Jew?”

  I shook my head and pressed back the rising tears. What could I say? That I memorized my Torah portion because I was told to? That I learned the melodies of the haftarah as if they were an algebra lesson? That God was as unclear to me as my new and muddled feelings for boys, and that even though I knew I should revere Him, all I really did was question? No. Instead, I murmured that I would try harder, and six weeks later, I was showered in presents after delivering the most passionless haftarah portion my synagogue had ever sat through.

  I stared at my wig, held captive on the other side of the Formica counter, and realized with a wave of nausea that Mrs. Seidel was Ms. Goodstein déjà vu.

  “It’s hard to have faith right now…with all this,” I answered, and waved my hands in front of my body. And then, as they always do when I think about my destiny, my eyes filled with tears.

  “But that is when you need to have faith the most, my dear.” Mrs. Seidel placed her hands on my shoulders and looked into my welling eyes. “That is when our forefathers believed more than anything: when they were oppressed and when life seemed too terrible to even fathom and when there was no light for them to cling to. That is when they most believed.”

  “Maybe they were better people than I am.”

  “No,” she said, dropping her arms. “Maybe it’s just because they didn’t think that there was any other way.”

  I shrugged. “I’m not sure if God can be my way. I’ve tried to believe in Him several times in the past few months, and it seems each time I do, more crap flares up, and I get angry all over again.” I paused, not wanting to offend her. “I’m just being honest.”

  “Oh, you can be angry,” Mrs. Seidel said, as she retreated behind the counter to retrieve my bag. “There were many times when our people were angry. But they didn’t stop believing, no matter how often they threw their hands up and raged. They had faith that this was part of His plan.”

  “I guess I don’t have that sort of faith,” I said. “I guess none of this seems fair. I guess God hasn’t quite clearly explained to me why the hell this happened, and each time I think, okay, I might just make it, I get slapped down with something else.”

  Mrs. Seidel clasped my hand in
her chubby, wrinkled fingers, so even if I wanted to bolt, I couldn’t. I was her captive. “If you choose not to believe, that is okay.” She smiled. “So the question becomes, not why hasn’t God brought you good fortune, but how can you bring good fortune upon yourself?”

  Dear Diary,

  I haven’t spoken to Zach since I last wrote, nearly two weeks ago. He e-mailed me a few days ago to make sure that I was doing okay and to see if I needed more “stuff,” that’s how he put it because I suppose that he couldn’t very well write “pot” in his work e-mail, but I wrote him back and told him that I was okay. I’ve figured out how many hits I need to stimulate my appetite without getting ridiculously high, so I haven’t burned through (literally! ha!) the whole bag yet.

  Even though he didn’t mention it, I know that Lila called him. As soon as she got back into town after New Year’s. (Which, Diary, I should note, I spent curled up with Manny on the couch watching Ryan Seacrest host numerous lip-synching tweeny pop stars. It wasn’t a personal best.) I don’t think she really suspected that anything happened between Zach and me, but I guess seeing him happy and normal and well-adjusted with other women sent her into a spiral, so I think she’s presently in the midst of concocting a plan to win him back. I know that he told me that he wouldn’t take her, but Sally mentioned that he and Lila were getting drinks last weekend, so I don’t know. Maybe I misinterpreted that whole thing between us.

  So, Diary, after having brought you up to speed on that situation, I guess the reason that I’m writing is because I did manage to catch up with Dylan. You know: law school assistant professor who went totally amuck? Yeah, well, who knew that he was right here in the city? It’s a small miracle that in day-to-day life, I haven’t run into him because he’s actually working at Cravath right around the corner from the senator’s office. I know that I’m questioning my faith in God right now, but I would like to say a short prayer of thanks for steering me in the opposite direction of Dylan in the city. It’s almost fate that our paths haven’t yet crossed. Or was almost fate, I should say, since I took it upon myself—you know, in my efforts to retrace the past—to pretty much change all of that.

  I found him in Yale’s alumni directory, and when I called him up, his secretary asked me to repeat my name three times, then unceremoniously put me on hold for six minutes. “He’s in a meeting,” she said, when she came back on the line. “In a real meeting meeting?” I asked. “Or a fake meeting because he doesn’t want to talk to me?” “A real meeting,” she responded curtly and asked if I wanted to be put into his voice mail. Before I had a chance to reply, she dumped me in.

  I left a fairly idiotic message, stumbling, stuttering, repeating my phone number twice, which in hindsight might have made me sound a little desperate. As if, just in case he missed it the first time, here it is again! Call me. Call me! Oh well. I’d done it, and I really didn’t expect him to call anyway. Dylan really was the type who faked meetings and illnesses and all sorts of things just to get out of whatever he didn’t want to do. I saw him master his skills when he was in the midst of a divorce (he married young) at Yale and screwing around with me.

  But I digress. I was just about to take Manny out for a walk when the phone rang. Frankly, I figured it was Kyle. He and I had been e-mailing about how to appease the senator’s constituents who felt like she might back off some of her tax reduction promises, and it was getting a little too complicated to keep writing. He wanted PR spin; I thought, and this was a new tactic for me, that we should just tell them the truth: that in order to fund Homeland Security measures and keep the garbagemen happy with their pay, tax cuts simply weren’t on the agenda for the year.

  Anyway, so when the phone rang, I answered it with a run-on sentence, something about coming clean with the voters because ultimately, they had to trust the senator’s overall vision. When he cleared his throat, I immediately recognized the deep baritone—think Barry White, but on a handsome yet pale blond guy—and knew that it wasn’t Kyle.

  “Miller,” he said, calling me by my last name like he always did. “I never expected to hear from you again. What gives? Does your senator need someone to bail her out of hot water?” I felt dirty, and sort of like I wanted to vomit, but I resisted the urge and didn’t take his taunting bait. That was our thing, or at least it used to be. Our banter was never playful: It was pushy, it was in-your-face, it was borderline hostile but not enough so that we ever stepped back to question what the hell we were doing. Dylan, in essence, was the quintessential alpha dog, really, Diary, perhaps the male version of me, and during my second year in law school, when he led a lecture in Professor Randolph’s absence, I was mesmerized, no, maybe infatuated is a better word, with the way that he took command of the class. Yale students were notoriously diligent; we paid attention to most lectures regardless. But when Dylan spoke it was different—he wasn’t the teacher and we weren’t his students. Rather, he was the star and we were his mere audience. He posted office hours at the end of class, and I went. I had to have him.

  Now, when I heard his voice, my mind flashed with tumult. And I instantly felt foolish for calling. I didn’t need to pick apart why this relationship dissolved. I already knew: We were too similar—in our quest for the top, in our desire for control, in pushing someone away when they’d rather move closer. But I asked him anyway, Diary. I figured, why not? And besides, he’d definitely think I was a huge ass for calling with nothing to say.

  So I said to him, “Why were we so combustible? Why did we settle for a half-warm relationship when I think we both knew that it would never get hotter?” And he said, “Miller, is that really how you see it? Six years later, that’s what you think? Because I thought we had a pretty damn good time.” Fair enough, I agreed. We certainly didn’t have a bad time. In fact, the sex might have been the best ever (needless to say, Diary, I did not tell him that), but still, wasn’t there something that was lacking? I mean, together for two years, we were. And never once did we say, “I love you.” Never once did we talk about our future. I graduated and moved on. Left him in New Haven. And he never tried to stop me, so I assumed that he never wanted to.

  “You’re missing the point, Miller,” he said. “You’re analyzing this like a lawyer would, not like someone who was in our position at the time would. At the time, we held our own pretty well—it wasn’t a fairy tale, but it was great for what it was. And I was just coming out of a divorce; I didn’t want to fall in love. And you? You were tough as nails, so you weren’t looking to be loved in the first place.”

  I held the phone to my ear and stared at the picture frames that littered my desk. A college formal, law school graduation, my folks and me in Philly on our back deck. Who ever said anything about not being loved? I finally caught my breath and asked him why he thought that, why he thought that anyone would possibly choose not to be loved, because certainly, that wasn’t my intention.

  He thought about it. I heard him crushing some ice in his teeth and realized he was really thinking about it. And then he said, “I don’t know, Miller. I always had the impression that for you, other things came first, mattered more. I was just someone who was a warm body for you to mark time with, nothing more, nothing less. And I thought that’s all we wanted from each other, even while we were having a grand go of it.” He grew quiet before something else came to mind. “I guess I always figured that you were a hard enough nut that you didn’t want to be cracked. And that somewhere along the line, you figured that love came second. The rest of your life came first.”

  I stood for a long time after talking to Dylan, staring out my living room window. My apartment was quiet; I couldn’t even hear the street noise below. All I could hear was Mrs. Seidel’s gentle but firm voice as she handed me my wig. “So the question becomes, not why hasn’t God brought you good fortune, but how can you bring good fortune upon yourself?” How can I indeed?

  TWELVE

  We’re going to run some tests,” Dr. Chin said. “Similar to what you first got
when we diagnosed you. We’d like to see how well you’re responding to the chemo.”

  I nodded and tried to go numb. I knew that this was coming; they’d warned me at my last appointment. After the fourth round of chemo, they like to gauge how well it’s working, whether or not the chemicals they shoot into me every three weeks are killing more than just my hair follicles and my spirit. If the tumors are reduced, they continue. Or they might even operate. If the tumors are still thriving, we’d need to rethink our efforts. Effectively, these were the tests that would tell me which side of the 50/50 odds of beating Stage III I’d fall into.

  It was hard to believe that I was halfway done. Time does a funny thing to you. Sometimes, it goes so slowly, like in your senior year in high school when all you want to do is press the fast-forward button and get out, that it’s almost excruciating. And sometimes, like when Jake and I were resting in bed, listening to each other’s heartbeats, it was as if gravity had taken hold and no matter how hard you tried to hang on, it roared past; you’d do anything to get it back.

  Sally had come with me. My father was receiving an award in Australia for a bridge his company designed and my mother was with him. The plans had been made long before my diagnosis, so Sally was my next best option.

  “This is such a big honor,” Mom had explained on the phone when I mentioned that Australia seemed like an awfully long way away from Sloan-Kettering. “You dad would be terribly disappointed.”

  I snorted and wondered if my dad had any say in the matter to begin with. “Mom, I just…what if something goes wrong? You’ll be halfway around the world.” I paused. “I’d like to know that you’re here if I need you.”

  “Oh honey.” She sighed. “We’re always here if you need us. We’ll just be a bit farther away.”