Department of Lost and Found Read online

  Before I had time to type a response, production aides swooped down and whisked us back onstage, marching us like penguins over to the Big Wheel. Bob didn’t join us until just before the cameras started to shoot.

  It was indeed a big wheel. Bigger—and it turned out heavier—than it looked on TV. Sean went first: His sorry winnings held the lowest value, and he managed to eke out a semidecent 70 cents. “I’ll stick with that, Bob,” he said, and moved over to the winner’s perch.

  I was next. I took a deep breath and pushed down on the wheel. Damn, I thought. This is more of a workout than I’ve had in five months. Tick, tick, tick, tick. The numbers slowly spun past me. OH SHIT. My eyes widened, as the wheel slowed down. It’s not even making it around one time! Bob put his arm around me and told me to spin again, but all I wanted to do was crawl into the comfort of his arms and have him hold me. Instead, I pushed every last ounce of my weight into the wheel, and threw my arms down. Tick, tick, tick, tick. A little faster this time. Until…wait…hold your breath…it was perfect. Smack on the $1.00. I just won a thousand bucks!!!! I hurled my body in the air and started screaming, while Bob kindly bumped Sean from the winner’s circle and escorted me into it.

  Joanne from Portland, the only contestant who actually won her prize—new kitchen appliances—didn’t stand a chance. She spun twice, and ha!, too bad for her, came out far over the $1.00 goal. I looked out to the audience and gave Zach the thumbs-up. I was going to the showcase showdown. The production assistants plopped us in the green room, and I frantically grabbed my BlackBerry.

  From: Goodman, Maureen

  To: Miller, Natalie

  Re: Problems already

  Hey Natalie—

  I just got off the phone with aides from the Mississippi contingents’ offices. We’re already in deep shit. Evidently Sally called them, too—I mean, of course she would if she’s a half-decent reporter—and they want to know what we’re saying about them. Obviously, I told them nothing, but they said that if we even murmured a derogatory word about their senators, they’d unleash their “folder of secrets” (whatever that is) and happily feed it all—I assume background dirt on Dupris and McIntyre—to Sally. Well, this should be fun. Only not.

  —Maureen

  Holy Mary mother of God. I inhaled and exhaled and thought of Janice’s soothing voice. Rationally, I knew that Sally was only doing her job. Irrationally, and this was the emotion that was winning out, I wanted to kill her. Well, not literally, but almost. I pulled up her e-mail address on my screen and started to type. I wasn’t sure why my hands were shaking, whether it was nerves from the imminent showcase showdown (my dream!) or whether it was because for the first time in our decadelong friendship, I was about to test its strength.

  From: Miller, Natalie

  To: Fisher, Sally

  Re: Your story

  Sally—

  I know this sounds weird, but I’m writing from California.

  Yeah, I’m actually backstage at The Price Is Right. With Zach. Don’t ask. I just got an e-mail from Maureen Goodman, and she said that you’re working on a story on the stem cell bill. Sal, look, I’m thrilled for you. You know that. You know that I’m the biggest champion of your work, but this piece could be really damaging for Dupris. For everyone who works for her. So I’m going to ask you a favor, and it’s a big one. And please, this is off the record. (Sorry, I had to say it.) But it’s to either (a) make sure that Dupris is cast in a good light in the article or (b) don’t write it.

  Gotta go. I’m up for the showcase showdown.

  Nat

  Just as I pressed Send, a production assistant grabbed my elbow and ushered me to a stage on the right and placed me in front of the “loser’s” podium: the one who had accumulated the lowest winnings thus far. I knew that the loser was in a less strategic position because the “winner” got first dibs at which showcase to bid on. In nearly every case, he passed the first one to the loser. And in the cases when he didn’t, you’d sit at home, mouth agape, and wonder if the idiot had ever seen the show. The second showcase was always more valuable than the first! Moron!

  True to form, Adam from San Diego tossed the first prizes—new living room furnishings (circa: 1983), a new hot tub (not so helpful in NYC), and a new washer/dryer (ditto)—my way. I pressed out foreboding thoughts of Sally’s exposé, squinted my eyes, and blocked out the screeches of the audience.

  “Bob, I’m going to go with…” I stared at the hot tub one last time. “Yes, I’m going to go with $8,175.” The crowd went bananas.

  “All right, Natalie from New York City. Remember, you can’t go above the actual retail price of your showcase, and the contestant closest to the price of his showcase will go home a winner. Should one of you come within $250 of the actual retail price, you’ll take home both showcases.” He winked at me, and I swooned.

  Adam was lucky enough to land a themed showcase: what Barker’s Beauties found at their local lost and found. My eyes widened when the lovely ladies emerged in bikinis and flip-flops. I already knew what was coming. The Beauties filtered through the navy steamer trunk and pulled out teeny bathing suits. ($200, I figured.) Next came a life vest…and stage left opened to reveal a speedboat. ($11,000, I calculated.) And finally, yep, there it was, a coconut. The stage-right curtain whisked open, as the MC shouted out “a vacation for two to Fiji!” (At least another $8,000, I reasoned.)

  I looked over at Adam, and he had all of the signs of a novice written on his face. Perplexed, furrowed brows, wan, sweaty skin, frantic eyes pleading for the audience to guide him. Sucker. I smirked. Don’t mess with the showdown unless you’re a seasoned expert. Bob prodded him for an answer.

  “Um, uh.” Adam tried to buy himself time until the buzzer dinged in the background. “Uh, gosh, okay. I’ll go with…” He looked out into the audience again. Even they can’t save you now, buddy. “I’ll go with $26,350, Bob.” The audience groaned, and I let out a wide smile.

  We took a break, and the makeup team bum-rushed us. I saw Bob getting his blush redone, and I grinned. I’m not sure that you can ever see a man get swathed in peach tones and ever want to bed him again. Yes, I’d have to tell Zach after this, I do believe that dear Bob was officially off my list.

  The MC asked for the audience to settle down, and the Barker girls took their places.

  “All right, Natalie,” Bob said, moving into position next to my podium. “Let’s see how you did. You bid $8,175. And the actual retail price of the showcase is…$8,235…a difference of…” His eyebrows shot up. “Just $60!” He patted my arm. “Very good. Very good indeed. If Adam here doesn’t beat that, you’ll go home with both of these.”

  He moved over to Adam’s perch, and the audience shouted out my name. “Now, Adam. You had the sun and fun package. And for that, you bid a grand total of $26,350. The actual retail price is…$22,540…” Moans from the audience. “So, Adam, I’m sorry. You went over by nearly four thousand dollars, which means that Natalie here takes home both showcases!”

  My legs started quivering, and my face contorted into all sorts of humiliating shapes (I’d know this when the show aired several months later), and I wondered if I’d ever had a moment as fulfilling as this. I jumped into Bob’s arms the way that a sailor’s wife might when he finally docked home after a year at sea, and started uncontrollably, mortifyingly, from-the-bottom-of-my-belly sobbing. It was Zach who rescued him from me (audience members who were friends of the winner were whisked onstage by production assistants), peeling me off, limb by limb, until I stood on my own feet and wiped the snot off my face, while Bob pretended that something almost entirely inappropriate (and if not that, then certainly terribly weird) had just occurred.

  We waved good-bye to the camera, Bob asked everyone to spay and neuter their pets, and I stared up at the bright lights of the studio, the ones that surely would have made every pore in your body sweat if not for the arcticlike air-conditioning, and I figured, maybe you can make your own luck after all.
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  ROUND SEVEN

  March

  NINETEEN

  Two days after we got back, a week into my seventh chemo round and back in the discomfort of my cube, Brian returned my call.

  “Natalie, I think we’re in,” he said.

  I let out a whoop and grabbed the notepad on my desk, the one that held the list of all the senators who were about to change history.

  “But there are strings.”

  “Aren’t there always?” I said. This, after all, was politics. Twine was practically invented for it. I started doodling squiggly lines on the yellow pad.

  “He wants Senator Dupris to back off her education push. It’s not going over well down here, and frankly, if the bill goes through, I think our schools might suffer. Vouchers aren’t what our voters want.”

  “Brian, you know that I can’t promise that. Education is her thing. It’s what she ran on last year.” Even as I said it though, I found myself agreeing with him. The senator’s education plan really wasn’t a solution. It was a false hope that parents might be able to land their child in a better school outside of their immediate district: It didn’t address the real problem—that our teachers had no motivation to teach and the kids weren’t learning.

  But she sold it so thoroughly during the campaign that people actually bought it: She actually convinced them that something bad for them was really something good. It’s amazing how easily swayed a mind can be if you have the tools to be cunningly persuasive.

  “People run on broken promises all the time,” Brian said. “And besides, I thought you said in our initial phone call that stem cell research was her big thing this year—that you guys were getting pounded from your voters asking for change.”

  I had said that. It was true. Our constituents did want public funding for research. But did they want it at the expense of their schools, even if the senator’s solutions wouldn’t really fix anything? I doubted it. Still, I promised Brian that I’d raise the subject with the senator. In doing so, I also raised the stakes.

  THE FUNNY THING about chemo is that it lulls you into a false sense of security. You get used to the pattern of it—of watching the drip, drip, drip as it enters your bloodstream, of repeating the cycle of rehabilitating yourself every three weeks—so used to it that you feel like you own the chemo instead of it owning you. And any cancer patient can tell you, this? Is a mistake.

  Which is how it turned out that Manny saved my life. Ironic, isn’t it? Instead of being rescued by an alpha dog, I was saved by my rescue dog. I don’t remember that part, of course, but pieced it together by what was told to me in the hospital. I woke up, and Sally, whom I’d listed as my emergency contact number when I was first diagnosed, was sitting by my side, listlessly flipping through Cosmo.

  “What happened?” I said, tasting the stale saliva in my mouth.

  “Neutropenia,” she said, reaching for my hand.

  I closed my eyes and tried to remember what Dr. Chin had told me about neutropenia, one of the complications that could arise. One of the complications that could kill you. Neutropenia, I thought—the absence of the necessary number of white blood cells. One in three cancer patients suffers from it. And without these cells, the ones that act like armor for your blood in the face of infection, you have no protection against bacteria and germs. You’re essentially a walking time bomb, an open window for illness.

  “How did I get here?” I asked her with my eyes closed, as I listened to the beeping of the heart monitor beside me. At least it assured me that I was still alive.

  “You collapsed in your living room. Manny kept barking and barking until your neighbors insisted that the doorman see that everything was okay.” She grew quiet. “Obviously, it wasn’t.”

  “Fuck.”

  “They found you collapsed by the kitchen table. Manny was spinning in circles, going crazy. They called 911, brought you in, and then they called me.”

  “I don’t remember any of this.” I cradled my face with my hands. “Christ, I feel horribly ill.” And then I remembered that I was supposed to be mad at her. That we hadn’t spoken since I’d e-mailed her from backstage of The Price Is Right, and that instead of replying, she’d left a vague, but certainly not promising, message for me that I hadn’t had the spine to return. I listened to her voice echo out from my machine and felt my stomach sink. I hated it, this feeling of wondering who was betraying whom. Me or her.

  “They’re treating it. They caught the infection in time.” She started to say more but caught herself.

  “We need to talk, Sal.” I looked her in the eye. “We’ve been artfully avoiding each other, but clearly, we need to talk.”

  “Nat, I swear, I didn’t know. I had no idea that this would be such an issue.” She looked down at her hands. “But I can’t…I can’t just walk away from this. Not even for you.” All at once, I felt exhausted, like the neutropenia really might kill me. Sally picked up on it. “Look, please, let’s talk about something else. This isn’t the time.” She paused. “Where’s Jake, Nat? I thought he was here in New York for this exact reason.”

  “He had to go back to L.A.,” I managed. “Just for a night.”

  The Misbees had been so hailed on Leno that the label wanted to release an acoustic version of “Miles from Her” by April. Jake had halfheartedly tried to convince his manager to hold off until I was done with my chemo or, at the very least, to record the cut in New York, but Sony had already booked a studio and a producer in L.A. It had to be there. Within the next three weeks. That’s what he told me. On Valentine’s Day. That’s when he told me.

  I’d felt well enough to go out, so I pulled on my knee-high boots, a black lace skirt, and my movie-star wig, and we went to Bouley. It was nearly impossible to get reservations there—possibly New York’s swankiest restaurant—during the year, much less on Valentine’s Day, but when the maître d’ heard that Jake was the one who wanted a spot, they found a way. This is how Jake’s life was now: The fact that he was Jake Martin was usually enough to get him in or out of just about any situation.

  At dinner, before Jake told me about L.A., I tried not to think about Zach. Instead, I thought about how people were turning and noticing us, but this time, it wasn’t because I looked like a cancer patient. It was because my boyfriend was nearly a rock star. And I’ll admit it: It was kind of cool. I saw women attempt to inconspicuously size him up as we ushered past, and I saw men lean over and whisper into their wives’ ears when we raised our wine and drank a toast. I looked across the table at Jake and wondered, why doesn’t this feel like enough? By anyone else’s measure, at least at Bouley on that night, it looked like it should have been.

  Now, in the hospital room, with an IV in my arm and my future looking noticeably cloudier than over that dinner, I felt like I should have stopped him from going to L.A. this time. Offered an ultimatum, although they never work. I know this because two of my girlfriends had threatened their live-in boyfriends with the line, “propose in X months or else get out,” which is how they found themselves paying the bulk of their rent and living in a half-furnished apartment X months later. Still though, if not an ultimatum, then what? He came back to make things right, but when I found him faltering, was it now my obligation to make them right for both of us? I didn’t know.

  “He went to fucking L.A. again?” Sally said. “I cannot believe him.”

  “Sally, please. I don’t have the energy. But he didn’t have a choice.”

  She picked up her Cosmo and started flipping through it. Just so she didn’t have to look me in the eye. “You always have a choice, Natalie. It’s just that he didn’t choose you.”

  Dear Diary,

  I spent three days in the hospital, but I’m okay now. It’s ironic, though, how I was cruising along, taking this cancer thing in stride, assuming that I’d tackle the odds (and everything else, really—Jake, work, you name it) without a problem, when it roundly landed me on my ass. And now, tack on Sally’s big story, and everything h
as gone to pot.

  When Jake got back, he was mortified. No, he was worse than mortified. His eyes welled with tears, and he asked me how this could happen—how he could leave one morning when I was by all accounts healthy (oxymoron, I know, but healthier, I guess) and return 36 hours later to find me laid up in the hospital, fighting off an infection that could conceivably end my life. I reminded him that I’d actually taken the day off from work that day, that I wasn’t feeling well when he headed out to the airport, but he just said, “But you told me it was a cold. Nothing. How was I supposed to know?”

  I didn’t say this, Diary, but that doesn’t mean that I wasn’t thinking it. And what I didn’t say was this: We have no way of knowing anything, but why the fuck is that somehow a justification for you leaving? I mean, if he’s only sticking around for the times that I’m sick, because I am sick, well, then, that’s not really much of an incentive to stick around at all, is it?

  But as I said, I didn’t say anything. I know. I KNOW. Look, Diary, should I have taken that moment to not so gently point out to Jake that he came back under the promise of taking care of me? Of being my alpha? Of course, I should have. Should I have taken that time to say, hey, even with you around, I feel incomplete, worried that you already have one bag packed? Without a doubt. But the thing is this: Without him here, I worry that I won’t just feel incomplete, I’ll feel empty. God knows it was bad enough having my dog save the day just this once. Of having my dog be the one being whom I can trust completely. Even if Jake goes away now and then, and even if he’s increasingly distracted with their new album and slightly in awe of his rising fame, isn’t it better to take a chance on him than wait for my dog to wake up one day and find my cold, dead body splayed on the floor?