The Department of Lost & Found (2 page)

5:12 I pick my cuticles.

5:16 I pick my pimples until my face is both puffy and splotchy.

5:34 I apply a cooling Kiehl’s mask in hopes of undoing the damage of my picking.

6:02 I check e-mail.

6:27 I make Lipton’s Chicken Noodle Cup-a-Soup and sit down on the plush white couch in my living room to watch the evening news.

6:34 My blood pressure palpably rises, and I nearly blow a gasket when Brian Williams introduces a segment on Dupris’s “checkered” tax returns. When I sense that my cheeks are getting unhealthily red, I try to breathe in through my nose and out through my mouth, as Janice taught me, in an exercise to ward off stress, but discover that I don’t have the patience to count to five on each exhale, so I quickly abandon this so-called 10

a l l i s o n w i n n s c o t c h

calming exercise. Barely hearing the end of the segment, I race, well, move as swiftly as possible under the weight of my blue puffy slippers and terry cloth robe, to my pine desk that overlooks Columbus Avenue and serves as my home office.

6:38 I dash off a semifrantic note to Kyle.

From: Miller, Natalie

To: Richardson,

Kyle

Re:

Have you seen the Nightly News???????

K—

Haven’t heard back from you. The tax return shit is everywhere. The third story on NBC tonight. What the hell is going on??? Why haven’t you responded??? Does the whole office go to hell when I’m not there??? You need to act on this ASAP.

I’ll be up for a while. Call.

—N

7:11 I rush to the ringing phone on my nightstand and feel a wave of disappointment when Caller ID comes up as my parents, not Kyle. Falling back on my bed, I stare out the side window while I absorb my mother’s daily stoicism masked as a pep talk—that my strong will can beat this disease and even if my grandmother succumbed to it, that I shouldn’t let that affect my attitude and outlook. She’d been offering up these mantras ever since she and my dad headed here from
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11

Philly and hunkered down at the Waldorf to nurse me through my first chemo blast, as if tough love were all that I needed to beat cancer. I flatly tell my mother that I wasn’t even thinking of my grandmother at the moment, but thank you for reminding me that this disgusting disease has already put its pox on our family tree.

7:52 Relief washes over me as my mother finally says good-bye. My wave of nausea passes, so I nibble on a semi-stale bagel.

8:23 I survey the damage of my zit picking in the dim light of my white-tiled bathroom, and then half heartedly brush my teeth. Why bother? I think. Morning breath is the least of my worries.

8:31 I check e-mail.

8:45 I strip off my cherry red tank top and stare at my breasts in my full-length closet mirror. I stare and I stare and I stare, while I wonder what I did to cause my body to turn against me, to ever deserve this mutiny. I cast my eyes upward and realize that in the blackness of my bedroom, illuminated only from the closet light above, I almost look like an angel.

9:12 I check e-mail. For a faltering moment, I consider add-ing Ned’s name to the mailing list for the penis en-largement drug I received. Instead, I hit delete.

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9:54 I fall asleep on my couch while watching Animal Planet and wondering how it might feel to have an uncondi-tional best friend who smothered my face in slobber even when poll numbers were down, even when I hadn’t showered for three days, and even when my face resembled a pepperoni pizza from Ray’s.

So that’s my day. Sure, just one day, but really not so different from the rest ever since this cancer set up shop. Now be honest, if you were me, wouldn’t you need a hobby, too?

◆

◆

t w o

t all happened very quickly, which is why, I think, I still felt so Ishell-shocked three weeks after my diagnosis. I mean, one day, I’m prepping the senator to launch a major initiative on birth control, and the next, I’m donning a paper-thin robe, sitting in Dr.

Zach’s cloyingly pink-walled examination room, watching his face fall as he feels my right breast and rolls the lump over and back and over again underneath his fingers. So you have to understand that in the span of less than a month, my (disloyal, scum-sucking) boyfriend of two years dumped me (“I can’t handle this” is how he put it, right before I threw a vase at his head, which, surprisingly enough, because he wasn’t much of an athlete, he actually managed to duck); my job, which previously had been my lifeblood, had been pared down to admittedly semidesperate e-mails; and my health, 14

a l l i s o n w i n n s c o t c h

my mortality, something that I’d never even given a flying fig of a thought to, was suddenly in total jeopardy. So it’s not hard to see why I was coming more than slightly undone.

It didn’t help that with nothing much left to do, I had to pack up Ned’s clothes. After finally honing in on the cues that I had no intention of returning a single phone call of his ever again, he resorted to e-mail.

From: Sanderson, Ned

To: Miller,

Natalie

Re: My

stuff

Natalie,

I understand why you aren’t calling me back. Surely, I could have chosen a better time to tell you the truth about Agnes and I. I’d like to talk about this with you. When you’re ready, please let me know. In the meantime, I need my clothes.

Please let me know when I can come by and get them.

Love,

Ned

I sat in front of my computer screen and snorted.
Idiot,
I thought. It’s
“Agnes and me.” Half-wit
. How I ever considered dating him, no,
loving
him, seemed truly beyond the realm of possibility. Because Ned, nonathlete, evident coward, grammar whiz inextraordinaire, was not the man who one might dream of when one dreamt of men. Since he left me two days after discovering the burrowing lump of insidious cells while feeling me up during ho-hum morning sex, this might go without saying. As if to prove this point, I took a sip of my chamomile tea and hit reply to his e-mail.

I’ l show you how ready I am.

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15

I swirled the lukewarm tea around in my mouth and clicked my mouse to insert a table into the blank white space underneath the e-mail header. On the left side, I typed “why I loved you,” and on the right, “why I didn’t.”

- Idiot

- Makes a lot of money at a job that a chimpanzee can do

- Tendency to stare too long in the mirror to the point of vanity

- Not good-looking enough to have the right to pull off above
behavior

- Your moles

- Boring—I never missed not having dinner with you because
it was a snoozefest

-
Tiny
penis (note to readers: this isn’t necessarily true, but
surely, he didn’t know that)

- Amazing ability to drop your blue-blooded family’s name into
any conversation with important people

- Insecure twit

And that was just the right-hand column.

In the left, I put a question mark, but conceded that we had, indeed, dated for two years, so that didn’t seem entirely fair. So instead, I hit the delete key and wrote:

- Has good decorating taste

- Makes decent pancakes

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Both of the characteristics were true. When we first moved in—

actually, when Ned moved in with me, which is why I was the one who got to kick him out—Ned didn’t rest until our one-bedroom was sharp enough to nearly be photographed for
Architectural Digest
.

Ebony floors. Rich leather headboard. Deep crimson foyer. And yes, he did make a mean weekend breakfast. On the rare Saturdays when I was in town and he wasn’t toiling away as a vice president at Goldman Sachs, he’d wake up before me and serve up the most perfect silver-dollar pancakes that a girl could ever dream of.

But before I got too wistful, I realized that these two attributes also meant that I could tick off another trait in the right-hand column.

- Aforementioned domesticity would lead me to the conclusion
that you should, perhaps, examine your sexual preference.

And then I thought of one more.

- Leaves cancer-laden girlfriend for ridiculously named hussy
It was true. If
Ned
and
Agnes
were to ever procreate, their kids had no chance at being cool. This was a fact.

I went to press Send, but then remembered the very purpose of the original e-mail. “I’ll leave your clothes with my doorman by 5:00 tonight. I don’t want any future reminders of you around to stink up my karma.”

Send.

t h i s wa s n ’ t t h e first time I’d been faced with packing up my romantic history. And certainly, if it hadn’t been for the nuclear
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drugs coursing through my body and the diabolic cells they were trying to stomp out, this wouldn’t have been the hardest. No, that title fell to Jake. So as I pulled out Ned’s seemingly endless amount of staid blue pin-striped suits and threw them—literally threw them, he could have
Agnes
iron them for him—into a duffel bag, it was hard not to think of Jake.

I met Jacob Spencer Martin when I was twenty-five. I’d moved to the city only three months before, fresh out of Yale Law, to join Dupris’s first election campaign, and given the clip at which I worked, I wasn’t looking for anything romantically. To be more precise, I wasn’t looking for anything. But on a damp October evening, Sally begged me to join her for a girls’ night out. “We haven’t seen you in a month,” she said, and she wasn’t incorrect: I’d been holed up in my crappy cubicle in midtown making last-minute calls encouraging people to get out and vote. When she put her figurative foot down and told me that if I didn’t come out, she’d never speak to me again (she has a knack for exaggeration), I caved. I placed the cap on my highlighter and tucked away my list of phone numbers and met Sally, Lila, and a pack of other sorority sisters at a bar in the East Village. I didn’t even bother changing out of my entirely too-geekish suit. I can assure you that I was the only one there in pumps. And hose. And we’ll leave it at that.

Around 10:00, a band, the Misbees, one that my friends made a point to see every time they played in the city, hit the stage. Maybe it was the wine, or maybe he really was a fucking great singer, but either way, I couldn’t take my eyes off the blond, tousled-hair guy behind the microphone. His voice hummed out low and deep, and when he sang of pain and betrayal and love and lust, I believed him. And I wanted to know more. Our eyes locked toward the end of the set, and I felt my pulse speed up and my stomach tighten.

When the Misbees finished their set, the singer wandered over 18

a l l i s o n w i n n s c o t c h

to the bar directly next to my perch on a stool and ordered a beer, and when he took a step backward, he somehow missed the fact that said leg of the stool was in his way. Which is how he wound up tripping and dumping at least half of his Heineken on the Donna Karan suit my mother had bought me when I accepted the senator’s offer. Maybe that should have been a warning sign—an in-auspicious start—but when he patted me down with a napkin and apologized with his hound-dog eyes, I was hooked. Line and sinker. Sinking fast, actually. . . .

I heard the microwave timer ding, and shaking off my memory, I placed my feet firmly into the existence that now comprised my reality. I stared at a pin-striped shirt and snorted.
Ned
. As if he’d ever compare to the great love of my life. As if he were anything more than filler.
Maybe I’ l e-mail him again,
I thought.
Just to let
him know
. I plodded out of my walk-in closet, dropping Ned’s dry-cleaned Armani on the floor and stepping smack on it. I might have even let my foot swivel a few times before I actually took a step forward.

I’d programmed the timer to remind me to take my medicines: the antinausea, the anticancer, the pretty much antieverything. It dinged four times a day, subtle reminders of my altered existence just in case I should ever be lulled into a false sense of reality. The antinausea drugs were the worst: so large I didn’t see how it was possible for a gorilla, much less a human, to swallow them. I’d swing back a gulp of water and the prickly pill would hang in the curve of my throat, daring me to dry heave or cough and start all over again. You’d think after three weeks, I’d have mastered this, but there are some things you just never get used to.

I went back to the closet and picked up Ned’s Armani. My hands dove into the side pockets: I figured that if he had any spare cash, I might as well line my own wallet. I’d already found $31.57,
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and I was only half done. I pulled out a receipt from an Italian restaurant in the West Village, dated the night of the day that Ned discovered the lump.
Bastard. He told me he was in Chicago
. I threw the Armani onto the duffel bag on my bed and kept the receipt.

Ammunition in case things ever got dirty, I figured.
As if they’re
not dirty enough,
I thought. But I’d learned that on the job: Keep whatever evidence necessary to burn the opponent and shred whatever evidence might be able to be used to bury you.

I reached up to the top shelf for his T-shirts. His lacrosse shirt from Harvard. I tossed it over my shoulder into a garbage bag. After all, it was his favorite. Not that he actually played on the team, you understand. But he managed them, so I guess he felt entitled to don it regardless. And not that he actually got into Harvard on his own merits. As I’ve already mentioned, he’s one step above a complete twit. But his family practically dates back to the Mayflower, and the admissions committee seems to look fondly on ancestry that has enough cash and leverage to donate a new library or two.