The Department of Lost & Found (8 page)

Picking up the phone, I called Kyle but was shot straight to voice mail, so I made my way to the kitchen to pour a glass of water, then tried him again. And then again, and then again. The embarrassing truth was that nearly two hours later, by not even 11

o’clock, I had desperately and frantically and shamelessly called him over twenty times. Not even
The Price Is Right
proved to be much of a distraction. I could feel my shoulders tightening up and my core temperature rising; I pictured Kyle and his smarmy, weasely smile basking in the glory of my work,
my due,
and I simply couldn’t stand it one second longer.

I suddenly felt compelled to drop my robe on my taupe Pottery Barn rug, grab the stand-by tweed suit off the lid to my hamper, and hail a taxi, despite an increasingly dizzy feeling. For my second trip into the office in less than a week, I wasn’t quite as presentable. I’d pulled my hair back into a pseudobun, but my nonwashed, ratty ends poked out of it like chopsticks. And let’s not even talk about my face: I’d tried to apply some under-eye concealer and mascara in the cab, but my driver appeared to be auditioning for the Indy 500; thus, with every lurch or sudden break, the wand painted black stripes all over my eyelid. I spit on my finger and tried to rub it off, but really, that just sort of grayed it and left bruiselike splotches just below my eyebrow.

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The cab screeched to the curb at Fifty-fifth Street. I staggered through the revolving glass door, and the security guard asked me if I was okay when I flashed him my ID, but I waved him off with an “I’m fine.”

“Holy crap, Natalie, should you be here?” Blair asked me when I got off the elevator. “You look paler than a ghost.” Evidently, my decision to forgo any blush was a mistake.

“Fine. I’m fine. Where’s Kyle? Where’s Dupris? Is she back from Nashville yet?” I cocked my head looking around for them.

He better not be stealing my damn glory
.

Blair nodded toward the senator’s office. “Yep, she’s back, and he’s in there.” She lowered her eyes. “I’m not sure if you want to go in.”

Ignoring her, I spun on my black pumps and opened the door just in time to catch the senator mid-diatribe.

“We are getting annihilated from this, goddamn it! His wife is a sympathetic figure, and people know that it came from us!” She stopped, startled when I joined them. “Natalie, what are you doing here? This isn’t the best time. Too much going on right now. I assume that you saw the papers?”

My mouth dropped, and I looked over at Kyle, but he was strangely fascinated with his hands in his lap. He glanced over at me and mouthed, “Nice work,” then continued staring at the floor.

“I saw the papers, yes, which is why I came in. No one would return my calls.” I suddenly felt much dizzier and more nauseated than just a moment before, so I steadied myself on the empty chair beside Kyle.

“I think you should go home,” Dupris said tersely, folding her arms across her chest. She couldn’t have stood more than five foot three, but she made so much of those sixty-three inches that she
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towered as if she were eight feet tall. Even from behind her desk, Dupris conveyed the sense of power. Of drive. Of being someone whom you could only aspire to be because her aura made you well-aware that you weren’t quite there yet. She was arguably the pret-tiest of the female senators: She was meticulous about her blond highlights at the salon, and in six years, I’d only seen her twice without makeup. Even so, she’d been blessed with sharp bone structure, so she didn’t need the spatulaed layers to begin with.

“What’s the problem?” I asked, befuddled. “This is a good news day. The tide is turning in our direction.”

“Did you leak this? The stuff about Taylor? Because the phones have not stopped ringing, and frankly, I’m furious. You should have informed me.” She paced back and forth behind the very hand-carved desk that had gotten her in trouble.

“You said you didn’t want to know. And you told me to do what I needed to.” I paused to let that sink in. “And besides, I still don’t see the problem! We needed to make Taylor look like the bad guy. We did. End of story. We win.”

“No, Natalie, we don’t win,” Dupris snapped back and pointed to a chair, which I immediately sank into. “This? Is a major fuckup.

This? I would have wanted to know. Totally unacceptable. True, I don’t give a flying fuck that Taylor’s favorite pastime is sleeping with prostitutes, but I
do
care about the fact that his wife is one of the leading faces of cancer right now and people want to champion her. Do you know how many calls I’ve had this morning from people who now think that if Taylor loses, Susanna will lose the will to live? Because
she has nothing else to live for
. That’s actually what three of them said.”

My glory,
I thought.
There it goes. Right down the shit er
.

“That didn’t occur to me,” I said with less assurance than 68

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

I’d have liked to. I felt my stomach rise up into my throat. I hadn’t eaten breakfast, so I wasn’t sure what, if anything, I had in me to throw up. A cool layer of sweat began to form on my neck, and my fingers felt tingly, as if they were about to detach themselves from my hands.

“Damn right, it didn’t!” The senator tossed her arms up in the air and stopped pacing. She pointed at us. “Kyle, I want you to clean this up. Natalie, I want you to go home. Kyle will call you if he needs you, but for now, I suggest that you stay out of it. Enough damage has been done.” I saw Kyle shake his head and watched his hands clench into fists of rage.

“No,” I said firmly and stood up. “This is my doing, this is my idea, I’m going to get us out of it. I started it, and I want to be the one to finish it.”

“Absolutely not,”
Dupris seethed.
“Go home. Now. Stay. Out. Of
it.”
As if I were ten, and she was sending me to my room for bad behavior.

I started to protest, to tell her that I’d finessed her out of larger jams in the past, and that we were still seventeen percentage points ahead, and that when the dust settles, frequenting hookers really can sink a political career, but before I could say any of that, I went to move toward her desk, and, instead, made a mad reach for her bamboo wastebasket. But I didn’t make it in time. So I lurched over and vomited on my too-pricey Joan and David pumps.

“I couldn’t have said it any better myself,” Kyle said, and he went to get paper towels from the kitchen.

I sat on the senator’s creamy white rug, the outline from my puke sinking deeper and deeper into the strands of the carpet, and peered up at her.

“Go home, Natalie,” she repeated firmly. “Take care of yourself. I think you’ve done enough.”

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“I suppose this is a bad time to discuss the birth control bill?”

I looked up at her and closed my eyes.

“That discussion is over. There is no discussion, in fact,” she said, as she walked out of the room.

By the time I had the stomach (literally) to turn on the TV that night, Taylor had eaten five percentage points into our lead.

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s i x

D
ear Diary,

This is shit, Diary. My life is shit. I know that I
should feel guilty over outing Taylor, but guess what?

I don’t. In this job, anything goes. Kyle knows that. Dupris certainly knows it. And how am I repaid? By being cast off and
ignored. So you know what, Diary? F-them.

So it looks like it’s just the two of us, Diary. Ready to make
a run for it? Wel , maybe not just the two of us. Sally showed up
last night to listen to me bitch, even though it was pret y clear
that she didn’t agree with my tactics. I guess she’ d interviewed
Susanna Taylor once last year and thought she was a pretty okay
broad. That’s what she said, “She’s an okay broad. She cares
about making a difference. I think she’s helped a lot of women in
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her . . .” and then she paused and looked at me, “wel , in
your
position.” Truth be told, Diary, I felt a pang of irritation because I hardly wanted to be compared to other cancer victims, but
stil , for the most part Sally listened, and I don’t even think she
judged me too much. So I guess it’s just the three of us, Diary.

Maybe that’s not so bad.

Anyway, the fact that work won’t cal me back is actually
working out just fine because I finally got this little endeavor of
mine off the ground. I know that you’ l find this surprising, but
my first manhunt went off without a hitch. Ha! See, now I told
you not to worry!

I called up Colin the other day to get some answers. And, in
fact, I plan on cal ing them al —no need for jokes, my list is not
so long that I’ ll be two breasts smaller by the time I’m done—

until I’ve successfully come out on the other side.

Colin was, understandably, surprised to hear from me. We
broke up just after graduation, our senior year in high school.

Five months before that, he’ d robbed me of my virginity, though,
if I’m being totally honest and I guess I should be since I’m the
only one reading this, I’ d given it up pret y easily. He still lived
in Bryn Mawr; actually, his wife answered the phone. God, I
hope she didn’t get suspicious that some strange woman was cal -

ing their house around dinnertime. Colin was never the type to
cheat; in fact he might have been the most loyal of the lot of
them. He set the bar high and all of that.

When he asked why I was calling, I explained that I was
trying to work some things out with myself, and I thought maybe
he could provide one sliver of the answer. I didn’t mention the
cancer, but I think he already knew—heard it in the hometown
gossip cycle. So when Colin paused and asked, “How are you?”

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with the overemphasis on the “are,” I knew that he knew. I got
that sort of emphasis all the time now . . . it was as if people
thought that by stressing the “are” and casting their eyes downward and shaking their head, they were asking enough about my
health without actually having to broach the subject. I know, I
know, both Janice and Sal y have told me that cancer makes
people uncomfortable. So does death. But would it actual y kill
people (pardon the term) to address the overriding theme in my
life now? For the first time, in like, ever, it’s surprisingly not
work—the senator has ignored my cal s and I haven’t heard
from Kyle in two days—it’s cancer, and no one seems to want to
acknowledge, other than with the use of overexaggerated “ares,”

that anything’s changed.

But I’ve digressed. Colin knew, but we didn’t speak of it. Instead, when I asked him why we didn’t stay together forever, as
you think you might be able to do back in high school, back when
you dry-humped in the back of your forest-green Volvo station
wagon and believed that your SAT scores defined the rest of your
life, he just said, “Natalie, we never planned to. I mean, I
thought that we both understood that you were going off to Dartmouth, to the big time, and I was staying behind, doing my best
to get decent grades at Penn State and then come back to join my
dad’s business.”

“But weren’t we in love?” I pressed. “I remember loving you.

Feeling like you would have done anything for me.”

“We were,” he answered. “But you were bigger than me,
bigger than what I wanted. And I was smaller than what you
dreamed. And besides, high school relationships never last. They’re
all about idealism: no screaming babies, no bil s to pay, no jobs
to get in the way. So we just enjoyed ourselves and let it run its
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course.” He paused. “Natalie, really, there’s no dark secret here.

Sometimes, the relationship is just supposed to be a stop along
the way, not the one you end up with.”

This was true, I thought. And then I remembered that he
left out some of the details: that our last summer together, he
tried to preserve our bond, stoke our love, as if to reassure himself that I wouldn’t forget him as soon as I hit Hanover. Truth
is, the more he pushed, the more I pul ed. We danced like magnets around each other. By August, when we snuck into my
parents’ swimming pool wel past midnight to burn off the oppressive humidity and make out under the iridescent glow of
the patio lights, I was already thinking, I don’t feel a thing.

I didn’t have to go to Hanover to stop loving Colin. I was
already gone. Bigger than him, he said now. Maybe I thought
that I was.

So when his two-year-old started crying, and I heard his wife
cal ing for him, I thanked him for his honesty, and he told me to
take care of myself, and that was all of Colin that I got.

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