The Department of Lost & Found (4 page)

To: Foley,

Blair

Re:

re: The BC bill

Blair—

Please ask the senator to hold off her car to Albany, I’m coming into the office. And tell Kyle he better get his ass in gear: I expect to speak with him when I’m there. Tell him those words exactly.

—Natalie

I surveyed myself in the mirror. This wouldn’t do at all: the ratty, thinning hair, the pallid, blotchy skin, the protruding cheekbones that resembled Kate Moss at the height of her drug habit.

Shit,
I muttered, standing in my now much more spacious closet and looking for a magic suit that would somehow make me look not even polished but merely presentable. I’d settle for presentable. I grabbed a tweed skirt suit, tugged on my nude hose, and slipped my tingly feet (a side effect from the chemo) into my alligator-skin pumps. PETA would have a field day in my closet, despite the fact that Dupris (and thus supposedly her staff ), at least on paper, was staunchly pro-animal rights. However, I suspected that if PETA took a closer look into Dupris’s wardrobe, they’d find it even more egregious than mine. A rabid fan of just about any accessory that 28

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

required an animal skinning, she wasn’t quite the poster child she was thought to be. I took a more tempered approach. I loved dogs more than anything, tolerated cats, and only ate red meat when I’d already gulped down a minimum of two glasses of wine. Anything fewer, and I was a part-time vegetarian.

I splashed cold water on my face and gingerly applied a layer of Stila concealer underneath my eyes. I stared into the mirror and saw myself for what I was, or at least what I looked like to the outside world: an exhausted, disheveled, thrown-together mess, nothing that even touched a reflection of who I was a month earlier.

I stared until tears started to well.
Hold it together, Nat, hold it together,
I whispered to myself as a wet drop slithered down my cheek. This wasn’t who I was. This wasn’t who I should be. I focused in on my moist eyes and wondered if there would ever be a day again when I’d come close to being the person of my former life. And then I realized that my bruised-looking eyes aside, today could be that day. I, Natalie Miller, was going to the office. To get something done. To make a sweeping change to protect the uteri of women across the nation. And with a rush of adrenaline, I stuck my hand back into the pot of concealer.

When one layer wouldn’t do, I slathered on another, then another, and then remembered a trick that Sally had written about for
Allure
: dotting the insides of your eyes with white eye shadow to make them pop and look more awake. I dipped my finger into a packed tub of shadow that sparkled like a field of morning snow and dabbed my eyes. I’m not sure I looked more alert or more like a dressed-up fairy on Halloween, but I didn’t have time to remedy it. The senator would be leaving any minute. I pulled my still somewhat tolerable, though slightly thinning hair back with a headband, slid on rosy pink lipstick and thick, black mascara, and dashed downstairs to a cab.
Christ.

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Sally.
I dialed her from the back of the taxi and told her I’d take a rain check for tomorrow.

“You’re not going into work, are you?” she asked. “I thought you’d committed to taking it easy for a few months.”

“Emergency, Sal, emergency.” I put my hand over the mouth-piece and told the cab driver to cut down Central Park West to avoid the traffic. He ignored me and turned up the hip-hop station on the radio.

“Fine.” She sighed. “I’m working on a ridiculous story on infi-delity, anyway. God, what I wouldn’t do to be able to actually cover a story that really matters.” She paused, refocusing on me.

“Wait, Nat, define emergency.”

“A situation in which I control the power to single-handedly save the future of your reproductive rights.”

“Single-handedly?” I heard her sigh again.

“More or less, yes.”

“Correct me if I’m wrong, but you’re not the actual
senator
are you?”

“More or less, Sally. I don’t think she could survive without me.”

◆

◆

t h r e e

t had started raining by the time I made my way through mid-Itown traffic, so I pressed ten dollars into the cab driver’s hand and dashed to the revolving doors, leaving wet handprints on the glass as I pushed through. The elevator doors were closing, but I shouted “Hold it,” and bolted there just in time, sticking the tips of my fingers through and pushing back the doors. “Thanks,” I muttered to the lunch crowd, to really no one in particular, and offered a thin smile.

When the senator won her seat after a fierce campaign six years ago, just after I’d come to work for her as an assistant, one of her first tasks was to purchase office space in midtown Manhattan. She liked to be “among the people,” as she liked to say, 32

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

though her brushes with “real citizens” were usually limited to her walks to and from The Four Seasons for lunch or Frederick Fekkai for highlights. We sat on the thirty-first floor—too far above to hear the raucous din of the taxi horns or the clangs of construction or the buzzing of the pedestrians, and certainly too far aloft to make out any of the pedestrians’ faces or to see their problems or assess their woes.

In fact, though my office had a sweeping window with a decent view of Third Avenue, most of the time the blinds remained firmly shut. If the sun bore down and spread its rays across my desk, I’d find myself missing the fresh air that I wouldn’t get to taste for another twelve hours. So generally, the blinds did the trick, casting an illusion of my insulated world, as if the only thing that mattered was the policy I was crafting on my computer, not the people below whom the policy might actually affect.

I hadn’t been back to the office in the month since my diagnosis. Although I’d practically begged the senator to let me keep working, she personally fielded a call from Dr. Chin, and when she explained my long hours and my incessant travel schedule (and, I assume, my insatiable appetite for the office), they both agreed that I should tone it down a notch (or two) while my body acclimated to the chemo. Even my mother agreed—my mom who once decided, back when I was eleven, that she wanted to run the New York marathon, just to test herself, to see how far her body could sustain the pain (and most likely insanity), and thus trained for all of five weeks, and managed to cross the finish line at just under four hours. So it wasn’t as if my mother’s sympathy chip was finely honed.

My parents had driven up from Philly for my first round of chemo. “You don’t have to,” I’d told them on the phone, wiping away the snot that poured from my nostrils after succumbing to a
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crying fit over Ned. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d wailed so loudly; surely my neighbors thought that someone had died.

But then I did remember it, of course. It was when Jake cut a wedge so deeply into my heart that I feared I’d never be able to successfully breathe, much less relish the life that comes along with that breath, again.

But my parents arrived just three hours later, and my mom sat and squeezed my shoulder as I reclined in a blue recliner and watched
General Hospital
while liquid toxins filled my bloodstream. “That wasn’t so bad,” I told my mom in the cab ride home, and she rubbed my back and pulled my head to her shoulder, something she probably hadn’t done since I was about five.

My parents stuck around through the weekend. Although Dr.

Chin had warned me of the symptoms, sometimes words do little to warn you of the oncoming storm. Within a day, getting out of bed to pee seemed too big a task. To say that the fatigue felt as if I’d been plowed, flattened, pancaked by a Mack truck would be close to the truth. To say that the effort required to lift just my pinky or my little toe or even to crack open my eyelids felt Hercu-lean would also be accurate.

And of course, the pesky part of dealing with the exhaustion is that within twenty-four hours, I was also battling nausea. So the little energy I did have in reserves was spent running back and forth to the bathroom with the threat of constant vomiting. Finally, my mother matter-of-factly placed a stainless-steel bowl, one that Ned and I had bought at Bed Bath & Beyond when we moved in together, at the right side of my bed. What had been purchased with the thought of spending lingering hours whipping up gourmet delicacies as a new cohabitating unit now served to receive the pure bile purged from my stomach; it wasn’t as if I had the appetite to eat anything to barf back up.

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Five days later, I slowly emerged from the cocoon of my first chemo treatment, and my parents checked out of the Waldorf, ready to return to their now semialtered lives. I was gingerly stepping out of the shower when they stopped over to say good-bye.

“We’ll be back in a few weeks,” my dad said, ignoring my damp hair and pulling me into him, as I clung to the top of the towel rather than return his embrace. He kissed the top of my head, and I heard his voice crack.

“I spoke with your boss,” my mom interrupted, as I pulled back from my father. “She’s agreed that it’s best if you work from home—

or really, don’t work at all—for a few weeks or even months.”

“What? Who gave you the right to do that? We’re headed into the election, I’m not taking any time off.” I walked into the bedroom to get dressed.

“Natalie, this isn’t negotiable,” she said to my back.

I slung on a sweatshirt and pajama bottoms and reemerged with the towel wrapped around my head. “I can’t believe that you did this!” I was sixteen all over again and my mother had just called my swim coach and told her that they were pulling me from the team so that I could focus on my SATs. It’s not that I loved swimming, and truly, it wasn’t even that I didn’t
want
to focus on my SATs (after all, no one became president with lousy SATs . . . or so I thought at the time), but it was all so typical: her making decisions about me,
for
me, whether I wanted to quit swimming or not.

My mother eyed me coolly. “The senator and I both spoke with Dr. Chin. And this is how it’s going to be, so don’t waste your energy screaming at me. You need to preserve what you have right now.”

“Why are you butting in?” I pulled the towel off my head, throwing it on the couch. “This is totally ridiculous. It’s
my life
. I
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know what’s best for me, and cutting myself out at work is
not
what’s best for me
.”

My mom moved forward to kiss my cheek. “Honestly dear. I really don’t think that you know what’s best for you.” And then she took my father’s hand and walked out the door, leaving me there shaking from rage, damp hair, and the side effects of chemo.

A month later, with nothing much to show for my time off other than accumulated knowledge of
The Price Is Right,
I knew with more certainty than ever that my mother barely knew me, much less knew what was
best
for me.

Now, back at the office, as the gold-mirrored elevator doors opened, the first thing I noticed wasn’t the buzzing of the junior aides in their cubicles or the pulsing of the incessantly ringing phones. No, it was a foul, fetid rotting smell. I gulped down a pocket of air and tried to breathe through my mouth as I made my way through the maze of cubes to the senator’s office at the opposite end of the floor. When we first moved in, Dupris had attempted to make the space look luxurious—I convinced her that it certainly wasn’t illegal to allocate the extra campaign money for renovations—but regardless of how she dressed it up, it still looked like a drab, lifeless void . . . except for the toiling of the actual live bodies. Staid white cubes were laid out like honeycomb; bluish-grayish carpeting hid linoleum tiles on the floor; fluorescent bulbs glared down from above, highlighting our omnipresent purple under-eye circles.

Blair was laughing into her earpiece when I reached her desk.

She pushed her blond bob behind her ears, then held up a finger and mouthed, “One second,” when she saw me. “Love you, too,”

she said, before she clicked off. “Sorry.” She looked up at me and beamed. Clearly a new boyfriend.

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At twenty-two, fresh out of Georgetown, Blair still had the naïveté to be caught up in the throes of young Manhattan love, which would inevitably get stomped into the ground as soon as one of them got too drunk one night and made out with another twenty-two-year-old in a basement bar with pulsing music and far too many candles to legally pass any sort of fire code. “I told him not to call me here, but, you know how it is . . .” She waved her manicured hand in front of her.

“It fucking reeks in here. What the hell is going on?” I peered down, ignoring her idealistic romanticism.

“Oh, gosh, I’m sorry. Yes, yes, I know.” The blood drained from her face. “Um, a pipe burst three days ago, and um, water seems to have gotten underneath the carpet. So, um, it seems to have, um, mildewed. The cleaners are coming tonight after work.”

“Whatever.” I sighed and looked toward Dupris’s door. “Can I go in?”

Blair bit her lip. “You just missed her actually.” Her voice rose an octave, as she jumped out of her chair and tripped over one of the legs. “Natalie, I’m so sorry! I tried to tell her that you were coming in, but she said that she couldn’t wait, and I tried to delay her, but . . .”

I pushed open the door and slammed it behind me before she could finish. Dupris’s office looked jarringly different from the hovel in which we plebeians toiled. Rich forest-green drapes hung from the picture windows, lush cream carpeting welcomed my pumps. Her deep ebony desk had been a gift from an Indian ambassador: He claimed that his son had made it so she didn’t have to refuse it as a potential bribe. And of course, for the senator, there were no fluorescent lights with which to highlight the damage from the previous evening’s all-nighter. Just brass lamps scattered throughout. If you didn’t know that you were in the office of one
The Department of Lost & Found