The Department of Lost & Found (6 page)

“I’m sorry,” I said, lowering my eyes. “You’re just trying to do right by me, and I act like a crazy person.”

“Oh please, this is nothing compared to how you reacted when you found out that Brandon was cheating on you sophomore year.

Remember that? If I can handle that, I think I can cope with this.”

She laughed and handed me a tissue from her purse. “Okay,” she 48

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

conceded, “we won’t stop.” She squeezed my hand and started walking.

“Did you hear that, ‘cancer’?” I replied, mustering up a grin.

“I’m not stopping until you prove me unstoppable.”

◆

◆

◆

Dear Diary:

The good news is that I barely think of Ned at all anymore.

And when I do, it actually doesn’t occur to me to head down to
Model ’s and buy an aluminum bat with which to bash his brains
in. So that’s good news, right? I mean, I sort of get it. Why he
left. No. Let me amend that. I will never GET why he did what
he did WHEN he did it. But in the larger picture, I mean, I
think I might get it. The truth is, Diary, we didn’t have much of
a relationship going, even if we thought we did. And I know this
now because my life hasn’t changed so much since he left. I still
eat most of my meals by myself, I still confide more in Sal y
than in him, and other than my rage, I still don’t miss him much
when he’s gone. Huh. So go figure. Maybe if I get around to it,
I’ l listen to his side of the story, too. But that’s my peace for
now.

And of course, as life would have it, as soon as I’ve made
peace with one thing, another bat le arises altogether. See, Diary, I’ve been thinking about Jake. A wee bit too much. And I
also think I might have a teeny, tiny crush on Zach. Oh, who I
haven’t told you much about. See, the fact that he’s my ob-gyn
should, I know, be enough to skeeve me out for, like, forever. I
mean, Lila jokes that he’s been in more vaginas than the entire
NBA (and she would know since she broke his heart into a billion pieces this spring when she up and dumped him without
any warning). But he bears a striking resemblance to Patrick
Dempsey, and, wel , he calls a few times a week to check up on
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me, and when he does cal , it’s like I almost forget that I have
cancer—which I know is stupid, since that’s the only reason he’s
cal ing to begin with—but still. Let me be clear here, Diary:
Zach looks nothing like your gynecologist, nor does he look anything like your previous gynecologist. In fact, with pools of green
eyes, a lean runner’s body, and wavy hair that curls perfectly
over his forehead, I’m not sure that he should even be allowed to
be a practicing gynecologist, given that it’s highly probable that
the bulk of his patients find him, just
35
years old, more arous-ing than their husbands. And for those ten minutes on the phone
when he cal s, it’s like I’m a normal girl who might have a normal shot with a normal guy.

So between my pathetic ruminations on Jake—Where is he?

Is he banging groupies? Does he ever think of me? (and to answer some, if not all of these questions, I logged in nearly two
hours on Google last night)—and my realization that despite
my rising lust for my gynecologist, I cannot, nor will I ever, be
his, it’s easy to see that I fell into a bit of a funk. All of which I
raised with Janice at our next session.

After assuring me that (a) I was still entirely sexually viable
to men (snort, as IF, Diary!) and (b) my topsy-turvy emotions
were perfectly normal, Janice did mention that she wasn’t sure
about opening up the doors to my past via this very diary (remember, the hunt for my exes?) when I was already dealing with
so much change, but she wasn’t there to judge. That’s what she
said, “I’m not here to judge, Natalie, just to help.” As if that
didn’t make me think she was judging. It’s like back in high
school, when my mom would purse her lips and say to me, “Wel ,
if you think it’s the right decision,” when clearly, she thought it
was entirely the wrong decision, and pretend that she wasn’t dropping a passive-aggressive bomb. But I told Janice that I felt like
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a l l i s o n w i n n s c o t c h

sorting through my past might help me come to terms with the
present, so she nodded and said, “Wel , that’s progress.”

We spent the rest of the session talking about my theory that
in every relationship—friendship, romantic, whatever—there
is an alpha and a beta. Namely, one strong person, the rock, so
to speak, and one weaker link, the one who does the leaning. By
weaker link, I don’t mean to imply that they’re a less critical
component: In fact, if you put two strong types together, they
often combust, sort of like two opposing elements that explode in
chemistry class.

I wasn’t sure why my alpha dog theory had been weighing on
me as of late, until Janice suggested that other than you, Diary,
it would be nice for me to find someone on whom to lean. You
know, so I didn’t have to bear my burdens all alone. I told her
that I liked living as a solitary being, and that really, at the end
of the day, I was the only person I trusted enough to rely on. (No
offense. I do find you to be a fantastic listener.) She nodded and
said she understood, so she suggested taking baby steps, that I
shouldn’t be afraid to also look for small gifts, for people who
outstretched their hands, even if they weren’t offering a full
shoulder. I remembered Sal y running my errands for me last
weekend when I couldn’t find the energy to restock my toilet paper, and Lila blowing off her afternoon of work after our walk to
sit in a tea shop and regale me with all the latest gossip from our
group of friends. Still though, Diary, if I’m going to be honest—which is really the point of this whole thing, isn’t it?—it
all felt flat.

So anyway, Diary. I know that it’s only my second entry and
I’ve already lost track of the purpose of this damn thing in the
first place, which namely was to provide a diversion from my
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51

wal owing and self-pity parties. So this week, honestly, I’m going to shovel myself out and stop Googling Jake and move on to
Colin, from high school, and then to Brandon. That should be
fun. (Note heavy sarcasm.)

i h e a r d t h e latch turn before I actually saw it. I was flattened on the couch, staring up at the ceiling and mentally calculating how many square feet someone could live in without officially going crazy. The 650 feet of my one-bedroom apartment had me choking with claustrophobia, my daily walks be damned. I remembered the room that I’d shared with Lila back in college—it couldn’t have been more than thirteen by thirteen—and yet I never felt suffocated there. But inside my apartment, I truly felt as if I might crawl the walls. I was debating how the view might appear from a Spiderman-esque perch on the ceiling when I heard the
click-click
of the door, and I shot straight up, my butt sinking into the down pillows. I ran through a mental checklist of who had access to my keys.
Sally
.

But she was working this morning; she’d already e-mailed me.

My parents
. But they were safe in Philly.
My doorman
. But he always called before he came up. And then my stomach dropped.
Ned. That
rat-bastard, skunk-smel ing, motherf
—
ing Ned
.

He poked his head through the door and muttered, “Shit,” as he dropped his keys. I stared at him the way that a rabid dog might size up a postman’s shin, and when he straightened up, I pelted him with the fluffy angora pillow that he’d insisted on buying because he’d seen something similar in
Metropolitan Home
.

“Holy shit,” he yelped, as the pillow smacked him on the side of the head, and he jumped two feet in the air, coming dangerously close to the door frame.
Damn,
I thought.
Nearly fifty points for a
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a l l i s o n w i n n s c o t c h

concussion
. “What are you doing here?” he asked, cautiously taking a step in. “You’re never home from work on a weekday.”

I crossed my arms across my chest. “Need I remind you, oh valiant one? I’m in the middle of chemo. I’m working from home.”

I reached out my hand. “I guess it goes without saying that I want my keys back.”

“Look, Nat, I’m sorry. I didn’t think you’d be here.” He squeezed the bridge of his nose like he was getting a migraine.

“But I left . . . well, you didn’t pack up . . . anyway, some of my work files are here. I just wanted to grab them.”

“Get out,” I said, raising another pillow as ammunition.

“C’mon, Nat. Be reasonable. I just need to find this stuff, and I’ll be gone.” He shuffled over and dropped the keys on my coffee table.

I reached for the remote and flicked on
All My Children,
increasing the volume until the entire block could surely catch wind of Erica Kane’s latest romantic embroilment. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched Ned walk to my desk, open up the bottom drawer, and filter through the papers. He stuck two manila folders into his messenger bag and paused for a minute to read over a memo, which he then crumpled up into a ball and tossed in the trash can that sat at the foot of the desk. Then he kept digging.

“Do you need this?” He held up a business card. I squinted to make out the writing, so he flipped it over to read it himself. His voice grew soft. “It’s for a wigmaker, Adina Seidel.”

After I got home from my first appointment with Dr. Chin, I’d tossed it in my “junk” drawer. Surely, I’d thought, it will never come to that. Resorting to a wig was like relying on a wheelchair: It was a crutch, and I didn’t need anyone—or anything—to hold me up. My mother’s voice echoed through my mind.
“There’s no

‘we’ in Natalie,”
she used to say with an overemphasis on the last
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53

syllable. “
Just an ‘I’ and almost a ‘me.’ ”
She’d made up that little rhyme back when I was eight.

It was my first day at my new private school, and when she dropped me off at my homeroom, running late and jotting down to-dos on her notepad, I knew she had to leave. I knew that she
wanted
to leave, but that didn’t mean that I couldn’t try to stop her.

So I clung to her side until her suit jacket became so twisted that the buttons faced the wrong way, and I sobbed hard enough that snot ran clear down to my neck. My mortified mother, my mother who labored with me for a mere thirty-five minutes and (she’d like you to note) drug-free, apologized to the teacher and walked me out of the room. I thought I’d been granted a reprieve, freedom from my new, marbled-hall school, but instead, she firmly grabbed me by the elbow and said with a just-kind-enough smile,
“There’s
no ‘we’ in Natalie. Just an ‘I’ and almost a ‘me.’ ”

I blinked at her, uncomprehending. So she sighed and said,

“Natalie, I can’t be here for you all of the time. You’re a big girl now, and big girls do things on their own. I expect you to be a big girl. You need to rely on yourself now.” I started to protest, but she cut me off, spun me around, and after planting a kiss on my head, left me to wipe the mucus off my own face and in the care of my new homeroom teacher.

“There’s no ‘we’ in Natalie.”
And from the age of eight on, indeed, there hadn’t been.

I glanced at the wigmaker’s card, and unconsciously, I ran my fingers through my thinning hair. “Just put it on my keyboard,” I said to Ned, and turned my attention back to
AMC
before my voice could break and belie the loneliness behind it. I heard him start to say something more, but he thought better of whatever it was and kept sorting through his files.

“Oh my God,” he said, which I could make out over the an-54

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

nouncer on the Swiffer commercial. “I totally forgot about this.” I didn’t turn to look, so he stood up and came over to the couch. He held out his hand, but I tucked mine farther into my armpits. In exasperation, he grabbed my arm. “I bought this for you,” he said.

“The day after we got back from the Vineyard.”

I didn’t bother looking at the baby blue Tiffany box he’d placed in my palm. “Why don’t you give it to
Agnes
?” I spit out her name as if it were chewing tobacco. I’d tried it once in college and found the two things—Agnes and Skoal—equally revolting.

“Because it isn’t for Agnes. It was for you.” He shook his head.

“I was so inspired when we got home from the trip. And I saw it in the window . . .” He paused, and I almost thought he was going to cry. “And so I bought it. Because it reminded me of us.” He sighed.

“It reminded me of what I hoped we would become as a couple.”

He shrugged. “But then I didn’t see you for a week straight, and so I stuck it in the bottom drawer where you wouldn’t find it. And obviously, I never gave it to you.”