The Lost & Found by Katrina Leno Page A

Bucker about how hot it was in LA.
    I wrote him back quickly:
    It’s hot and muggy here. Is it muggy in LA? It’s not, right? You guys are lucky. Mugginess is the worst. I’m tryingto figure out if I should do something really stupid. Like, drive-across-the-country-to-meet-a-movie-star stupid. I keep going back and forth.
    I closed my laptop and lay back on my bed. I was glib with Bucker, but the truth was that my stomach had tied itself up in a knot that felt irreversible. The truth was, Arrow and I had cried for a long, long time, but I didn’t feel like I was done.
    I loved my mother. I missed her. Admittedly, I missed her more five years ago, when it was fresh, when one day I had spent all my time with her and the next day she had vanished, poof, never to be heard from again. I had learned to live without her, but that didn’t make the pain any less real.
    But I knew even then. I knew after my father went to jail and it was just my mother and me, spending money on stupid things and getting our hair done twice a day at different salons. I knew it couldn’t last forever. I was only a kid, but I could see my mother unraveling. I could see the knots in her brain unknotting. She was falling apart. She was coming unhinged.
    She burned our pictures and smashed in our TV set to make an aquarium.
    â€œI don’t want a TV anymore,” she’d said. “I want a fish tank. Put these safety goggles on, Heph.”
    I put the safety goggles on. I stepped back until my butthit the far wall and then I watched my mother take a bat to our television. It wasn’t a flat-screen; it was one of the old ones.
    My mother bashed the shit out of that poor TV and then she stepped back and looked at me like—
eh? Pretty cool, huh?
    â€œI’ve never seen the inside of a TV before,” she said, bending down and inspecting it. “Come here and look. It’s like a science experiment. Don’t worry, I unplugged it.”
    I went and looked at the inside of the TV. To be honest, it was a little boring.
    â€œWhat kind of fish do you want?” she asked me.
    â€œGoldfish?”
    â€œHow many?”
    â€œThree?”
    â€œNames?”
    â€œI dunno.”
    â€œHeph! They gotta have names.”
    â€œGoldy?”
    â€œInspired. And the others?”
    â€œSunshine. Lava.”
    â€œI love those names
so much
,” she said, putting her arm around me. “All we have to do now is saw the top off and get a sheet of glass. We’ll go to the hardware store later, how about it? We need a saw and we need some glass and we’ll probably need some netting for the top. Like a screen. So they don’t jump out.”
    We never made it to the hardware store.
    I missed my mother now. Her letters were manic and nonsensical and long-winded, but they made me miss her in a way I hadn’t missed her in five years. They made her feel so close. I was happy she had thought about me in the mental institution. I was happy she wrote me letters even when the letters were filled with made-up words.
    Tole barken!
she wrote in one of them.
Howba goesy!
    I wanted to read them again even though I was so tired my eyes burned with the effort of staying open. I’d left them on the nightstand this morning when I’d finally fallen asleep. I reached over to get them, but they weren’t there. They had gone wherever the photo of her had gone. They had gone wherever everything went.
    I knew I wouldn’t find them, but I got up anyway and went downstairs to the living room. Grandma was knitting something on the couch. She wasn’t supposed to knit anymore, because of her arthritis, but she didn’t listen to the doctors.
    â€œDid you take my mother’s letters?” I asked.
    â€œNo, dear. Did you misplace them?”
    â€œI know where I left them. Maybe Grandpa?”
    â€œGrandpa’s been gone all day.”
    â€œHow come you lied to me? I mean, really,” I