Lost and Found
It’s nothing more than a quick glimmer on the asphalt, weak morning sun grazing dull metal. A minor miracle in the parking lot at Saint Ursula as an old man’s filmy gaze catches a wink of light. He stops, and for one more step, the woman next to him keeps walking. He sets a hand on the nearest car’s tail light, steadying himself before bending down. “What on earth?” his wife asks, turning on a sensible heel, her voice deep and full, a laugh with syllables.
Sam and Lily O’Dowd have grown to look alike, just like so many couples of a certain age. They are age-spotted and gray, with pink-rimmed eyes and long earlobes, rounded shoulders and swollen knuckles. Their skin is creased like paper once crumpled and bound for the trash, then smoothed into a state of not-quite flatness. Like a shattered vase, reassembled, but they are still defiantly whole, still driving, still grocery shopping, still kneeling down on the mahogany pews each day just past dawn. They live life in tandem, each always ready with a pearl of wisdom or a gentle nudge, a partnership against the ravages of time. But even so united, they remain distinct: Where his wrinkles tug down, hers defy gravity. The years have etched her with a smile.
Folded down to the pavement, Sam laughs, and in a breath his joy becomes a wheeze. “Help up?” he asks, and Lily reaches out a hand. Her wrist is thin, sinewy, but Sam is just as slight as she is, easily hoisted to his feet. Lily gasps, the shock of fleeting pain. Her palm is red, pinched. There in Sam’s hand is a bracelet, a silver chain with small, bezel-set rubies and a spiky, old-fashioned clasp. Lily thinks of her first husband, an anniversary gift in another lifetime, and absently rubs the flesh below her pinky finger. “What have you there?” she asks, and Sam states the obvious. “Good eye,” she tells him as the church bells begin to clang — one, two, three, four, five, six, seven o’clock mass. Bracelet slides into worn pocket. Father, son, holy spirit, hand in sacred water, knee to stone floor. Their worn-down muscles move best from memory.
When the monsignor has finished, gone in a noxious cloud of incense, Lily nudges Sam. “In your pocket,” she reminds him, and his gray eyes narrow. She scolds herself silently. Better to pretend she doesn’t see the storm she knows is brewing in his memory, sometimes for an hour, lately for a day at a time, even two. He reaches into the folds of his drab khakis, cinched around his waist with a nubby needlepointed belt, and she smiles. They wait their turn to leave the pew, and Lily fiddles with the ring on her finger, the ring Sam gave her a decade ago, when widower and widow decided it might be nice to finish out their days together. It’s a ruby, too, the size of a pinhead. She polishes it Sunday evenings, one small vanity.
“Let’s take the bracelet to Monsignor Perry,” she suggests as they file out in a noisy pack, the sacred silence lifted and immediately forgotten. Sam agrees. The priest is where he always is, in rain and snow and Hadean heat, at the edge of the parking lot by the wizened elm. The hem of his robe, Lily sees, has dragged through a puddle, and his glasses need a polish. This, she thinks, is why Sam needs her. Men can’t be left to their own care. Her cheeks flush with embarrassment for this silly man in his silly robe, thoughts she’d never say aloud.
“Sam!” the priest exclaims. “And Lily! How are you feeling? How are the grandchildren?”
Sam brags about his granddaughter. Notre Dame, early decision. Lily nods and tut-tuts at the right times and chimes in about her grandson, star of the eighth-grade musical. The priest claps his hands together once, and Lily sneaks a glance at his nails. Too long. Then Sam pulls out the bracelet, coiled in his palm, already tangled. His face travels back in time, and he is a little boy on the shore of a stream, holding up a shimmering bluegill, expectant and proud. “In the parking lot? Oh my,” the priest says. “It looks like it’s been out there for ages.” Both men fall silent, waiting for someone to push this unfamiliar exchange along. As if either of them would know there’s a lost and found in the parish center, as if Perry would have heard chatter that some other woman had lost a treasure. “We were thinking we might take it to the lost and found,” Lily says. “Is the parish center unlocked this early?”
“Oh yes, good, good,” the priest answers, relieved. “I’ll take it over. And if it’s not claimed in two weeks, I think, it’s yours.”
They say their goodbyes, and the bracelet tumbles into the pocket of the priest’s robe. Lily wonders if that’ll be the last they see of it, the last anyone sees of it. She pictures an industrial dryer in the rectory eating it up, hot metal sucked into a shaft of hotter air. At the car, Sam opens the driver-side door for her. “I was thinking,” he says, frowning. “If no one claims it, maybe you’d like to buy it from me.”
*
So many times, Lily is tempted to tell the story: to her best friend, Peggy, or to Clara, Sam’s daughter, who visits on Thursdays. But every time it’s on the tip of her tongue, she says a silent prayer to Saint Monica and puts a thumb on her left wrist, feeling a slow, slow pulse.
Sam had seen her wince that day as she lowered into her seat. She’d played it off like knee pain, but he’d known better. And he’d never mentioned the bracelet again. Neither had the priest, who was transferred the next year to Toledo.
Sam is forgetting too much, too fast. The principal at Saint Benedict’s calls, wondering if they’ve had to stop their monthly donation, the nominal tuition fee for a little girl named Elizabeta, a Bosnian refugee with round, black eyes and a long chin, who sends them her school picture every September inside a handmade card. “Goodness, no,” Lily says, flustered, scribbling a check as she apologizes. “Please don’t mention this to Sam,” she adds, speaking low. “It must’ve slipped his mind.”
Sometimes he calls her by his first wife’s name — his first wife who was Lily’s cousin and closest friend. But before they lost the pigment in their hair and their figures blurred with age, it had been a stretch to think they shared any genetic material. Lily had been willowy and Gertie was all curves; Lily’s hair had stayed a flaxen blonde until she was 50, and Gertie’s long, black curls were shot with gray by 35. But they’d shared a perfect laugh, the patience of an angel.
He’d told Lily about those quiet similarities years ago, when they were friends with a standing dinner date, friends who’d started meeting to cope with grief and then moved on to a new kind of peace. Over time, though, he’s stopped talking about Gertie, and Lily wonders when he’ll start again. She knows how dementia works, believes Sam is bound to wind up moored in the past. Every time he shouts for Gertie, she thinks, this is it, and then he corrects his mistake and remains rooted in the here and now, confused but utterly present.
One winter morning, Lily calls Clara, and Clara calls her brothers in Boston and Pittsburgh and Galveston, and they all come for a visit. Sam is thrilled until he is irate. They tell him he can’t drive anymore, and Lily feigns innocence. They donate the car to Saint Benedict’s, to the custodian who’s been riding the bus each day before dawn. Another card arrives in the mail, another snapshot: a tall, tan man leaning up against the hood of the Jeep, his thumbs up and his smile wide. Sam stares at the image, which Lily has left for him on the antique secretary where they keep the mail and the keys and the list of emergency contacts. His eyes flash anger and then compassion, and Lily sees him hard at the work of remembering his good deed.
Lily drives Sam to the doctor, to Clara’s to see the kids, and she is happy for the company, even as he swears he’s a burden. He stoops more each day, and so does she, but no one notices, not even her sons. She joins the choir and quits. Sam stops going to his men’s club, the informal group that used to meet every Friday afternoon for bratwurst and Budweisers. Half the men are dead now, and Sam says he can’t bear it.
Sam grumbles in his dreams, and Lily hears him from the next bedroom over. In the morning, he can’t remember, and Lily can’t decide if that’s the disease or just the normal course of things. He loses a box and reports this loss to Lily, who asks what color it is, what’s in it. He can’t answer, and the matter is dropped. So it goes, over months of disappearing sweaters and forgotten names, of frustration and shame gone just as fast as they’ve bubbled up.
One evening, Sam falls, and Lily’s sure he’s broken his hip. He stands right back up and tells her, in his old voice — deeper, surer — not to worry. Another afternoon, he bumps his shin on the corner of a kitchen cabinet, and the next day, half his leg is a bruise, purplish-black and ominous, swollen. It heals, and Sam keeps four Band-Aids affixed over the spot. When Lily asks him why, he looks at her as if she couldn’t be dumber.
They visit their lawyer, get affairs in order, and Sam forgets they’ve done it. They visit again. They hire a gardener for Sam’s cabin, off in the woods an hour from town. Weeds have poked through a crack in the back window. Lily’s middle son says he’ll handle the maintenance, but Sam objects. “I don’t want him getting any ideas,” Sam tells Lily with a faint snarl. “You’re to sell that cabin when I’m gone, not give it away.”
*
And then Sam is gone, quietly during his afternoon nap. They’d been to church that morning, him shuffling behind the metal walker he despised, Lily with her hand on his shoulder as he folded himself into the pew. On the way out, he’d seemed exhausted, his hunch so pronounced, he stood barely as tall as Lily’s shoulder. Lily had made nervous small talk on their way out, so unlike her, and forgotten to dip her fingers in the holy water.
Sam is gone, and Lily feels so many things. Profound sadness, most of all, because she’d loved him. She still loves him. She’s done all of this before — placed the calls, signed the papers, comforted the people who were trying to comfort her — and this time, it’s easier. It’s much less sudden, Sam being in his mid-80s, not his late 60s. And so Lily follows the script and chides herself for wondering, for asking herself the same silent questions she had the first time around — about heaven and hell and what good our faith is at the end. She remembers forgetting the holy water.
Clara comes by and they sit on the couch, quiet. Lily has known her all her life, and she remembers her most acutely as a ten-year-old, thin and tall for her age and unsure what to do with her knees and elbows. Now she is nervous but kind, and Lily realizes how close they’ve become — realizes only now, when their lives might again drift apart. “You know you’re not rid of me,” Clara says, as if she can hear Lily’s thoughts, and Lily smiles for the first time all day. “Everything you did —” Clara says, pausing. “Well, you’re a saint.”
“Oh, now,” Lily says, and each realizes the other is crying.
“Do you want to sort through his things?” Lily asks, and Clara tells her no. Not today. There will be time. A few days later, Lily calls Clara to ask again. “Do you kids have a list of who wants what?” Lily wonders. They don’t. Clara’s brothers and sister won’t come to town for another month, not until the memorial mass. And so Clara tells Lily to take a look first, to take whatever she wants.
“You did so much for him. You just — you deserve more than we could give,” Clara says, and then she laughs. “God knows, he didn’t have anything nice.”
A few days later, Lily decides what she wants: a tan cardigan, pilled with age. It’s cashmere, a decades-old gift from Sam’s youngest son. She’d always liked to borrow it, and Sam had been happy to loan. “Too fancy,” he’d grunt, and perhaps it was.
She pulls the cord that turns on the light in Sam’s closet. It’s tidy chaos. Pants are folded in stacks on the floor. Sweaters are hung next to undershirts. Two pairs of boxers are clipped to a skirt hanger. He’d done his laundry to the end. Lily chuckles and begins to rummage. Next to a pile of flannel pants, the cardigan is folded, inside-out. Underneath it sits a shoebox, which Lily picks up to take to the trash, but it’s heavier than she’d expected. It rattles. Loose change? She carries it into Sam’s bedroom and sits down at his desk, and sure enough, there’s a roll of quarters inside, and a rosary, and a British pound. There are prayer cards from funerals dating back to the ‘80s — one for Lily’s first husband and for Peggy’s first granddaughter, stillborn — and a journal. Lily wouldn’t dare open it. And, she notices finally, there’s an envelope with her name on it, dated a week before her birthday two years ago. She picks it up, and before she can think about what she might find and how she might feel, she tears it open. It smells like Sam, this box, like pine needles and Dial soap, and for a moment, it’s as if he’s looming in the door frame.
Lily unfolds a piece of ruled paper, and out falls a bracelet. Silver, polished, with little rubies. A note, written in shaky pencil: Happy birthday to my companion. I’m sorry.
Joan Niesen is a journalist who’s working on her first novel. Her work has appeared in the Washington Post, Sports Illustrated, Washingtonian and the Guardian, among other outlets. She’s also a part-time bookseller at Wonderland Books in Bethesda, Md. Based in Washington, D.C., Joan spends her free time baking elaborate desserts and going on long walks.
