The Lost and Found

Hillary Behrman

Hillary Behrman

Hillary Behrman is a Chris O’Malley Fiction Prize winner and Missouri Review Editors' Prize finalist. Her stories can be found in literary journals and an anthology. She lives in Seattle and has worked as a social justice advocate and public defender.

He lost everything—fleece pullovers, raincoats, sweatshirts, winter parkas, green rubber rain boots with frog faces, and his left sneaker. The left, not the right, and he still made it home unscathed, single wet sock prints up and down the hallway.
 
We stopped buying anything new for him. Sent him to school in his sister's castoffs and Goodwill jackets. For a while it worked. He returned home each day in his cousin's magenta hand-me-down Land's End parka, and made it back from a weekend camping trip still in possession of his sister's stained and outgrown yellow down jacket.  But after the winter holidays, outfitted in expensive grandparent given gear, it started up again.
 
"Did you check the lost and found?"
 
His answer always, "Yes."
 
 But I doubted him, and he could see me doubting.
 
I couldn't help myself and would arrive early to pick him up from after-school-care to brave the massive overflowing mound of outerwear that was the Lost and Found—a dumpster sized wooden bin located under the overhang of metal stairs that led from the basement of his elementary school to the first floor. Everyone called it "The Lice and Found." And I didn't want to let anything touch my skin, hair, or clothes, at least not until I had washed what I might find in very hot water and dried the item on the highest setting.
 
The stuff I found there was legion: tiny Patagonia down jackets, brand-new North Face rain gear, every imaginable color of REI and Hanna Anderson fleeces, but never his one shoe or the Norwegian sweater my mother gave him the year before she died.  I claimed nothing and washed my hands in the knee-high communal sink of the girls' bathroom before I ascended the stairs and made my way to the gym, where I would sign him out from After-School-Care. Of course, he knew where I had been. His stuff was lost, and I was late, ten dollars for every ten minutes, the cost of two more Goodwill coats.
 
This doubt in me— of him, has persisted. And I will always want to ask him something.
 
Is that really your jacket?
 
Did you get the paper in on time?
 
Are you okay? Really okay?
 
Questions, only for him, that should never be asked.
 
He has always found his way.
 
The problem is mine, this fear of lost things.
 
He has always known precisely where he is.
 
Sometimes, I wonder, did he give that coat away to another child who was colder than he was? The same way, one Saturday downtown, he gave away every single crumpled bill of spending money he had in his pocket to a street musician in the Market and a man who needed bus fare in front of the liquor store on the corner of 3rd and James.
           
There was a brief time in middle school when he stole from our wallets regularly—not much, a ten here, a twenty there. He never could admit it. And the thefts stopped, not when we punished him, but when I asked, "What is it that you need?"
           
 And he said, "I don't need anything."
           
 "Then why?"
           
 "It is the wanting. Just the wanting, I can't help it."
 
After he said that, the twenties remained crisp in our wallets.
 
I don't know where he has put all that wanting or if he has stopped wanting all together, and is it all my fault.
           

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