Page 8 of Lost in the Moment and Found

Suddenly, the extra size of the new house didn’t feel like a way to avoid Tyler. It felt like the trap she’d seen that long-ago night at the dinner table, finally snapping shut around her.

“We could be friends,” said Tyler, and reached over, and unfastened the top button of her nightgown. That was all. Just one button, just one little twist of his fingers, and then he was standing, the smile on his face visible even through the dimness of the room around him. “Think about it, and remember: if you tell your mother anything, I’ll tell her you’re a liar, and she’ll believe me. Not you. Me. Goodnight, Antoinette.”

Those words were the final crack in the wall between her and the crying she had lost when her father died. Tyler let himself out of the room as the first fat, slow tears began to roll down her cheeks and her shoulders began to shake, and she finally understood why she’d never liked him, why the way he looked at her had always felt like a hand running along her spine, why having him in her house was an endless offense to the way the world was supposed to work.

But she also knew her mother wouldn’t listen if she tried to tell her what she was afraid of, knew it with the bone-deep conviction that children can sometimes bring to things that are entirely untrue. She knew Santa Claus wasn’t real; his handwriting had changed when her father died, and that had been the last piece of a puzzle she’d been unwillingly assembling for over a year. She still believed in the Tooth Fairy, and the Easter Bunny, and the mystical power of cracks to snap the spines of mothers. She believed so many things that weren’t true thatone more would have made no real difference if it hadn’t been for the nature of this final, brutal, unendurable thing.

Tyler had been careful to demonstrate, over and over again, that when it was her word against his, he was the trustworthy adult and she was the child making up stories to get attention or avoid getting into trouble for whatever reason. He’d given her a lesson to learn, and she had learned it well. Too well to see how false and cruel it was, to understand that had she gone to her mother, her mother, who had a better understanding of the world and all its dangers, would have taken her side.

Still crying, Antsy slipped out of bed and—after checking her door to be sure it was all the way closed—stripped out of her nightgown, putting on the clothes she’d worn the day before, that were still at the top of the laundry basket. She was seven years old, almost eight, and she knew she should get something clean, but she also knew her dresser drawers would scrape if she opened them, and it wasn’t like she’d spilled anything on herself at dinner.

Her backpack was partially under the bed. She pulled it out and froze. What did you put into a bag for running away? Her piggy bank was half-full, and she knew she’d need money, but it also jingled and jangled, and even padding it with the rest of her laundry wouldn’t stop the coins from bouncing around. She had her twenty dollars of birthday money still on top of the dresser, and that could go in the bag. That was easy.

Her favorite doll, her stuffed monkey, they both went into the bag, and she stepped into her shoes before slinging the bag over her shoulder and carefully, carefully easing her bedroom door open and peeking into the hall. There was no sign of Tyler. She could hear the sound of the television drifting up from the downstairs living room.

Good. The one thing about this new house that was better than the old one: the floors didn’t creak. They were new and level and perfect, and as long as she stayed close to the wall, she could move like a ghost, even going up and down the stairs. She walked rather than creeping, confident in her understanding of the acoustics.

The television cast flickering shadows on the walls. Antsy passed silent and swift, and thanks to the placement of the couch, neither Tyler nor her mother saw her go.

She stopped when she reached the kitchen, looking around for food she could take without opening anything, without disturbing anything. There was fruit in the big bowl by the stove, and a whole loaf of bread. The peanut butter had been left on the counter after lunch, inviting and easy to grab. She stuffed all those things into her pack, careful to stay as quiet as possible, before making her silent way to the back door.

This was it, then. She could go back to her room right now, could put her nightgown back on and pretend this had all been a dream, and call her grandparents tomorrow, to beg them to come and get her. But would they listen? If her mother told them she was just acting out, which story would they believe? Staying here wouldn’t promise her safety. It would just promise she was still close enough for Tyler to get to, and she knew she wasn’t safe here.

So she eased the back door open and slipped into the night, and by the time it swung shut on its own and her mother came to investigate the sound, she was long gone, out of the yard and heading down the street, backpack over her shoulder and tears running down her cheeks. She was never going back. She knew that, as completely as she knew she’d had to go, and so she just kept on going.

She kept on going all the way to the end of her street and turned, heading into unfamiliar neighborhoods, one redhairedlittle girl in a denim jacket and corduroy pants walking into the night, alone.

THE NEIGHBORHOOD STREETS GAVEway to a main street, busy with cars and bright with lights even after eight o’clock at night. Antsy paused, considering the wisdom of retreating back into the safer, darker residential streets, but forced herself to keep on walking. Her maternal grandparents might not believe her, but her father’s mother would. She knew that. If she could find a store that would let her use their phone, she could call and ask for rescue; she could ask her grandmother to come and get her, and she knew calling from a place that wasn’t home would just make her story—hertruestory—all the more believable.

The first shopping plaza she found was built around a supermarket, lights bright and artificially white. They looked too much like the lights in Target and she shied away, looking for another option. There was a liquor store, but that didn’t seem like the kind of place that would want a little girl coming inside, no matter how much trouble she said she was in. There was a McDonald’s, but she’d been with her mother when she got a flat tire once, and no one at the McDonald’s they had gone to had been willing to let her use their phone.

And there was a little store with junk-filled windows, light seeping through the cracks between the items. Antsy drifted toward it. She hadn’t realized they lived this close to a thrift store now. She loved thrift stores. They were like scavenger hunts every single time you went there, and things were usually cheap enough that when she found something really good, she could even keep it if she wanted to.

The sign on the door readANTHONY & SONS, TRINKETS AND TREASURES.Someone had used a big black marker and writtensomething else on the very top of the doorframe. Antsy couldn’t imagine how tall that person would have needed to be.

Be sure,said the words scrawled above the door. Well, she was. She was sure it was cold out here, and the store would probably close soon, and she needed to get inside before someone saw her and asked where her parents were. She was sure she couldn’t go home.

She pushed the door open and stepped through.

5HOW TO GET LOST

THE BELL OVER THEdoor jingled softly as it swung closed behind her, and Antsy gazed in awestruck wonder at the shop she had stepped into. It was a glorious cacophony of things, every shelf piled high with books and antique vases and dishes and chests overflowing with jewels or coins from countries she didn’t recognize or tiny, polished bones, as white as chalk. She started walking again when she noticed that the ceiling was just as crowded, dripping with stuffed birds and model airplanes. It felt like the junk shop she’d been looking for her entire life, and she couldn’t decide what to look at as she walked slowly forward, looking for the counter.

A staircase up stretched along the righthand wall, books stacked on each step, so only a narrow path was left between them, and she wanted to run up those stairs, see what other treasures might be waiting for a quick, clever little girl to find. She had stopped crying, although she didn’t realize it yet, and her tears were drying on her cheeks.

“Hello, young miss, and can I help you? I would ask if Imighthelp you, but I know I’m allowed, this is my shop and you’re clearly a patron, come through the Door just now,” and the way the new voice said the word “door” was funny, placing too much importance and emphasis on it. More than it deserved. “I am absolutelyallowedto help you, and so the question becomes whether Icanhelp you, for perhaps you didn’t mean to come here. Perhaps you’re only passing through andnot seeking for something you’ve lost or answering my advertisement! Perhaps there is nothing I can do for you at all.”

Half of what the voice said made no sense, and the other half was too fast and hence confusing. Antsy frowned, turning toward the source of the voice.

Then she paused, even more confused, frown growing deeper and voice dying in her throat as she studied the sight in front of her. There was no one there, as she had assumed there would be; instead, an enormous bird with mostly black and white feathers, save for a blue patch at the bottom of its wings, was perching atop one of the nearest shelves. She blinked as she realized the bird was wearing a tiny pair of wire-framed glasses. It was the biggest bird she’d ever seen, bigger even than the macaw at the pet store near their old house, and they were the tiniest glasses, and that would have been funny, if it hadn’t been so confusing.

Then the bird opened its beak and said, a little impatiently, “Well?CanI help you?”

Antsy squeaked, feeling her eyes get so wide that it hurt her face, and took two big steps backward. Not clever: that was enough to collide with the nearest shelf and send folding paper fans and tiny balsawood boxes cascading down over her. They didn’t hurt, but the noise they made was immense, and somehow, that was one thing too many on top of everything else that had already happened. Antsy began to cry again, not quietly at all this time; no, she sobbed, huge braying sobs that shook her whole body and knocked more things off the shelf.

The bird looked alarmed. “Please, please, miss, stop your crying! I don’t trade in the tears of children, the people who want to buy those type of things are never the sort of patrons I’m looking to attract, they bring the whole tenor of the placedown, so you’re simply wasting them! Please, I’ll help you if I can and if you’ll let me, but I need you tostopcrying!”

Antsy—who had run away from home and stumbled into a place where birds wore glasses and asked questions, and who had the vague feeling that on top of everything else she’d lost tonight, she had managed to lose her way—kept crying as she sank to the floor, sticking her legs straight out in front of her and slumping there like a broken doll. Her sobs gradually dwindled in power and intensity, until they were no longer shaking the shelf, and it didn’t seem like there was anything else to fall on her by that point. She stayed slumped on the ground.

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