Free The Garden of Lost and Found by Dale Peck

than the first two, filled out his gray suit like the meat of a sausage fills its intestinal casing, and he stepped out of the van slowly, as if sudden movement might split the suit from his skin. Trucker had moved that way, before he’d lost all the weight, but Trucker had never radiated the air of menace this man possessed. He reached one hand up to the cabbie’s shoulder and it looked like the weight of his hand drew the cabbie’s turban-covered ear down to the level of his mouth—I didn’t see him pull I mean, it didn’t look as though the sausagey man expended any effort in the gesture—and then the sausagey man said something, what I couldn’t hear, but when he took his hand off the cabbie’s shoulder the cabbie ducked back into his car, and with a complaining groan from his transmission he backed the length of Dutch Street, spinning out into Fulton and disappearing, still in reverse.
    And there she was again: the homeless woman— bag lady , I’d learned from the papers, wasn’t exactly in vogue anymore—the one I’d seen on my first night in New York. Her baby carriage was tucked into the nook of a doorway further up Dutch toward Fulton and she was crouched behind it, to all appearances hiding from the men in front of No. 1—and then, when I looked below me again, I saw the sausagey man standing with his thick arms bent at their nonexistent elbows and his shapeless mitts resting on his hips, his big broad teeth bared in a smile aimed directly at me.
    I ducked back inside. Darkness transformed the faded pattern of my bedroom’s wallpaper into a thousand swirling vines knotted loosely around each other like the unraveling threads of a tapestry, and behind their glass doors the spines of my books seemed as hollow as the false fronts of the stores on Main Street in Selden. I closed my eyes against the room’s shadowy insinuations, and even as I heard the sausagey man climbing back into the van my mind was taken over by another image of hiding, a memory, it was me who was hiding and I hid behind the bed with the thin thin mattress in Cousin Benny’s bedroom in Idaho. Just before the van’s door slammed I thought I heard him speak—the sausagey man, I mean. I say I thought:I may very well have dreamed it. I ought to have. I mean, I never heard the van drive away and when I woke the next morning I was still sitting underneath the window, but at any rate what I thought I heard the sausagey man say was:
    “Well whaddaya know, Sonny. Ginny really did have that kid.”

three

    THE PAST IS A PARADOX. You can’t take it with you but you can’t leave it behind either. Its bond is no less palpable for being invisible, intangible. Like a magnet tugging at a ball bearing, it only nudges at first, until all at once the ball is snatched up and snaps against it. The van outside my window had been one of those snaps, pulling me out of an already nebulous present and reminding me that my history was longer even than I knew. The sausagey man had indicated that his companion had an interest in my mother—had an interest in her kid—which was enough to make him rise out of the faceless father figures all around me. In fact he was still faceless. I’d seen nothing more than the top of his head, heard nothing but a string of motherfucker s out of his mouth, but at least he had a name. Sonny. Sonny. Motherfucker. Well whaddaya know, Sonny, Ginny really did have that kid . Each word was pregnant with possibility but, though their conjugal insinuation hinted at my family’s ties to No. 1, they didn’t come close to explaining how a working-class high-school dropout came to possess a piece of property worth, in development terms, five to ten, and if you have to ask Five to ten what? then, as they say, you can’t afford it.
    When I first learned of No. 1’s existence I found myself imagining all the usual—which is to say, fairy tale—scenarios about the ways an uneducated impoverished girl might come into possession