Free The Garden of Lost and Found by Dale Peck Page A

of a multimillion-dollar property in lower Manhattan: that she won it in a poker game, that she hit the lottery, that she had it left to her by a benevolent shopkeeper whose floors she swept without pay for years and years (though as soon as I moved in I realized that the role of sweeper belonged to Nellydean, as did, for that matter, the role of shopkeeper). Of course I could’ve just, you know, asked her, but I felt that she should have come to me . That she should have seen the need written in my gangly limbs and gaudy clothing and skulking habits and offered me the succor, the solace of the personal history denied me my entire life. But Nellydean avoided me as I avoided her—avoided, I suppose, what I might tell her about her future just as I avoided what she might tell me about my past—and, confronted by the decidedly un–fairy tailish desuetude of No. 1, I traded in my generic imaginings for myths of origin that, though no less hypothetical, were at least more distinctly New York. This was the Big Apple, after all, the city that never sleeps, the city where dreams come true, the greatest city in the world, and among its most time-honored traditions is that of the penniless woman coming into possession of expensive if esoteric pieces of property or social position or notoriety—jewelry, hotels, seats in the U.S. Senate, things like that—which tradition is locally called marriage (or, more specifically, divorce). The story tells itself: my mother, all of nineteen years old. She’s not desperate but she is willing to try anything. She’s already dropped everyone she’s ever known, including her year-old son, pulled them from her life like hairs from a comb, so the appearance of a well-heeled older gentleman might have been seen not as imposition but opportunity, a ride she could climb off as easily as she climbed on. To some degree I was doing what I’d always done—distracting myself from the fact that my mother had abandoned me—but this time my storytelling was bolstered by tangible props. My mother, for so long nothing more than spoken words (an oral history, The Iliad , The Odyssey ), was suddenly Homerized in legal documents, in bricks and glass and ten thousand boxes. You who have parents may see these as totems, mere tokens, but to me each hot breeze blowing through my new home was air from my mother’s lungs. A flap of cardboard was as smooth as the skin of her cheek, a door handle so ergonomically poised that its crescent-moon curve of brass seemed to grasp my fingers and not the other way around. For the first time in my life I glutted in my mother’s attention and found myself spoiled by the measurelessness of her presence, and I let that love shield me from the more complicated truths of the world—of my world, my past and present and future—because I knew that once I returned to the clinic there was nothing in The Lost Garden that could protect me from what I’d done with Trucker, which transgression, though it felt as distant from me as original sin, was no less inescapable.

    TWO WEEKS. The traditional fortnight between initial visit and final results has become, like everything else in the digital age, unacceptable, anachronistic—like the word fortnight . But even in the dying city, where history is erased as it happens, a few anachronisms linger. If I’d paid a hundred bucks I could’ve gotten my results in an hour, but because I used a free clinic I had to sweat it out for fourteen days. During that time I did nothing besides track down extension cords and light bulbs and forks, tasks that didn’t consume time so much as fritter it away. And though the confrontation between van and cab had, to say the least, piqued my curiosity about my family history, it was too little too late. The following morning, my results were due.
    By then the papers were calling it a heat wave, THE WORST, in this, the age of global warming, SINCE LAST YEAR. I’d lived in Florida, Louisiana, Arizona, but