The Lost and Found Bookshop

Tess and Dominic slid into the row behind Natalie. Tess leaned forward and gave her shoulder a squeeze. Natalie acknowledged the touch with a pat of her hand.

Cleo and Bertie, who both worked in the bookstore, arrived and took their seats on Natalie’s other side.

“Hi, guys,” she whispered. “Thanks for being here.”

“How are you holding up?” asked Bertie. “Sorry for speaking in clichés, but I really want to know, sweetie.” An aspiring actor, he was lithe and graceful, his whole body expressing feelings without words—in the angle of his head, the slant of his shoulders. Bertie was smart and funny and melancholy, chasing his dream of starring in a major theater production. He’d loved her mother, who had encouraged his acting career by giving him time off for auditions and rehearsals whenever he needed it.

“Grandy and I are keeping each other company,” Natalie said. “Honestly, I’ve never had my heart ripped out of my chest. But I imagine this is what it feels like.”

Cleo’s eyes were as dim as twilight, gleaming with a mist of sadness. She nodded and dabbed at her cheeks with a tissue. “Damn. You remind me so much of her.”

“Do I?”

Bertie leaned forward. “Hell, yeah. In the best possible way.”

Cleo was Natalie’s age, and had grown up in the neighborhood. The girls used to play together in Portsmouth Square, surrounded by Chinese grannies sipping their milk tea and playing board games. They’d snack on soft buns filled with sweet coconut, and when it rained, they’d duck into the curio shops or the Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Factory, their senses dazzled by the delicious, sugary aroma.

Cleo was Blythe’s second-in-command, helping manage the shop and, in her downtime, writing plays.

Frieda Mills, Blythe’s longtime friend, had volunteered to officiate the service. Now she stepped up to the podium. Her defiantly unkempt hair, threaded with gray, formed a nimbus around her small, drawn face.

The music subsided as Frieda adjusted her mic. “Good morning and welcome,” she said. “On behalf of Natalie and Andrew Harper, I want to thank you for coming.”

She gazed out at the crowd. “I’ve known Blythe since we were freshmen in college. She was the roommate I dreaded having—messy and talkative, better looking than me, never on time, constantly in motion, cluttering every space she inhabited.” She said this with a smile, and the smile trembled as she paused and took a deep breath. “In spite of all this, or maybe because of all this, I loved her like a sister. We celebrated holidays together, raised our kids together …”

Frieda’s two boys had each, on occasion, asked Natalie to dances and parties. She—and probably the boys as well—suspected they were being nudged together by their mothers.

“And then there were the books,” Frieda said. “Even in college, she had so many books that we used them for furniture—step stools, benches, nightstands, shelves for other books …”

Natalie could so easily picture that. When she was very small, her mother used to tell her that books were alive in a special way. Between the covers, characters were living their lives, enacting their dramas, falling in and out of love, finding trouble, working out their problems. Even sitting closed on a shelf, a book had a life of its own. When someone opened the book, that was when the magic happened.

“My friend Blythe often said her life was a grand adventure,” Frieda continued. “Books were her passion, so I wanted to share one of her favorites.” She put on a pair of wire-rimmed reading glasses and opened a well-worn copy of Charlotte’s Web.

The passage from the classic novel was filled with lovely prose that took on new poignancy and concluded with Charlotte’s famous words: “After all, what’s a life anyway? We’re born, we live a little while, we die.”

Natalie had heard the reading many times, but now she clung to Charlotte’s wisdom, hoping with all her heart that her mother had left with that same calm, matter-of-fact acceptance. Haunted by images of those last moments, Natalie reflected that this did not seem possible given the way Blythe had died.

Other speakers reminisced about her mother. In cracked voices, they recounted memories of browsing the stacks with the well-read bookseller, or relaxing in the tiny café and basking in the sense of community Blythe cultivated. The tributes were lavish and heartfelt, a clear indication of the many lives she had touched. Through her shock and grief, Natalie felt a sad glimmer of understanding of why her mother had been so devoted to the shop.

The readings and tributes were followed by a song, and they were all invited to join in. The lyrics were printed in the program. “No Rain” by Blind Melon had been a favorite of Blythe’s, expressing the glory of escaping into the pages of a book. The woman playing guitar was a frequent patron of the shop. She had contacted Natalie and Frieda as they were organizing the program and asked to perform in Blythe’s honor.

As the lyrics of the song came out of Natalie on a shaky breath, she wished she could do exactly as the words expressed—Escape, escape, escape.

Andrew Harper felt the soft caress of the music on his face as he waited. Waited for what?

His mind darted away in search of the answer. It was a slippery process, like trying to catch polliwogs in the pond shallows in springtime. He glanced over at the young woman sitting beside him. She had pale skin and dark curly hair, and a face so beautiful and so sad it cracked his heart in two.

Now that he was old and plagued by strange fugues of forgetfulness, Andrew was learning to pay attention to certain details he used to filter out—sounds and smells, colors and fleeting images. Focusing on one thing—the timbre of a voice, the narrative on a page in a book—was increasingly difficult and disturbing. Walking out onto the street was like entering an amphitheater into an overwhelming and deafening cacophony of confusion.

He shored up his thoughts. He had to teach himself to think in a different way.

Although he knew Dr. Yang would disapprove, he had skipped taking his tablets this morning. Supposedly the pills were keeping him from feeling anxious. Perhaps that was indeed the case, but he needed a clear head to face the day, and the meds made him drowsy. He must not face this day in a state of drowsiness.

It was an important day. He couldn’t remember why.

He felt the sad young woman watching him through eyes bruised by grief. He looked down at the printed program card in his hand. It was beautiful, the thick stock imprinted by the letterpress machine in the basement of the bookshop. After he’d closed down his typewriter repair business and founded the bookstore with Blythe, no one had wanted to move the heavy machine, so they kept it and occasionally used it for special printings—a birth announcement when Natalie was born, the grand opening of the bookstore three decades ago, a gallery showing for Charlie Wong. Andrew used to tell Blythe he was getting old while waiting to print an announcement that she was finally getting married.

That always made her laugh and say he’d raised the bar too high; she would never find a man who could measure up to him. After what had happened with the fellow who had fathered Natalie, Andrew was glad she could laugh at all.

Then, in a blink, the situation came clear to him. The young woman beside him was Natalie, his granddaughter, Natalie. Her regard felt like a whir of moth wings against his cheek, powdering his skin with a residue like May Lin’s dusting powder, back when she had lived with him and they were happy.

He summoned a smile for Blythe. No, not Blythe. Natalie. Blythe was gone, suddenly and irretrievably, like a zephyr shooting into the night sky, leaving a trail of moonlit particles that swirled in brief, unspeakable beauty, and then faded into nothing.

The very sweet pop song was one he’d heard on Blythe’s radio many times, so he knew when the melody was winding down. He took out his handkerchief again and checked on Natalie, the silent sadness beside him.

His granddaughter’s face was a portrait of everything they were both feeling. Her eyes mirrored his pain. The shock and grief of losing Blythe were so deep and intense that it felt as if a new and devastating emotion had been invented just for them.

Natalie noticed his attention and tucked her hand inside his. Leaning over, she whispered, “Are you doing all right?”

No, he thought. A man is not meant to outlive his daughter.

“Yes,” he whispered back, the lie hissing through his teeth.

“If you don’t want to speak … if it’s too much for you—”

He squeezed her hand. “I know what I want to say. I’ll get through it.”

“You’re incredible, Grandy. I’m so glad I have you.”

“And I you.” He sat still as the officiant did another reading. He tried to think about what he wanted to say. What he needed to say.

How did one honor a woman’s life in a five-minute speech?

He had suffered losses through the years, certainly, as anyone his age had. Long ago, Lavinia had walked away from him and into the arms of a man who promised her something better. May Lin had come back into his life briefly at the end, bringing latent joy that was all the sweeter for having been delayed, and she had died in his arms last year.

Maybe that was the start of his decline. Dr. Yang called it a decline. A gradual slide down a hill into a pile of nothingness.

Andrew could not pinpoint the precise moment his memories had begun to slip and his thoughts turned to a jumble. Sometime after the hip debacle, he supposed. Before then, and even during his stay in the hospital and rehab, everything had been clear to him.

Then, once he’d finished with the rehab and returned to Perdita Street, Blythe had moved his living quarters to the main floor. Stairs were out of the question now. The room by the garden used to be a storage area for his father’s apothecary infusions, medicines, and herbs. Later, Andrew had cluttered the space with the tools of his own trade—Stoddard solvent, brushes, tiny pincers and lubricants and cleansers for repairing typewriters.

As he’d settled into his new quarters, which were not unpleasant, the fog had closed in, bit by bit. Fatigue dragged at him, and his stomach was upset by everything he ate. Food tasted like metal. His days started to fade, and his life turned as thin as lukewarm water. He was a ghost in a world that appeared through a glass that was ash-colored and wavy.

At some point he’d lost the proud man who used to swagger around the neighborhood, a regular cock of the walk. These days, he wandered, seeking a way out, and then he asked himself—out of what? He wanted to go home. Then he would remember that he was home.

He was Odysseus one moment, the Ancient Mariner the next, an ordinary man like Tom Joad or a seeker like Douglas Adams’s hitchhiker. He wandered in search of a past that existed only inside himself. He sought fields of flowers and towering cliffs that jutted out over the ocean and mountaintops that pierced the clouds.

Maybe he wandered because he had spent his entire life in one place—the shop on Perdita Street. He used to live upstairs, first with his parents when he was a boy. Then with Lavinia, the wife who had betrayed him. Then with Blythe, whom he had raised with no help from Lavinia. And now he was obliged to bury his daughter with no help from anyone at all.

The reading concluded and soft music trailed from hidden speakers. And then it was Andrew’s turn. With Natalie at his side and his cane in hand, he made his way to the podium. He turned slightly, letting his granddaughter know he was all right standing on his own. Then he set aside the cane. The least he could do was stand for his daughter.

Then he took off his glasses and tucked them into his breast pocket. He didn’t need to look at any prompts. Notes were not necessary when speaking from the heart.

“On the day she was born, my beautiful daughter, Blythe, became a part of my life’s journey, and we followed our common path until … until … the unthinkable happened. So let us not dwell on the way she died. Let us celebrate the way she lived.” He had to pause, then, as despair took his breath away. Recalibrate. Speak of Blythe, who could no longer speak. “What can I tell you about my child who died?”

He heard a few gasping sobs. “I can tell you that she had a happy life. I can tell you that her life was too short and mine is too long. At my age,” he explained, “I thought I knew what grief is. In all my years, I have known loss—my parents, dear friends, the woman I loved. But until the day my daughter was taken from me, I had no idea that grief could cut so deep or feel so painful.”

He paused, hearing Natalie’s soft, broken breaths. “And that is all I shall say about my feelings, because today is not about me. It’s about my daughter, Blythe Harper. On the day she was born, she changed my life. And the day she departed, she left an indelible mark on us all. And in between, she led a remarkable life.”

4

Andrew Harper’s wife left him on a Monday. He would always remember it was a Monday, because that was the day May Lin delivered the finished laundry, crisply folded and wrapped in a paper parcel. Then she would pick up the week’s bag, marked Harper and tagged with Chinese characters.

The bag of soiled items was considerably smaller without Lavinia’s clothing. She had packed everything in a battered steamer trunk she’d made him drag up from the basement. The trunk was a mysterious family heirloom that had once belonged to Colleen O’Rourke, the grandmother he’d never known. Colleen had migrated from Ireland in the 1880s, arriving at the age of fifteen. She had found work as a maid in the very building that was now the bookstore, somehow making her way in the world alone.

Now her trunk would be traveling with the gloriously beautiful Lavinia, not on a steamer but on a train to Los Angeles, where her rich lover had promised to give her the life she always claimed she deserved.

Her farewell to Andrew and Blythe had been terse. “I can’t be happy here,” she had said that Monday morning as the taxi driver loaded the trunk into his bulbous Plymouth van. “You’ll be better off without me.”

Blythe, less than a year old and still in diapers, had gurgled and clapped her hands, a string of teething drool pooling on Andrew’s sleeve. The radio was playing that inane Sonny and Cher song, “I Got You Babe.” The baby reached both starfish hands out to her mother. Lavinia paused, but the brief flicker of hesitation in her eyes quickly hardened into icy resolve.

“Be well,” she said, and then she was gone.

A few moments later, May Lin arrived with the laundry delivery. Andrew was still standing in the middle of the shop, frozen, surrounded by his customers’ typewriters, cash registers, and adding machines, with Blythe snuggled against his chest.

The sight of May thawed him out. He and May had fallen in love as teenagers, but her family forbade her to be courted by Andrew, a gweilo. His own parents had not forbidden it, but they’d warned him that there could be no easy future with a Celestial—their archaic term for Chinese people in America. May Lin entered an arranged marriage to an older man from her father’s district in China. He had a laundry, he needed a wife, and that was that.

Heartsick, Andrew had sought solace in the arms of Lavinia. She was stunningly beautiful, and when she got pregnant, he was foolish enough to believe the sense of obligation that bound him was a kind of love.

Each week, when he and May saw each other, they rarely spoke. They didn’t need to, because they knew each other’s hearts without words.

And little Blythe became the center of his world. His ray of sunshine, he called her, a black-eyed Susan of a child who sang songs and read stories all the livelong day. She had a little rocking chair right next to his by the dormer window in the sitting room, and he could still remember the way the evening light used to slant through the window, settling over her like a benediction while she was absorbed in a book.

As the years passed, they had their ups and downs, but the core of their relationship was a fierce, protective love. He taught her touch-typing and watched her win spelling bees. Though the teenage years mystified him, he indulged her yearning for pretty clothes and baffling tubes of makeup. For the father-daughter dance in high school, he’d taught her a passable foxtrot, and she had lamented that he’d set the bar too high for any boy to reach.

He harbored no regrets about the way things had unfolded. He had the world’s most wonderful child and enough common sense to know, finally, that love took the heart by surprise. Lavinia was gone, but she had left behind the very best part of herself. Of them both.

“It was just the two of us,” Andrew told the gathering at Blythe’s memorial. Their faces were a distant blur, but memories stood out clearly in his mind. “She was my daily joy. It’s probably hard for you to imagine, but there was a time when the Lost and Found Bookshop was a typewriter showroom, with a letterpress printing operation in the basement. I made my living by fixing the very things a writer uses every day. Founding the bookshop was Blythe’s idea, and it was a great adventure for us both.”

The day Blythe went away to college, Andrew thought he might die from missing her. It was just across the bay in Berkeley, but it might as well have been in Timbuktu for all his lonely heart knew. He lived for the weekends when she would come home with high-flown ideas in her head and a collection of dirty laundry in a faded cloth bag, still stenciled with their name and Chinese characters. His typewriter business was in sharp decline thanks to the computer revolution, and he spent most of his days reading the antique books someone had left in the basement decades before. He became an expert at restoring the rare volumes, which he displayed in a glass-front barrister case. Every once in a while, a collector would come in and buy one of the books, and the enterprise became more than a hobby.

Four years later, Blythe returned home with a bachelor’s degree, a broken heart, and an unexpected pregnancy. She tearfully confessed that she had fallen in love with a teaching assistant who had promised her the world. She’d believed him, in her hopeful, romantic way, imagining a life of adventure with the young doctoral candidate.

Then she discovered in the most hurtful of ways that the man was already married and had three children.

Andrew’s private, selfish secret was that he couldn’t thank Dean Fogarty enough. The man who had broken his daughter’s heart had given Andrew a new purpose. Blythe had needed a way to provide for herself and her child. Andrew needed a fresh direction in life. Together, they had founded the bookstore, both energized by the prospect of creating a future for themselves and little Natalie.

He looked out at the gathering once again and brought the present moment into focus. Familiar faces, names lost in the cobwebs. There were ghosts as well, people who had left, yet remained a lingering presence in his mind. He had a fanciful thought that somehow they offered Blythe a loving welcome into their midst.

Please let it be true, he thought.

The rest of his eulogy was brief, highlighting the things he loved best about Blythe, the things he would miss the most. He knew the words were not enough, but they were all he had to pay tribute to his one and only child.

“I am quite certain I will never laugh without hearing her laugh. I will never smile without seeing her bright smile. I’m grateful to all of you for being a part of her brilliant, precious life. I feel sorry for those who missed out on knowing this exceptional person.” A gasp of sorrow built in his chest and he paused, then spoke again. “In a moment, you’ll hear from another exceptional person. Of all the gifts my daughter gave to the world, the greatest is her own daughter, Natalie.”

Andrew kept himself steady as he stepped back, though his knees threatened to give out. A new song started up, Natalie accompanied him back to his seat, and he sank down with as much dignity as he could muster.

“I’m up next,” she said, “and I have no idea how I’ll follow that.”

Her tears were silver tracks of grief salting her achingly lovely face. Blythe’s face. One and the same, and maybe this was the reason he was confused sometimes. He held tightly to the top of the cane as “What a Wonderful World” filled the hall. He didn’t really need the cane, but by now it was a habit. And maybe a way to keep himself from drifting away forever, on a raft of unutterable sadness.

Natalie didn’t sing along with the rest of the gathering as she awaited her turn at the podium. Instead, she time-traveled, trying to visit her mother in a different era, trying to bring her back to life.

When Natalie was little, her mother had dwelled at the bright center of her world, an incandescent force organizing their lives around books and ideas.

Even at a very young age, Natalie had understood that this was unusual. That their family was unusual.

She remembered a time when she was in the fourth grade—Mrs. Blessing, California History—and came home in a quandary: “We’re doing family trees in school,” she told her mother, “and I feel weird about mine.”

“Why do you feel weird about it?” Blythe quite frequently responded to Natalie with a question about her feelings. She read tons of parenting books and got all kinds of ideas from them.

“Kayla says we have an alternative lifestyle. She told everyone at recess that means we’re freaks.”

“You say that like it’s a bad thing,” Mom remarked, smoothing her hand over the pages of an antique book. She liked to display the most special collector’s items in a lighted glass case under the counter. People who wanted a closer look had to ask, and they had to wear white gloves when they touched the pages.

“Is it a good thing?” asked Natalie.

“What it is,” Mom said, finally looking up, “is none of her goddamn business.”

Natalie always felt a little forbidden thrill when her mother swore. She didn’t do it often, because she said too much swearing watered down the effect.

“Can I tell her that?”

“Sure, but brace yourself for the reaction.” Mom carefully placed the book in the case, laying it open to a page with an illustration of a bird. Then she went over to the coffee area and gave Natalie a cookie from Sugar, the bakery across the street, and poured her a glass of cold milk. It was their afternoon ritual each day when Natalie got home from school.

Blythe set the tray on a tiny table in the coffee area. She often said she wanted to make more room for coffee to serve to customers but didn’t want to sacrifice shelf space for the books. “I love our family. And I know you do, too. Just because it’s not like other families doesn’t mean a thing. It certainly doesn’t mean we are freaks.”

Natalie took the city bus to school. Her friends had carpools, some of them with drivers in polished chauffeur’s livery. Mom didn’t even have a car. Natalie’s friends all had fathers. Or stepfathers. Or two mothers. Or two dads. She had only ever met her birth father a couple of times. His name was Dean Fogarty, and she didn’t like him much. Mainly because he didn’t seem to like her. Mom called him her biggest mistake that had resulted in her greatest accomplishment. “He gave me you, Nat,” Mom would say. “So I can never have any regrets.”