The Department of Lost & Found Read Online Free PDF Page A

tears started to well. Hold it together, Nat, hold it together, I whispered to myself as a wet drop slithered down my cheek. This wasn’t who I was. This wasn’t who I should be. I focused in on my moist eyes and wondered if there would ever be a day again when I’d come close to being the person of my former life. And then I realized that my bruised-looking eyes aside, today could be that day. I, Natalie Miller, was going to the office. To get something done. To make a sweeping change to protect the uteri of women across the nation. And with a rush of adrenaline, I stuck my hand back into the pot of concealer.
    When one layer wouldn’t do, I slathered on another, then another, and then remembered a trick that Sally had written about for Allure : dotting the insides of your eyes with white eye shadow to make them pop and look more awake. I dipped my finger into a packed tub of shadow that sparkled like a field of morning snow and dabbed my eyes. I’m not sure I looked more alert or more like a dressed-up fairy on Halloween, but I didn’t have time to remedy it. The senator would be leaving any minute. I pulled my still somewhat tolerable, though slightly thinning hair back with a headband, slid on rosy pink lipstick and thick, black mascara, and dashed downstairs to a cab. Christ.
    The Department of Lost & Found
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    Sally. I dialed her from the back of the taxi and told her I’d take a rain check for tomorrow.
    “You’re not going into work, are you?” she asked. “I thought you’d committed to taking it easy for a few months.”
    “Emergency, Sal, emergency.” I put my hand over the mouth-piece and told the cab driver to cut down Central Park West to avoid the traffic. He ignored me and turned up the hip-hop station on the radio.
    “Fine.” She sighed. “I’m working on a ridiculous story on infi-delity, anyway. God, what I wouldn’t do to be able to actually cover a story that really matters.” She paused, refocusing on me.
    “Wait, Nat, define emergency.”
    “A situation in which I control the power to single-handedly save the future of your reproductive rights.”
    “Single-handedly?” I heard her sigh again.
    “More or less, yes.”
    “Correct me if I’m wrong, but you’re not the actual senator are you?”
    “More or less, Sally. I don’t think she could survive without me.”
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    t h r e e
    t had started raining by the time I made my way through mid-Itown traffic, so I pressed ten dollars into the cab driver’s hand and dashed to the revolving doors, leaving wet handprints on the glass as I pushed through. The elevator doors were closing, but I shouted “Hold it,” and bolted there just in time, sticking the tips of my fingers through and pushing back the doors. “Thanks,” I muttered to the lunch crowd, to really no one in particular, and offered a thin smile.
    When the senator won her seat after a fierce campaign six years ago, just after I’d come to work for her as an assistant, one of her first tasks was to purchase office space in midtown Manhattan. She liked to be “among the people,” as she liked to say, 32
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    though her brushes with “real citizens” were usually limited to her walks to and from The Four Seasons for lunch or Frederick Fekkai for highlights. We sat on the thirty-first floor—too far above to hear the raucous din of the taxi horns or the clangs of construction or the buzzing of the pedestrians, and certainly too far aloft to make out any of the pedestrians’ faces or to see their problems or assess their woes.
    In fact, though my office had a sweeping window with a decent view of Third Avenue, most of the time the blinds remained firmly shut. If the sun bore down and spread its rays across my desk, I’d find myself missing the fresh air that I wouldn’t get to taste for another twelve hours. So generally, the blinds did the trick, casting an illusion of my insulated world, as if the only thing that mattered was