The Garden of Lost and Found Read Online Free PDF

squeaking wheels were what had awakened me. The carriage’s paper-capped cargo spilled out of the bassinet like a scoop of vanilla ice cream from a cup, and as we neared each other I could hear her muttering curses under her breath, and I crossed the street to avoid her. In the distance the two towers of the World Trade Center marked the north and south poles of the urban defile, and then my eye was caught by a newspaper crowning a trash can on the corner of John and Broadway. My first New York headline screamed at me from atop its pile of refuse: CARNAGE ON THE GWB!
    The GWB turned out to be the George Washington Bridge, the carnage was of animal rather than human flesh. Somehow in the pre-dawn hours of the previous morning nine deer had wandered onto the middle of the lower level of the bridge, where they ran into a wave of early commuter traffic coming from New Jersey. According to all reports the deer had stood there as deer do when confronted by headlights, and the drivers, more afraid of the cars behind than the hapless creatures before them, had had no choice but to mow the animals down. The effects were devastating. In some cases the deer had literally burst into pieces. Decapitated heads smashed through windshields, severed limbs sawed the air like batons, great swaths of blood painted a gooey calligraphy across the asphalt. Four deer were killed outright, two more were so badly injured they had to be destroyed on the scene, and the remaining three were rushed to an animal hospital. But according to the veterinarians the real threat to the deer’s survival wasn’t their injuries but malnutrition. The three survivors were bloated, mangy, pocked with sores and loose-toothed with something that would be called scurvy in human beings, and these details, combined with the fact that all of the commuters insisted the deer had been walking toward them, suggested the animals were leaving Manhattan’s concrete forest in search of greener fields. One of the people quoted in the article insisted he’d seen hoofprints in Fort Tryon Park all his life, and—
    And then, with a roar and squeal of brakes, a garbage truck appeared. I’d set my suitcases down, taken the paper out of the trash to read it, but the truth is I didn’t want to hear about diseased or dying deer or anything else fleeing the city on the day of my arrival, and I tossed the story back into the can and watched as the trash collectors dumped it into the gullet of their wheeled leviathan. I considered throwing my suitcases after the paper and starting my new life with a completely blank slate, free of stolen possessions and unwanted gifts, but even as I considered that option my knees locked and my fingers tightened their grip on the suitcase handles, my entire body went rigid with the refusal to reject what had been given to me, and I retraced my steps to my most recent acquisition, my most miraculous and troubling gift: Dutch Street. My reflection in the window was just one of a thousand shapes in that yawning space until I remembered: these shapes had belonged to my mother. They had been placed by her hand, the shadows they cast were in effect her shadow, and I stared at them as if I might spy her crouched behind something, ready to jump up and laugh off her death and twenty-year absence as a practical joke I’d finally seen through. The feeling was so strong that I found myself wondering if I was still sleeping—I hoped I was, because on some level I knew that a dream was as close as I'd ever again come to my mother, and it had been years since I'd even thought of her, let alone dreamt of her. What I wanted more than anything else was for her to appear and tell me everything was going to be all right. That even though she was gone, even though I was only making her up in my sleep, the strange, wondrous inheritance she'd bestowed on me would make up for everything that had gone wrong up to that point.
    But she didn’t materialize and I didn't wake up