The Lost & Found Read Online Free PDF Page A

tennis for a Division I school . . . it was enough to make me feel anxious and like I was running out of air.
    I hung over the side of my bed and rescued my laptop from the floor, where my cat, Bucker, was currently sleeping on it. I checked my email first, scanned Facebook, and then headed over to TILTgroup.org, a site that hosted online support groups for people who’d experienced tragedy.
    In the years after Willa’s accident, we were both sent to therapists.
    We had back-to-back appointments with an older woman, graying hair twisted into a thick, neat bun. My sister went first. I read outdated issues of
Highlights
while my mother knitted erratically. My mother knitted so much in the year following the accident that she had to have surgery on her wrist. One of her tendons swelled up so big it was like an enormous fat worm underneath her skin. Afterward, even though the doctor said it was okay, she wasn’t so interested in knitting.
    â€œIt was nobody’s fault,” the therapist often said to me.
    But because she said it so often, I had to assume the opposite.
    We saw Dr. Williams for a few years, but when we got a little older, she suggested we sign up for accountsat TILTgroup. It was a way to wean ourselves off therapy without quitting cold turkey, she said, and plus it was sometimes easier to open up from behind the safety of a computer screen.
    â€œThis is progress!” she exclaimed to the both of us in our separate sessions. “I am so happy with all the work you’ve put into therapy!” (She often said the exact same things to each of us. We compared notes after our appointments.)
    Except apparently Willa was making more progress than I was, because a few months after we started TILTgroup, Willa was released from face-to-face therapy. Dr. Williams recommended that my parents keep me in both, at least for the time being.
    Dr. Williams told my parents she was concerned about my insomnia.
    She told my parents she was concerned about my panic attacks.
    She told my parents a lot of things that I wish she hadn’t told my parents, because they started looking at me like they were worried I was going to lose it, snap in half, or explode in the living room.
    Post-traumatic stress disorder. A propensity for self-harm.
    Willa and I heard her because we stood on the opposite side of the door, eavesdropping.
    â€œWhat’s
propensity
?” Willa asked.
    â€œI don’t know,” I said.
    â€œWhat’s
self-harm
?”
    â€œI don’t know; shut up.”
    I was irritated because Willa didn’t have PTSD. I was irritated because Willa was the one who had lost her legs but I was the one stuck in therapy.
    â€œYour daughter is a surprisingly well-adjusted young lady,” Dr. Williams told my parents.
    â€œI’m well-adjusted,” Willa whispered.
    â€œShe just feels bad for you because you don’t have any legs,” I told her.
    â€œWell
you
have to keep seeing her and
I
don’t.”
    â€œCB,” I told her.
    That was what we called all the special treatment Willa received for being a young kid with a handicap. CB stood for chair benefit. Like when we went to Disneyland and we didn’t have to wait in any of the lines, or how we always got to park closest to the mall, or how any type of concert or show sat us directly in front of the stage. I got to benefit from all of Willa’s CB, of course, because when she got free ice cream in Universal Studios, they couldn’t just not give free ice cream to her twin brother.
    So it worked out for both of us.
    It didn’t make up for the accident. Obviously.
    But sometimes it felt like Willa had lost her legs, and I was losing everything else.
    TILT stood for
Tragedy Inspires Love and Togetherness.
    You were supposed to call yourself a tragedy overcomer.
    Years later and it still didn’t feel like I’d really overcome anything. I also hadn’t actually attended a group session in a