Lost and Found by Carolyn Parkhurst

Author:Carolyn Parkhurst [Parkhurst, Carolyn]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: General Fiction
ISBN: 0316033499
Publisher: Back Bay
Published: 2006-06-13T04:00:00+00:00

TWENTY

Justin

It’s not uncommon for me to be swallowed up by a tide of unrest following a slip like the one I made yesterday, but the depth of my agitation today has taken me by surprise. I feel fidgety and wired; I feel like every joint, every sinew, is twitching beneath my skin. I was awake before dawn, movies playing in my mind, my body in flames. Redirect, I thought. Cast it away. I plucked the thoughts from my mind, tossed them to the floor beneath the bed with all the force I could muster; I reached out to my wife in the dark, ran my hands over her soft body and imagined that I might find something less yielding there. She turned to me with a hushed breath of an “oh,” and I plunged and dove as though I wanted her more than anything in the world. Afterward, in the shower, I knelt in the spray and rocked back and forth in a desperate pantomime of prayer, and hoped that, for just a few minutes, God was watching but not listening in.

It was, of course, a relief (the base tug of my disappointment notwithstanding) to find that Ken was nowhere in sight when we gathered in the lobby for the assigning of camera crews. I don’t know if he’s been sent home or reassigned to more general camera duty; either way, it looks like my future contact with him will be limited. Our cameraman for this segment is a thick, unappealing man named Stu, and our sound tech is the much-dreaded, foul-smelling Raymond, so maybe someone’s looking out for me after all.

Abby and I are both good at word games, so it didn’t take us very long to determine that the clue was an anagram and to tease the word Sweden out of the mishmash of letters. Finding a non-Japanese map of Sweden seemed to be a trickier task, but we got lucky: we talked to the concierge, hoping he might be able to point us toward an English-language bookstore, and when we told him what we were looking for, he mentioned that the Swedish Embassy was only two blocks away. Clearly, the producers must have known this—they must have chosen the hotel with this in mind—but I’m not sure it would have occurred to us to ask, and I’m willing to bet it didn’t occur to too many of the other teams. The people at the embassy were very helpful, and within twenty minutes we were in a cab speeding to the airport, the word Jukkasjärvi scrawled on a piece of paper in my lap, while the Japanese landscape passed us by. I didn’t even want to look out the window. I couldn’t wait to put that country behind me.

We’re now on a plane to Copenhagen, on a flight that seems it will never end. Cassie and Juliet are here as well, and so are Carl and Laura; I’m not sure how far behind or ahead the other two teams are.

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