“What do you mean?”
“The valley is huge, but it’s not so massive that it would take decades to search it.” Q held the lone umbrella they had found in the dresser’s bottom drawer over their heads. “And a whirlpool that size isn’t just hard to miss. It’s impossible.”
“So you think that Olly found the whirlpool but chose not to go through it?”
Q nodded. “I think that’s why all those notebooks we found were filled with spirals. It’s almost as if Olly was contemplating a decision, you know?” he said, recalling the sketchbooks he had filled with the eyes of the imaginary woman who visited his dreams. He drew them over and over, unable to decide on their color, size, or shape. His memories of her were slippery and unreliable at best, more changeable than the Missed and Misplaced Department’s weather.
“But why would Olly hesitate to go through it?” Raya said. “If the whirlpool was a door, wouldn’t he have jumped right in?”
“If the weather holds, we should get answers soon.” A silver ring bounced off their umbrella. “Just keep your fingers crossed that no one loses a car.”
Raya
The drizzle of wedding rings slowed to a trickle. Raya stepped over a gold band, thinking how careless it was to wear something as important as a vow on a place where it would easily slip off. But this was the nature of promises. Nothing bound people forever. Not gold. Not bone marrow. Not even an invisible tether that tied two souls. Raya hated that she could not keep her secrets from Q nearly as much as she was going to miss sharing them once their tether cut them loose.
Q stuck his hand out from under the umbrella. “It looks like that was the last of it.”
“And not a car in sight,” Raya said.
“Don’t jinx it.” Q laughed, closing the umbrella and hooking it over his arm. A silver ring sparkled on the ground. “I wonder what its owner is thinking about right now?” He bent down and picked itup.
Raya kept her eyes in front of her, gripping her bag. “I’m pretty sure that whoever lost it is too busy feeling lost themselves.” She knew, more than most did, about the truth behind the things peopleheld on to. At one point, they stopped being objects and turned into limbs.
A weighted breath escaped Q’s lips.
Raya stopped and plucked a coin from the grass. “Ten baht for your thoughts?”
Q chuckled and looked at her, utterly focused, as though he was certain that whatever she was going to say next was worth nothing less than his full attention.
This, Raya thought, was a quality that set Q apart from most people, herself included. It had not taken her long to notice that Q was a person who honored the present, taking care not to stray into any second before or after the precise moment he was in.
“I was just wondering if she was here.”
“Who is ‘she’?”
“The faceless woman I told you about, the woman in my dreams.” Q took the coin Raya offered with a smile and tucked it into his pocket. “I lost her every morning when I woke up.” The wedding ring wriggled between Q’s fingers. It jumped from his hand and onto the grass. “Whoa.”
Raya swept the flashlight’s beam over the ground. The ring flipped on its side and joined the herd of rings rolling past them. Raya hopped out of a diamond-encrusted band’s path. It sped off and settled on a shiny mound of rings.
Q grinned at the rings. “I was wondering how all these lost items got organized.”
Raya watched the rings roll up the mound, wishing her own thoughts could sort themselves into neat piles.
Q took the sketch he had made of Olly’s spiral from his pocket and directed his flashlight over it. “Once we pass that mountain of white socks, we should be in the inner whorls.”
The unfinished train tracks looked more lost than the pens and credit cards they had passed. Without a train to travel over them orstations to mark their beginning and end, the tracks seemed to be aware that while they may have been conceived as part of a grand railway plan, their journey had come to an end.
“I’d love to know how one manages to lose a train track,” Raya said.
“Things like that don’t get lost.” Q stared at the tracks. “They’re abandoned. We must be in the ‘missed’ part of the Missed and Misplaced Department.”
From the tower, Raya had not been able to tell the difference between the objects that were lost, left behind, or longed for. They were just like the valley’s pockmarked ground. It wasn’t until you fell into the holes that you discovered how deep each one was. From a distance, all loss looked the same. Walking through the spiral’s inner whorls, Raya saw them up close. Here, the holes were deeper and darker, the mountains of paper, framed photographs, and children’s toys surrounding them shrouded by a blacker night. Raya kept her eyes from straying beyond the borders of her flashlight’s beam. If this part of the valley was where the deserted and discarded were kept, she was bound to run into a hill containing half of her life.
Q plucked a piece of paper from a mound of assorted stationery, ran his eyes over it, and put it back.
“What was it?” Raya said.
“I don’t know. It contained one word.”
