The Lost and the Found by Cat Clarke Read Free Book Online Page A

thing protecting me from the monster in the front yard—the one who led little girls away by the hand and made their families sad.
    Laurel tells me that she used to think about Egg when she couldn’t sleep, when she felt suffocated by the darkness around her. She would try to picture him in her mind, focusing on every little detail. “Sometimes it felt like I could actually
see
him—but only if I concentrated really, really hard. Those were the best times. I was able to go to sleep then. But sometimes I couldn’t quite remember the exact shade of red of his hat, or the shape of his beak didn’t feel right.”
    I nod as if I understand. And I do understand, in a theoretical sort of way. But I’ll never truly understand what she’s been through, will I? Even if she was to tell me every single thing that happened to her, I will never really
know.
I’ll never know what it’s like to be locked in a pitch-black basement, scared and alone—or even worse: scared and
not
 alone.

L aurel is disappointed that I have no idea what happened to the night-light, so I tell her we’ll look for it when she comes home. “Home,” she says. “I like the sound of that.”
    She asks me about school, and it all sounds amazing and interesting to her because she can barely even remember going. I ask her if she can read, then I apologize because it seems like an insensitive question. Laurel doesn’t mind, though. She learned to read and write. She learned pretty much all the same subjects I did. I ask how that’s possible, not bothering to hide my skepticism.
    “He taught me.”
    “Like…proper lessons?”
    She nods. “He hated ignorance. He said there was no excuse for it.”
    “So you had textbooks and everything?”
    “Some. Mostly he had his own handwritten notes. A colored folder for each subject.”
    It’s too bizarre to get my head around. The idea of this monster—this
psychopath
—teaching her math and grammar and science. He brought her novels to read, too—but only if she was good. She didn’t go into detail about what being “good” entailed. A couple of years ago, he taught her how to use a computer, saying everyone needed to be able to use computers in the modern world. He wired up an old desktop one for her. It wasn’t connected to the Internet—obviously.
    We talk and talk, and gradually I begin to build up a picture of her life for the past thirteen years, and she begins to build up a picture of mine. We swap information, filling in the gaps, asking questions and answering them. I steer clear of anything that I think might upset her, though, which means a lot of my questions aren’t the ones I really want to ask.
    Laurel finds it fascinating that I have a boyfriend. She asks lots of questions about Thomas, and I try my best to answer them. She even asks if Thomas and I have had sex. There’s an awkward silence before I tell her the truth. She asks me if I liked it, and I say I sort of did. Then she goes quiet, and I say maybe we should talk about something else.
    She shakes her head fiercely and says, “I
hate
it. I never want to do it again. It’s disgusting.” She looks so intense and angry, and I want to kill the man who made her feel like this. No—I want to hurt him, inflict the worst sort of pain, and
then
kill him. What he did to her doesn’t count as sex. He attacked and violated a little girl in the most horrifying way possible. She
must
see the difference.
    “What was he like? The…man. It’s okay if you don’t want to talk about it.”
    Laurel leans forward and grabs a sheet of paper that was facedown on the coffee table. She hands it to me without comment.
    It’s a drawing of a man’s face. It’s hard to tell how old he is—somewhere between forty and fifty, perhaps. His eyes are slightly too far apart, which is supposed to make a person look more trustworthy. His face is utterly nondescript, apart from the nose, which is big and hooked, with weirdly distracting nostrils. His