The Keeper of Lost Things

It is Christmas. Laura invites Freddy along with Sunshine and her parents to a festive dinner at Padua. Amid the festivities and the preparations for the dinner, Laura is bothered by phenomena she cannot explain. There is a ghostly figure she thinks she sees in the rose garden at night, and the Al Bowlly record keeps playing on the downstairs gramophone. Most bizarre, the upstairs bedroom that Therese and Anthony shared before her death has somehow been locked from the inside. Sunshine, in tune with the paranormal, matter-of-factly explains that Therese is behind these occurrences and that the dead woman is still upset, although Sunshine does not know why. The holiday dinner is perfect—the food is plentiful, the conversation is convivial, and Padua provides a “fairy-tale setting” (164). At the end of the evening, swept up by the magic, Laura and Freddy kiss under the mistletoe. When they do, Therese’s framed photograph shatters into splinters.

We return to the story of Eunice. By 1989, five years into his father’s diagnosis, Bomber struggles to handle his father’s deteriorating mental state. Godfrey, hospitalized now, only occasionally recognizes him when he visits. Bomber’s sister is particularly upset, confronting something her vast trust fund inheritance cannot repair. Over the next several years, Bomber adjusts to his father’s “mental fragility,” his “inaccessible horizon,” and how he has become little more than an “overgrown, frightened, and angry child” (187). Bomber’s work publishing manuscripts of obscure writers keeps him occupied, although he refuses to consider the increasingly silly manuscripts his sister submits. He and Eunice share inside jokes over the manuscripts’ obviously derivative elements drawn from bits of successful romance and fantasy series. Eunice for her part sees Portia’s submissions as a way for a sad and lonely sister to find the approval of her distant brother.

Meanwhile Godfrey edges toward death. In an emotional visit one evening at the care facility, Bomber’s mother kisses her frail husband gently and whispers into his ear, “It’s time to let go” (200). He dies quietly. Before the family leaves the hospital, Bomber’s mother, in a moment of honesty and love, assures Bomber that she has known for a long time that he is gay. She tells him that she cares only for his happiness and begs him to be careful. She could not handle his dying from AIDS. The story then moves forward two years. Bomber’s mother dies soon after her husband, unable to live without him. A grieving Bomber solicits Eunice’s promise that should he ever be diagnosed with dementia and end up like his father, “mad as a box of frogs” (220), she will help him commit suicide. Eunice reluctantly agrees.

At Padua, Laura and Freddy ended up spending Christmas night together, but they did not have sex. Rather, they danced and drank champagne and ended up sharing secrets: Laura about her disastrous marriage and her lost dreams of being a writer, Freddy about his short-lived lucrative career as a computer technician, his decision to leave it all to work outside, and his then-fiancée’s decision not to marry a gardener. Freddy and Laura were both too tipsy to do anything but collapse in bed together.

On a rainy New Year’s Eve afternoon a few days later, Laura waits for Freddy. Since Christmas, they have become lovers. Waiting in the study, she picks up a small toy wooden house. We learn the story of Edna, an elderly widow living quietly in a splendidly appointed little home. She is tricked into selling her home by a ruthless real estate developer who hires an ex-con to pretend to work as a municipal water company inspector and who then sabotages Edna’s home’s ancient upstairs plumbing. The same morning a woman pretending to be an itinerant psychic visits Edna. The psychic has been hired by the same developer to make sure the pipes are leaking. The woman callously leaves Edna the tiny wooden house as, she says, a talisman to protect her from those who might harm her. After the “psychic” leaves, as Edna sips tea at her breakfast table, the entire ceiling of the house collapses from the weight of the leaking water.

Into the new year, the website construction is progressing. Laura, although still uncertain over her relationship with Freddy, increasingly turns to him for his strength and common sense. Laura grows more annoyed with the evidence that Therese haunts Padua. Laura assumed reuniting Anthony and Therese in the garden memorial service would bring the two lovers peace. For some reason, Therese is still angry. Sunshine tells her that the ghost is not mad at Laura specifically but rather is “cross with everyone” (195). Laura is determined to bring Therese peace. At Sunshine’s urging, the two hold an impromptu séance in the study and ask Therese why she is upset. The only answer they get is by way of a mischievous prank: Laura later finds one of Anthony’s favorite pens in a cookie tin in the kitchen.

Laura decides the pen is Therese’s way of telling her to read the voluminous boxes of Anthony’s unpublished stories she suspects are stored in the attic. Amid the cobwebs in the attic, she retrieves a battered suitcase. In addition to manuscript copies of Anthony’s unpublished stories and harsh rejection letters sent by a rival publisher of Bomber’s that describe the stories as too dark and too complex, Laura finds mementos of Anthony’s childhood. She also finds a beautiful ring and the sunflower dress Therese was to have been married in. Laura hopes the objects, if returned to Therese downstairs, might bring her spirit peace. But that does not work. Now the spirit will not even let Laura play “The Very Thought of You” on the gramophone. Sunshine adamantly insists that neither the dress nor the ring is the key. The secret, she says, is in the letter Anthony wrote to Laura asking her to take over his work recovering lost things. That’s what the pen means. When Sunshine says that, the gramophone begins to play the song.