The Keeper of Lost Things

It is 2005. To commiserate over the publishing success of Portia’s novel (critics hail it as a masterful example of sly satire), Bomber and Eunice travel to Brighton along the English Channel some 50 miles south of London. It is Bomber’s favorite seaside port (Eunice suspects it might have to do with Brighton long being known as a welcoming city for the LGBT community). The two enjoy a day of sunshine and freedom. During the visit, however, Eunice notices that Bomber asks the same question in the space of 10 minutes. Eunice fears the beginnings of Bomber’s “gentle unravelings.”

Within a few years, Bomber is admitted to the same facility where his father died. Eunice visits almost daily. By 2013, Eunice is a regular at the facility. Eunice and Bomber sit together for long periods in the facility’s gardens. Bomber’s life had become like “an unbound manuscript, badly edited” (237). His awareness of Eunice comes and goes, but the two still share their passion for movies. Often, they watch movies in Bomber’s hospital room. One night, Bomber asks to watch One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. During the movie, at the moment when Chief Bromden smothers McMurphy rather than leave him helpless and lobotomized in the mental institution, Bomber grips Eunice’s hand and says, “Get. Me. Out” (246). Eunice understands Bomber is calling in his promise.

When confusion in the hallway distracts the night nurse who comes to Bomber’s room to dispense his nightly medication, Eunice steals the key out of the cabinet door and gives it to Bomber. She kisses him goodbye and leaves. She reads in the paper the next day of Bomber’s death in a fall from the second floor. The coroner finds an unusually high presence of sedatives in his system, but the death is ruled accidental. After Bomber’s death, Eunice is certain Portia’s memorial service will be gaudy and tasteless. Determined to scatter Bomber’s ashes at the beach in Brighton, Eunice switches the cremains. She puts Bomber in a tin of cookies and, crushing the cookies and mixing them with gravel for weight, fills the urn. She calmly watches the cheesy memorial service for Bomber, knowing the entire time the urn contains crushed cookies and gravel. When it is over, she boards the train to Brighton with the cookie tin.

The narrative returns to Padua. The Keeper of Lost Things website begins to attract responses. In the first months of its operation, the owners of the jigsaw puzzle piece, the hair clip, and the child’s umbrella each contact Laura and come to Padua to collect their lost items and share their stories. Meanwhile, Laura and Freddy parse Anthony’s letter line by line looking for whatever clues Sunshine claims it holds. They are intrigued by a reference the letter makes to the Communion medallion as “the last remaining thread” that bound him to Therese and how important recovering it was to him (244).

Laura is frustrated; she has no idea how to locate the medallion after all these years. She cannot post anything on the website because she does not know what the medallion looks like. Sunshine then discovers the cookie tin with the cremains among the things in Anthony’s study. It is such an unusual lost thing that Laura immediately posts details about the cookie tin on the website, but she has little hope anyone will claim the ashes. Uncertain over her deepening relationship with Freddy, Laura, in a fit of anxiety, deliberately provokes a silly fight and summarily breaks up with a flabbergasted Freddy, who was, he says, ready to propose marriage. The narrator explains, “She knew how unreasonable she was being, how hurtful, but she couldn’t stop” (257).

Within days of posting about the cremains, Laura is stunned when a woman named Eunice appears at the door to claim the ashes. Over stiff drinks, Eunice shares the story of pilfering the ashes and then how, on the train to Brighton, she became entangled with a woman with two bratty kids and at a stop one of the kids jumped out. Eunice instinctively hopped off to bring the kid back—but the train pulled away, leaving the ashes on the train. Laura asks about Bomber, and when she hears he was a publisher, she hesitatingly asks whether Eunice has contacts in the publishing world, saying that she is thinking of trying her hand at writing. Eunice assures Laura that she could help. Before she leaves, Eunice gives Laura an old Communion medallion she found years ago outside the publishing house the day Bomber hired her. She hopes after all these years that the website might help find its owner. Laura knows exactly what it is and, as soon as Eunice departs, takes the medallion to Therese’s room. She hears the faint first chords of “The Very Thought of You.” Therese is finally at peace. Eunice, for her part, succeeds in scattering Bomber’s ashes along the surf on the beach at Brighton.

As Eunice is departing, Freddy drives up. Laura, with the smiling encouragement of Eunice herself, quickly moves to reconcile. Over the next several days, the two become engaged. At last Laura turns to her long-deferred dream: writing. She now has a story to tell of “love and loss, life and death, and, above all, redemption” (274). It sounds familiar to the reader. Confidently Laura settles in front of her computer and types the first line of her novel: “Charles Bramwell Brockley was traveling alone and without a ticket on the 14:42 from London Bridge to Brighton” (274), which is the first line of the novel we have been reading.