LOST AND FOUND

by Lois Lowry

(registered: Writers Guild of America)

(OPENING TITLES, MUSIC). Outside a large, rambling, city home, Professor CHARLES CHALMERS and Mrs. LYDIA CHALMERS pack household items into an old station wagon. She is efficient. He buries himself in the books he carries.

(TITLES, MUSIC CONTINUE). On the second floor, Thirteen-year-old MEG struggles to pull a drab olive trunk out of her room. Across the hall, fifteen-year-old SANDY tugs at her trunk, freshly painted mauve. The two girls stop, look at each other, and play a quick game of scissors/paper/stone. Sandy wins. Together they move her trunk downstairs.

(TITLES, MUSIC CONTINUE). Curbside. Meg snaps a picture of Sandy posed in front of the loaded station wagon. As she finishes the shot, Charles and Lydia appear with the last load, his manuscript box, and happily get into the car. Meg and Sandy do not appear happy.

(TITLES, MUSIC CONCLUDE). Mrs. Chalmers driving, the station wagon pulls up to a small clapboard house on a country lane. A black Audi sedan behind them roars past, spewing gravel, its black-suited DRIVER glaring briefly at them. Charles wonders aloud where that car is going, since the road dead ends, nowhere a city man in a hurry would want to go. The girls scramble out.

Inside the house, Meg bounds up to the single upstairs room--it has wonderful views, is gabled like an artist's garret, has bare plaster walls, random-width pine flooring. Perfect for her . She caroms down the stairs, off her father and into her mother, who is helping Sandy staunch a nosebleed.

But the room is not for Meg. "I should have told you sooner. You and Sandy are going to share." Mrs. Chalmers hugs her. That room is for Dad to use as a study. He has to finish his book. THE BOOK, as the family knows it, The Dialectical Synthesis of Irony. "Can you say that three times fast?!" Mom reminds Meg. Dad gets huffy at one more repeat of that family joke.

Meg bolts the house. She runs through late fall woods, and throws herself onto a hillock, fighting tears until the scene in front of her draws her interest. The black Audi is parked near a yellow cottage. Not hastily, but irresistibly, a tall old man firmly holds the elbow of the black-suited driver and escorts him toward his car. The younger man is talking in swift phrases. The old man exaggeratedly is not talking at all. At the car, he opens the door and firmly pushes the young man in, then walks away. The Audi roars off. As the car leaves his sight, the old man slumps.

Meg sits up. The old man, WILL BANKS, notices her, straightens up, and strides toward her. He addresses her by name, which surprises her, but she is most interested in the scene she has witnessed. Guilelessly she asks what it was all about. He slides past her question, explains instead that he knows Meg's name because he owns the house her Dad has rented for the year. He also owns this yellow one, and a third, now delapidated house around the corner where he was born. Furthermore, he adds without missing a beat, his wife's name was Margaret, and he called her Meg.

That said, he invites Meg into his house for tea. She hesitates. Banks assures her he's 70 years old, harmless even to a beautiful young girl like her. Meg does not think she is beautiful at all. Sandy got all the looks. But Meg begins to relax and is perhaps about to accept Bank's offer when Professor Chalmers comes up to take "this one" back with him to assist the unpacking.

As Meg and her Dad walk home, he apologizes to her about the room. She tries to tell him that it's not just the room. "Did you have to do this?" He automatically replies, "This what, Meg...?" She cuts him off, saying that she knows demonstratives must point to nouns, and then lists two sample this's: moving in the middle of her first photography class, and making Sandy give up cheerleading which means grotty Lisa Halstead gets her place. Charles is truly sorry, but his book is important. He really has a grip on Coleridge. Meg asks how many books there are in a library. Taking a deep breath, he explains that he has to finish this book so that he can keep his job. Then they can return to town. Meg softens, takes his hand, and shines her radiant, freckled grin up at him. "O.K., Dad." He adds, "I really do have a grip on Coleridge."

It is now deep winter. Snow covers fields and roads. Hungry birds peck at grain Sandy has placed on a ledge outside the window of their shared bedroom. Inside the room, Meg's half is a mess: notebooks, snapshots, clipped photographs by famous photgraphers litter her bedside table and any space not covered by rumpled clothes. Sandy's side is impeccably neat except where Meg's things have spilled over.

Lying on her quarter-made bed, Meg observes Sandy experiment with makeup at her dressing table. Sandy is clearly becoming expert at this form of skin painting. Meg breaks the silence with a sudden, "You are so beautiful." Sandy accepts the compliment. The girls talk of what they want to be. Meg doesn't know, but she wants to be someone, maybe a photographer like Dorothea Lang or Marguerite Higgins.

Sandy wants to be Mrs. Somebody Else. She knows she's supposed to want to prove she can do something as well as a man, but she wants to be a woman, to have four babies, raise them well. 'Mother' means as much to her as 'photographer' means to Meg. Both girls are surprised at the political chasm between them, and Sandy tries to bridge the gap with praise of Meg's talents, but the praise sounds dangerously close to, "you've got a great personality and glasses and no chest and no friends." Meg parodies Sandy with a glamor pose: "Poor, silly me! I can only be behind the camera."

Suddenly Sandy is shouting about what a slob Meg is, her is stuff everywhere. She grabs a piece of chalk and draws a line, a line to divide the room in half. She draws the line across the rug and up the wall to the ceiling. She grabs a chair and continues it across the ceiling, down the opposite wall to the floor. "You can be a slob in your own part of the room," and she hurls whatever pieces of debris lie in her own half at the shocked little sister.

Meg retreats, taking a parka with her. From upstairs comes the whine and spit of the computer printing out another page. From the kitchen comes rattles of pots and pans. As the front door closes, these home sounds fade. There is only the crunch of Meg's feet on snow. She reaches the mailbox and finds amidst shopping flyers a package of her photographs, sent back to her from a mail-order lab.

She walks along, rapidly sifting through her snaps. Down the road she sees the black Audi, parked once again by Will Banks' yellow cottage. The Driver is leaving. Banks brusquely shakes his profered hand away. The Driver roars off in his usual angry style, fishtailing dangerously on the snowy road. Meg walks up to Banks. This time she accepts his invitation to tea.

Sun pours into Banks' tidy living room. Clouds of steam rise from their cups. Banks explains the Audi belongs to his nephew's attorney, a word for which he has a disrelish. Banks words grow more and more crusty. This nephew and his attorney are legacy hunting, trying to have Banks declared mentally incompetent to manage his own affairs because he won't fix up the old family house, develop the property, or else sell it all and move to an adult community. "Management," another word that sticks in Banks' craw, "making pots of money by cheating city folk."

Feeling he has talked too much, Banks says that Meg seems out of sorts herself. Meg observes that her Dad has a grip on Coleridge, her mother has a grip on her quilt, Sandy has a grip on some boy named Tierny McGoldrick, but she, Meg, doesn't have a grip on anything. Still, she wonders if he could fix up the old house and rent it fairly, and wouldn't that show he isn't mentally...incompetent? For a start?

Banks changes the subject to Meg's photos, which now lie on the table between them. His warmth returns. The pictures are low-grade in quality, but he observes that their composition shows Meg has an eye. At least he thinks so, and from a box on top of the bookcase he pulls out a Leica and a Rolleiflex, two long unused cameras he brought home at the end of the Second World War. He bargains with her. Since she won't just accept the Rolei as a gift, he'll lend it to her on long term, say 10 years, in exchange for her good advice. As for the Leica, he'll use it himself to start taking pictures again. For the first time in years he has somebody to photograph.

Afternoon winter shadows stretch long patterns across the snow, sliding up the clapboard house to the smoking chimney. Inside, using that soft slanting light as it sweeps through the window, Meg snaps vampish pictures of Sandy. Charles comes down stairs carrying a huge armload of crumpled pages, while upstairs his printer churns away. As Charles crosses the window light Meg snaps his picture too. She seizes the moment to tell her father about why she "needs" a darkroom to print her own pictures. Then, she explains, as she tags along while he carries his armload to the garbage and returns, she can really control the sun and shadow, just as all the photographers she's been reading about do. Charles likes Meg's idea, and she rattles off a list of all the things she would need, when mother interrupts with the question, "How much will it cost!" Sandy snorts and tosses her silken hair back and is about to go off to practice cheerleading routines when she abruptly gets a nosebleed. Charles retreats to his upstairs office. Lydia helps Sandy staunch her nose again and makes her lie down for a few minutes. "Don't budge."

"Budge...?" wonders Meg. "What's my budget?" she asks her mother. The question startles Lydia. "How much do you budget for me," Meg pursues. The big item is camp. Dad reappears at the foot of the stairs. Against Lydia's warnings, Meg and her father agree they have found the solution. No camp next year, a darkroom now.

There is a sudden montage of family activity. In the new darkroom, Meg struggles to make her first print. The school bus drops both girls near their house, and there appears to be someone special Sandy waves to as the bus pulls away. Darkroom again: a new photograph, still not right. "It's so much easier to read about." Dad's fingers fly on his computer. Lydia quilts. Sandy goes through new cheerleader routines interrupted by frequent phone calls and occasional nosebleeds. Exchanged glances between Lydia and Charles. Will Banks does chores, joins the family for tea, offers kleenex for Sandy's nosebleed. Both girls study. Banks goes over a book of flower drawings with Sandy, helping her pronounce the Latin names. She is weaker now, often lying on the couch. It's as if she has become suddenly old. In the darkroom, Meg makes her first good print. It's one of Will Banks. His eyes gleam across a steaming cup of tea. She is exultant.

Bedtime. DR. PUTNAM leaves the shared bedroom, advising the worried parents that Sandy's nosebleeds may be reason for some "work-up." Sandy lies angrily on her bed. Meg awkwardly tries to interest her in some of the photographs she's taken of Sandy, pulling them down from a collection of faces she has tacked to her wall. The obvious difference between Sandy's looks just a few weeks ago and her looks now makes Sandy rant about how ugly she's become. Meg is sick of obsessive talk. Sandy tells Meg to pick up her crummy sneakers from her side of the bed before the paint peels from the floor. Meg tells her to pick them up herself, and Sandy rises to throw them at her. Meg sees Sandy's legs, momentarily in a Brook Shields' pose, but mottled as if covered with bleeding mosquito bites. "What's wrong with your legs?"

Meg says she is going to get Mom. Sandy desperately forbids her, but Meg goes anyway. There is a hurried consultation between Lydia and Charles. Meg is sent to the living room. Alone, she hears Sandy scream, "No, I won't, I won't go." Her parents bundle her up in a blanket and carry her out into the night air toward the car. As they pass Meg, Sandy screams out, "I hate you."

The station wagon drives off, and Meg is left alone.

In the morning, Meg shuffles prints. The phone rings and her father tells her he will be there in an hour. Before she can ask him any questions, he hangs up.

She knocks at Banks' cottage. He is cutting a mat for a favorite photo of his, fringed gentian. It's a flower that blooms late. "Just like me," says Meg. "Like us," he replies. "They took Sandy to the Hospital last night. Sandy hates me," she blurts out. "Meg," Banks starts, then deliberately changes the subject. Angrily he talks about how he will outfox the foxes, fix up the old family home, rent it out. "Now about hate...," he finishes, and Meg smiles briefly for the first time that day. "Actually, I'm scared," she admits.

Meg is waiting as Charles returns from the hospital. Lydia has stayed with Sandy. He haltingly explains to Meg that Sandy is dying. She has cancer, acute myelogenous leukemia. Meg cannot seize this news, and tries, "Can you say that three times fast?" Dad tries a line from Shakespeare, "We are such stuff as dreams are made on." Meg is furious. "What did Shakespeare know? What do you know? Coleridge? What do you have a grip on. Why Sandy?" Father and daughter look at each other. He reaches to embrace her. She yields.

They prepare to go together to the hospital. Meg looks at her camera, leaves it behind.

In the hospital, Lydia and Charles lead Meg to Sandy's room. Labeled glass bottles and plastic bags dangle from metal racks. Through tubes that lead to Sandy's arm solutions drip like tears. The tube to her throat is held firmly in place with adhesive tape. Meg sees the lashes of her closed eyes outlined on her cheek in perfect curves. On her bed rustle patterns of sunshine as wind shudders trees outside. "Sandy." She opens her eyes, smiles sleepily. Sandy's hand seeks and finds Meg's and squeezes it gently, weak and loving. Then she falls asleep again.

Spring. Fresh flowers on the table. Boxes eveywhere. Once again the family is packing up. The computer goes into its case. Meg labels one box in large letters, "THE BOOK," while Dad loads his books into boxes. Meg remembers something Will Banks told her. She quotes to her father, " 'It is Margaret you mourn for.' I told him I never mourn for myself. But I think... he is right...I even miss fighting with her."

Will Banks brings a photograph to Meg. It is of both Meg and Sandy. Around the frame he has painted a thin purple border of Fringed Gentian. Sandy is looking off camera, in her most beautiful, slightly puzzled way. Meg faces the camera, open-eyed. The long lens has compressed the distance between the two girls so they are almost on the same plane.

Meg: "She is so... so close."

Lydia: "She will always be there, behind you, beside you."

Charles: "I never realized how much you two look alike."

Meg: "You made us both beautiful"

Will: "Oh, I just paid attention... to time and exposure."

The loaded station wagon pulls away. The family of three struggles to wave back at Will Banks standing and waving by "their" house. Meg leans out the window and clicks one final picture of Will. She waves for the last time, and Will waves back. Wind and road dust whipping around her, Meg's freckled face breaks into a smile.

(end)