More Lost and Found
By Janet Marshall Watkins
At 1:58 one recent August morning, I heard my phone go off but was too soundly asleep to figure out how to answer it. The call was from our youngest daughter, Lili, who was spending the summer 5,000 miles away from us, working and living with family in Hawaii. I quickly called back. Only Lili didn’t pick up; a woman whose voice wasn’t familiar to me did. She said she had Lili’s phone, and I thought immediately of how, a few weeks ago, some friends and I were driving along a highway on a road trip when a car merging into our lane hit a ditch and flipped over. We pulled off, parked, and ran to the scene. The driver was hurt but OK, and she borrowed one of our phones to call her parents.
Could Lili have been in an accident? Was this woman calling to tell me that? No, no. Fortunately. She said she’d found Lili’s phone on the beach and wanted to get it back to her. Was I with Lili?
I told the woman that Lili was on Maui and flying back to Virginia in the morning. And I thought: Holy shit, Lili’s life is on that phone. Her boarding pass, probably. All her summer photos. And this woman knows she has Lili’s phone, because she’s telling me she has “Lili’s phone,” which means Lili’s ID is probably with it, too, which means even if Lili got a hard copy of her boarding pass, she wouldn’t have an ID to get on the plane. And oh, god, is her credit card with her phone, too? These thoughts spun through my mind as the woman told me she was in the village of Paia, which was good news because I knew Lili went to Paia, she swam there, she worked part time in a coffee shop there. Lili could be able to find this woman.
The woman said she was at a beach called Bookipa, or at least that’s what I thought it sounded like, and what I scrawled down on a Post-it note on my desk because, damn it, I’m a reporter first and always, and if you call me at 1:58 a.m., I may be dopey, but I will grab a pen and paper and take notes. I got the woman’s name and number, though as she pointed out, once Lili realized her phone was missing, she would probably start calling her own phone.
The clock was ticking. The woman told me it was 8 p.m. there and getting dark, so the park, and access to Bookipa beach, would be closing soon, and she’d have to leave. She asked where Lili was living, and I said Kula, and she said OK, good. She said she lived in the town of Haiku, and that wasn’t too far. She said she’d stay at the beach as long as she could, and hold onto Lili’s phone after, and I said, “I’m going to hang up right now and call my niece, Jubilee. Lili’s staying with my niece and maybe they’re close by.”
I hung up, but I didn’t call my niece. I group texted her and her dad—my brother-in-law, Wayne—because I didn’t know where Lili was or who she was with, and it could have been either of them. I hoped Lili wasn’t surfing solo. I hoped I could reach SOMEONE.
And here is the text conversation that transpired in the following two minutes:
Me to Jubilee and Wayne: “A woman just called me from the beach and said she has Lili’s phone. Are y’all at the beach??”
Jubilee: “Yes!”
Me: “Said she found Lili’s phone there”
Jubilee: “We are at Ho‘okipa”
Me: “That’s where she is!”
Me: “Name is Ciara (?)
Me: Call Lili’s phone and she should have it”
Jubilee: “Ha she got it”
Jubilee: Thank you!”
Me: “Wait—you already have it?”
Jubilee: “Yep!”
Me: “Whew!!! Thanks! Going back to bed now”
Moments later, my phone beeped once again.
Lili: “Got it back!”
And then I got a dark photo of Lili walking next to something—one of those beach bathroom/changing areas, maybe. At Ho‘okipa, not Bookipa. I couldn’t make it out. It was now 2 something in the morning. I put my phone aside and crawled back under the covers—well, sheet, because I’m a hot-flashing woman—and tried to fall back asleep. But my brain spun through all the possibilities for what would have happened if Lili hadn’t gotten her phone back. Our daughter Claire had her phone stolen in London a couple years ago; we tracked it to China, briefly, before it went dark. Replacing it cost. A lot. Thank god this woman called.
I was finally drifting back to sleep when something else hit me: Our friend Heather Montanye’s finding-a-phone-on-a-beach story.
A few months back in Pie & Chai, we ran a short essay by Heather about how she found someone’s phone on the beach in Florida. Heather started asking people if it was their phone, with no luck, so she started asking people for tips on finding the owner. Finally someone said, “Ask Siri.”
You probably can’t crack into a stranger’s phone because Apple keeps those things locked down. The FBI had to send the phone of Trump’s would-be assassin to Quantico to see if they could open it up, because no one on the scene had a clue. But you can talk to Siri even when a phone is locked, apparently, and Siri can do things for you. So Heather started asking Siri to call people—“Mom,” “Dad,” all the common names she could think of, until someone actually answered. And wonder of wonders, Heather eventually connected with the owner’s mom and got the phone back to the guy who’d lost it. She even met him when she dropped it off at his mother’s house.
He’d had her phone number listed under “mommom” because he accidentally wrote it twice and had never bothered to correct it.
As Heather said, bless his heart.
Bless Lili’s heart, too.
And while I’m at it, bless my husband Steve’s heart, because it started vibrating like a restaurant pager a few afternoons ago, and that was freaky. Something was clearly glitchy with his pacemaker/defibrillator, but what? We spent whole weekend wondering whether the glitch was with the device, or his heart, or both, and whether fixing it would require medicine, surgery, or a little reprogramming—and also wondering whether the vibrating would continue or stop, and what it would mean either way. The land of chronic heart disease is a land of uncertainty, and I’ve yet to meet anyone who loves uncertainty. It certainly isn’t me. It turned out Steve’s device needed a little reprogramming. Not exactly a false alarm, but not a sign of doom, either.
Bless my heart, too, because it is tired.
Lili heads home soon after two months on Maui, now her favorite place in the world. Claire goes to London next week for 10 days in her favorite place in the world. May the sun shine warm upon their faces, and may their phones stay glued to their hands.
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Janet Marshall Watkins is the co-founder of Pie & Chai. She is a writer, mom, grandma, dog owner, former nonprofit director, and longtime advocate for people suffering from violence, food insecurity, and other challenges.
