The Lost Girls (14 page)

Justine collapsed on the sofa as if someone had cut a string. Angela whimpered in the corner and Justine bent over, hugging her legs. Oh, God, it had all been a mistake. A terrible mistake. This house wasn't a starting-over place. It was cold and isolated and wrapped in a half-sentient pall of tragedy, and she hadn't escaped anything, she'd only made everything worse. They should go home. Patrick wanted her back, he would take her back, and maybe Dr. Fishbaum hadn't replaced her yet. They could leave today and they could walk right back into their apartment, to the worn brown carpet and the humming hallway
clock, and it would all be familiar and theirs and exactly the same.

But at the thought she recoiled so viscerally she nearly retched. If she went back she'd never leave again. She'd live in that apartment with Patrick for the rest of her life, making his meals, managing his moods, massaging his fragile ego, snatching precious moments of silence at the kitchen table before his alarm went off, and every day in a thousand tiny ways he would remind her that she'd left; that she'd broken his heart; that she could never love him enough, no matter how hard she tried to make amends. Angela would try to make everything all right, as she'd always done, and Melanie would watch it all, as she always had, the festering welt of her resentment growing more rancid every year.

No. They couldn't go back. So they would have to go somewhere else. Somewhere Patrick could never find them. It didn't matter where. They would just pile their things in the Tercel and drive to another town. To another apartment, another school, another job. She knew exactly how it was done.

“Angie, sweetie, come here,” Justine said, and Angela crawled to the couch. Justine gathered her close, and into the silken froth of her hair she sobbed like a little girl.

The morning after Independence Day, I lay in my bed and watched the sun creep from one floorboard to the next. Lilith was awake, too; I could feel it in her arm that lay around my waist. From the kitchen we heard the clink of forks on plates, but neither of us moved until Mother came upstairs and opened our door. Her hair was in its snood and her dress was pressed in crisp pleats beneath her apron. Time to get up, she said.

She'd made an elaborate breakfast: hotcakes, sausages, eggs, potatoes, and even corn muffins, Lilith's favorite. Father ate in his deliberate way while Mother scrubbed the pans, the sawing of the wire-bristle brush loud in the little room. I rearranged my food with my fork and stared at the butter dish in the middle of the table. The butter was soft, and brown crumbs crusted it where Father's knife had cut. No one spoke. Lilith's feet didn't touch mine under the table. Emily's eyes worried between Lilith and me, sensing trouble she didn't understand.

Even though I wasn't hungry, I picked up my corn muffin and reached for the butter. Before I could pick it up, Father lifted the dish and set it by my plate. I looked up at him. He seemed his normal self, not the agitated man who'd waited for Lilith in the parlor the night before. He smiled at me, and I gave a small, tentative smile in return. Lilith's fork stopped for a moment on its way to her mouth, and suddenly I felt disloyal and guilty, as though with that one smile I'd taken Father's side against her. After that I didn't look at anyone.

When Father was done, he kissed Mother and Emily before he
picked up his bag. We listened to his car drive away, the engine fading into the woods.

Then Lilith announced, “I'm going to Betty's.” I stared at her, startled and hurt. She'd never done that; even after she began going to the lodge at night, she still spent her days with me. But I knew she was angry at me for smiling at Father, and this was her way of punishing me. I watched with misery as she washed her plate, put it on the drying rack, and walked out the front door without meeting my eyes. Mother twisted her hands together, pitying me, but I didn't want her pity, so I ignored her, and after I cleared my plate I walked out myself, letting the door slam.

Once I was outside, though, I couldn't think where to go, so I sat on the steps. The lake was listless in the sun. A loon swooped lazily, its wing tips pricking the water. Some of the littler boys fished off the end of the dock. Mrs. Lewis and Mrs. Pugh strolled by on their way to the lodge, fanning themselves. I picked at a scab on my knee until blood seeped through the crust.

The porch door opened, and Emily came to sit beside me. She turned her face to mine, hopeful and nervous. Her eyes were wide and black, like Father's. “Do you want to come play with the kittens?” she asked. I didn't answer her. I just stood up and left her there alone, as Lilith had done to me not ten minutes before, and it gave me a shabby sort of satisfaction.

I went into the woods, and without planning to, I followed Lilith's and my secret path to the Hundred Tree. We still hadn't gone there that summer, and I'd never gone without her, but my feet knew the way through the leafy light. I felt brave to be out in the forest alone. I also felt a smarting pride. I wasn't sitting around waiting for Lilith to come back; I was going on an adventure by myself. I imagined her asking me that night what I'd done without her. Oh, I went off to the Hundred Tree, I'd say. By yourself? she'd ask, and I'd shrug, as if it were no big thing.

But when I got to the clearing, everything looked different. The
hole in the base of the tree didn't look like the door to our secret cave; it gaped like the entrance to a tomb. The great tree's branches that had always seemed so sheltering reached for me like the talons of an enormous bird. I thought about how far I was from the lake, and the forest through which I'd just come seemed to whisper with menace. Every nerve urged me to run back to the boys fishing on the dock, to Emily and her kittens.

The undergrowth behind me erupted. I screamed and spun around. Matthew Miller stood there, his hands raised in apology. I glared at him in shock and fury—just like that, his invasion made the clearing mine again. “You followed me,” I accused. The thought of him creeping behind me through the woods was both frightening and a little bit thrilling.

“It wasn't hard. You're really loud.”

“This is our place. It's private.”

“I know all about this place. I found it years ago. I wondered who was using it.” He gestured to the tree, filled with last summer's treasures, sodden and abandoned.

I opened my mouth to repeat my outraged defense of our property rights, but I remembered thinking, that first day, that the Millers might own much of this forest. If that were true, the Hundred Tree might not be Lilith's and mine at all, but Matthew's. I couldn't let him tell me that, so I changed my strategy. “Won't your mother be looking for you?” The terse way she'd called him when she saw us skipping rocks had made it clear she didn't want him playing with me.

Matthew laughed an odd laugh. “She's not my mother.”

Despite myself I was intrigued. I'd never heard that Mr. Miller married a second Indian woman after the first; in fact, I didn't think anyone else at the lake knew this. I imagined telling Lilith later, with just a hint of the smugness that comes from having superior knowledge. If she'd come with me, she could have heard it for herself.

“Who is she, then?”

“My grandmother.”

I scoffed to cover my disappointment. Then I wondered, where was his mother? I'd only seen his grandmother working in the lodge, and like all the lake children, I'd always called her Mrs. Miller. No one ever corrected us.

Matthew saw my curiosity. He debated with himself for a moment, then gave me a sideways glance. “I'll tell you the story,” he said, “if you let me in your hideout.”

No way was I letting him in the Hundred Tree. But I've never been able to resist a good story, so after some internal debate of my own I offered a compromise: we could sit on the ground beside the tree. He nodded, and we sat on the dry, brown leaves.

It was a terrible story, and therefore quite good indeed. Matthew's father had been the son of the Lutheran minister in Williamsburg, a good, God-fearing boy. Then he met a girl who lived among the impoverished remnants of the Chippewa who hadn't moved to the White Earth reservation south of here. Her father was a tribal leader who'd resisted the relocation, and he didn't want his daughter marrying a white man any more than Mr. Miller's parents wanted him marrying an Indian. They got married anyway, and both were disowned, moving in exile to our lake.

I'd known all this, more or less, but when I started to tell him so, he cut me off. “Something went wrong when I was born,” he said, and I leaned forward—I could guess what was coming. He drew back, and I thought he might stop, but he dropped his eyes and continued. His mother was as proud as her father, so when Abe was born she hadn't called the white doctor or the Indian midwife. She'd done it alone, with only her husband to help her. She would do the same with Matthew, even though she had a fever when her pains came. At first Mr. Miller gave in, but after hours of fruitless labor his wife was so weak he became afraid, and he went down the lane, pounding on the door of Dr. Pugh's lake house in the middle
of the night, for it was summer and the doctor was there. But Dr. Pugh didn't answer the door.

When Matthew's father got back to the lodge, his wife no longer knew him. The nearest hospital was in Bemidji, over poor roads in the dark, so he put her and Abe in his wagon and went to her family in Olema, the Indian town on the far side of the lake. But his father-in-law blocked the door. His daughter had forsaken her people, he said, and she couldn't come crying for help when that choice brought hardship. Go to the white man's doctor. It's too far, Mr. Miller said. He begged his father-in-law to come see his daughter where she lay delirious in the wagon. He wouldn't come; he was too hard a man; but there were tears on his wife's face, so to her Mr. Miller said, please, tell me where to find the midwife. She won't help you, said her husband, but under his words she whispered an address.

The midwife was a fat woman with long gray hair who smelled like gin even at four in the morning. She did her best, but Matthew's mother died on a bloody blanket on the linoleum floor just before dawn, her new baby screaming in her husband's arms and her firstborn crouched by her head, his hands twined in her hair, as though he could keep her in the world just by holding on.

Matthew's father buried his wife and returned to the lake with his sons. In his grief and ignorance, he struggled to care for them until one day, not long after, he opened his door to find his wife's mother. She walked to where Matthew lay wailing on a cot, picked him up, and never left. She'd raised and schooled him and Abe, and worked by their father's side ever since. She'd saved them, Matthew said. She never told them what her husband said when she left, but by coming she joined them in their exile: she hadn't seen her husband or any of her people since.

During this story Matthew's eyes never left the leafy ground. I could see that once he started, he regretted bartering this miserable tale for a few minutes of my attention beside the Hundred Tree.
In those days I was a stranger to empathy for anyone but Lilith, but I felt it for him as he sat under the great oak with his stained clothes, thin face, and lank hair. He must have been very lonely, to follow a girl he barely knew into the forest and pander his family's tragic and private history in exchange for her company. So I gave his tale the weight it deserved: I listened with grave attention and, when it was done, I let it have the forest to itself for a while.

During that silence I thought about Dr. Pugh, who did tricks with his stethoscope and always had a candy to ease the pain of a shot. I imagined him listening to Mr. Miller pounding on his door, begging for his wife and child. I knew my neighbors thought little of the Indians who lived in our county, but surely he wouldn't refuse to treat one, in an emergency? I thought, too, of taciturn Mr. Miller, who spoke to the fishermen who stayed at his lodge with quiet formality but never had much to say to us, even though he made the meals we ordered and served the ice creams we ate all summer long.

Matthew was watching me, trying to gauge my reaction. “I'm sorry your mom died,” I told him.

He shrugged, and I could see his armor slip back into place. “It's not like I knew her. It was worse for Abe. He's never been right, and sometimes I wonder if that's why.”

I asked him when his birthday was, to change the subject just a little. August 30, he said, which was right before we would go back to Williamsburg. He would be thirteen, a man according to the Chippewa. I told him mine was September 23, and I would be twelve. We smiled, pleased to confirm we were, indeed, almost the same age. Then we eased out of the sticky place his story had led us into a discussion of the rite-of-passage ritual he would have undergone were he with his mother's people.

We talked for a long time, about this and other things, first sitting and then lying on the carpet of leaves. I learned most of the books I'd read were his. His favorites were Ellery Queen myster
ies, which his father gave him every birthday and Christmas, and he kept them in the room he shared with Abe, never abandoning them to the lending library. He asked me what it was like to go to a regular school, and I said I thought he had it better, doing his lessons at home, even though I could tell from his wistful tone he thought differently. As we talked I forgot, for a while, the night before and that Lilith had left me this morning. Above us the old tree spread its branches protectively once more.

When at last we stood to go, reluctant but hungry, Matthew said if I liked, some other day he could show me more secret places in the forest. He looked down as he said it, almost as if he were shy. Sure, I said, and we walked back together through the trees.

Back at the house, Mother was in the kitchen, making our lunch. Emily sat at the table, and in the glow of the pleasant morning I'd spent with Matthew I found the decency to feel bad about the way I'd treated her before. I wondered if she'd gone to see the kittens without me.

I leaned on the counter, watching Mother spread butter on the thick white bread. She gave me a smile and asked where I'd been, by which I knew she meant, what had I done without Lilith all morning? Instead of telling her, I asked whether she'd known Mrs. Miller was Matthew and Abe's grandmother. She went back to buttering the bread. Yes, she said; the mother died when the youngest boy was born, and the grandmother showed up after.

“Why do we call her Mrs. Miller?”

“We don't. We've never known her name, so we don't call her anything.”

“All the kids call her Mrs. Miller.”

“Well, she must not mind it, then.”

“Why wouldn't she mind it? It's not her name.”

She frowned. “Who told you all this?”

I opened my mouth to tell her Matthew had, but at the last moment I changed my mind. “Some of the other kids.”

“You shouldn't gossip. It's none of our business.”

I crossed my arms. “It's awful what happened to them.”

She turned to face me, something she so rarely did that I had to stop myself from taking a step back. “Awful things happen all the time. Even to good people who don't deserve them.”

That silenced me. I'd never heard her offer an opinion on fate or, even indirectly, on God, and at first I was outraged that it was the opposite of Father's lessons about how our free choices and intentions dictated God's rewards and punishments—a lesson he had, just last night, reiterated to Lilith while Mother listened behind Emily's door. Then I thought about Matthew and his family, and for the first time I tried to apply Father's teachings to someone other than myself or Lilith. What might they have done to bring down such tragedy? It would have to be Mr. or Mrs. Miller who was the sinner, and the sin must have been huge, to demand a life in payment. Would God really punish someone in a way that took away an innocent child's mother? It seemed so cruel. Yet it had to be so, because if Mother was right, it would be fate that had done it, unconcerned with deserts or consequences, and that would be worse. I shook my head, trying to find the words to ask Mother how she could believe such a thing. But she turned back to the plates, and in that motion became again the cloudy-eyed woman I'd always known, so much so that I wondered if I'd imagined her vehemence of the moment before. “Call your sister for lunch,” she said.