The Lost Girls (19 page)

Maurie picked up her wineglass. The rim was crusted with feathered red stains from her lipstick. “It doesn't matter. We Evans girls make our own luck, that's what I always say.” She waved her glass at Melanie and drank.

Justine looked at the clock on the microwave. It was ten. “It's
past bedtime,” she said to the girls. Reluctantly, they allowed her to shepherd them up the stairs.

Maurie put out her cigarette and followed, as Justine knew she would. She watched as they brushed their teeth and Justine helped Angela pull on her nightgown, but she didn't say anything until Justine told Angela it was too late for their story. Then she pushed her way into the room, swaying a little from the wine. “How about Grandma reads you your story, since Mommy's too tired?”

Justine tugged at the sleeves of her sweatshirt, smarting from the implied criticism, even though she'd been expecting it ever since they'd climbed the stairs. Maurie took a dim view of Justine's parenting. Justine was never any fun, she said. She never—in one memorable phrase from years ago—made magic for her children. It was ten fifteen, and the girls had school tomorrow, but Justine got out of her mother's way. It wasn't a battle she could win.

Angela pointed to the box of Emily books. “They're over there.”

Maurie picked up a notebook. “Oh my God. Where did you find these?” When Justine told her she said, “Lucy used to read these at the library. She let me turn the pages.” She turned one now. She wore a wistful expression that made her look younger, or at least less tired. “I always wondered what happened to them.”

When Justine was little, on the rare nights Maurie stayed in, she would sometimes read Justine a bedtime story. Justine had loved the weight of her mother on her bed in her chiffon bathrobe, the scent of her night cream, fresh and sweet. Maurie read as well now as she had then: slowly and with great expression. Both girls were mesmerized, and Justine, too, found herself drawn in by Maurie's voice, mellow and tinged with a lyricism that transported them all to the magical summer forest of Lucy's imaginings.

The story was called “Emily and the Indian Princess.” In it Emily found a series of earthen mounds in the woods. She didn't know what they were and they scared her. Then, on the night of the
midsummer full moon, the ghost of an Indian princess appeared and told her the mounds were where the Indians had buried their treasures. If Emily were to dig in the mound she indicated, she would find the princess's own riches. So, with the help of Mimsy the mouse and her cousins the moles, Emily dug until she found a golden crown and scepter, and necklaces and bracelets of gold and silver and gems. She put them on, and all the creatures of the forest called her Princess Emily. The ghost of the princess smiled and said Emily was the true heir to her forest kingdom.

Maurie closed the book. In the silence they could hear the house breathing, soft and slow. Then she laughed, breaking the spell. “Well, damn. I sure could use an Indian princess right about now.”

“Couldn't we all,” Justine said neutrally.

Maurie gave her an irritated look. She pushed Angela's curls aside and kissed her forehead. “I'll tell you what, baby. While I'm here, I'll read you your stories every night. How's that sound?”

Angela nodded as she slid down her pillow. Melanie's eyes met Justine's, but Justine looked away. It was okay if her mother read the Emily stories to the girls for a while. She was their grandmother, after all. And they would be leaving soon.

Father wasn't Mother's first love. I didn't know this until she was dying. She died slowly, so she had lots of time for deathbed reminiscences. Most were about her childhood on her family's farm, and how desperately she'd wanted to escape her father, our tiny, hunchbacked Grandfather Roberts, whom I barely remembered, so long had he been dead. Lilith and I ignored those stories; they didn't interest us. But this one did interest me, so I listened.

His name was Samuel. I never heard the family name, but he was a Williamsburg boy. They were the star pupils of the one-room schoolhouse that used to sit on First Street, and when they were in the upper grades the teacher often asked them to stay after school to help her. He lived in town, but every day he walked her home to her family's farm—three miles there and back. By the time they graduated, they were promised to one another. He was going to take over his father's cabinetry shop and build her a house. It would have been yellow, she said.

Then came the Great War. Williamsburg's young men shipped out in the fall of 1917 in a frenzy of flag-waving and band-playing, and Samuel the cabinetmaker's son never came back. Mother wasn't the only war widow, or almost-widow, in the county by any means, but she was a shy, plain girl who'd just held one boy's hand. She thought Samuel was her only chance, she told me through milky tears, and I did feel a little sympathy for the girl she must have been.

Father was six years older than she, so although she knew of him and his prominent family, they'd never had much to do with
each other. While she and Samuel were courting, Father was away at the Methodist seminary. After he broke with the seminarians, he came back to Williamsburg, and when his brother was killed in France and his father died of the influenza, he took over the pharmacy that was supposed to have been his brother's inheritance. So he was there when the shy, plain girl came to pick up the sleeping powder her mother was stockpiling against the day, not much later, when she would make her own escape from the hunchbacked farmer.

He was so charming, Mother said, her eyes swimming with an apology she didn't know she was making. Of course he was. He was educated and intellectual, and to a smart girl who never got to go to college, listening to him talk about Kant and Hegel and the power of free will had to have been thrilling. He was older, too, and had the aristocratic superiority of his well-to-do family. I can see it. I did see it, every day of my life until the summer of 1935.

A picture of them on their wedding day sat on the fireplace mantel at our house in town. I don't know where it is now; probably in the basement, where many of the things from that house went once the bank claimed it. In it they're standing side by side, their faces unsmiling in the manner of the time. He is as compelling in the photo as he was in life, his eyes mesmerizing, his cheekbones sharp and argumentative. She is small, her head just reaching his shoulder. Her arms are thin beneath the silk of her gown, and she clutches her bouquet so tightly that the tendons are visible on the back of her hand. Her eyes are full of surprise and gratitude. She thought, then, that she had been saved.

Saved
. What a word that is! So full of power, yet so passive. It speaks of a force greater than we, of an agency that is strong enough to redirect the flow of our lives when we cannot. God, the love of a man or a woman, the birth of a child, the simple act of growing up—these are all things we think can save us. Father, Mother, Lilith, and even Maurie believed they could be saved by
these things, at one time or another. I had no such delusions, but it didn't matter; in the end I'm no more saved than they. As I sit in this dark house, listening to its exhalations that have worn the walls as smooth as vellum, it occurs to me that the whole tragic history of our family comes down to this: none of us knew how to save ourselves.

I've often wondered what Lilith thought of Mother's story. Because she, too, lost a sweetheart to war. Charlie proposed in early 1942, during a weekend leave between training and deployment, with that enormous diamond ring that had been his grandmother's. He was a serious young man then, and he'd become handsome in that big-featured Lloyd way. It wasn't the life Lilith had dreamed of on those summer nights at the bridge, but it would have been a good life all the same. He'd been accepted to the state medical college once his service was done, and someday they'd live in the Lloyds' fine house and she would be the doctor's wife instead of the pharmacist's daughter. And, of course, he'd loved her since they were children. Even through her wild days, when everyone tutted and said she wouldn't have become so wayward if her father had lived. That was worth something, right there.

The telegram came just six weeks after he'd gone. Lilith sat with it on the porch for hours while Mother and I pretended to go about our business so she wouldn't see us watching. Then, when I was preparing our supper, she came and set it on the table. She looked at me with that level gaze of hers, and her eyes were dry. I stood with my hands covered in flour, my faded plaid apron hanging from my shoulders. I couldn't think of anything to say. I suppose, by then, nothing I could have said would have made any difference.

A month later she told us she was pregnant with his child, conceived during that one, brief visit.

The Lloyds were awful about it, of course. Agnes had been
against the marriage from the start; she had higher hopes for her son than a small town beauty with a sullied reputation. She even demanded the ring back, saying she never gave Charlie permission to take it. Lilith said no. Then, after Agnes stood on the sidewalk outside Lloyds' Pharmacy and told her Maurie wasn't Charlie's child—no Lloyd was ever so dark, she claimed, and we knew what she meant—Lilith never spoke to anyone in that family again.

Years later, when Maurie learned her father was the son of the richest family in town, she was furious at Lilith. If only Lilith had given the ring back, she said, Agnes would have acknowledged her grandchild and Maurie wouldn't have been stuck out here living on my library wages and Lilith's hostessing paycheck. I knew Agnes would never have acknowledged Maurie under any circumstances, but Maurie didn't see it that way. To her, Lilith had thrown away her birthright out of selfish pride. But Lilith was right to keep that ring. While she didn't love Charlie, she appreciated his devotion, and, as I said, they would have had a fine life. I don't blame her for holding on to the one talisman she had of the one dream she dreamed that could have come true.

Besides, Maurie wouldn't have been happy even if she'd gotten the Lloyd name and money. She craved change too much, and the thrill of choosing. As soon as she could walk, she'd disappear the instant we looked away, into the woods or around the shore, reappearing covered in dirt like a wild creature. Lilith named her for Maureen O'Hara, the young ingenue—just two years older than she—who'd starred in the film
How Green Was My Valley
the year before, and the name was apt, for Maurie loved drama. She reinvented herself constantly, changing her hair, her clothes, and her way of talking. She was incapable of conforming. Or belonging.

Still, she brought such life to this place while she was here. I used to take her with me to the library, and at my lunch break we'd go for fountain sodas at Father's old pharmacy. I knew what people
thought of us by then, three women living in the woods with an unsolved mystery and a bastard child, but Maurie was irresistible. Iain McNeil at the counter gave her extra syrup. At the library, Jeannette Lewis let her stamp the return dates on the checkout cards. When I read my stories in the children's circle, she sat on my lap like a queen, turning the pages while her schoolmates watched.

We were happy, I think now. It's a thought that surprises me. But when Maurie was young, we thought less about what we'd lost, and more about what we had in front of us. Less about the things we'd done, and more about what amends could be made. Lilith and I even began to look at Mother differently, as a grandmother instead of a mother, and there seemed the possibility of forgiveness.

But as soon as Maurie stormed out of here, her sails filled with rebellion and pride, we became mother and daughters once more. Into the space Maurie left crept memories of that other child, memories that had lurked patiently in the corners, waiting for an absence large enough to fill. Mother sat in her chair while the television muttered. Lilith's travel and celebrity magazines piled up on the coffee table. I lay awake as I hadn't in years, thinking of things long past. We became again what we'd been at the start: three women living with their sins and their ghosts, keeping an unspoken vigil, growing old.

One day I looked at Mother and knew she was dying. It was autumn, an ordinary day, and she was stringing beans into a bowl, and in the stuttering movement of her hands I knew it. For a time she spent her days in the parlor watching television as usual, the only evidence of her decline the afternoon naps that became longer and longer. Then came the morning she couldn't get out of bed, so we moved the television to her room, and propped her on pillows. When she could no longer feed herself, we held the spoon to her mouth. We carried her to the tub and washed her papery skin while she crossed her arms over her chest as though keeping
a secret. Once a week we set her hair, a limp memory of the curls she'd wrested into a snood for all those years. Toward the end we diapered her, changing her often so she wouldn't get sores. We sat by her bed with our books and magazines, letting the endless tremor of her voice wash over us.

We were good daughters. We were dutiful.

At the very end she talked only of Emily. It was all I could do to sit out my assigned hours by her bedside, listening to her voice tremble on about how she'd loved her. I was going to keep her safe, she told me, her eyes imploring my understanding, my forgiveness. She was going to be the one I saved. I wouldn't look at her in those moments. I looked at my book, the words a blur, and tried to keep my hands from shaking.

She died at night. Lilith was keeping watch, and she came to wake me when she heard Mother's breathing change. I sat on one side of the bed and she the other. We didn't turn on the light, but the moon was bright; we could see her and we could see each other. We didn't speak. We watched her, and we waited. Mother's mouth was open and her lips were cracked from the air that seeped in and out. Her hands twitched on the sheet, unable even at the end to be still. At last the sky to the east began to grow pink and the stars to fade, and it was time.

I expected her to back out of her life without waking, just as she'd lived it. I thought this would be fine with me. But she opened her eyes, and I was overcome by a sudden, wretched need for her to see me. For mine to be the last face she saw on this earth. I leaned over her, looking into her eyes that were as pale as smoke and as dry as ash, but she didn't see me. She looked beyond me, over my shoulder. She raised her arms. They shook with the effort it took to hold them up, but I could see them curving, the palms softening, as though cupping a face. I felt the air change, as if a veil had shifted just beyond my sight, parted by those seeking hands. Emily's name was a whisper on her breath.

I sat back. My chest was tight, and I swallowed hard to loosen it. Lilith watched me. Her cheeks were wet with tears she had shed without a sound. Then she seized Mother's hands and pulled them down to the bed. She held them there as they fluttered like moths, trying to break free. She held them as the lake took on the color and sheen of mercury in the gathering light. She held them as Mother's eyes pleaded and then were still. She held them until Mother was dead.