The Lost Girls (22 page)

Justine only checked Lucy's post office box every few days, so she wasn't sure how long the letter from the assistant principal had been there. “I would like to schedule a meeting with you about your daughter Melanie,” it said. Justine was alone in the kitchen when she read it, and she thought about throwing it in the trash. It had been three weeks since the assistant principal called, but Justine hadn't done anything about it. She'd decided to ignore the whole thing. They were leaving anyway, so what was the point?

But the tone of the letter was stern. It used the words
consequences
and
unacceptable,
and Justine worried about what the woman might do to punish Melanie without consulting her. Better to meet with her and apologize for whatever Melanie had done. So, on the Monday before the winter break, she told her mother she had some errands to run and went to the school an hour before the final bell.

She pictured Elizabeth Sorensen as a gray-haired woman with reading glasses and a buttoned-up mouth. That was how the assistant principal in San Diego looked, and that was how she remembered all the assistant principals she'd met as a child. She'd spent a lot of time in assistant principals' offices. Sometimes her mother was there, too, and when she was, the assistant principal would talk about the importance of a stable home in a voice that sounded just like Mrs. Sorensen's had on the phone.

Instead, Mrs. Sorensen turned out to be a tall, attractive woman about Justine's age with straight, straw-colored hair in a blunt cut. She wore brown tweed pants, a soft brown sweater, and a cream
scarf, all with a casual elegance that made Justine feel short and frumpy in her T.J.Maxx jeans and pullover. Her office was small and outfitted with cheap public school furniture, but framed Audubon prints hung on the wall, and a kilim rug lay on the industrial carpet. The effect was cozy, which Justine also found discomfiting.

She sat with her purse on her lap while Mrs. Sorensen opened a manila folder. “I've read Melanie's records from her school in San Diego.” She looked down at the file. “The counselor there said she had become resistive. Refusing to follow instructions and do classwork. Over the past few months she had several physical altercations with her peers.”

Justine hadn't known Melanie's disciplinary record would follow her here. So much for a clean slate. The mother of the girl whose backpack Melanie threw in the mud had snatched the new backpack and shut her front door before Melanie could finish her apology. Justine felt again the helpless anger she'd felt that day, both at the woman and at Melanie. She gripped the vinyl handles of her purse. “Just tell me what she's done so we can make it up.”

Mrs. Sorensen's blue eyes were cool and intelligent, like a scientist's. “She hasn't done anything. I was surprised to read all this in her file.”

Justine was confused. “Then what—?”

Mrs. Sorensen softened almost imperceptibly. “Look, it's a small town. We don't get new kids often. I keep an eye on them, because I moved here in fourth grade myself, so I know how hard it can be.” She paused, inviting Justine to appreciate her solicitude. Justine doubted whether pretty, blond Elizabeth Sorensen had any idea how hard it could be, so she said nothing. The assistant principal continued, “Angela's doing fine, all things considered. She's a sweet girl and she's working hard. Melanie's situation is different.”

So that was what this was about: Melanie hadn't made a friend yet. Justine was relieved it wasn't a disciplinary issue, but Melanie's lack of social skills wasn't a new problem, either. Melanie hadn't
had a friend since the third grade. Alicia Clark had been the last, a cute, red-haired girl who came over on Saturday afternoons until her mother stopped calling without explanation.

Then Mrs. Sorensen said, “Unfortunately, she's being targeted by some of the other girls.”

Justine wasn't sure she'd heard her correctly. “Did you say targeted?”

“Bullied, I should say.”

“
Melanie
's being bullied?”

Mrs. Sorensen picked up a pen and turned it over in her fingers. Then, her expression as bland as though she were describing the weather, she told Justine how a group of girls—the “queen bees” she called them, daughters of the town's oldest, most prominent families—had organized a campaign against Melanie almost from the day she'd arrived. They called her Smelly Melly and made up cruel rhymes about her. They said she was dirty and anyone who touched her had to wash their hands. Even things she touched, like pencils, books, or her desk, had to be wiped before anyone else used them. It was a small school, Mrs. Sorensen explained, and all the students in the fifth grade, even the boys, were under the social control of these four ringleaders.

Stunned, Justine waited to hear how Melanie had struck back. Hit someone, wrecked someone's backpack. But Mrs. Sorensen said nothing about that. Instead she said, “Melanie was so distant when she arrived. She acted like she didn't care about these girls, or their power. They saw it as a challenge.”

The assistant principal regarded her with studied, bureaucratic sympathy. Justine looked away, over Mrs. Sorensen's shoulder at a print of a red bird with an orange crest. She'd grown accustomed to Melanie spurning other children, but for her to be the object of these attacks, so similar to the social torments Justine herself had experienced as a child? And she'd had no idea. She remembered
how Melanie had walked up the school steps just that morning, her feet heavy, her head bowed. Still, she'd trudged into the San Diego school, too, hadn't she? How was Justine supposed to have known the difference? The red bird stared back with one bright, black, accusatory eye.

Mrs. Sorensen was waiting for her to say something. Justine thought for a minute, then said, “What are you going to do about it?”

This was the right question; the one the assistant principal expected. Her tone became, if possible, more officious. “Well, in addition to serving as the assistant principal, I'm the school counselor. What I'd like to do is use this situation to start a school-wide discussion about bullying that, frankly, is long overdue. Melanie's difficulties will be a learning opportunity for everyone at Williamsburg Elementary. It's a teachable moment, as they say.”

Justine's mouth opened in disbelief. She couldn't imagine anything Melanie would like less than to serve as the poster child for an antibullying campaign. But what would other mothers say about this? Would they give permission? They probably would. It was the expected thing, to want to help your children. And of course she did want to help Melanie. She also didn't want to make trouble for her, because trouble apparently followed you, in your records, from town to town.

Then she remembered the winter break was four days away. “Can it wait until after the break?” she asked.

Mrs. Sorensen nodded. “That would be best.”

Justine relaxed—they would be long gone before Mrs. Sorensen could seize her teachable moment. She picked up her purse, preparing to leave. The assistant principal cleared her throat. For the first time she looked a little uncomfortable.

“There's one more thing. I'm worried Melanie may have deeper problems that need to be addressed. With your permission, of
course.” She took another folder from beneath the first and slid it toward Justine. This, Justine figured with a sinking dread, was going to be the same thing the San Diego school always wanted to talk about. Melanie was unhappy. Melanie was angry. Melanie missed her father. All of it true, all of it immutable. In San Diego she'd assured them Melanie lived in a stable home with a good man who wouldn't leave, and that had mollified them somewhat. She wouldn't be able to say that here.

But the folder didn't hold the counselor's report she'd expected. It held a stack of drawings on lined papers torn from a spiral notebook. They were clearly done by Melanie, but unlike Melanie's usual delicate sketches the lines of these drawings were heavy, as though she'd driven the pencil hard into the paper.

The first was of a girl crouching in a forest. She wore a white dress and had black hair that covered her face except for her eyes, which were wide with fear. The forest was a tangle of scribbled trees that pressed down upon her from all sides. In the branches loomed a man's face, his hair a dark mass, his eyes black holes. The drawing was crude, but the menace in the woods was visceral, like something done from a nightmare. Justine's pulse quickened as she turned the page over. The next drawing was of the same girl, her arms reaching as she fell into a circling black vortex. Her mouth was open in a scream.

There were a dozen more, each of a terrified dark-haired girl, usually in a tangled forest, sometimes in a swirl of black circles, many with that same face watching from someplace close and dark. In each, the pencil had scored with a passion that made Justine's fingers shrink away as though the paper were hot. As she turned the pages the air in the assistant principal's office became heavy, smothering.

“She was drawing in class, and her teacher took away the notebook,” Mrs. Sorensen said.

Justine licked her lips. “She likes to draw.”

Mrs. Sorensen turned the pen in her fingers. “The registration papers you filled out don't list a father's name.”

Oh, God, here it was. “Their father left. Over a year ago. I don't know where he is.”

“I see.” The pen turned and turned. “Is there another man now?”

“No. We left him in San Diego.”

“Why?”

“Does it matter?”

“Was there violence?”

“Of course not.”

“Did he touch the children in ways they weren't comfortable with?” The assistant principal's face was mild, as if she were asking the girls' shoe size, but a faint pink tinged her cheeks.

“No! Patrick would never do that!” Justine snapped the folder shut. He wouldn't. She knew it with absolute certainty. Whatever his faults, he wasn't a child molester, and he loved Melanie. Melanie hadn't loved him back, but that wasn't because he'd done anything terrible. He just wasn't Francis, that was all.

Elizabeth Sorensen's face was quite pink now. “Surely you can see how these drawings might arouse suspicion.”

“No, I can't. They're just drawings! How do they mean Patrick hurt her?”

“I'm troubled by how distressed the girl is in these pictures. And by how much she looks like Melanie. And there's a man in several of them.”

“That man looks nothing like Patrick.” Justine felt a hot rage. This woman! So perfect, so smug, so certain she knew everything about the single mother and her children who'd showed up in her insular little town dressed in cheap, ill-fitting clothes. So troubled, by the dismal life of abuse and neglect they must lead!

“Even so, may I have your permission to talk with her about them?” Mrs. Sorensen prompted.

“No.” Justine snatched the folder and walked out, leaving Elizabeth Sorensen sputtering about not removing documents from a student's file. She walked past the secretary, out of the school, and got in her car. It took every one of the ten minutes remaining before her daughters came out for her hands to stop shaking.

August came. August in Minnesota is a miserable month, thick with heat and the buzzing of horseflies as big as grapes. In the towns it's something to suffer through, especially in those days before air conditioners, when people sat inside with the windows shut and the drapes drawn and children spent hard-won nickels on fountain sodas that cooled them only for a moment. But our lake was so deep it never fully gave up the cold of winter, and the shock of it against our hot skin made even the worst days bearable. At night we slept with our windows open, listening to the crickets and the frogs, in sleeveless nightgowns under white sheets, as water-fed breezes cooled our faces.

One morning, not long after the scene in the lodge with Abe and Mayor Lloyd, I woke to find Father sitting on my bed in his fishing clothes. It wasn't quite dawn, and everything floated in shades of gray, so at first I thought he was the afterimage of a dream. I managed to keep my breathing even so he wouldn't know I'd woken. I couldn't imagine why he was there. He just sat, with his elbows resting on his thighs and his hands clasped between them, his head bowed, as if he were praying. The lines of his shoulders, the curve of his back, the clenched muscle in his cheek, all betrayed the weariness and tension that had haunted him the past few weeks. After a minute or two I couldn't help myself; my breathing hitched, and he looked at me. He relaxed a little when he saw I was awake, and smiled. “Lucy. Do you want to come fishing?”

Fishing! I had to fight to keep the joy and, yes, triumph, from my face. He'd never taken any of us fishing. None of the men took
their daughters; fishing was only for the sons. Lilith used to say we were lucky to be girls, because no one pulled us out of bed before dawn on Saturday mornings, but now that Father had asked me, I wanted nothing more than to get up and go fishing with him.

He waited on the landing while I dressed. Like Lilith before her evenings at the lodge, I dithered over what to wear, then chose my simplest skirt and plainest shoes. When I came out, Father smiled again. “It's not the usual fishing attire,” he said, “but it will do.”

All but two of the boats were already gone. Mr. Jones stood in one of them, stowing tackle boxes and rods while two of his sons waited on the dock. Bobby and Davy were younger than I, and they looked at me with open surprise. Mr. Jones said, “Going to try a little fishing, Lucy?” He had a gentle way about him, and was the unlikely father of six wilding boys who were in and out of trouble their whole lives. At his funeral those boys, grown men then, would sob like children as they carried his casket from the church.

Father said, “I decided I shouldn't have to fish alone just because God gave me daughters.”

“Your girls are so pretty, they'll be doing fishing of a different sort soon,” Mr. Jones said, winking at me. Father didn't say anything to that; he just went to the shed, where he got two fishing poles. While he was gone the Joneses' boat pulled away. Mr. Jones waved, and I waved back. I was pleased he'd said I was pretty.

Father loaded the boat with his tackle box, a bucket, a thermos, and the poles. Then he helped me in and started the motor, heading the boat out into the lake. We didn't go very fast, but the air teased my hair and face. It smelled wet and musky with leftover night. Since Lilith and I had swum to the pontoon, I hadn't ventured into the lake beyond where my feet could touch the bottom. Now, as we forded the dark water, I thought about how it had lured me down, and for a moment I imagined myself jumping in, clothes and all. I tightened my hands on the metal side of the boat.

Just inside the eastern point, where the land curved to form
our bay, was a marshy area thick with grasses and lily pads. Here Father cut the motor. It was as if I'd gone deaf, so sudden and absolute was the quiet. Then, as my ears adjusted, I caught the small sounds of morning: a whippoorwill call, the peeps of frogs in the grass, the first buzz of insects. The mouth of the creek was nearby, and its water trilled over rocks to meet the lake.

Father patted the metal bench beside him. Wary of the pitching boat, I climbed over and sat. He was patient as he explained how it was done. He showed me how to put the worm on the hook, winding its body three times through the barbed tip, leaving enough at each end to wriggle in the water. I stifled my revulsion as I picked up a worm and fed it to the hook, clumsy, Father's hand guiding me. He turned me sideways so I straddled the bench, and he sat behind me the same way, his chin brushing my hair as he reached his arm around me to drop the line in the water. The red and white bobbin slapped the surface, then floated.

“Now we have to be quiet,” he said, “and wait for the fish to come.” I nodded, relieved. Whenever I'd dreamed about being alone with Father I'd been unable to imagine what we might talk about. But being quiet—that was something I was very good at.

The fishing line lay as light as a spider's thread on the perfect stillness of the water. Far away I heard a motor start; one of the other fishermen was moving to a new spot. The other boats were past the points, in the deeper water beyond our sight. I was glad we were inside the bay, here by the reeds, where the lake's surface lay like a glossy membrane over the silty, caramel-colored bottom a mere dozen feet below.

After a while my eyes grew heavy. Father was warm and close, sheltering me from the cool air. We breathed together, in and out, and he stroked my arm, his fingers lightly tracing my skin, as they often traced Emily's when she sat on his lap. Love was in his touch, but reverence, too, a worshipfulness that felt as though he were drawing a great calmness from my body. Happiness, thick and
liquid, flooded even my smallest veins and settled below my stomach. The newly risen sun was warm on my head.

“You're not one to be noticed, are you, Lucy?” Father said quietly. “You're like the church mouse that no one sees but who hears the entire liturgy.”

His words shivered in my spine. I didn't know what to say, or if I should speak at all. Should the church mouse speak when it was noticed? Thankfully the fishing pole bowed in my hands.

“You have a fish,” Father said. He put his hands behind mine on the pole, his arms on either side of me. The bobbin was nowhere to be seen; the tip of the pole was bent almost to the water. With his right hand Father worked the reel, winding it up then spinning it out. “We're letting the fish get tired,” he said, “so it won't fight so much when we pull it in.” The reel whizzed and clacked, the line whipping up and bowing again. I held on to the rod, though Father's were the hands working it, his long, thin fingers nimble and strong. “Good job, Lucy,” he said, “you're doing great. Now we'll bring it in.”

He began to wind and wind the reel, stopping when the rod bowed too much, then starting again. I looked over the side, eager to see the fish. When it rose through the water, glimmering and struggling, I gasped, and Father laughed. “It's a big one,” he said. “A fine, big fish for your first catch.” He stood as he wound in the last of the line, rocking the boat, hauling the brown-speckled fish from the lake. It was as long as my arm, a walleye, and it twisted in the sun, its mouth gaping for air and its scales glinting with gold.

Father took the line just above the fish's mouth and pulled it into the boat. It flopped on the bottom, its thrashing tail loud against the metal. I lifted my feet, startled. Its eye was as big as a dime, dumb with mindless terror, looking up at the sky, which must have seemed a new and terrible thing. Its mouth opened wide then closed again, and again, and again, and the hook through its jaw and gill dripped bright red blood. Father watched it, his
head tilted. Its spasms slowed, then renewed with an even greater frenzy. I covered my face with my hands. “How long until it dies?”

I heard Father pick it up and strike it against something. “It's dead now.”

And it was. Its jaws were still and its eye was blank. Father yanked the hook out and threw the fish in the bucket, which was filled halfway with water, and it floated there with its white belly up. The water in the bucket turned pink. I felt dizzy. I held on to the side of the still-rocking boat, hoping Father wouldn't see.

“This is a good spot,” he said. “Let's cast the line again.”

Over the next half hour we caught three more walleyes, all smaller than the first, all dying for too long on the bottom of the boat until Father picked them up and crushed their heads against the metal bench and threw them in the bucket. I didn't doze anymore. I watched the bobbin with dread, hoping it would stay on the surface, my heart lurching each time it twitched and sank. When at last we turned for home I sat in the bow, facing away from the pale bodies that swayed in the bucket. I leaned into the wind, feeling the air cool my face as it blew my hair back.

In the kitchen Mother was making breakfast. When she saw me with Father she stopped mixing the pancake batter. “You took her fishing?”

“She caught four fish.” He laid them on the counter.

Mother wrapped them in paper and put them in the refrigerator. “We'll fry them for supper,” she said, smiling a tight smile at me.

At the table I surprised myself by how hungry I was, reaching for more than my usual share of pancakes, eggs, and biscuits. Father laughed, saying I was a fisherman and deserved a fisherman's breakfast, and when he smiled at me I felt something shimmer between us like a ribbon. But I also remembered the fish flailing on the bottom of the boat and the pink water in the bucket, and the eggs tasted like dough in my mouth and I had to turn away.

Lilith hadn't asked where I'd been, and she'd hardly looked at
me since I'd returned. She was awake, I think, when I got dressed, and as I pictured her watching through the window at our boat trailing black chevrons across the water I felt a wretched mixture of spite and regret. I hoped she was envious that Father had chosen me, the quiet church mouse, to take fishing. I hoped she'd felt left out, the way I did when she was with Jeannette and Betty. I also wished she'd been in the boat with me, because she would have understood about the fish, and about Father's hand on my arm, and I didn't know how to explain any of it to her.

Now she set down her fork with an air of announcement. “Guess what? We're going to put on a cabaret.”

“A what?” Father said.

“It's like a talent show,” she explained. “With singing and dancing and magic tricks. We're going to do it on the last night of summer, for all the families. We've been practicing.”

She hadn't told me about this. Not once, in all the nights I'd stayed up until she got home just so I could listen to her gossip, had she said anything about putting on a show. I'd been keeping my own secret, of course—she didn't know about my friendship with Matthew. I was afraid she would ruin it; that she'd make fun of how we still played like children or tell me what a little boy Matthew was compared to Charlie and the others. I could think of no reason for her not to tell me about the cabaret other than that she simply hadn't cared to tell me or, worse, hadn't even thought about it.

“Who's we?” Father asked. I could sense Mother stiffen, and I realized Father might not approve of this at all, and might forbid it. I wasn't sure what I wanted him to do. Lilith, though, seemed unconcerned as she began ticking off her fingers. Jeannette and Betty. Ben. Harry and Mickey Jones. Felicity and Sincerity. Opal would play the piano. Opal was the Williamses' daughter, shy and immature at seventeen, and Father had been fond of her since she was a little girl. Everyone else Lilith named was the teenaged son or daughter of a lake family, and she hadn't mentioned Charlie.

“What kind of music?” Father said.

“Songs from the movies, and from musicals. Like ‘Lullaby of Broadway' and ‘Blue Moon.' I'm going to sing ‘On the Good Ship Lollipop.'”

Shirley Temple's films were the only live-action movies we were allowed to see when they came to the Williamsburg theater. I hadn't heard of any of the other songs. Father nodded. “When I was a boy, we put on a puppet show one summer,” he said, his face soft with nostalgia. Mother turned back to the dishes.

After breakfast I didn't linger at the house. I wanted, more than anything, to be in the deep forest with Matthew, even though it was Saturday and we didn't play together on the weekends. So I sat on the fallen log by the shed where we always met. I hoped he'd see me and come down. If he didn't, I told myself, I'd go to the Hundred Tree alone.

Abe was behind the lodge, tinkering with his motorcycle, a black, catlike machine he kept in fine condition and that, when he rode it up the lane, never failed to bring the younger boys running. My log was thirty feet from him, but he had his back turned, so he didn't see me. The grass was high here, and tickled my knees. A cloud of gnats swam around my head, and I swatted them away. I wouldn't wait long.

I heard the familiar squeak of the hinges on our back door and, to my surprise, Lilith came out. I'd assumed she'd gone to join her friends for what I now knew was cabaret practice. She looked around and called my name. I didn't want to talk to her; my thoughts were too muddled with the fishing and the cabaret she hadn't invited me to join, so I didn't answer, and she didn't see me sitting low on the log. But she did see Abe. She walked toward him through the Williamses' and the Joneses' backyards. When she got about ten feet away, she stopped. She put her hands on her hips. “I like your motorcycle.”

Abe looked at her, then lowered his eyes. “Thanks.”

“Would you take me for a ride on it sometime?” Lilith's mouth curled up on one side in that way I'd come to recognize. She arched her back slightly, pressing the cones of her breasts against her yellow blouse. Abe stared at them. He wiped his greasy hands on his pants. My heart beat an alarm inside my ribs: what was this?

“I can take you now, if you want,” he said.