The Lost Girls (24 page)

Abe's eyes were cloudy again. “She was too small,” he said, almost to himself. “Too small to be out at night.”

“That's right,” Matthew said to him, soothingly.

“What about Lucy?” Melanie asked. “Can we talk about her?”

Matthew frowned. “Why do you want to talk about her? She has nothing to do with you.”

“You said I was like her.”

“I said you looked like her. There's a difference.”

Melanie looked so hurt that Justine felt bad for her, but she
didn't say anything. Like Matthew, she wanted this conversation to be over.

Matthew drummed his fingers on the table. Then he reached for his brother's cocoa, even though Abe had barely touched it. “It's time for your rest.” This time Abe didn't resist, and neither did Melanie.

When Abe and Matthew had gone, Melanie slouched in her chair, watching the door. On the wall behind her hung half a dozen faded photographs of men and boys holding large silver fish. None was more recent than the 1970s. The place really was a time capsule, Justine thought, its past separated from its present by the thinnest of veils. Maybe it wasn't so strange that Melanie would be fascinated by the old story. After all, Emily had disappeared from the house they were living in, which, like this lodge, seemed unchanged from the day it happened. She herself had been intrigued by it the summer she'd spent here. “You seem interested in Emily,” she said.

Melanie's head snapped around. Justine saw a flash of anger, then her features shuttered. “It's okay,” Justine said. “I think about her, too. It's hard not to.” She raised her fingers and lowered them flat upon the table. “Does it scare you, what happened to her?”

“No.” Melanie's voice was flat.

“Well, it scares me. If you disappeared like that, I don't know what I'd do.”

As the dim light cast shadows beneath Melanie's cheekbones, Justine glimpsed again the adult face that waited beneath the girl's, all hard edges and smooth, icy planes. “Would you stay here for the rest of your life?” Melanie asked. “Like Emily's mother?”

Justine knew the answer: of course she would. She would stay here, waiting, just as Emily's mother had. She would die without knowing, just as she had. And the not knowing would be almost worse than the loss itself. She looked down, gathering herself. Before she could speak, Matthew came back. He collected their
empty mugs and began washing them in the small sink behind the bar.

The message was clear. Justine stood and zipped her coat. Melanie rose too, reluctantly. As they turned to leave, the back door opened and Abe was there again, holding a small wooden box. Matthew looked up in frustration, a mug in his hand, but Abe spoke to Melanie. “I have a present for you.” His manner was shy, like a boy giving a flower to a crush. Justine took the box before Melanie could reach it, then felt ridiculous. What did she think it was going to be? All that talk about missing daughters had rattled her.

When she opened it she found a little girl's blue slipper. It was stained with dirt, and it was the match to the one she'd found in the trunk in Emily's room.

Justine heard the crash of ceramic in the sink and turned to see Matthew picking up the pieces of the mug. She could sense his heart pounding and felt a corresponding surge in her own blood. What was this? Why did this old man have a missing girl's dirty bedroom slipper hidden in a box?

Abe gestured at Melanie. “I want her to have it.”

“Where did you get it?” Justine asked.

“I found it by the creek. The night she left.”

“I thought they found no trace of her.” She was sure that's what Dinah the librarian had said, and the newspaper clippings in the basement, too.

Abe stammered under the pressure of everyone's attention. “I—I wanted to keep it. To remember her. She was my friend.”

Matthew put his hand on his brother's arm. His manner was calm, but Justine could still sense the rapid pace of his heart. “You found that the next day, when we were looking for her, right?”

Abe's fingers worked at his pant leg.

“It's okay. You didn't know they would want it, did you?”

“They were looking for her. Not her slipper.”

“That's right. We were looking for her.”

Melanie's eyes were wide as she watched them. Justine felt a tickle along the back of her neck. Abe had said he'd found the slipper the night Emily disappeared, not the next day, when the searchers had gone looking. Had he meant to say that? Or was it just the lapse of an old, simple man—a fumbling of time, or of words? For a moment she pictured the dark-haired figure who'd stalked Emily in Melanie's drawings, but of course that didn't mean anything. Melanie had no idea what had happened to the little girl, and it was in her grim nature to imagine the worst fate possible.

Justine put the slipper back in the box. “You should keep this,” she said to Abe as she placed it on the table. “Thank you anyway.”

She left then, nudging Melanie before her. As she shut the door she saw the brothers standing in the light from the back room. Matthew placed his hand on Abe's shoulder and turned him toward the back door. He picked up the box as he followed.

Matthew was here this evening. We had tea on the porch and watched the lake settle into darkness. Since Lilith's passing, he comes by once or twice a week. We don't talk much, but our silences are comfortable, and I'm always happy to see him walk up the road.

Tonight, as he sat in Lilith's chair and I in mine, I found myself wanting to ask him if he remembered our time together as children. It was a difficult question, because we never talk about the past. Our conversations are always in the present or the immediate future: how are his guests, how is the library, what will the weather bring. I've always thought it a generosity on his part, to avoid raising memories of the worst time of my life. I still think that. But now that I'm writing this and remembering so many things I thought I'd forgotten, something else occurs to me. He and Abe are the only other people still living who were there, and they were witnesses to much of it. I wonder how much he remembers.

So I said it, straight out, the way Lilith would have: “Do you remember how we used to play in the forest?”

The question surprised him, as I knew it would. He looked at me, and then away, and in the quick turn of his head I saw the boy he'd been, smooth skinned and black haired and clear-eyed. “I do,” he said. His voice was melancholy, but there was happiness in it, too, as if this memory, at least, was a treasured one. Then my mind leaped ahead to the end of that summer, to our last day
together, and the old shame bore down on me. I couldn't speak anymore, and he, respectful as always, let it be.

When he left I watched him walk to the lodge. In the last, blue light his figure was straight and tall. He is nearly seventy-seven, but he could have been sixty, or forty. He will live a long time after I'm gone, and he'll outlive Abe as well. He'll be lonely here by himself, but I don't think he'll leave.

If you read this, I imagine you'll think it strange that so many of us stayed. Strange that Maurie was the only one to go. Of course, we always knew she would. As a girl she found her adventures in the forest, but as she grew she wanted adventures of a different sort. She hung around the lodge, teasing and flirting and God knows what else with the summer boys. Every year she had a new one on a string; some lawyer's son or prep school baseball star who was “going places.” They played along, because she was alluring in a wild sort of way, but in the end they drove away with their parents, casting her off like an outgrown pair of shoes, and she cried behind her bedroom door. She had her pick of the local boys, too, but she treated them the way the summer boys treated her: as nothing but easy fun. Like Lilith, she got a reputation, but she didn't care. Neither did Lilith, though it drove me to exasperation. She's ruining herself, I told Lilith, but Lilith wouldn't hear it. Let her play, she said. She's not long for this place anyway.

Still, we weren't prepared for the suddenness of her departure. That was my fault. I shouldn't have kept those letters, the ones that boy Justin sent. They spanned about six months before he gave up and, I suppose, began to forget her, but I couldn't bring myself to throw them away. Maybe it was because I remembered the way they played in the early days, off in the woods, as Matthew and I had. I used to imagine them finding the Hundred Tree, with the cushions rotting where we left them. As if those things were still there, after all these years. Whatever the reason, I kept his letters in a shoe box in the back of our closet. And one night Maurie found them.

We were in the parlor. Mother and Lilith were watching the television, and I was reading. Maurie had been upstairs for some time. She'd taken to wearing some of Mother's and Lilith's old things—brooches, scarves, and wraps that she made lively in that way she had—so I suppose that's what she was looking for. She came running down the stairs in her jeans and those cowboy boots she wore everywhere then. The tears on her face ran black with the mascara she slathered on. She went to Lilith, opened the shoe box, and threw the letters in her lap. Her fury had that elemental quality Lilith's used to have, a crackling, combustive charge that lit her up from the inside. I was glad of the enormous wings of my chair, like a protective shell.

“He wrote me! And I never knew! I thought he didn't care. But you took them! You opened them, and you read them, and you never gave them to me!”

Lilith picked up an envelope and read Maurie's name in that boyish hand. “I've never seen these.”

I crossed my legs beneath my skirt. My panty hose scraped together. It was a hot night, and they were wet behind my knees. I said, “She didn't take them. I did.”

Maurie whirled on me. “Liar. You don't do anything she doesn't tell you to do.”

Well, that hurt me. I wanted her to know she was wrong. I wanted it very badly. So I gripped the arms of the chair and said, “His mother asked me to do it. She didn't want him with you. They were a nice family.”

I shouldn't have said that, I know, even though it was true. Maurie's face wrenched. I'd never thought she looked like Father, except for the coloring, but her anger did something to her eyes, giving them that intense, deep-seeing quality his had. “You bitch,” she said.

Lilith stood up. The letters fell to the floor. “Don't talk to Lucy like that.”

“It was better this way,” I said, and my voice shook only a little. “Those things never last.” She was right; I'd read the letters. I'd read them many times. I knew how much he loved her. But they were only fifteen.

“How would you know?” Maurie's voice was acid. “Nobody's ever loved you.”

“I said leave her alone,” Lilith snapped.

Maurie spun back to her mother. “Do you understand what she did to me? Do you? All I've ever wanted is to get out of here! He was the only one who ever loved me, who ever wanted me. And she wrecked it!”

A quivering silence followed. I was terrified Lilith would look at me, and of what I might see in her eyes if she did, but she didn't. With a forced calm, she said, “Stop it. He was just some boy you played with for a month every summer. He wasn't some knight in shining armor.”

Maurie jabbed a finger at her. “You don't know what it's like for me, stuck out here with my mother, a dried-up virgin, and an old woman who can't stop talking about a girl who died twenty-five years ago.” She waved her arm at Mother, who shrank as though from a blow. “Do you even know what people say about you? About me?”

“I don't care what they say. And if you don't like it here you can leave. You don't need some boy to take you.”

“Really, Mother?” Maurie's voice raged with bitter contempt. “Like you did? After my daddy died you just sat here on your ass, and you're going to keep sitting here until you die. So will Lucy, because she doesn't have the guts to leave. I know what this is about. You both lost your chance. So you had to ruin mine.”

It took everything I had not to move. Lilith stepped close to Maurie until her face was inches from her daughter's. They were the same height, with the same dark hair, the same strong bones
from which Lilith's skin had begun to slip. When Lilith spoke, her voice was quiet and hard. “I didn't lose my chance when your father died. I lost it when you were born.”

Maurie went white. In her chair by the television Mother gave a low sob. I closed my eyes. To this day, I don't know why Lilith said such a cruel thing. Maybe it was to give Maurie the shove she needed to get out. Maybe she even believed it. If that were true, it would be a great relief to me. But in all the years that followed, I never found the courage to ask.

“Fuck you,” Maurie said. Her voice was quiet now. “Fuck all of you. You're going to die in this dump. But I'm getting out.”

And she did. The next morning, before we woke, she drove the car to town and took the first bus that pulled into the station. We got the postcard two months later, from Minneapolis. She'd gone looking for him. She must not have found him, or it hadn't turned out well, but she would never let us know that. Instead she wrote about her sophisticated life, sharing an apartment with two other girls, working in a restaurant, going out at night. Honestly, it all sounded pretty low to me, but she had a job and a place to live, and that gave me great comfort. Lilith hadn't seemed worried that her daughter was a runaway at seventeen, but the thought had made me sick with fear.

Six months later she was in Chicago, and it was the same story, but this time there was a boyfriend she was sure she'd marry. A year after that she turned up in Detroit with no mention of the boyfriend. On it went: Kansas City, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh, and then towns so small we'd never heard of them. Sometimes there were boyfriends, sometimes not, but it never stopped, even after you were born. The way she dragged you back and forth across the country, it was clear she never caught up to whatever she was chasing.

When she came back that summer, though, something was dif
ferent. On the surface she seemed relaxed, glad to be home, but she jumped when the phone rang, and I knew she wasn't chasing anymore. She was running. That was what made me think she might be back for good. Because there's no better hiding place than here. And, I told myself, she had you to think about. She'd rarely mentioned you in her postcards, and apparently she never told you about us, but you were old enough to want to belong somewhere, and where else could you have that? We were your only family, even though we were strangers. I watched you read in the hammock and walk barefoot down the lane to the lodge, and I could feel you unwind as the summer went on. Surely, I thought, Maurie would see that staying here was the best thing for you.

I will admit, too, that I wanted her to stay. Despite all the trouble she'd been, despite all the worry she caused me and the things she said the night before she left, I loved having her home. She acted like nothing had ever gone wrong between the three of us, and I believe she was glad to see us. She lay on the beach in her bikini, her body too thin but her skin rosy in the sun, or sat with her legs over the arm of the porch swing, dangling her sandals from her toes, and laughed with her mouth wide open. Best of all, she did something to Lilith, something that made Lilith's eyes glow as they used to do, before Emily and Father and the rest. I would have done almost anything to keep them that way.

Then one night in late August, the four of us went to dinner at the lodge. We didn't often eat there, especially after Matthew added those cabins, but most of his guests were gone now, so when Maurie suggested it we agreed. It was as empty as we'd hoped, with just two other families who were well along in their meals and three Indian men at the bar. After Matthew's summer girl took our order, he brought the food himself. By then the other diners had left, so he pulled up a chair and we had a nice, easy time for a while, listening to Maurie's stories about the places she'd been. She could tell a story, even when she was the butt of the joke, so she made
her life sound like a wild, funny ride instead of the miserable, vagabond existence it was. “Remember, Jus?” she'd say. “Remember when we went to Six Flags, and rode the roller coaster?” You were so proud of her, your beautiful mother, reshaping your life into a grand adventure there at the table.

After a while, Maurie asked why Abe didn't join us. Matthew told her he was closing down the kitchen, but she shook her head. “Why don't you ever let him out of there?”

“He works in the back,” Matthew said, in a tone that told me he didn't want to discuss it. Maurie said that was just an excuse.

“Do you think he's some sort of pervert?” She was smiling, but Matthew's arm tensed next to mine. I didn't like this conversation either. Matthew's father had kept Abe in the back for one reason, but I knew Matthew did it for another.

“I'm going to get him,” Maurie announced, and walked to the back door.

Matthew looked at you, where you sat fiddling with the last of your French fries. “You don't have to sit here with us old folks. Why don't you get a book from over there and go read on the porch?”

It was clear you wanted to stay, but it hadn't been a question, so off you went.

A minute later Maurie came out with Abe. He was still a handsome man then. His shoulders were broad and he hadn't gotten fat the way some big men do. His hair had almost no gray in it, and his face was as unlined as a man twenty years younger.

Maurie went to the bar, where she ordered beers from the girl. The three Indians watched her while she waited and she smiled at them. When she brought the mugs, two in one hand and three in the other like the practiced waitress she was, she set them on the table. “Now that it's just us grown-ups, we can have a party.” She didn't ask where you'd gone.

I've never been much for beer, so I sipped mine. Abe drank his
as if it were a Coke, and Maurie wasn't far behind. The conversation wasn't as much fun as it had been. Matthew stopped talking altogether, and Lilith sat stiffly, watching Maurie as she draped herself over Abe's arm and talked about some man she'd known in Abilene who ran a dog racing park. Abe blinked his slow eyes, always at Lilith. I was glad Matthew had sent you to the porch.

When Maurie finished her beer, she picked up her glass and Abe's and went to the bar for a refill. This time she stood a little closer to the Indians and said something to them with a toss of her head. They were rough-looking, with long hair past their collars and pants dirty from outside work. They'd come over from Olema, just for the beer; they weren't overnight guests. I'd noticed more Indians hanging around the lodge since Matthew's father retired. I didn't know why—Lord knows they had plenty of bars in Olema—but I knew Matthew had longed to be part of his mother's tribe as a boy, so I'd been happy for him.

Now one of them put his hand on Maurie's hip below the belt loops of her tight jeans. She shook it off playfully, then took the beers and came back to us. The Indian said something to his friend, and they looked over their shoulders at her. When she sat she wound her arm through Abe's and ignored them in a way that wasn't ignoring, if you know what I mean.