The Lost Girls (3 page)

But Lucy had left the house to Justine.

The elevator chimed. Phoebe, the office manager, was back from lunch.

“Mom, I have to go,” Justine said. “Do you have the lawyer's number?” She wrote it down and slid the phone back into her purse just as Phoebe opened the office door. “Angela's sick,” she said to her, without meeting her eyes. She'd never asked to leave early before.

Phoebe sighed. She didn't much care for Justine, but she had a fatherless child of her own, so she said she'd cover the desk. Justine walked out without looking back.

In the apartment she paced, holding the phone in one hand and
the lawyer's number in the other. Finally she sat at the kitchen table, pulled up her knees, and closed her eyes, as she did during her morning minutes. Only this time she couldn't hear the silence. Instead she heard the low hum that came from the refrigerator, the fluorescent lights, the clock on the wall.

The apartment was crappy. The walls were scuffed, the carpet was matted, and the sliding door was held shut with duct tape. Still, it was the only place she'd lived since she stood with one hand in Francis's and the other on her belly, where the secret clot of cells divided and grew, and told her mother, who'd decided to give Portland a try, that she was staying in San Diego. She was eighteen, Francis nineteen. They'd picked it because it was the closest place to the ocean they could afford. Eight blocks, so not that close, but when she stood on the balcony at night with Melanie in her arms Justine could hear it whispering beyond the low-slung buildings that made up their neighborhood. The night they moved in they drank champagne out of paper cups in the empty living room. The worn nap of the carpet was soft on Justine's shoulders as they made love, and she'd sworn she'd never leave. That her child would grow up in one place, whole.

She opened her eyes. Patrick's coffee cup, half empty, sat on the table.

She dialed the lawyer's number. Just to find out what was going on. To see if her mother had her facts straight, which wasn't a certainty by any means.

The lawyer's name was Arthur Williams. He and his uncle before him had handled the Evans sisters' affairs for decades, he said. Lucy had died three weeks before, in her sleep. It had been sudden but peaceful, and her neighbor had found her the next day. His voice was soft, the consonants that bracketed the broad vowels crisp.

Justine pressed the handset against her ear. “My mother said you wanted to talk about Lucy's will?”

“Yes. You're her sole beneficiary.” This meant, he explained, that Lucy had left Justine everything she owned, except the jewelry she'd left for Maurie. The house was old and in need of updating, but it was unencumbered by any liens. Lucy had a checking account and an investment portfolio, too; he would fax her the details.

“How much is in the accounts?” Justine asked, then wished she could take the question back. It sounded like something her mother would ask.

The lawyer answered as though it were a perfectly acceptable question. The checking account had about $2,000, and the investments were mostly stock and worth about $150,000. “You might want to come and settle things in person,” he said, “if there are things in the house you want to keep. Or you can contact a lawyer where you are, and we'll handle the probate by fax. Then I can recommend a realtor to sell the house for you.”

He paused. Justine knew she was supposed to say something, but her head felt as if it would float straight up and away if she didn't hold on to it. There was $150,000 in an investment portfolio somewhere in Minnesota. She and Patrick had $1,328 in their account at the Wells Fargo. The lake house had been the color of butter in the sun.

“Can I call you back?” she asked. Of course, he said.

When she hung up she took Patrick's coffee cup to the sink. She washed it and dried it and put it in the cupboard. Then, from the storage unit in the basement, she pulled the faded blue duffel she'd kept from when she was her mother's daughter. In it she put her jeans and the three sweatshirts she owned. Two pairs of shoes that weren't sandals. Bras, underwear, socks, pajamas. Toothbrush, shampoo, hairbrush. She zipped up the bag and put it by the front door.

From beneath the sink she took a stack of brown grocery bags. In them she put the photo albums she'd made when the girls were
babies and the more recent snapshots magneted to the refrigerator. From inside the refrigerator she took bread, peanut butter, and jelly. From the pantry, crackers, chips, and cereal. At two thirty Patrick called on her cell. She stood motionless in the apartment as he crowed about his day: two fax machines and a printer sold before his lunch break. When he asked what was for dinner, she told him they had leftover spaghetti. He asked her to pick up that garlic bread he liked on her way home. She said she would.

After they hung up she called the lawyer. “We're coming,” she said. He sounded pleased. He gave her directions and told her Lucy's neighbor, Matthew Miller, would have a key to the house.

Her daughters didn't have suitcases, so Justine took the pillowcases from their beds and filled them with their warmest clothes and shoes. Then she used more brown bags to hold their jewelry boxes with tiny ballerinas inside, stuffed animals, plastic horses, dolls with tangles in their hair. Barrettes and scrunchies, drawing paper and markers. She put the bags by the front door with the rest. It didn't look like much, but it filled the back of the Tercel.

When she finished loading the car it was four thirty. She was supposed to pick up her daughters at the aftercare at five. At five thirty, Patrick would be home.

She put her apartment key on the kitchen counter and her cell phone beside it. She pulled a Post-it off the stack. The clock inched forward another minute while she debated what to write. Francis's note had said he was sorry. She didn't know if she was sorry. She didn't know what she felt, other than a buzzing anxiety pegged to the sweep of the second hand around the clock face. In the waning November afternoon the living room furniture she and Francis had bought on layaway looked dark and strange, as though it had never belonged to her at all. A shiver ran across her shoulder blades. She'd forgotten how easy it was, to slip out of a life.

Dear Patrick
, she wrote,
the spaghetti is thawing in the refrigerator
. She laid the note on the counter, smoothed it once, and walked out.
Her feet on the steps were light. When she reached the bottom she heard her cell phone ring, faintly.

Later she wouldn't remember driving to the school. But she would remember that her face felt like dried icing as she walked her daughters to a picnic table on the playground and told them they'd inherited a house on a lake that had a porch and a swing, and that it was in Minnesota, but that was okay, because they'd get to see things along the way, like the Rocky Mountains and Las Vegas, and it would be an adventure.

The girls stayed quiet until she was done talking. Then Melanie's eyes narrowed. “Wait. Are we moving there?”

Melanie was not an attractive child. At eleven she'd long since lost her baby fat, revealing severe features and a too-long nose that rode high into her wide brow and gave her a haughty air. Now her suspicious frown made her look small and cunning, like a fox.

Justine forced her voice to remain even. “It's a house, sweetie. We'll have a great big house just for the three of us, with a lake right out front. For free.”

“The three of us? What about Patrick?”

“I thought it might be good to be on our own for a while, just us girls.”

Melanie's frown deepened. Angela looked stunned. Both girls' arms in their short-sleeved shirts were thin and straight and brown from the San Diego sun. Behind them Justine could see other parents picking up their children. Taking them home for dinner, then homework at the kitchen table, maybe some television before bed. “I've got all your stuff in the car.”

“We're leaving now?” Melanie's voice slid up half an octave.

“I know it's sudden. But it's better this way. A clean break.”

“What about Daddy?” Angela said.

Justine opened her mouth and shut it again. Francis had been
gone a year, and they hadn't heard a word from him in all that time. Neither girl had asked about him in months. After Patrick moved in, the picture of Francis and the girls at Coronado Beach had disappeared from the girls' room. Justine had thought this meant they were shaking him off their feet like dust, the way Maurie always told her to, the way she was trying to, but the hitch in Angela's voice told a different story.

Melanie said, “Daddy's not coming back, you idiot.” She looked at Justine, her eyes flat. Justine muffled a flare of anger. Her eldest daughter's sullen temperament and brusque manner often made Justine dislike her, something she felt ashamed of and guilty about. Besides, she knew it wasn't Melanie she should be mad at this time. Toward the end Francis had hardly come home at all, but that hadn't diminished his daughters' love for him. The opposite, in fact.

Justine put her hand on Angela's arm. “I'll tell Mrs. Mendenhall where we're going, and if Daddy comes looking for us, she can tell him.” This was a lie. She wasn't going to tell Mrs. Mendenhall anything. Mrs. Mendenhall liked Patrick.

Angela's eyes filled with tears. “What about Lizzie and Emma?” These were her best friends, the three of them the most popular girls in the second grade.

Justine's tongue tasted like metal. She remembered how she would come home from school to find her mother sitting at the kitchen table with her cigarette and her can of Tab. “Sit down,” Maurie would say, and Justine would know they were leaving.

“We can send them postcards when we get there, sweetie,” she said, just as her mother had.

Angela looked back at the school. Through the open door of the aftercare center Justine could see children coloring and playing with LEGOs. Angela's face puckered, and Justine's simmering anxiety bubbled into panic. It was five thirty. Patrick was walking into the empty apartment right now. Would he come to the school?
He probably would. A familiar, claustrophobic sense of failure mixed with her panic, making the world feel small and tight. What was she thinking, doing it like this? She should have waited until tomorrow. Kept the girls home from school, had them help her pack. It would have been easier on them. And easier for her to get them in the car.

Then Melanie stood up. “Angie, you know what? It sounds like fun to live on a lake. And Lizzie and Emma can come visit.” Justine watched in mute astonishment as she continued, “Plus you'll go to a new school and you'll make all new friends. You'll be the most popular girl in class because you're so pretty. And maybe”—she shot a dark-eyed glance at Justine—“you can get a kitten.”

Justine leaned forward. “Of course! We can have cats, dogs, whatever we want.”

Angela's face was a study in misery. She'd wanted a cat ever since she was small, but Francis had been allergic, and Patrick, the farmer's son, thought cats belonged outside.

“Come on, Angie.” Melanie reached out her hand. After a precarious moment Angela swallowed a throatful of snot and tears and took it. Justine tried not to show her limb-loosening relief as she rose to follow them.

An hour later they were on Highway 15. None of them said a word as they drove through the California dusk into the Nevada night. Justine could hear her mother's voice, braying over the wind that whistled through the open windows of the Fairmont: “See any place that looks good, honey?” In the rearview mirror the salvage from their apartment crowded the Tercel's back bay, looming like a slag heap over the small forms of her daughters. She forced her eyes forward, to the yellow ribbon that unspooled before them.

It's hard for me to remember what Mother looked like then. She was slender, I do remember that, with blue eyes and curly light-brown hair she wore in a snood. Sometimes I heard people say I looked like her, and sometimes I heard them say she could be pretty if she tried, but I didn't want to look like her and I didn't think she could ever be pretty. Although I will grant that she had fine bones—years later, her cheekbones and jaw made delicate craters into which the flesh of her face sank. What I remember most are her hands: chopping, kneading, washing, mending, combing. How the tendons worked as she made her samplers, or picked at the quilt that covered her when she was dying.

In the kitchen the morning after we arrived, her hands were wet with soap as she scrubbed the pot she'd used to make our oatmeal. Father was fishing, so it was just us girls for breakfast. Lilith and I filled our bowls and sat at the table, Lilith's face a portrait of martyrdom, and mine, I'm sure, its studied mirror. We knew what awaited us: every year we had to spend the first full day of summer cleaning the house. But this year I felt a relieved pleasure beneath our shared misery, because it tasted the same as always, and as always it belonged only to us. Emily never had to help with the cleaning. She never had to do any chores at all, an inequity that had rankled us for years. Just looking at her that morning, immaculate in her pink flowered dress and matching hair ribbons, was enough to raise a righteous bile into our throats.

Lilith spooned up a large bite of Emily's oatmeal and ate it.
Emily looked at Mother, whose back was to us, but didn't say anything. Lilith laughed, and so did I.

After breakfast, we worked. We washed the curtains, beat the rugs, and wiped the cupboards clean of the curled-up insects that had died there during the winter. We scrubbed with Borax, swept under bureaus and beds and parlor furniture, and dusted the tops of the picture frames. Father was fastidious, so Mother kept a nice house in those days. She checked our work, found dust we missed, and told us to do it over. She said it kindly, though, and promised us ice creams at the end.

At first Emily crept along behind us, her eyes always on Lilith, but when we got to the upstairs bathroom, Lilith pushed her backward hard enough that she nearly fell. “Stop following us,” she said, and shut the bathroom door in her face. After that, Emily gave up and went back to Mother. Then Lilith's mood lightened, and she started to do one of the things I loved most about her: she made things fun. She staged contests to see who could clean the bedroom windows faster (she won), and who could hit the Lewises' house with the dirty water we threw out the window from our buckets. We pretended we were Cinderellas, slaving away in anticipation of our princes, and Lilith used a funny British accent as the voice of the evil stepmother, and I could barely breathe for laughing. We hadn't played like this in a while, and as we scrubbed I shared in the pleasure the house seemed to feel in shedding the dirt of winter. Once our cleaning was done, we would go to the Hundred Tree, and summer would begin in earnest.

We were mopping our bedroom floor when we heard Father return. At the sound of his voice we both stopped, listening as his feet came light upon the stairs in that quiet way he had. When he reached the landing, he paused in our doorway.

Mother's long-ago appearance may be hard for me to recall, but I remember Father's as though I saw him yesterday. This is
partly because, unlike with Mother, my memory of Father in his youth wasn't displaced by the image of him in his old age, but it's also because no one who met Father forgot him. It wasn't that he was handsome. His face was narrow, and he was shorter than most men, with spare bones. It was his eyes, which were deep-set, with bottomless dark irises that seemed unusually large, like those of babies. Like a child's, too, they looked at you for longer than was comfortable and seemed to see things that others did not. I used to love it when he looked at me.

That morning, though, he looked only at Lilith, and he frowned. She'd fastened a skirt to her head so it hung down her back—it was part of her Cinderella costume—and the makeshift wimple gave her fine cheekbones and arched brows a proud austerity that made her look, to me, every bit the beautiful servant girl destined to be a queen.

“Take that off,” he said.

Lilith's shoulders twitched in the smallest of flinches. I didn't know why Father was upset with her; we were just playing, and our game was the innocent sort of play he'd always told us God loved to see. Lilith dropped her eyes, pulled the skirt from her head, and went back to mopping. Her long hair fell forward, hiding her face.

I expected Father to leave then, but instead his eyes slid to me. He didn't look at me often, and the unaccustomed weight of his attention slackened my fingers so that my mop clattered to the floor. My face burned as I bent to pick it up. When I stood, he was gone, into his bedroom to change. Lilith and I went back to our cleaning, but we didn't play anymore.

After we finished, I wanted to go straight to the lodge for our ice creams, but Lilith made me wait while she changed into a blue plaid dress and brushed her hair. Only when she'd checked herself in the mirror for the fourth time did we go to the kitchen, where Mother was cleaning the walleyes Father had caught. Her bloody fingers
were quick with the knife, and a pile of severed heads stared dully from the counter. Emily stood on a chair, watching.

Mother brushed her forehead with the back of one hand and gave us a tired smile. “Go get your ice creams, and get those things for me. Take Emily with you.” She motioned to the table, where a five-dollar bill sat next to a grocery list. Lilith put it in the small blue purse she'd selected to match her dress, and we went out the back door.

We didn't want to take Emily, of course, and we didn't think she deserved an ice cream, so we walked faster than her legs could go. Lilith glanced at our neighbors' houses as we passed, and I was peevishly glad no one was out to see her parading in her summer glory. The happiness I'd felt during our cleaning, which even Father's disapproval of Lilith's costume hadn't erased, dissipated into the dust that clouded our feet, hers in trim white sandals and mine in dirty Keds. The moment she'd changed her clothes I'd known we weren't going to the Hundred Tree.

The lodge was the only commercial structure on the lake, so it served many purposes. On the second floor were rooms for the fishermen who drove up from the lakeless counties downstate. Downstairs, a screened-in porch ran across the front, with couches and chairs and two pinball machines. Behind that was a big, high-ceilinged room with a bar, a pool table, an old upright piano, a half dozen tables, and, in the far corner, shelves that held a dusty collection of souvenirs and the most basic of groceries.

It was empty when we arrived, but as we gathered our groceries Abe Miller pushed open the kitchen door. The night before, when the Millers served our supper by the lake, I hadn't paid him any attention, but now I saw how much he'd changed since the previous summer. He must have been fifteen then, and he'd gotten his growth; he was taller than Father now, with large hands dangling several inches below his sleeves. His black hair was cut short, and his face had lost its childish softness, revealing strong features with
a straight nose and full lips. To my horror, Lilith smiled at him—a close-mouthed smile that canted up on one side, like the one she'd given Charlie Lloyd.

Abe's swarthy skin reddened. “Can I help you?” His voice was slow, the consonants labored, the way it had always been, but now it was the deep voice of a man.

The kitchen door opened again, hitting his shoulder. Matthew, the younger brother, nearly dropped a heavy tray stacked with coffee cups, and blurted out a word I'd only heard grown men use when they thought children couldn't hear them. Abe took the tray and carried it easily to the bar, his shoulder muscles knotting beneath his white shirt.

Matthew saw us, and wiped his hands on his apron. “Do you need anything?” He stammered a little, no doubt remembering his curse word of a moment before. His head was lowered, and he looked at us through straight black bangs.

Lilith and I hadn't had much to do with the Miller brothers before that summer. The little I did know about them came from overheard talk among the grown-ups: their father was a white man from Williamsburg who'd married a woman from the local Chippewas, and after they'd both been cast out by their tribes they managed to get property along the lake and build this lodge. The lake families disapproved of them, of course, but they liked the lodge's amenities, so the women smiled at Mrs. Miller when they bought their groceries, and the men shook Mr. Miller's hand when they rented their fishing boats.

But as we stood there that day, it struck me for possibly the first time that the Miller boys were almost the same age as we. We'd lived our childhood summers not one hundred yards from one another. Lilith and I had spent those summers exploring the woods and swimming in the lake. What had the Miller boys been doing? I couldn't remember seeing them in the water, or even fishing off the
dock. Had they, too, explored the woods? With a start I realized the woods might even belong to them.

Abe was standing by the bar. He'd gone back to staring at Lilith, his mouth hanging slightly open. Matthew moved in front of him, as though shielding him.

“We'll want ice creams,” I told him, then gathered the rest of our groceries as fast as I could. Lilith went to the bar and leaned there, still giving Abe that off-kilter smile.

Matthew went to the freezer box. “What flavor do you want?” He was talking to me but his eyes cut between Abe and Lilith.

“Strawberry,” Lilith said.

“Me, too,” I said, even though chocolate was my favorite. I wanted the transaction over quickly.

“What about you?” Matthew said. I'd forgotten about Emily, who stood a few feet behind us.

“Butter brickle,” she said, in her high, little-girl voice. I looked at her—I'd never even tried the butter brickle. She smiled, and I turned away.

Matthew scooped out our cones and began to make the tally. Lilith handed me her cone and rooted in her bag for the money Mother had given us. She smiled again, this time showing Matthew her white, even teeth, and Matthew fumbled with the change. She thanked him sweetly, took her ice cream from me with graceful fingers, and walked to the door, leaving me to carry the groceries. Her hips swung in her blue dress as she brushed past Emily. Abe stood like an oak tree, his liquid gaze following her. As I picked up the groceries I glanced at Matthew, expecting to see him similarly transfixed. But he was looking at Abe.