The Lost Girls (34 page)

I'm in my old bed, in Lilith's and my old room. It seems the proper place to write the last lines of this, my last story. Tomorrow I will go to town to read to the children, and when I'm done I'll drop this journal by Arthur's house and tell him to give it to you if you come. He won't have to keep it long. There's a sickness in me; I've felt it growing for many months. Unlike Lilith, who was dragged into death one cell at a time, I have no stomach for hospitals and tubes and dying under fluorescent lights. So I will die here, in this place that is still my favorite place, despite everything.

Matthew came by this evening. He brought pumpkin bread, his grandmother's recipe, which I love. It's gotten too cold to be on the porch, so we sat in the parlor, drinking tea from flowered cups and eating bread from flowered plates, like the old people we have become. We talked about the first snow, which is coming next week, or so they say. Later this year than usual. It's been strange to see the lake frozen but the earth brown all around. It makes me uneasy, with the millennium turning just over two months from now.

We talked a bit about it—the end of the millennium. Matthew said that when he was a boy he thought by the year 2000 there would be space travel, time travel, and cures for all diseases. Instead, all we got were faster cars and flu shots. He laughed ruefully, a boy disappointed. I told him flu shots were no small thing. But I agreed with him. Not much has changed in all these years. More wars. New countries. All that technology neither of us has much
use for. Still, it's much the same world as it was when we were young, in all its most important particulars.

I asked if he wished he'd done anything differently. It was an odd question, and I surprised both of us by asking it. As I said, we don't talk about the past, but I've spent so much time in my memories of late that I suppose it was on my mind. I could see I'd made him uncomfortable.

“I made a choice once,” he said, “but I'm not going to regret it.”

I smiled: it was the sort of thing I'd expected him to say. And I did understand him. I knew he meant the choice he made to stay here with Abe, in the place for which Abe was best suited, rather than go be an astronaut or follow whatever dream might have supplanted that one. He'd made his peace with it, no doubt because he'd made it out of love. The things we do for love are the hardest things to regret.

“Do you?” he asked. He wasn't just being polite, asking me the question I'd asked him. He wanted to know. I could see it in the careful way he held his plate. Between us lay all the decades that connected the children we'd been with the old man and old woman we'd become. And something more: that listening thing that, from time to time, infuses the air of this house and brushes against my cheek. Emily, but not quite Emily. Or not just Emily.

I set my teacup on the table. For a long time I'd wanted someone to ask me that question. I'd wanted to tell someone that I regretted nothing. That I, too, had acted out of love, and could claim that absolution. That I kept Lilith's secret because I was a good sister, loyal to the end to the only person who ever truly cared about me, who ever needed me. And that anyone who was hurt by what I did deserved their suffering.

But I don't believe these things any more, if I ever truly believed them. I regret it all. I regret that I didn't leave Lilith and Emily on the shore that night, and go get help. I regret that I didn't tell everyone, when they came, that Emily's death was an accident.
I wish I'd let Lilith go wherever her spirit led her. I wish I'd let Emily lie in the earth, with a stone to tell the world she'd been here for a little while. I wish I'd been a different person entirely. A person with courage. If I had been, many lives would have been different.

Matthew was watching me with that patience I've always loved in him. I wanted to reach across the space between us, across all the vanished moments, and take his hand. The hand of the boy who had been my friend. Who walked with me all those years ago, as the light shimmered through the trees and the hem of my dress brushed my calves.

But I couldn't answer him, so I didn't.

One afternoon that summer you came, you asked about the girl in the painting and I told you the lie I've always told. I was very practiced by then. But I couldn't look at you while I told it. You, with your wispy hair and fragile features and your eyes like water under a pale sky. A child delivered of the past, born of the choices I made, whose life would span two centuries, not just one. You are the only person at whom I could not look when I said my little sister had run away in the night and disappeared in the forest. Not Matthew, not Maurie, not even Mother. Only you.

Then, when you asked what I thought had become of Emily, I told you the truth. I said it out loud, there on the porch. It's the only time I've ever said the words. I bound my secret up in the trappings of speculation and cynicism so you wouldn't hear it as anything but the clear-eyed guess of a person who accepts a great likelihood as certain. But I told you the truth.

Lilith would say I owe her, still, the secrecy she gave so much to purchase, and she is right. But now that she's gone, and I soon will be, there is another, greater debt I must pay. Long ago, I cast my sister into a grave over which her mother would never weep,
and over which no one but I would ever mourn. She would have grown up to be beautiful. She would have grown up safe. I would have grown to love her. I have kept the promise I made to watch over her all my life, but it is not enough. After I am gone, I want someone who cared about her, even for just an afternoon; and who loved this place, even for just a summer; to know where she is and what happened to her.

So I'm telling you. You, the nine-year-old girl who lives in my memory.

Please, remember her. Remember all of us. We are the ghosts of lives stolen, and lives never lived. Once we were heavy, but now we are light. I promise we will not burden you.

The water was a perfect mirror for the sky. Matthew turned off the motor, and the metal boat coasted to a stop, suspended between two heavens. The air on that early spring day was warm and cool at the same time. The last of the ice had melted just the week before, but the brown grasses at the water's edge already were streaked with green.

Justine opened the cardboard box. She expected a fine dust, noncorporeal, that would blow away on the wind or float on the water, but it was heavy, like sand. It would sink quickly.

Melanie sat beside her, and Angela and Maurie faced them. Matthew and Abe sat in the stern. Everyone was watching her. She'd thought she would recite Psalm 51, so she had a Bible—the King James version, with its words like music. Now she decided not to. The lake, so bright in the sun, seemed unconcerned with sin, or forgiveness.

She caught Matthew's eye. He nodded. She tipped the box over the side so that some of the ashes slid into the water. They plumed into the clear green depths and disappeared. Then she passed the box to Melanie. Melanie pushed her hair behind her ear, and it fell forward again. She took the box and tipped it over the other side. The ashes entered the water with a
shhh
.

Maurie helped Angela send a few fine grains to join the others. Then she put the box on her own lap and straightened her back. For a moment Justine was afraid she was going to say something, some grand, hollow words about death and family. She thought,
please don't. And Maurie did, indeed, seem to think better of it. She poured the ashes over the side with only a whispered, “Good-bye, Lucy.”

She would leave the next day. The probate had come through two weeks earlier, and Justine had given her the five thousand dollars her boyfriend took from her and told her, gently, to go. Maurie's face had closed tight on her hurt, and Justine wavered. But she remembered Melanie's red, open mouth on the frozen lake and her daughters' faces after Arthur's party, and she said nothing when Maurie said she'd been planning to leave anyway. Now, looking at Maurie's upright posture, she realized she might never see her again. There would just be the postcards that would keep coming until the end, and a couple of phone calls a year.

As Maurie gave the box to Abe, she squeezed his hand. Matthew hadn't wanted him to come, but Justine insisted. He lifted out a handful of the ashes and let them filter through his fingers into the water. “She'll be glad of the company,” he said, almost to himself. He didn't see the look on his brother's face, but Justine did. Later she would find Matthew in the kitchen of the lodge, make them both a cup of tea, tell him Lucy's secret, and give him the pendant he had made for her long ago. Grief and regret would settle into the lines of his face as he took it, and he would seem much older from that moment on. Justine would wonder if she had been right to tell him, but he would thank her.

A flock of geese flew overhead in a raucous chevron, heading home. Matthew waited until they passed. Over his shoulder Justine could see the gap in the row of houses, like a missing tooth. The builders would come once the ground thawed. There had been a small policy on the house, enough to build something simple. Two bedrooms, a kitchen, a living room, a front porch. She would paint it yellow.

The birds were gone. Silence returned. A light breeze lifted Jus
tine's hair and fell away. Melanie leaned over the side of the boat and drew her fingers across the surface of the lake, breaking her reflection into ripples. Then Matthew, with the greatest of care, laid the last of Lucy's ashes upon the water, and the water took them down.

First things first: I would never have written this book without the unfailing encouragement of my husband, Chris. His faith in me, even as years passed without a finished draft, gave me the strength I needed to get it done. Saying yes to him twenty-five years ago was the best move I've ever made.

I also want to thank my children, Kyle and Matthew, for their patience, their willingness to put up with their father's cooking while I was at workshops, and the pride and wonder in their eyes when I told them this book had sold. If I've taught them nothing else, I hope I've taught them that even the wildest dreams are possible.

Thanks to my parents, Don and Audrey, and my sister, Tracy, who are the opposites of the parents and sisters in this book, and make me feel almost like the smartypants they seem to think I am.

I owe an incalculable debt to the writers who've helped me along the way, especially Elizabeth Clark, my muse and fellow dreamer, who made me do it and showed me how. Also Ellen Collett, Judith Edelman, Sharon Hazzard, Sharon Knapp, Jeanne Koskela, Deborah Michel, and Kathy Stevenson, the Bennington “Old Ladies” who make me grateful every day that I got on that plane to Vermont. Thank you to my teachers, Douglas Bauer, Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Martha Cooley, and especially Alice Mattison, who always took the time. To Melissa Cistaro, in whose footsteps I have tried to walk, and Carey Lifschultz, who went into the trenches with me. And to Jenny Brown, Aya de Leon, Abby Fabiaschi, and Louise Miller, my comrades in this crazy debut journey and whose friendship kept me sane.

Thank you, also, to the many friends who asked how it was going and listened to my tales of woe, especially Jocelyn Lamm, Karla Martin, and Rona Sandler, sharers of wine, wisdom, and twenty-five years of friendship; Jules Campfield, who knows how hard some hills are to climb; and the ladies of the Mill Valley Book Club: Lisa Carmel, Sara Fortine, Tammy Grant, Katy Kuhn, Annika Miller, and Dawn Smith-Holmes.

A
massive
thank you to Michelle Brower, my agent, who picked my manuscript out of the slush pile one snowy February day and changed my life, and whose positive energy and stalwart support made it all so much fun. An equally enormous thank you to my editor, Kate Nintzel, whose guidance took this novel to places I didn't know it could go.

Last, but of course not least, I want to thank everyone in the publishing world who took my dog-eared manuscript, made it into a beautiful book, and sent it into the world, especially Lauren Truskowski, Molly Waxman, Shelby Meizlik, Jennifer Hart, Margaux Weisman, Annie Hwang, Ben Bruton, Joy Johannessen, and Sally Arteseros.

HEATHER YOUNG
earned her law degree from the University of Virginia and practiced law in San Francisco before beginning her writing career. She received an MFA from the Bennington College Writing Seminars, and has studied at the Tin House Writers' Workshop and the Squaw Valley Writers Workshop. She lives in Mill Valley, California, with her husband and two children.
The Lost Girls
is her first novel.

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Cover design by Mumtaz Mustafa

Cover photograph © Gary Isaacs / Getty Images

Title page photograph by Skylines/Shutterstock, Inc.