The Lost Girls (4 page)

The drive took four days and $493.

They drove nine hours a day, stopping only for gas and food. They had the $26 Justine had left from the allowance Patrick had given her on Monday and $600 she took from their joint account on the way out of town. She didn't want to pay with the credit cards or the checks because Patrick would know where they'd been used, so they bought lunches at gas station convenience stores and dinners at fast-food restaurants to make the cash last. At night they stayed in Motel 6s and Travelodges, paying $19.99 for a single and sleeping sideways on the bed. Every day the weather grew colder and the trees fewer and more barren. In Salt Lake City they found a Salvation Army store and spent $67.50 on down coats and wool gloves. In Idaho Falls, the girls walked in snow for the first time, twisting to see the treads their sneakers left in the thin dusting that covered the motel parking lot.

Sometimes Angela asked what was happening in school. Was it recess? Was it math time? Instead of answering, Justine talked about the lake, surprising herself with the details she dredged up: the feral cats who lived under the lodge, the white butterflies in the grass at the edge of the woods, the green smell of fresh water. Angela listened with a worried crease between her brows, but Justine thought she looked intrigued despite herself.

Melanie didn't ask about school or the lake or anything else. She just drew in her sketchbook or looked at the landscape with the intensity with which she looked at everything, as though it were hiding something on purpose. Still, she seemed thoughtful rather
than sullen, and this made Justine feel hopeful, speeding like an arrow across the high desert. On Highway 90, between Bozeman and Billings, she lifted her feet and shook them, just a little.

But when her daughters slept, their heads lolling against the shoulder belts, Justine watched the snow-frosted brown land roll past and thought about Patrick. His absence was so present it was like a living thing sitting in the car with her. It accused her from the passenger seat, its silence a shout in her head, the air ringing with its charges of abandonment and betrayal. I loved you, it said. And you left me, just like Francis left you. Like your mother leaves everyone—without even bothering to say good-bye.

“I wasn't planning to leave you,” she told it. It was true, but it sounded more like an excuse than an apology.

She'd met Patrick six weeks after she came home to find Francis's two-word note next to an empty can of Coors. Those six weeks had been the worst of her adult life. She'd staggered from one day to the next with two little girls asking where their daddy was and none of his so-called friends answering her calls until reality hit in the form of the rent payment, which she couldn't make on her own. They needed to move, but she couldn't do it; couldn't send her daughters to another school in another part of town—it would be like moving to a new town altogether, a trial she'd sworn she'd never put them through. So she begged her old manager at the Sunny Kitchen for dinner shifts and went straight there from Dr. Fishbaum's, waiting tables until midnight while her daughters fell asleep without her and Mrs. Mendenhall watched her television and knitted.

It was probably the exhaustion that made her careless. She remembered a shout, the squeal of air brakes, and then someone tackled her like a linebacker and landed heavily on top of her. When her rescuer pushed himself up on his hands she saw blue eyes and square, even features etched with concern. She recognized him: he was a salesman from one of the medical supply companies. He'd been in
the office the day before, pushing his syringes and gauzes. Over his shoulder a San Diego transit bus was stopped in the road. Its door swung open, and the driver yelled, “Watch where you're going!”

The man helped her to her feet and promptly asked for a date. “I saved your life. The least you can do is let me buy you dinner.” She felt herself blush. No one had asked her out since Francis offered to drive her home from the Sunny Kitchen twelve years before, and that hadn't been a proper date. Not dinner, she said; she needed the money from the evening shifts too desperately. So she met him for lunch at a diner down the street.

She'd liked him from the start. He was handsome in a midwestern way, with reddish hair and white teeth that filled his wide smile. He ate his sandwich neatly, his fingernails clean and square, brushing the occasional crumb off the table as soon as it fell. And he talked—how he talked! There were none of the awkward pauses that marked so many of her conversations with other people as he told her about his job, his life growing up on a dairy farm in Indiana, the 1969 Mustang he'd rebuilt. She returned to work exhausted and exhilarated.

After that, he wound himself into their lives quickly. On weekends he took them to the pier in Santa Monica or fishing near Mammoth Lake, and after her night shifts he waited in the parking lot with beer and doughnuts that they ate before making love in the cramped backseat of his truck. He called her beautiful, sexy, irresistible—words Francis had never used—and made her feel she might be those things, at least some of the time. He won Angela over with presents and magic tricks, and though Melanie wasn't so easily bought, Justine didn't let that bother her. Melanie wasn't going to like any man who tried to replace her father, even a man like Patrick, who was better than Francis in every way that mattered. So when, after a month, he told her his landlady was a nightmare, she didn't need convincing. He was a miracle, she thought as she gave up the night shift.

Once he moved in, he obliterated the faint footprints Francis had left. While Francis almost never touched her, Patrick always had his hand on her hip, his arm around her on the sofa, his body pressed against hers in bed. Francis's lovemaking had been gentle and rare, even nonexistent the last few years, but Patrick's was exuberant and frequent. Francis had disappeared when he worked his bar shifts, but Patrick e-mailed from work a dozen times a day. His name on her screen was like a finger reaching from the supply company or, after the layoff, the Office Pro, to touch her on the shoulder.

And she'd loved it all. No one had ever needed her the way Patrick needed her. Not because of biology, as her children needed her; or as an audience, as her mother needed her; or intermittently, as Francis had needed her; but fully and constantly. His every mood depended on how she touched him, the words she said, the way she made his breakfast, the way she folded his shirts. It was hard work, managing him like that, and when she didn't do it right it could take days of soothing and capitulation before he recovered his equilibrium, but it made her feel like she mattered to someone for the first time in a very long time. And she needed him, too. He took care of everything, from fixing the leaky faucet to managing their money to making their weekend plans. She could depend on him, and she loved that, just as she loved his smile, his easy way of talking, the mimic's way he had of bringing people to life in his stories. When he talked about how they met he'd say “I swept you off your feet,” and it was true. He swept her up inside his world, and she loved him for that most of all.

But now, when she pictured him finding the apartment empty and reading her note on the counter; when she looked out at the brown grass and the small white houses alone in the vast land and thought about calling him—she didn't. She drove, and felt the distance between them open like a sail, pushing her forward.

In the late afternoon of the sixth day she turned the Tercel from a rural Minnesota blacktop onto a nameless, snow-covered dirt road where a wooden sign said
MILLERS LODGE—FISHING
above an Indian-style arrow pointing into the woods. The letters were a dirty white, the background once red but faded to brown. The sign itself stood in waist-high weeds. They'd seen no one for miles, and the sky threatened more snow, its chill ceramic pallor pressing against the black-fingered trees.

The road was just wide enough for the Tercel. It was so pitted and ridged that Justine steered carefully along at ten miles an hour until, after a mile and a half, they drove over a small bridge with low stone walls and down a long hill to the lake. Justine stopped the car in front of a square, log-bound structure that looked as if it had been hewn from the forest itself—the fishing lodge, where Arthur Williams had told her she'd find Matthew Miller.

The three of them sat unmoving on the vinyl seats. The lodge brooded over them, its massive porch jutting like a mouth. A smattering of cabins receded into the woods behind it. Farther along, a row of seven weathered houses dating to the early days of the century huddled together like dowager sisters, looking across the dirt road to where the lake lay embalmed in gray ice. The lake was bigger than Justine remembered, its frozen surface running between two narrow points of land half a mile away and into the distance beyond. No other structure interrupted its watchful black borders. Not a soul could be seen.

Melanie said, “I thought you said it was pretty.”

“You said there would be butterflies.” Angela's voice was small.

“That's in the summer,” Justine said. “This is winter. Remember, I told you it would be cold at first. Soon it'll get warm and sunny, and it'll be pretty then. In fact, I think it's kind of pretty now, don't you?”

Both girls looked dubiously at the austere landscape.

A hand rapped on Justine's window, startling her. An old man stood there. He wore a stained brown coat and a wool hat with heavy earflaps, and his black eyes were sunk deep in the webbing of his skin. Justine had no idea where he'd come from. She rolled the window down two inches, her eyes watering in the icy air.

“Justine Evans?” His voice was low, roughened by cigarettes.

“Yes. Are you Matthew Miller? Arthur Williams said you'd have a key to Lucy's house.”

The man's eyes slid to her daughters. They paused, then came back to her. He reached a slow hand into his pocket and withdrew a set of keys on a silver ring. He jerked his head toward the decrepit row of houses. “It's the yellow one. Third one up. You can park in the back.” Without another word, he walked around the front of the car and up the steps to the lodge. Despite his age he held his shoulders erect, and he walked quickly.

“Who was that?” Melanie asked.

“That's Aunt Lucy's neighbor. He had the key for us. Wasn't that nice?”

“He's creepy.”

For once Justine agreed with her. Matthew Miller was decidedly creepy. She kept her voice light as she said, “I'm sure he's perfectly nice. He wouldn't have been Aunt Lucy's friend otherwise.” Neither girl said anything, but she could feel them looking at her as she coaxed the car along the road to a clapboard house whose color did seem, on closer inspection, to be yellow. It was narrow and plain, with two windows in peeling frames above a battered screened-in porch, and it seemed to lean toward them, as though the effort of holding itself up had made it weary.

“Is that it?” Melanie asked.

“It's big, isn't it? Think how much bigger it is than our apartment.” Justine turned the car into a lane between the house and its equally dilapidated neighbor, finding a covered parking area in
the rear where she wedged the Tercel beside a green Subaru. Her mouth was dry. In her memory the house had seemed to glow, its yellow paint fresh in the sun.

Snowflakes began to fall bleak and fine as they walked to the front of the house. Justine was cold even in her coat. It was just four thirty, but the sun had already set and the temperature dropped by the second.

When she unlocked the door, they stepped into a gloomy entryway lit only by the pale light that filtered through heavy draperies in a living room to the left. Dark wainscot pressed close, and shadowy portraits watched from the walls. To the right a staircase vanished into a deeper darkness upstairs. Though it was warmer than outside, it was still very cold.

“Mommy, it's awful,” Angela whispered.

Justine didn't answer as she led them down a short hallway to the kitchen, where she found a push-button switch that lit a fluorescent ceiling light. This room, at least, held an echo of what she remembered, but the years had been as unkind to it as they'd been to the outside of the house. The white cupboard doors were scratched, and several hung askew on their hinges. The linoleum floor needed patching and sloped toward the back wall, and the ceiling had an ominous brown stain that probably meant something in a bathroom above was leaking. She clutched the bag of groceries she'd bought in Fargo close to her chest. Arthur Williams had said the place needed updating, but either he'd understated things or he hadn't been here in a while.

Yet—here was the old wooden table where she'd had breakfasts of cinnamon rolls and dinners of roast chicken. The flowered plates she'd loved still sat on the shelves, and the teacup collection hung in its wooden rack. Justine felt her shoulders unwind a little, and she set down the groceries. In the corner next to an antique white stove stood a radiator. She turned the knob and heard the clank of hidden pipes.

“Why is it so cold?” Melanie asked, her jaw tight.

“I don't think they knew we were coming today.” It hadn't occurred to Justine to call Arthur Williams as they got closer. She'd assumed the house would be warm and waiting, as though Lucy had lived here until yesterday morning. In reality she guessed the heat had been left on just enough to keep the pipes from freezing.

The radiator soon warmed the small room, though, and when they could take off their coats Justine made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for dinner. Afterward she washed the flowered plates, looking out the window over the sink to the blue-dark night. The forest was a curtain of black velvet a hundred feet away. The ground in front of it was luminous with new snow, tracked here and there by the hopping prints of something small, and the light from the kitchen fell upon it in a golden square. The journey's end settled over her, weighing on her eyelids.