The Lost Girls (5 page)

Angela's head rested on her arms. Melanie's face was drawn with exhaustion. “I think we should find your bedroom,” Justine said.

The rest of the house was still bone-chillingly cold. They would need to turn on the radiators in the bedrooms or they'd freeze even beneath the covers. Justine led them upstairs to a square, pine-floored landing with four white paneled doors. She groped at a flitting memory, then opened the one to the left and pushed the light switch inside.

“Oh, look!” she said, relief and delight mingling in her voice.

It was a girls' room, without question. The walls were a delicate green, the baseboards eggshell white. Twin beds with matching wrought iron headboards and faded star quilts bracketed a tall window that faced the lake. An oak dresser stood on the opposite wall, with brass hooks above. The furniture was worn, but the air smelled like pine soap, and everything was as neat as a room in an inn awaiting its guests.

Justine found the radiator and turned it on. She sat on one of the beds, and after a moment's hesitation, Melanie and Angela sat beside
her. The mattress sagged under their weight. Melanie looked around, picking at her nails, something she did when she was thinking things through. Angela leaned in, and Justine put her arm around her, feeling her shoulder blades flared like wings beneath her sweatshirt. The room was so cold she could see her breath.

“It'll be fine once it warms up,” she said. “The walls are such a pretty color, like spring. And look at these quilts. I wonder if Aunt Lucy made them.”

“I want to go home,” Angela said.

Melanie's fingers stilled their restless motion. Her eyes glittered as she looked at her mother. Behind her, through the darkness outside the window, snow fell like ash.

Justine took a slow breath. Beneath the pine soap other odors lurked. Mildew, maybe. Old age, definitely. She bent her head to the penumbra of Angela's wheat-colored curls and inhaled their apricot scent that bore the memory of sunshine, hot pavement, and close-cropped grass. She tried to find the lightness she'd felt when she'd left the apartment key on the counter, but she couldn't. Instead she felt her inner compass teeter and spin. What was she doing? Her daughters had never lived anywhere but in that San Diego apartment. Yes, it was worn and poor and stank of striving and failing and overcooked brussels sprouts. Yes, their father had left it, and Patrick had moved into it. But in its constancy she'd given Melanie and Angela what she'd promised them that first night with Francis in the living room, something far more important than the poverty of circumstances and the comings and goings of men. They would have friends they'd someday say they'd known since grade school. They would have a mother who came home at night, who was there in the morning when they woke up. They wouldn't eat dinners of stale crackers and warm soda. They wouldn't tell the landlord to come back later because their mother was sleeping. And they would never, ever disappear overnight in an overstuffed car, unable to say good-bye to the friend they'd just
made, at the whim of a woman consumed by the promise of the next good thing.

Yet here they were, sitting on a faded quilt in a dead cold house by a frozen lake that was practically in Canada. She'd pulled them from the life of certainty she'd promised them after a conversation with a man she didn't know about a house she barely remembered. Why? What was it about this place that had unmoored her in a way she'd sworn she never would be? Yes, Patrick was needy and manipulative. Yes, Melanie was struggling at school. Still, these were problems other people faced every day, weren't they? Problems other people faced without ripping up the footings of their lives and disappearing without a good-bye.

Her eyes skittered around the room until they landed on a small framed picture on the bedside table, a black-and-white shot of two girls, maybe ten and twelve years old. Their arms were around each other, their dresses tugged by a long-ago breeze. The younger one, her blond hair a frenzy of curls, looked up at the older one, whose light eyes smiled into the camera. The photograph was faded, but behind them Justine could see the lake, and could tell from their dresses and sandals that it was summer.

She herself had rarely worn shoes here. Not even sandals. She, who'd never had even the rudest patch of yard to play in, had roamed the forest barefoot for hours that summer. She found old structures made of branches and twine—remnants of forts built by long-ago children—that were the first places she claimed for her own. The lake was busy with fishermen and water-skiers, and the lodge that now seemed so grim was filled with children playing pinball, fathers and sons playing pool, teenagers flirting over malts, and mothers buying ice cream for their toddlers. She and Maurie and Aunt Lucy and Grandma Lilith ate dinners at that table in the kitchen, and she could see the happiness that suffused the older women's faces as they reached across to pat Maurie's arm or smooth Justine's disheveled hair.

She hadn't slept in this room, she remembered now. She'd slept in a smaller bedroom across the landing with a single twin bed and lavender walls. This mint-green room was where Aunt Lucy and Grandma Lilith had slept. Two old women sleeping still in the room they must have shared as children, beneath the quilts that sheltered them from the nighttime breezes of their youth. She looked at the lace curtains, frayed but freshly laundered. She saw for the first time that the beds had sheets on them. Someone had made them up. For her girls.

She ran her hand down Angela's back. Felt the fragile bones beneath.

The doorbell rang. Justine froze, listening to the crashing silence that followed the jangle of the bell.

“Wait here,” she told the girls. She went downstairs. Through the door she said, “Who is it?”

“Matthew Miller.”

She opened the door halfway, bracing it against her hip. The old man stood there, snowflakes dusting the shoulders of his coat. He held a grocery bag and a flashlight. His eyes lifted, and she turned to see her daughters at the top of the stairs. He looked at them for a beat more, then he held out the bag.

“I thought you might need some things to tide you over until you can get to the store.”

Justine took the bag and looked inside: a pint of milk, four eggs lodged in a broken half-carton, a stick of butter, and most of a loaf of sliced bread. “Thank you,” she said, surprised.

“You're welcome.” He stepped back so his face, just outside the reach of the light, was shadowed. Then he went down the steps and back to the lodge, stepping almost delicately in the snow.

Nowadays, twenty miles is not that far. When I worked at the library, I drove it twice a day, and I still go on Saturdays to read to the children and do my shopping. But when I was young we took car travel less lightly, and the men had businesses to run, so they came to the lake only on the weekends, leaving the weekdays to the women and children. Because of this, our lake retreat was really two places: one when the men were there, and another when they were not.

On the weekdays, the strings of our mothers' aprons hung loose. They drank iced tea on one another's porches in the late afternoon, reveling in the fact that supper need only be cold sandwiches and that no one with any authority would ask when it would be served. During the heat of the day they played bridge at the picnic table underneath the elm tree or walked along the lane, carrying umbrellas against the sun. We children ran about unheeded, and no one told us to be quiet because Father needed to think.

On the weekends, when the men were there, our mothers fixed their hair and wore their better housedresses. They did laundry and cleaned house while the men fished in the mornings and napped or read in the afternoons until cocktail hour. On most Saturday evenings, the Joneses or the Lloyds hosted a grown-up party. Our parents hardly ever went, but Lilith and I watched the other couples walk past, the women in pearls and starched dresses and the men in light summer suits, and later we heard their laughter through our window.

Suppers were a more formal affair, too, when the men were
there, or at least they were in our house. Mother made roasts or fried the fish Father caught instead of serving the leftovers and cold plates she gave us during the week. Lilith, Emily, and I had to come to the table in dresses, not our playsuits or, God forbid, our swimming suits. Father wore a tie and sat at the head, where he helped himself first, then passed the dishes around and said grace. Only when he lifted his fork could we lift ours, and we couldn't be excused until he finished. He and Mother talked, sharing news from their separate lives, but we girls were not to speak. Lilith and I endured these suppertime vigils by carrying on conversations below the table, pressing our feet on one another's in a rudimentary Morse code while keeping our faces frozen in perfect decorum. How Emily managed I have no idea.

After weekday suppers, Lilith and I were free to go back outside, but on weekends we had family time, just as we did in town. We went to the parlor, where the curtains were still drawn against the afternoon heat, so the room was dim and cool. Lilith and I sat on the davenport, Mother and Father in the chairs, and Father held Emily on his lap. From outside came the hoots and cries of the other children playing, but I never wanted to be out with them. I loved family time. I loved that none of the other families had it. It was a secret of the best sort, the kind others would envy if they knew.

It began with Father reading aloud. He'd gone to the Methodist seminary outside Chicago for a while, and he still had much of the preacher about him, so he'd read from one of his books of philosophy or the big leather Bible his father gave him, then speak for a time on what it said about how we should conduct our lives. I liked the philosophy books quite a bit—Kant was my favorite—but I loved it best when Father read from the Bible. He had a voice like a cello, deep and melodious, and it made of the language of God's chosen people a wrathful and mesmerizing poetry, as I imagined it sounded when first spoken by the mad prophets of long ago. We
weren't churchgoers; Father left the seminary over an ideological dispute, something about how the church defined sin “in the hand rather than the heart,” as I once heard him tell Mr. Williams. But it didn't matter. From his lips the Word of God rang more awfully in our parlor than I ever heard it from the pulpits of the churches I visited later in life.

That first night, as he did every summer, he read to us one of his favorite passages from the Gospel of Matthew:

And Jesus called a little child unto him, and set him in the midst of them, and said, Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven. Whosoever therefore shall humble himself as this little child, the same is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. And whoso shall receive one such little child in my name receiveth me. But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.

The words, spoken in his beautiful voice, colored the air with tones of darkest purple. When he was done, he placed his hand on Emily's knee, tracing gentle circles on her skin with his fingertips. The slow gathering of his thoughts ripened my breath, even though I knew what he would say.

“There is no such thing as original sin,” he began. “The ministers who say so are cowards, excusing the transgressions of those they depend upon for their livelihoods. The truth is here, in this passage. We're all born pure, and while we remain that way, we are children. As soon as we take our first step into corruption, we are no longer children in the eyes of God. We must then strive to return to that state of grace as best we can, trusting that if we get close enough, and try hard enough to wash away our sin, Jesus's forgiveness will open the gates of heaven for us.”

I nodded. The purity of my childhood self was one of the few things I took pride in. I wasn't compelling to look at, like Lilith, nor was I funny or charming or brilliantly imaginative, as she also was. I didn't have Emily's more conventional beauty, either, with her long-lashed eyes and heart-shaped face. But I saw the reverence with which Father touched Emily's hair as he spoke of Jesus's godly child, and I thought I, more than she, might be one of the “least of these” whom Jesus loved most especially, and whom Father, too, might learn to love, if he ever noticed.

“Your mother and I,” Father went on, “bring you here every summer, even though it means we must live apart, because it is a refuge for innocence in the corrupt world. We want you to be children here. Swim in the water, play in the forest, look at the stars. Enjoy the simple pleasures of nature and family, and keep your innocence as long as you can.”

This, too, was something I loved hearing every year, a blessing that bestowed upon all of our summer games and adventures something of the character of religious observances. But Father's words had an unusual intensity tonight, and he looked at Lilith as he spoke. For a shivery moment I thought he'd seen her flirting with the Miller boys in the lodge, but he hadn't been there. Then I remembered the way she'd smiled at Charlie the night before, and the expression on Father's face as he watched, and I knew he was warning her.

“When did you stop being a child, Father?” Lilith asked.

I stiffened. No one ever interrupted Father's sermons, and questions most definitely were not allowed. That Lilith would ask this, especially in the face of his clear warning, shocked me. Mother's hands stopped their needlework, and Emily watched Lilith with a worried crease between her dark brows. Even the children playing outside fell quiet. Lilith sat with her eyes wide and blue in her pale, strange face, waiting.

Father regarded her. I felt in his gaze the power of his will bear
ing down upon her, and for once I was glad he wasn't looking at me. Then we heard a shout from the shore—a little boy's crow of triumph, followed by a chorus of youthful outrage like geese squabbling over bread—and the lines of Father's face eased. He gave an indulgent laugh and patted Emily's thigh. “That's not for you to know. All you need to know is that I'm trying to become like a child again, through the example of my own children.”

He closed the book and, to my relief, the odd moment passed. It was time for our nightly prayer: Psalm 51, which we knew by heart, even Emily.
Have mercy upon me, O God, according to thy lovingkindness: according unto the multitude of thy tender mercies, blot out my transgressions
. As I recited it I closed my eyes, searching for recent transgressions for which I might beg forgiveness. I didn't find very many. As I said, I was quite certain of my goodness, then.

When we were done, Father kissed Emily's head. Then Mother lifted her from his lap and settled her on her own, smoothing the hair that Father had mussed. The rest of the evening passed in quiet pursuits. Lilith and I played cards on the coffee table, Father read one of his philosophy books, and Mother continued her stitching while Emily pillowed her head on her breast, her eyes sleepy. When the light that came through the curtains turned from gold to navy, and the voices of mothers calling children home sang in the air, Mother carried Emily upstairs. Then she changed into her nightgown and slipped into Emily's bed with her, where, as always, she would sleep all night long.

Lilith and I took their departure as our cue. We kissed Father good night, brushing our lips on the rough skin of his cheek. He smelled of cinnamon and Arabic spices, the subtly wild smell of his aftershave lotion that, as a child, I thought belonged to him alone.

Soon after, settled between our sheets, we heard the crunch of his feet on the lane. I raised my head and looked out the window. It was almost full night by then, but the gibbous moon was up, so I
could see him walking up the road toward the bridge, black against the silvery water. He went for a walk every night he was at the lake, after everyone had gone to bed. Once, years ago, I heard Mother ask him why. He told her he loved to count the stars as they came out, one by one, until they filled up the sky. I still remember the hush I felt when he said this. The way he spoke made it sound like church, or how I imagined church to be. Worshipful, and quiet.