The Lost Girls (7 page)

“He brought us some groceries.”

“Well, don't hesitate to ask him or Abe if you need anything.”

“Abe?”

“Matthew's brother. They keep to themselves, those two, but there's nothing they wouldn't do for Lucy's family.”

Justine tightened her arms around Angela. During the drive from San Diego she'd tried to remember what Lucy looked like. All she could remember was the reading glasses she wore on a chain around her neck and that she smelled of talcum powder. Now, as she thought of the unfinished book on the bedside table, the porcelain bowls with their unused cotton balls and hairpins, and the photograph of herself and Maurie, her chest felt hollow.

“I don't want you to think I'm being ungrateful. But I'm not Lucy's family. Not like family is supposed to be. I only met her once, when I was a little girl. I hardly remember her.” Surely, she wanted to say, there must be someone else—if not Maurie, then some cousin, or even a friend—who was closer to Lucy than she. More deserving.

Arthur templed his fingers and looked at her over the tops of his glasses. “There were just the three sisters. Lucy never married. Lilith had the one child, your mother. And Emily died young.”

Justine nodded but didn't trust herself to say anything more. Arthur reached for an accordion folder and walked her through the paperwork, instructing her where to sign and giving her copies of
everything. When he said the probate would take four months he was quick to reassure her that, as Lucy's trustee, he'd requested an early disbursement of the two thousand dollars in Lucy's bank account. “To tide you over,” he said delicately. When he was done he handed her a small jewelry box. “Lucy gave this to me a few weeks ago. She said Lilith would want Maurie to have them.”

Justine took the box with numb fingers. As she'd signed the papers and listened to him talk about transfers and court orders, the reality of her changed circumstances had struck her with full force. Two thousand dollars was more money than she'd ever had at one time. The investment portfolio could send her daughters to college, which was something she'd hardly dared hope for them. She felt a manic elation, yet at the same time she felt chagrined, even guilty. She could not remember Lucy's face.

“There's one more thing,” Arthur said. “Lucy asked that her body be cremated and the ashes deposited in the lake. I arranged her cremation before you arrived, and will keep custody of her remains until the lake thaws. But I wanted you to know, in case you were wondering about funeral arrangements, or burial.”

Justine hadn't wondered about any of that. She swallowed, her throat thick. “Thank you.”

Arthur took off his glasses, relaxing now that their business was done. “How long will you be staying?”

It took a moment for Justine to realize what he meant. “We're going to live in the house permanently. If that's all right.”

Arthur looked at Melanie, then back to her. “It's awfully isolated out there.”

“I know. But the girls will be at school during the day.” She didn't know where the school was, but surely it was here in town.

“What about you? I imagine you'll need a job.”

Justine hadn't given this much thought, either. She'd never had trouble finding the sort of work she and her mother had always done—waiting tables, tending bars, working in stores. Now she
thought of the empty shops on the square. “I was a receptionist in San Diego, but I can do most anything, if anyone's hiring.”

“People are losing jobs rather than finding them around here. You might try over in Bemidji. There's a Walmart there, and a Home Depot. If you're willing to work a cash register, there might be a place for you.”

“Thank you.” Justine had seen Bemidji on her map. It seemed far to the southeast, but maybe it wasn't as far as all that. Besides, she reminded herself, her situation was different now. She had two thousand dollars and no rent to pay. She could take her time.

I've moved the parlor table to the porch so I can feel the breeze as I write. It's a lovely day, cool and almost cloudless, and the lake is that midnight blue it takes on in the late afternoon this time of year. Most of Matthew's summer guests have gone, all but the young family. The mother is in her chair by the water, stretched out in her pink bikini to catch the last of the sun. Her children are playing with their sand toys next to her. Her son, the elder, is quite gentle with his sister. He touches her on the shoulder as they walk and fishes her toys out of the water when they drift too far for her to reach. Watching him, I wonder what our lives would have been like if we'd had a brother. Or if Lilith had been a boy.

Matthew stopped by earlier. He's curious about what I'm doing, I can tell. I haven't been so clearly pursuing a project in a long time, not since the days when I wrote my stories, one after the other, in notebooks like this one. He didn't ask, though; he wouldn't. As usual, he offered to do some shopping for me in town, as he was going. I asked him for coffee and some of Millie Conroy's jam that I love. I find I haven't been hungry lately.

I realize I'm writing to a nine-year-old girl who lives only in my memory. I have no idea who you've grown up to be, Justine, and sometimes, I confess, I hope you won't read this. Lilith would say that an old woman's secrets should be allowed to sink beyond the reach of recollection, and maybe she's right. Still, I will keep writing. There is no harm in the writing. It is only in the reading that the damage would be done. Even then, what will it matter? I will be dead, along with anyone else the truth would hurt.

It was late spring when your mother called. When Lilith hung up, the look on her face astonished me. That was Maurie, she said. She'll be here in a week. Her voice was even, as though her daughter's coming to visit wasn't at all remarkable. As though it wouldn't be the first time she'd see you, her granddaughter. I said only that we should get Emily's room ready. We always called that room Emily's, even though it had been Maurie's for nearly eighteen years.

I still don't know why she came. I do know she hadn't a penny when she arrived and she left with several hundred dollars, but that was between her and Lilith. I think there'd been a man in St. Louis, which is where you came from, though she didn't say much about it. She seemed to want to pretend this was just a visit to her mother's house for a summer vacation, but it was the first time she'd been back since she left twenty years before, and that phone call was just the second one we'd gotten in all that time. Those postcards were the only contact we had. She did send a lot of them, though. Letting us know, I suppose, that she was seeing the world we'd kept her shut away from.

She arrived three weeks after she called. We were beginning to think she'd changed her mind. Of course, we'd been telling ourselves that all along: she won't come. We didn't even mention it to Mother; we didn't want to get her hopes up. But we cleaned the house, bit by bit, without seeming to. One day I cleaned out the pantry, throwing away past-dated jars of spaghetti sauce and boxes of stale crackers. When I did our shopping I bought a few treats I thought a nine-year-old girl might like—Fig Newtons and apple juice, things like that. Lilith put away her creams that cluttered the bathroom and moved her magazines to the basement, all those celebrity and travel magazines that had collected in foot-tall piles on the coffee table. I put sheets on Emily's bed, just in case.

We were sitting on the porch, as we often did in the afternoons while Mother slept. When we heard the car we didn't mention
it—it was the time when the first summer guests arrived to stay in Matthew's cabins, so it could have been anyone—but when your station wagon pulled up, full of suitcases and boxes, I didn't dare look at Lilith. I went to the screen door, to be sure.

Maurie got out of the car. She was wearing tight, high-waisted jeans and those high-heeled plastic sandals the young girls wore in those days. A yellow halter hugged her small bosom, and her midriff was flat below it. Her hair, as dark as Lilith's, was parted in the middle and flipped out in feathery wings. She was almost forty, but in that light, in that outfit, she looked just like the girl who had stormed out our door twenty years before. She smiled the crooked smile I remembered, and there were tears in my eyes that I couldn't help.

She climbed the steps, looking me up and down. I felt frumpy and soft in my polyester pants with their waistband sinking into my stomach and my short-sleeved blouse from Milligan's in town, cheap and practical. I wished I'd thought to wear something less old-ladyish. I wished I'd known for certain she would come that day.

Lilith came up behind me. Maurie said, “Hello, Mother,” and her smile didn't falter for an instant. Her eyes were that intense black, shining with points of light like stars.

Lilith said, “Pull your car around back, then we'll get supper on.” Her voice was casual, as though Maurie lived in town and we saw her three times a week. Maurie didn't like it; she wanted the Prodigal Daughter welcome. She tossed her head, that old gesture.

“I need to get our suitcases first.” She turned to the car, and for the first time I noticed you standing there. Your arms were folded, your fingers picking at your elbows. All of us looked at you, and you looked back, your gaze shifting from your mother to me to Lilith.

The picture of you that I carry in my mind is the image I saw that day. A small child, too thin, in a dirty pink tee shirt with flow
ers on it. Your legs below your denim shorts were beginning to lengthen as girls' legs do at that age, your knees bony and scabbed with patches of eczema. You wore navy Keds with frayed laces and no socks. Blond curls that needed cutting straggled unkempt to your waist. Your eyes were pale and wary, and you worked your lips between your teeth in a way that must have been habitual, for they were chapped. I felt a small, sharp pain in my chest. It seemed to me that by looking at you I could see everywhere Maurie had ever been.

The moment stretched longer than was comfortable, until you dropped your eyes and shifted your feet. Then Maurie called you over. I opened the screen door, and the four of us gathered in a circle on the porch. Lilith stood next to Maurie, and I thought how similar they looked, still.

“Justine, this is your grandmother,” Maurie said, “and Aunt Lucy.”

You watched us with those careful eyes and didn't say anything. I started to say hello, but Maurie laughed a brittle laugh. She wore dangling earrings with turquoise stones that looked like something the Millers might have sold in the lodge, years ago. “God, Mother, this place looks exactly the same.”

Instead of answering, Lilith bent down to you and took your hand. Sometime in the last week she'd colored the roots of her hair so no gray showed in the flat L'Oréal black. “You can call me Grandma Lilith,” she said, and you smiled just a bit. Until then I'd seen little of Maurie in your face. But as you smiled, one corner of your mouth tugged higher than the other, and I could see her there.

I never knew who your father was, but it's no mystery who you were named for: that boy Justin Yeats, the doctor's son from Minneapolis whose family used to rent the Lloyds' house every August
when Maurie was little. Of course, by then it wasn't the Lloyds' house anymore—they had sold it to a family from Duluth after Charlie died in the war, and its new owners rented it out by the week to people like the Yeatses.

Justin and Maurie were four when he started coming, and they were inseparable from the beginning. They ran around building forts, pretending to be Indians and cowboys and whatnot. Maurie always decided the game, ordering Justin about in her high, bossy voice. His parents thought it was sweet; Justin wasn't the sort for rough play, and I think they were happy to see him having some adventures. But I never liked it.

One day I walked past the fish cleaning shed to our kitchen garden and surprised them there. They were seven, eight at the most. As I came around the corner Maurie jumped backward, away from him. Justin was standing against the wall of the shed, his hands behind his back. His cheeks were red and his lips were shiny and wet. Maurie wiped her hands on her shorts and looked at me with those glittery eyes, and as I said, I didn't like it. They weren't doing anything wrong that I could see, but the air was charged with something, and it made me uneasy. I shooed them back to the beach.

Later I told Lilith about it. We were making dinner while Mother watched one of her programs, the muffled voices coming through the door. They were probably playing doctor, Lilith said; it was nothing to worry about. She knifed through a peeled potato with brutal dexterity.

I told her it hadn't seemed like they were playing doctor.

Lilith laughed a singing little laugh, the knife flashing up and down through the white meat of the potato. “How would you know? Is that something you did with Matthew?”

I had been draining the lettuce but I stopped, putting my hand on the counter. I was twenty-seven years old that summer. No one had ever kissed me, and Lilith knew that. In fact, no one ever was
going to kiss me, and I was beginning to realize this, and she knew that, too. Here I was trying to be helpful, pointing out that her daughter might be a bit wayward, and perhaps this tendency ought to be nipped in the bud, but instead of thanking me Lilith couldn't miss the chance to cut me, the virginal, unclaimed sister. I hated her a little bit in that moment. But all I did was turn back to the lettuce.

She knew she'd hurt me, though, and she continued in a milder tone. It was normal, she said, and she wanted Maurie to be normal in that way.

I'm sure she did, but I was right. The Yeatses eventually saw it, too, because after the summer Maurie turned fifteen, when it was obvious to everyone where things were heading—indeed, probably had already gone—they never came back. For a while, the two of them wrote to each other, but then Sylvie Yeats called and asked me to intercept Justin's letters, as she was doing with Maurie's, and I did. I know it was hard on Maurie. Still, I was surprised to see the name on the birth announcement, ten years after she'd gone.

Justine, indeed.