The Lost Girls (8 page)

After they left the lawyer Justine found the elementary school, a squat, brick cube with 1924 stamped in its cement cornerstone. Inside, it stank of sweaty sneakers and microwaved noodles. Melanie made an explosive noise with her lips. “Gross, Mom.” Justine ignored her and led them to the office, where the secretary gave her the enrollment forms and said the girls could start on Monday. She offered a tour, but Justine thought of the airy San Diego school and declined.

Then they went home and unpacked. As the girls bickered over the drawers in the green bedroom, Justine replaced the photo of Lucy and Lilith on their dresser with one of Melanie and Angela at the Padres game Patrick had taken them to that summer. Her own room was less easily claimed. Its closet and drawers were bursting with Lucy's elastic-banded pants, polyester blouses, broad-bottomed underwear, and nylon stockings. The thought of clearing it all out was too much, so she left her clothes in her duffel bag.

The next day they drove forty-five miles to the Bemidji Walmart, which sprawled like a cow patty across from a snow-covered field and a Burger King, and Justine bought each girl two pairs of jeans, three sweaters, and a pair of rubber snow boots. As they headed for the cash registers they passed an aisle stocked with backpacks and lunch boxes. Angela stopped in front of a pink backpack with zebra trim. She fingered the strap and looked hopefully at Justine.

“The one you have is fine,” Justine told her.

“It has a tear in it.”

Her backpack did have a tear in the front pocket; she'd had it for two years, and Melanie had carried it before that. It wasn't a big tear. Not so big that it needed to be replaced. But Angela stood on the scuffed linoleum beneath those horrible Walmart lights that made every color too bright, and in two days she'd go to a new school where a rip in your backpack could tell everyone exactly who you were and who you were not, and she was so small, and so worried, and so perfectly made that Justine said, “Do you like that one?” Then she let both girls choose new backpacks and new lunch boxes. It was a spree compared to the stinginess of their San Diego lives, but she would have liked the same, once or twice, when she was their age. On the way out she picked up an employment application.

Back at Lucy's, she pulled out the chocolate chips she'd smuggled into the Walmart shopping cart and announced they were going to bake cookies. Melanie's eyebrows shot up so fast that Justine laughed. “It's a starting-over time,” she told her, “and that requires cookies.” The girls sat at the table, Angela bouncing in delight. Justine was a little giddy herself. New clothes and homemade cookies surely would make them forget the cold, shabby house and the grim school.

She'd never made cookies from scratch. When she was young, Maurie would buy a refrigerated roll of cookie dough and they'd slice it into hockey pucks they ate right out of the oven. It was a real treat, Maurie said, but Justine was secretly disappointed in the cookies' perfect roundness and the overblended texture that tasted of cut corners. She'd sworn she would bake from scratch when she was a mother, but she'd never found the time. She had a moment of panic in the pantry, but the dry ingredients were there, and they had the eggs and butter from Matthew Miller. As she lined up the ingredients, she felt she was keeping a promise.

She turned the oven to 375 degrees and read from the recipe on the back of the bag of chips. “Start with the flour. Two and one quarter cups.”

They needed a separate bowl for the butter, eggs, and sugar, so Justine pulled one out and got the butter from the refrigerator. She dumped two sticks in the bowl, then Melanie and Angela cracked the eggs and the yellow hearts slid around the butter. The girls watched them silently. Justine made a mental note to get a radio. She could put it on the counter, next to the microwave.

She couldn't find a mixer, but she did find a sturdy, wooden-handled whisk. “This is what people used before they had electricity,” she said. She expected an eye roll from Melanie, but Melanie just took the whisk and began to stir. The butter was hard, so she pulled the bowl into her lap and pounded it until it was the texture of tapioca, her face determined. When she was done she set the bowl back on the table, and she and Angela added the dry ingredients. Finally Justine opened the chocolate chips with a flourish and poured them on top. She was proud of herself, not just for the cookies, but also for how well she was managing things. She'd driven them halfway across the country, met with the lawyer, enrolled the girls in school, found the Walmart, and baked cookies from scratch, all on her own. Neither Francis nor Patrick would have thought she could do any of it, except for the cookies.

“Have some chocolate chips,” she invited. Melanie and Angela each collected a small handful, then Justine set a cookie sheet on the table and they placed dollops of dough in four neat rows. When they were done Justine held the tray up as though it were a crown. “Now we cook them for eight to ten minutes, and then we eat them!”

But when she opened the oven it was cold. She jiggled the knob. The stovetop was working, a quick turn of a burner knob confirmed, but the oven definitely was not. Behind her the girls
ate their chocolate chips. Justine looked under the stove for a pilot light. She didn't see one, but she wasn't sure there should be one, or where to find it. How old was this oven, anyway? She played with the knob again. Nothing happened. Her hands on her hips, she looked at the microwave. It was fairly new. And there were a dozen microwave dinners in the freezer. “Damn,” she said, quietly.

“What's the matter?” Melanie said.

Justine kept her back to her daughters. The cookies lay in their raw balls on the silver sheet. “The oven isn't working.”

“So we can't cook them?”

She forced herself to turn around. Angela's pewter eyes were wide with dismay. “No, I'm afraid we can't.”

Melanie flicked a chocolate chip across the table with one finger. Disappointment mixed with scorn on her narrow face.

Then Justine remembered something. Sometimes Maurie didn't want to wait until the cookies were baked, and they ate the store-bought dough right from the plastic wrap. Maurie said it tasted even better that way. Justine pinched a fingerful of dough. It was delicious, buttery and grainy with sugar. “We can still eat the batter. It's almost as good.”

Angela shook her head. “Mrs. Fitz says you can't do that. There's something bad in the eggs that you have to cook them to kill.”

Justine wiped her finger on her jeans. Mrs. Fitz was Angela's teacher in San Diego. Was she right? Justine had never gotten sick from eating uncooked dough, but maybe the store-bought kind was different. Pasteurized, or something. She looked at the raw cookies. The sweet sugary taste was gone, replaced by a bitter one she knew well. “Okay. I'll have somebody out to fix the oven. And then we'll make them again. This was just practice.”

Melanie gave a harsh laugh. “Sure, Mom.” She walked into
the living room. When Angela heard the television snap on she followed. Justine leaned over the sink. Through the window the forest looked like a tangle of barbed wire.

Patrick, who'd rebuilt a 1969 Mustang, could fix the oven. He'd get out his toolbox and sit on the floor with the contented look of a man doing something he knows he can do well. “We'll have cookies tonight,” he'd say with his wide grin, and they would.

Damn it, Lucy, she thought. Why couldn't you have gotten your oven fixed? And Matthew Miller, creeping around, washing the curtains and changing the sheets. Why hadn't he noticed the oven wasn't working?

The dough made a sodden thud when she scraped it into the wastebasket.

She was washing the bowls when the phone rang, a harsh, old-fashioned jangle. On the third ring the ancient answering machine kicked in, and a thin voice spoke into the room. The house seemed to catch its breath at the sound of it, and Justine froze. “You've reached the home of Lilith and Lucy Evans. Please leave a message.”

After the beep came Maurie's much louder voice: “Justine, I know you're there. Call me.”

Justine hesitated, then lifted the receiver. “Mom. How did you know we were here?”

“I called your cell phone. Peter, or whatever his name is, said you'd gone. He didn't know where, but I figured you'd head up there once you found out you got that house.”

Justine should have expected that—both that Maurie would call her cell and that Patrick would answer it. Carefully, she sat down at the table. “Did you tell Patrick where we were?”

“Of course not. Believe me, sweetie, if there's one thing I know,
it's when a girl leaves town without telling her boyfriend, she's got her reasons.”

For once Justine was grateful for her mother's horrific track record with men. “Thank you.”

“Artie Williams told me he gave you Mother's jewelry,” Maurie said.

“He did. I'll send it right away.”

“Never mind that. Just tell me what's there.”

Justine got the box from Lucy's room and described its contents: a strand of pearls, a half dozen necklaces studded with semiprecious stones, a few rings, a gold locket, and several pairs of clip-on earrings. Justine didn't wear much jewelry, but she was pleased for Maurie. The pieces seemed like things she would wear, and it was nice she could have some jewelry of her mother's.

“Isn't there a diamond ring?” Maurie asked. Justine looked again; there was not. “Damn it, where did she put it?”

“What diamond ring?”

“She had a huge diamond engagement ring from my father. He was killed in World War Two before they could get married, but she kept it. It's got to be in that house somewhere. You need to find it for me.”

Justine ran a hand through her hair. She knew what this was about. Whatever Maurie had going on, with Phil-the-boyfriend or without him, she needed money. Again. “I'll try.” She dreaded going through the house, sorting through a dead woman's stuff from the bedrooms to the dank, mildewy basement, but she knew Maurie wouldn't leave her alone until she did. Besides, she told herself, she needed to do it anyway, if the house were ever to feel like theirs.

After she hung up she reached for the answering machine, intending to replace Lucy's message with her own. But as she placed her finger on the “record” button, she hesitated. Erasing that whis
pery voice, the last echo of her great-aunt, felt like a desecration, somehow. The air stirred around her face in a cold caress, and she gave a quick shudder. There must be a draft somewhere. In fact, she could hear it: a whispering all through the house, as if the house were breathing. She shook it off, and went back to washing the bowls.

At the lake, some children were younger than I, and others were older than Lilith, but none were our age. We didn't mind this, because we took little interest in other children anyway. On weekday evenings we'd join their game if we liked the game and were feeling sociable, but usually we walked up the hill to the bridge by ourselves. The bridge had low stone walls that Father, along with the other lake fathers and sons, built one summer when he was a boy. They were only a foot or so high, so they made a perfect bench for us. There we'd sit as the night fell around us, our feet dangling over the water, and talk about our future selves: rich, beautiful, and far away.

Lilith had it all planned. We'd go to Hollywood, where she would be discovered and become a movie star. I would be her assistant, the one person she could trust. We'd marry handsome men who adored us, and live next door to each other in houses that overlooked the Pacific Ocean and were linked with a covered walkway. Back in Williamsburg, people would read about us in magazines and marvel at how the Evans girls had made such sparkling lives for themselves. Night after night Lilith spun this tale to the sound of the creek that ran below the bridge, a shallow trickle of water over rocks. As she talked, I closed my eyes and let her voice replace my blood with air until it seemed all I had to do was take her hand and we would float away, as light as the fireflies that blinked all around.

When the stars were all out, we walked down the hill and home.
The other mothers would have called their children inside by then, but not ours. Emily's door would be open, and Mother would raise her head from Emily's pillow when she heard us on the landing, but that was all. Lilith and I would close our bedroom door, change into our nightgowns, slide between our sheets, and keep talking, in whispers now, until we fell asleep.

At first, to my relief, our nights that last summer were like this. During the day, Lilith had no interest in roaming the forest or playing the games we'd always played; she wanted to sit on the beach near Jeannette and Betty and the other teenaged girls. But she was the Lilith of old in the dark, where it was hard to see the shapes of her breasts and her dreams were the same as they'd always been.

Then one night she stopped in front of the lodge on our way to the bridge. The sun had just dipped behind the hills, casting the lake into copper shadow, and the lodge's lights glowed like embers. The air was warm; it was late June and summer had overtaken the cool spring evenings of three weeks before. Laughter, high pitched and young, floated through the screened windows of the big porch.

“Let's have a Coke,” Lilith said. I followed her, my steps heavy with misgiving. The lodge was the evening hangout of the teenaged crowd, who played cards and drank pop on the porch until ten o'clock, when the Millers closed up. That night Jeannette and Betty, Charlie Lloyd, Ben Davies, Harry and Mickey Jones, and Felicity and Sincerity Pugh sat on the porch in a circle they'd made of couches and chairs. I'd known them all since before I could walk, but it still startled me to see what they'd become overnight: bosomy girls with rouge on their cheeks and pimply boys who seemed made of elbows, the cheekbones of men pushing up beneath the soft skin of their faces. I kept my eyes down and followed Lilith to the main room.

Mr. Miller was at the bar. I was a bit frightened of him—he rarely spoke, and his face sagged in heavy lines around his mouth, so he
looked like he was angry all the time. Lilith ordered our Cokes in a light voice and he poured them from the fountain. I headed for a table in the corner, away from the group of lodgers playing pool, but Lilith walked to the porch. She sat on a couch near the teenagers and motioned for me to sit beside her. The teenagers didn't pay us any mind, but Lilith watched them with sideways glances as she sipped her Coke. She crossed her legs at the ankles like Jeannette and tucked her hair behind her ears like Betty.

I asked her if she wanted to play the pinball. “No, you go ahead,” she said, but I didn't.

After a few minutes Charlie rose to go to the bar, and as he passed he gave Lilith a blushing smile. Lilith shifted her foot just enough that he kicked it as he went by. His apology was so awkward I almost felt sorry for him. Lilith rotated her delicate foot in its sandal. “I'll forgive you if you buy me a Coke,” she said, waving her nearly empty glass. He ran a hand through his short brown hair and said sure he would.

“Why are you getting another Coke?” I asked her once he'd gone.

She winked at me. “I'm thirsty.”

When Charlie came back he sat on the couch opposite us. Lilith thanked him for the pop, and soon they were in a conversation—halting on his side, astonishingly cool and flirty on hers—about how dull it was to be stuck at the lake all summer. This was the first time I'd heard her say our summers were boring, and I took it painfully to heart. I was the only one she spent her time with, after all. I finished my Coke, draining the dregs in a noisy gurgle. They ignored me.

Before long Harry and Ben came over, and then the entire gang. They pulled in more chairs and resumed their party, but now with Lilith and me at the center of their crowd. Or, rather, Lilith. I sat with my arms folded over my flat chest, my little-girl legs skinny
below my skirt. But Lilith talked as though she were one of them. She, who normally ignored everyone but me, talked about the movies they'd seen as though Father had let her see them and the music they liked as though Father let her listen to the radio. Her hands gestured and her wide smile beckoned. Through the open button of her gingham blouse the tops of her new breasts glowed with an early summer sunburn. The boys darted looks at them when no one but me was watching.

When the last of the supper crowd was gone, Abe came out to wait on them, and they kept him busy wiping up their spills, bringing them French fries, and refilling their pops. He moved among them with barely a word. Though he was the same age as the other boys, he was bigger in every dimension: taller, his arms more muscular, his shoulders broader. Lilith smiled at him when he took her order, and I noticed he served her first when he brought the trays of pops and fries. I thought about Father, and what he would say about this whole business, and my stomach clenched. I wanted to leave, but I was stuck between Lilith and Ben, and of course I wouldn't have gone without her anyway. So I stayed, listening to their silly talk about the dance hall that had opened in Lexington—everyone seemed to know someone who'd gone, but none of them had ever been—until Mr. Miller told them it was closing time.

The boys shoved one another as they walked up the path. Jeannette linked her arm through Lilith's, and Betty walked on Lilith's other side. I trailed behind, watching their heads bend close together as they talked. When we got to our house they called after her: “Good night! See you tomorrow!”

In our bedroom, Lilith was giddy almost to the point of mania, twirling about the room so her nightgown wound around her thighs. “Did you see Charlie bought me two Cokes? And Ben couldn't stop looking at me. I would love to go to that dance hall.
Can you imagine?” She didn't notice I said almost nothing in return.

After that, she went to the lodge every night Father wasn't there. When supper was over, she went upstairs and primped, leafing through the
Vogue
and
Harper's Bazaar
magazines Jeannette and Betty loaned her, studying the models while I sat on my bed in silent misery. She'd never look like them, of course; not with her hair that Father wouldn't let her cut and the babyish dresses Mother bought for her. This gave me some comfort, though secretly I wished she'd offer to do my hair in the new style she devised: swept back and pinned in a glorious mass that gave the illusion, at least, of short hair. I knew I'd never be pretty no matter what anyone did. But I would have liked to feel her fingers in my tangled curls and have her eyes meet mine in the mirror.

“Why do you want to go?” I asked her one night.

“It's fun,” she said. I told her I didn't see what was so fun about playing cards and drinking Cokes for hours on end. She stopped in the middle of pinning her hair and turned to face me. Pressed against the dresser, with her hands gripping its edge and her face set in tense lines, she didn't seem like someone who was about to go have fun. “I'm practicing.”

“Practicing for what?”

Her pupils were large in the blue fields of her irises. “I'm getting out of here, Lucy. I'm going to go far away, and live a fabulous life. To do that, I need to make people notice me. So I'm practicing.”

I looked at her raven hair, her bold face, the graceful young curves of her body. We had talked about leaving for as long as I could remember, but in that moment I knew it had been just a game to me. I couldn't really imagine myself anywhere but here.

“You should come to the lodge, too,” she said, and I knew she did want me to come, but I couldn't go to the lodge and watch,
ignored, while she sat among her new admirers, practicing, so I shook my head.

Not going, though, was almost as bad. Without Lilith I had no idea what to do with myself. I tried to join the evening games, but as the older children had become the teenaged crowd, only the youngest ones remained to play, and among them I felt out of place. One night I walked up to the bridge by myself, but this was an exercise in self-pity that even I, feeling hard-done-by though I was, could not abide. In the house my moping distracted Mother and Emily, whom Mother was teaching to stitch.

“Where's Lilith?” Mother asked one evening as I leaned against the doorway.

“At the lodge,” I said, “with Jeannette and Betty and them.” I watched her. She pursed her lips, and I could tell she didn't know what to make of this. Lilith and I had never separated before, and although Jeannette and Betty were nice girls from good families, they were older, and she had to know what that meant. I think I was hoping she'd intervene, perhaps forbid Lilith from going, but I shouldn't have hoped that. Even then I knew she'd relinquished any power she might have had over Lilith and me long ago.

Emily was watching me from Mother's lap. I frowned at her, indulging a small flare of resentment. Once it had been my hands Mother guided in embroidery, and my bed she shared at night. My bed, where I'd pull Mother's arm over my head so its soft weight closed my ear to everything but her heartbeat and mine, a thrum-thrum that sent me safely into sleep. Until the night, soon after Emily outgrew her crib, when Mother sat beside me in her white cotton nightdress, her long hair in its plait, and looked at me with a sorrowful apology in her face that in those days I thought was sweet and plain, a perfect mother's face. “Good night, baby,” she said. Then she laid her hand on my forehead, smoothed back the curls, and kissed me, her lips light and dry, before slipping away to
Emily's room. Ever since, I'd fallen asleep alone, except in summer, when Lilith and I shared our bedroom at the lake.

What saved me in the end was books. Lilith and I had never read much; quiet, internal pursuits like that didn't suit her. Now, with these long evenings to fill, I began to investigate the lodge's makeshift lending library, two shelves of castoff books left by earlier guests. All the children's books were for boys, but I was so desperate that I picked up Tom Swift, the Hardy Boys,
Huckleberry Finn,
and
Treasure Island,
and soon I was immersed in the worlds of these messy, swaggering adventurers. Each night after Lilith left me I lay in my bed and read about rocket ships and pirates and orphaned pickpockets until she came home. Years later, when I got around to reading the books girls my age were supposed to read—
Little Women, The Secret Garden, The Little Princess
—I found their staid rhythms difficult and the melancholy that seeped from their pages distaff and secondhand when measured against the loneliness of my eleven-year-old self reading
Tom Sawyer
in that empty bedroom.

When at last Lilith opened our door, I'd slide the book under my pillow, because I knew she'd want to talk then. I tried not to mind that the topics of our conversation had changed; that instead of talking about Hollywood and the glamorous lives we'd live there, she talked about how Charlie adored her, how desperate Ben was to catch her eye, and how, through clever gesture and insinuation, she flattered first one, then the other, with her attention. Practicing. I listened and made the assenting noises she wanted. I was just glad to have her there, alone with me, who knew her best, after all.