The Story of Beautiful Girl (27 page)

Then Doreen leaned over and whispered that she’d been in the administrative office when the weirdest thing had occurred. Lynnie looked at her, but just as Doreen drew in breath to say more, Lynnie glimpsed, out of the corner of her eye, Kate letting herself inside A-3. Doreen took note of Kate, too, and together they watched as Kate marched right into the dayroom, went over to Suzette, and, after a brief exchange that left Suzette looking stunned, switched the channel. Then Kate backed away, standing behind Suzette and glancing over at Lynnie.

At first everyone in the room groaned.
Gilligan’s Island
was one of the few shows that staff and residents agreed on. To make matters worse, Kate had turned to the news, which was viewed as duller than a wall. But sitting at a desk on the news was John-Michael Malone—and Lynnie stopped noticing everyone around her. “Your tendency might be to change the channel,” he was saying directly to the audience. “I ask you to stay with us all the way through this special report. It’s important that you see America’s disgrace.”

Then, as the film began to run, the residents’ grumbling was quickly replaced by gasps.

There were the gates of the School. There was Albert, motioning to a parking space. There were the empty fields, the power plant, the administrative building. The clock.

“It’s us!” Barbara called out.

“It’s Sing Sing in living color!” Lourdes chimed in.

Lynnie felt her blood pounding as she watched her own world. The hospital cottage, with Marcus in his muffs. The gym, with the buckled floor and cobwebbed hoops. Z-1, with Christopher rocking back and forth, Timmy spinning. An entrance to the tunnel. A lake of ugliness on a lavatory floor.

And suddenly: Lynnie!

The room went wild. “Lynnie!” they called out. Loretta thumped her on the back.

What if Clarence and Smokes saw her? She felt fear grab hold of her face.

“Do you live here in this building?” John-Michael’s voice said off-camera.

The Lynnie on the television, blond curls falling around her face, nodded.

Doreen jabbed her in the side. “You’re a star.”

Lourdes said, “Lynnie is ready for her close-up.”

John-Michael, still off-camera, asked his second question. “If you could walk out that gate right now and never come back, would you?”

The television Lynnie paused. She looked outside the frame of the picture—to Kate, Lynnie remembered. Then the television Lynnie looked back and nodded.

The dayroom let up hollers of approval.

In the attendants’ office, the phone started ringing. “Oh, shut up,” Suzette called out.

The camera cut away from Lynnie. Now the television was showing them other parts of the School, but Lynnie couldn’t concentrate because other phones were ringing. Phones in other cottages. Phones all around the School. And everyone in her dayroom was in a state, calling out, “It’s us!” and, “We’re famous!”

So no one could hear what John-Michael was saying. But they could see: John-Michael was entering Maude’s office, where she gave him a curious look, and then he was walking past her into Uncle Luke’s office. Uncle Luke, sitting at his desk, looked up, startled and confused. John-Michael said something, and Uncle Luke’s eyes flashed with suspicion, then anger. He stood up. Maude came into the room, looking flustered. Then Mr. Edgar, Uncle Luke’s beefy driver, appeared, gesturing for John-Michael to leave and covering the camera with his hand.

The room went into a frenzy. No one knew what it all meant, though everyone knew it was something that had never happened before. They were on TV! Uncle Luke looked like a buffoon! Phones were ringing everywhere!

“Ooo,” Doreen said to Lynnie, “someone’s got it coming.”

Lynnie sat back, feeling her face turn like a page, from fear to thrill.

She looked across the room. Kate, rising from her seat, was coming over, her arm held high. Lynnie stood up and raised her arm, too, and, with their faces in a mirror smile, they slapped their palms together.

Then she looked past Kate’s face, out the window into the night sky. The clock was still glowing in its tower, trying to boss everyone around as it cast its light on them all. For the first time in Lynnie’s life, she glared back.

1974

I
t’s a miracle,
Kate thought as she strode up the path toward the parking lot, sunlight glinting off the February snow.
Thank you, Jesus, thank you,
she prayed.
Thank you for making Dr. Hagenbuch so appalled by the School that he quit. Thank you for sending John-Michael Malone to meet Dr. Hagenbuch, then giving them the courage to sneak into the School. Thank you for broadcasting John-Michael Malone’s exposé across many more states than Pennsylvania. Thank you for one television being on in one apartment where one woman happened to be eating her Swanson dinner, and happened to glance up from her jewelry making, and happened to recognize the gate. Thank you for giving that woman the fortitude that built slowly yet steadily over the next few weeks and led her to pick up a phone. Thank you for Maude taking that call and telling the caller she would have someone check the files to find out if an Evelyn Goldberg lived here. Maybe Maude would never have called back, though with the press now bearing down—and the governor at last coming to see the School—maybe she would have. But thank you, Jesus, for Doreen to be picking up the mail at just that moment, and for Maude to hand the request to Doreen, and for Doreen to run not to the file room, but to me, and to tell me breathlessly what she had in her hands. Most of all, thank you for the miracle of that woman making the long trip here today, even with the snow and her “stupid, meaningless job,” as she put it on the
phone. It’s a miracle of love.
And as Kate had been thinking for the last few days, since Scott had proposed on his knees,
love’s the greatest miracle there is
.

At the parking lot, Kate looked at her watch. Twelve fifteen. Right on time, Albert was ushering a rusty Ford Falcon to a visitor spot. Although it seemed unlikely that a drive from Ithaca, New York, could be timed so precisely, Kate knew, from just a glance through the windshield at a tall woman with curly hair, that Hannah was a woman of her word.

Kate waved as Hannah, dressed in a pea coat and flowing skirt, stood up from the car. It took her a moment to notice Kate; she seemed distracted by the clock in the tower. At last she glanced across the lot. Kate, in her quilted coat and boots, waved her mittens in the cold.

They approached each other as opposites: Kate, smiling and jaunty; Hannah, grim and awkward.
She’s the sister,
Kate thought.
She has no reason to feel troubled.
But Kate suddenly understood: Kate had been Lynnie’s family, and the Lynnie Hannah knew was long gone.

The two who had never met took each other into a hug.

“It’s so strange being here again,” Hannah said, her voice weak as a shiver as they headed down the hill toward Kate’s office. “I’ve thought of it so much. It comes up a lot in my dreams.”

“When was the last time you were here?”

“The day we brought Lynnie. I never saw it again until that story aired on TV.”

She made a choking sound. Her dark hair was as curly as Lynnie’s. Kate knew from Eva that the child—no, she needed to think of her by name—that
Julia
shared this hair. Would Hannah ever recognize her niece if she happened to stroll into the bank where Hannah was a teller? Or wherever Hannah worked next—because, at twenty-seven, she’d been “job hopping,” as she’d
put it, for years? Well, it wasn’t a scenario that would ever happen. Hannah didn’t know she had a niece.

“I never tell anyone I have a sister,” Hannah said as they began walking. “But I remember so much.” She smiled. “We had fun. We had a bubble-gum game, where she’d pop my bubble. We had our own version of hide-and-go-seek. She liked sucking on wet washcloths and playing dress-up. And we loved to sing. Show tunes, Tin Pan Alley stuff. The one that got her most excited was ‘A-Tisket, a-Tasket.’ I’d stand on the desk and sing my heart out while she bounced on the bed.” She began the song, then trailed off. The wind droned across the empty cornfields. The governor had shut down the farm; those fields would never see corn again.

Hannah sighed. “My parents never talked about her. We even moved so when my brothers got older, no one around them could spill the beans. Can you believe that? And can you believe I didn’t question that for years? The things you just accept.” She walked in silence a minute, then added, “Twice I asked my mother why we did it. The first time, after the twins were born, she said we’d confuse Lynnie if we visited. The second time, when I was in college, she said my father had wanted to spare us the shame. And all along I had to promise not to tell my brothers.”

“Do any of them know you’re here?”

“I called my mother and told her about the broadcast. She said”—Hannah brushed at her eyes—“ ‘Go. Tell me what you see. Then I’ll think about telling your brothers and your father.’ ”

“Is that why you came? As an emissary for the family?”

Hannah blew on her fingers, which Kate realized weren’t gloved. And her coat was unbuttoned, as if Hannah were unconcerned with her own discomfort. “No. It’s for me. I can’t tell you what it’s like having a sister no one talks about.”

“I’m sorry,” Kate said. She didn’t add that some families
had
come to visit. Not many, and usually siblings became too uneasy
by the time they were teenagers. Why tell Hannah that if her parents hadn’t done what the doctors told them to do, she might feel differently—but might not? And why tell her that when a parent did come, some of the more lonely residents would go to the window to see if the person walking on the path was theirs? Kate always knew when a parent was near A-3: Barbara, Gina, and Betty Lou would be at the window, mournfully calling out, “Mommy?”

She would not tell Hannah that—or what happened one night five Novembers ago.

“Here we are,” Kate said, opening the door to her building.

Hannah stamped the cold from her feet. Then she looked at Kate. “I hate to admit this: I have no idea what to say to her.”

Kate placed both hands on Hannah’s shoulders. “I don’t think you need to say anything,” she said, smiling into the dark eyes. “You’re here.”

Kate opened the door to her office. Lynnie was sitting at the desk, drawing. Her eyes rose, and she looked at Kate, then this stranger.

“Lynnie,” Kate heard herself say, her voice far off, “this is your sister.”

Lynnie focused. “Nah-nah?” she said, her voice soft.

Hannah, nodding, started biting her lips.

Lynnie pushed back from the desk and said more loudly, “Nah-nah!”

“What do I do?” Hannah said to Kate. “I don’t know what to do!”

But already Lynnie had shot out from the desk and flung her arms around her sister. Slowly Hannah lifted her arms and wrapped them around Lynnie. Fastened together, they were opposites, too: Hannah sobbing away, Lynnie laughing for joy.

*    *    *

The visit was brief. With Uncle Luke fearing for his job, visitors weren’t supposed to stay longer than an hour, and only in administrative offices. Though maybe, Kate thought, a short visit was best, at least at first. As she watched Lynnie show Hannah her artwork, she was well aware that Hannah didn’t understand Lynnie’s long-unpracticed speech, and she looked to Kate to provide a translation. Hannah, who’d once been Lynnie’s fiercest supporter, was clearly embarrassed by this. She also barely knew what to say, startled that her sister was not just living her own life, but also had talent. “These are so good,” Hannah kept saying. Hannah also didn’t know what to make of Doreen, who, after stopping by and learning that Lynnie’s sister had come to visit, abruptly slammed out of the office. Hannah couldn’t know that Doreen had still never heard from her parents. Only Lynnie seemed relaxed, paging through her drawings of horses and cornfields. Yet Kate knew all was not as it seemed. Lynnie was showing only the drawings from her most recent folder. Nothing of her time with Number Forty-two. Nothing of the baby.

But she said none of this to Hannah when they walked back to her car. She said only that she’d felt hope in the air since the broadcast by John-Michael Malone and that Hannah’s visit was the first major development.

“What else might happen?” Hannah asked.

Kate told her she’d put in a request for a speech therapist for Lynnie. If more teachers were hired, it was possible an art class might get going. Physical improvements were probably going to happen at the cottages. And Uncle Luke could be replaced.

Then Kate shut her mouth, and not only because Hannah had no expectations of the other things that could change. Kate did not want to tread near the topic of housing options, since the
main option that usually came to anyone’s mind was family, and Hannah had already indicated her family would not be receptive. For a moment Kate felt her jaw set, though she understood. This family, like so many others, had spent decades living without a son or daughter or brother or sister. For all the harm that had been done, for all the sorrow and silences and secrets, full, complex lives had grown over the absence. To bring a person back to the household would be to throw lives into turmoil, family and residents alike. The system, for better or for worse, had given residents an existence of their own, and even if her family was desperate for her return, Kate knew Lynnie would not go. Lynnie was a woman now. Certainly she couldn’t make her way alone in the world—she’d always need help. But there must be a way she could live outside these walls without depending on family.