Little Girl Lost

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  Their family, not mine.

  Her mother’s quilted sewing box is the only other thing on that shelf. It holds an array of notions, spools of colored threads, and a length of leftover orange rickrack that brings back a harsh memory.

  Bettina used this zigzag trim to encircle the uneven hem of a hand-sewn dress that was supposed to look like one Amelia had coveted in a store window. They couldn’t afford to buy it, so Bettina attempted to re-create it using an outdated Butterick pattern and ugly pastel pink fabric from the remnant bin. One sleeve was noticeably shorter than the other, both gathered with elastic that left puckery red rings around Amelia’s wrist and forearm. She wore that awful dress to school once, and refused to wear it again, preferring her mother’s disappointed tears to her classmates’ cruel taunts.

  “I’m sorry,” Bettina said later. “I should ʼa known better. My mother and aunts made all my clothes. I always wished I could just once have something store-bought.”

  Swallowing a twinge of remorse, Amelia unfolds the low stepladder and climbs up to investigate the top shelf.

  She doesn’t bother to look at the envelope from the photographer who took the senior yearbook portraits at her high school. She looks halfway decent in the pictures, wearing the studio’s sophisticated black shoulder drape and fake pearls, but every shot has the word PROOF stamped across it. Her mother claimed they couldn’t afford to order anything, but one day, they would.

  Yeah. Sure you will.

  Nor does she reexamine a pair of old photo albums, relics from her parents’ childhoods. They’ve dragged them out and gone through them plenty of times over the years. She feigned interest as they pored over milky photos of family members she’s never met, whom she now knows aren’t even related to her.

  She sets the albums on the floor, along with a collection of her old report cards stuffed into a frayed brown envelope. Boring, boring.

  Wrapped in dry cleaner’s plastic, a large, tightly woven basket sits wedged high atop a stack of boxes. She tugs it forward, careful not to tilt it and spill the contents. But it’s empty. She tosses it onto the floor, shaking her head. What a waste of precious storage space. And why wrap a stupid old basket in plastic when the heirloom afghan sits unprotected and moth-eaten a shelf below?

  She pulls out the large white cardboard box that sat beneath it and lifts the lid. Under a layer of tissue paper lies the white taffeta dress Bettina had worn when she got married.

  She takes it out and holds it up, a wisp of soft fabric fluttering against her cheek. Pressing the tops of the sleeves to her shoulders, she faces her reflection in the full-length mirror on the other side of the closet door.

  It couldn’t have been considered a wedding gown, even on Bettina. The hem would have fallen just below her knee; it rides a few inches above Amelia’s. The neckline is a simple circle; the bodice unadorned by lace or sequins; the skirt by flounces or bows.

  I look like her. It’s a strange thought, because of course she doesn’t, and why would she?

  Bettina was short, squat, and dark skinned; Amelia is tall, thin, and light skinned.

  And yet . . .

  There were times, over the years . . .

  Before she knew she didn’t share her mother’s blood or—what is it called? DNA?

  There were times when Amelia would laugh, and someone would say, “Oh, you look just like your mother when you smile.”

  She’d never seen it back then.

  Why now?

  She sure isn’t smiling.

  She yanks the closet door open again, thrusts the dress back into the box, and crams on the lid. Then, overtaken by guilt, she removes it and smooths the fabric, folding it. The dress may not be meaningful to Amelia, but Bettina did make an effort to preserve at least this family heirloom.

  As she tucks it back into the tissue paper, she realizes that there’s something more in the box. Her mother’s wedding headpiece, she assumes, reaching for the scrap of lace.

  But it’s not connected to a hat. It must be a nice wedding handkerchief, or . . .

  No, it’s a doll’s tiny, ruffled dress, made of delicate pastel fabric.

  Amelia had a rag doll once, but not one that would have worn this dress. Her mother must have. But why would she preserve doll clothes in a box with her wedding dress?

  She holds it closer, and notices a label sewn into the back collar. It’s hard to read, but she makes out “Best & Co.” . . .

  That used to be a fancy department store here in New York. They could never have afforded to shop there, and anyway, Bettina had been raised down south.

  The label contains another word. Is it . . .

  She frowns, remembering the film she’d seen last year, My Beautiful Laundrette. What the heck . . .

  No. It’s not Laundrette. It’s Layette.

  Layette means it’s not a doll’s dress—it’s for a newborn baby.

  A store-bought and expensive dress couldn’t have belonged to Bettina, but it mattered enough for her to pack it away in a special place, just as she’d kept the tiny gold ring with the sapphires.

  Amelia’s breath catches in her throat.

  It must have been mine. And it’s blue.

  Chapter Ten

  October 24, 1987

  Boston, Massachusetts

  “I just died in your arms . . .”

  Tara sings along with the cassette playing on the stereo as she walks Jake Kilpatrick to the door. Earlier, her favorite band, Cutting Crew, had performed the hit power ballad live on the Tonight Show.

  “How many times are you going to rewind that after I leave?” Jake isn’t a fan of new wave music like she is.

  “Till I get sick of it.”

  “How can you not? It’s got the same lyrics over and over.”

  “That’s why I love it! I think it should be our song.”

  “If I say yes, can I stay?”

  “No.”

  “Come on, we’re both consenting adults.”

  “I have an eighteen-year-old daughter.”

  “So do I.”

  “Yours lives in Medford with her mother. She isn’t sneaking out at all hours to meet her boyfriend.”

  “She might be.”

  “Well if she is, he’s not twenty-five.”

  “Liam’s not that old.”

  “He’s twenty-four, then. Last night, she went to bed at nine o’clock and I thought she might be sick so I went up later to check on her, and she had her giant teddy bear in her bed under the covers so I’d think it was her, asleep. Anyway, now she’s grounded, and I have to set a good example.” She turns the dead bolt, slides the chain, and opens the door for him. “Get home safely.”

  “I always do. Lock up after me.”

  “I always do.”

  He turns up the collar on his jacket, gives a wave, and disappears into the dark drizzle.

  She watches him go, a faint smile playing at her lips.

  Before Jake, she’d only ever had a handful of awkward dates. She was too busy raising her daughter and helping her aging aunt and uncle keep the tumbledown Victorian’s mansard roof over all their heads.

  In August, she let a friend talk her into answering a personal ad in the Phoenix. It didn’t say, “Soon-to-be-laid-off Southie boiler room engineer, father of four with angry ex, seeks hard-knocks, soon-to-be-homeless diner waitress—single mom of troubled teen preferred.”

  Yeah, she and Jake were a match made in heaven—or in a Bon Jovi song.

  Their first date was at Murph’s Bar and Grill across East Broadway, neon lit now in a row of low Victorian homes that have seen better days.

  Locals have been predicting that the neighborhood will be on the upswing when—not if—the yuppies start moving in. It’s hard to envision the Brooks Brothers and BMW crowd settling here amid sagging steps, peeling paint, and missing shutters.

  The neighborhood was different when she visited as a little girl. They’d take Amtrak up from Brooklyn every March to visit Aunt Patsy and Uncle T
ommy. The famed Southie Saint Patrick’s Day Parade marched right past the door.

  Still does. But Tara makes sure to get out of town every year on that day.

  She can’t bear the memories of that final parade in 1968. She was a house guest here then, visiting with her parents, little sisters, and Lucky, the orphaned kitten they’d adopted the week before.

  “Black cats are bad luck!” Uncle Tommy said when he saw Tara cuddling the tiny creature on the porch.

  “Blarney, just look at the Irish eyes on this little guy. They’re greener than any of ours!” Aunt Patsy said. “Come on in, everyone. You, too, Lucky. Come in, come in.”

  She ruled this ramshackle roost, just as she’d ruled Grandma’s old Bay Ridge apartment when she and Tara’s mom were growing up in Brooklyn, and now rules her new Daytona Beach retirement condo. She and Uncle Tommy are letting Tara and Emily stay on here rent-free through the end of the year. They can’t afford to keep the house and she can’t afford to buy it, so she should be looking for a new place. But she doesn’t want to move at all. It’s been home ever since . . .

  “Don’t let it in, lamb.” She hears Aunt Patsy in her head. “Think about something happy.”

  Happy . . .

  Saint Patrick’s Day 1968 stands out as the last happy day of her life. East Broadway was awash in a sea of green jubilation, and Tara herself was full-to-bursting with rich, raisin-studded soda bread and the excitement of seeing Bobby Kennedy in person.

  “There he goes!” Daddy told her as they marched past. “He’s going to be the next president of the United States! You just wait and see!”

  “Which one? Which one is he?”

  “The one on the left.”

  RFK looked dignified striding alongside his brother Teddy, younger and full of swagger in a brash green tie. Slurring on a tide of Guinness, Uncle Tom correctly predicted she’d never forget this day, as Aunt Patsy and Mom bickered good-naturedly over which of the famous siblings was more handsome. They agreed that oldest brother, Jack, had been the true star of the family.

  “Such a shame,” Mom said, and crossed herself as she always did when someone brought up the late president. On the November day he was assassinated, school was dismissed early. Tara arrived home from seventh grade to find her mother huddled on the couch in front of the TV, sobbing as if JFK had been a personal friend.

  “This is the worst tragedy ever,” she wailed.

  Mom didn’t live to watch his younger brother Bobby meet the same fate. Less than a week after the Saint Patrick’s Day parade, the Brooklyn Butcher murdered them all in their sleep—Mom, Dad, Linda, and Kimmy.

  Tara moved to Boston to live with Aunt Patsy and Uncle Tom. They said Lucky the kitten could come with her.

  “I don’t have him anymore. Black cats are bad luck.”

  She’d thrust him outside the day she came home from the hospital, and expected him to scamper into the bushes. Instead, he stayed on the doorstep mewing, watching her through the windows with sad green eyes that had seen everything that happened in her bedroom that terrifying night.

  Back in the living room, she turns off the stereo and ejects the cassette tape. She puts it back into her Walkman, and attaches it to the high, pleated waistband of her new acid-washed Lees that set her back a whopping thirty-two dollars at Filene’s.

  “For jeans?” her friend Cindy said on the phone earlier. “You can get two pairs for that.”

  “Not like these. There’s a jean jacket to match. It has shoulder pads. I put it on layaway.”

  “Are you crazy? You can’t afford to throw all this money around! What if Emily decides to go to college or something?”

  “She can get a loan like everyone else.”

  Tara places the Walkman headset in the teased hair riding high above her forehead, presses Rewind, and then Play.

  “I just died in your arms . . .” She gathers the empty Sam Adams bottles from the attic steamer trunk now serving as a makeshift coffee table. Her aunt and uncle moved most of their furniture to Florida, leaving shadowy patches floating like phantoms on sun-faded rugs and wallpaper.

  For the second time in her life, she has no idea where she’s going to live next. The first, in the hospital, she pretended to be asleep while her grandmother and Aunt Patsy argued at her bedside. They’d just come from the quadruple funeral. Nana wanted Tara to live with her—until they discovered she’d conceived the rapist’s child. Aunt Patsy saw her through that miserable pregnancy, and made arrangements through the church for the baby’s adoption long before she was born. Tara assumed it would be like putting the kitten out on the step, but when she held her tiny daughter, an unexpected tide of maternal love swept her. She’d lost everything, and then found this tiny person, fragile and unspoiled, gazing up at her with wide blue eyes.

  In that moment, Tara was certain she and Emily belonged to each other.

  In this one, her daughter seems like a stranger.

  Her friend Cindy, the mother of Emily’s best friend, always reminds her that temperamental and even sneaky behavior is normal in teenaged girls. But she doesn’t know the truth about Tara’s past, or her secret fear that Emily inherited some dark, violent paternal gene from him.

  She testified at the trial, carrying sixty pounds of post pregnancy weight, with breast milk leaking under her sweater. She kept her chin up as Uncle Tom hustled her past shouting reporters at the courthouse, and did her part to make sure that her family’s murderer would be imprisoned for life. For her, that was closure. She shed the past like the extra weight and her old last name, taking her uncle’s name to hide the truth from the friends she later found in Boston. Even Emily doesn’t know the whole story. She’s aware that Tara’s family had been killed, but not that it was murder. She doesn’t know Tara had been raped, or that she’d been born out of a lethal crime. In their stoic Irish Catholic household, certain things were not discussed, certain questions weren’t asked, and certain emotions were kept to oneself.

  The song ends, and she presses Stop on her Walkman to rewind it. As the tape whirs, she hears a thump overhead. It came from the back of the house, where Emily’s bedroom windows face the flat roof of the back service porch, an old trellis serving as sturdy, if wisteria-entangled, ladder rungs.

  She wouldn’t dare defy Tara by sneaking out again, but what if her deadbeat boyfriend is sneaking in?

  Her gaze falls on the magnet-held refrigerator gallery of Emily’s artwork. The papers are yellowed now, and curling at the edges, but Aunt Patsy could never bear to take any of them down.

  “I’ll leave that to you,” she told Tara when she left in May.

  Tara managed to remove a couple of crayoned drawings—stick figures, puffy green trees studded with red dots—no, not apples, first-grade Emily had explained, long ago. They were her favorite cinnamon candies.

  “Candy doesn’t grow on trees, honey,” Tara said.

  “It does in my picture, Mama.”

  Sweet, sweet Emily. Whatever happened to that pigtailed little angel?

  She heads up the carved mahogany staircase.

  She’s not a kid anymore. She thinks she’s in love with this dirtbag.

  That last winter in Brooklyn, Tara, too, had an inappropriate boyfriend. She was only a year younger than Emily when she snuck off to the free clinic to get birth control pills. Her boyfriend dumped her that February, but she’d kept taking the pills, certain they’d get back together. She shouldn’t have been able to get pregnant the night she was raped, and yet there she was.

  At the top of the stairs, Tara walks past her own door, down the hall to Emily’s room. She pushes the headphones back and knocks on the door. “Em? You awake?”

  Silence, other than the song faintly audible through the headphone speaker buds resting somewhere around her collarbone.

  I just died in your arms . . .

  She turns the knob.

  The bedside lamp is on, and someone is in bed.

  She’s relieved to see that it isn’t
a teddy bear this time. That’s her daughter’s blond hair on the pillow, teased high and cemented with dippity-do.

  “Em?”

  No response.

  “Em!”

  Stinker. She’s pretending to be asleep.

  “I know you can hear me. I want to talk to you. Come on, sit up.”

  Still, she doesn’t stir. Tara hurries over to the bed, yanks back the covers . . .

  And shrieks.

  Emily is drenched in blood, blue eyes staring vacantly at the ceiling.

  A hand clamps around Tara’s mouth, smothering her agonized scream. A strong grasp wrestles her back, away from the bed, holding her as a blade slices her throat.

  The last thing Tara hears is her own dying breath and her favorite song, muffled as a tide of blood washes over the headphones.

  I just died . . .

  After leaving Wash, Barnes stops at one of his old Harlem haunts for a couple of drinks. It’s not the kind of place he tends to frequent these days. Bottom shelf booze, seedy clientele, restrooms so filthy he chooses to use the back alley as a urinal instead, with evidence that he’s not the first. He’d walked in needing to forget that his old friend’s days are dwindling and the paternity mess is waiting for him at home. He walks out hoping the cheap whiskey has done the trick, and stops on the way home to pick up a pint of Jack.

  Stepping into his small apartment, he’s hard-pressed to recall why he was so excited to move in here a few months ago. Somehow, a high floor, white walls, and minimalist décor don’t hold the same allure they did at the Waylands’ Park Avenue penthouse.

  No designer furniture, marble floors, or skylights here, though. Just plastic milk crates and curbside castoffs; beat-up parquets and two air shaft windows covered in plastic venetian blinds that refuse to stay open or closed. No matter how he fiddles with the cord, the narrow slats settle into a position insufficient for letting in sunlight or keeping out voyeurs from across the way.

  He crosses over to the kitchenette and flips a wall switch. The overhead fixture illuminates Connie scurrying away from last night’s meatball sub, abandoned in its deli bag on the countertop alongside the lawyer’s letter.