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.
Lucy
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 bro
ws. 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 bearing 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.
Justine
When she woke up, Justine checked her watch to see how many minutes she had before the alarm. Then she remembered: she was in Minnesota, in a double bed in the room next to her daughters’.
She ran her hand across the cool, empty space beside her. She’d slept in her sweatshirt and jeans, missing, against her will, the warmth of Patrick’s body pressing against hers. She wondered how Lucy had stood it, sleeping alone in this room where the radiator fought a loud but losing battle against the cold.
The night before, she’d been so tired she hadn’t cared that this was probably the bed Lucy had slept—and died—in. She’d only cared that, like the girls’ beds, it had fresh sheets. Now she slid from beneath the covers and stood on the small rag rug, rubbing her arms in her sweatshirt. This was definitely Lucy’s room. Though it was as immaculate as the girls’, it bore the unmistakable tracings of a life. Cotton balls and hairpins filled porcelain pots painted with yellow daisies on the dresser. On the bedside table sat a pair of reading glasses, a small photograph in a gilt frame, and a library copy of The God of Small Things.
Justine picked up the novel and fingered the leather bookmark lodged two-thirds of the way through. How terrible to die without finishing a book, she thought. Never to know the end of the story. She read the inside flap. The story sounded exotic and sad. She wouldn’t have chosen it. She loved to read, but she liked cozy mysteries, romance novels, the occasional thriller. Trashy stuff, Lucy probably would have thought. But it was distraction she was after, not intellectual stimulation or emotional engagement.
As she set down the book the photograph caught her eye. She picked it up with astonishment. It was a snapshot, the square sort taken by cameras in the late 1970s, and it was of a dark-haired woman and a blond girl. Maurie never kept photographs, claiming she didn’t want to look over her shoulder at anything, or at any time, but Justine recognized the woman as a younger version of her mother, and the girl as herself. They were sitting side by side on the porch steps of this very house. The summer sun was bright on their faces, and Maurie looked so young they could have been sisters. Her arm was around Justine, her hand hanging loosely over her shoulder, and they were both laughing at the person taking the picture. Justine looked closer at the image of her younger self. Unkempt hair, bare feet. Too thin. But happy, in that moment, with her mother’s arm around her.
It was so quiet here. A thick quiet that pressed on her eardrums. She looked out the tall window that was the twin of the one in the girls’ room. The bare branches of the trees were bowed with snow, and the lake looked as if it was covered with white felt. It wasn’t snowing now, but the sky was a pearlescent white, and for a moment the monochrome of the world made her dizzy. She set the photograph down.
Her daughters were still asleep, so she went downstairs. The entryway was only slightly less gloomy by the light of day, but at least she could see the pictures that had been shadowy, watchful squares in the dark the evening before. They were black-and-white photographs, the black faded to gray by years behind glass. Two were portraits of a man and a woman in Victorian clothes, the woman’s face severe, the man’s angular behind a wiry black beard. The third was of a couple posed stiffly in a photographer’s studio. The man had striking dark eyes below wavy dark hair. The woman was small and fair, her hair in a chignon that couldn’t quite tame her curls. She looked bewildered, as though she couldn’t think how she’d come to be there.
The photographs must have been here twenty years before, but Justine didn’t remember noticing them then. Now she studied them. These people had to be her ancestors—her great-grandparents and her great-great-grandparents, judging from the clothes. The blond, bewildered woman might even be her great-grandmother, the woman who, the summer Justine had come, lay wasted and dying in the bed she’d just woken up in. Justine had been afraid of her then, but in the photograph she was younger than Justine was now, and in the wan vulnerability of her face Justine saw something she recognized. They were the first pictures she’d seen of anyone in her family besides her mother, and she looked at them for a long time, her fingers working at the collar of her sweatshirt.
Then she went to the living room. It had the pine floors she remembered, but they were the color of dust in the thin light. Maroon velvet curtains framed the wide front window. A sofa and two armchairs upholstered in faded rose-colored fabric faced an ancient television on a metal stand, and on the far wall were a curio cabinet filled with figurines and an oak rolltop desk. Through a set of pocket doors was a small dining room with a table and six chairs. Both rooms swam with silent, chilly eddies of air.
Justine wrapped her arms around her chest and eyed the old metal radiator under the window. It must cost a fortune to heat this place. She should probably close both of these rooms off until spring. Except the living room had the only television in the house. She chewed her lip. They would just have to be careful. She shut the pocket doors to the dining room and made a mental note to turn off the radiators in the bedrooms once the girls were awake.
As she started back to the entryway, she saw an oil painting to the left of the door. It was of a little girl in a blue dress, her dark hair coiled in gleaming ringlets, a calico kitten in her arms. It wasn’t very good; even Justine, who knew nothing about art, could see that; but the painter had captured a watchfulness in the child’s eyes and a somberness in the turn of her mouth that made Justine feel almost as if she knew her. Below the painting, two candles sat on a walnut
stand with an old Bible between them. Twin smoke stains darkened the gilt frame.
Unlike the photos in the hallway, Justine remembered this painting. One day, as she and Lucy sat on the porch, Justine had asked Lucy who the girl was, and Lucy said she was her little sister, who had disappeared in the woods on the last day of summer a long time ago. Her voice was light, as though it were nothing, just an old story, but her eyes went far away, beyond the lake, and Justine felt uneasy. Later, when she played in the forest, she imagined she was the lost girl living there in secret. She imagined she could go home if she wanted to. But she didn’t want to.
Then, not long before she and her mother left, the older women held an observance of sorts. Lucy turned to Lilith and said, she’s been asking all day, and Lilith said, we might as well get it done. Together they carried their mother down the stairs and sat her in one of the armchairs, which they’d turned to face the painting. Lucy drew the curtains and lit the candles in the day-dark, and she and Lilith stood on either side of their mother, their hands on the back of her chair. Justine and Maurie stood behind them, Maurie’s arms crossed in silent, long-suffering irritation. The scene felt heavy with remembrance and mourning, and Justine waited for something else to happen, for Lilith or Lucy to say something, or to read from the big Bible, but other than lighting the candles, they did nothing. The old woman’s dry, fluttering sobs were the only sound, and they were so quiet they sounded like mice chirruping under the floorboards. When she was done, her daughters carried her upstairs again, their hands dutiful.
Now Justine walked over to the Bible and opened it. It was a beautiful book, with gilt-edged pages and an embossed leather cover that was cracked with disuse. On the title page was written “To Thomas—An Enquiring Mind,” signed “Father,” with the date August 12, 1915. Gently, she turned the pages, which were riddled with underlinings and margin notes in a neat but crabbed hand. A red satin bookmark marked a page with a rectangle drawn around Psalm 51. Have mercy upon me, O God, according to thy lovingkindness, it began.
The Lost Girls Page 5