The Lost Girls

by Heather Young

  Who was Thomas? Was he Maurie’s grandfather, the father of the three Evans sisters? Perhaps the severe, dark-haired man in the photograph in the hallway? Justine thought he must be. She looked up at the painting. The girl’s black, pupilless eyes looked back at her as though they were actually seeing her. Unnerved, Justine took a step back.

  She heard footsteps on the stairs: Melanie. Justine closed the Bible and went out to the entryway. Even as a baby Melanie hadn’t been a morning person, so from long habit Justine didn’t try to talk to her; she just led her to the kitchen and made them both toast. As they ate in their usual silence, Justine gave the room a closer look. It wasn’t any less shabby in the light of day, but now she noticed more of its homey touches: a set of rooster canisters on the counter, a clock made from a barn door on the wall, and on the table a set of salt and pepper shakers shaped like fat bakers. With the radiator on, it was practically cozy.

  One day that summer, she’d come inside, sand on her bare feet, and heard her mother, Lucy, and Lilith talking in here. Her mother’s voice was higher than usual. “No,” she said. “Absolutely not.” And, “You have no idea what you’re asking.” A softer voice in reply: Lucy. “Think of her, Maurie. Think how it is for her.” Justine must have made a noise, for they called out—“Justine, is that you?”—so she had to come in. Her mother, leaning against the counter, caught her as she passed and pulled her close. “We Evans girls stick together, don’t we?” she asked, her voice too bright. Justine nodded because her mother wanted her to nod, and the old women looked back at her with something sad in their faces.

  Now Justine turned to Melanie, whose hair hung in limp black curtains above her plate. She found herself smiling. Lucy had found a way to ask again, hadn’t she? A way to ask Justine directly, without Maurie’s interference. Now they were here, Justine and her own daughter, in that very same kitchen. “I think this house could be nice if we fixed it up a bit,” she said.

  Melanie raised her head. The colorless light of morning fell on the sharp angles of her face. For a moment she looked like someone different, someone older. “I hate it,” she said. “It’s freezing, and nobody lives here.”

  Stung, Justine looked away, at the teacups in their rack. When Melanie bent over her toast again she went to the sink and washed her plate.

  After breakfast they went to see Arthur Williams. The dirt road was even more treacherous with four inches of fresh snow—the low stone walls of the bridge they’d crossed the day before were nearly covered—and Justine wondered uneasily who would plow it. Fortunately, the county road was clear. They followed it through winter forests and small hamlets barely large enough to justify signage: Kishawnee, population 120; West Liberty, population 179; Six Arrows, population 86. Each one a scattering of dirty white houses and a small, understocked-looking general store. Justine turned on the radio. The rock station from Fargo was fuzzy, but she didn’t care.

  After twenty miles they passed a sign that said WELCOME TO WILLIAMSBURG, POPULATION 2,425, and the small houses gave way to larger ones, some sturdy and plain, others with wraparound porches and fussy Victorian woodwork. Large oaks lined the street, their roots rippling the shoveled sidewalks. After a few blocks, the street ran into a small central square framed by quaint nineteenth-century storefronts. The Jones General Store anchored one corner. On the opposite corner sat Lloyd’s Pharmacy, twin wrought iron benches framing its door, and there was a gazebo in the center of the square. The little town looked like a Rockwell painting, even with the dirtying snow and the metal-gray sky.

  “It’s cute, don’t you think?” Justine asked the backseat as she slid the Tercel into an angled parking space. Neither girl answered, and as they picked their way down the sidewalk, cold air biting their faces, Justine saw that up close the stores’ signs were worn and paint was peeling on many buildings. Several shops were closed, with faded FOR LEASE signs in the windows. She walked quickly, hoping the girls wouldn’t notice, but a glance at Melanie told her that she, with those sharp eyes that found fault in everything, had.

  The law office was on the first floor of a plain two-story building facing the square. On its plate glass window the firm’s name was stenciled in chipped gold and black: WILLIAMS & WILLIAMS, ATTORNEYS-AT-LAW, EST. 1885. Its waiting area was furnished with four straight-backed chairs and a coffee table on well-worn parquet floors. At a small desk a woman with neat gray hair looked up when they came in.

  “I’m Justine Evans. I’m here to see Mr. Williams.” Justine glanced at the lettering on the window. “Arthur Williams.”

  “There’s just the one. Mr. Williams’s uncle passed ten years ago.” The secretary picked up her phone and motioned them to the chairs. “I’ll let him know you’re here.”

  Justine and her daughters sat. Angela swung her feet until Justine stopped her with a hand on her knee. Melanie picked at her fingers. It was quiet except for the clacking of the receptionist’s fingernails on her keyboard until the door beside her desk opened on a slight man of about sixty, stooped in tweed pants and a light blue dress shirt. His gray eyes behind wire-framed glasses followed Justine with keen but friendly interest as she and the girls entered his office, which was surprisingly opulent after the austerity of the waiting room. Its shelves were heavy with law books, an Oriental rug lay on the floor, and the mahogany desk was the size of a small boat. Justine took one of the two leather chairs and lifted Angela onto her lap while Melanie took the other. Arthur sat in the enormous desk chair. It made him look even smaller.

  “This office was my great-uncle’s,” he said with a smile, as though he’d read her thoughts. “Apparently it was important to him to have the biggest desk in town. How are you faring at Lucy’s?”

  Justine smiled back, liking him. “It’s cold.” She cleared her throat. “But the house is clean. The beds were made up for us.”

  “I told Matthew you would be coming. I trust he’s been helpful.”

  “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.

  Lucy

  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 flowers 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 thoug
ht 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.