Mrs. Williams brought us our winter clothes and space heaters. When the snow came in earnest, Mr. Miller plowed the dirt track to the county road so Lilith and I could walk to where the school bus picked us up. The other children whispered about us, but we didn’t care. Lilith’s summer friends, Jeannette and Betty and the lot, were at the high school across town, and she never mentioned them again. At night, Mother made our supper and we did our homework in the kitchen, warmed by a little heater. Father, busy with the business of bankruptcy, came on the weekends, and after supper Lilith and I went upstairs while he and Mother sat in the parlor without speaking. On Christmas Day, when he didn’t come, the three of us sat in the thin light filtering through the front window and waited for the phone to ring.
Every day of that first winter, Lilith and I returned from school to find Mother sitting in the kitchen with her eyes on the back door. She wasn’t waiting for us. Long past the time anyone could think a six-year-old girl might survive in that wild country, Mother hoped Emily would walk out of the woods. She never stopped hoping it. As the years passed she stopped watching the door, and if anyone asked why she stayed at the lake she said it was where she felt closest to her lost child. But she left the back porch light on every night for the next forty-four years, until the day she couldn’t get out of bed. And it is only now, as I look back upon that summer and find my bitterness toward her has mellowed enough to permit something almost like pity, that I understand what it was I did to her the night I gave my sister to the lake.
Lilith killed Emily. But I kept her alive.
Justine
The morning after the fire was one of almost impossible beauty. The skies were a scrubbed and perfect blue, and the sun starred the new snow with millions of tiny lights, winking and sharp like diamonds. But the chaos of the night was written in the tire treads and footprints that dirtied the road and in the blackened husk of the old house. The smoke seeping from the ruins tainted the air even inside the lodge.
Matthew had made up three of his upstairs guest rooms. Melanie and Angela fell asleep in one of them around dawn, the thin summer blankets pulled up to their chins. Maurie and Patrick took the other two. Justine and Matthew were still awake when, at nine, the last of the fire trucks drove away, leaving the lake to its accustomed quiet once more.
Matthew went to the bar and started washing the mugs in which he’d served the firefighters coffee. Justine picked up a towel and dried them. Matthew’s hands shook a little, and when Justine saw this she was overcome with gratitude and affection for him. All night long he’d been steadfast. Without being asked, he’d made up their beds. At five he’d made a breakfast none of them thought they could eat until he placed it before them. At seven he’d stood beside her as the fire chief told her what she already knew, that the fire started in the kitchen and they were lucky to have gotten out alive.
She said, “You should get some sleep.”
He nodded, but when she went upstairs he was still there, behind his bar, wiping the counter that needed no wiping.
Her daughters lay in narrow twin beds in the first room at the top of the stairs. She went to their window to pull the shade so the light wouldn’t wake them, and as she reached for the cord she saw the Emily book sticking out from under Melanie’s pillow. Justine slipped it out and opened the cover. But it wasn’t a book of Emily stories. On the first page, in an old woman’s shaky hand, was written, “For Justine.” On the second began what appeared to be a journal.
Justine took the book to the room she was sharing with Maurie. While Maurie slept she read it, turning the pages first with curiosity, then with dread, and finally with horror. When she was done it was late afternoon, and Maurie was still sleeping.
She went down to the main room, which was empty. Matthew had gone to bed at last. She sat at a table with the book in front of her and drew her knees up under her chin. The sun poured through the mullioned windows on the western wall in columns of gold, and dust motes hung motionless in the air. Justine closed her eyes. The insides of her eyelids were scratchy with soot. Against them a little girl in a white nightgown sank through dark water to the words of a prayer.
They were her family. The family she’d brushed against as a girl and forgotten, the family whose legacy she’d planned to take with her now, in photographs and books and brass-faced clocks. As if legacies lay in things that could be bought and sold. As if families could be left behind or taken with you as you chose.
She tightened her arms around her legs, feeling the weight and wonder of it. Their history, Lucy’s story, had directed her life even though she’d known nothing about it. It was a legacy of loyalty and betrayal. Weakness and regret. Love, and tender, harrowing violence. Lucy and Lilith, Emily, Eleanor with her nervous, ineffectual hands: they’d followed her everywhere she’d ever been, no matter how many times she’d shaken the dust off her feet in Maurie’s car and her own.
She felt someone watching her and opened her eyes to find Melanie standing in front of her, wearing the adult extra-large sweatshirt Matthew had given her to sleep in. It had a silk-screened orange sun and the name of the lodge in kitschy log letters, and it hung to Melanie’s knees. Justine thought: she has no clothes. Everything is ashes.
Melanie sat in the chair opposite Justine’s. The book lay between them. It looked like all the others, the same black-and-white marbled cover, just as old. But its binding wasn’t creased with decades of openings and closings. It hadn’t been in the box Justine had gotten from the librarian, she was certain. “Where did you find it?”
“In the table by my bed.” In the faint challenge of Melanie’s gaze Justine saw that it hadn’t been an Emily book Melanie had hidden beneath her covers the night they fought. It had been this. She’d had it for weeks, reading it in secret and illustrating it in dark strokes in notebooks of her own. It was she, Justine realized, who’d lit the candles beneath Emily’s portrait, creeping down the stairs in the night, striking the matches while Justine and Angela and Maurie slept.
She pulled her feet off the chair and rested her arms on the table. “Why didn’t you give it to me?”
The last ray of sun burst through the window like a solar flare before guttering out. It took the colors of the day with it. Melanie said, “Because I can give her what she wants. Better than you.”
“She wanted me to know what happened to Emily.”
“That’s not all she wants.” One of Melanie’s fingers touched the corner of the book, lingering on the binding in a small caress.
Justine slid the book away and folded her hands on top of it. Melanie’s finger picked at a divot on the table instead. The white bandage was bulky on her thin wrist. When had she become so thin? She didn’t even look like a child anymore. She looked like an old woman with the smooth skin of a girl. “You shouldn’t have gone back for it,” Justine said. “You could have been killed.”
A small muscle in Melanie’s cheek tightened. “I know,” she said, and for a time they sat with the memory of the choking heat in the green bedroom and the wailing of the house as it died, the stain of Melanie’s blood on the snow and the cold metal of the gutter in their hands.
Then Justine said, “What happened at the Padres game?”
Melanie blanched. She looked away and gave the smallest of shrugs. “Nothing. He just told me I should be nicer to him.”
Part of Justine wanted to accept this half-truth as the whole. Even after reading Lucy’s book, that part of her could still make its cowardly argument. But she could not let it win. Not now, when she had seen the terrible wages a mother’s cowardice could reap—had already reaped. So she said, “What else?”
Melanie’s fingers worked at one another. Justine gathered the courage to push harder, but before she had to, Melanie’s fingers stopped. She raised her chin. “He said sometimes kids disappeared, and nobody ever found them. But if anything happened to me, I shouldn’t worry. Because he’d take good care of you.”
Justine kept her face still. At
the Padres game she’d left Melanie with Patrick while she took Angela to the bathroom. She thought it would let Melanie get to know him, see what a nice guy he was. She’d told herself it had worked; that Melanie had decided to give him a chance. Because afterward Melanie accepted his place in their lives without complaint. Now she remembered it was Melanie who had convinced Angela to leave the San Diego school, and she felt faint.
He wouldn’t have hurt her. He didn’t have real violence in him, she was sure. He was a man of neatly overturned sofas, sly fingers under a car’s hood. But. If Melanie had disappeared, he would have been Justine’s rock. He would have talked to the police, coordinated the search parties, made the flyers. He would have bought groceries and made their meals, and driven Angela back and forth to school. He would have comforted Justine in her shattering terror and, ultimately, her grief, which she would pour into his arms as he held her in their bed each night. He would have saved her, to the extent she could have been saved.
“We’re going to go somewhere he’ll never find us,” she said, thickly. “I promise.”
Melanie folded her bandaged arms, their bones skeptical in the too-big sweatshirt. They were as thin as Eleanor’s arms in her wedding dress, in the photograph in the foyer. Above them her eyes were as black as her great-great-grandfather’s must have been, as black as her great-grandfather’s—for so Abe was, Justine now believed—still were. She said, “I don’t want to go anywhere. I want to stay here.”
Justine sat back in her chair. Her wool sweater scratched against her shoulders.
Melanie’s fingers picked at one another. “Please, Mommy.” She hadn’t called Justine that in a long time. The two syllables were as soft and round as a baby’s cheek.
Before Justine could answer, before she knew how she wanted to answer, she heard footsteps on the stairs. Melanie sat up, every muscle tense, as Patrick came into the main room and slumped into the seat next to Justine. He looked exhausted, as though he hadn’t slept at all. “How you girls doing?” he asked. “Okay?”
“We’re fine,” Justine made herself say. She had gone as rigid as Melanie.
Patrick rested his hands on the table. He smoothed the right with the left in a nervous habit Justine knew well. He cut his eyes to her, then back to his hands. She knew what he was going to say. He kept his eyes on his hands as he said it. “I guess you’ll have to come back to San Diego now.”
She didn’t answer. And as she studied him, she realized something. His face was clean. Unlike hers and Melanie’s, which were dusky with soot. He hadn’t run into a burning house after a book. He hadn’t run into it after a child. He hadn’t even run into it after the child’s mother. He’d paced in circles in the snow instead. And he was ashamed of this. Justine’s pulse quickened. She leaned forward. “Patrick, you need to leave. We don’t want you here.”
Melanie’s eyes flicked to her in surprise. Patrick looked as if she’d slapped him. “But—I saved you. I saved all of you.” He saw her disbelief and rushed on. “The fire started in the oven. I smelled the smoke, and I went in there, but it was already too late. So I came to get you. If it weren’t for me, you’d all be dead.”
Justine felt a flapping in her chest. It was true he’d woken them up, and he’d helped Maurie out of the house. But he hadn’t saved Melanie, and he hadn’t saved Justine. In the end, Justine herself had done the saving he’d wanted so desperately to do. She’d changed his script. Now he was trying to pivot.
She still had her hand on Lucy’s book. The edges of its pages were warped with damp from lying in the snow where she’d thrown it. Long ago, two girls knelt on a beach in the moonlight, pressing a secret between their palms. But not only a secret. The promise the secret bought was pressed there, too.
The flurry of wings quieted. She felt again that surreal, distant calm she’d felt in Lucy’s bedroom. She said, “The oven hasn’t worked since we got here.”
“What?”
She raised her head and looked him in the eyes. “I said the oven is broken. And if you don’t leave, I’m going to tell the firefighters that.”
Patrick’s mouth fell open. He looked like one of the fish in the photographs on the wall, with their gaping jaws and stunned eyes. The rest of the room seemed to disappear, and Justine could see every small hair on his face, every blood vessel in the whites of his eyes. Seconds ticked by. She waited. She waited for him to think it through. To understand exactly what she meant, and to believe she would do it.
Finally he blinked several times, and she knew it was done. He looked away, at the window. Then he pressed his hands on the table and stood. Now his face was shadowed; she couldn’t see his expression. His arms hung from his shoulders, and his body seemed heavier than when he’d walked in. He said, “You will never find anyone who loves you like I do,” and she knew he was right. Then he walked out.
When the screen door slammed she dropped her head into her hands and felt the breath leave her body through every pore. Across from her, Melanie picked up Lucy’s book and put it in her lap.
Justine didn’t know how long Matthew would let them stay in the lodge, or where they’d live when summer came and he needed the rooms. How they’d deal with the girls at school, or the assistant principal and her antibullying campaign. How she’d find a job. She couldn’t think about any of these things until she’d slept fourteen hours in one of Matthew’s beds, with her daughters safe and whole down the hall. But when she woke up, she would come down to the kitchen and help Matthew make breakfast. Then, as she cracked eggs into a bowl, no longer trying to make them exactly right, she would ask him if they could stay for a little while.
In the silence they heard Patrick’s engine start. Justine reached across the table and took Melanie’s hand. Though it was smaller, their fingers were the same. Slender and strong.
Lucy
I’m in my old bed, in Lilith’s and my old room. It seems the proper place to write the last lines of this, my last story. Tomorrow I will go to town to read to the children, and when I’m done I’ll drop this journal by Arthur’s house and tell him to give it to you if you come. He won’t have to keep it long. There’s a sickness in me; I’ve felt it growing for many months. Unlike Lilith, who was dragged into death one cell at a time, I have no stomach for hospitals and tubes and dying under fluorescent lights. So I will die here, in this place that is still my favorite place, despite everything.
Matthew came by this evening. He brought pumpkin bread, his grandmother’s recipe, which I love. It’s gotten too cold to be on the porch, so we sat in the parlor, drinking tea from flowered cups and eating bread from flowered plates, like the old people we have become. We talked about the first snow, which is coming next week, or so they say. Later this year than usual. It’s been strange to see the lake frozen but the earth brown all around. It makes me uneasy, with the millennium turning just over two months from now.
We talked a bit about it—the end of the millennium. Matthew said that when he was a boy he thought by the year 2000 there would be space travel, time travel, and cures for all diseases. Instead, all we got were faster cars and flu shots. He laughed ruefully, a boy disappointed. I told him flu shots were no small thing. But I agreed with him. Not much has changed in all these years. More wars. New countries. All that technology neither of us has much use for. Still, it’s much the same world as it was when we were young, in all its most important particulars.
I asked if he wished he’d done anything differently. It was an odd question, and I surprised both of us by asking it. As I said, we don’t talk about the past, but I’ve spent so much time in my memories of late that I suppose it was on my mind. I could see I’d made him uncomfortable.
“I made a choice once,” he said, “but I’m not going to regret it.”
I smiled: it was the sort of thing I’d expected him to say. And I did understand him. I knew he meant the choice he made to stay here with Abe, in the place for which Abe was best suited, rather than go be an astronaut or follow wh
atever dream might have supplanted that one. He’d made his peace with it, no doubt because he’d made it out of love. The things we do for love are the hardest things to regret.
“Do you?” he asked. He wasn’t just being polite, asking me the question I’d asked him. He wanted to know. I could see it in the careful way he held his plate. Between us lay all the decades that connected the children we’d been with the old man and old woman we’d become. And something more: that listening thing that, from time to time, infuses the air of this house and brushes against my cheek. Emily, but not quite Emily. Or not just Emily.
I set my teacup on the table. For a long time I’d wanted someone to ask me that question. I’d wanted to tell someone that I regretted nothing. That I, too, had acted out of love, and could claim that absolution. That I kept Lilith’s secret because I was a good sister, loyal to the end to the only person who ever truly cared about me, who ever needed me. And that anyone who was hurt by what I did deserved their suffering.
But I don’t believe these things any more, if I ever truly believed them. I regret it all. I regret that I didn’t leave Lilith and Emily on the shore that night, and go get help. I regret that I didn’t tell everyone, when they came, that Emily’s death was an accident. I wish I’d let Lilith go wherever her spirit led her. I wish I’d let Emily lie in the earth, with a stone to tell the world she’d been here for a little while. I wish I’d been a different person entirely. A person with courage. If I had been, many lives would have been different.
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