The Lost Girls

Justine-1

Justine

She wasn’t thinking of leaving him. Why would she? He was everything she wanted; everything Francis, her daughters’ father, had never been. He was faithful. Reliable. Home every night at five thirty. And he made her feel safe. Especially after the burglary. She was lucky to have a man like him when there were people out there with lock picks and violence on their minds. At least, that’s what she told herself as she lay awake beside him the night after it happened.

The police said the burglars must have been watching the apartment building, because their timing was perfect. Justine had picked up Melanie and Angela from the elementary school aftercare on her way home from work as usual. Then, five minutes after they walked in the apartment, Angela said she needed supplies for a school project – poster board and colored pipe cleaners. Patrick wasn’t home yet, so Justine left a note saying she’d be back at six and would bring takeout. They went to the Walgreens and the In-N-Out and got back at six exactly.

As soon as they walked in the door Justine stopped, instinctively pressing the girls backward. The apartment was completely trashed. The sofa was on its back, its cushions off. Both lamps were on the floor. The coffee table was tipped over, and magazines were everywhere. In the kitchen the cupboards stood open, their contents emptied on the counters, and pots and pans covered the linoleum.

Patrick’s black messenger bag, the one he took to work, sat in the hallway at Justine’s feet, but he wasn’t in the kitchen or the living room. ‘Patrick?’ She called, in a half-whisper. There was no answer. The air went thin around her. ‘Run!’ she hissed to the girls. ‘Go to Mrs Mendenhall’s! Tell her to call the police.’

Melanie and Angela fled back to the landing and down the stairs. Carefully, Justine lowered the shopping bags to the carpet. She stepped into the living room, every muscle tensed. She called Patrick again. Again there was no answer. She crept down the hall to their bedroom, her back pressed against the wall. She held her breath and peeked inside. The covers were off the bed and clothes spilled out of the drawers, but no one was there. Across the hall, the girls’ room was the same. No one was in the apartment.

Justine ran back to the living room, panicking now. Where was he? Had he been here when the burglars came? He must have; otherwise he’d be here now. She pressed her hands against her head. They’d done something to him. They’d taken him. Or he’d chased them and they’d hurt him. She heard the distant whine of a police siren. The police would find him. She would meet them in the parking lot.

She turned toward the door and jumped, a scream in her throat.

Patrick was standing in the doorway, watching her.

‘Patrick! Oh, my God!’ She staggered with relief – he wasn’t hurt; he didn’t have a mark on him; he was safe. She ran to him, tripping over the sofa pillows, kicking one of the lamps, falling against his chest. His arms swallowed her as she inhaled the tang of his sweat and the acrid scents of ink and toner, sobbing into his white work shirt. His fingers dug into her ribs as though trying to unlock them.

‘It’s okay,’ he murmured into her hair.

‘I was so scared.’

‘Me, too.’ His voice was tight. ‘I came home, and you were gone.’

She raised her head and saw in his taut, pale face what he’d been through. He’d come home at five thirty, as he always did, and found the apartment wrecked, and her gone. With her note buried in the mess, he hadn’t known she and the girls were safe, buying pipe cleaners at the Walgreens. The errand might have saved their lives, but she knew what it had done to him to walk into the ruined, empty apartment. He’d thought his worst nightmare had come true.

‘Patrick, I’m so sorry.’ She embraced him again, tenderly this time. He sagged against her. They stood for a long time like that, his weight heavy on her. When her back began to ache, she eased him away, kissing him in solace. His cheeks were soft, like a baby’s. After the police had come and made their notes and dusted for fingerprints, Justine and Patrick cleaned up the mess and made a list of what was missing: the television, the VHS player, Justine’s few earrings and necklaces. Then, while Justine retrieved the girls from Mrs Mendenhall and fed them their cold In-N-Out burgers, Patrick drove to the twenty-four-hour CVS and bought a new lock that he installed himself. It took the girls a long time to settle into sleep, but once they did, Justine and Patrick made love like survivors in the tangled sheets of their bed.

Afterward, Justine lay with Patrick’s arm heavy across her waist and watched the digital clock measure out the minutes in silent red lines. He made her feel safe. He did. But something about the burglary niggled at her. Part of it was the enormity of the mess – why would a burglar flip over the sofa and strip the beds? – but it wasn’t just that. Finally, as the sky lightened toward dawn, she put her finger on it: it wasn’t how excessive the violence had been, but how orderly. The lamp shades had still been on the lamps, even though the lamps lay sideways on the floor. The pots and pans were stacked on the linoleum as if set there rather than tossed. Things were missing, but nothing had been broken.

She thought, too, about how she hadn’t left her note on the counter but on the kitchen table, which wasn’t really in the small kitchen but practically in the living room, where Patrick might not have found it right away. For a few minutes, when she’d been at the Walgreens and her note wasn’t in plain sight, he might not have known where she was.

She drew her legs to her chest. Patrick always wanted to know where she was, insisted upon it, even. It was one of the things she found most endearing about him, after Francis’s painful disinterest those last years. She stared at the gray light that came through the gaps in the oatmeal curtains that had come with the apartment. Where had Patrick been when she got home? When she called his name, fear making her voice tremble and crack? How long had he been standing in the doorway, watching her?

Outside, birds began to chirp and chatter. Patrick’s body, curled around hers, was warm and solid and reliable as always. What was she thinking? That he’d staged an elaborate burglary just to make her feel what he’d felt when he came home and she wasn’t there? To see if she would feel it? Because that would be crazy. This was Patrick. Dependable, meticulous Patrick, who couldn’t abide any sort of mess and never raised his voice to her, much less a hand. She was thinking like her mother. Her mother, to whom every man was a prince – until he was a liar, or a pervert, or a nutcase, and she had to leave town. She wasn’t her mother. She’d found a good man. She felt his breath on her shoulder and forced her suspicion to hold its tongue.

But the next day, she left him.

That day started like every other day since he’d moved in ten months before. Justine got up first, even though she’d barely slept, and spent half an hour sitting in one of the Windsor chairs at the kitchen table with her knees pulled up under her chin and her eyes closed. She’d done this every morning since she was a girl, sitting alone while her mother slept, storing up silence against the noise each day would bring. If she listened, she could hear the low voices of the couple next door, but she didn’t. She listened only to the quiet of her own apartment in the pale light.

When Patrick’s alarm went off, she woke her daughters for school and made breakfast. When Patrick appeared, he ruffled Angela’s hair and said good morning to Melanie. Justine stood on her tiptoes to kiss him, and he didn’t smell like sweat and toner; he smelled of Irish Spring and Walmart laundry detergent, the fresh-bitter scent she associated with him. By the light of day, in the tidy kitchen that bore no traces of the burglary, her nighttime suspicions seemed even more preposterous.

He had his eggs over easy, as always, and as always he told her they were great. She’d learned to make them exactly the way he liked. He needed his eggs done exactly right because he sold office equipment at the Office Pro, mostly desktop printers and other small machines. When he proved himself, he could sell the copiers, which was where the big money was, because once you sold one you got to sell the paper and toner and ink that went with it, forever, but his boss wouldn’t let him do that until he got his quarterly numbers up, and to do that he needed the eggs. After he ate he wrapped her in a hug and tossed his keys in the air as he walked out. Just like any other day.

On her way to work, she dropped her daughters at the elementary school. She watched Melanie trudge to the blue doors and wondered if she was going to get another call from the assistant principal that afternoon. Her eldest had been surlier than usual, even disobedient, and last week there’d been shoving on the playground during which another fifth grader’s backpack had landed in the mud. The assistant principal said if it didn’t stop there’d be counseling, maybe special classes. Justine watched with a frown as Melanie climbed the steps with her shoulders hunched like a tiny boxer. Then she drove to Dr Fishbaum’s office, where she was the receptionist, and she didn’t think about anything but work until lunchtime, when her mother called and everything changed.

She answered, assuming it was one of Patrick’s check-ins – it was why he’d given her the cell phone, an expensive luxury in 1999 – but instead her mother’s voice breezed in from Arizona or New Mexico or wherever she was now, cruising the warm lands with her latest boyfriend. Justine hadn’t seen her in three years, but Maurie called every couple of months and, of course, she sent all those postcards – pictures of beach towns and mountain towns and desert towns with a scrawl on the back: ‘Mesa is wonderful!’ ‘Gotta love Austin!’ Justine threw them away immediately. Now she rubbed her left eyebrow, where the headache a call from her mother always awoke opened its tiny eyes.

At first Maurie chatted on in her usual way about Phil-the-boyfriend, the RV park, and how she was learning to play golf, and Justine’s attention wandered to the stack of patient files on her desk. She wasn’t supposed to read them, but she liked the small, ordinary stories they told, so she opened the top one. Edna Burbank, 84. Arthritis, bursitis, a prescription for Xanax.

Then Maurie said, ‘Do you remember my aunt Lucy? Up at the lake?’

Justine closed Edna’s file and sat forward in her chair. She hadn’t thought about Lucy for years, but at the mention of her name a riot of memories broke out in the front of her brain. When she was nine, Maurie had driven them to a lake in northern Minnesota where there were green trees, clear water, and blue nights filled with the sound of crickets. They’d lived in a yellow house with a screened-in porch with three women: Aunt Lucy, Grandma Lilith, and their mother, her own great-grandmother. ‘Yes. Yes, I remember her.’

‘Well, she died. I just got the notice. Thank God I set up the forwarding this time.’ Ice clinked in Maurie’s glass. ‘She never should have stayed in that house by herself. After Mother died I told her she should move to the retirement home over in Bemidji, but she wouldn’t. God knows how she made it through those winters.’

Justine had loved that lake. Not only because it was beautiful, but also because Maurie laughed differently there. Instead of the brittle laughs Justine had heard in the diners and cheap cafés that crowded her memory, Maurie’s lake laugh let you see all the way to the back of her mouth. She’d seemed different in other ways, too. Relaxed. Not looking ahead to the next big adventure. For a while Justine even thought they might stay, that they might live there longer than the few months they spent in most places. But in September they piled their things in the rusty Fairmont and drove away. Off to Iowa City, or maybe Omaha. She couldn’t remember. Another apartment, another job, another boyfriend, another school.