The Lost Girls

Lucy

Lucy

It’s hard for me to remember what Mother looked like then. She was slender, I do remember that, with blue eyes and curly light brown hair she wore in a snood. Sometimes I heard people say I looked like her, and sometimes I heard them say she could be pretty if she tried, but I didn’t want to look like her and I didn’t think she could ever be pretty. Although I will grant that she had fine bones – years later, her cheekbones and jaw made delicate craters into which the flesh of her face sank – what I remember most are her hands: chopping, kneading, washing, mending, combing. How the tendons worked as she made her samplers, or picked at the quilt that covered her when she was dying.

In the kitchen the morning after we arrived, her hands were wet with soap as she scrubbed the pot she’d used to make our oatmeal. Father was fishing, so it was just us girls for breakfast. Lilith and I filled our bowls and sat at the table, Lilith’s face a portrait of martyrdom, and mine, I’m sure, its studied mirror. We knew what awaited us: every year we had to spend the first full day of summer cleaning the house. But this year I felt a relieved pleasure beneath our shared misery, because it tasted the same as always, and as always it belonged only to us. Emily never had to help with the cleaning. She never had to do any chores at all, an inequity that had rankled us for years. Just looking at her that morning, immaculate in her pink flowered dress and matching hair ribbons, was enough to raise bile into our throats.

Lilith spooned up a large bite of Emily’s oatmeal and ate it. Emily looked at Mother, whose back was to us, but didn’t say anything. Lilith laughed, and so did I.

After breakfast, we worked. We washed the curtains, beat the rugs, and wiped the cupboards clean of the curled-up insects that had died there during the winter. We scrubbed with Borax, swept under bureaus and beds and parlor furniture, and dusted the tops of the picture frames. Father was fastidious, so Mother kept a nice house in those days. She checked our work, found dust we missed, and told us to do it over. She said it kindly, though, and promised us ice creams at the end.

At first Emily crept along behind us, her eyes always on Lilith, but when we got to the upstairs bathroom, Lilith pushed her backward hard enough that she nearly fell. ‘Stop following us,’ she said, and shut the bathroom door in her face. After that, Emily gave up and went back to Mother. Then Lilith’s mood lightened, and she started to do one of the things I loved most about her: she made things fun. She staged contests to see who could clean the bedroom windows faster (she won), and who could hit the Lewises’ house with the dirty water we threw out the window from our buckets. We pretended we were Cinderellas, slaving away in anticipation of our princes, and Lilith used a funny British accent as the voice of the evil stepmother, and I could barely breathe for laughing. We hadn’t played like this in a while, and as we scrubbed I shared in the pleasure the house seemed to feel in shedding the dirt of winter. Once our cleaning was done, we would go to the Hundred Tree, and summer would begin in earnest.

We were mopping our bedroom floor when we heard Father return. At the sound of his voice we both stopped, listening as his feet came light upon the stairs in that quiet way he had. When he reached the landing, he paused in our doorway.

Mother’s long-ago appearance may be hard for me to recall, but I remember Father’s as though I saw him yesterday. This is partly because, unlike with Mother, my memory of Father in his youth wasn’t displaced by the image of him in his old age, but it’s also because no one who met Father forgot him. It wasn’t that he was handsome. His face was narrow, and he was shorter than most men, with spare bones. It was his eyes, which were deep-set, with bottomless dark irises that seemed unusually large, like those of babies. Like a child’s, too, they looked at you for longer than was comfortable and seemed to see things that others did not. I used to love it when he looked at me.

That morning, though, he looked only at Lilith, and he frowned. She’d fastened a skirt to her head so it hung down her back – it was part of her Cinderella costume – and the makeshift wimple gave her fine cheekbones and arched brows a proud austerity that made her look, to me, every bit the beautiful servant girl destined to be a queen.

‘Take that off,’ he said.

Lilith’s shoulders twitched in the smallest of flinches. I didn’t know why he was upset with her; we were just playing, and our game was the innocent, pretend sort of play he’d always told us God loved to see. Lilith dropped her eyes, pulled the skirt from her head, and went back to mopping. Her long hair fell forward, hiding her face.

I expected Father to leave us then, but instead his eyes slid to me. He didn’t look at me often, and the unaccustomed weight of his attention slackened my fingers so that my mop clattered to the floor. My face burned as I bent to pick it up. When I stood, he was gone, into his bedroom to change. Lilith and I went back to our cleaning, but we didn’t play anymore.

After we finished, I wanted to go straight to the lodge for our ice creams, but Lilith made me wait while she changed into a blue plaid dress and brushed her hair. Only when she’d checked herself in the mirror for the fourth time did we go to the kitchen, where Mother was cleaning the walleyes Father had caught. Her bloody fingers were quick with the knife, and a pile of severed heads stared dully from the counter. Emily stood on a chair, watching.

Mother brushed her forehead with the back of one hand and gave us a tired smile. ‘Go get your ice creams, and get those things for me. Take Emily with you.’ She motioned to the table, where a five-dollar bill sat next to a grocery list. Lilith put it in the small blue purse she’d selected to match her dress, and we went out the back door.

We didn’t want to take Emily, of course, and we didn’t think she deserved an ice cream, so we walked faster than her legs could go. Lilith glanced at our neighbors’ houses as we passed, and I was peevishly glad no one was out to see her parading in her summer glory. The happiness I’d felt during our cleaning, which even Father’s disapproval of Lilith’s costume hadn’t erased, dissipated into the dust that clouded our feet, hers in trim white sandals and mine in dirty Keds. The moment she’d changed her clothes I’d known we weren’t going to the Hundred Tree.

The lodge was the only commercial structure on the lake, so it served many purposes. On the second floor were rooms for the fishermen who drove up from the lakeless counties downstate. Downstairs, a screened-in porch ran across the front, with couches and chairs and two pinball machines. Behind that was a big, high-ceilinged room with a bar, a pool table, an old upright piano, a half dozen tables, and, in the far corner, shelves that held a dusty collection of souvenirs and the most basic of groceries.

It was empty when we arrived, but as we gathered our groceries Abe Miller pushed open the kitchen door. The night before, when the Millers served our supper by the lake, I hadn’t paid him any attention, but now I saw how much he’d changed since the previous summer. He must have been fifteen then, and he’d gotten his growth; he was taller than Father now, with large hands dangling several inches below his sleeves. His black hair was cut short, and his face had lost its childish softness, revealing strong features with a straight nose and full lips. To my horror, Lilith smiled at him – a close-mouthed smile that canted up on one side, like the one she’d given Charlie Lloyd.

Abe’s swarthy skin reddened. ‘Can I help you?’ His voice was slow, the consonants labored, the way it had always been, but now it was the deep voice of a man.

The kitchen door opened again, hitting his shoulder. Matthew, the younger brother, nearly dropped a heavy tray stacked with coffee cups, and blurted out a word I’d only heard grown men use when they thought children couldn’t hear them. Abe took the tray and carried it easily to the bar, his shoulder muscles knotting beneath his white shirt.

Matthew saw us, and wiped his hands on his apron. ‘Do you need anything?’ He stammered a little, no doubt remembering his curse word of a moment before. His head was lowered, and he looked at us through straight black bangs.

Lilith and I hadn’t had much to do with the Miller brothers before that summer. The little I did know about them came from overheard talk among the grown-ups: their father was a white man from Williamsburg who’d married a woman from the local Chippewas, and after they’d both been cast out by their tribes they managed to get property along the lake and build this lodge. The lake families disapproved of them, of course, but they liked the lodge’s amenities, so the women smiled at Mrs Miller when they bought their groceries, and the men shook Mr Miller’s hand when they rented their fishing boats.

But as we stood there that day, it struck me for possibly the first time that the Miller boys were almost the same age as we. We’d lived our childhood summers not one hundred yards from one another. Lilith and I had spent those summers exploring the woods and swimming in the lake. What had the Miller boys been doing? I couldn’t remember seeing them in the water, or even fishing off the dock. Had they, too, explored the woods? With a start I realized the woods might even belong to them.

Abe was standing by the bar. He’d gone back to staring at Lilith, his mouth hanging slightly open. Matthew moved in front of him, as though shielding him.

‘We’ll want ice creams,’ I told him, then gathered the rest of our groceries as fast as I could. Lilith went to the bar and leaned there, still giving Abe that off-kilter smile.

Matthew went to the freezer box. ‘What flavor do you want?’ He was talking to me but his eyes cut between Abe and Lilith.

‘Strawberry,’ Lilith said.

‘Me, too,’ I said, even though chocolate was my favorite. I wanted the transaction over quickly.

‘What about you?’ Matthew said. I’d forgotten about Emily, who stood a few feet behind us.

‘Butter brickle,’ she said, in her high, little-girl voice. I looked at her – I’d never even tried the butter brickle. She smiled, and I turned away.

Matthew scooped out our cones and began to make the tally while Lilith handed me her cone and rooted in her bag for the money Mother had given us. She smiled again, this time showing Matthew her white, even teeth, and Matthew fumbled with the change. She thanked him sweetly, took her ice cream from me with graceful fingers, and walked to the door, leaving me to carry the groceries. Her hips swung in her blue dress as she brushed past Emily. Abe stood like an oak tree, his liquid gaze following her. As I picked up the groceries I glanced at Matthew, expecting to see him similarly transfixed. But he was looking at Abe.