Free The Lost Girls by Heather Young Page B

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