The Lost Girls by Heather Young

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 mentionit—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.
    â€œI 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 thought how similar they looked, still.
    â€œJustine, 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