The Lost Girls

She didn’t decide to go until the last moment, sitting in the car line waiting to drop off the boys before heading into work. It washed over her, that sudden tsunami of need, and she phoned into the office, fingers shaking as she punched the lurid green contact on her screen, citing an unforeseen family emergency, and Beth Ann, always so suspicious of sudden sick days, didn't even pause to question the urgency in her voice when she told her to go, take care of whatever was needed.

The drive to her childhood home was as familiar and interminable as ever, seventy-four minutes of silver-sided interstate, the congestion and traffic of the inner-city loop gradually giving way to meandering stretches of lazy, rolling hills and shadowy thickets of oak trees, brilliant and glowing in the final stages of autumn foliage, a defiantly gorgeous montage of sassafras and red and orange that blurred by her cracked right window. It was fate that spurred her on with such inexorable force, not madness, she told herself, because here it was, the second Wednesday of the month, and her mother, silver-haired creature of habit that she was, would be at the salon getting her monthly cut and color, and her father would be in the office, because even at sixty-four, he still sipped his second cup of coffee at his desk every morning at 5:45am, rain or shine, both of them as constant and unchanging as the blistering sun in the bright summer sky, so she would be alone and unquestioned, to do what she needed to do.

She pulled into the loose gravel drive, parking her minivan in her customary spot, the little patch of dirt where she had once parked her battered old 95’ Corolla in some half-remembered life. Her legs tingled a little as she rose creakily from her seat, sleepy and stubborn from the long drive, and stood still for a moment, staring at the lush green expanse of her father's pristinely manicured lawn, at the tree which she had driven all this way to see.

Her mother loved it, her prized Scotch elm, this rarity of an arboreal find, and tended to it with such loving, maternal care, pruning its branches each fall, setting a well-regulated watering schedule well outside the drip line to accommodate its far-reaching roots, regularly inspecting it with a laser-like precision for the faintest signs of elm beetles or fungus. It was at its most stunning in the full glory of summer, the dense, verdant leaves layering over the ground in gorgeous green waves, the pockets of cool, deep shade beneath its boughs providing the perfect respite from the sweltering Carolina heat.

She herself had once used it as a playhouse, curled under the dim shadows of its thick, sweeping branches, playing at princesses and pirates in her younger years, later curled on a soft cashmere blanket with a book and glass of iced sweet tea as she grew older, and she almost forgot for a moment why she was here as she felt the small beginnings of a fond, nostalgic smile begin to creep across her face. She brushed aside the sandpaper-rough, honey-golden leaves and ducked under its welcoming branches.

It faded away, that shadow of a smile, when she saw them, side by side, the two quiet, demure markers.

She sank to the ground, crisscross apple-sauce, like the little girl she once was, and looked at them for a long moment.

The one on the right was more weathered with age, a little round granite stone, engraved with a single name in simple, no-nonsense script: SALLY. She had had it custom-ordered in the early stages of her loss, aching with the illogical need to do something, some futile sign of love for her most loyal friend, because her twenty-one-year-old self was so heartbroken at the first rip of true grief that it had ever known. Even now, that decade-old, deep scar throbbed anew as she studied that simple stone, and she closed her eyes as the faint, faded memories of shaggy yellow-brown fur and rough pink tongue and fierce, unwavering love rushed over her in a wave of remembered pain.

There was a name on the other marker as well, smooth, gray-white marble unstained by the passage of so many years, and a gentle scrawl of an inscription on the bottom of the polished stone: GRACE: ‘A thing of beauty is a joy forever.’

It had seemed the practical thing to do, in those early stages of numbness and grief, to entrust her girl to the care of her faithful, sweet-eyed shepherd, because surely, in whatever afterworld waited beyond the borders of this life, Sally would recognize the scent of her blood and being on the tiny soul of her daughter and guard her, protect her as devotedly as she had once done for her in those distant days of her girlhood. Surely, she had assured herself, clutching cold, unwashed onesies to her fractured chest, her long lost dog would sit, tail wagging and tongue lapping, by the side of her only girl, for all those moments in the years to come, the moments that her mother would inevitably miss, because even in the midst of her wild, weeping grief and her pain, she could not bear to think that her baby should ever be alone.

It was already too intolerable to think that she had been alone on this particular might-have-been birthday.

She had marked it on the calendar on a gusty day in March a little over three years ago now, and circled it with a bright, highlighter-pink heart as soon as the bloodwork had come back – finally, a girl, even though she would have been happy with another fat-cheeked son, because oh God, she adored her boys so. Mark had picked her up so carefully but exuberantly and swung her around in a jubilant circle. The boys were undeniably hers, stereotypical mommy’s boys through and through, but this girl would be his, he said with all the triumph of a proud papa, his special buddy, his precious princess.

She remembered when December had reached its end and it came time to throw that calendar away and replace it with a new, starch-pressed year, it had taken all the willpower in her body to reach up and take it down from the kitchen wall, knowing that bright pink heart still encircled that rainy Tuesday in October, forever waiting, never arriving.

It was a long, long time before she could find her voice, wobbly and uncertain, to choke out the belated, broken notes of the song she had happily crooned so many times before to her husband, her sons, her family, her friends, loud, exuberant parties with cakes and candles and bouncy houses and craft beers, but never before with such somber, lonely longing.

Because no one had remembered this year. No one but her.

On the first anniversary of what would have been the due date for her daughter, they had all rallied around her. Mark had brought home flowers and bath bombs and a bottle of her favorite merlot, and her mother had texted her sweet GIFs and constant reminders of “I-love-yous” and towards the end of the day, a grainy picture of this white polished stone laden with pale pink roses, and her girlfriends had called and sent funny memes about laundry-folding and Ryan Gosling to try and make her laugh. The second year, only Mark and her mom had remembered, a quick text from her mother of more flowers – daisies, this time –and an extra-long hug from Mark at the end of the day as she stirred the spaghetti sauce at the stove with blank, blurred eyes, but this year, it was just her, it seemed. Yesterday had come and passed, and no one had remembered her, this brief, beautiful girl of hers, and she knew that this was how it would be for the rest of her life, alone in her quiet isolation of grief, year after year after interminable year.

She didn’t blame them – really she didn’t. There were so many dates to keep track of in their busy, bustling lives – the boys’ actual birthdays and wedding anniversaries and T-ball games and doctor’s appointments – so a would-be birthday of an almost faceless girl could hardly be expected to take precedence in their jumbled recollections.

Only a mother would remember to memorialize a life that never came to fruition, a life that was only anticipated for thirteen short weeks.

That was what clawed at her so incessantly, that left those savage, raw wounds on her soul, the unfulfilled promise, the wondering about what that life could have been. It wasn’t that she did not love her boys – God, did she ever – but more often than she liked to admit, when they were at the park, shrieking on the slides, or eating ice cream, their chins sticky with chocolate chip and cookie dough or snuggled on the couch, blinking sleepily at the end of Toy Story 3, she would look at them and wonder – what would she have looked like, blonde-haired and sturdy like Jude, or slight and slim and big-eyed like Brennan; would she have been quiet and even-tempered, and fiery and fierce and bold as the bright violent paint that sat unopened and untouched in the tin cans in the corner of their garage?

It killed her, the never knowing, the ceaseless wondering.

She had named her after her grandmother almost as soon as they had laid that miniscule little form down next to her in the white-sheeted, sterile hospital bed and she had looked at that tiny, squashed face, so still and purple-pink, and she had thought for the briefest, most heartbreaking moment that she could see the vaguest outline of Nana’s nose on her half-formed face, and so she had said with horrible, hollow curtness, “Her name is Grace,” and turned away, unable to look any more on the daughter whom she had failed.

She knew now that she hadn’t – that it was never her fault, that all the prenatal vitamins and ultrasounds and blood screens in the world could not have saved her girl – but sometimes on dark, cold nights, her treacherous heart whispered differently.

It was foolish and fanciful to think it, but she closed her eyes and imagined it for a moment, her delicate, dreamlike daughter playing underneath the shade of these quiet boughs, and she could almost see there in the shady nook of her mother's favorite tree – that faded-out, curly-haired, grubby-fingered girl whom she used to be in another life. She would emerge from the shadows and join her unborn daughter, frolicking and giggling together in unseen delights, sword-fighting with sticks and plaiting each other’s pig tails, an eternity of joyous innocence under the watchful brown eyes of her sweet-natured shepherd.

Maybe she could let herself believe that she wasn’t alone after all.

She let her fingers trail through the loose rust-brown crumbs of clay one last time, a final caress of farewell, then rose, brushing the grass and leaves from her wrinkled pencil skirt and went home to her boys, leaving them there, those two lost girls and their dog, whispering secret stories of pirate-queens sailing the bright, high seas, eternally young and frozen in time, under the cool, dark shade of the weeping elm tree.