LIZ
“NORA IS IN KEY LAKE,” Quinn said, staring at the screen of her phone.
“What?” Liz looked up from the sink. “She can’t be.”
“She just texted me.”
Liz didn’t know what to say. How to feel. Such secrecy, and from the woman who had once been the very center of Liz’s universe. When Nora was born she was just over six pounds, but by the time Jack and Liz took her home from the hospital she’d lost a couple of ounces. One afternoon, on a lark, Liz wrapped her baby girl up in a blanket and tucked her in an old Louis Vuitton shoe box. She was a perfect fit. Downy head, petal pink cheeks, rosebud mouth pursed in a tiny pout. Her whole life contained in a small, neat rectangle. It was hard to believe that once upon a time, Liz had known all that there was to know about her daughter. The sprinkling of freckles across her shoulders, the way her nose crinkled when she was upset. Who her best friend was and how she liked her eggs cooked (scrambled with cheddar cheese) and that any problem could be fixed with a gingersnap cookie and a glass of cold milk. Who was this stranger? What had she done?
“Is she coming here?” Liz asked, turning back to the soapy water, the final sticky dish.
“I think so. I don’t know.” Quinn put her phone down on the counter and reached for a towel. “She has to, right? I mean, I haven’t even told her about the fire.”
“Or the strange man who stopped by my house last night,” Liz added.
“What?” Quinn spun on her, shocked.
But Liz just reached for the towel in Quinn’s iron grip and dried off her hands. “It’s him, right? It has to be.” But the thought didn’t make her scared, it made her angry. Gone was the woman who teared up about things she couldn’t control anyway. Liz could do something about this, and heaven help her, she would. “Now tell me everything you know.”
“Nothing.” Quinn shook her head almost furiously. Liz wanted to grab her by the chin and tell her to knock it off. “I swear, absolutely nothing. Nora brought Lucy to me a couple of days ago and asked me to look after her. No, she told me to. She didn’t give me a choice.”
Liz peered over her shoulder at the closed bathroom door. Quinn had drawn Lucy a bath and brought her an old ice-cream bucket filled with cups and plastic containers, an old spray bottle and some sponges. Hopefully that would keep the girl occupied for a while. Breakfast had been abandoned. Even Liz couldn’t stomach the blueberry pancakes anymore.
“Okay,” Liz said, all business. “Clearly we know who she is, we just need to figure out why Nora is trying so hard to keep her a secret.”
“You said we need to talk.” Quinn crossed her arms over her chest, regarding her mother with a skeptical look. “Do you know something about this?”
Liz sighed. “No,” she said. “Not about this. Not about why Lucy is here now and seems to be in some kind of danger.” She thought about the missing child poster and stifled a little shiver.
“But . . .”
“But I think I know why Nora ran. Why she never told us about Lucy.” Liz came here for this exact reason, to share this knowledge with Quinn, but at the moment of revelation she found herself wavering. Really? Did Quinn need to know? What good would it do now? But the set of her daughter’s jaw told Liz that it was too late. She sighed. “Let’s sit down.”
“I don’t want to sit down.”
“Fine.” Liz put her hands on her hips. Took a deep breath. “Years ago I overheard your father having a conversation with someone.”
“Go on.”
“He was in his office, on the phone. And I didn’t mean to eavesdrop, but he was obviously very upset. I was going to step in, but then I heard what he was saying.”
“Mom?”
Liz pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes for just a moment. Gathered enough courage to say: “He was telling someone to ‘take care of it.’ He said: ‘If you don’t get rid of it now, I’ll ruin you.’ ”
“What was ‘it,’ Mom?”
“Lucy. I mean, I think.” Liz was overcome with the need to explain, to wipe away the look of horror on her daughter’s face. Of course Quinn looked like she was going to be sick! What did she know of the things Liz had worked so hard to keep hidden? Nothing at all. And now, for it all to come out like this. It was almost too much. “The conversation could have been anything, right?”
“But you think Dad knew Nora was pregnant and he was threatening her. Telling her to get an abortion. Why?”
“Because he was afraid.”
“And ashamed,” Quinn said bitterly. “You hide things you’re ashamed of.”
Liz didn’t argue. Especially because she intended to hide her own shame—at least for a while yet. Right now, Quinn didn’t need to know about her father’s multiple affairs, about the way that he stopped pretending when his kids were older because the ruse was too complicated to maintain. “I have needs,” he had told Liz. Blithely. As if he were confessing to a craving for brownies when she had instituted a weeklong sugar fast. What was she supposed to say? Do? She had two choices: endure or leave. And leaving wasn’t really an option at all.
“It makes sense,” Quinn said finally. Fatally. But then she looked up, her eyes flaming with fury. “He stole her from us. He did this.”
“Quinn, there’s obviously much more to the story than just this. I think—”
They were interrupted by the squeal of the bathroom door. Lucy stood in the opening, wearing a pale green sundress. Her hair had been toweled dry but not combed, and as Liz watched, Quinn walked over and straightened the girl’s dress where it was bunched on one shoulder.
“You look lovely,” Quinn told her. “Let me get the comb and we’ll go through your hair, okay?”
While Quinn was gone, Liz studied the child. It hurt to admit, but she didn’t feel anything, not really. Even though she knew that she should—even though she wanted to. This little girl was her granddaughter. Of course, she had been hoping for exactly this with JJ and Amelia’s firstborn—a little girl, a daughter once removed. But the sudden arrival of Lucy—of this half-grown child who had unexpectedly been thrust into their world already living and breathing and embodying her own memories and personality and a life that was completely separate from Liz—was unsettling. Granddaughter. The word felt complicated and heavy on her tongue, overripe with consonants. I’d like to buy a vowel, she thought. Something to make this word—this reality—more palatable.
She wondered what would have happened if she had walked into the office that night so many years ago. If she would have confronted her husband. Thrown things. Yelled. What would their lives look like now?
“Who are you?” Lucy asked after a few moments. She didn’t seem scared, just hesitant, curious. And oh, but she was adorable. Slight and wispy, big familiar eyes, thin shoulders, sweet mop of hair that, though unnatural, suited her remarkably well. She would have fit in perfectly with the childhood version of Nora. And JJ. They took after their father—and Liz’s stomach coiled at the thought. It was Quinn who favored her mom.
“I’m Quinn’s mother,” Liz said, taking the safest route possible. “Remember? And Nora’s, too. My name is Liz.”
If she expected some bolt of recognition to flash across Lucy’s face, it didn’t come.
“I own this house,” Liz said. It was a foolish thing to say. What did Lucy care? But Liz wasn’t sure how to relate to a six-year-old anymore, and she had grasped at the first thought that flitted through her mind. “I did all the decorating.”
Lucy looked around as if taking it in for the first time. “I like the pillow on the couch,” she said eventually.
It was a bold print, one Liz had created with oil paint and an old canvas that she’d had to scrape. The texture had created strange shadows on the strike-offs that the mill had sent her, but instead of correcting the tones, Liz had decided to print the fabric as is. She loved it more than one should love an inanimate object. “Thank you,” she said, pleased. “I designed it myself.”
“The pillow?”
“The fabric.”
Lucy wandered into the living room, picking up things as if looking at them through new eyes now that she knew Liz had pulled all the pieces together.
“Did you design these, too?” Lucy asked, her fingers raking through a small bowl of smooth glass shards.
“No.” Liz left her seat and went to join the child near the window. “That’s sea glass.”
“That’s not the sea,” Lucy said, pointing at the lake.
“No, it’s not. But a long time ago a ship sank in Key Lake and sometimes the glass from all the windows still washes up on shore.”
“What kind of a ship?”
“It was a steamboat. A boat with a big paddle on the back. Have you ever seen one of those?”
Lucy shook her head.
“Sometimes they’re called riverboats, but Key Lake isn’t a river so we just called it a steamer. It had two decks and a big red wheel on the back that rotated through the water to make it go.” Liz used her hands to demonstrate. “It took people on tours of the lake. And do you know what they called it?”
Lucy shrugged.
“The Queen Elizabeth. It was painted on the side in the same red paint they used for the paddle.”
Lucy seemed unimpressed.
“My name is Elizabeth,” Liz said, prompting. “I loved that boat when I was a little girl because I believed that it was named after me.”
“Your name is Liz.”
“That’s short for Elizabeth.”
“You were named after the boat, not the other way around,” Quinn reminded Liz, coming out of the bathroom with a wide-toothed comb in hand.
“Well, you didn’t have to tell her that part,” Liz said. “It kind of ruins the story, don’t you think?”
“Not really.” Quinn took Lucy by the shoulders and steered her in the direction of the sofa. She set her on the arm and began the slow process of untangling her shock of red curls.
Liz watched her daughter work in silence for a moment (brushing her granddaughter’s hair) and felt an ache so deep her breath caught in her throat. Had she done this? At the very least, had she been complicit?
No more pretending.
“I’m sorry,” Liz whispered. “I’m so, so sorry.”
Quinn heard her, but she shook her head urgently. No. Not now. But Liz never had a chance to explain what she meant because the sound of a key in the door made them all look up. A few seconds later Walker stood in the entryway, a grim look on his face.
“They want to talk to you, Quinn.”
She faltered, the hairbrush still in her hand.
“I’ve got this.” Liz stepped forward and carefully took the brush. “We’ll be fine,” she said, giving Quinn what she hoped was a fortifying smile. “We’re all going to be just fine.”
But the words were thick and heavy on her tongue. Bitter.