Little Girl Lost

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  For years, they chimed every Saturday afternoon at this hour in the steeple at Saint Paul’s down the block, signaling the end to a wedding mass and the beginning of another happy couple’s lives together.

  Mom sometimes allowed Christina and her little sister, Allison, to walk over to Saint Paul’s to watch the wedding party leave the church.

  “I need you right back here, though,” she’d say. “Don’t get in the way, and don’t wander. As soon as you get your look at the bride, you come home.”

  Christina would stand, holding her little sister’s hand, on the curb opposite the old redbrick church, Allie bouncing from foot to jittery foot, waiting for the fairy tale to unfold. From their post, they could hear snatches of music from the ancient pipe organ. At the opening strains of Mendelssohn’s recessional, the big wooden doors would open and out they’d spill—pretty bridesmaids in matching dresses clutching handsome ushers’ arms, a dazzling bride floating along on a cloud of white lace and tulle, a groom who couldn’t take his eyes off her.

  Christina and Allie always stayed until the newlyweds had ducked through a shower of rice thrown by gleeful families and friends who lined the steps. Then they headed home, leaving behind laughter, car engines starting, tin cans tied to the bumpers rattling over the streets. Through it all, the bells pealed high overhead to celebrate another happily ever after.

  “When you marry Billy, can I be your maid of honor and wear a pink dress and carry roses?” Allie asked one Saturday, close to the end. It was January, the church engulfed in snow globe flurries. Christmas wreaths still hung on the front doors and carpeted the slushy steps with dry needles. That day, the bridesmaids wore velvet; the bride a white fur cape.

  “You’re too young. Carolyn’s going to be my maid of honor,” Christina said, thinking that her best friend would look nice in blue velvet that matched her eyes.

  “What about me?”

  “You can be my flower girl.”

  “I’m ten! That’s too old for a flower girl!”

  “Well, it’s too young for a maid of honor.”

  “Well, sixteen is too young for a bride. By the time you’re old enough to get married—”

  “Billy’s going to propose as soon as I graduate. We’ll have a summer wedding, and then we’ll go abroad.”

  “For a honeymoon?”

  “No, to live. We’re going to backpack through Europe. London, Paris, Rome . . .”

  “Forever?”

  “For a while. And then we’ll probably come back and settle down and have babies.”

  “Can I be the godmother, Christy? I’ll be old enough by then.”

  “Billy’s sister will be older,” she said—cruelly, it seems, whenever she looks back. If only she’d known that Allie wouldn’t be around forever. That she was about to lose everyone she loved—even Billy.

  He was at her side on the cold February day when she followed the row of caskets out of Saint Paul’s. Hearing the clanging high overhead, Christina realized there must be two sets of bells in the tower—one for mournful, measured funeral tolls; the other for glorious wedding chimes.

  In the car on the way to the cemetery, she mentioned that to Billy.

  “No, they’re all the same bells, Christina. We played up there when I was an altar boy.”

  “But . . . they can’t be! They sound so different than all those wedding days!”

  “No, they don’t. It’s you. You feel different today, so they sound different.”

  Everything was different, that day, and forever after.

  Billy stayed with her at the cemetery, and held her while the coffins were lowered into the ground. But the police were waiting to take him away.

  “They think I did it, Christina! Tell them I didn’t!” he shouted at her as they led him to the patrol car.

  She couldn’t find her voice until after they drove off.

  “He didn’t do it!” she whimpered to herself. “I know who did, but . . . I can’t remember.”

  The man who’d killed her family and then raped her had worn a mask. She was there and yet not, lying beneath him in the dark, hearing his grunts and Allie’s dying moans in the other bed. At one point, there was something—a whiff of fragrance in his hair, or maybe some note of familiarity in his voice when he told her to shut up and stop crying . . .

  Clarity broke through the merciful haze and for that instant, she thought she might know him.

  But she lost consciousness before it was over, and later, she couldn’t recapture the fleeting recognition.

  She knew only that it hadn’t been Billy.

  The police questioned him for a long time, and when they let him go, he came back. Once, twice, a handful of times. But his parents didn’t want him around her, and he no longer seemed to trust her. She was alone.

  Sister Anthony came to stay. She was Mom’s aunt, and she lived in a convent upstate. They’d never seen much of her, but after the murders, she became Christina’s guardian. Pious and unsmiling, Sister Anthony told her there was nothing to do but pray. So she did. She prayed for her family to come back, prayed for Billy to love her again, for someone to love her, someday, for the school year to end and when it did, for a way not to go back in the fall.

  When she realized she was pregnant, she believed that her prayers had been answered. She needed that baby; needed to believe it was Billy’s child, and not . . .

  Sister Anthony sent her upstate to a home for expectant unwed mothers. There, she made friends with other pregnant young women, watched her belly grow, and thought about what she wanted for her child. Hers and Billy’s. He would come back, and they would be a family, and she would be a bride at Saint Paul’s.

  Her son was born on Christmas, like Jesus, and she believed the child was meant to be her savior. Exhausted from the grueling delivery and drugs that numbed the excruciating pain along with her brain, she allowed the nurses to whisk him away, not realizing she’d never see him again.

  “It’s better that way,” Sister Anthony told her later, after she’d signed the adoption papers. “He was conceived in sin and violence. You could never love him.”

  “But—”

  She couldn’t bring herself to tell Sister Anthony that he might have been Billy’s son. It didn’t matter. It wouldn’t have changed anything. Guilt-ravaged and grief-stricken, she could never have wholly loved that baby, or anyone, ever again. She was meant to be alone. That was her punishment for a sin so shameful that she had never managed to utter it in the confessional. And so a wrathful God had taken matters into His own hands with an agonizing penance.

  At fifteen, she’d lost her virginity—not even to Billy, but to a senior who told her she was pretty. It happened at a party her parents had forbidden her to attend, but she lied about babysitting and went anyway, and drank forbidden vodka, and smoked grass. When the boy led her to a dark bedroom, she went willingly. The encounter was painful and awkward. Afterward, terrified of pregnancy, she swore to God that if she could just get her period, she would never do it again, until her wedding night.

  Then Billy came along.

  She not only broke her promise to God, but she went against the teachings of the church, visited the clinic and obtained birth control pills.

  No wonder God was so angry. No wonder He had destroyed her life, robbing her of everyone close to her.

  For almost twenty years, she’s lived surrounded by reminders of what happens when you stray off the path.

  The house is as it was back then, full of their belongings, and memories. Every day, she’s forced to think of the people she’d loved and lost—her parents, her sister, Billy, her boy, and the life that was supposed to be hers.

  She’ll never have a child of her own, and so she nurtures lost, gentle souls at the animal hospital.

  She’ll never marry, but listens for the echo of long-ago wedding bells, though Saint Paul’s was torn down a few years back.

  She sits on the burnt orange sofa in the living room, the mantel clock cl
icking in time with her knitting needles. A ball of red yarn bobs alongside her as she pulls the strand. Christmas is two months away, and she’s making mittens for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, as she has every year for at least a decade. Before that, when she still knew all the neighbors, she made mittens for them.

  During the bleak upstate autumn while she was waiting to give birth, one of the nuns, Sister Helen, taught her how to knit. It seems cruel, now, that they encouraged her and the other girls to make little booties and knit caps for the babies they were carrying, knowing they would never get to dress them, cradle them, love them. The clothes went with the newborns to their new homes, along with letters the nuns had the girls write to their children’s new families.

  “I don’t know what to say,” Christina wailed, still sore and bleeding from delivery, yet forced by Sister Helen to hold a pen over a sheet of blank stationery.

  “Say whatever is in your heart.”

  She scribbled in black ink, so hard that the paper tore. She wadded it up and threw it at the elderly woman, who deposited it into the wastebasket and handed Christina a fresh sheet of paper. “Would you like me to help you?”

  “I would like not to do this.”

  “Dear Sir and Madam . . .”

  “Sir and Madam? Don’t I even get to know their names?”

  “Dear Sir and Madam, thank you for accepting this infant into your loving home. I am grateful to you for providing him with all the things I cannot—”

  “That’s not true! I can give him a home, too. And food, and love . . .”

  Sister Helen got her way in the end. Christina wrote the letter and sent it, and the little white cap and booties, away with the little boy she never saw again.

  She’s never forgotten that day. Nor has she ever forgotten how knitting had soothed her during those awful months. She couldn’t bear to make more baby booties, but she learned how to make a scarf. She used bright orange yarn, Billy’s favorite color. She’d heard that he’d gone to college for a semester and then dropped out. By the time the scarf was finished, it was summer. And when she finally worked up the nerve to knock on his door, it was too late.

  “Billy’s gone,” his sister said, glaring at her, and at the tissue-paper-wrapped package in her hands.

  “Gone where?”

  “Overseas.”

  “To Europe?” She was stunned, for some reason, that he’d taken their backpacking trip without her, even though everything had changed.

  “To Vietnam.”

  Billy never came home. She later thought of him every time she heard the song “Billy, Don’t Be a Hero.”

  He wasn’t, she’d think. Not mine, anyway.

  The orange scarf is still wrapped in tissue paper, tucked in a drawer upstairs. She never made another one. But she learned to knit mittens for all the neighbors, and a little sweater for the landlord’s poodle, and a larger sweater for his Irish Lab. The neighbors were grateful and so were the animals, nuzzling Christina and offering unconditional love. Someone suggested she volunteer at the animal shelter, and at last, she found her salvation.

  Her vet tech job barely pays the bills, but she spends her days nurturing forsaken creatures. Nights are harder. There’s too much time to think. Too much time to listen, not for phantom bells, but for creaks and footsteps.

  She never heard him coming on that awful night. Slept soundly through her parents’ massacre down the hall, and even her little sister’s slaughter in the bed across the room. The nightmare blindsided her.

  Long after he was arrested and sent to jail—after she knew he could never come back for her—she maintained a restless, prayerful, round-the-clock vigil. She told herself it was good training for the sleepless nights that lay ahead after the baby was born, yet unaware that some other woman would be stirred awake by her son’s wee-hour cries.

  Home alone at last, she listened for the baby that never cried, footsteps that failed to fall, wedding bells that—

  A blast of doorbell shatters the hush.

  Startled, she sets aside the needles and yarn and goes to the door. A human shadow waits beyond the frosted glass. Probably someone looking for the couple upstairs, who are away for the weekend.

  Christina stands on tiptoe to remove the dead bolt key hidden above the narrow door molding, inserts it into the lock, and opens the door.

  “Hi, I’m collecting for the Humane Society.” A stranger shakes a coin-filled red-and-white can identical to the one she’d seen the other day while picking up her threadbare coat at the dry cleaner’s.

  Christina has nothing to give, but her heart softens as always, confronted by the reminder that one way or another, many are worse off than she is.

  “Care to contribute for food and shelter for stray cats and dogs this winter?”

  “I actually just donated to them.”

  “That’s wonderful. Every dollar helps.”

  “If I could give more, I would, but—”

  “Even nickels add up. And pennies. Whatever you can spare, ma’am.”

  Pennies? Fair enough. Some spare change might have fallen through a hole in her coat pocket lining she couldn’t afford to have replaced. And she’s seen firsthand the ravaged animals on the street.

  “All right. Hang on. I’ll see what I can find.” She turns away, looking around for her coat. There it is, draped over the back of a chair.

  The Pendleton wool overcoat was her father’s. Judd Nelson wears a similar one in The Breakfast Club. After she saw the movie a year or two ago, she went to the master bedroom closet, pushed aside guilt and her mother’s clothes, and culled vintage menswear from her father’s 1960s wardrobe. Now, even the hand-me-downs are threadbare.

  Reaching into the pocket, she pokes her index finger through the hole in the lining, fishing around to find a dime and pennies that slipped through the other day.

  “Sorry,” she calls, glancing toward the door, “I’ll be right—”

  A hand claps over her mouth, another yanks her head back by the hair, and she sees a knife cut a glinting swath toward her neck the moment before it makes contact.

  She drops to the floor, blindsided . . . again.

  “Have fun and be good, girls,” Silas calls after Jessie and Amelia as they head down his front steps.

  “Don’t contradict yourself, Si,” Jessie calls back with a laugh, and Amelia wonders what she’s gotten herself into as Silas closes his own door with a final wave.

  Jessie points next door at the three-story white Victorian with a gingerbread porch, dormers and bay windows. “That’s my house. We’ll go there first and dump your bag.”

  “First? What’s after that?”

  “Fun,” she says simply, and leads the way down the walk and over to the one next door.

  “It looks a lot like the professor’s house,” Amelia observes, “except it’s not yellow.”

  “Diane had a conniption when Si painted his place. When we moved in, it was a gaudy turquoise-blue color, so she was thrilled when he told her he was going to paint it. I think she was thinking white. You should have seen her face when she saw the yellow!”

  “Why did he choose that?”

  “He says it was because the paint was on sale, but I think he secretly wanted to piss off Diane because of the way she treats me.”

  “She’s not nice to you?”

  “No,” she says flatly as they climb the steps.

  “Who did all these decorations?” Amelia asks, gesturing at the pumpkins and pots of bright fall flowers on the steps. The doormat imprinted with a grinning jack-o’-lantern and reads Happy Halloween.

  “Diane. Aren’t they the cheesiest?”

  “I think they’re nice.”

  “Oh, please. You do not.”

  “Is she really that bad?”

  “Yes. I mean, other people might think she’s okay, and, like, Si is always telling me to lighten up about her, but I think he’s just trying to get me to deal because he hasn’t been able to find my real mom.
The second he does, he knows I’m out of here.” She steps back and gestures at the front door. “After you.”

  “Isn’t it locked?”

  “Around here? Are you kidding?”

  Amelia turns the knob and steps over the threshold, expecting another cluttered, museum-like mansion, but this house is clean and much more orderly. There’s wall-to-wall carpeting throughout, and the wallpaper and furniture are modern, in pastel stripes and pretty Laura Ashley floral prints. Instead of old paintings, there are photographs in old-fashioned gilt frames. Even at a glance, Amelia can see that Jessie is in most of them—solo school portraits, or posing with her two siblings, or with her whole family.

  There are dolls everywhere—old-fashioned dolls in old-fashioned toy carriages, vintage dolls Amelia remembers from TV commercials, tiny, fragile-looking porcelain dolls smiling behind a glass cabinet door, and even a Cabbage Patch doll, so rare a few years ago that people rioted trying to get their hands on one.

  “Are these all yours?”

  “No. Diane collects them. Do you want to change before we go?”

  “Go where?”

  “Wherever. We’ll cruise around town. Maybe see some people.”

  “Who?”

  “Whoever’s around. So if you want to change or freshen up or something . . .”

  “No, thanks.”

  “You sure?”

  Amelia nods and follows her toward the back of the house. The layout is similar to the one next door, but here, the wall between the dining room and kitchen has been replaced by an island with painted stools and a wooden butcher-block countertop. Everything is blue and white, from the wallpaper to the speckled pottery displayed on a shelf above the lace curtained windows. A framed cross-stitch design reads Welcome to Our Country Kitchen. The air wafts with a faint savory smell, and there’s a big basket of apples on the counter, some with leaves still attached to the stems.

  The refrigerator is covered with magnet-pinned postcards, business cards, photos, and children’s artwork.

  She leans closer to examine a picture of Jessie wearing a black drape and pearls—her senior portrait. The word PROOF is stamped across the front, just like Amelia’s back in her parents’ closet. But this one has a canceled check for fifty dollars paper-clipped to it, along with a receipt saying the order will arrive in November.