The Lost Girls

by Jessica Chiarella

  “She didn’t have to live it in real time,” I say. “She didn’t have to talk to the person who found the body. She didn’t have to give her DNA.” Most days, I try not to think of that morning, the backs of my legs sweating against the plastic chairs at the Twenty-Fourth District police station. Trying to puzzle through the tangle of what to pray for, waiting to give DNA that might match the Jane Doe’s body.

  I was certain that praying for my sister to be dead, just so I would finally have an answer, was likely something God would disapprove of. I could pray for forgiveness, for spending so many years trying to forget my sister, trying to forget the questions that remained unanswered as I went to wine tastings with Eric and trained at the gym and watched Netflix with Andrea.

  It finally came to me when Detective Olsen knelt before me, his tie loose and shirt unbuttoned at his throat, his eyes already apologetic as he peeled open the packaging of the DNA test. An impulse rang out in me like the shuddering peal of a bell. The desire to be comforted by men. The comfort I could only draw from dancing at the edge of the abyss I feared the most: being defenseless, daring them to hurt me. The pleasure so much more acute when they did not.

  “We’ll have the results in a few days,” he said. “I’ll call you. You don’t have to come back down.”

  I nodded, unable to talk.

  “Hang in there, okay?” he said, a hand on my shoulder. Eyes concerned, as if he could guess all the things I was about to do. Like that very night, unable to sleep, when I would go for a run and end up in the back storeroom of Mathilde’s bar, having sex with a man who was not Eric for the first time since I was twenty. Or a few weeks later, when I would be pressed against a sink by one of Coleman’s caterers. Or all the others who would follow.

  But in that first moment with Detective Olsen, in that clarity of wanting, I remembered what to ask for. Give me another chance, I prayed to whoever would listen. Give me another chance, I won’t forget her again.

  “You think your mother wouldn’t have done those things if they’d asked her?” Wilson says, turning down the long, tree-lined street that leads to our house. I try to imagine Wilson driving my mother into Rogers Park, waiting with her in those plastic chairs for Detective Olsen and his DNA test.

  “I think there’s a reason I got that call,” I reply, remembering all the times I took the receptionist from the medical examiner’s office to breakfast in the past ten years. To keep Maggie fresh in her mind. To make sure she had my number when she needed it. “It’s because I was the only one still looking for her.”

  Wilson is silent for a moment. And I think I’ve won this round, until he continues, softly. “She looks, in her own way.”

  “Right, by hosting five-hundred-dollar-a-plate lunches for Maggie’s foundation.”

  “And inviting that reporter from the Tribune,” he counters.

  “Who writes for the style section. But Mom wasn’t too keen when the podcast got three column inches on the front page.”

  Wilson’s silvery brow twitches. This has clearly been a topic of conversation in the house, though I can’t tell what side he’s taken or who he’s been arguing with.

  “Your mother would prefer if you didn’t investigate so . . . publicly.”

  “She would prefer if I didn’t share details about Maggie publicly. Like the fact that she might have had sex. With another girl.”

  “It’s not that,” he says. “The thing that keeps her up at night now is you living alone in that city. Knowing the man who took your sister might also be there.”

  This, too, is a familiar worry. Of my mother’s. Of Andrea’s. Of mine. The more I become a public figure, the more likely it is that whoever took Maggie will notice me. I think again of the calls. This morning’s voicemail makes five of them in the past month alone.

  “So why did she cut me off?” I ask, to deflect the fact that this line of reasoning sharpens the pulse in my throat. “Because I’ll tell you, I could be living in a place with much better locks right now.”

  “She was hoping you would come home,” Wilson replies as we turn off the main road and pull down the tree-lined driveway of my childhood home. “I think she’s still hoping that.”

  “Well, someone is going to have to disabuse her of that notion.” I raise my eyebrows at him theatrically until he notices.

  “Don’t look at me,” he says, a hint of a laugh in his voice.

  * * *

  * * *

  THE EVENT IS already under way as I step inside, the smell of perfume and fresh flowers thick in the air. Lilies, my mother’s favorite. Funeral flowers, my sister would have joked. I’m barely in the front door when Jasper, my grandmother’s Pomeranian, skitters up to greet me. I scoop him up and let him lick my chin as I tuck him under my arm, navigating around the groups of women in designer suits chatting in the living room, searching for my grandmother. She’s easier to spot now, in her wheelchair, sitting on the back deck. And I’m prepared for it, when she turns and catches sight of me, that moment of disappointment that’s always there. That the granddaughter who has crept up behind her, the one Jasper leapt from her lap to greet, is not Maggie. I don’t bother to remind her that Jasper never met Maggie, that it was Pepper we used to play with as little girls. I’ve learned the lesson well by now, that there will never be a time when my grandmother is entirely happy to see me.

  “You look like that girl. The one whose husband tricked her into giving birth to the antichrist,” she says, eyeing my hair as I lean down and kiss her powdery cheek, depositing Jasper back in her lap.

  “Mia Farrow?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “Well, good,” I reply. “Feel free to spread that rumor when people ask why I’m getting divorced.” I don’t tell her the truth, that all my life I kept my hair long because Maggie’s was always long. That I never wanted to be anything but beautiful in the way my sister was. Until I could no longer stand it, being a living memorial to her.

  “Can you imagine? Your mother would be scandalized.” She gives a small chuckle, amused by her own wickedness. After all, this is not her crowd. While my mother’s family has always been wealthy, my grandmother was a postal worker who raised my father mostly by herself. She received her money, her family connections, and her status in much the same way my father did, through his marriage to my mother. It has always been a point of affinity between the two of us—while my father took to his marital wealth as if it were a birthright, my grandmother has always been uncomfortable in these circles, just like I have.

  “Not as much as if you offered to do readings for them,” I reply, though I know I’m poking the bear a little.

  “This crowd?” my grandmother asks. “It would be like squeezing water from a rock. What am I going to do, give them stock tips?”

  My grandmother is aware that I don’t much believe in that sort of thing, tarot or tea leaves or my grandmother’s brand of magic, which is much more the daytime TV variety. I once found a newspaper article from the eighties that mentioned her being brought on as an investigative consultant with the CPD on the case of a missing five-year-old. The boy had been found alive two days later, though the article didn’t go so far as attributing that result directly to my grandmother.

  And I still remember running home the night Maggie disappeared and finding my grandmother already at our house—an aberration, especially on a weeknight. Already asking, when I was barely through the door, still catching my breath and choking back tears, what had happened to Maggie. Before my parents even realized anything was wrong, my grandmother already seemed to understand. But I have no interest in hearing what she has to say about Maggie anymore. Because whatever peculiar talents she might have, they’ve never done us any good in finding my sister.

  “Where’s Mom?” I ask, glancing back through the French doors and into the open-concept kitchen. Everything is pristine, white tile and granite counterto
ps and cream-colored cabinets paned with glass. Because the caterers are undoubtedly prepping the food downstairs in the basement’s wet bar, hauling trays up and down the narrow back staircase to the dining room.

  “She breezed by about a half hour ago. Asked if I wanted a drink. Actually laughed at me when I suggested she should bring me a gin rickey, and now I haven’t seen her since.”

  “You’re not supposed to be drinking, Grandma,” I chide. My grandmother has been in a wheelchair since she had a minor stroke about a year ago, which left her on a perpetual course of blood thinners. Since she could no longer manage the staircase in her Jefferson Park two-flat, she’s moved into my mother’s first-floor guest room, and the two of them have been at each other’s throats ever since. I actually feel a little bad for Mom, considering my grandmother is much friendlier when she has a couple drinks in her, and her medication has kept her sober for the better part of the last year.

  “Please, you think a doctor knows more about what’s going to happen to me than I do? Believe me, honey. When I go, it’s not going to be because I got a little too tipsy over lunch.”

  “I’d prefer not to think about it,” I say, giving Jasper’s head another scratch and squeezing my grandmother’s shoulder. But she catches my wrist as I straighten up.

  “You’ll find her, you know,” she says, her voice low, her eyes intent on mine.

  I don’t want to talk about this, about Maggie, about any of it. I don’t want to ask her the question I’m desperate to answer: Alive, or dead? So I just nod.

  “I know,” I reply, giving her arm a squeeze. My grandmother waves me off, and I slip back inside, nearly colliding with a wide-eyed caterer as I head for the back stairs. I make my way up without turning on a light, though the staircase has always been dim, relying only on the ambient light from the kitchen and the upstairs hallway if the chandelier suspended above the steps is switched off. Still, an entire childhood sneaking up and down those steps after dark has left me with the ability to climb them blindfolded if necessary.

  The upstairs is quiet, despite the running current of conversation downstairs. The door to the master suite is open, so I kick off my shoes and pad across my mother’s pristine white rug, passing her perfectly made bed and its four hundred pillows—compliments of Carla’s morning sweep—to the balcony at the back of the house. I step out onto the sun-warmed concrete, peering at the map of Galley Road I pulled up on my phone. From where I stand, I can see a line of three houses, one off-white, one slate gray, and one pale yellow, through the break in the trees behind our house. But 4603 is blue, just too far to the west of the yellow house to see from here. I find I’m disappointed, though really, the proximity is all that matters. That Sarah Ketchum lived so close to the house where Maggie and I grew up. That two girls who lived within blocks of each other would both be plucked out of their lives, would both have met violent ends. It strained plausibility to imagine it could be coincidence.

  The truth is, I’ve been thinking about Sarah Ketchum all morning. Despite the fact that I told Ava I wasn’t interested in her story. Despite the fact that I told her I didn’t care about her brother and wasn’t interested in turning my podcast into a second-rate knockoff—just another true-crime dive into the case of an innocent man behind bars, as if the murdered girl were nothing but a set piece in the larger story of his wrongful conviction. As if Sarah were simply an inconvenience in his life, and the injustice of his story should supersede the injustice of hers. After all, there has to be someone in the world who cares only for the girls, who has no interest in solving their cases to the satisfaction of the courts but wants only to know what happened. To finish their stories, instead of simply tacking them on to the fates of the men who may or may not have killed them.

  Still, I cannot deny the bigger picture here. If Ava’s brother did not kill Sarah Ketchum, it means that Sarah Ketchum’s murder might be linked to Maggie’s disappearance through more than coincidence. So taking up Ava’s case, working to exonerate her brother, could be a means to my own ends. Of figuring out who took Maggie from us. Of figuring out what really happened to Sarah.

  My eyes adjust slowly as I go back inside; everything around me is foggy with the shadow images the sunlight has burned onto my retinas. I step into the hallway and peer at Maggie’s bedroom, its door always closed. My room, on the opposite side of the hall, is empty of belongings. Only a bed, a dresser with some old spare clothes inside, and a desk against the window remain. But Maggie’s room still holds every possession she owned. It is still full of all the things that made up her life. Every secret she ever had is hidden there. So I go inside. Now, and every time I come home, though I know my mom doesn’t like it. She doesn’t even like when Carla dusts in there. Still, I feel as much right to claim the space as my mother, and so I’ve been systematically going through Maggie’s belongings for the past ten years. Through everything, again and again, until my mind has become a map of her space, an index of all the things she bought and collected and saved.

  I sit on her bed and gaze at the mobile of polished seashells hanging over her window. At the photographs stuck in the frame of the mirror over her dresser. At her easel, splattered with paint, the source of so much mess, my mother insisted she only paint outside on her balcony. At the landscapes tacked to her closet doors, studies of our yard in summer and autumn and even winter, when she sat outside wearing fingerless gloves, warmed by an electric heater my dad set up for her. I see it first, in the winter study, with its trees bare of leaves. But then, when I rise from the bed and look at autumn, at spring, at summer, it’s still there. The scrap of blue sending me rushing out onto her balcony, squinting at the horizon. From this angle, the gap in the trees has shifted just enough to reveal a slice of that blue house. An upstairs window. It’s 4603 Galley Road, Sarah Ketchum’s house. My pulse beats heavily in my hands, throbbing at the base of my tongue. If Sarah Ketchum ever stood at that window as a child, she might have seen Maggie painting on her balcony. Or—I can barely let myself imagine it—whoever lived in any one of those houses might have seen Maggie, might have been aware of both girls. Might have watched them. Might have waited for the right moment to strike.

  “What are you doing?”

  I turn and see my mother standing in the doorway to Maggie’s room. She’s in her late fifties, though she could pass for forty-five, because she’s got an excellent colorist and has always been very careful about the sun. She’s started in with the fillers too, though she’s always been very canny about how much work is too much. She’s leaning against the doorframe, which means she’s at least one drink deep. This is a woman who can hold her liquor, but there’s a certain slackening of the body that occurs after a drink or two.

  “Just, you know. Visiting,” I say.

  “And here I was thinking you came to visit the people in your family who are still around,” my mother replies.

  “Grandma said you were busy.”

  “You could have at least said hello,” she says.

  She comes into the room and opens her arms for a hug. She’s wearing a cashmere wrap over her Givenchy dress, and the fabric is so absurdly soft that I almost want to put my head on her shoulder, to stay there. Tell her all the secrets I’ve kept to myself. Tell her the ways I’ve spared her. But I don’t. Because that would be yet another victory for her, in our years-long competition over which of us can need the other less.

  “I didn’t know if you were talking to me again,” I say as she releases me.

  “Don’t be silly,” my mother says, taking my hand and leading me out of Maggie’s room. As if I’ve conjured up the rift with my mother entirely from my own imagination.

  “Silly,” I say, as if I’m unsure of the definition of the word.

  “I mean, can you blame me for being upset?” she asks. “Eric’s been like a son to me.”

  “Well then, maybe you should have invited him today instead,” I rep
ly.

  “Have you heard from him?” she asks, ignoring me, leading me down the grand front staircase Maggie and I used to pretend was the drawbridge of our imaginary upstairs castle.

  “He called a few days ago.”

  “And did you clear the air at all?”

  “It was a voicemail. I haven’t talked to him yet.”

  “You haven’t called him back?” The skin between my mother’s eyebrows creases as much as the Botox will allow. It’s one of the chief annoyances of my life that, without any supporting information at all, my mother has correctly assessed that my divorce is entirely my fault. And she’s also deluded herself into believing that reconciliation is only one good conversation away.

  “I’ve been a little busy this week,” I reply. “We’re starting to plan for a second season, now that we won the APA award.”

  “Not still about Maggie?” she asks, a hand at her throat.

  “No,” I reply, hedging. “A different case.” I watch the relief pass through her. That I will not continue my public discussion of her elder daughter, that I will not further damage the image she’s cultivated for Maggie over the years. Of the perfect girl, the perfect victim.

  “I wish you would just stop with this,” she says, shaking her silver-blond bob.

  “With trying to find out what happened to her?” I ask.

  “With trying to make every little thing public,” she replies. “It’s unseemly, this need for attention.”

  “Maybe it has to do with how little attention I got as a kid,” I reply under my breath, but I know she hears me. She just chooses to ignore me.

  “You tell the whole world everything there is to know about your sister. This family. But I’m not allowed to know why you’re divorcing my son-in-law? Even when it’s like losing another of my children?”