Mrs. Everything (51 page)

“Your niece is a miracle worker,” Eileen said, bouncing up and down as she jogged in place in her bright-blue tank top and black Lycra biker shorts. Eileen said that Lila had managed to
get her daughter to comb her hair and her son to sleep in his own bed. Bemused, Bethie said, “She seemed to enjoy it,” and Eileen, who’d always been a little frosty toward Bethie (Bethie was never sure whether that had to do with her black husband or her lack of kids), said, “She’s amazing. You’re so lucky.” Bethie had high hopes for a regular engagement, but at the end of July Eileen and Bill took the kids to visit her parents in Rehoboth, and that was the end of that.

The last two weeks of August felt like they took two months to pass. Bethie’s shoulders would tense every time she heard Lila sigh; she’d have to fight the urge to shout
Just talk to us!
every night at the dinner table.
Talk to us!
she’d think.
Let us help!
But Lila never did.

The night before Lila’s departure, Bethie made one last foray to her room. Lila was sitting on the bed, her back against the wall. Her hairbrush sat on top of her dresser, and her backpack slumped next to her bed. The Sweet Valley High and Trixie Belden books were still lined up on the shelf, untouched.

“I’ll bet you’re looking forward to going home,” Bethie said, sitting on the edge of the bed, hoping she looked cheerful and that she didn’t sound like she was happy that Lila was leaving. Lila turned to her and grabbed her hands, startling Bethie, who didn’t think Lila had touched her, voluntarily, even once, all summer long.

“Can I stay here?” Lila asked. “With you and Uncle Harold?”

Bethie was so shocked that she almost couldn’t think of what to say. “You want to stay here?” she asked.

“Please,” said Lila. “Please, can I?” She leaned forward, her eyes shiny with tears. “I wouldn’t have to go to private school. And you could fire Isobel and Sidney. I could do the cooking and cleaning, I could even buy groceries on the weekends—”

“Whoa, whoa!” Bethie was shocked by Lila’s words, and by Lila’s unrelenting grip on her hands. “What’s wrong?” Bethie asked. “Why don’t you want to go home?”

“Because my mom hates me,” Lila said.

Bethie stared at her niece. “Oh, honey. Your mom doesn’t hate you.”

“She does.” A tear spilled down Lila’s cheek. “Why do you think she sent me here? She wanted to get rid of me.”

“She doesn’t want to get rid of you,” said Bethie. “We asked if you could come! It’s true that your mom’s going through a hard time right now, and maybe she hasn’t been herself. Maybe she hasn’t made you feel like she loves you, but I know she does. And Harold and I love having you. Your mom was doing us a favor!”

Lila shook her head, once to the right, once to the left. Her voice trembled. “She likes Kim and Missy because they’re smart and good at stuff. I’m not smart . . .”

“Oh, Lila. Of course you’re smart.”

“I’m not,” Lila said, raising her voice. “I’m not in any of the accelerated classes, I got a Needs Improvement in math. I hate school, and I’m not good at anything else. Missy was good at sports and writing, and Kim was good at drama and debate, and both of them got good grades, and I’m just . . .” Lila raised her hands and let them fall, a dismayingly adult gesture of resignation. “I’m
ordinary
,” she said.

“Lila.” Bethie kept her voice low and calm. “You are not ordinary, you are wonderful. You’re a very smart, very special girl.”

“I’m not smart. Or special. I’m just regular, and that’s not good enough for my mother. She’s always talking about how Kim and Missy are going to have big lives, how they go to these great colleges, and they’ll have big careers, and, and do things. And I won’t. I can’t.”

“Lila, listen to me.” Bethie looked into Lila’s dark eyes. “No matter where you go to college or what kind of job you have, your mother will still love you. And so will I, and so will Harold, and so will your dad and your sisters.”

Lila shook her head, her expression woeful. “You don’t know. You’re not there, so you don’t hear her. She’ll never be proud of me.”

Bethie kicked off her shoes and stretched out on the bed, with her back against the padded headboard and her legs out in front of her. She put her arm around Lila’s shoulders, feeling the girl
tense, then lean into her. “When your mom and I were your age, there weren’t a lot of options for girls. Like, you know how your mother’s always telling you that you can be anything you want to be when you grow up? That wasn’t what we heard. Men could be doctors or lawyers. We were just supposed to marry them.”

Lila blinked. “My doctor’s a lady,” she said. “So is the principal of my school.”

“Yes,” said Bethie. “Some
girls did grow up and became doctors and lawyers and school principals. And then, some of those lawyers couldn’t get jobs once they’d gotten their law degrees. And if you ask your doctor the next time you see her, I’ll bet a lot of times people thought she was a nurse. I bet people still think that your principal is a teacher. A few girls did grow up and do things, and got those jobs, but for the rest of us, we were told that the most important thing was to be married, and be a mother.”

“So my mom didn’t want to get married or be a mother?” asked Lila.

Careful
, Bethie thought. “I think your mom loved your dad. I think he loved her. And I know your mother loved being a mom, more than anything. She loved being pregnant, she loved taking care of babies, she loves all three of you girls. If you want to be a wife and a mother, she’ll be proud of you. She just doesn’t want that to be the only choice you have.”

Lila shook her head. Carefully, as if she was approaching a feral cat, Bethie reached out to stroke her hair. “Your mother loves you,” she said. Lila turned her face to the wall and didn’t respond. “I love you, too,” said Bethie. She heard, or thought she heard, Lila saying something, but Lila didn’t speak again, or look at her. After a while, Bethie gave Lila’s shoulders a final squeeze, then got off the bed, padded across the floor, and turned off the lights. In her own bed, she whispered to Harold what had happened, and Harold told her that she’d said all the right things, that she’d done everything she could, that Lila would get through this and come out of it fine.

The next morning, Lila was gone.

*  *  *

“We have to find her,” Bethie said, pacing the length of the kitchen with the cordless phone in her hand.

“We will. The police are coming,” said Harold. “Can you find a picture? They’ll want that.”

Bethie half walked, half ran to her home office. In the top drawer of her desk were copies of the photos that she’d taken and sent to Jo every week, documenting Lila’s adventures in Atlanta.
Our Lady of the Scowls
, she’d told Harold as they’d flipped through the images: Lila frowning at the zoo, Lila frowning in the pool, Lila squinting into the sunshine from underneath a Braves cap, Lila glowering at the camera from her black inner tube. Bethie’s stomach lurched. “Where could she be?” She could imagine possibilities from the benign (Lila in the Conaway family’s tree house at the end of the street) to the horrifying (Lila lured into some strange man’s car). Lila had left her suitcase by the bedroom door, but she’d taken her backpack . . . and, Harold reported, a hundred dollars in cash from his wallet. Bethie’s face burned as she remembered sliding her long-ago boss Mr. Breedlove’s wallet out of his pocket, and all the men she’d stolen from, all those years ago. Were such things hereditary? Was that skill buried somewhere deep in Lila’s genetic memory, along with resentfulness and mistrust?

“Should I call Jo?” she asked.

Harold considered. “How about we give ourselves ’til noon to find her. If we can’t, then we’ll let your sister know.”

Bethie nodded, already dreading that conversation.
You lost her?
Jo would ask.
Bethie, how could you?
It would be another terrible addition to the long, long list of things that Bethie had ever done.

The two police officers, both men, arrived at a few minutes after eight o’clock. Bethie and Harold led them into the living room and answered questions as best they could. No, Lila hadn’t made any friends that they knew of. No, she hadn’t been talking
to any boys or men. “She’s a kid!” Bethie had said, and one of the policemen, an older, heavyset man who’d introduced himself as Officer Beasley, said, “Ma’am, you’d be surprised.” No, they couldn’t think of anywhere she could have gone, anyone who might have taken her in, or taken her away. No, she didn’t do drugs. Yes, she had access to a bicycle, but the one she’d ridden that summer (glumly, the way she’d done everything else) was still in the garage. No, she couldn’t drive.

The officers advised Bethie and Harold to look anyplace that might have meaning to Lila, anyplace they thought she might have gone. “Should we put up posters?” Bethie asked. “Do we offer a reward?”

“Give it a few hours,” Officer Beasley said. “Most of them come home on their own.” He told them that the police would check with the phone company to see if any calls had been made after Harold and Bethie had gone to bed, or before they’d gotten up. He urged them to check the mall and the video arcade. He wished them luck.

“I’ll stay home in case she comes back,” Harold said. “Unless you want to?”

“No,” said Bethie. She’d gotten an idea after the officers had left, and after a quick turn around the neighborhood and a short, embarrassed conversation with Eileen Salter, who was still in her bathrobe with her hair uncombed, and who confirmed that she hadn’t seen Lila, she climbed into her car and sped off. Part of her thought that there was no way Lila could have gotten herself all the way out there. Part of her decided that there was nowhere else for Lila to go.

*  *  *

She found her niece on the porch out behind Blue Hill Farm, which had once been a commune and had then been their commercial kitchen and was now in the process of being turned into a restaurant and bed-and-breakfast, Sharon’s pet project, a laboratory and showcase for their products. Lila sat on the steps, her knees pulled up to her chest, and appeared to be staring out at
the fields, where they grew blueberries and raspberries and, still, a little marijuana. Bethie walked up behind her and touched her shoulder and said her name. Instead of answering, Lila just sighed.

“How’d you get here?”

“Bus.” Lila’s voice was flat. Bethie felt herself exhale, imagining she could feel her heartbeat slow.

She stepped inside to call Harold, who said he’d tell the police. In the refrigerator, she found a pitcher of iced tea and two glasses, which she filled with ice and a sprig of mint. She carried the glasses and the pitcher outside, set them on a small wooden table, and sat in one of the white wicker rocking chairs they’d put there, waiting until she was sure she had Lila’s attention before she spoke.

“When I was a few years older than you, my uncle started touching me.”

Lila turned around. Her mouth was hanging open, and her eyes were wide.

“Which uncle?”

“You never met him. He died before you were born. He started doing this to me after my father died, and when I told my mom, she didn’t believe me. Do you know who got him to stop? Your mother.”

Lila’s eyes got even wider. To her, Bethie thought, this must have sounded like a movie, one of those lurid ones that sometimes showed up on TV.

“Your mother was working that summer.”

“At Camp Tanuga,” Lila said. She’d absorbed at least that much of the family’s history, Bethie thought.

“That’s right. When she came home, I told her what Uncle Mel was doing to me. Your mom was ready to kill him. We figured out a plan. Your mom drove me to his house and went in with me. I told him if he ever touched me or any other girl again, I’d report him to whatever board was in charge of eye doctors. That’s what he was, an eye doctor. Your mother saved me.” Bethie took a sip from her glass of tea, wondering if Lila was old enough
to know the story of the other time that Jo had saved her. She decided that she was. “And later, when I was in college, I was raped.”

“Oh my God.” Lila’s eyes were glassy, and her expression was stunned. Bethie tried to remember being thirteen, when there was no pain as big or as consequential as your own pain, when you were at the center of the world, and other people just orbited in the distant periphery.

“I was raped, and I got pregnant. Abortion wasn’t legal then, but there were ways to get it done safely, if you could afford it. Your mom and her friend were going to travel all over the world, and instead, she came home, all the way from Turkey, and she used the money she’d saved to take care of me. That’s the kind of person your mother is. If she loves you, she’ll do anything to help you. Give up anything she has; make any sacrifice she can make.” Bethie looked at Lila and tried to keep from crying. “Your mother missed out on so much because of me.”

“Like what?” Lila’s voice was suspicious, but at least it wasn’t flat, or bored.

“Well, most of the 1960s, for starters,” Bethie said. “While I was roaming around, protesting the war and dancing at Woodstock, she was married. When the world started to change—for everyone, but especially for women—she was already a mother. She missed everything.”

“Misses everything,” Lila said, and gave the faintest smile. “It’s like a joke. Like, there should be a Mister Everything somewhere.”

Bethie found herself wanting to grab Lila by her scrawny shoulders and shake her.

“It’s funny, unless you’re the one sitting on the sidelines, living your life for other people.”

Startled, Lila said, “Is that what my mom did?”

“You tell me.” Bethie’s voice was sharper and louder than she’d let it get over all those long weeks of the summer. “Your mom wanted to be a writer. She wanted to see the world. She wanted . . .” She stopped herself, thinking that it was for Jo to tell
Lila exactly what she’d missed, if Jo ever felt moved to do so, and made herself breathe. “All I’m saying is that your mother is going to love you no matter what you do, because you are hers.”

Lila didn’t look entirely convinced, but she also looked less suspicious than she had since the day she’d gotten off the plane. “But she didn’t have to miss everything. She could’ve gone on that trip, when you were . . .” Lila paused. “Better.”