The initial arrangement my mother made with Albert Lynch—that he should call in a few days and see about getting his daughter—was not mentioned. Instead, a few days turned to four, four turned to five, five to eight, and on it went. One afternoon, I glimpsed my mother slipping into Rose’s room, carrying a tray of food like some do-good nurse in a ward for the infirm, when it occurred to me that Abigail had been with us a total of two and a half weeks. Seventeen days, I thought, working out the math in my head.
By then, it was early July. The official holiday had come and gone, but backyard fireworks could still be heard, popping off now and then like distant gunshots in the night. Temperatures had spiked to such a sweltering degree that my mother took to preparing cold dinners—beet soup, tuna sandwiches, tomato and cucumber salads—meals she normally reserved for the thick of August. Window fans worked overtime, whirring all over the house, blowing hot air around.
On this particular evening, my mother must have felt tired of those nonsupper suppers, so she baked a vegetable lasagna from a recipe clipped out of the newspaper. The idea sounded good, but after the oven had been on for over an hour, it created a sweltering, junglelike atmosphere in our house. Nevertheless, we took our same old seats at the kitchen table.
“I remember,” I said, swatting a mosquito that had made its way inside, “when Rose and I were little, and it got this hot, you used to take us swimming at that pond over in Colbert Township.” It was a memory none of us had talked about in years, but I could still see my sister and me in our bright bathing suits, splashing in the water, burying each other’s feet in the rocky dirt on the shore. I waited to see if my parents remembered too.
My mother kept eating, or not eating exactly, but dissecting the dish she had prepared, segregating peppers from onions from tomatoes on her plate. During the previous seventeen days—since Penny had been put in the cage, since the light had been left on below, since Abigail had arrived and my father returned home without Rose—my mother had not uttered a word about feeling unwell. And yet, I couldn’t help but sense that something about her, something unnameable, was no longer the same and, if I was truthful with myself, had not been since our trip to Ohio.
The way my father’s gaze lingered on my mother in certain moments, as it did then, made me wonder if he noticed the change in her too. He waited to see if she might respond to what I’d said; when she didn’t, he told me he remembered those swims, adding that when he was little, his father took Howie and him to an Indian Well outside of Philly to cool off some summer afternoons. Then he asked my mother, “Didn’t you used to swim in a pond on the farm in Tennessee?”
My mother quit segregating her food and looked up. “Yes. But someone once drowned in that pond, so I was always afraid of swimming there. Plus, it was such stagnant water it made for a buggy place. I only went when I felt desperate for—”
She stopped abruptly, and my father and I waited for her to finish. Window fans whirred. Moths beat against the screens in a haphazard rhythm. More mosquitoes hummed in the air. All the while, my mother just stared at the entryway of the kitchen. And then we turned to see her in the white nightgown intended for my sister.
She looked different than she had that first afternoon. There was the fact of that gown—cleaner, more simple, than the tattered clothes she arrived in. There was the fact of her hair, brushed so all the curls had gone straight. There was also the fact of those bruises and scrapes on her feet, healed now, I discovered with a quick glance down. But there was something more to it than those physical details. I couldn’t help but sense a deep and noticeable calm about the girl, a calm that had not been there before.
“Well, hello, Abigail,” my mother said.
“Yes, hello,” my father said too.
“Would you like to join us?” my mother asked. Rather than wait for a response, she stood and quickly set an extra place at the table.
Abigail lingered in the entryway long enough that I thought she might turn and retreat upstairs. Finally, she walked to the table and slipped into Rose’s chair. None of us said a word as she placed her napkin on her lap, picked up her knife and fork, and took the first hesitant bites of dinner. She kept eating, quickly and simply, until her plate had been cleaned. Then she looked up and said in a smooth and serene sort of voice, “May I please have seconds?”
My mother nodded, and she helped herself to another portion. That’s when I made an effort to bring back the previous moment, asking my mother to finish what she was saying about the pond on the farm. She didn’t elaborate on the topic, though, telling us it was just a pond and not a very nice one at that.
At last, Abigail wiped her mouth and said, “Lake Ewauna. Or Lake Ewaumo.”
“Pardon?” my father said.
“When we used to live in one place. Out west. There were so many lakes near the ministry, one in particular we loved. I could never say the name, but it was something like that. We used to go swimming there. Only at night, under the moon, when no one was around.”
“That sounds lovely,” my father told Abigail.
She gave a shy smile and went back to eating.