“Why are you here?”
Lillian looked at her. Her eyes, Beth noticed, were gray-green, her lashes dark. “I wanted to come here,” she said. “I’ve been here before.”
And suddenly Beth remembered. The footprints in the dew, the words on the window: I WAS HERE. She hadn’t seen the girl who’d made those words, but suddenly she was sure. “That was you?” she asked, her voice a whisper.
Lillian frowned, for the first time looking a little uncertain. “I knew about this house,” she said. “I wanted to come here. And one night, I thought about it as I went to sleep, and . . . I think I dreamed it.”
Beth was excited now. “Yes,” she said. “I saw you. Your footprints.”
“My feet were so cold,” Lillian said. “I couldn’t find a way in. I couldn’t see in the windows. I had to give up and go back to the trees. And then I saw you.” She looked at Beth. “Sometimes I imagine things that aren’t real. But you saw me that night, and I saw you. You told me to come in.” She smiled. “And here I am. Now we can be sisters.”
Beth’s heart was pumping hard in her chest. This was wonderful and terrible at the same time. It was going to be a nightmare, and it was also going to be the best thing that ever happened to her. She knew that already. Her life was starting.
“Who are you?” she asked the strange girl.
“I’m Lillian,” the girl replied. “That’s your name, too, isn’t it?”
“It’s my middle name,” Beth said. She was Elizabeth Lillian Greer.
“Like you were named after me,” Lillian said. “I think that’s nice, but no one ever calls me Lillian. Everyone calls me Lily.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
December 1960
BETH
That first year, when Lily came to stay, there was no real Christmas. Beth’s parents usually made an attempt at the holidays, with a lot of spiked eggnog, a few expensive presents for Beth, and a meal cooked on the twenty-fourth by the housekeeping staff and eaten the next day. It wasn’t fun, but it was something.
But that year, the tree sat in its shadowy corner, pungent and undecorated. No presents ever appeared. The girls played in Beth’s room while Beth’s parents had some kind of awful fight downstairs, carried out in angry, snarled tones. Sometime in the middle of the night two days before Christmas, her father left the house, the door slamming behind him. Lying in her bed, squeezed next to Lily, Beth listened to his car start up and drive away.
In the silent dark, Lily spoke. “We don’t need him,” she said. “Go to sleep.”
The next morning, Beth’s mother found them in the kitchen. Her hair was done, and she had makeup on, though her eyes were red. She was wearing a red sweater and a plaid skirt that fell below the knee, as if she thought she might go to a Christmas party. “I’m going shopping,” she said, her voice dull. She put on her coat, picked up her purse, and left the house.
She was gone for three days.
No one had told the housekeeping staff to cook a Christmas meal, so there wasn’t one. The girls were left alone in the house as the wet snow fell outside and melted on the cold grass. The first day, they raided the kitchen, eating cookies and drinking chocolate milk. They watched TV until late and went to bed after midnight. Beth jumped at every sound, expecting one or both of her parents back any minute to shout at them for being bad, but they never came.
On Christmas morning, the girls ate more chocolate and played dolls and dress-up. They raced each other around the yard, churning up the wet snow as the ocean roared at the bottom of the cliff. Beth thought of the other kids from school, and she knew that she wasn’t having the right kind of Christmas, a normal kind of Christmas. She didn’t unwrap gifts or leave cookies for Santa. She didn’t have turkey. It felt sad, but then she and Lily popped popcorn six times, smothering it with butter and eating it all day until they went to bed.
I should miss them, she thought as she and Lily jumped from the coffee table with their arms outstretched, seeing which one of them could touch the ceiling first. And she did miss her parents, a little. But she didn’t miss the watchfulness, the waiting for the moment when her parents started politely snapping at each other, forgetting that she was in the room. She didn’t miss having to tiptoe everywhere, remembering never to touch anything or ask for anything or make any noise, because she was supposed to be seen and not heard. She didn’t miss lying alone in bed in this strange house, wondering why she was so afraid of it, of beams and roofs and windows, as if she and the house hated each other.
“You’re not really my cousin, are you?” Beth asked that night as they wound the bedcovers around themselves and ate the last of the candy they’d found in the pantry.
“No, I’m not.” Lily’s profile was perfect as she snapped off a small bite of chocolate. “You don’t have a cousin.”
“Then who are your parents?”
“I live with foster parents,” Lily said. “This is the second family I’ve lived with. I’ll probably live with a different one next year.”
Beth had never imagined meeting a real-life orphan instead of reading about them in books. “Where are your real parents?” she asked.
Lily thought this over. “My mother is alive,” she said. “My father, I don’t know. Maybe he’s dead. If he isn’t, I plan to find him someday.”
“What about your mother? Do you plan to find her?”
Lily thought about this again. “My mother doesn’t want me,” she said. “But maybe she has no choice.”
The next day, they ran out of cookies, so they tried baking cookies themselves from a recipe book that was stacked under the sink, the pages stuck together with disuse. Beth singed a finger when she opened the hot oven, so the girls turned the oven off and ate the uncooked batter instead. There was a brief fight that day, when Lily took a doll Beth wanted to play with. Lily won.
Beth’s mother came home, still wearing the red sweater and the plaid skirt. Her hair had been taken down and put up again, and her mascara had dribbled into raccoon bruises beneath her eyes. She looked around the mess of the house, at the two girls sitting on the living room sofa, surrounded by blankets they’d pulled off the bed.
“How sweet,” she said. “It looks like you two had fun. I’m sorry . . . I’m sorry I wasn’t home for Christmas.”
“It’s okay,” Beth said. Her mother had been so sad ever since Beth’s grandmother died. She’d probably just gone off to be sad somewhere, Beth decided, since Lily was here to keep her company. It wouldn’t be much of a Christmas if your mother had just died.
Beth had explained this to Lily, who had given her a blank look. Beth had to remember that Lily didn’t understand anything about mothers.
Her mother looked past Beth at Lily and said her name, the word seeming to twist in her throat. “Lillian . . .”
“Yes, Mrs. Greer?” Lillian asked sweetly.
Mariana just looked at her. Beth noticed that Lily and her mother had the same color hair, the same pretty blond.
“Nothing,” Mariana said after a moment. “You two sweet girls have fun.” She went upstairs, and Beth heard her parents’ bedroom door click shut.
Beth’s father came home the next day, ragged, tired. He looked at Beth and said, “Housekeeping will be here in an hour. Have them clean up this mess.” Then he turned to Lily. “Pack your bags. You’re going home.”
“No!” Beth cried.
“Shut up,” her father said, and even though he wasn’t a very warm father, even though he expected her to be neat and quiet and never play, he’d never said those words to her before. He turned to Lily again and said, “You have five minutes. I’ll have a taxi at the door to take you to wherever you’re going.”