A Lily in the Light(53)

There it was. I stayed, and you didn’t. Esme was sick of apologizing for her life. She hung up.

The cord dangled. People moved in the hallway. A woman threw a red scarf over her shoulder in the courtyard. It was a magazine world where people posed but weren’t feeling anything. Esme sat very still on the wooden seat, aware of her heart beating too fast, her skin too tight around her fingers. The elastic bra clasp circling her back was too tight; her shampoo smelled too strongly of lavender. She repeated her sister’s words, rolling them over her tongue. “They found a girl.” She said them again to hear them, really hear them, so that she might believe them.

It probably wasn’t Lily, but hope bloomed like a spring bulb waiting through a silent winter. This was someone’s daughter, someone’s sleeping hope. Maybe Lily was out there too, reading books, doing laundry, watching the same sun rise and set.

She’d seen so many pictures of missing children, studied heights and weights, eye colors, nicknames. Those kids posed in front of laser backdrops with folded hands were part of her invisible family. They understood what it was to lose someone and not know what had happened, to never say goodbye without wondering if it was the last time. She memorized missing persons like a prayer, hoping people did the same for Lily. She doubted they’d ever find Lily, but maybe she’d recognize someone named Emily who was four feet tall when last seen on the corner of Forty-First and Second. Who are you? she wondered of the girl in the basement, smiling sadly at the thought of someone’s life starting over, of a family getting their missing piece back.

But if it was Lily, what would she say to her for the first time? She’d written so many postcards and mailed them to nowhere. For every year she’d been dancing and traveling, someone had been living in a damp, dark basement. She imagined sleeping on an old mattress on the floor with a rag for a blanket, listening to footsteps overhead, while Esme had worried over pounds, blisters, auditions, contracts, missed flights. Lily hadn’t deserved that; no one did.

I would hate me, Esme thought. I would hate me. She prayed this girl was someone else’s. Eight years made them strangers. A world in a basement made them strangers.

Tears slithered free. People were whispering in the hallway, but she didn’t care. She felt invisible. Madeline didn’t understand. For as much as she pushed away, there was still a part of her that wished she were in their old bedroom, on Madeline’s purple bedspread under her Saved by the Bell poster, a pile of tissues between them, but that life was over.

Finding Lily now terrified her more than silence. At least there was a new normal. Mom was a gray watercolor of her former self. Dad orbited Mom, catering to whatever she wanted, desperate to make things better by not making them worse. Esme danced, always, no longer expected home for holidays or birthdays or illness because she’d given herself a permanent excuse. And even when she did go home, she wasn’t expected to stay for long. She was not necessarily happy, but she was not unhappy either. She was a seesaw caught in a straight line, and that was better than being catapulted upward unexpectedly, legs dangling, not knowing how long she’d be there. A girl in a basement changed everything.

Madeline answered on the first ring.

“I’m sorry,” Esme said. “And I do want to know. I just . . .”

“I know.” Madeline sighed. “There’s never a good time, is there?”

“No,” Esme said finally.

“Go light a candle,” Madeline said.

“You should, like Mom.” Esme laughed a little through the last tears, terribly sad that Lily wouldn’t know what Mom sounded like. “And what about Mom? She must be going nuts.”

“Yeah, well, no more nuts than usual,” Madeline said. “She’s hopeful, but you know.”

Esme sighed. When this wasn’t Lily, Cerise would coast along again like an airplane flying after the oxygen was gone, full of frozen, sleeping passengers.

“Call me if you need anything.”

“You too,” Esme whispered.

She knew the statistics. It was unlikely that Lily was alive, less likely that she’d ever come home or that they’d ever know what had happened. There were more stories about bones and teeth found in unusual places than missing children coming home.

She pressed her sleeve to her eyes, ignoring the teardrops on the chair, glassy half globes that magnified the wood. Crying made her head throb. She was ready to move, to feel the barre beneath her fingers, to be in the studio with her suitcase full of warm-up clothes and makeup, but first she had a candle to light. I don’t have to feel bad, she reminded herself, for living the life I was given.

The sun had shifted. Paris was washed out. Blue doors blended into gray cobblestones. The boulangerie was empty, her nose too stuffy to smell bread baking or warm chocolate. The café on the corner was quiet. One man sat beneath the awning, cradling an espresso cup. She followed the street past the bastille in the roundabout, her sister’s words swelling in her chest.

There was always a church in Paris brighter and bigger than the last, glowing with stained glass and marble statues that made real people look gross. She wanted one with heavy doors to trap her prayer inside so it could echo through high ceilings over and over again. She found one with gargoyles on the roof, throwing long, stretched shadows over the sidewalk. The door closed silently behind her. Her footsteps echoed down the aisle as she ran her hands along the pews. A Blessed Mother held a tiny lamb near the altar. Esme lit a red candle beneath it. It seemed right, a mother and a lamb. She made sure the flame was still flickering when she left, just because.