I strode to her and swept her up. I didn’t care that she was fourteen, that I couldn’t remember the last time I’d hugged her, the last time she’d let me. I put my arms around her and buried my face in her shoulder, which smelled like sweat and drugstore body wash and Lisette.
She hugged me back, for a brief moment like the little girl she had once been. She hugged me like Ben used to. Then she remembered herself and squirmed, moving her hands to push me away. “Mom,” she said again, this time in protest.
I let her go, and she walked toward Vail’s voice in the kitchen. I followed.
“Hi, Uncle Vail,” Lisette said when she saw him, her tone suddenly shy.
Vail gave her a brief up-and-down assessment, decided she was unharmed, and said, “Lisette.” He held out the phone receiver, stretching on its curly cord. “Tell your father you’re not dead.”
“Do I have to?” she asked.
“You do,” he replied, his voice gruff.
My daughter sighed, dropped her backpack, and took the phone from him. There would be more arguments, more accusations. Clay would shout at all of us, including Vail. I didn’t know why Lisette had come all this way, or how she had done it. We still didn’t know where Dodie was. We still had the problem of Sister, of Ben.
But for just one moment, all I thought was,Lisette is here.
Those three words. Just for one moment.
It would have to be enough.
37
Vail
Lisette, it turned out, had taken money from her father’s wallet, taken a city bus to the nearest bus station, spent most of the cash on a ticket to downtown Fell, and then taken a taxi. Since she had spent the last of her money on a bus station sandwich, I’d had to pay the cab when it pulled into the driveway to drop her off.
She couldn’t explain her reasons. Her father asked her over and over on the phone—Why? What got into you? Why would you do that?Lisette’s answer was that she didn’t know, she wanted to, she wasn’t sorry, she hated him. The last was shouted through tears.
I didn’t ask her why she’d done it, and neither did Violet. What was there not to know? Lisette was rebellious, she was thoughtless, she was impulsive, she was selfish. She was yearning for some independence, which she had romanticized in her mind until she sat alone on a Greyhound bus full of strangers, her stomach rumbling, unsure where her mother’s house was exactly or how she would get there. She’d started to get scared then. Adult independence had its dark side.
She’d used a phone book in the bus station phone booth to findthe Esmie house, then taken a taxi with an empty wallet. She didn’t have to say that if it hadn’t worked out at the end of the taxi ride, she would have simply run instead of paying the fare.
She was an Esmie.
As if to illustrate this point, after Violet and Lisette finally hung up with Clay—thus turning the dial down on the drama—Dodie walked through the front door, her hair wet from the rain and her expression unconcerned. She toed off her sneakers, and they made a squelching sound.
“Where have you been?” Violet shot the words like bullets.
“Out,” Dodie said. She caught sight of Lisette, and I could have sworn her face grew paler. She didn’t look unconcerned anymore.
“Hi, Aunt Dodie,” Lisette said, straightening a little from her hunched-in-anger position at the kitchen table.
Dodie gave her a strained, silent look. Then she turned to Violet. “That,” she said, pointing at the girl, “cannot stay here.”
Lisette recoiled.
“Knock it off, Dodie,” I said.
“What’s wrong with you?” Violet hissed. “It’s raining, and it’s getting dark. Lisette is staying the night. We’ll figure out how to get her home tomorrow.”
That had been part of the drama. Clay—I did not fucking like that guy—had demanded his daughter be returned to him as soon as possible. Packing her off alone wasn’t an option, and if Violet drove her daughter home, it would take all night, and she would be leaving the house. We weren’t done here.
Clay could drive to Fell to pick Lisette up, but he’d have to take days off from work. Why couldn’t Violet fix the problem she had created by tempting Lisette to run away in the first place? And so the argument went around and around. I leaned silently against the kitchen doorway and stayed out of it. I had never been more sure ofmy decision not to have any romantic attachments or any children. This kind of shit was simply not my thing.
“She can’t stay the night,” Dodie said again, as if Lisette wasn’t in the room.
Lisette looked hurt and confused. She probably thought that Dodie was taking a personal exception to her, but I knew better. It was the house that Dodie was worried about. Lisette, in this house. At night.
