25. Liv
Liv
Two little girls, both lost, one never found.
What if my bio mom had kept me, but spiraled into the abyss of addiction, anyway?
Would I have become just as lost, slipping between foster homes or shunted from one family member to another?
I wouldn’t have wanted someone to give up on me.
I owed it to that lost little girl, wherever she was, not to give up now.
And I owed it to Theo, who had been abandoned by his father and raised by a mother who was present in body but absent in every way that counted.
He’d tried to hide it, but I hadn’t missed the tension that gripped his body as we scanned one article after another.
It bled through the smile he forced onto his face, through the touch of his hand on mine.
His pain was unmistakable, echoing deep in my heart as if it were my own.
Then came the stories of the legal battle.
Here, at last, was May Dressler: her assertions, the Carters’ denials.
Jewish Garment Worker Claims Miracle Girl as Her Daughter, the headlines read.
Lower East Side vs. Gramercy Park: Culture Clash Over Purported Kidnapping.
And Lies or Licentiousness—Whose Daughter Lives at One Lexington Avenue?
There was a photo of May at the courthouse, looking thin and desperate, captured mid-plea.
Theo’s jaw set, hard. “We should finish up,” he said, not bothering to keep his voice down.
“Theo—”
He shook his head, refusing to meet my eyes. “Let’s go. We don’t want to be late for our appointment.”
Ten minutes later, Theo and I were sitting at one of the long tables that lined the room, the records of St. Jerome’s and Divine Grace spread across its scratched surface.
I drew a deep breath, inhaling the musty scent of old paper, as Theo opened the first folder, marked ‘Divine Grace Home for Children’ in black Sharpie.
It held an assortment of papers: maintenance receipts; notes about facility improvements; copies of state and federal censuses—which were of no use to us, because 1927 fell between census years.
Theo thumbed through the stack, setting it aside.
Then he reached into the box and pulled out something else: a small notebook, marked ‘Records Kept by Head Matron Kissinger, 1925-1928.’
“Maybe there’s something in here,” he said, flipping through the pages.
The entries were scrawled in old-fashioned, elegant cursive. “God,” Theo whispered, staring down at them. “This woman wrote everything down. Who cares that she had stringy mutton for dinner?”
I stifled a laugh, but part of me thought Matron Kissinger’s attention to detail was a good thing. Someone who perseverated over minutiae like this seemed more likely to remark upon the appearance of two lost girls on her doorstep.
There was nothing on December 19th, the date of Ella’s disappearance. Nothing on the 20th or 21st, either. My heart began to sink. But then, on the 22nd, there it was.
A most unusual circumstance transpired this past week.
Today, one of our volunteers, the esteemed Mrs. Linzer, found a young girl in the street, just yards from our doorstep.
She was quite bedraggled, poor thing, and Mrs. Linzer brought her to us at once.
We set about warming her, expecting that she would be able to tell us from whence she had come, but alas, the little one was mute.
Given her tattered state and her proximity to Divine Grace, we can only assume that her mother brought her to us, hoping we would take her in, then fled.
Perhaps she feared that, if we knew the little one could not speak, we would reject her; perhaps that is why she sought to part with the girl.
We shall never know. It is a travesty how many women find themselves unable to care for their children in this fair city; we at Divine Grace do the work of the Lord.
Theo and I stared at each other. “Why would they assume that?” he muttered. “Why wouldn’t they call the police?”
I’d been wondering the same thing, but played devil’s advocate. “I guess because she was so close to the orphanage, they assumed she’d been left there on purpose?”
His fingers traced the faded ink. “Okay, so Mystery Girl #1 came in on Thursday, December 22nd,” he said, pitching his voice low. “We know Ella disappeared on Monday, the 19th. What the hell are the chances that she survived for four days in the snow?”
“Unless James took her and kept her somewhere,” I argued, earning a glare from our neighbor. “And then left her on the doorstep of the orphanage, so he wouldn’t get caught.”
“What…like he asked for a ransom, then had a change of heart and just dumped her? It doesn’t make sense.
” He shook his head. “I don’t know the exact day Lily disappeared.
I’m going to ask my grandmother about it tonight.
Hopefully, she’ll remember…although she was so young, who knows.
But if it turns out she disappeared on Thursday, the same day Mystery Girl showed up at Divine Grace, then I think the chances are pretty good that it’s Lily, Liv. ”
We flipped through the pages to see if the matron mentioned the unexpected arrival of a second girl, but there was nothing. She didn’t mention Grandma Ella—Mystery Girl, I corrected myself—until she rhapsodized about her adoption several pages later.
I tried to quash my disappointment as we combed through the rest of the records.
The St. Jerome’s box yielded only what we already knew: a young girl had shown up on the steps of St. Jerome’s the day that Ella disappeared, then died of frostbite shortly after.
It wasn’t Ella; when Charles had identified the body, he’d said as much.
But if Lily had vanished on that same day, it could well be her.
Mystery Girl had shown up at Divine Grace on Thursday.
Ella had disappeared on Monday. If I was right, the girl who’d died of frostbite was Lily, and James or someone else had hung on to Ella for four days, then let her go without collecting the ransom, counting on Divine Grace to take her in.
If Theo was right, Mystery Girl was Lily, and Ella had either died years ago or had slipped under the radar and was out there somewhere… lost.
Head aching, I rubbed my temples just as my phone buzzed. My breath caught.
It was Maisie MacEwan’s granddaughter, Diane Hayes, returning my call.