Michelle Hoover - Bottomland

“Have you seen these girls?”

“Who wants to know?”

“They’re my sisters.”

“Get lost.”

One of the girls stopped. “What if he’s telling the truth?” Her bangs were a black line, the tip of her nose red. The others tried to pull her with them, but she waved them off. “Don’t worry about them,” she said. “They think everything’s fishy. But a person still has to be human, don’t you think?” She stretched the poster between her hands. “What happened to them?”

“We think they ran away.”

“Golly.” She sniffled, pale drops. With her mitten, she wiped them off. “Place gets to me,” she said with a laugh. “Just sitting at a machine, matching collars to shirts. Should be easy. But every time that needle goes in, it pulls something out. By the end of the day, all these bits are floating like bugs. It’s like breathing with a sheet over your face.”

A whistle sounded. I bit the inside of my lip, tasted blood.

“Hey, what’s wrong?”

“Nothing.” It was that high kind of whistle, tall and shivering. It was rain inside my head.

“You’re all balled up, aren’t you?”

I tried to take the poster from her, but she held it.

“Aw, it’s all right,” she said. “Most of the time, I’m balled up myself. What are their names?”

“Who?”

“Your sisters, silly.”

“Esther and Myrle.”

“Esther and Myrle,” she repeated.

I cocked my head.

“Nothing. Just funny names.”

“Not so funny.”

“No. But it’s those names, together like that. Seems I heard them before, but I can’t tell when. Just a feeling you get, you know? On the tip of your nose. And that one.” She pointed at the poster again.

“That’s Esther.”

She shook her head and squinted. “The tip of my nose. Then nothing.” She shrugged. “I sure hope you find them. You should try the Y. They have all the lists. Boardinghouses. And the Defender too. They run the ads.”

I looked at her, puzzling.

“The YWCA, silly. Don’t you know anything?”

“Hey.”

“Oh, you don’t have to be like that. I know if my own brother came searching for me. ” She sniffled again. “I know I’d go with him in a snap.”

She opened her fingers and the poster curled into my hands. Finally that whistle was quiet. I touched my hat to her.

“Name’s Bernadette,” she called out, “but everybody calls me Nan.”

I stopped.

“You don’t like my name?”

“I like it fine.” My face went warm. “If you see them, can you say I’m looking for them? Name’s Lee. My big sister, I don’t know what she’ll do if I come home alone. She’s like a mother to them.”

“I’ll tell them, sure.”

I rolled up the poster. Nan watched me slip it into my sack. That black cut of her hair, it made her look some pretty.

“Lee, that’s a good name,” she said. “If I had a brother, I’d name him just that. And I’d never run off. If they know anything, they’ll let you find them, easy.”

A girl with my sister’s name. A sign. And with Nan’s voice in my head, that tip of her nose singing as if she knew something, that was good to keep me going. There were dozens of houses on that list at the Y, a dozen more in the paper, though those seemed the sorrier sort. I went knocking at the ones on the list first. The women who opened the doors were matrons. Behind them, the smell of coffee and sweets. Their arms cupped their heavy stomachs, their faces showing nothing much. When I took my poster out, the crease had grown so thick I worried it might well split in half.

“The nerve of you coming here,” one of the women said. She had kettle-colored hair, her mouth a pinch. “We don’t tell men what girls we have or not.” With that, she stared me up and down. “If you’re looking for your sisters, you best go home. You’ll find a letter there. Then you’ll know plenty about where they are.” She moved to shut the door.

“Ma’am?”

“What now?”

“If they’re here at all, will you tell them? Even if you don’t tell me. That their brother has come looking. We miss them something terrible.”

She swallowed, her voice quiet. “I miss my son too. But I don’t go bothering people.” She closed and bolted the door.

We miss them something terrible , I’d said. But for me, it was more than missing. My head felt hot, my stomach sore. All the way down to my bones, it felt. My face, maybe it didn’t show what it should. That’s why the women closed their doors.

I kept knocking. Sometimes the girls were in for breaks, eating dinner at the tables. Sometimes they weren’t. Sometimes I could see them when they’d just taken off their coats. “You’re no kind of gentleman,” the matron said when she caught me looking. “Interrupting them at their dinner. Go on, why don’t you?”

Those doors, they closed them fast. I couldn’t help but think what might walk these alleys to make them do that. My sisters, maybe they already knew.

The other houses were the same. A no . Then another. Not here. Never was . A girl going up the stairs, a girl coming down. A glimpse of a scarf, the kind Esther wore. But I saw all sorts of scarves like that. When I tried to see more, the doors pulled shut. They were clean places, at least, the smell of bleach and flowers, while the streets they stood in were everything but. You go on home , the women said, shooing me. Girls don’t just disappear. They’ll write if there’s anything decent in them. They’d want to tell their mother where they are.

“That’s it, ma’am,” I answered. “Mother’s gone.”

One woman touched her throat. “That doesn’t change a thing, now does it? One person goes off, then another. You have to get used to it. We all have to get used to these things.” She fiddled at the gold loops in her ears, as if they hurt her. “Daughters, they don’t want to stay in one place anymore. Probably never did.”

There was one thing I knew then: If Esther hadn’t been the one to take Myrle off, Myrle never would have come to this place. But Esther was different. She was trouble to track. I walked from door to door, thinking about that. My breath was hard. The ball of my boots splitting, both sides. Hours of knocking and my feet did some ache, but never so much as France. That night in my alley when I slept, I felt myself knocking still.

The next few days, that’s the way it went. I imagined Esther around every corner. Esther with her brown cap. Across the end of every street, before I could get a sure glimpse, she was there carrying a white bag, her flat-footed bounce. “Hey,” I called out. Sometimes she was alone, sometimes a whole group at her side. I pushed through one girl after the other. A hand on her shoulder, swinging her around. The face was plain as the moon.

“Sorry. I thought. ”

“You’re crazy, that’s what you are.”

“Leave us alone.”

At night my head knocked and Esther was there too. The way she’d slid into my smithy before she was gone, her hands polite in front of her skirts. She had never stood with her hands like that. Back then, she wore my old cap, but backwards. It pushed her hair close to her cheeks, hiding that she was a girl.

“Lee?” she asked. “What’s that lock on the shed?”

I’d been fixing a horseshoe over the fire, the fire a smoke and my glasses thick. Esther reached a freckled finger to touch its sharp point. I pulled it back.

“No one locks their sheds around here,” she said.

I shrugged. “Father does.”

“Can you open it?”

“It’s a hard one.”

“That means you can? Ray couldn’t do it, but you could.”

I shrugged again, but already I was thinking: Ray couldn’t. That was right. Esther straightened her skirt. She had never done much straightening before.