Mislaid by Nell Zink Page A

done it before and confessed. You never, ever believe that person again.
    The lie Meg repeated to Karen every single day was a very big lie.
    Little children don’t remember the past, and they believe anything you tell them. So Karen didn’t know she had been done to. But Byrdie hadn’t been so little when Meg left. He had been nine. Old enough to have a worldview and draw his own conclusions.
    Meg was fenced in: On the one side, her lies to Karen. On the other, her crime against Byrdie.
    There was only one way she could hope to be loved by any child, ever: carry on. Byrdie would never trust her. But Karen might, if she was kept from the truth.
    Meg’s feelings for Byrdie were fierce and self-sacrificing. Feeling that he was at Woodberry made her unbearably nervous. September 1980 was a month spent on edge.
    The fierce desire to see him, the self-sacrificing willingness to avoid disrupting his life. In October she capitulated and didwhat any normal mother would have done: She bought a watch cap and sunglasses and stalked him on a weekday afternoon.
    And she found him. He was alone on the tennis courts, practicing a two-handed backhand against a ball machine.
    She sat down inside a boxwood shrubbery—it was old, with a capacious interior—to watch. Feeling the smooth curvature of something artificial under her ass, she noticed that this particular hedge was a repository of many empty liquor bottles. It was dark in the shade of the bushes with sunglasses on. She stroked the dirt to check for broken glass and sat down again. She watched Byrdie practice.
    He stopped, startling her. But he didn’t leave the court, or even look her way. He gathered the balls in a basket and dumped them back in the machine.
    He was only fourteen, but almost as tall as Lee. He looked a lot like Lee, but with Meg’s suntan and brown hair. He could not have looked any healthier. He didn’t look happy, exactly, but he was working on nailing a two-handed backhand.
    Meg felt her heart constrict. There was so much she wanted to say to him. Things any normal mother would say, like that a one-handed backhand is more versatile. She was flooded by overwhelming emotions, which she immediately repressed, and the upshot was small, narrow emotions, tightly squeezed.
    She realized she had better get out of there before anybody saw her. She wasn’t crying, but her movements were awkward, like a blind baby kitten pawing at nothing. She backed out of the bush crab-style, clinking bottles as she went, right into a groundskeeper with a rake. “Hey, you,” he said.
    She panicked and ran. Like the wind, like a thief caught in the act, like the prowler the groundskeeper said she was when Byrdie came up the hill to look at the bottles.
    With Byrdie away at school, Lee’s parents gave him money to hire a detective again. Their main motive was concern for Byrdie’s peace of mind. They wanted to find Peggy before she had a chance to reenter his happy life and turn everything upside down.
    The detective went to see the Vaillaincourts and poked around thoughtfully. He toured the school, trying to get a general sense of what resources Peggy had to fall back on. He walked through the churchyard and saw Karen Brown’s grave. With very little legwork indeed, he found the registrar who remembered Peggy’s acquiring a birth certificate for a dead black child.
    He told Lee he had good news and bad news. The good news: His wife definitely had balls, and his daughter might be enrolled in school under the name Karen Brown. The bad news: Being named Brown in America is like being named Lee in China. Finding them was going to be expensive and time-consuming.
    He asked how Lee wanted him to proceed, repeating that they might both be passing as black.
    “Peggy’s not that stupid,” Lee said. “White, she’s a dime a dozen. A black lady who looks like her would be the talk of the town. More likely it’s the other way around. They’re up north somewhere, passing for white.