In the night room Page 0,114

Lily only got into a couple of fights, and she didn’t do any permanent damage to her opponents, which means that even when she lost it, she could manage a little bit of self-control.

Those were the summers we took her abroad with us, to Kenya, where Guy took that picture after wheedling Lily for about an hour and telling her she could hide behind me, and the Black Forest and the Rhine, and Amsterdam. She didn’t have a birth certificate, but in this state there’s a document they can make up, called an extraordinary birth certificate, for times like that. The information on it isn’t necessarily accurate, because who knew the exact date of Lily’s birth? No one, not even her horrible father, I bet. And the hour? And her weight? Please. But there is information on her document, and that document is part of the record. So it’s fiction, and it’s true at the same time. Getting the document took a little doing, but it came through, and we could start going on our travels again. Lily spent every possible minute with her nose in a book, but every now and then we got her to look up from her page and see a cathedral, or a castle, or a good painting.

But right then, when she was fourteen, two terrible things happened. My husband died, very suddenly, no warning at all. Pop, and there he was, dead in a heap on the ground. I thought I was going to go crazy with grief, but I couldn’t, for Lily’s sake. She took Guy’s death in her own way, and she took it hard. By dying, he betrayed her trust, which she’d only just learned to give. He’d abandoned her, and she turned wild again. There were days when I had to wrap her in her blanket all over again and hold her until she could feel some peace. And not long after, here came the second terrible thing: her father was arrested, and his terrible crimes were printed all over the newspapers. She couldn’t go to school anymore. I didn’t even try. Some of the children in her class came over here and shouted things at her from the front lawn. Every day! They painted things on our front door.

Without Guy, I couldn’t handle it. On top of everything else, I had to go back to work, because we had no money coming in anymore. Getting a job was no picnic, but I finally landed a spot at the Dresden, more a cocktail lounge than a restaurant, but they serve food, too. Lily and I cried ourselves to sleep, because we could see it coming. She couldn’t stay here anymore, that was it. We both knew it. I was a wreck, she had to stay in all day, those children were calling her “monster baby” and all kinds of things, they were driving us both crazy. . . . And I was losing my grip! So I did the worst thing in the world, the worst thing possible, which I had no choice but to do. I put Lily back in the shelter.

And they tortured her there. I thought they’d protect her, but they can only do so much when the kids are in those dormitories and they turn off the lights. They tortured her. I can’t bear to think of what happened to my dear girl when she was fourteen and fifteen years old. And do you know the most unbearable part of all that? Lily pretended nothing was wrong. She told me not to come, I thought because she was mad at me, which she was, but believe me, what she was actually doing was protecting me from the knowledge of what her life was like. In those days, Lily went wild—she smoked, and she drank, and she took drugs, because in her old age Georgia Lathem began to slip, and she couldn’t see what was going on under her own nose.

By working at the Dresden, and learning to live on my own, I gradually began to put things together, and I realized that more than anything else in the world I wanted to get Lily back. I thought I had to get her back with me, if I was going to call myself a human being. So I astonished Miss Georgia Lathem by telling her I wanted to be Lily’s foster mother again, and what’s more, that I wanted to adopt her. Because that’s what we should