by Tudor, C. J.
She rose and tipped the rest of the wine down the sink. It wasn’t helping. It never did. Problems float, she thought. She walked wearily out into the hall and almost went flying as she caught her foot on something by the stairs.
“Shit.”
It was one of the boxes from the cupboard. She must have left it lying there after she got out the blow-up bed. She rubbed at her toe. She really should sort some of these boxes. The house was too small, and they were full of junk. Old pictures, cards, leaflets. But Katie found it hard to throw things away. She knew how easily things could be lost. Life, family, love. It was all so fragile. Perhaps that was why she hung onto those faded photos and scribbled pictures on crumpled bits of paper.
She bent down to shove the box to one side and something fluttered from the top. A drawing of Gracie’s. A strange stick family with odd-colored hair, distorted limbs and a huge Gothic house looming behind them, complete with thunderclouds, rainbows and spiders. Part charming, part Tim Burtonesque nightmare.
She smiled and was about to stuff it back in the box when she realized the picture was drawn on the back of something else. She turned it over. A young girl’s face smiled back at her.
HAVE YOU SEEN ME?
The flyer. She had meant to look for it but, with everything else that had happened, she’d completely forgotten. She felt a little guilty that she had let Gracie doodle on the back. But at least she had the number. She would call tomorrow and find out how the thin man—Gabe—was doing. After all, he didn’t have anyone else to look out for him.
She might curse her family at times, but at least she had family: her precious children. She couldn’t imagine the pain of losing everything—your partner, your only daughter—in such a terrible way.
She stared at the picture. Izzy. A pretty little girl. Blonde hair. Blue eyes. Wide, gappy smile. Pretty, and somehow familiar. Something about the eyes, the smile. Katie suddenly had the strongest feeling that she had seen her before. Of course, she had seen the flyer before. That was probably it. But still, there was something else, something…
A stair creaked behind her. She spun around. Alice stood on the bottom step, long dark hair framing her face, eyes wide and haunted, a Japanese horror movie in Marvel pajamas.
“Alice—you made me jump!”
“Sorry.”
“No, it’s okay.” Katie stuffed the piece of paper into the pocket of her hoodie and tried to force a smile. “What’s the matter? Can’t you sleep?”
“I need to talk to you.”
“Okay. C’mon. Let’s go in the kitchen. D’you want some milk?”
“No, thank you.”
Alice sat down at the table. She still clutched the rucksack. It rattled restlessly. For some reason—stupid, Katie knew—something about the sound set her teeth on edge. Clickety-click. Clickety-click.
“Are you worried about your mum?” she asked now.
A small nod.
“Well, look, tomorrow, we’ll call the police…”
“No!” Alice’s cry was anguished.
“But they can help.”
“No.” Alice shook her head. “You can’t call them.”
Katie looked at her helplessly. “Why not?”
“Fran said they would take her away. I’d be left in danger.”
“Alice, why do you say ‘Fran’ sometimes, not ‘Mum’?”
“I…” She looked guilty, caught in a lie. Then she sighed. “Because she isn’t my real mum.”
And there it was. Somehow, Katie had sensed something was wrong—very wrong—about all of this.
“Where’s your real mum?”
“She’s dead.”
“I’m sorry. Are you adopted?”
“No.”
“Then why is Fran looking after you?”
Alice chewed her lip. Katie got the feeling it was a long time since someone had extricated the truth from Alice; it felt like pulling a sliver of glass from a wound.
“Something bad happened. Mum died. So did Emily. Fran saved me.”
Katie felt more confused than ever. “Who’s Emily?”
“She was Fran’s little girl.”
“Wait. Fran had a daughter who died?”
A nod. “That’s why Fran has to keep me safe. She can’t lose me, too.”
Christ. Katie tried to process this. Fran’s daughter was dead? So, who was this girl? Where were her family? Did she have a father? Did he know where she was, or was he out there somewhere, looking for her?
And that’s when it hit her, the realization sideswiping her like a juggernaut.
That feeling of familiarity. The eyes, the smile.
Something bad happened. Mum died.
Her breath seemed to lodge in her chest. Jesus Christ. Could it be possible?
She took the flyer back out of her pocket.
HAVE YOU SEEN ME?
She looked at the photo, then back at Alice. Of course, she was older, her hair had been dyed and her adult teeth had grown through.
But there was no mistake.
“What’s that?” Alice asked.
Katie reached for her hand. “Sweetheart, I think…it’s you.”
Izzy had loved the Toy Story movies. Gabe found them incredibly sad. The end of childhood. The fear of becoming old and unwanted. The realization that life moves on without you.
Gabe had found himself reflecting on this a few months before Izzy’s fourth birthday. Jenny had set him the task of clearing out some of Izzy’s old toys before the house filled with new ones.
“It’s either that or buy a bigger house.”
They both knew that that was not in the cards, not with the unspoken fragility of their relationship. And Jenny was right. The house was overflowing with pink plastic.
He had found Buzz beneath a mountain of more recent acquisitions in Izzy’s toy box. He stared at his wide plastic smile: to infinity and beyond, or the charity shop? He put him to one side—he couldn’t, just couldn’t—and set about collecting some of her older toys: cheap Barbie knock-offs, a pushchair, dog-eared cuddly toys and other plastic novelties acquired for Christmas or birthdays and never played with. He had divided them into two bin bags. One for the charity shop. One for the tip. By the time he had finished, it had been too late to take them to either, so he had deposited the bags in the garage—and promptly forgotten about them.
Izzy didn’t miss the toys. She had plenty of new bits of plastic for Gabe to spend hours putting together and days tripping over. Then, a few weeks later, the weather turned surprisingly warm. Gabe had opened the garage to get out the mower, to cut the grass. Izzy ran in with him and her face fell.
“Why are all my toys in here, Daddy? Are you throwing them away?”
“Well, you haven’t played with them for ages.”
“But I want to play with them now.”
She began to root determinedly through the bags. Gabe had checked his irritation.
“Izzy—you have lots of lovely new toys. We haven’t got room for all of them. I’m going to take some of your old toys to the charity shop. You know, like in Toy Story, when Andy gives his old toys to the little girl.”
“What about the others?”
He hesitated. “Well, they have to go to the dump.”
Her eyes had widened in horror.
“But then they’ll be burned.”
Crap. Why had he mentioned Toy Story?
“Izzy, they’re broken, missing bits—”
“But we can’t let them be burned just because they’re broken. Woody was broken and he got fixed.”
Gabe had sighed. “Izzy, some things can’t be fixed.”
“Why? Why can’t we save them all?”
And then she had burst into tears. One of those sudden, violent storms of emotion that gather and br
eak out of nowhere. He had knelt down and held her as she sobbed, her tears soaking hotly through his T-shirt.
He had felt her pain. Why can’t we save them all? Because we can’t. Because life isn’t fair. Because we have to pick and choose and, sometimes, those choices will be tough. Sometimes, we don’t even get the choice. Not everything or everyone can be fixed with some thread and a dab of glue and we won’t all end our days on the front porch in the sunshine.
He didn’t say any of this. He wiped her eyes and said, “Shall we go and get an ice cream?”
* * *
—
AFTER IT HAPPENED, somewhere within that huge chasm of darkness and pain, Gabe had found himself tasked with clearing out Izzy’s room. He couldn’t do it. He had shuffled around like a bewildered child himself, unable to give her things away, unable to let a single hair clip go. Eventually, he had called a removals company and everything—all of her toys, clothes and furniture—was put into storage.
Here. He stood staring at the anonymous row of shuttered garage doors, illuminated by the security lighting. Number 327. He hadn’t been back to this place, an industrial estate just outside Nottingham, for almost two years. Several times, he had thought about emptying the lock-up, giving away the contents, cancelling the direct debit. But the image of Izzy’s face that afternoon in the garage always stopped him.
“Are you throwing them away?”
If he let this go, then it would be the beginning of the end. He would be letting her go, casting aside that life jacket of hope that had kept him afloat these last three years. He would be admitting that she wasn’t coming back. The end.
He walked over to the keypad beside the door and tapped in the code. Izzy’s birthday. He stepped back as the door rolled open and the automatic lighting stuttered into life.
He steeled himself, but the pain still hit him, hard enough to cause him to wince. All in here. Izzy’s life. Her bedroom furniture, her toys, her pictures, playhouse, bike. All neatly stacked in this dark, cold storage space, the incongruity of the bright colors against the dismal cinderblock never starker. Toys need to be played with, he thought. Woody was right about that.
He walked forward, touched the headboard of her bed, her pink Barbie scooter, as if they could impart their memories to him. He realized he found it harder and harder to summon up the image of Izzy playing, or sleeping. She was fading, retreating into the past. And he couldn’t call her name or run after her because he was rooted in the present and you can’t go back, only forward.
“Gabe?”
He turned. Harry stood in the doorway, white hair haloed in the light. He leaned on his walking stick and looked thinner and more stooped than ever.
Gabe smiled thinly. “Come in—make yourself at home.”
He watched as Harry took an unsure step forward. Then Gabe pressed a switch on the wall. The automatic door slowly lowered, shutting them both inside.
“What the—?” Harry squinted at him across the lock-up. “What the hell is going on, Gabe? What is this place?”
“It’s all I have left of her.”
He saw Harry blink and look around, taking it all in. He watched every small movement: the bobbing of his Adam’s apple, the slight twitch above his left eye, a trembling in his hand.
“You said this was urgent. That there was something I needed to see.”
Gabe nodded. “That’s right. I wanted you to see this. I wanted you to understand how I never gave up hope. How I kept all of this because I wanted to be ready, for my little girl, when she came home.”
“And that’s why you’ve dragged me out here so late at night? For God’s sake!” Harry sighed, but it sounded forced. “I don’t know what more I can do to help you, Gabe.”
“You can tell me the truth.”
“I have.”
“No. You have lied. Right from the start. Right from the day when you misidentified my daughter’s body. Those pills Evelyn gave me certainly did the trick, didn’t they? Or was it something she slipped into my coffee before we left the hotel? Eye drops, perhaps? I mean, it was a risk, but you pulled it off. I just need to know why.”
Harry’s face regained some of the calm superiority that was the norm.
“I feel sorry for you. I really do. But this time, you’ve lost it.” He shook his head. “Open that door or I’m calling the police.”
“You do that. I think they’d like to talk to you—about why you faked a morgue photo, wrongly identified a dead girl. They know, Harry. But I wanted to talk to you first.”
Harry hesitated, mobile hovering in his liver-spotted hand. Gabe waited, wondered if he was still going to try and brazen it out. And then he saw Harry’s shoulders slump, the sag of defeat. He lowered himself onto the edge of Izzy’s bed.
He didn’t just look old, he looked ill, Gabe thought, and he could suddenly picture Harry in a few years’ time, lowering himself onto a hospital bed in much the same way, tubes hanging from his arms, skinny white legs poking out from his thin gown. Once the master of this domain, now at the mercy of doctors who were wielding dummies when he was wielding scalpels. Death might be indiscriminate, but time is merciless.
“I always thought faking the photo was a step too far,” Harry said. “But I kept it, just in case. When you told me about finding the car, I had no choice. I had to use it, to convince you to let it go.”
“It almost worked,” Gabe said.
“But not quite.”
“It was the cat.”
“Sorry?”
“That morning, the cat scratched Izzy on her chin. I put a bandage on it. In the photo, there was no scratch. It had to have been taken later.”
Harry shook his head. “Perhaps it’s for the best. You don’t know how hard it’s been for me, keeping this secret, all this time.”
“Hard for you?” Gabe stared at him in disbelief. “You tried to convince me my daughter was dead. You let me torture myself, searching for her. You let another child be buried in her grave. How…how could you do that?”
“ ‘Conscience doth make cowards of us all.’ ” Harry’s expression was sharper. “When you have a child, you would do anything for them. Anything. Jenny was our only child—our world. Izzy was our universe.”
“That’s why you came to visit them so often.”
“Evelyn never liked you.”
“I’m shocked.”
“It caused friction between her and Jenny. When the truth came out—all those secrets you’d been keeping, Gabe—I realized Evelyn was right. You didn’t deserve Jenny or Izzy.”
Gabe clenched his fists. “That has nothing to do with this.”
“Are you sure?”
“I—” he faltered.
Harry smiled unpleasantly. “Didn’t you ever wonder? Why me? Why my family? Why did this happen?”
Of course he had. He had wondered if this was what he deserved. Karma, kismet, fate.
Or something else.
We share the pain…with those that deserve it.
Gabe’s mouth felt dry. “It wasn’t a random attack, was it?”
Harry regarded Gabe as though he were a slow child finally adding up two plus two. He shook his head. “No. It was because of what you did. To her. The other girl. The girl whose name you gave to your own daughter, like some kind of sick joke.”
Gabe stared at him. Dread crawled up into his throat.
“Isabella.”
She sleeps. A pale girl in a white room. She doesn’t hear the machines that beep and whirr around her. She doesn’t feel the touch of Miriam’s hand or notice as the nurse leaves the room. The pale girl doesn’t hear or see or feel a thing.
But she does dream.
She walks along the beach. Her alabaster skin is kissed golden by the sun and her flaxen hair streaked almost white. Now the butter-yellow orb is settin
g, melting slowly into the sea. There’s a faint breeze, and it casts shimmering ripples across the water, crusting the tops with foam.
Isabella loves the beach. But she isn’t supposed to be here. She is supposed to be at her violin lesson. Every Wednesday after dinner. On Monday it’s vocal coaching, and Friday it’s piano. Her mother tells her she has a special talent for music; she is helping her achieve her potential. But sometimes it feels to Isabella as though her mother is squeezing the joy out of the very thing she loves, like a lemon in a juicer.
At least the violin lessons are out of the house. In her teacher’s small seaside terrace. She plays better there. The only reason her mother agreed to it. Miriam, their housekeeper, drops her off and picks her up afterward. Yes, they have a housekeeper. And a cleaner and a gardener. Isabella knows that she is privileged.
Her father made a lot of money and, when he died when she was just a baby, he left it to her mother. They live in a big house with acres of gardens and her mother likes to believe that she gives her only daughter everything she could ever want, except, of course, the one thing that any fourteen-year-old really desires: freedom.
Isabella understands why her mother worries about her. Her father died unexpectedly. Her mother is afraid that she might be taken from her, too. So she tries to build walls around her daughter. To keep her safe. Beautiful walls, but that doesn’t stop them being a prison.
So, sometimes, Isabella seeks small moments of escape, like this one.
Mr. Webster, her violin teacher, is away for three weeks’ holiday. She hasn’t told her mother. After school she let Miriam drop her at the small terrace as normal. And then she came to the beach.
Isabella never feels lonely on the beach. Even as summer ebbs away there is always life here. Dog walkers, families packing up their picnics for the day, couples sauntering hand in hand. And the beach itself. Alive with the lapping waves, the restless pebbles and the impatient cawing of the seagulls.