by C. J. Cooke
She sinks down on the sofa, anger crackling in her ears, fizzing in her wrists. The dream of her mother dances around her head like shards of glass. Every time she thinks or dreams of her mother, it happens. Ethan calls the days after such dreams a rage hangover—the massive comedown from some intense buildup of fury—and as usual she’s drained and weepy. Her memories of Lòn Haven are still so fragmented, little more than shattered slivers of a mirror.
The psychiatrist said trauma can cause memory loss. Whatever happened was so terrible it caused her to dissociate, effectively checking out of the horror. But the memories will be in there somewhere, buried deep in the earth of her mind. It makes her angry, the forgetting. What she does know—or what her social services file states—is that her mother, Liv, abandoned her there when she was nine. No explanation. No apparent motivation. Just dumped her in the woods and vanished into thin air.
She’s never been back to Lòn Haven, never so much as googled it. The very thought of that place triggers a panic attack.
She cradles the small gray triangle of a limpet shell in her hand. A limpet will wear away a patch of rock to fit its shell exactly. A home scar, it’s called, sealing it to the rock. Creating a tight fit to its home. Limpets move around at night to feed, but they always return to the home scar.
Where did she learn that? A few images begin to coalesce in her mind: her mother at a garden gate, bending down to pick up a limpet shell. There’s a raging sea behind her. And a lighthouse.
It’s Lòn Haven.
Luna gives a shudder and sets the shell down as though it’s white hot. She doesn’t dare touch it. Ethan is coming to pick her up shortly for the hospital scan. She’ll ask him to sweep up the shells when he arrives.
III
“Done,” Ethan says, washing his hands in the sink.
“You moved them? Both bags?”
He nods. “Put them in number ten’s bin. It was half-empty.”
“And you swept up the shells?”
“Yep.”
She’s relieved. Today, of all days, she wants to feel free of Lòn Haven.
They travel to the hospital in Luna’s car. Technically, they both own the car, and the flat is mortgaged in joint names, but Luna has both for now. A permanent separation isn’t yet on the cards.
“Mum says hi,” Ethan says after a long silence. “She’s wondering if you’d like her to knit blue baby blankets or gender neutral.”
“I don’t mind,” she says. “Gray? Or maybe she’d rather wait until . . .”
She falls silent, thinking of the last time Ethan’s mother started knitting for their baby. They’d got all the way to fourteen weeks with that one, had proudly told everyone they knew right after the twelve-week scan revealed a squirming, kicking fetus, apparently as healthy as could be. The night before the miscarriage she’d been sitting in Alison’s house, where Ethan is living just now, admiring the blanket she’d begun knitting.
“It’s going to be fine,” Ethan says now, resting his hand on top of hers. She pulls it away. He sighs and slides his hands between his knees.
“I found a flat a few streets away from ours,” he says, looking out the window. “I was thinking it might be smart to grab it before someone else does.”
It takes her a moment to work out that he’s asking if they’re to continue to live separately.
“It’s up to you,” she says, stung. “It was your decision to move out in the first place.”
“We’re going over this again, are we?”
The sign for the hospital appears at the side of the road, and she indicates to turn. “I said I wasn’t ready to marry you, Ethan. I didn’t say I wanted us to split up.”
She parks, and he fixes his dark, sad eyes on her. They have had this conversation so many times, over and over, never resolving it.
“I need you to be honest with me,” he says in a measured voice. She senses that he’s prepared a speech. She’s still attracted to him, still in love with him. He has honest eyes, beautifully straight teeth, thick black dreads to his shoulders, a smooth, radio-presenter voice. He was born and raised in Coventry, but his heritage is Trinidadian. He is striking to look at: six foot four, square-jawed, muscular as a gladiator. She used to feel short and unattractive beside him, barely scraping five foot four, boring brown bob, nothing at all striking about her looks, but he’s always acted as though he’s the luckiest man alive to be with her. When she has her period he buys her ice cream and rubs her feet, and after each miscarriage he cried without embarrassment. Marriage is important to Ethan, especially since they’ve been trying for a baby.
“Look,” he says, and she notices that he’s nervous. Is he seeing someone else? The thought of it pierces her.
But he’s talking, and she has zoned out, mentally sifting through possibilities. Jenn from the Pilates club has always been flirty with him, even in front of Luna. She knows that Uche from the flat across the road is always a little more friendly when Luna’s not around. Or maybe it’s his ex Maeve, who still comments on his Facebook posts.
“I don’t care about the piece of paper, either,” he says. “But I want to know what’s changed your mind. I mean, if you don’t want to marry me after six years together, when we’re finally having a baby, do you really want to be with me?” His voice catches, and he looks down. “For the record, I don’t want us to split up, either. I just wanted to give you space.”
So, he isn’t seeing someone. Relief washes across her like a warm bath. What was it he asked? Oh yes; does she want to be with him. Yes, she thinks. I really do. But the stubborn resistance to marriage is still there, and she doesn’t know why. Marriage was always in the cards. They said it would happen when they had enough money, when they could get time off work, when the time was right. And now it’s the perfect time to get married.
But when Ethan got down on one knee on New Year’s Eve, when she knew marriage was finally feasible, something inside her bolted.
And she said no.
IV
The sonographer shows them their baby boy on the screen, the occasional ribbon of blue or red showing where he’s drinking amniotic fluid or sucking his thumb. Luna has seen him on this screen so many times now—the single benefit of being high risk—but today she’s especially relieved to see that he is wriggling around like an eel. The appearance of the shells had made her fear that something might be wrong, that they were an omen, somehow, of their baby’s imminent departure.
“Is everything OK?” she asks the sonographer when she seems to be frowning at something.
There’s a fraught silence. She and Ethan share a terrified look. This is it, she thinks, and she feels her heart plummet.
“Ah, there we go,” the sonographer says. “The screen had frozen. Baby’s absolutely fine.”
She breathes out with relief and laughs. Ethan takes her hand and she squeezes it tight.
Later, as they’re waiting in the reception area for her pregnancy notes to be returned, she picks up her phone and scrolls quickly to her Facebook pages, “Have you seen Clover Stay?” and “Help Find Sapphire Stay!” Clover’s page features a handful of photographs and a home video of Clover doing handstands in a field. She’s wearing a cotton dress over jeans. Her brown wavy hair is teased by the wind and she talks to the camera, which is held by their mother. “Is it on?” she asks several times. A voice off-camera—Liv—says, “Yeah.” Luna must have watched the clip a thousand times over and yet the sound of her mother’s voice still feels like a horse kick. On camera, Clover raises both arms in the air, lifts her right knee, and lowers her hands to the grass, swinging her legs high above her until she is perfectly straight. Then she counts quickly to one hundred, wobbling as she holds her balance. She finishes with a flourish, walking two steps forward on her hands and throwing her legs over her head into a crab’s bend. Then she leaps up and runs toward the camera with a laugh, h
er whole face filling the frame.
Luna doesn’t have a Facebook page for her mother. She has a single photograph of Liv, sent by her uncle, that she keeps in her bedside drawer. Her mother is kneeling by a canvas propped on an easel on the stern of the houseboat where they lived for a while. She’s wearing old dungarees covered in paint, and her brown hair is worn in two girlish ponytails. She’s slim, with tattoos on both arms, and her face is turned to the camera in a wide smile, as though she’s laughing with the photographer about the painting she’s doing. In the corner of the frame, Luna can make out a child of around eighteen months old, wearing just a nappy. She’s never been able to work out if the child in the photograph is her or Clover.
The photos and video were donated by old school friends from Bristol and York. Sapphire’s page has only two pictures that Luna had managed to source from the school. One is a good-quality school photo from Year Seven in which Saffy is smiling so broadly that she doesn’t resemble the sullen, angry girl that Luna knew. The other is a scan of a blurry photo Saffy’s ex-boyfriend Jack sent—he’d found it in the back of a school notebook. It shows Saffy’s rakish frame as she stands in front of the Longing. She’s wearing jeans and a black ribbed polo neck, her blonde hair scraped up off her face in a topknot, revealing her long, pale neck—this is exactly how Luna remembers her. From the scowl Saffy is wearing, it’s likely Luna is the one who took the photo, using her mother’s Polaroid camera.
No bodies were ever found, despite extensive searches. The disappearance of an entire family may well have attracted substantial media attraction, especially given Lòn Haven’s history. But barely a week after Liv disappeared, an explosion at the nuclear power station near Glasgow drew the eyes of the national press and the government for months afterward, and the mystery of her family was all but forgotten.
The phone buzzes in her hand. She lifts it hastily, hoping to see her foster mother Grace’s name on the screen, but instead finds “NO CALLER ID.” She lifts her thumb to cancel it, let the caller go to voicemail, but changes her mind and answers quietly instead.
“Hello?”
“Is that Luna Stay?”
“Yes?”
“Hullo there, this is Police Constable Cullen. I’m calling you from the station here in Dingwall.”
The line is bad. She rises, heading out of the reception area. “Where?”
“Dingwall? In Scotland? We have you down as a named contact in the case of finding a missing person.”
She walks quickly toward the window at the end of the corridor, where, at last, three bars of signal appear on her phone.
“Hi, are you there?”
“I’m here.”
“You said a missing person . . .”
“Yes. Clover Stay. Your sister, is that correct?”
Luna holds the phone away from her face and catches her breath. Is this actually happening? Did the police officer on the other end of the line just say that Clover has been found?
“Yes, yes,” she says, her voice thin. “You said Clover, right? Is she there with you now?”
“Can I take a few details from you first, please?”
He asks for her full name, date of birth, current address. She is shaking from head to toe, her palms clammy and her breaths quick and light. She can’t believe this is actually happening. Once he’s satisfied she is Luna Stay he gives full disclosure. “She was brought to us last night. An ambulance has just taken her to the hospital in Inverness.”
Luna stops pacing. “What happened? Is she all right?”
“I’ll let the social worker talk you through that.” Then, quickly: “She’s OK, by the looks of things. Dehydrated, and they’ve sedated her to get some rest, but otherwise sturdy enough. Nothing life threatening. I’ll need consent to pass your number to social services for them to get in touch.”
Her throat is dry, and the link between her brain and her mouth seems to have been severed. “Of course, yes. Yes, please. Which hospital?”
He tells her. She gets him to spell out the postcode and makes sure to write it down as she’s certain she’ll forget. “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
She’s pressing a hand to her mouth, as though she might be sick, when Ethan approaches.
“What’s wrong?” he asks.
“They’ve found my sister.” She whispers it. She has had false alarms before. The last one was four years ago and she cried for weeks afterward.
Ethan stares at her. “They’ve found . . . ?”
“Clover. Clover, Ethan.”
“Are you sure it’s her?”
She’s weeping and laughing at once. “That’s what they said. Oh, God.”
“Did you see her? I mean, didn’t they FaceTime you, let you speak with her?”
“They just said she’s in a hospital in Inverness. She has to stay in for another day, maybe two.”
“I’ll drive you there . . .”
She shakes her head. “You’ve got work.”
He’s insistent. “This is more important, Luna.”
At their flat, she packs as much food as the cool box will hold and fills an empty milk bottle with water. Luckily their old car has just been serviced, though it still has a kayak attached to the roof and there won’t be time to take it off. Ethan empties the gin bottle filled with loose change to fill up with petrol. Luna taps the postcode into Google Maps, a long wavy line snaking from their home to the Scottish Highlands. They should reach the hospital by six p.m.
She kneels by their bed and reaches under for the small box she has kept all this time. Inside is Clover’s toy giraffe, Gianni. There are some photographs, too, the ones she has scanned with her phone and added to the Facebook pages. She tucks them into her bag, noticing that her hands are shaking.
V
“So how old will she be?” Ethan asks once they hit the road. “She was seven when she went missing, right?”
“She’s twenty-nine now,” Luna says.
So many people told her to accept that Clover was dead. Accept that both she and Saffy were swept away by the sea, drowned. Or murdered, their bodies dumped in a shallow grave in a forest. The theory that Saffy had run away had merit, but it was unlikely that a child as young as Clover could have survived the wilds on her own. Most likely, she had fallen off the cliffs and drowned, or she’d been kidnapped.
That’s what they’d said.
The social worker calls from the hospital. Eilidh, she’s called. Ay-lee. The line is frustratingly bad, and when she tries to tell Luna what ward Clover’s in, Luna can’t make her out.
“I’m wearing a teal-blue jumper and a black skirt,” Eilidh says. “I’ll meet you outside the main entrance.”
Just before she ends the call, Eilidh refers to Clover as “a wee girl.” She must be very thin, Luna thinks. What has happened to her? She can barely bring herself to think.
They stop off at a town with a name she can’t pronounce, buy coffee that tastes like dishwater. A Highland cow snorts at her from a field nearby, its jaw working a mouthful of grass. Emerald mountains disappear into wispy clouds, the valley cradles a turquoise lake. She feels sick with nerves and excitement, she can’t decide which.
It’s just after six p.m. when Ethan pulls into the hospital car park. At the entrance she sees a woman in a teal-blue jumper, searching the car park as though she’s waiting for someone.
She must be Eilidh.
“Lovely to meet you, Luna,” she says when they approach her. “Now, are you ready to see your sister?”
VI
“This way,” Eilidh says, leading Luna and Ethan through the hospital doors and along the corridor.
Luna is aware that Eilidh is talking but can’t make out what she says. Her mind is turned to the carbolic smell of the corridor, the photographs of puffins on the hospital walls, an elderly man in a wheelchair with bloodied dressin
gs across both eyes. She clutches the toy giraffe to her chest, her mouth running dry.
“It says on the form that you’re next of kin,” Eilidh says, flipping through a paper file.
“Yes,” Luna says. “She’s my sister.”
“Clover mentioned that she was living with your mother when she went missing, is that right?”
“Our mother?” Luna says. “My . . . she went missing many years ago.” It’s clear to everyone that the words are difficult to say, even all these years later. Ethan squeezes her hand. This could be the moment, she thinks. The riddle of her childhood solved.
She follows Eilidh into a ward with walls covered in cartoon figures. A sign reads “Children’s Ward.”
“Are you sure it’s this way?” she hears Ethan ask.
In a moment she’s in a side room, and she sees the figure on the bed, the chestnut shades in her hair lit up by a side lamp, hands folded in her lap, the lines of her face strikingly familiar. The delicate mouth, denim-blue, deep-set eyes, that wide, wise brow. Luna raises a hand to her mouth. She must sway a little in shock, for quickly Ethan is beside her, his arm around her waist.
“Hello, Clover,” Eilidh says brightly. “Your sister Luna is here.”
The figure in the bed is a child of around seven years. Her hair is scraped back from her face, the ends matted with dirt. She is pale, and her lips are dry and chapped. There are dressings on her knees and arms from where she’s been wounded. She is hooked up to an IV and a handful of teddy bears has been tucked into the bed beside her for company. On the chart above her bed, someone has written “CLOVER” in black marker.
“Here are we,” Eilidh says, smiling. But Luna frowns at her, searching her face for explanation. Where is her sister? Who is this child?