by C. J. Cooke
“So the witches were all burned, wiped out. But now the fae could take on human form. People called them ‘wildlings.’ They just have to touch a human to transform into them. Usually children.”
A shiver rolls up Saffy’s spine. “And why would they do that?”
“To kill everyone in the family. It happened. That’s what they say. Whole bloodlines wiped out in a few weeks. The only way to stop them coming back to life is to kill them.”
“That’s creepy shit,” Saffy says, relishing how dark the tale is. The only stories she’s ever heard about fairies involved tea parties inside tulips. “But . . . you don’t believe it, do you?”
His gaze moves past her, into the distance. She turns and searches behind her. “What?”
“People have been killing wildlings in these woods for hundreds of years.” He moves his eyes back to her face. “Want me to show you?”
She follows him through the trees, her curiosity quickened. They cross a small river, then past a waterfall feathering down a bank of rock.
“What if we get lost?” she says.
“We won’t,” he says. “I’ve spent a lot of time in these woods, trust me.”
He stops at a thick grove of trees. Five have burn marks on their trunks, a black mouth of shiny charcoaled bark. The upper branches are untouched, but she can make out signs of regrowth on the lower branches where they’ve been previously destroyed. The lower trunk on one old tree has been gnawed away by flame. Perhaps a lightning strike, she thinks, or—more thrillingly—an act of arson. She walks up to one and lays out a hand to touch it.
“Don’t,” Brodie says. There’s a warning in his voice, and she turns, intrigued. “They’re sycamores.” He bends to pick up something from the ground. She starts, mistaking the teardrop pericarps of a sycamore seed for a moth. He tosses it into the air, where it twirls like helicopter blades. “Helicopter seeds. That’s how you can remember them.”
“So . . . what burned them? Lightning?”
He gives her a dark look. “You have to kill a wildling in a certain way. You have to cut out its heart and burn the rest of it. And the parent has to do it.”
“Holy shit.”
He grins, visibly pleased that he’s succeeded in scaring her. “I saw them do it, you know.”
She studies him. “Do what?”
He steps toward her. “Kill a wildling. I was six. I hid behind a tree and watched it all. The heart cutting, the burning.”
She swallows hard, imagining him as a child witnessing such a horrific thing. She moves backward. Her heel catching on something. She stoops to see what it is. A piece of frayed rope is visible there, hidden among the leaves like a snake. She lifts it up and runs her thumb along the fibers.
“The last thing that rope touched was a wildling,” Brodie says, and she drops it like she’s been burned. He laughs and steps closer as she examines the hand that held the rope.
“Aren’t you scared?” she asks Brodie, looking up into his dark eyes. “Living somewhere like this?”
He bends to pick up the rope. Shows he’s not afraid to touch it. “Aren’t you scared?” he says. “You’re just a wee lass.”
“Fifteen,” she says, straightening. “I’m fifteen.”
“ ‘I’m fifteen,’ ” he mimics, laughing. “I bet it’s a shock to the system, this place. So different from London.”
“York,” she says. “I’ve never even been to London.”
“Yawk,” he repeats, mimicking her accent.
“Sorry, I meant ‘Yark,’ ” she says, teasing him back.
He reaches out to place the rope back in her hands, daring her to hold it, and his fingers brush against hers. It’s only a momentary connection and yet it feels like she’s touched raw lightning. She raises her gaze to his. He stares back, nailing her to the spot with those eyes filled with danger. She can tell, in a way that is cellular, that he is taking her in, layer by layer. She craves to be wanted.
“Maybe I could show you some other trees,” he says, the corner of his mouth lifting into a half smile. “Ones that didn’t involve murder.”
“I’d like that.”
Something flickers at the fringes of Saffy’s vision, and she turns to see Rowan standing between the trees, watching them uneasily.
“Hey,” Brodie calls to Rowan. Saffy gives a big friendly “hey there” wave, as if she’d fully expected Rowan to manifest like a dark cloud. Rowan doesn’t respond. She has her hood up, and eyes them both with a scowl. Brodie reads the mood and walks toward his girlfriend while Saffy busies herself by studying the rope in her hands. Her hearing is fully tuned in to the conversation.
“You OK?” Brodie asks Rowan. She responds, but it’s in Gaelic. Angry, hissed words.
“Of course not,” Brodie says, then something else in Gaelic. Rowan arches her face up to his, and he leans forward, pressing his sublime lips against hers. Saffy tries not to look, but she sees and feels it all, the handful of seconds that he kisses Rowan stretching through time, glaciers melting, the earth burning and turning to dust. She imagines that this is what it must feel like to be impaled.
She crumbles the dry leaf in her palm, turning it to fragments.
LIV, 1998
I
Finn apologized for his comment that afternoon. I’d gone back to the bothy and made myself something to eat, though I couldn’t eat at all. He looked shamefaced, his hands in his pockets. I let him in.
“I really didn’t mean to offend you,” he said. “Sometimes my sense of humor rubs people up the wrong way. This isn’t the first time . . .” He cleared his throat. “For what it’s worth, I actually wasnae being serious when I said you were running from something.”
I folded my arms. “I don’t follow.”
“Thought we were having a bit of a laugh, that’s all,” he said. “But I know I go too far sometimes. People have told me.” He bit his lip. “I’m sorry.”
I softened. “You’ve nothing to apologize for. I was just being a bit . . . oversensitive.”
The truth was, I was running. But this time, I thought I’d managed to hide it from everyone, including myself.
Just twelve days ago, I had fled in the middle of the night with my girls and whatever essentials we could pack into bin liners. My relationship with Drew had long gone sour, but it was a phone call I’d received the day before that had made me bolt. I’d had a smear test that showed some abnormal cells. They’d called me back for a colposcopy and blood test, which had left terrible bruises all over my arms when they couldn’t find a decent vein.
The next day, the phone call came. From a doctor at the hospital to let me know the scan results were in. They’d found a solid mass, around five centimeters in length, and she wasn’t sure it was in my cervix or ovary. She wanted to speak to me urgently about getting another scan.
For the rest of the day I was in another realm, outside time, floating above my body. I knew all too well what the outcome was. Mum had died from cervical cancer. And Aunt Lynne. And my grandmother. All of us, born with a gene that prevented the women in my family growing old.
Mum had four rounds of chemo. She grew thinner and weaker, less and less like herself. They tried surgery. We celebrated the news that it did work, only for the cancer to return. She died two weeks after the news.
I had three girls to care for. Three fatherless girls. Who was going to care for them, raise them? Not my father. Not Sean’s family. They had hearts of gold, but his parents were too old and his brother was an alcoholic.
What if my girls were born with this gene?
I ran. I thought that if I kept moving, we might outrun this terrible disease.
I drove us all the way to Newcastle before the fuel light came on and I was forced to pull into a petrol station. I filled up with petrol, then bought us all some cold water and crisps in the services station
. I spotted a small email café in the corner of the station. I needed to check that email from Anna Taylor, the one about a commission. Some kind of mural she’d been asked to do but it clashed with her wedding.
Hello my lovely, how are things?
Sorry for the delay in getting back to you but I’ve been busy, as you can imagine! Are you able to do the commission? It’s well paid and I recommended you very highly. (I don’t know if you’re doing many murals these days? The one you did for St. Mark’s hospital was incredible. Still the best one I’ve seen!)
Patrick is very keen for you to take it up but he doesn’t do email. Please can you think about it? I’ve forwarded you the info. Let me know as soon as you can!
The venue was a decommissioned lighthouse with the bizarre name of the Longing. It was situated on an island, Lòn Haven, off the east coast of Scotland. The owner wanted an artist to create “a stunning and inspiring mural” inside the lighthouse, which was being transformed into a writing studio. A handful of images showed rugged coastline fringed with turquoise sea, a tall white lighthouse overlooking cliffs. Five thousand pounds plus expenses for just over a month’s work.
I’d already emailed Anna to say that yes, I’d be happy to do it, but now I emailed to say I could arrive earlier than planned. Tomorrow, in fact.
Anna replied straightaway.
Thank you!!! I’ll email them now. OK to pass on your number??
II
Right up until I arrived in Lòn Haven, I’d had no symptoms. Nothing at all to indicate that something might be wrong. And yet, the day after we arrived, I started peeing blood. It started off pink, with cramping, like cystitis. By the time Finn made the comment, I had back pain. I called at the island GP and asked for antibiotics.
“I have a tendency toward UTIs,” I told her. I was wary of being pulled into the hospital and confronted with the full facts of my diagnosis. I knew how stupid my own thoughts were, but it didn’t make them any less compelling—the idea that, if I simply ignored it, if I point-blank refused to face up to the fact that the cancer that had stalked my family had finally found me, it would go away.
Distraction was key, especially now that I was showing signs of the illness taking hold. I took painkillers regularly, both paracetamol and ibuprofen. I wore pads to collect the spots of blood that ruined my underwear, and asked Isla if I could borrow a hot-water bottle for back pain. I tried to force myself to enjoy every detail, every second of time. When I looked out at the beach, I imagined each grain of sand like a measure of time that I’d been allotted. I could either let them run through my hands or I could stop and pay attention.
I started waking at dawn to walk along the coastline, immersing myself in the textures, colors, and sounds of this place, trying to summon the stories I’d need for the mural, something to add story and color to Patrick’s diagram. I noticed chartreuse lichen scabbing the rocks, the lick and suck of tide against sea-smoothed stones, how every single one of the shells in the bay was different; white limpet shells and ear-shaped mussel shells; kelp fronds, the ones like bronze ribbons, and cream ones like bandages, their stems like bone joints; and, of course, the ocean, that perpetual shape-shifter: one day a disk of hammered gold, the next wild and rearing, like a thousand white horses. I noticed how the ocean had moods, just like a person.
Every morning Clover made a point of running to the edge of the rock and calling out to Basil. More often than not his dorsal fin would be visible above the water, and I began to join her in calling “good morning” to him.
I began to wonder if we might stay longer than the autumn. If we might make a life here, start over. If I could somehow will the cancer away, or at least find a solution to this impossible situation.
How could I leave my daughters without anyone to care for them?
LUNA, 2021
I
“Luna?”
Ethan is kneeling in front of her, his face full of concern.
“I’m all right,” she says, trying to blink away the white lights in her vision.
“Do you want to lie down?” the nurse asks. “There’s a free bed on the ward. An hour’s rest won’t do any harm at all.”
“Honestly, I’m fine,” she’s saying, but it’s a prayer instead of the truth, an effort to will the white lights away from her vision and restore her strength. Ethan takes her hand and watches anxiously as a nurse checks her blood pressure, then uses a stethoscope to check the baby.
“Heartbeat’s nice and regular,” she says, smiling. “Still, we don’t want to take any chances. You’ve had quite a journey traveling up here, and a shock finding your sister, too.” Luna nods. Yes, shock. That’s what it is. She isn’t miscarrying. Behind the nurse she can see Shannon, her arms folded impatiently and Clover’s file in one hand.
Maybe this distraction isn’t such a bad thing after all.
* * *
—
It’s dark outside now, rain pattering against the window. Ethan is snoring in the chair next to her. She must have been asleep for most of the day. On the table there’s a white envelope and what looks like a test tube with her name printed on one side.
Ethan rouses, his eyes bloodshot. “How’re you feeling?”
She blinks hard. The white lights are gone from her vision, as has the weird smashed-mirror effect that suddenly descended upon her before. The headache has lifted, too.
“Where’s Clover?” she asks.
“She’s fine. A psychiatrist came to speak to her. I think she’s just left.”
“And the social workers?”
“Eilidh said they’ll be back in the morning. They said it might be a while before Clover is discharged. And they still have more questions.”
She lays a hand on her stomach, rubbing where she feels the baby’s foot must be. The insistent pulse of that little heel.
“Why don’t you get a train back home?” she says. “Ryan’ll be wanting you to get back to work.”
“I can’t leave you here,” he says. “You and the baby.”
“I’ll be fine,” she says. “I’ll drive back as soon as they discharge Clover. I promise.”
He leans forward and kisses her on the forehead. “No.”
“You won’t have to cancel any classes. You know it makes sense.”
He runs a hand through his long hair, hesitant. “You’re sure this won’t be another strike against me?”
“Don’t be silly.”
II
He’s on a train home first thing the next morning, leaving her the car. She stays at the hospital, both to be with Clover and to be close to help if she goes into labor. The nurses make up a bed in a side room. Luna sleeps solidly, not stirring until the breakfast trolley rattles into the room at eight o’clock the following morning. She notices that the envelope is gone from the side table.
“Morning,” Eilidh says, ducking her head into the room. “Everything OK?”
Luna sits up in bed and fixes her hair. “Much better, thank you.”
Luna gets up and washes in the small bathroom, then heads gingerly along the corridor to see Clover. She’s out of bed and sat cross-legged on the floor, making what looks to Luna like an obstacle course for Gianni out of plastic cups and pillows. Luna sits in the chair next to her, noticing how much stronger she looks.
“Are we going to see Mummy today?” Clover asks. She doesn’t make eye contact.
Luna bites her lip. “If they discharge you, I can take you back to my flat. It’s quite a drive from here. I don’t have a child seat, though. I’ll need to find one before we go.”
“And Pop-Tarts,” Clover says. “They don’t have Pop-Tarts at this hospital. I already asked.”
Luna feels her breath catch. She’d forgotten all about her and Clover’s love of Pop-Tarts. How the mention of such a small detail summons so much of their past. In an instant she is back in the kitchen o
f their little flat in Bristol, the one they lived in before Liv moved in with Drew, the smell of warm, sugary strawberry Pop-Tarts fresh from the toaster filling the air.
III
Luna didn’t use to believe in miracles. But now, as she walks with Clover to her car in the hospital car park, she could be persuaded that anything is possible. They’ve granted her permission to take Clover home. She’s sure it was Eilidh who made this possible. Shannon, the other social worker, was definitely not so keen. She’d heard low voices from the side room in heated discussion. She was sure they’d been discussing her and Clover.
Later that afternoon, they’d asked Luna to go for a walk around the hospital grounds while they chatted with Clover. On her way out, Luna heard Eilidh’s voice. “Are you happy to go home with your sister, Clover?” She’d strained to hear Clover’s response, but it wasn’t audible.
When she returned fifteen minutes later, it seemed that Clover had said she was happy to go with Luna, and the decision had been made. All she had to do was procure a car seat, and her sister was free to leave.
But things weren’t as final as Luna hoped. “I’ll call in a while to check up on how things are going,” Eilidh said. “I’ll not discharge wee Clover from our services just yet. Just gives space for you to access our support and . . . see how things go.”
See how things go.
Luna doesn’t like the sound of Eilidh checking up on her. What if she decides to take Clover back?
At the car, Luna reaches past Clover for the seat belt and clips her in, noticing the large freckle just above her right thumb. God, it really is Clover. Twenty-two years of searching, hoping, fighting fears that said she was dead. And now she’s here.
She turns the key in the ignition and puts the car into reverse, letting out a breath she hadn’t realized she was holding as they exit the hospital car park. She can’t dare believe this is happening.
But, as with all Luna’s wishes, it doesn’t seem to last. The mood seems to unravel as they turn onto the road that leads to the Airbnb that Ethan has booked for them. A storm has whipped up out of nowhere, creating winds of fifty miles per hour and dumping a month’s rain on the M74. A different kind of storm seems to be brewing in the car, for Clover has fallen silent in the back seat. Luna can sense she’s upset.