by C. J. Cooke
She pouted and looked from Luna and Clover to her dad. “But, Daa-aad! Luna and Clover said we’d do a pony party tonight. Didn’t we?”
All three girls nodded in dejection.
“Aw, come on, Cass,” he said. “You’ve got to make time for your old man.”
And she’d relented. But even at the time, I’d noticed that Finn had seemed pointedly unwilling to come inside. A part of me had taken it as a sign that he was distancing himself from me.
I couldn’t believe that he’d taken Saffy. But doubt crept in, and I felt horrified at what he might have done to her. Who could I trust?
I retraced my steps, thought carefully about every detail, every word spoken. On Friday evening I’d taken Luna and Clover for a nature hunt around the small island of the Longing. We’d gathered up some shells and flowers, then stood on the outcrop and waved to Basil, who was still hanging around the bay. That night, we’d stood and tried to find the major constellations until the cold forced us indoors. I’d heard the door open and close, and I could have sworn that I heard Saffy go upstairs and climb into bed.
I hated myself for not checking. Two minutes. That’s all it would have taken for me to discover that she wasn’t at home.
I don’t think I could bring myself to fully imagine why Finn might have taken Saffy. My mind lurched to those moments I could recall her being with us. How had he looked at her? How had he spoken to her? Jokes he’d told, moments where I might not have seen him touching her . . .
I woke up the next morning, shocked to have dozed off. I was in the living room, still fully clothed and curled up in the armchair Finn claimed was his grandfather’s.
“Mum?”
I looked up to find Luna standing there in her day clothes. Her dark hair was disheveled from sleep and she’d dragged her duvet with her and wore it wrapped around her like a cape.
“Where’s Clover?” she said sleepily, looking around the room.
“It’s early,” I said, pulling myself to my feet. “She’ll still be asleep.”
Luna looked back at her room. “She’s not in bed.”
I studied her face for a half second before racing into their bedroom and searching the room. She was right—Clover wasn’t there. Nor was she in the bathroom, the kitchen, or hiding in a cupboard.
“Clover, please!” I shouted. “This isn’t funny. Where are you? Please come out!”
I opened the front door and lurched outside, where angry white waves were smashing across the causeway. I searched the Longing, taking the rickety staircase two steps at a time until I reached the lantern room.
Empty.
I ran back down and searched the island, clambering down the cliff face to see if perhaps she’d gone looking for seals on her own and slipped. There was no sign of her. No trace.
Nothing.
Finally, I lifted the phone and called the police.
“My daughter,” I managed to gasp. “My youngest daughter Clover isn’t here. She’s gone.”
LUNA, 2021
I
“This is fucking insane,” Cassie says, opening two bottles of non-alcoholic beer in the kitchen. “I was literally talking about you the other day. And now you’re here, sitting on my sofa. I can’t get over it.”
They are in Cassie’s croft on the west of the island. It used to belong to her father, Finn, and Luna vaguely remembers playing in the kitchen. Cassie has redecorated since—it’s charming, with a white living room, large open fire, and dramatic views of green fields rolling down to blue sea. Clover is already asleep on the sofa, worn out from the tumult in the car. Luna is still shaken after the confrontation with Brodie. The minute she stepped inside Cassie’s home, she felt tearful, a release of everything that had happened before.
Cassie hands Luna a bottle and sinks down in the armchair opposite. “How long has it been?” she says, dragging a hand through her short blonde hair. “You were all here in the autumn of 1998. So . . . twenty-two years?”
“You were talking about me?” Luna asks.
Cassie nods. “There was this headline in the newspaper about a girl called Sapphire. It made me think of the three of you. I told the guy I work with about the summer I met you. You were only here for a couple of months but I never had a best friend like you, before or since.”
Cassie’s words are like a warm blanket across Luna’s shoulders. “Was the headline about Saffy?” she asks.
“Oh, no—about a different girl. She just had the same name. They found her here last September.”
Luna frowns. “Found her here?”
“I’m taking it Saffy has never been found?” Cassie says sadly.
Luna shakes her head.
“God. I’m so sorry.”
Cassie passes her phone to Luna. There’s a news article dated 22 September 2020. Teenage girl found on Lòn Haven still unclaimed.
“Apparently she was found on the bay,” Cassie says, sitting next to Luna. “Nobody had seen her before. Nobody reported her missing. She wasn’t from the island at all. No family or friends here.”
Luna’s eyes fall on the name amidst the text of the article. The missing girl is 15 years old, and says her name is Sapphire. She does not have a local accent and claims to be from northern England. Anyone with information should call the following number.
“What happened to her?” Luna asks.
“I don’t know. It couldn’t be Saffy, though, could it?”
Luna checks the date of the article again before handing the phone back. “I suppose not.”
Cassie has been living in Edinburgh for the last five years with her wife, Lucia, and is temporarily based in Lòn Haven for two months to work on a restoration project for Historic Scotland. Prior to Edinburgh, she had been living in Auckland, New Zealand. A Kiwi twang slides into her voice every now and then.
“What about you?” Cassie says, nodding at Luna’s bump. “When are you due?”
Luna rubs her belly, feeling a little spine pressing against her palm. “New Year’s Eve.”
“Husband? Wife?”
Luna shakes her head. “Neither. I’ve been with Ethan for a long time. The plan was that we’d get married, but . . .” She tails off, biting her lip.
“Did you split?”
“No. Not yet, anyway. He proposed and I rejected him. It came as a shock to both of us.”
Cassie takes that in. “Do you think it was to do with everything that’s happened? Losing your whole family at the age of ten . . . that’s a mindfuck if ever there was one.”
Luna gives a small laugh. “Don’t I know it.”
“Do you think Ethan knows that’s why you rejected him?”
“I’m not honestly sure. He took it quite badly . . .”
Cassie gives a small smile and tilts her jaw. “Wounded pride, perhaps?”
“A lot of that. And I suppose he has his own issues.”
“Don’t we all?”
Luna bites her lip. “I think he’s worried that it’s him I was rejecting. Not marriage.”
Cassie leans forward. “But . . . have you told him you weren’t rejecting him?”
“Not in so many words.” Luna rubs her stomach and lays her head back on the sofa. “Maybe I should.” She smiles at Cassie. “Thanks.”
Cassie shrugs. “Every relationship comes with baggage. I fucked up my last relationship so badly that it’s made me an expert on communication.” She smiles. “Lucia and I see a counselor every year. We don’t have any serious problems, but I’m a prevention-instead-of-cure sort of person now.”
“What about your dad?” Luna asks. “Is he still on Lòn Haven?”
Cassie takes a swig from her bottle and wipes her lips on the back of her arm. “Fuck no. He moved us both to New Zealand not long after you left. When Rowan accused him of taking Saffy, I think it broke something in hi
m. I don’t think he could ever face coming back.”
Luna tries to remember this. It’s a small detail buried inside other memories. “Rowan . . . she was Isla’s daughter. Wasn’t she?”
Cassie nods. “And the daughter of the chief inspector. Dodgy.” A muscle ripples in her jaw. “The accusation was false, of course. And there was only a slap on the wrist for little Rowan for slipping Polaroids of Saffy into my dad’s car.”
“Polaroids?”
“Nudes that Saffy had of herself. You never heard about this?”
“No. Who took the nudes?”
“Saffy did.”
Luna stares, processing this.
“Dad never said anything more about that time,” Cassie says. “God knows I tried to get him to open up but I think it was too painful for him. Some of his closest friends stopped speaking to him after it. Mud sticks, doesn’t it?”
“It does.” The mention of Isla’s name has flipped Luna’s stomach. She doesn’t want to ask, but she has to know. “What about Isla?” she asks. “And Rowan. Are they still on the island?”
Cassie shakes her head. “Rowan’s in Bali, apparently. Lives on some weird commune. I think it’s a cult, actually, by the sound of it. Isla’s in prison. She got handed twenty years a couple of years ago.”
Luna’s eyes widen. “She’s in prison?”
Cassie nods and grins, relishing the opportunity to share this with Luna. “It was a huge scandal, as you can imagine. Bram—you remember him? Had a heart attack on the job. They brought in a new chief inspector, young guy, not so tolerant of bullshit folklore and what have you. About a month later, someone writes anonymously to the police that Isla killed a child in the forest. They dug up human remains and Isla confessed to the whole thing.”
Luna shivers. She presses the bottle to her cheeks, her mood spiraling. She barely knows what to do with this information. Did Isla murder Saffy? Her mind races.
“You never found Clover?” Cassie asks, sadly. “Or your mum?”
Luna opens her mouth to answer, but holds back. She doesn’t know where to start.
“I think it’s beautiful that you named your daughter after Clover,” Cassie says. “The likeness is stunning.”
“She’s not my daughter,” Luna says quietly.
“Who is she, then?”
Luna opens her mouth to lie, but despite herself, it all comes out—the phone call, the trip to the hospital in Inverness, fully expecting to be reunited with a twenty-nine-year-old woman.
Cassie looks stunned. She stands and paces, thinking it through. “That’s crazy,” she says. “And they let you take her?”
Luna explains about her worries that social services will yet come looking for her. She tells Cassie about her theory that Clover has some kind of age regression disease that has stopped her from growing, about the things that Clover has said that only Clover could have known: the Longing, Saffy, their mother painting the mural.
She tells Cassie about the glass in the food they ordered at the hotel. About Brodie chasing her.
Cassie cups her hands to her mouth. “Fuck, Luna. This happened tonight?”
Luna nods. “Right before I saw you in the car park.”
“Why didn’t you tell me? I’ve a crowbar in the boot of my car. I’d have gone after the bastard if you said . . .” She recovers. “Tell me you at least called the police?”
“I don’t trust anyone on this island,” Luna says firmly. “Except you.”
“I’ve heard about Brodie,” Cassie says after a long silence. “He’s been married a couple of times, had a long stint with drugs, fell on hard times.”
“Why would he say I’m meant to be dead, Cassie?” Luna asks. “What happened after I left Lòn Haven?”
Cassie blinks, thinking back. “It’s all a bit of a blur . . . Dad was so out of sorts after the accusation . . . and then Liv went missing and he spent a while looking for her. He took you to the police station, do you remember that?”
Luna shakes her head. “No, I didn’t know that.”
“He wouldn’t leave until social services were ferried out from Inverness. I remember him phoning them, even when we were in Auckland, to check up on you.” Cassie looks up. “He said you were in foster care. What was that like?”
“I’m still in touch with one of my foster mothers. Other than that, it was shit from start to finish.”
Cassie nods again, smiles. “You seem to have it together, though.”
Luna considers briefly telling Cassie about her wayward youth, her years as a shoplifter, desperate to be caught for something, for someone to tell her why she’d been abandoned by her mother.
“You remember the folktale about wildlings?” she says after a long pause.
“Remember?” Cassie says. “Of course I bloody remember. It was drilled into us before we could talk.”
Luna cocks her head. “You still believe it?”
Cassie gives a small laugh. “Are you joking?”
“If I told you that Clover has a burn on her hip, a set of numbers—what would you think?”
Cassie blinks. “I’d say that was very bloody unfortunate and you should make sure she sees a doctor . . .”
“And the fact that she’s still a seven-year-old?”
A pause. “Luna. She cannot be Clover.”
“I think she’s a wildling.” She feels something change in her as she says it. Different than thinking it, she realizes it. Saying it aloud—she feels both relieved and sick to her stomach. How can she believe this?
Cassie’s face softens into pity. “You know it’s just a fairy tale. You of all people know . . .”
“I’m not saying I know how it all works,” Luna says, covering her face with her hands. “I’m just trying to connect the facts. But you know the stories. You can tell a wildling by the mark . . .”
Cassie sits back in her seat, her eyes wide. She clasps her hands and visibly considers her next words. “OK, so I remember that after Saffy and Clover went missing,” she says, “there was a rumor about you. People said you were a wildling.”
Luna feels her heart race. She tries to remember, but her mind is a whirlwind of images and sounds, cloudy with a thousand emotions. “A wildling.”
“Now do you see what a ridiculous idea that is?”
“Well, it’s obvious that I wasn’t.”
“ ‘Obvious’ is a relative term.”
“Do you think that has anything to do with Brodie saying I was meant to be dead?” Luna says, and Cassie stares ahead, searching her own memories.
“I don’t know,” she says. “I really don’t know.”
II
“Are you all right, Clover?” Luna asks as they lie in the twin beds.
Clover nods, but she looks sad. “That man was scary.”
She means Brodie. “He won’t hurt you. I promise.”
“I thought we’d see Mummy here.”
“I’m sorry.”
“And the Longing,” Clover adds. “I don’t understand. Why is it like that?”
“That’s why we’re here,” Luna says. “To find answers.”
“Thank you,” Clover says, but she still seems sad.
Luna presses a hand to her belly, feeling the baby kick. She squeezes her eyes shut and breathes deep. She knows what has to be done. But it’s so, so hard.
“I was thinking we could take a drive,” she says in a thin voice.
“When?”
“Tomorrow. First thing. I thought . . . we could explore the woods.”
“Will Mummy be there?”
“I don’t know.”
Clover yawns, deeply. “OK.”
Clover turns over, stretching out a hand, brushing against Luna’s finger. And there it is again, the beginning of the headache that grows and grows until it feels her
head might explode.
She squeezes her eyes tight, pressing the balls of her palms against them as though to stop them from exploding out of her head. She wants to cry out, but even amidst the agony of it she knows she mustn’t alarm Clover, or Cassie. She gets up and feels her way to the kitchen, hoping to find some kind of painkiller that will numb the pain. The cold on the ground floor of the house is instantly soothing, and so she makes her way to the front door, pulling it open and letting the chill of the night air wash over her.
As she looks out over the ocean in the distance, the headache gradually lifting, images swirl in her mind.
She remembers finding an odd shape on the bay by the Longing, a large black hump that looked like the sand had dropped to reveal a stone bank. When she had gotten closer, she’d spotted the white marks, the slits indicating gills, and gasped. It was the basking shark, Basil. He had beached, his gills opening and closing slowly as he struggled for breath. He was so large his own body weight was crushing him, and he looked like he was melting into the stand.
Mr. McPherson, the fisherman, had appeared with two buckets of water. He’d poured them over the shark.
“If we do this until the tide comes in, we might save him,” he’d said.
Luna had taken one of the buckets and run to the tide, scooping it up and tossing it over the shark. It was a phenomenal and strange sight. That enormous shark, long as a bus and helpless as a kitten.
She remembers scooping the water and dumping it over the shark until her arms ached. Finally, Mr. McPherson had said, “That’s enough, lass. Say your farewell.” They’d stood in silence for a moment, looking down at the huge body of the shark, his gray skin so rough that Luna had friction burns from where she’d accidently rubbed her arms against him while pouring water over him. He was more rock than fish, all thirty feet of him lying stretched out on the sand. She’d asked Mr. McPherson if they could lasso him somehow and get a boat to tug him back out to sea.
“The rope would only hurt him,” he said. “Yon beast weighs about five ton. We’re best letting nature take its course. He should have left these waters weeks ago with the rest of the sharks. Maybe he knew his time was up and he wanted to die here.”