Lost Daughter

by Ali Mercer

  ‘It’s understandable that you might feel hostile. Becca, I want you to know I really have no intention of trying to replace your mother,’ Leona says.

  ‘Just as well, because you couldn’t,’ Becca says. She isn’t shouting: she’s pleased to hear that her voice sounds perfectly controlled. ‘She may have her faults, but she would never do what you’ve done to her. You were supposed to be her friend. And she would never make me sit around soaking wet and listen to her telling me how she was going to turn my life upside down and expect me to like it. At least when she messed up she had the grace to feel bad about it!’

  ‘That is completely different,’ her father says. ‘You owe Leona an apology.’

  ‘You owe me an apology,’ she tells him. ‘Me and Mum.’

  She pushes back her chair and stands, looks down at her father, pointedly ignores Leona.

  ‘I know about you and Mrs Chadstone,’ she tells him. ‘You bastard.’

  ‘I don’t know what your mother’s been telling you,’ he says, much too smoothly, ‘but when she thought I was having an affair with Mary she was delusional. If she’s been bringing all that up again and trying to poison you against me, then you need to tell me exactly what she’s been saying, for her sake. It could be a sign that she’s getting worse again.’

  ‘She hasn’t said anything. It was Amelia who told me. She saw a message on her mum’s phone. A recent message. You told her you missed her. We need to talk. Call me, I miss you. Kiss kiss.’ Inspiration strikes – no, not inspiration, the truth. It’s like being struck by lightning. She just knows, sure as she’s standing there. ‘You must have wanted to tell her about Leona. About the baby. Have you spoken to her yet? Does she know? I guess she probably wasn’t too happy. You weren’t still seeing her, were you?’

  ‘Mitch?’ Leona says quietly. ‘What—’

  Her dad’s expression is awful to see – cunning and resentful and self-pitying at the same time. He looks cornered, but like he isn’t going to go down without a fight.

  ‘Amelia shouldn’t be looking at her mother’s messages,’ he says. ‘It’s very easy for snoops to get the wrong end of the stick.’ He glances at Leona: clearly right now what she thinks matters more to him than Becca. ‘I never said I missed her. Amelia’s exaggerating, or she’s remembered it wrong. But I did ask if we could talk. Mary’s been a good friend, and I’ve known her a long time. I wanted to tell her our news, and pick her brains about how to talk to you about it, Becca. After all, she has a teenage daughter, too. And she knows Rachel, she knows about the situation, and she’s been very discreet.’

  He reaches out, squeezes Leona’s hand. ‘I’m sorry. I screwed up,’ he says. ‘I know I should have run it past you.’

  Becca says, ‘So? What did she tell you then?’

  Both of them stare at her. Leona looks a bit weepy, but Becca can’t help that. Her dad looks sheepish and reluctantly impressed. He must realise that he hasn’t managed to convince her. He is regarding her with something not far removed from awe, and the truth is a kind of power in her hands, ready to be used.

  ‘I don’t believe you, Dad,’ Becca says. ‘So you might as well stop lying. She probably wasn’t best pleased that you’d moved on, was she? But maybe she didn’t really care, as long as nobody found out about you and her. So how long did it go on for? Was it just the summer, or did it start before that?’

  Mitch lets go of Leona’s hand, stares down at the table. ‘All right. I suppose I may have allowed myself to get a little too close to her after your mother started having problems. I mean, she’d turned into a completely different person. I didn’t know what to do. It all started after your grandmother’s funeral, after she scattered the ashes in the garden.’ Suddenly he looks completely pathetic. ‘You must remember that. She was behaving like a crazy person.’

  ‘She was behaving like a crazy person because her mother had just died!’

  Becca is shouting now; she’s angrier than she has ever been. The injustice of it makes it impossible to be anything else.

  ‘Don’t,’ Mitch says. ‘Please don’t.’

  Suddenly he bursts into tears. Leona spares Becca a reproachful glance and moves in to comfort him, folding her arms round him like a mother with an overgrown child.

  ‘There, there,’ she murmurs. ‘It’s all over now. There, there.’

  The storm is over; Becca’s moment of power has passed. She retreats from the room. Nobody follows her. She can still hear her father crying, and Leona murmuring to him.

  Her dad has basically just admitted to cheating on her mum – even worse, cheating with Mrs Chadstone, which is so gross and ridiculous Becca can hardly bear to think about it – and Leona seems to think that’s just fine. Well, she obviously just isn’t a very nice person, given the way she’s treated Mum. If she thinks it’s OK for Dad to carry on like that, maybe she’s done loads of things that are even worse.

  It’s like Macbeth and Lady Macbeth: both of them are guilty as hell, or would feel that way if either of them had a conscience, but instead they’re going to try and convince each other that it’s all OK and everything is all right and the other one is still lovely.

  Well, they’re both horrible, and they aren’t going to fool Becca.

  But this is her dad. Her dad, who is more fun than anybody else’s dad, and more there, too. Her dad, who’d taught her how to draw, who’d got her at the end of the day from school all those years and made her tea and let her have extra cake and watched all the Disney films with her and got her maths homework wrong and read her bedtime story and tucked her up for the night…

  She slams her bedroom door shut, throws herself down on the bed and punches the pillow.

  ‘I hate you,’ she mutters. ‘I hate you. I hate you. I hate you.’

  But it doesn’t make her feel better. Maybe nothing will.

  She can hate them all she likes. None of them cares. If she disappeared they’d probably barely notice. Or they’d be pleased to have her out of the way.

  She remembers that talk in the lecture theatre the time she fainted. The circle with HARM written in it. Cuts and broken glass and blood. People hurt themselves, sometimes. She has never understood why before, but now she does: it must be because other people hurt you so much worse.

  Forty-Six

  Rachel

  When her phone buzzes and ICE Mitch comes up on the screen it barely seems like an intrusion. She hasn’t stopped thinking about him and Leona and the baby and Becca since she left the house.

  In like a strawberry, out like a candle…

  She answers the call. ‘Hello?’

  He says, ‘Rachel. Is Becca with you?’ His voice is rough and weirdly distant, as if he is calling from underground.

  ‘Of course not. She’s with you. Isn’t she?’

  ‘She hasn’t been in touch with you?’

  ‘No, I haven’t heard from her. Why would I? She’s with you.’

  Mitch sighs. ‘OK.’

  In like a strawberry. It doesn’t work. All the air seems to have been sucked out of her lungs.

  Something is wrong. Very wrong.

  ‘Mitch,’ Rachel says. ‘What’s going on? Where is she?’

  Mitch clears his throat. ‘Right now, I’m not sure.’

  Several heartbeats elapse. Time seems to expand, then contract. Rachel says, ‘What happened?’

  Mitch sighs. ‘It’s kind of complicated to explain. I don’t want to go into all the details. But anyway, Leona and I told her the news and she didn’t take it very well. She started yelling and carrying on, and then she stomped off to her room. A bit later on, at some point, she slipped out of the house without telling me, and I don’t know where she’s gone.’

  ‘What do you mean, she slipped out without telling you? You mean she went out and you didn’t even notice?’

  ‘We were in the kitchen, talking. You know how insulated it is from the rest of the house. I just didn’t hear her. I didn’t realise until I went up to her bed
room and found it was empty.’ There is a small, reproachful pause. ‘Leona’s very upset about it. If you’d helped us like I said, this might never have happened.’

  Rachel has shifted the phone into her left hand, and is pinching the skin of her wrist with her right. She makes a conscious effort to stop.

  She asks, ‘When do you think she went out?’

  ‘Oh… I suppose it could have been, realistically speaking, pretty much any time between say about half-past four and maybe ten to six?’

  ‘You ignored her for all that time? Wow. Leona must have been upset. Did she take her phone?’

  ‘I think so. But she’s not answering it. She got changed, too, and hung up all her school uniform. She’d come home soaking wet, for some reason, even though she had a perfectly good umbrella with her.’

  ‘She never has an umbrella.’

  ‘Well, today she had one and didn’t bloody use it.’

  ‘Just out of interest, Mitch… what’s this umbrella like?’

  ‘I can’t see what that’s got to do with anything.’

  ‘Just humour me, Mitch. Describe it to me.’

  ‘Well… it’s kind of checked? I don’t recognise it, actually.’

  She can hear someone talking to Mitch in the background. Must be Leona. Then Mitch says, ‘It’s designer, apparently.’

  ‘Could be Amelia’s.’

  ‘Could be anybody’s.’

  ‘True. But one of us ought to ring the Chadstones, and it would probably be better if it was you. She might have gone over there. Or if Amelia was talking to Becca just before she came home, maybe she’ll have some idea where she’s gone. After all, Amelia is Becca’s closest friend… As far as I know, anyway. Unless you can think of anybody else?’

  Mitch pauses. ‘No,’ he admits. ‘Not really.’

  ‘Then it has to be worth a try, surely?’ Mitch doesn’t respond. ‘So… what happened when you told her about the baby? What did she actually say?’

  ‘Well, not much. She just kind of went into an adolescent huff. You know what they’re like. It’s not always easy to live with, believe me. Thirteen-year-old girl hormones can be pretty vicious.’

  There is a crackle on the other end of the line. Leona says, ‘Hello, Rachel. I’m on the phone in the bedroom. I think we need to talk. Mitch, you can listen if you want, or you can leave this to me. I’m afraid I’m going to tell her what Becca told us.’

  ‘Leona, no. Please don’t do this,’ Mitch said.

  ‘It’s necessary, Mitch. She ought to know. Rachel, I’m afraid that Becca isn’t just upset about the baby. There’s something else. Mitch and Mary had an affair, and Becca found out about it. Mary’s daughter told her. She’d seen some messages on Mary’s phone – nothing intimate, the relationship is over, but enough to make her suspicious. I’m so sorry, Rachel. It seems to have started last summer. They broke it off after you went over there on Becca’s birthday and everything came to a head. Mitch was only getting in touch with Mary because he wanted to tell her about me.’

  And there it is. The truth.

  The shock of it bowls her over. It’s huge, it’s too much. It’s like the rush of being hit or falling, but she is frozen in place. Leona has stopped talking but Rachel can’t speak. There is silence and nothing moves.

  She had thought it would be a relief to know for sure. It isn’t. It’s hell. It’s the end, the final killer blow to the love she and Mitch had shared. And it wasn’t Leona who had killed it, or even Mary: it was Mitch.

  It’s an effort to remember to breathe. Strawberry. Candle.

  She’s conscious of the phone, the bedsit, the grey light of a rainy-day evening, Mitch and Leona together at a distance in Rose Cottage, and Becca where? Nowhere that they know. Vanished. And in that instant she knows that Becca was never really lost to her before. That even when Becca rejected her and chose Mitch, even when she slept under a separate roof every night, that was never loss in the way this is.

  And something Viv had said comes back to her…

  Hope is what makes it possible for us to keep going. It’s much more useful than despair.

  She catches sight of the old green pinboard. The three photos: Aidan, Becca, Bluebell. And she’s suddenly glad that Leona’s new baby won’t belong there.

  Will having another child remind her of the one she had given away – will Bluebell continue to haunt her like a ghost-child compounded of what-might-have-beens and if-onlys? But with a newborn, there was so much to do – all the waking-up and baths and puttings-to-bed, the doctor’s appointments, and then the playdates and trips to the shoe shop. The farewells at the nursery and at the school gates and before sleepovers, the dropping off at a first shared house or hall of residence, the leaving home, the exchange of promises and endearments at the ends of visits and of phone calls.

  The routine pangs of parting that come with a lifetime’s slow separation.

  The being there.

  Anyway, Bluebell is back in Leona’s life for real now – she would see her again, they would get to know each other. Bluebell might even meet the new baby. Her half-sibling. Who would also be Becca’s half-sibling. Three children: one lost and found, one new, and one missing.

  Breathe. Suddenly it is possible for her to move again, and the world slams back into place.

  ‘You know what, Mitch? You’re a pretty good father. I’ve always thought that… up until now, anyway. But you were a lousy husband,’ she says. ‘It would have been nice if you’d had the decency to confess at the time. It might have saved me some heartache. Not to mention thinking that I’d lost my mind. And I don’t think much of your taste. With all respect, Leona. But anyway, I can’t worry about all that now. I have far more important things to deal with. Like tracking down my daughter, who you two seem to have managed to lose without even realising it. Mitch, you should call the police.’

  ‘Oh, is that really necessary? I mean, I can’t imagine they’ll actually do anything about it. She’s hardly going to be a top priority.’

  ‘Just let them know, OK? At least then they can look out for her. And they might have some advice for us. It can’t hurt. It’s worth trying anything until we’ve got her back safe and sound.’

  ‘Mitch, I think she’s right,’ Leona intervenes.

  ‘Well, all right, but they’ll just think I’m wasting their time,’ Mitch grumbles. Then, rather resentfully: ‘You seem very keen to hand out tasks, Rachel – what are you going to do?’

  What is she going to do? She has to do something.

  ‘I’m going to find Amelia Chadstone. Call me the second you hear anything,’ Rachel says.

  Mitch begins to protest – ‘Are you really sure that’s a good idea? Maybe I should handle it—’ But she cuts him off by ending the call.

  Forty-Seven

  Rachel pulls up right outside the house in a slew of gravel and slams the car door shut with a vigour that echoes across the quiet lawn.

  She checks her phone. Missed calls from Mitch and Mary. Nothing from Becca.

  Mary’s voicemail is in her committee voice, smooth and reasonable and blameless.

  ‘Rachel, I got your message. Mitch rang me, too. I’m afraid I’m not at all sure that any of us is going to be able to help. I’ve already spoken to Amelia and she has no idea where Becca might be. I wonder if there might be more fruitful avenues for you to pursue. I’m so sorry that this has happened, and I very much hope Becca will be home soon safe and sound. Do call me back if you’d like. If there’s anything else useful that we might be able to do, I’m sure we’d be pleased to assist.’

  Hypocrite. She doesn’t want to help, not really; she just wants Rachel to go away. Understandably. Who would want their ex-lover’s still-wife making a scene on the doorstep, especially if said wife is also distraught because her husband is having a baby with someone else and her daughter has run away? Nobody. But this isn’t about her and Mary. This is about Becca, and the possibility that she might have said something to Amelia that
would cast some light on where she’s gone.

  She listens to her message from Mitch.

  ‘Rachel? Rachel, please call me. I’ve spoken to Mary, and she said you’d rung her and she’s going to talk to Amelia and call you back. I’m really hoping you haven’t just gone over there. That would be a really bad idea, and we’ve got enough on our hands as it is. Please ring me when you get this. I’m going to call the police.’ … ‘Just a sec, Leona, let me finish. Rachel, I’ll let you know if the police are going to come round, and if they are you can come back here if you want, so we can talk to them together.’

  End of message. Rachel puts the phone back in her bag and gets out of the car. She rings the doorbell once, twice.

  It is so unlike Becca to just take off that almost anything seems possible. Terrible things: falling into bad or dangerous company, harming herself, putting herself in harm’s way. It is such a brutal, indifferent world, so full of people who at best are willing to turn a blind eye and ask no questions and stay well out of anything that’s not their business, or who at worst might see a lonely and confused young teen as an opportunity…

  Some children run away and never come back.

  Mary opens the door a chink. She doesn’t take the chain off. ‘Rachel. I wasn’t expecting you to see you here. Did you get my message?’

  ‘I did, thank you, Mary. I’d just like to speak to Amelia for myself, if that’s all right. Then I’ll be on my way.’

  ‘It’s not really the best time,’ Mary says. ‘We’re just about to have supper.’

  ‘It won’t take long, and I’d really appreciate it. Given the circumstances, maybe Amelia would understand the urgency?’

  ‘I know you’re upset, and looking for someone to blame,’ Mary says. ‘But this is nothing to do with any of us.’