The Lost Girl

by Sangu Mandanna

  “I have a question,” I say.

  “What a surprise,” he says. “You, with a question? Unprecedented.”

  I grin. “Never mind. It was only about the book, anyway.”

  “Well, I have a question, too,” he says. “I happen to have two tickets to the zoo for tomorrow. Want one?”

  “What would I do with it?” I ask him. “You might as well give it to somebody who can use it, Sean.” I clench my teeth. “Wouldn’t Lucy like to go as a birthday present?”

  Sean sighs. “I’m going to let that slide, because you’ve never been asked this type of question before. Obviously I haven’t done a good enough job of teaching you how to recognize the situation. For future reference, it might help you to know that when a friend tells you they’ve got tickets and asks if you want one, they usually also mean that they would like you to go to the event in question.”

  I don’t even notice the sarcasm. I look up at him, taken aback, the book and essay forgotten. “You mean, you’re asking if I’d like to go to the zoo? Like, actually go?”

  “Well done,” he approves.

  How could he have possibly known how much I have wanted to go to the zoo?

  I fly out of the chair. “Sean, do you mean it?”

  “Of course I mean it,” he says, exasperated. “Why would I ask you if I didn’t mean it, you daft harpy?”

  I falter. “Is this about the tattoo again?” I can see my life unfolding in front of me, filled with pitying gestures like scones and zoos. I can’t bear to imagine that I will always be someone Sean feels sorry for.

  He pulls out a pair of tickets. “Here,” he says. “These are the old tickets I got before I changed them. Look at the date on them.”

  “These are tickets for next month.”

  “And at the bottom, see, there’s my receipt for the day I bought them.”

  “You bought them two weeks ago.”

  “Right,” says Sean. “Meaning I bought them long before I knew about the tattoo. I’ve changed the date so we can go tomorrow instead, which I will admit is about that bloody tattoo. I thought you could use some cheering up. But I was always going to ask you.”

  “Why?” I ask, bewildered.

  “Everyone should get to go to the zoo,” he says. “So do you want to?”

  “Yes,” I burst out, my chest tightening with excitement, “thank you, yes, of course I want to go!”

  “You’re not allowed,” Sean reminds me, “so it’ll be tricky. It’s more than an hour away on the train.”

  I tip my chin, refusing to let such a consideration destroy this moment, this flare of hope that I may never have again.

  “No one needs to know,” I say.

  “Not the others,” he concedes, “but Mina knows. I asked her when I first came in today. It took some persuading, but she’s agreed. I think she wants you to get out for a bit. But only as long as I, and I quote, ‘don’t let you out of my sight for an instant.’”

  “I don’t need looking after,” I say indignantly.

  “You may be able to handle yourself in a scuffle, but you don’t know the first thing about the country beyond this town. If you got lost, you’d probably wander straight into a hunter. Wouldn’t that be the prettiest pickle?”

  I point a dirty look his way, but I’m too euphoric and grateful to stay annoyed. A lock of hair falls over my forehead, feathery and wayward, and I blow it impatiently out of the way.

  “Do we have to take the train through Lancaster to get to the zoo?” I ask eagerly.

  “Yeah.”

  “So can we stop off and go to your house on our way back?”

  Sean gives me a strange look. “You want to go to my house? Of all the places—”

  “I’m curious.”

  He rolls his eyes. “Well, if that’s what you want, why not?”

  I am so excited for the rest of the evening that Mina Ma says she has half a mind not to send me if I can’t act my age. When Sean says he could get a ticket for her too, she declines, announcing that she’s quite happy not to go “racketing about the countryside.” Yet this doesn’t stop her from muttering about “unaccompanied girls, with boys” and “zoos, of all things” and “if they find out.”

  It’s the last bit that worries me, a knot of fear battling the excitement. What if the Weavers do find out? For me to actually leave town, go somewhere even with a guardian, is punishable. I am not allowed to leave Windermere. I am not supposed to spend time in busy places. Someone might see the Mark on my neck and recognize me for what I am.

  “What will they do if they catch us?”

  “I don’t know,” says Sean.

  His voice gives nothing away, but I am looking at his eyes, which are honest and very green, and they’re troubled. I believe him. He doesn’t know what they’ll do to us. But he knows that because I belong to them, they have every right to dispose of me if I defy them.

  Sean might not belong to anybody, but that doesn’t mean he’s in the clear. Guardians are not allowed to help us. To interfere with the laws. The Weavers can punish them, too.

  “They won’t find out,” I say.

  “Course they won’t,” says Sean. “So finish your broccoli, it’s good for you.”

  I have trouble sleeping all night. Tonight my dreams are mine, which is not always the case. Sometimes I dream of things from Amarra’s life, bits of memories and emotions that slip through the cracks from her consciousness to mine. Like the time the dog bit her. It preyed on her mind for weeks, the memory of that terror. Or the time she had an enormous crush on a pop star and I dreamed of his face for days. Erik says it’s normal: when they made me, they had to put bits of her into me. This means that sometimes traces of memories and feelings cross over from her to me.

  I dream of strange things—not of zoos, like I’d expected to, but of an abandoned carnival in a deserted dark city. Men and women in green, swinging back and forth on trapezes. Elephants rearing up on their hind legs. Brightly painted clowns. Each time I wake, my heart races with a mixture of fear and excitement. In my dreams, the clowns and the Weavers look eerily alike.

  On the train the next day, I am too excited to sit still. I bob up and down in my seat, jostling Sean, who gives me a look that mingles amusement with exasperation. I can’t contain myself. I haven’t left Windermere since I arrived as a baby. As the familiar town disappears, the English countryside meanders in. It’s like a snapshot lifted off a postcard, with endless fields and sheep-dotted hills.

  “It’s so beautiful,” I say softly.

  Sean points things out, like the low stone fences that he says are a northern thing, you don’t see many of them in the south.

  “Have you been to the south much?”

  “Now and then,” he says. “London, mostly. Cornwall, too. My parents used to take me there on holiday when I was younger. Except for one year when we went to Egypt. Echoes are illegal there, too, so Dad had to lie about his work whenever anyone asked. I met some kids in Cairo who weren’t even sure echoes actually exist.”

  “So you and your mum don’t go on holidays anymore?” I ask.

  He shakes his head.

  “Is she all right?” I ask tentatively.

  He shrugs. “She misses him.”

  “You do too, don’t you?”

  “Yeah. Do you?”

  “I try not to,” I confess. “But I keep thinking about that rhyme Mina Ma used to sing for me. You know, about the five little ducks? And how they went out one day, over the hill and far away. And the mama duck quacked, but only four came back.” I try to smile, but there’s a lump in my throat. “It’s silly, but I keep thinking Jonathan’s the one that didn’t come back. And in the song it goes on until none of them come back.”

  “You know how it ended, don’t you?”

  “I always made Mina Ma stop because it upset me so much.”

  “Silly,” he says. “In the end, the mother duck followed them, over the hill and far away. And she quacked and quacked, and
all five little ducks came back.”

  “Really?”

  He laughs. “Yes, really.”

  I laugh too.

  When we pass through Lancaster, I pay special attention to it. I can’t quite imagine how Sean lives his everyday life in this place, with its storybook castle and cobbled streets and old bridges. I’ve never known Sean in any setting except our cottage by the lake.

  It’s almost noon when we finally pull into Blackpool. Sean seems to know his way around, so I follow him out and down the street to the nearest bus stop. I can smell the seaside, all salt and fish and vinegar.

  “What do you want to do with your life?” Sean asks me unexpectedly. We’re on the bus. I can see the ocean as we rattle down the road. It’s a bluish gray, sparkling in the pale sunlight.

  I have the answer ready, slotted in place in my memory. “I’m going to study archaeology,” I say. “My other’s father, Neil, is a historian, and she really loves that kind of thing. We could be the next Indiana Jones.”

  “No,” says Sean. “What do you want to do?”

  “I’m not supposed to think about that,” I say flatly.

  “I’m asking.”

  “I don’t really know,” I admit, “but I like not knowing. I could go to university when I’m eighteen, maybe, study art. I think I’d like that.”

  It’s a nice thing to dream of. I look out at the sea and the sky, and then I look the other way at the passing street. And though I try not to, I see the laughing teenagers, the mothers and children, the families outside the restaurants and the pubs, and I think of how different I am from every single one of them.

  Sean carefully touches my hand. I try to smile, and it’s easy to do with the sun in my eyes and the salty sea air blowing around us.

  When we get there, the zoo is beautiful. Filled with brightly colored signs and little stalls and animals from the far-flung places of the world, it’s everything I ever imagined it would be. Sean has been here before, but he lets me take the lead and drag him every which way as signs and animals catch my eye. Many of the cages and enclosures have big signs with names on them: a chimpanzee is called Molly; a python is called Eduardo; the hippos are Daisy, Ju-ju, and Tom. Sean and I laugh over some of the names. He can’t believe anyone would name a hippo Tom.

  “Clear lack of imagination, that,” he complains.

  I try to remember the last time I was this excited, but the memory eludes me. Memories never elude me. Maybe this is the most excited I’ve ever been.

  But I’m careful. I keep my eyes open; I glance over my shoulder. Once, I catch Sean with a tiny frown between his eyebrows, searching the crowds as though worried someone might be watching us. I let myself enjoy every minute, but the Weavers stay in the back of my mind. I can’t forget that I’m not like the happy, chattering crowds. I check my hair, making sure my Mark is covered.

  “There,” says Sean, as we stop in front of a large enclosure. “That’s what I really wanted to show you.”

  The elephants.

  “Mina told me Amarra went to the zoo for the first time when she was seven,” he says, “and she wrote in the pages about seeing the elephants, but she didn’t put a picture in. And you cried and said you wanted to see them too.”

  There’s a lump in my throat. “I can’t believe you know about that.”

  “I know a lot of things,” he says. “You’re their favorite thing to talk about. Mina and Erik, I mean. You’re everything to them, you know.”

  I wipe my eyes and watch the elephants. There are three adults and a couple of smaller ones nuzzling up to their mothers. They look happy, like they’re enjoying being out there in the sun with the grass to nibble on. One of the elephants uproots a tuft of grass with its trunk and dumps the grass and dirt on its back. They’re so beautiful.

  I glance to the right and see a sixth elephant. This one is very young, smaller than the others, and seems to be in a separate enclosure. The sign at the front says she’s Eva.

  “Why is she on her own?” I ask indignantly. “Won’t she be lonely?”

  “Does seem weird, doesn’t it? There’s someone in a uniform right there. I’ll ask him.”

  I watch Eva the elephant. She has a restless energy. She stomps at the grass beneath her feet, kicking up small mounds of dirt and soil. Occasionally she glances at the other elephants, and I imagine her expression is wistful. Then she lets out a defiant trumpeting sound and turns her back on them. I want to stroke her trunk, the short, bristly hairs on her back.

  Sean reappears. “Apparently, she’s—”

  “Difficult,” I guess.

  “Yeah. When they’re all together, she is generally disruptive. So they put her on her own whenever she’s particularly difficult.”

  “It won’t make her behave,” I say with certainty. “Look at her. She’s stubborn. They’ll just have to accept her for what she is.”

  There’s a smile in Sean’s voice. “You like her.”

  I nod absently.

  After another half hour, I regretfully leave the elephants behind and follow Sean back in the direction of the reptiles. For a while there, with the smell of elephant and wet grass around us, I forgot about the Weavers. Now they’re back. I push them into the furthest corner I can find, but their murky, half-remembered faces keep coming back like a persistent jack-in-the-box.

  Sean and I buy a box of popcorn and a Coke to share and wander around while we finish them. I sip the Coke noisily through my straw.

  “Which way?” Sean asks me when we reach a fork. “Reptiles or birds?”

  “Is a turtle a reptile?”

  “More reptile than bird, I reckon,” says Sean, grinning, “so we’d better go that way.”

  There’s a girl on the path ahead of us. She has dark hair and eyes like me. She falls and starts to howl. Her father leans down and kisses her knee and wheedles a laugh out of her. And for no reason at all it makes me think of the Weaver who made me. Of how he will never pick me up when I fall.

  I want to be human so badly it hurts.

  “Look at me,” says Sean, and the tone of his voice makes it clear he knows how I feel. “You’re different. We’ve always known that. But it doesn’t have to be a bad thing. Being different doesn’t make you something less than the rest of us.” I open my mouth, but he cuts me off. “And it does mean that you are not Amarra. You’re someone else. And you’re important. As a girl, not an echo. No matter what the Weavers take from you, you matter. To all of us.”

  I stare at him. “I’ve always wanted to be a girl. Only a girl. To not be ‘the echo.’”

  “You’re not ‘the echo’ to me.”

  “But it doesn’t make me any less of one.”

  “So?” he demands. “There’s nothing wrong with being an echo. You step in when someone else dies. That’s pretty glorious, don’t you think? You’re an angel among mortals. Echoes are asked to sacrifice everything to make another family, other people, happy. To give them hope. You are hope.”

  He gestures at the little girl and her father on the path ahead. “Think of how he would feel if something happened to his daughter. But if that girl has an echo somewhere, he might find her again. He might get her back.”

  I’ve never looked at it quite that way before.

  “Dad used to say that if he could have an echo made for every person he loves, he’d do it.” He looks me in the eye. “You shouldn’t be ashamed of what you are. Or of not being like us. You should wear it like a badge of honor.”

  I stare at him for a long time, and he stares back, until I can no longer see anything beyond him but a blur, and he’s the only clear thing in the world.

  Then his phone vibrates and the spell is broken. He checks his text. “It’s Lucy,” he says.

  Lucy. It takes a second to pierce my thoughts. For a moment there, I had completely forgotten he had a girlfriend.

  But I still can’t help smiling. Because no one has ever said those things to me before. I look at the father and his daught
er, but not with envy or longing this time. I imagine the man losing the little girl, like one of the five little ducks vanishing over the hill, and I think of the echo who could be good and perfect and replace her. I am not perfect, but I could be the thing that gives somebody hope. The thing that makes the loss of each little duck a bit less painful.

  It doesn’t make everything okay, it doesn’t fix much, but it does fix something. It does force me to look at things differently. For the first time I see my own face through someone else’s eyes.

  I’m not like these people around me, and I am not Amarra, but I can wear all my differences without shame.

  Sean puts his phone away. “You look happier,” he says, smiling crookedly at me. “I must be good for something.”

  “I’ve wanted a name, my own name, for so long,” I say, “and I think you just gave me one.”

  “What is it?”

  I smile. Here it is, at last, the one thing that belongs to me.

  “Eva.”

  4

  Story

  We get off the train in Lancaster and walk to Sean’s house. It takes us ten minutes, across a bridge, down two cobbled roads, and onto a street lined with old, pretty houses. Sean leads me to the third house from the top of the street, fishing a set of keys from his pocket. I stare at the house in interest, marveling at the fact that in all the years I’d known Jonathan, I’d never seen where he lived. Where Sean lives. Or Erik, or Ophelia. When they enter my world, they leave theirs behind.

  I hope Sean’s mother’s not home. I always got the impression, from things Jonathan would let slip, that she doesn’t like me.

  I’m sure she adores Lucy.

  Something funny happens to my throat when I step into the house and smell the faint scent of cigars. Even nine months after his death, it feels like Jonathan is still here.

  It reminds me of those late evenings at the cottage, when he would sit on the steps with his cigar and Ophelia would sit next to him and fish for a cigarette in her bag and the smell of smoke would waft into the house and mingle with Mina Ma’s hand cream and the tea brewing in the kitchen. And I’d hover in my pajamas outside the door, listening to them talk quietly about grown-up things. Now and then I would hear Erik laugh at something one of the others said. I always waited for that sound. If Erik was laughing, it meant nothing was wrong.