Last Seen

by Lucy Clarke

  Isla and I stare at each other, layers of history folded between us. My mouth opens and closes around the choices that lie before me. If I let her leave, it is over. We are over.

  Jacob’s questions pound in my head. Does she know it’s a lie? Are you going to tell her?

  I think of Isla on the water’s edge seven years ago, the moment we had stood with our hands locked together, waiting for news of our boys. All this time, the events of that day have been sealed off, buried between Jacob and me. But now, as he waits for my answer on the other end of the line, as Isla stands in front of me, a question in the dip of her brow, I can feel the memories being unearthed, pulling me right back into the grip of it.

  I circle the wet rag over the window, working loose the trails of salt. The rush of feet pounds on to the deck as the boys come barrelling in, Marley clipping the washing-up bowl, sending water sloshing across the hut floor.

  ‘Sorry!’ Marley says, leaping from foot to foot to avoid the puddle.

  ‘Good one!’ Jacob laughs.

  I count to three. Smile. ‘Never mind. The floor could use a clean.’

  I grab the beach towels that are thrown over the deck railing, and lay them over the puddle. ‘I expect you two are after some lunch?’

  Jacob opens the fridge, asking, ‘Can we have a Snickers?’

  ‘After lunch. I’ll finish up the windows, then do you both sandwiches. Go and play for quarter of an hour. I’ll call you when it’s ready.’

  I hear them laughing and teasing one another as they dash back down to the beach, while I mop up the spilt water. I hang the towels out to dry, then refill the plastic bowl with soapy water and get to work finishing the windows. It takes me fifteen minutes, maybe twenty, but it’s worth it. I can see the reflection of the sea dancing in the polished glass, a quiver of sunlight shimmering on the windows.

  I’m not sure what exactly makes me turn towards the water, but an unsettling feeling moves through me. Instinctively I scan the bay, then the shoreline, looking for the boys.

  But all I see are two spades cast aside at the water’s edge, their sand fortress abandoned.

  The skin on the back of my hands pinches as I yank off the rubber gloves, my gaze not leaving the beach. Sand shifts beneath my feet as I begin to jog, lightly at first, towards the water – a hand shading the sun from my eyes. Diane is already there, pointing. ‘The boys are swimming. I think they’re in trouble.’

  I find them, two tiny dots in the water, so far from shore that panic seizes my chest. ‘Oh my God!’

  Everything seems to be happening in broken fragments. I am standing on the shoreline with Isla, our hands laced tight, fear marching in our hearts. I am hearing Neil’s boat engine roar as he thunders out of the bay. I am watching Isaac’s boat return with only one of our boys on board. I am wading through the shallows towards Jacob, who shivers beneath a blanket, his lips a purplish blue. I am cradling him, holding him, saying Thank God! Thank God you’re safe! Then I am turning, aware of Isla alone on the shore, her hands balled into fists, her eyes filled with terror.

  I guide Jacob into our beach hut. He doesn’t speak. Not a word. The paramedics say it’s a reaction to the trauma and advise me to keep things as normal as possible, not to push him to talk, telling me he’ll do it in his own time. It could take hours – or days.

  I bring him mugs of hot, sweet tea, and crumpets with melted butter and cinnamon sprinkled on top. I open a Snickers bar and place it beside him. I dab antiseptic cream on the cuts on his knee and hand from where he must have been hauled onto Isaac’s boat. I wrap a fleecy blanket around his shoulders and pull out his favourite books. But he doesn’t eat, or drink, or talk, or read. He just sits, staring at something I can’t see – his dark eyes still.

  Nick rings. His voice is tight with worry as he waits at Bergamo Airport, despairing that there are no flights till morning. When I put the phone on speaker for Jacob, I hear Nick saying, ‘Mummy’s told me what happened today. You’re such a brave boy, Jacob. We love you so much. I’m going to be home soon. This will all be okay.’ I watch Jacob’s face closely, but his expression never changes.

  Hours pass, but he says nothing. When dark falls, I ask if he’d like to sleep in my bed, but he starts climbing the ladder to the mezzanine at the top of the hut. I follow him up, but he turns his back on me when I try reading him a story and I descend the ladder, winded.

  Twenty minutes later, when I poke my head into the mezzanine to check on him, I’m relieved to hear the slow draw of his breath as he sleeps.

  I know Samuel will be next door with Isla, but I need to be with her, too. I’ve seen the searchlight from the helicopter disappear, the beach grow quiet. It is unthinkable. Completely unthinkable. As I slip out of our hut, I hear Jacob’s scream. It’s a piercing, heart-shattering sound. I fly back inside, catching my shoulder on the doorframe. My skin is throbbing and hot as I scramble up the wooden ladder in the dark.

  Jacob is curled in the corner of his bed, his arms clenched around his head, knees balled to his chest. ‘It’s okay, you’re safe. I’ve got you,’ I say, pulling him into me. His little arms wrap around my middle, his hands gripping on to the fabric of my jumper. I rock slowly, whispering over and over, ‘It’s okay, baby. You’re okay. You’re safe now.’

  I free one of my hands and use it to tug the blind cord, letting moonlight flood in through the porthole window. Then I return my hand to his back, rubbing in slow, soothing circles. After a few minutes, Jacob goes still in my arms and I wonder if he’s fallen back asleep, but then I hear his voice – barely more than a whisper. ‘It was my fault.’

  I wait, wondering if I’m imagining it.

  When he doesn’t speak again, I ask, ‘What did you say, baby?’

  ‘It was my fault. I pushed him under.’

  A prickle of unease licks at my skin. ‘Jacob,’ I say, very calmly. ‘Why don’t you tell me what happened?’

  ‘I wanted to swim to the marker buoy. Some people did it yesterday – I thought we could do it quicker. It’s not even that far. It was easy on the way out. When we got there, we were talking, drifting.’ He sniffs, pushes his hand over his face. ‘When we went to swim back … I don’t know, it was further. The huts – they looked tiny, Mummy. Like … like those Monopoly houses.’

  ‘You’d drifted with the current.’

  He nods, like he understands. ‘I tried to swim – to be calm – but it felt like we weren’t moving at all. Like we’d never make it. We started shouting … I don’t know. I can’t remember. I couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t think. I wanted to get out. I grabbed Marley’s shoulders. I just … I needed to rest, to breathe. But, I don’t know … the weight of me … he went under. When he came up, he was thrashing around, shouting at me. I swallowed so much water. I was choking, spluttering, and I grabbed him again. He … he went under again. I just needed to catch my breath. I was going to let go. I knew I had to. But I didn’t. I didn’t let go. I held him down. Kept holding him and holding him …’ He breaks off, tears streaming down his face, his body shuddering against mine. ‘He didn’t come up.’

  Jacob is trembling, clinging to me, his skin fever-hot. ‘I’m sorry, Mummy. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.’

  I try gently shushing him, my lips against his salt-thickened hair, rocking, rocking. ‘It’s okay, baby. Everything’s going to be okay. It wasn’t your fault. It was an accident. A terrible, terrible accident.’

  He’s heaving with panic, his face wet with tears, his fingers pawing at me. ‘Please don’t tell Daddy!’ he cries. ‘Or the police. I’m a bad person. They’ll take me away – don’t tell them, please! Promise!’

  ‘I won’t, I won’t,’ I soothe reflexively.

  He presses his face to mine, our cheekbones clashing, his tears sliding down the side of my neck. ‘Promise, Mummy? You have to promise you won’t tell anyone. Not even Auntie Isla.’

  One of the hardest things about being a parent is the choices – those crack-sharp decisions you have to mak
e in a blink of an eye. There’s a window of time when your child looks to you to know what is right. But what if you don’t know? What if you have absolutely no idea what to say? What if you are as bewildered as they are?

  I feel the rabbit-like race of Jacob’s heart as he waits for my answer. Strangely, what I think about is Maggie: her lying on the roadside, her skirt ruched around her waist, a neat pool of blood warm on the tarmac. Then I see the grey void of my mother’s gaze as we’d watched Maggie’s coffin lowered to the ground, her hands clenching into closed fists as I tried to reach for her.

  I breathe in the sweet warmth of Jacob’s skin. My lips move against the side of his face as I whisper, ‘I promise. I promise I won’t tell anyone.’

  *

  As I look at Isla now, tears slide unbidden from the corner of my eyes.

  ‘Mum? Mum? Are you there?’ I hear distantly from the phone still held in my hand.

  Did I make the wrong decision back then? Should I have told Isla the truth?

  I remember all those nights as a teenager when I’d sit on the swing chair in Isla’s old garden, talking and smoking with the awning pulled down. Or later, when we’d huddle around beach fires, talking until dawn. I spoke a lot about Maggie. After she died, when my mother looked at me, there was this blankness in her expression – as if she could no longer see who I was. All she saw was me throwing a ball into the road – and Maggie chasing after it. She blamed me for Maggie’s death. She wasn’t being cruel. She just … couldn’t help it. I told the truth – and spent the rest of my childhood living under its shadow.

  I couldn’t bear that for Jacob. If Isla had known Jacob had drowned Marley, she’d have looked at him differently, felt differently about him – I know she would have. People on the sandbank would’ve talked. What happened that day was an accident – yes – but if Jacob had stayed calm, not panicked, then Marley would still be alive.

  It’s a brutal fact, but it’s the truth.

  Isla needed our family more than ever after Marley drowned. How could we have supported her if even just a part of her held Jacob responsible? At the time, I truly thought it was the right decision, not just for Jacob, but for Isla, too. But then … Marley’s body didn’t wash up – and it left all that room for her to … hope. To search for answers. To look for explanations. I had no idea the damage the lie would cause. But by then it was too late.

  I swallow. I had to either watch her suffer the anguish of never truly knowing what’d happened to Marley – or let Jacob suffer the agony of being blamed.

  I chose to protect my son.

  ‘Isla,’ I say again, as she stands on the dark beach, her backpack on her shoulders. ‘I’m sorry.’

  And I am. I am desperately, desperately sorry for everything she’s suffered, for everything I’ve kept from her, for making a decision that is a bullet to our friendship – but sometimes the truth is more painful than the lie.

  She looks at me for a long moment. Then nods. ‘Me, too.’

  I watch her leave, slipping between our two huts, disappearing into the night.

  I glance at the phone still held in my hand. Eventually I draw it towards me, my lips moving against the mouthpiece. I tell Jacob, ‘I made you a promise.’

  54. SARAH

  SEVERAL MONTHS LATER …

  The beach lies silent beneath a jewelled blanket of frost, the sea shivering under the sun’s early light. I stand on the deck of our hut, shoulders hunched against the cold, a mug of freshly brewed coffee cupped between my hands. I’ve tramped across the headland to get here, sending warm clouds of breath into the morning.

  I take a sip of the hot, milky coffee, scalding my lips. Coffee for one, I think, echoing a worry I’d had last summer, a lifetime ago. I lift my face to watch as a gull cuts across the sky, wings stark white against the weak blue morning.

  My fingers travel over the smooth, rectangular For Sale sign nailed to the deck of our beach hut. We hand the keys over to the estate agent this afternoon. I asked the office not to give me any details of who’s buying it: I’d rather not know.

  Climbing down from the deck, the hard-packed sand crunches underfoot like fresh snow. I turn once, looking back at Isla’s hut, which stands frostbitten and faded in the winter light. I only hear her news second-hand: she’s left Chile and is living on the west coast of Ireland, where she’s retraining as a Reiki practioner. The strange thing is that, even after everything we’ve done to each other, I still miss her. But we can never go back, I know that.

  Nostalgia swells around me as I think of the warm memories that tide-mark our beach huts: the years of sandy footprints tramped between our decks, fingerprints greased with sun cream on the door handles, ring marks from hot mugs of tea or glasses of wine placed on the windowsills. There is the afternoon I lay in the sand next to Isla, our pregnant stomachs resting in carefully sculpted grooves; there’s the evening swim we took as the tide lolled and the wind stilled; there’s the day our boys showed us the bivouac they’d built, their suntanned chests puffed with pride. Those are the memories I’ll hold tight to, pressing them close, like beautiful shells slipped into a pocket.

  I pull my gaze away and continue moving towards the water’s edge, wanting a final look at the sea. There’s no one around except for a young fisherman hunched against the cold on the rocks; I smile lightly, then walk along the shoreline in the other direction.

  Jacob moves into my thoughts, as he so often does. He has a meeting with his counsellor this morning. I hope Nick gets him out of bed on time; in fact, I hope Jacob decides to turn up this week. He needs to start talking to someone, and he’s made it clear that that person won’t be me. As the months pass, I’m beginning to understand more about why he lied to Isla about my part in Marley’s death. I’d hurt him in the deepest possible way over Isaac, and he was lashing out – wanting to hurt me back. He needed Isla to have a reason to say, Yes, come to Chile with me. So he chose a lie that positioned him in the light, and me in the dark.

  It hurts, of course it still hurts, but he is my son and I have to believe that we’ll come out the other side of all this.

  I’ll see Jacob later tonight when I visit him and Nick – knocking on the front door rather than letting myself in with the key I can’t quite bring myself to remove from my key-ring. I like Wednesdays. I prepare a meal for the three of us – there’s fresh beef waiting in my fridge, which I’ll cook with shallots, garlic and plenty of red wine, taking round the casserole steaming hot.

  The other nights of the week are quieter, harder on my heart. Once or twice a month I meet Nick straight from work. I enjoy arriving in the smart clothes I wear to my job as a legal secretary and having new things to talk about that aren’t the running of a home. I make Nick laugh more than I remember ever doing – but we won’t be reuniting; in fact, the first set of divorce papers are due to be submitted to our solicitors next week. We have talked about trying to save our marriage, but the trust is gone. I admit that on the nights when I wake alone in those strange, silent hours before dawn, I sometimes wonder if, several years from now, I’ll catch sight of him across the street, or in a restaurant, or on a beach – and he’ll be with Isla.

  I’m living at my mother’s for now. I’m forty-one years old, single, and I’ve moved back home with my mother – but I like it. My mother and I are closer than we’ve ever been, and this gives me hope for my relationship with Jacob.

  My pace slows as I notice someone moving along the beach towards me. Their shape and stride are familiar and I pause, hugging my arms to my chest.

  ‘It’s true, then?’ Isaac says, coming to a stop in front of me. I haven’t seen him in months. He looks tired, paler in the winter light. ‘You’re selling your hut. Leaving.’

  ‘It’s not the same here any more.’

  He nods as if he understands this only too well, and I wonder how these last few months have been for him. He pushes his hands into the pockets of his coat. ‘How’s Jacob?’

  ‘Living with Nick.’
It’s not much of an answer, but it is the best I can do.

  ‘If he ever … you know, wants to see me … I’d like that. I’d like that a great deal.’

  I nod. ‘Thank you. I’ll tell him.’

  A slow silence stretches around us. ‘And you, Sarah. How are you?’

  I shrug lightly. ‘I’ll be fine.’

  Isaac watches me closely, as if he’s reading something hidden in my eyes. ‘You’re a good mother, Sarah. You know that, don’t you?’

  My gaze drifts to the space between us. ‘Am I? I’m not sure anyone else would agree.’

  I hear the shift of sand beneath Isaac’s feet as he moves closer. ‘People here have been talking about that day on the water with Marley and Jacob.’

  Course they have. It was one of the many reasons why I know selling the hut is the only decision.

  ‘They think you sent the boys out swimming. Set a competition for them to reach the buoy marker. The rumour is you forgot to watch them – that’s why Marley drowned.’

  I shrug again, not wanting to get into this with Isaac. I’ve made my bed.

  ‘But I know that didn’t happen.’ Isaac’s dark gaze is square on my face. There’s something unsettling in the intensity of his expression, a familiarity that reminds me of Jacob. ‘I saw what happened, Sarah.’

  I’m slow to understand – to register his meaning.

  ‘From my boat. I saw what happened between Jacob and Marley.’

  My breath shortens. ‘You can’t have.’

  ‘I worried a lot about whether I should have told you – but I didn’t want Jacob to get into trouble. I didn’t want to hurt you.’

  I see it then, the depth of feeling he’s always held for me.

  ‘But you knew all along, too,’ Isaac says.

  I nod, feeling the pulse of a connection between us: we were both carrying Jacob’s secret, protecting him.

  Isaac’s gaze slides away to the sea, as if considering something in the soft patterns of the swell. ‘Has he ever told you why he did it?’