“She’s gone, Hazel,” Rose says angrily. “And this is fucking creepy and I want to go home.”
I whistle one last time, without much hope.
“If you think I’m getting into that water after you, you can dream the fuck on,” Rose warns. “Come back or I’m leaving without you.”
I wade back. I stand dripping in front of her and she’s shivering almost as much as I am. She’s tall but I’m taller. We’re almost eye to eye.
“I don’t know what I’m doing here,” she whispers.
I sort of wave behind me in the direction of the lake. “We followed the dog . . .”
“No, I mean I don’t know what I’m doing. Here.” She points down at her feet, which are right in front of mine. I’m dripping on the shore. I don’t know what she means and then I kinda do.
“With me,” I say like a question.
Rose sighs. “With all of this,” she answers. She looks back at the forest with its lost things, its findings, its string. With its smell of smoke and its yellow eyes watching us quietly from between the trees. “I don’t know if it’s still whatever we drank last night, or . . .” She trails off. “It’s all just kind of fucked.”
I drip lake water on the rocks and I tell her, “I think I’m falling in love with you.”
Rose gives a helpless laugh. “You hardly know me,” she says.
“Sure I do.”
“I hardly know you.”
“I want you to,” I say. “Know me. But I’m afraid you won’t like what you see.”
I want to tell her, Being with you makes me feel like I deserve to be loved. Like I’m less of a monster. Like if you trust me, that means I can trust myself.
Rose shakes her head. I don’t know how to convince her when I can’t convince myself. Trust. Acceptance. I decide right then to tell her the truth. Cold dread sweeps through me. That feeling that’s been building. I feel like it’s been leading up to this. “Nothing behind me, everything ahead of me,” I say softly.
“No offense,” Rose says, “but that’s a really stupid way to live.”
“Not if you’re a monster.”
Rose laughs drily. “I’ve seen pretty much every bit of your body, Hazel,” she says. “I think I’d’ve noticed the spikes and the scales.”
“I killed my parents,” I tell her. Four words. My voice is so thin, it could fit through a needle. Shaky as a leaf. Colder than cold.
I can’t feel anything. I can’t feel my skin.
“What?” she says. I take my hands out of my pockets. Half the lake spills onto the rocks. The key looks like it’s part of a shipwreck. The lighter still sparks fire. The words come out like they’re spilling on the rocks themselves.
“After our granny died and our granda went into the hospice, Rowan and I had to go back to live with Mom and Dad. We were staying in a rental place just outside Wexford. My parents were fighting, so I packed our stuff, only the things we couldn’t bear to leave behind. My dad passed out in the bedroom—they’d both been drinking. His stuff was packed, too, but I don’t think Mom knew that. She should have, though. He never stayed anywhere for very long.
“She was wasted. Asleep on the couch with a cigarette in her mouth. We’d been there three weeks and I’d lost track of how many times I’d had to take a lit cigarette out of her hand when she’d passed out pissed on the couch. It was like she’d forgotten all about what had happened to Rowan. She said she was sorry, but she never changed.”
A flicker of a question crosses Rose’s face and I explain about the locked room, the lit cigarette, the burning flat, Rowan’s scar. Rose’s eyes are wide.
“I guess I just wanted to teach her a lesson,” I tell her. “I guess I just wanted to show her what she’d done. Let her sit with her own fate. Rowan’s scarred forever because of her. Of them. Of Dad. I dunno. They’d locked the door and he’d got burned and here she was again and I was just so mad.
“I lit her cigarette. I took it off her and I lit it with my lighter and I left the lighter open and didn’t kill the flame. There was a bottle of drink spilled on the table. There wasn’t much, but I saw it. There was a magazine open beside her. The tassels of the cheap throw on the couch. It was all so close together. All it would’ve needed was a small spark.
“I lit the cigarette. I left the lighter. Rowan was already outside with our bags. I thought I saw a light. A spark. Hot ash falling. Bright enough to catch a flame. But I still left.
“And when I left I locked the door.”
Olive
Monday, May 15th
Lost: A sister
None of us slept much last night. In the morning I wake up slowly and it takes me a moment to figure out why I haven’t been called out of sleep by my dad’s reciting voice. My mom has left a note on the kitchen table.
Gone to station with Gillian to help find Emily. Max is at Nana’s. Call us when you’re awake.
I message to let her know I’m up and that Rose and I will comb the town for Emily. I slip her note into my pocket.
Rose comes over and hugs me tight. She looks like she didn’t sleep well last night either, but when I ask if she’s okay she shrugs off the question and says she’s here to help find Emily.
We call all Emily’s friends. None of them have seen her, but we can’t get through to Chloe, so I figure they’re together, which is something at least. It means she can’t have gone far. Or else that Chloe’s still asleep, or out looking for her own missing brother. My heart twists.
We look through what we can find of Emily’s online activity over the last couple of days. Pictures of her nail polish, of her made-up eyes, of her shoes. Posts about hating exams and saccharine self-help quotes on floral backgrounds. We drop by any of the places we’d have hung out at her age. The parking lot of the old service station. The empty playground. The low walls around some of her friends’ houses.
“It’s nothing,” I keep saying, trying to make sure my voice doesn’t shake. “She’s having an all-night marathon of crappy romantic comedies with some friends and hasn’t charged her phone. Or she’s just tried her first beer and is throwing up in a bathroom somewhere.” By saying it enough, I hope I’ll come to believe it. I hope I’ll manifest it into being. Conjure Emily up from wherever she’s hiding. But, as the morning goes on, my panic intensifies.
The playground is deserted when we get to it, so we stop for a minute and sit on the swings.
Rose wraps her arms around the chains of the swing and asks, “Do you think we can trust them?”
I don’t need to ask who she’s referring to. Secrets on tunnel walls, inked skin, kisses over handlebars.
“What makes you say that?”
“Nothing really.” She leans her head on the chain and swings sideways, knocking gently into me. “It’s just, they’re just so . . . mysterious, I guess. Like they’re keeping secrets.”
“Yeah,” I say. “But I think they’re okay. Troubled, yeah, but I think they’re working through a lot of stuff. Dead grandparents, neglectful parents.”
Rose looks at me sharply.
“What has Rowan told you?” she asks. “About their parents.”
“Apart from what we already know about them abandoning their kids with the grandparents and generally being shit at parenting?” I say.
Rose nods. So I tell her what Rowan told me about the fire, about his burned skin.
“Hazel said something about that,” Rose says quietly.
“But he doesn’t think his mom’s a bad person,” I go on. “Just messed up because of her relationship. He said their dad is . . . controlling. Abusive maybe. He thinks that’s why their mother drinks.”
I don’t say, I think that’s why they drink, too.
“My mom used to know her,” I say instead. “Amy Kennedy. Their mom. Nana said she was a troublemaker.”
“What did you
r mom say?”
“They lost touch when my mom left on her world tour to find herself. She says they haven’t spoken since.”
“When we first met,” Rose says, “I showed Hazel the messages I’d been getting from Cathal, and she said her dad was kind of like that. With her mom. Controlling, like you said. Abusive. But Hazel seems to blame her mom most of all.” Rose’s voice sounds strange, distant, like there’s something she isn’t telling me.
My mind drifts to my own parents: the poetry and the coffee smells, the groundings, the dogs. Max’s and Emily’s music blaring from opposite ends of the landing, vying for loudest.
I think softly, Emily, where the hell are you?
It’s nearing noon when the twins and Ivy meet up with us.
“Still no sign?” Rowan asks as they pull up beside us on their bikes. Rose and I shake our heads.
“If she was over at a friend’s house, she might not even be awake yet,” Hazel says. “That’s probably why she hasn’t called.”
Rose puts a hand on my shoulder. “That is probably it, you know,” she says. “She’s gonna wake up in a couple of hours with her first hangover and call your mom to come get her.”
“I know,” I say, my voice a little weak. I’ve done the exact same thing many a time since I was her age.
Rowan touches my hair gently before suggesting we split up to cover more ground. Rose, Hazel, and Ivy head in one direction, Rowan and I go in the other.
We end up at Maguire’s, where Mags is stacking glasses behind the bar.
“Have you seen my sister around at all?” I ask Mags. “Her name’s Emily? She’s thirteen? Skinny, tallish, blond shoulder-length hair?” I take out my phone and show her a picture.
“I don’t serve minors,” says Mags, and I raise one disbelieving eyebrow right up into my bangs. She looks down at the picture. “Sorry, pet,” she says. “I haven’t seen your sister. I’m sure she’ll show up, though.”
“I know she will,” I tell her. “I’d just rather it be before my parents each have a heart attack.”
“I’m sure she will, pet,” Mags says, in what I assume must be her softest voice, before turning to Rowan and saying in her usual abrasive tone, “If you don’t move that feckin’ guitar out of my storeroom, I’ll burn the damn thing.”
Rowan gives Mags an ironic salute and leads me down a narrow corridor beside the bar to the storeroom (which is barely a broom closet), where he grabs his guitar and shoves it into its case.
“Wait,” I say. “Stop.”
I unzip the case and take the guitar back out. Stuck between the strings is a piece of paper. It’s probably sheet music or chords or something, but I take it out anyway.
It isn’t sheet music. It’s a page from a notebook. A diary. I pick it up and hand it to Rowan. I recognize Laurel’s handwriting well enough at this point. I don’t know how it could possibly have got in here, but when Rowan reads it out to me I’m not even surprised.
“Something was building and it wasn’t the storm.”
It’s about Saturday night. Two days ago. The night we cast the calling, the night of the storm. The night Ash knocked at the door and we lost her in the woods.
As Rowan reads, my face clouds over. It’s the lead-up to that night. The storm starts; Ash and Laurel go to the forest to find Holly kissing Jude in the tree. They drink something he gives them that sounds like it’s spiked.
Ash tells Laurel she’s the one who took their diaries. That’s how they went missing.
Ash running through the forest in the rain. Ash with the torn pages of the diaries in her hands. Ash running over the rubble.
Rowan falls silent, staring at the paper. Then he grabs my hand.
“We have to tell Hazel,” he says.
“Tell her what?” I ask, but he breaks into a run and pulls me along behind him, across the street and down a side road to Emily’s favorite café, where Rose told me she and the others were going to look next. Rose is just coming out of the café. Hazel is waiting outside with Ivy.
Rowan stamps right up to his sister and says, “Our mother’s middle name is Aisling. Ash-ling.”
“So?” says Hazel.
“So it’s been staring us in the face all along.”
“What has?” Rose asks.
“She always said we’d’ve hated her if she’d stayed in this nothing town,” Rowan says. He thrusts the newest diary entry at Hazel. “This nothing town.”
Rose says, “What do you mean? What’s wrong?”
But I feel the penny drop. It slaps onto the back of my hand like a tiny tin medal. Heads or tails?
“That’s why we don’t know them.” I almost want to laugh. “Ash and Laurel and Holly. They weren’t at the town bonfire party—at least, not the party that happened last Saturday. They didn’t lose their diaries last week.”
Rowan nods. “They lost those diaries years ago.”
“Of course.” Ivy’s eyes are bright. “Of course.”
“Well, fuck it all,” Hazel says eloquently, and she sits heavily on the café windowsill. “Ash is our mother.”
Laurel
July 29, 1997; July 30, 1999; October 21, 2006
Found: Three lost letters (the third unsent); half a thought on a scrap of paper
July 29, 1997
Dear Holly,
I thought that if I left town I could forget everything, but traveling only makes the memories sharper. Things come into focus. A few months ago in Greece I went to a lecture on the muses, but the speaker was more interested in talking about their mother, the titan goddess Mnemosyne, who gave her name to a river in Hades, the one next door to the river Lethe. Lost souls drank from the Mnemosyne to remember like they drank from the Lethe to forget. Do you remember her name in the spellbook? I could still recite the list of offerings. Even this far away, everything comes back to home.
Last month, in Paris, I stayed with some art students and drank absinthe that would make Mags Maguire green with envy. Is it the magic she distills with the sugar and barley that conjures up visions, or is it that we expect the visions to happen that makes it so? Either way, these days I feel as if I have been drinking from the river of the goddess of memory, not the waters of oblivion.
I think about Jude sometimes, trying to tell us the tale of Icarus as if he was teaching us something new.
I ramble a lot in these letters, don’t I? It’s only because I miss you. I won’t be home again for a while, although I won’t be as far as I am now—St. Petersburg is beautiful, golden and cold, you would love it. Come October I’ll be in Dublin, starting a degree in Classics. Wait until you meet Daniel, Holly. You’ll love him more than St. Petersburg. I already do.
My best to your mom, and if ever Ash happens by again tell her I think of her often.
All my love,
Laurel
July 30, 1999
Dear Laurel,
I found a letter you sent me two years ago today. Things keep going missing and turning up again, although I expect you will tell me it’s because I’m scatty. Perhaps I am. Or maybe even, years later, the spell we cast lingers. In it—the letter—you wrote about the goddess Mnemosyne. I can still remember the list of offerings suggested in the spellbook. Lost eyelashes, swathes of silk, ripe acorns, small flames.
You were in St. Petersburg after Paris, after Athens, after Marrakesh. I have hardly been out of the county. Sometimes I worry I might disappear. Things are so quiet now without Mom around. I find myself ghosting through the house.
You mentioned Ash in the letter, too. I can count on one hand the letters in which you mention Ash. She came back to town last month. Her and Jude. She has changed so much in—could it be?—four years. And yet she hasn’t changed a bit. I told her you think of her often, because I don’t expect that that has changed. I told her you’re pregnant. You have that in common. S
he’s carrying twins. Already her belly is twice the size of yours.
Do you remember we all got our first periods together? It was the same week. We bled at the same time every month from that day forward. Now all three of them have stopped, for a time. My belly’s swelling slowly. If I have a daughter, I’ll call her Ivy. It’s a hardy little climbing plant.
With love,
Holly
October 21, 2006
Dear Holly and Laurel,
There is so much I want to write, I can’t bear it. It would be impossible to make you understand.
I told you one day that I saw the future. That I knocked on its door and it opened for me and I saw what was going to be. It was the night of the storm. When I ran from you, I lost my way. I came across a house that wasn’t there. I thought I’d got turned around. The oak tree where we found the spellbook, where we found Jude, had disappeared. So had half the forest. Leading all the way to my house. Those trees they were felling to make the road—I know now that that road led straight to there.
There was no oak tree. Only these houses—a whole development of them, big but abandoned. I heard voices inside one of them. I knocked on the door. I saw the future. I saw his children. Jude’s. They looked exactly like him. Twins. A boy and a girl—tall, with curly brown hair and a million freckles. The same chin, the same nose. The boy so like him I almost believed it was Jude. But they were bruised and broken. Cuts on his face and mud on their skin.
I don’t know how I knew that what I was seeing would come to be, but I did. I thought they were your children, Holly—yours and Jude’s. I thought that if you stayed with him that’s what would happen. I didn’t see you. I just saw the abandoned house, the abandoned children, and I knew that he was trouble.
You said it once, Laurel, long ago. He’s trouble. Stay away from him, or you’ll lose everything.
I knew I had to warn you. I knew I had to stop him. It’s only now, years later—five years after you’ve stopped talking to me, Laurel—that I’ve realized they were not Holly’s children. They were mine. Mine and his. They look so like him already.
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