Yes, My Darling Daughter

by Margaret Leroy

  “You need to say goodbye now, Sylvie,” I tell her.

  I go to take her hand. To my intense relief she lets me pull her away from him. Her hand is cold and limp in mine, as though some vital energy has sunk in her.

  We thank him again and go out onto the path. Gordon shuts the door behind us. Dust from the house has clung to us. You can feel its dryness on the tips of your fingers, and there’s a yellowish bloom like pollen on our clothes.

  Sylvie is frowning. “He didn’t give me a kiss,” she says as we go to open the car. “Is he cross with me, Grace?”

  “No, of course he’s not cross with you, sweetheart. He doesn’t really know you. People don’t kiss other people that they don’t really know.”

  “He does. He does know me. Grace, he does.”

  We climb into the car, and Adam drives away. Sylvie twists around as she always does, staring out of the rear window until we turn the corner and the house is lost to view.

  I turn to face her. “What were you looking for, sweetheart?” I say. “Why did you open the cupboards?”

  “Lennie wasn’t there,” she says.

  Whenever she talks about Lennie, I feel a surge of hurt about Karen and what happened.

  “Lennie’s in London,” I tell her, as I always do.

  She ignores this. It’s as though I hadn’t spoken. She speaks over me.

  “I couldn’t find Lennie. Where’s Lennie hiding?” she says.

  Adam pulls the car over, stops abruptly on the shoulder of the road. He twists around to face Sylvie.

  “Sylvie, who’s Lennie?” he says. “Who is she?”

  “She’s like me, Adam. She looks like me. Two peas in a pod. I told you.”

  It must be as Karen suggested. It’s that complete and perfect family that Sylvie has invented, and a perfect imaginary friend—someone a bit like Lennie but who will always do what she wants, like another part of her.

  But Adam doesn’t think this.

  “Did you and Lennie play hide-and-seek?” he says.

  “Yes, of course, Adam,” says Sylvie. “Me and Lennie.”

  She sounds quite matter-of-fact, but she looks so fragile and pale. Her mouth quivers.

  “D’you think you could tell us who Lennie is?” says Adam.

  Sylvie begins to cry, quietly, bleakly. Her tears spill over her face, and she doesn’t brush them away.

  “Leave it, Adam,” I tell him. “Just leave it, okay?”

  He shrugs slightly. I know he disagrees with me, but he starts up the engine again.

  I take a tissue, reach back to wipe Sylvie’s face.

  “Don’t cry, sweetheart.”

  She pushes the tissue away. “I can always find Lennie,” she says through her tears. Her voice is fierce with protest. “She’s really good at hiding. But in the end I always find her. Where’s Lennie gone to?” she says.

  “I don’t know, sweetheart. I don’t really know who Lennie is.”

  Her tears go on falling, and I can’t stop them.

  “You’ve got to find her for me, Grace,” she says.

  44

  THE NEXT DAY, Sylvie seems happier. She comes with me to breakfast and eats a lot of toast.

  “Can I go and look at the boats?” she asks when she’s finished. “I like to look at the boats.”

  I tell her yes. We walk to the seafront with Adam.

  It’s a blue and glimmery day, the tide far out, the beach a perfect white crescent, so pure and clean it’s like it’s just been made. Way down by the sea, the sand has a sheen where it’s been smoothed out by the water, with no mark of a human footprint, just the exact webbed print of a bird. I’d love to walk there.

  “Sylvie, why don’t we go down on the beach? It looks so lovely,” I say. “We wouldn’t have to go anywhere near the sea.”

  “No.” Her closed face. “I don’t want to.”

  There’s someone new on the seafront today: a woman has set up her stall in front of a shop that sells Irish crafts and bodhrans with your name on them. She’s hoping maybe for tourists or for day-trippers from Galway, though it seems a little optimistic so early in the year. The woman is young, she looks about nineteen, and I wonder if she’s an art student; she has earrings made of feathers, and tattoos. She sells Celtic crosses on leather thongs, and woven belts and bracelets, and there’s a sign with photographs, to show she will braid your hair. We say hello as we pass, and Sylvie stops by the photographs.

  “I want a hair braid,” she tells me.

  “Okay. If you’d like one.”

  We pay our five euros. The woman smiles at Sylvie.

  “Shall we choose your colors?” she says.

  She has her threads laid out on a tray. She looks at Sylvie with an artist’s appraising eye.

  “You’re a real little Nordic blonde. You’re so lucky to have that coloring.” She turns to me. “Isn’t she lucky?”

  “Yes, I guess so,” I say.

  “Nothing too obvious, I think. We don’t want to overwhelm her.”

  She pulls out sherbet colors, strawberry, lemon, pistachio.

  “D’you like them, darling?” she says to Sylvie.

  Sylvie nods.

  She sits on the stool in front of the woman. The woman starts to weave. She has deft, clever hands with bitten nails. The cuffs fall back from her wrists as she works; you can see the tattoos on her forearms, the intricate serpents and arabesques, and the serpents seem to slither around as her muscles tense and ease.

  Adam and I sit on the seawall and watch. I think about Flag Cottage.

  “D’you think we’ll ever make sense of it all?” I ask him.

  I hear how tired my voice sounds.

  Maybe Adam hears it too. He takes my hand between his hands. Desire moves through me at the touch of his skin. I hear my breathing quicken.

  “Grace, don’t despair,” he tells me. “We just need to keep on asking—give Sylvie a chance to tell us.”

  We sit for a while in silence. I look around at the white, blowy beach. The salt breeze fingers my face. Way out, there’s a lobster boat, with a smoke of seagulls behind it. The silence spills over between us and scares me.

  He moves his hand to cradle my head, pulls me toward him, just brushes my mouth with his mouth. It’s the lightest kiss, but I feel it right through me. I feel undone by his touch.

  Sylvie comes running back to us, and we edge away from each other. When I blink, there’s a dazzle against my darkened eyelids, as though all the light from the water has got into my eyes.

  Sylvie spins so her braid flies out.

  “It’s pretty, isn’t it, Grace?”

  Adam photographs her on his cell phone. The image is bright and blurry with her movement. He shows her the picture, and she’s pink and flushed with pleasure.

  I’m thinking about what Adam said. We just need to keep on asking. I decide I will seize this moment—when she’s so relaxed and pleased.

  I crouch down, put my hands on her shoulders, holding her there in front of me.

  “Sweetheart, there’s something I need to ask you,” I say.

  She’s smiling, looking into my face.

  “Yes, Grace.”

  My mouth is thick, like blotting paper. I wish now I hadn’t started on this. I’m scared I will make her unhappy.

  “It’s about Flag Cottage. About the people who disappeared . . .”

  “Yes,” she says.

  “And what you told us about before . . .”

  My throat seizes up. I can’t quite say it out loud.

  “When I died, Grace?”

  “Yes. Then.”

  Her face is quiet and serious.

  “Can you tell me what happened?” I ask her.

  “I told you,” she says. “The water was red.”

  “Is there anything else you remember?”

  “The water was cold and red. It hurt me, Grace. It hurt me here,” she says.

  She touches her chest with one finger.

  I shiver when she
says that.

  “What hurt you, sweetheart? Was it a person who hurt you? Can you tell me?”

  Her expression is blank, as though she doesn’t understand the question.

  “It hurt, and I saw the bubbles,” she says. “Lots of bubbles went up from my mouth.”

  I move my hands to her face. I feel how chilly her skin is.

  “Sylvie. Can you tell us what happened before? Before the water?”

  She doesn’t say anything. Maybe she doesn’t know, can’t answer.

  “Sweetheart. Before the water. Who was there?”

  Her face is shuttered. I feel her slipping away from me.

  I try again.

  “The water where this happened, sweetheart. Where was it? Can you remember?”

  She doesn’t say anything.

  “Is it a place that we’ve seen?” I ask.

  But she slides from my hands, goes running along the seafront. She stops by the window of Barry’s and studies her reflection in the pane.

  45

  THAT NIGHT, WE eat again at Joe Moloney’s in Ballykilleen. Sylvie plays with her hair braid, wrapping it around her hand.

  “D’you like it?” she says. “It’s really pretty, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, it’s pretty,” I tell her.

  It’s utterly dark when we leave, all around us the great still scented quiet of the Irish night. Adam drives slowly. A dazed sheep runs in front of the car, then lurches off into the blackness.

  We come to the right turn that leads across Coldharbour Bog. There’s a sign that says YIELD, and usually Adam stops here. He brakes, but the car glides forward, over the line.

  “Shit,” he says.

  My pulse races off.

  “What’s wrong?” I ask him.

  “I think it’s the brakes. They feel kind of spongy,” he says.

  He drives on very slowly to a place where the road is wider, pulls over, turns off the ignition. It’s so quiet in the car without the engine noise.

  I can see the black of the sky and the denser dark of the mountains, and the lights of Coldharbour far off, like a handful of bright beads flung down.

  “But can’t we just drive on—you know, really slowly?” I say.

  “No, we can’t,” he tells me.

  I feel the dark edge closer.

  “Please, Adam.” There’s a shred of panic in my voice. “I don’t want to stop here.”

  “No. There’s no way I’d risk it. Not with Sylvie in the car.”

  “But if we just drive very slowly?”

  “No, Grace.”

  There’s something hard in his voice—I sense he could get angry with me. I glance at him. He looks shaken. I think about Jake, of the fear he must have that something like that could happen again. I feel a surge of protectiveness, wanting to reach out and put my hand on his arm.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “I’ll shut up now.”

  “I’ll ring the AA. We’ll just have to wait,” he tells me.

  He turns on the map light, starts flicking through the information folder. With the light on, there’s a deeper darkness to the night outside. We’re so exposed now, people miles away could see us.

  “Adam. If it’s the brakes, could someone have done something to them?”

  Yet even as I say it, it seems a wild idea.

  “Grace. Calm down,” he tells me. “I’m sure nobody’s tampered with anything.”

  But I see his frown, the sharp little lines between his brows.

  I wind my window down. Cool air touches my cheek, carrying the smell of the peat bog, that heavy scent of roots and rot and wet. The countryside smells stronger at night. In the frail gleam from the map light, the cotton grass has a bleached look. You can hear the strange, scraping croak of some hidden frog or bird, and a hissing in the grasses, the incessant seethe of the wind.

  Adam is making his call.

  “Can’t you be any quicker? We’ve got a young child in the car.”

  I hear the anger in his voice. He’s more worried than he’s admitting to me.

  “They’ll be an hour,” he tells me.

  I feel afraid, but I don’t know what I’m afraid of.

  I turn to Sylvie. “We’re going to have a bit of a wait,” I tell her.

  She undoes her seat belt, leans across the seats between us. She’s looking at the Saint Christopher that hangs in the front of the car. She taps it with one finger, and it sends out sparkles of light.

  “You could read your comic,” I tell her.

  I hand her Big Ted and the comic and a felt-tip.

  “I’m hungry,” she tells me.

  I have emergency supplies that I bought at Barry’s this afternoon—a Twix, a packet of potato chips. I give her the Twix; she pushes down the paper, takes a bite. She sits back in her seat, but she can’t seem to get comfortable, and I take off my sweater to make a pillow for her head. She opens her comic and works on one of the puzzles, using her felt-tip to trace a path through a maze. Now and then she picks up the Twix and takes a little bite. There’s a sepia trace of chocolate around her mouth. Whatever scares me about this place doesn’t seem to frighten her.

  We sit there in the quiet. My breathing seems too loud. I hear the click as Adam clears his throat. The Saint Christopher goes on moving long after Sylvie has touched it, as though it’s stirred by some secret movement of air.

  And then the moon rises, moving above the mountains—a full moon, bright and sudden, like a light switched on. You can see the patterning on it, the penciling in of cold, vast craters and seas. Everything is washed in its cool whiteness. I realize I am shivering without my sweater.

  When I first hear the car, it’s a very long way off. Sound travels for miles across this empty land.

  My heart pounds. I turn slightly toward Adam. He’s tense, alert. I know he’s heard it too.

  The sound grows slightly louder. The car is coming down from the mountains, coming the way we came. Sometimes it’s louder, sometimes it fades where a wall or hillock blocks the sound, but always drawing closer. It stops for a moment, and I know it’s reached the intersection at the edge of the bog, the road we came by. I will it to turn left, to follow the road that leads off toward Barrowmore, willing it with all my strength—as though with the force of my mind I could actually make it change course. But it starts up again, and the noise draws nearer, coming straight toward us, its approach quite steady across the flat, straight road through the bog. The sound is so clear and distinct, you can tell when the driver changes gear.

  I glance at Adam again. He’s drumming his fingers rapidly on the steering wheel.

  I’m watching in the wing mirror. I can see it now—the thin, long thread from its headlights, bright where it falls on water or gilds the blowing grass. Then the road turns a little, and the light shines straight in the mirror, so I’m briefly dazzled. I hear the engine slow. The car pulls to a stop behind us. I hear the thud of my heart.

  The driver turns off the headlights. A door swings open, a man gets out, straightens, comes toward us. He’s a big man, but I can’t see him clearly in the darkness. Then he moves through the square of flimsy light that falls from the side of our car.

  “Thank God,” I say. With a quick, warm rush of relief, I recognize Marcus Paul. “It’s Marcus. It’s okay, Adam, it’s okay. I know who it is.”

  I open my door. Marcus Paul comes to my side of the car. He has a tentative half smile. I’m so happy to see him.

  “Now, I think it’s Grace, isn’t that right?” he says. “We met at St. Vincent’s, didn’t we? Brigid told me who you were.”

  “We’ve broken down,” I tell him.

  “I kind of worked that out.” His smile is a little ironic.

  “This is Adam,” I tell him.

  “Delighted to meet you, Adam,” says Marcus. He bends and reaches across me so he can shake hands with Adam. He’s wearing some cologne that has a spicy, opulent scent. I feel a flicker of inchoate desire, briefly reminded of Dominic.

&
nbsp; “And this is Sylvie,” I say.

  I turn toward her.

  Sylvie is intent on her maze. She doesn’t even look up at him.

  “Sylvie. Delighted,” says Marcus.

  He smiles at her, but she’s staring at her comic. He reaches to shake her hand, he’s being charming, treating her like a grown-up, but she won’t put her hand out, so instead he pats her arm.

  “I like Twixes too,” he says.

  I feel a flicker of irritation that she won’t even smile at him when he’s so polite to her.

  “I can give you folks a lift back to the village,” he tells us.

  “We’d be so grateful,” says Adam.

  “What I suggest—you could leave the car here till the morning and see Jimmy Flynn at the garage. He’s got a tow truck.”

  “I will,” says Adam. “Thank you.”

  “And when we get back to the village,” says Marcus, “I’d be delighted if you’d all come to my house for a drink.”

  I’m so happy at the prospect of seeing inside Kinvara House.

  Adam rings the AA to tell them not to come.

  “What are we doing?” says Sylvie.

  “We’re having a drink at Kinvara House. We’ll go in Marcus’s car.”

  “No. I’m not going to.”

  I feel a brief, hot rage.

  “Well, sweetheart, that’s what we’re doing,” I tell her briskly.

  “I don’t want to, Grace.”

  This time I won’t give in. I’m longing to see inside the house and to get to know Marcus a little better. I’m not going to pass up my chance of that.

  “Sylvie, it’ll be fine. It’s that great big house, the one with the falcons and the gorgeous garden. You’ll love it . . .”

  I hunt for a tissue to wipe the chocolate from her mouth. She has muddy legs and an ice-cream stain on her fleece. I wish she looked a bit cleaner. I want Marcus to think I am a good mother.

  I wipe her mouth. She twists away from my hand.

  “You’re hurting, Grace.”

  We climb into Marcus’s car, which has a rich male scent of leather. Sylvie stares out the window. I have a weak, shamed feeling—as you do when you’ve been afraid, yet your fear has proved utterly groundless.