The Accidental Family

by Rowan Coleman

  “No, no, no!” she shouted, kicking the car and immediately feeling it kick back through her toe and spine.

  Where was Seth? Where had he taken them?

  Sophie knew nothing about Seth except that his mum lived in Newquay and he went to college in Falmouth. She didn’t know if he could drive, or if he had a car. And she had no idea what he wanted with her girls. She had to think, she had to get her body and her brain moving. She had to get to them as soon as she possibly could.

  Grabbing her phone she dialed Carmen’s number and held her breath while she waited for her to pick up.

  “Ye Olde Tea Shoppe,” Carmen said as she picked up.

  “Carmen, I’m at the school and …and Seth’s back, he’s—he’s got the girls, my car’s clamped. I don’t know where they are, I don’t know anything, or what to do …”

  “Stay there,” Carmen said. “I’ll be with you in five.”

  • • •

  True to her word, Carmen walked out of the tea shop leaving a regular customer in charge and was at Sophie’s side in minutes.

  “Right, let’s think,” Carmen said as Sophie scrambled into her car. “Now, we know he’s not a nut or a pervert. He’s not going to hurt them. He’s just a messed-up kid who’s done something stupid.”

  “Do we know that?” Sophie asked Carmen, her heart gripped with icy fear as the car pulled away from the roadside. “Do we know he’s not going to hurt them? Because if anything happened to them because of me, I’d never …how would I? I couldn’t …”

  “Shush,” Carmen told her. “The police are already looking, they were already asking around when I left the tea shop. I’ve told all my customers to keep an eye out. He won’t take them out of St. Ives, I’m sure of it. Bella wouldn’t let him; she’s done stranger danger, she knows what to do.”

  “But he’s not a stranger, he’s her brother and she’ll be trying to find out about him, get to know everything—you know what she’s like.”

  “No, I’m sure he’ll have taken them somewhere they know. What about the park? Let’s try the park.”

  Sophie hadn’t known that the passing of time could be so agonizing. As Carmen drove her to the park, each second that passed without her being certain of the exact whereabouts of her girls dragged over her, rasping every inch of her skin as she battled with the fear of the unknown, and every moment passed too quickly, too much time slipping by between the last time she had known they were safe and now, as if they were gradually falling out of her reach.

  The park was empty except for some bored teenagers leaning against the swings and spinning slowly around on the merry-go-round as if they were gang members in L.A. and not a bunch of kids in Cornwall.

  “Excuse me,” Sophie said, marching over to them, aware that the tone and pitch of her voice would instantly alienate them, high and angry as it was. “Have you seen a man, tall and dark, with longish hair, and two little girls in here this afternoon?”

  “Why?” one of the boys asked her as he kicked one more revolution out of the merry-go-round. “He a pervert or something?”

  “No …no, they’re my …I’m looking after them and I need to find them, please,” Sophie pleaded. “If you’ve seen them …”

  “Pigs have already been round here asking,” another kid spoke up, from the top of the climbing frame. “We’ve been here since four and we’ve not seen them.”

  “Really?”

  “What, you saying I’m lying?” the boy challenged her.

  “Sophie, come on,” Carmen called from across the park.

  “Yeah, Sophie, go on,” one of the boys said.

  “Hey, Sophie, got any smokes?” another one called as Sophie hurried back to Carmen.

  “What else you got under that jacket, Sophie?” she heard as she shut the car door.

  “Take no notice of them,” Carmen said. “They’re just idiot kids, they don’t know anything. I was thinking we should go and check the house, you never know—and Bella knows the neighbor’s got a key.”

  But when they got back to the house, it was standing quiet in the twilight, no lights on in any room, no outward sign of life. Just to be certain Carmen waited in her car with the engine switched on as Sophie raced through the house checking every room, pausing in the girls’ bedrooms, looking at the clothes strewn thoughtlessly across the floor, the school shoes discarded in a corner. The house had never seemed more empty. She picked up the phone and listened to the single monotonous ring tone; there were no messages waiting.

  As she scrambled back into Carmen’s car, the sun was already low in the sky.

  “Seth hasn’t thought this through, he doesn’t know what he’s doing,” Sophie said anxiously. “It will be dark before long—and then what? He’s never been to Louis’s house, he doesn’t know where they live. What’s he going to do then? What if he panics and realizes how much trouble he’s in …? Then what’s he going to do? Wendy said he was impulsive. The last time Louis saw him he was agitated, on some sort of drugs, he’s sometimes violent …oh god, Carmen.”

  “There’s no point in thinking about that now, he’s just a kid, a boy. He’s not going to do anything stupid. All we have to do is think …where else might they go? Would he take them to one of the beaches? Maybe they’re at one of those having an ice cream or something. Think about it, he’s doing it to find out about Louis, to find out about being a big brother. He’ll want them to like him, to be impressed by him. He’ll have taken them out for ice cream somewhere, I bet you. He won’t have thought about all of this pain, he’s just a kid himself. He’ll have thought he was doing a good thing.”

  “The beaches,” Sophie said quietly, willing herself to believe in Carmen’s logic even though it was cold and getting dark and the likelihood of a cone of Mr. Whippy on the beach seemed ever diminishing, like the beaches themselves as the tide came in. But it was something to do and she had to do something. “Let’s check them.”

  They drove from beach to beach as the sun sank into the sea. They stopped to talk to dog walkers and hard-core swimmers in wet suits, most of whom said that the police had already asked the same questions. All of them said they hadn’t seen the girls or Seth. They’d been walking along the wall of the harbor when Sophie sighted her first woman police constable speaking to some die-hard tourists sitting huddled on benches, warming themselves over fresh pastries.

  “I’m Sophie Mills,” she told them. “The girls’ guardian while their father’s away. Has anyone seen them?” The constable was very young, her face smooth and round. She didn’t look older than Seth himself, and her discomfort in talking to a distraught woman was palpable.

  “It would help if you had a photo to give us.” She offered the advice apologetically.

  “No,” Sophie said, shaking her head and glancing at her watch as moment after moment separated her further from the children.

  “Yes, madam, it really does help to have a photo,” the young woman told her. “Hold on here and I’ll radio through to the station, get the sarge to come and have a word with you about protocol.”

  “No!” Sophie found herself shouting. “No, because …it’s not that bad, it’s not that serious. They haven’t been abducted. They’re just somewhere around here. We just need to look.”

  “A photo would help,” the policewoman told her, unable to look her in the eye. “Seriously, it’s only something to help jog people’s memories. It doesn’t make it any more serious. It will help.”

  “This is a waste of my time,” Sophie gasped as she dragged her wallet out of her bag and handed the constable the school photo that she kept in the clear plastic part, the first photo of anyone that she had ever carried anywhere. It had been taken at the end of last term, Izzy with her hair sticking up vertically because she’d insisted on styling it herself that day and had a very individual idea on how a headband should be worn, and Bella, sitting alongside her, her smile prim and proper, her shoulders straight as she posed for the camera.

  “It’s my
only one,” Sophie said reluctantly as she handed it over.

  “We’ll find them,” the policewoman told her.

  “So he’s not taken them for ice cream,” Carmen said as soon as Sophie shut the car door. She kept her eyes ahead, on the road, determined not to let Sophie pause for thought as she pulled away and headed out of the town center. “And he wants to get to know them, he wants to find out about them. He’ll ask them about Carrie, about what it was like when Louis came back. Where would Bella take him? Where would she take him to explain everything? Maybe Carrie’s grave?”

  “Carrie doesn’t have a grave, she was scattered over the …oh my god.” Sophie looked at the cliffs that rose up behind the town.

  “They could be up there, they could have taken him to meet their mummy.”

  Carmen pulled the car up as close as she could to the footpath that led up to the cliff edge, driving her SUV much farther over the rough terrain than was strictly allowed, but the rest of the way had to be walked; once again Sophie found herself laboring uphill, against the clock, her heart pounding in her chest as she strove for the crest. As she finally reached it, she expected to see nothing but the empty expanse of the jagged edge of the land as it jutted into the sea, and the faint embers of the day dying in the sky.

  She caught her breath as she saw the silhouette of people on the horizon. They were sitting on the rough grass, and she couldn’t be sure how many there were or how old they were. They could as easily have been a courting couple or a pair of bird-watchers as two small girls and their confused older brother.

  Slowly, quietly—fearful of the sound of her own heart hammering in her chest—Sophie crept toward the group, holding her breath as the small huddle of humanity finally fell into focus. She stopped by an outcropping of rock about fifteen feet behind them, standing in the shadows, and let out a long, silent, sigh of relief. It was Seth. Seth and her girls, sitting at a safe, but still frighteningly close, distance from the cliff’s edge.

  Sophie edged carefully around the rock until she could make out what they were saying. She had to pick her moment, she had to make sure he couldn’t hurt them before she let him know she was there.

  “Mummy’s out there, somewhere,” Izzy was explaining. “And she’s in the trees and the sky and the lampposts and the bushes and the …sea and the boats and stuff. She’s everywhere, Aunty Sophie says, keeping an eye on us and loving us. But this is our best place to talk to her, here because this is her most favoritest place.”

  “Man, you must miss her a lot,” Sophie heard Seth say as she crept closer to him. He didn’t sound like a crazed loon who’d just kidnapped two children in order to hurt them. He didn’t even sound angry, just tired and, somehow, relaxed.

  “I’ve always had my mum,” he explained. “Mum’s always been around, but I never had a dad, except for a bit, and that turned out to be rubbish.”

  “We didn’t have our dad for a bit,” Bella told him. “He left us when I was little and Izzy wasn’t even born. I don’t think he meant to, but he went and …then it was just us and Mummy for ages.”

  “But he’s back now, yeah?” Seth asked her. “And that’s cool, right?”

  Sophie squinted into the gloom, afraid to move any closer. She could see evidence of sandwich wrappers and a Styrofoam cup lying on its side on the grass. Hot chocolate probably if Izzy had anything to do with it.

  “He was back until he found out about you,” Bella said, her tone darkening. “And then he went away again to find you. He kept going away and leaving us and now we don’t know where he is. Because he’s not with you.”

  “He was, babe,” Seth said, ruffling her hair. “Bloody hell, I’m sorry I messed you up. I didn’t really think about you lot. I was just angry with him and Mum, you know? For thinking it was cool to drop that on me from out of nowhere. I went off, acted like a fool. My mum and your dad have been chasing me round the bloody country and they haven’t finished yet. I never told them I was coming back down here today. I just had to get away from her, always telling me how it’s going to be. I’m not a kid anymore. I don’t need anyone to tell me how anything is going to be. I’ll decide that for myself.”

  “You’re not supposed to go anywhere without telling your mummy,” Bella chided him. “They told us that in stranger danger.”

  “And does your mummy know where you are?” Seth asked her uncomfortably.

  “Yes, ’cause we just told her,” Izzy said, pointing at the darkening sky. There was a moment’s silence.

  “I’ve never had a big brother before,” Izzy said. “Is there hugging? Hope so because I’m a bit chilly.”

  Seth was quiet for a moment, Sophie unable to see his expression as he looked out to sea.

  “I don’t know,” he said eventually. “I’ve never had really little kid sisters and stuff before. I don’t even know any kids. But I guess a quick hug should be all right.” Sophie watched as he put his arm around his four-year-old half sister and rubbed her shoulder briskly.

  “I should get you back, really,” he said. “I’ve caused enough trouble.”

  “But why? You’re our big brother,” Izzy said. “That’s allowed.”

  “Suzanne Dean’s big brother picks her up every Thursday for football practice,” Bella added.

  “Yeah, but she probably lives with her brother, she probably knows all about him. You’d never met me before today.”

  “You look a lot like Daddy,” Izzy said. “Only smoother.”

  “You don’t look much like that Wendy woman at all,” Bella added.

  Seth chuckled. “Is that what you call her?” he asked. “ ‘That Wendy woman’—it suits her.”

  “Are you cross with your mummy?” Izzy asked him, just as Sophie was about to make herself known. She paused, waiting to hear Seth’s answer.

  “She does my head in a lot of the time,” Seth said. “It’s like, I know she went through hell having me so young and on her own. And she’s done a bloody lot with her life considering. Got her own business, got her own place, pays her own bills, and got me to art college. She’s always done her best for me. But sometimes it feels like she thinks that because she’s done all of that, she owns me, you know? And this thing with your dad, my dad …It’s not like it’s the first time she’s tried to spring a bloke on me and told me this is the way it’s going to be. She was married once to this decent enough bloke when I was a bit older than you. She told me he was my dad, she told me to think about him like my dad and love him. I didn’t want to at first, but I did want to make her happy, you know, and she said that if I could love him, then I would make her happy. So I tried, and I got to like him. Love him even. It was a big deal for me, to have this bloke in my life, to share him with her and to trust him …and then it didn’t work out with her and he was gone. We never heard from him again because that wasn’t what she wanted. And I was supposed to forget all that stuff I felt about him, supposed to forget he was my dad and act like it never happened. And now she’s trying the same bloody story on me again. It’s like, I’m an adult—I don’t need a dad now. I don’t need anyone telling me what to do. Do you know what I mean?”

  “Not really,” Bella said carefully. “Not exactly. But also she is four and I am seven. You’re not supposed to swear in front of us.”

  “Sorry,” Seth said. “I forgot you are such little dudes.”

  “I loved Daddy and then he went away,” Bella told him. “I was little, littler than her, but I remembered him and I missed him even though I was really small. Then Mummy died.” She spoke the word carefully, as if she was aware of how important it was, how that single word and its meaning had altered the course of her life. “We were very, very sad and Aunty Sophie came and got us from Grandma’s and took us home and looked after us.”

  “And let us eat nuggets,” Izzy remembered fondly.

  “And then Daddy came back,” Bella added.

  “I didn’t even know he was my daddy.” Izzy giggled. “That was a bit funny.”

>   “But I did, I knew,” Bella said. “I didn’t like him very much. Because he’d been away so long and I felt funny and angry and shy.”

  “You shouted at him,” Izzy reminded her. “And do you remember when we made that tent out of Aunty Sophie’s coat and I got stuck in the toilet!”

  Seth chuckled as Izzy collapsed into giggles against his shoulder.

  “She does that,” Bella explained. “She laughs about things when she’s worried. I’m the only person who knows that. And now you.”

  “Cool,” Seth told her. “I think that’s a cool thing to do if you’re worried. Like whistling in the dark.”

  “’Cept I can’t whistle,” Izzy said.

  “Man, I’m totally tops at whistling,” Seth said, grinning at her. “I’ll teach you, babe.”

  He turned to Bella. “So what happened to make things cool with your dad then?”

  “Aunty Sophie said that sometimes grown-ups are stupid, and do stupid things too, and that him not being there didn’t mean he didn’t love us, it just meant he was stupid. And we came back here, and when we got here he looked like my daddy again,” Bella said.

  “Until you were invented,” Izzy told Seth matter-of-factly. “Then he went off with that Wendy woman.”

  “It’s a bloody mess for all of us then, isn’t it?” Seth said, shaking his head. “Sorry, forgot not to swear again. She’s cool then, is she, Sophie?”

  “She goes to sleep in her clothes.” Izzy giggled.

  “She made a special promise to look after us,” Bella told him. “She’s not used to being a mummy, but she’s tried really hard to be our mummy even though she doesn’t know it, and even though we have a mummy we love, we love Aunty Sophy like she’s a mummy. An extra one who’s here to do us teas and give us hugs.”

  “And she talks to us about Mummy whenever we like,” Izzy said, suddenly thoughtful. “Daddy never really talks to us about Mummy, but Aunty Sophie does all the time and it helps us to remember her.”

  Sophie pressed her hand against her chest, desperate to run up to the girls and hug them and tell them how grateful and glad she was to have the chance to love them. But they had never spoken to her this way, and she was beginning to realize that there was so much about how they thought and felt that she didn’t know about. For some reason they could talk to this brother they barely knew and she wanted to hear more.