The Vacation

by T. M. Logan

  I felt dizzy, as though I’d been struck in the back of the head. Up until now I’d had suspicion, fear, and maybe a tiny bit of hope that this could all—somehow—be a misunderstanding.

  Now that hope was extinguished. Now I knew.

  But if I took it now, Rowan would notice it was gone and she’d know someone had been in here. She’d probably be able to work out who. The smart move would be to put it back where I found it, avoid the danger of being discovered.

  I slipped it into my pocket instead.

  For a moment I forgot where I was and what I was doing. The room seemed to spin around me, colors swimming in my vision as I fought to hold back the tears. The fact that I’d found this, particularly this, just made everything worse. More hopeless.

  Lucy’s voice floated up from outside, from the pool below, snapping me back into the moment. Our conversation on the first night had been revolving in my head all morning, bouncing from one thought to the next as I tried to work out how to help her. My girl. There was so much she kept from me now, so many things she kept out of my reach, that I sometimes felt like I was spying on her. But I only wanted to help. Moving the sheer curtains aside, I pulled the sliding glass door open a little farther and slipped out onto Russ and Rowan’s balcony.

  This side of the villa was in direct, dazzling sunlight, and I felt the skin of my arms and face instantly start to cook in the heat. From here, I had a good view over the infinity pool and across to the main balcony off the living room. Lucy was in the pool, doing lengths with her smooth, graceful breaststroke. Back and forth.

  If she looked up, she’d see me straightaway. I crouched down on the corner of the balcony, peering through a gap between two towels hung from the railing.

  I watched her for a moment, the smooth movement of her limbs hardly rippling the surface of the water.

  She had switched to backstroke when my eye was drawn to a flicker of movement in a shady corner under the stone staircase that ran up to the balcony. At first I thought it was a little statue, a stone figure of a cat, but then the head swiveled slightly to look up in my direction. It was a small ginger-and-white cat, more of a big kitten really, yellow eyes blinking slowly at me as I stared back from my vantage point.

  Alistair was directly below me, stretched out on a sun lounger in what seemed to be his standard poolside attire: Speedos and a vest top, black socks and sandals. Plus cell phone, of course. I squinted through the bars of the balcony again, straight down at him. As I watched, he shifted the position of the phone in his lap, angling it up slightly and zooming in on something.

  What exactly was he doing?

  18

  ALISTAIR

  Alistair had started the bogus social media accounts for a totally legitimate reason: so he could follow his sons’ activity on Instagram and Snapchat, keep an eye on what they were doing from a respectful distance. Particularly after the tough time Jake had gone through recently, and Jennifer always worrying about what they were getting up to. Initially, Alistair had tried to follow them under his real name—rookie mistake—but they’d just ignored his friend requests.

  A subtler approach was called for.

  So he made up a couple of fake accounts—username SkyBlue-Lad99—using a generic teenage boy profile image downloaded from a picture-sharing website, started populating it with more generic images of cars, food, football players, and celebrity tittle-tattle, and sure enough they’d accepted his friend request and followed him back. Jake and Ethan had hundreds of friends on the sites, most of whom they barely knew in real life. It was pretty easy to blend into the background.

  It wasn’t long before he’d discovered that the bogus accounts allowed him to see the whole picture, the background of everything the boys were going through, the environment in which they lived and interacted and were judged, the ocean in which they swam. Things were said on social media that they would never in a million years say in front of him and now he followed lots of others on Instagram, Snapchat, and Twitter. As ever, the beauty of it was that he could be on his phone—looking at literally anything, taking pictures—and no one would be any the wiser. They’d think he was just checking his emails or scrolling through Facebook.

  So what were the young folks posting on Instagram today? He started with his boys, scrolling through a series of pictures from the poolside, Jake standing on the edge, with his arms aloft. Always Jake doing the doing, always Ethan daring him. That was an interesting dynamic in itself. He came out of Jake’s profile and went back to his own feed, made up of their schoolmates and friends. There were copious sun-drenched vacation pictures from various spots on the globe, lots of posts about a girl called Lexie, who was having a sixteenth birthday party over the weekend, a shaky video of some boys dancing in a club, posts about someone called B-Boy with sad face emojis and kisses, quizzes, the usual dogs, cats, food and drink pictures, funny memes, diets, and other random teenage things that Alistair didn’t pretend to understand.

  After a few more minutes of light stalking, satisfied there was not too much going on with his boys that he didn’t know about, he typed LucyLupin22 into the search box and selected the account. A selfie of Lucy on the balcony of the villa filled the screen, the landscape spread out behind her. Various other pictures of the beach, the vineyard, the gorge from this morning. He scrolled back further. A picture of Lucy and two other girls, all in animal onesies: a sheep, a giraffe, and a panda. It looked like they’d been at a sleepover a few days ago.

  OK. That all looked OK.

  He switched to his real account and pulled up the pictures he’d just taken a few minutes before: a beautiful sleek creature with perfect features and effortless poise—it made him smile just looking at it. He picked the best one and posted it to his own Instagram account with the caption Extra guest at the villa #Cats_of_Instagram.

  Lucy climbed out of the pool. She lifted her face to the sun and smoothed her long hair down her back with both hands. He was pleased to see that in this company—among friends she had known all her short life—she could still be unselfconscious, unguarded. It was good to see. He knew that on her Instagram account she could pout and pose along with the rest of her friends, filtering the image and getting the angle just right to show herself off in the best light. But when she thought no one was watching, she could still be natural. That was a healthy sign from a mental health perspective; there was a lot that troubled him about the deliberate fakery of most social media content.

  Lucy walked back over to the sun lounger and pulled on her dress, then grabbed her phone, checking it with a frown and walking off in the direction of the vineyard. Minutes later, Izzy came down the steps to the pool in a silk sarong, sitting down on the sun lounger Lucy had just vacated. Izzy was another interesting character. Very honest, no artifice to her at all. No pretense. Well traveled. No kids, none of the baggage, none of the stretch marks and excess weight that women took on board when they joined the motherhood mafia.

  Alistair spotted the ginger-and-white kitten again, and went back to his phone.

  19

  I was hurrying down to see my daughter by the pool, the images I’d seen on Alistair’s phone still flashing in my mind, when I ran straight into Jennifer.

  “Have you seen Jake?” she said. “Or Ethan?”

  “Not recently, no. Not since we—”

  “I haven’t seen them since we got back from the beach.”

  “Not at all?”

  “No.”

  “Have you tried texting them?”

  “Yes, but they’ve not replied.”

  “Maybe they’re in their rooms, or the games room?”

  She shook her head. “I’ve checked already. No sign of them anywhere.”

  There was no sign of Lucy, either—where had she gone?

  Jennifer threw a look at Rowan on the far side of the pool, then lowered her voice. “I think Jake was a bit upset.”

  “Why? What happened?”

  “About what Odette said at the beach
, that the boys had told her she couldn’t play with them.”

  “I don’t think she meant anything by it, did she? Maybe she was just a bit confused.”

  “Jake hates liars. He gets so wound up when people say things about him, when they try to get him in trouble.”

  “I don’t think she was doing it on purpose, Jennifer. She’s only five.”

  “That’s perfectly old enough to know what a lie is.”

  “Look, do you want a hand looking for the boys?”

  Her expression softened. “Would you?”

  “Of course. I don’t know where Lucy’s gone to, either. Perhaps they’re all hanging out together somewhere.”

  * * *

  The late afternoon sun was still strong and my sleeveless top was starting to stick to my back with sweat. Jennifer and I walked on through the vineyard, looking for the three teenagers, green creepers high on either side of us, calling their names as we walked toward the woods.

  Having checked the garden and the villa without success, I had pulled up the Find My iPhone app on my phone, logging in with Lucy’s details. Short of implanting her with a GPS chip, it was the surest and fastest way of finding her: she was never parted from her phone.

  Twenty-first-century parenting.

  I watched as the map zoomed in on our location—there was the village, and the road out, and the junction. The image of her phone appeared in the center of the screen, about seventy-five meters to the west. I zoomed in further, then out, looking around me to get my bearings.

  At the edge of the vineyard there was an unmarked dirt path leading on through the trees. The path wound around a pair of towering oaks, their bark gnarled with age, past pine and tall, slender cypresses and olive trees that crouched low to the ground. The trees thickened as the path dropped into a dip, curving away, then up and around again, past a big standing rock and a fallen tree, exposed roots twisted like intestines spilling from a wound. A waist-high sign, faded and peeling with age, bore the word ATTENTION! in large red letters, above some other French that I didn’t quite understand. Below the text was an outline of a cliff face, rocks tumbling down the side.

  It was cooler here, the occasional call of birds the only sound above the whispering leaves in the canopy of the trees high above. I checked the iPhone map again and we walked on, Jennifer quickening her pace and me hurrying to keep up. Ahead, the trees thinned out into a clearing, an open area where the sun was stronger, a dusty spur of open ground where the trees seemed to stop abruptly. A shaft of sunlight pierced the thinning tree cover and I was momentarily blinded. Blinking and raising a hand to the light, I looked up and caught a glimpse of red through the trees. A T-shirt?

  Jennifer broke into a jog, calling her boys’ names a bit louder.

  We emerged into the small clearing and skidded to an abrupt halt.

  To the right, there was a sign indicating a steep path winding down to the gorge below. Directly in front were two olive trees, perhaps fifteen feet apart, the tattered remains of an orange plastic mesh fence hanging limply from each trunk. Between the two olive trees was a dusty outcrop jutting into empty air, a shelf of rock that led to nothing but a vertical drop straight down into the gorge below.

  Jake had his back to us.

  He was standing right on the edge. “Jake!” Jennifer shouted. “Stay still!”

  Her shrill voice sent birds scattering from the canopy of branches above us.

  Ethan sat cross-legged a few feet from the edge, phone held up, snapping pictures of his older brother.

  “Go on,” he said to his older brother. “Right to the edge.”

  Jake shuffled forward another few inches, posing for another photograph.

  I looked wildly about me for Lucy, heart leaping against my rib cage.

  There. She was sitting on a large flat rock, barely seeming to notice Jake posing for the camera. I perched on the rock next to her.

  “Everything all right?”

  “Of course,” she said, her voice toneless and flat. She wouldn’t look at me. “Why wouldn’t it be?”

  I gestured wordlessly toward Jake, and we watched as Jennifer walked slowly toward him, hands out, as if she were approaching a skittish animal.

  “Jake,” she said, a wobble of panic in her voice, “just take a step back from the edge, darling.”

  In response, Jake struck a new pose, holding his arms out to each side, raising them to shoulder height like a diver getting ready to leap. He tilted his head back and looked at the sky.

  “If you look up,” he said to no one in particular, “it feels like you’re flying.”

  “Nice one,” said Ethan, taking more pictures on his phone.

  “Jake, please.” Jennifer’s voice cracked. “Please come away from the edge.”

  The breeze ruffled Jake’s red T-shirt, the tips of his flip-flops sticking out into open air.

  “You know, I thought this place was going to be really dull but this”—he indicated the drop into the gorge at his feet—“is properly cool.”

  “Listen to me, Jake, I just need you to take two steps back, OK? Two steps toward me.”

  He turned slightly to look at his mother, seeming to lose his footing a little, arms flailing to keep his balance.

  “Whoa!” he said with a laugh. “That was close.”

  Jennifer took another step toward him, her face a mask of terror. “Jake, I’m begging you. Just one step back.”

  He held out his hand and let a smooth, round stone fall from his palm. There was no sound, no impact, for what seemed like forever. Then a sharp echoing crack as it struck the rocks below.

  “Sick,” he said.

  Jennifer moved another step closer to her son. “Didn’t you hear me shouting for you, Jakey? I was looking for you.”

  He leaned forward slightly, peering down into the gorge.

  “There are some rock pools down there, Ethan. We should check them out.”

  “Definitely,” Ethan said, leaning over to look.

  I took a step toward Jake, feeling a sick, lurching sensation in my stomach as I neared the edge: vertigo by proxy.

  Jennifer held both hands up in silent alarm. I froze.

  She turned back to her son. “Don’t look down, Jake,” she said, trying to keep her voice steady.

  He turned back to look at her, blond fringe falling over one eye.

  “Why not?”

  “Because you might lose your balance. Better to keep your head up, look at the horizon.”

  “Nah.”

  “Please, Jake,” Jennifer said, her voice taut, “just don’t, OK?”

  He gave Lucy a grin full of bravado, then turned and looked straight down into the gorge.

  20

  Jake leaned forward slightly to look down and then jerked straight again, knees wobbling, arms windmilling at his sides for balance.

  Jennifer’s hand flew to her mouth. “Jake!”

  He stepped back from the edge abruptly, turning to give a little bow.

  “Ta-da! You see? Safe.”

  Jennifer grabbed his arm and pulled him farther away from the bluff.

  “Don’t ever do that again, Jake! That is so dangerous. I was so scared.”

  “Don’t overreact, Jen, it’s just a bit of fun.”

  He shook her off and went to stand with Ethan, who was holding up his phone.

  “Nice one,” Jake said, scrolling through the pictures his brother had taken. “Might post a few of these. Send them to me, yeah?”

  I put an arm on Lucy’s shoulder.

  “Luce, you must promise me never ever to go near the edge here, do you hear me? In fact, you shouldn’t come down here at all until the barrier is fixed.”

  She shrugged my hand off and stood up.

  “You don’t have to treat me like a five-year-old.”

  “I’m just worried about you, that’s all.”

  She walked over to Ethan and Jake without a word.

  Jennifer and I moved closer to Jake as if we migh
t have to grab him back from the edge at any moment: mother tigers circling the errant cub. I touched her gently on the arm.

  “Are you OK?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” Jennifer said in a monotone, her eyes not leaving her sons.

  She didn’t look OK. The deep flush in her face had spread down to her neck and chest, her whole body shaking with adrenaline.

  “This drop-off is pretty scary,” I said.

  “It’s so dangerous!” she said, her voice rising. “How could Rowan have not told us about this? How is it even allowed?”

  “We’re all fine,” I said, giving her a quick hug. “We’re all safe. Jake’s safe.”

  I inched slowly and carefully to the drop-off, taking small steps in the dusty soil.

  Where we stood was an overhang, projecting out into nothing but thin air. I put my left foot sideways onto the edge and peered carefully into the gorge below: it was a straight drop down onto smooth, bare rock, scrubby green bushes sticking out here and there from the rock face on the way down. At the bottom, there was a thin stream running from one rock pool to the next, clear blue water sparkling in the late afternoon sun.

  I had another sudden, powerful wave of vertigo, my stomach turning over so hard I had to step back and crouch down on the dusty ground, touching the earth with my fingertips.

  “Jesus,” I breathed, “that’s some drop. It’s got to be a hundred feet.”

  “I can’t believe Rowan didn’t tell us about this.” There was an accusatory tone in her voice. “We should make it off limits to all the kids, or can we fence it off with something?”

  “I’ll ask her to call the maintenance company in the morning, see if they can send someone out straightaway.”

  “Boys?” Jennifer said to her sons. “You’re not to come down here on your own until the barrier is fixed up again. OK?”

  Ethan gave her a quick nod and a smile.

  Jake gave no sign of having heard her at all.

  21