The Vacation

by T. M. Logan

  Jennifer and Izzy were the last to arrive, both of them blank faced and silent. Jennifer took her place to the end of the table, next to Alistair and her boys, while Izzy edged past the chairbacks to the last empty spot at the other end. As she passed me she paused, touching me lightly on the shoulder.

  “Kate?” she said gently, almost apologetically. “We need to talk.”

  I felt a jolt, as if I’d just grabbed a live wire.

  “OK.” My voice almost cracked. “What about?”

  She held my eyes for a moment, then dropped her gaze.

  “Tell you in a bit. After we’ve eaten.” She went to the empty chair at the head of the table and sat down.

  At the other end of the table, Jennifer stared at her with a look that I couldn’t quite define. Anger? Disappointment? Her blue eyes darted quickly in my direction before settling back on Izzy.

  Alistair’s voice broke the silence.

  “We’d best eat up before that arrives,” he said, gesturing toward the mass of dark clouds to the south. “There’s a storm coming.”

  59

  My appetite had disappeared. I put a couple pieces of bread on my plate anyway, just to give my hands something to do, reaching for a sharp knife and cutting thin slices of Roquefort cheese that I had no intention of eating.

  We need to talk.

  So this was it, the moment of truth, the confession. The moment when she finally came out with it, finally put me out of my misery. I felt as if I had been waiting for it for months, for years, but in reality it had been less than a week since discovering the messages on Sean’s phone. I had sworn to find the evidence, to smoke her out. And this was what it came down to.

  I felt sick, scared, angry. Numb.

  Conversation around the table was muted. A muttered exchange between Jake and Ethan, Daniel asking me about the pizza toppings. Odette’s voice piercingly loud as she pointed out—yet again—all the things on the table that she didn’t like and wouldn’t eat, which seemed to include virtually everything apart from what was on her mother’s plate. Rowan coaxed her into eating a small slice of tomato. Odette chewed it for a few seconds and promptly spat it out onto the tablecloth.

  Sean’s eyes were fixed on Alistair across the table with a frown of barely concealed suspicion as if he were waiting for the slightest reason, the slightest provocation, to restart last night’s hostilities. But if he was the least bit bothered, Alistair wasn’t letting it show as he uncorked a bottle of Faugères and filled nearby glasses.

  We need to talk.

  Each word was as heavy as lead.

  I took a sip of wine, the taste bitter in my mouth.

  Plates were filled and emptied in short order, food eaten quickly as if we all wanted this stilted meal together to be over. After ten minutes or so, as if sensing a need to fill the silence, Jennifer tapped a fork against her wineglass with a ting-ting-ting and cleared her throat.

  “Well, everyone, since we’re all here we’ve got a bit of an announcement, actually.”

  All eyes turned to her.

  “What with one thing and another”—here she looked pointedly at Sean—“we’ve decided to head back to England a little bit earlier than planned.”

  There was a stunned silence around the table.

  “You’re leaving?” All my thoughts of Izzy were momentarily forgotten. “When?”

  “That’s such a shame,” Rowan said. “Aren’t you having a nice time, all of you?”

  Jennifer ignored her question.

  “There’s an evening flight tonight. We just need to get packed and sorted out here and then we’ll be off.”

  I put down my fork and pushed my plate away.

  “There’s no need to go early is there, Jen?” I said. “We’ve only got a couple of nights left.”

  Jake sat up straighter in his chair, tuning in to the adult conversation for the first time.

  “Hang on, what?”

  “We’ve changed our flights, Jakey. There’s one at ten tonight from Béziers.”

  “Why?”

  “Your dad and I thought it was for the best, Jake.”

  “Best for who?”

  Jennifer’s blue eyes fell on Sean again.

  “Everyone.”

  “I don’t want to go home.” Jake’s face was flushing red. I’d never seen him blush before. “I want to stay here, all of us together.”

  “Let’s talk after tea, shall we, Jakey?”

  Jake stood up.

  “This is bullshit.”

  “Language, Jake.”

  He pushed his chair back and stormed off into the villa, throwing up a hand.

  “Whatever.”

  Ethan stood up, too, looking at Daniel.

  “You coming?”

  “I suppose,” my son said, looking over at me. “Can I?”

  “We’re in the middle of tea, love.”

  “I’m finished.”

  “You’ve got a whole piece of pizza to eat.”

  His cheeks started to redden, too: I was embarrassing him in front of a bigger boy. His friend.

  “Please?” he said. “It’s our last time to play together on vacation.”

  “What about the pizza?”

  He bit off half the pizza slice and spoke with his mouth full. “Finished now.”

  I sighed. “Go on then.”

  He scampered off into the villa after Ethan, following the bigger boy toward the staircase down to the games room.

  Odette pushed her chair back and stood up.

  “I want to go, too, Mummy.”

  “You can wait until Mummy and Daddy have finished.”

  “Not fair!” She stamped her little foot. “All the other children have got down!”

  “No, they haven’t—look, Lucy is still here.”

  “She’s not a children.”

  Odette ran off to catch up, shouting, “Sardines!” at the top of her lungs.

  Jennifer was already on her feet.

  “I should talk to the boys. Explain.”

  “Jen,” Alistair said, “just let them go. Let them do what they want to do.”

  She ignored him, hurrying after her sons.

  The rest of us—six adults plus Lucy—sat in silence for a moment, none of us quite sure what to say next. It was as if a bomb had gone off and we were slowly emerging from the rubble, trying to assess the damage. “Another lovely meal all together,” grunted Russ. Rowan jabbed him in the ribs with her elbow.

  “Such a shame you’re leaving early,” she said to Alistair again.

  Alistair refilled his wineglass. “Well, I think things here have pretty much run their course, don’t you? No point in stringing it out any longer.”

  “The kids seem to be getting on well, really getting to know each other.”

  “Perhaps.” He threw a glance at Sean. “But I’ve always maintained that one needs to know when to cut one’s losses.”

  The silence resumed and we continued eating, listening to the voices of the children floating up from the games room below. After a few minutes, Lucy pushed her chair back and walked off toward the garden without saying a word.

  Later, as the men wandered off in search of their children and we finished taking all the tea things back through to the kitchen, Izzy caught my eye.

  It was time.

  60

  Daniel

  Daniel trailed after the two bigger boys, the thick green grass tickling his toes in their sandals. He was tired and bored and didn’t really know what they were doing down here in the garden. They’d done table tennis and air hockey and pool, and now he was just following them because he didn’t know what else to do.

  All in all, today had been a rubbish day. The ice cream at lunch had been nice, but that was about it. Then Jake and Ethan’s mum had told everyone at dinner that they were going home early, like tonight, and that seemed really unfair because it meant that the only children left at the vacation house were him and his sister and Odette, who had told him six times
now that she didn’t like boys.

  Something bad had happened last night but neither of the bigger boys would tell him what it was. From what Daniel had overheard from the grown-ups, Jake had been sick and needed to be carried back to the villa by the dads. And today Jake was cross, especially after his mum had announced that they were going back to England. Everything was f-this and f-that. He’d always seemed a bit crazy, but today he was acting properly weird, like he didn’t care about anything anymore. It made him even more unpredictable than usual. But it was also—in a weird way that Daniel couldn’t really explain—more exciting to be part of his gang, to be an insider for once, rather than on the outside.

  Jake crouched down suddenly behind a stone bench and hissed at his brother to follow suit. There was a man by the swimming pool, with his back to them. Jake and Ethan’s dad.

  “Jake?” Alistair called out into the garden. “Ethan? Are you going to come back into the villa now, gents? We need to pack.”

  “Get down!” Jake hissed under his breath.

  The three of them huddled behind the bench so they couldn’t be seen.

  Alistair stood on the far side of the pool, looking all around, one hand stroking his beard. “Jake?” he called again. “Ethan? Time to go, come on.”

  With one final look around, he shook his head and began walking back up the staircase into the villa, away from them.

  After a minute, Jake rose up to a kneeling position and the other two did the same.

  “You still got your lighters?” he said.

  “Yeah,” Ethan replied, fishing in his pocket and holding out the green plastic Bic lighter.

  Daniel nodded, too, blushing, hoping they wouldn’t notice. “Yeah.”

  The truth was, he’d managed to lose the little yellow lighter they’d given him for being a member of their gang. It had been in his bedroom. But he’d gone to look for it yesterday and it had disappeared. He searched under the bed, in his bedside drawer, in his empty suitcase, but it was nowhere to be found. He didn’t want to ask Jake and Ethan because they’d think he was stupid for losing it. It must have fallen out of his pocket when they were playing outside.

  He wasn’t about to tell Jake and Ethan that, though.

  Ethan held out his lighter, sparking the flint to make a tall flame.

  “Still got loads of fuel left. Might as well have some fun before we have to go home.”

  Across the garden, Odette wandered alone in her little pink sundress, long red hair held back with a sparkly tiara. Heading away from the villa with no adults in sight. Scanning left and right, she disappeared through the big gate that led down into the vineyard and the woods beyond.

  Looking for us, Daniel thought with a twinge of guilt. She looked small and a bit lost, heading down the hill on her own.

  Jake turned to him and grinned, putting the lighter back in his pocket.

  “I’ve got an idea,” he whispered. “Follow me.”

  61

  Izzy followed me into the dining room and we sat down at the end of the big table. There was a floor-to-ceiling window and I looked out over the landscape as if seeing it for the first time: such a breathtakingly beautiful place for something so ugly to happen. To the south, the clouds were much closer now, ominously close, a wall of gray and black blotting the light from the sky. The villa was quiet. Rowan was making cocktails in the kitchen—apparently to cheer us all up—while everyone else was spread out in the gardens and vineyard below.

  “Sorry for the cloak-and-dagger stuff at dinner,” Izzy said. “Didn’t want to do this in front of everyone.”

  “Of course,” I said tonelessly.

  She blew out a breath, blowing her fringe off her forehead.

  “This is tough, Kate, but I’ve given it a lot of thought and I know it’s the right thing to do under the circumstances. Since we’ve been friends for a long time.”

  “Right.”

  Not anymore.

  Normally I’m good at keeping my emotions in check, but my anger was so hot I could barely bring myself to look at her. I’d been pushing it down, forcing it back down for so long now that I wasn’t sure what was going to happen when I finally set it free. And the deceitful cow actually looked as if she felt sorry for me, giving me that sad little smile as if to say this is going to be tough on both of us. As if on cue, a tight little bubble of fury rose up inside me and it was all I could do to stop myself from reaching across the table and slapping her, really winding up and smacking her across the face as hard as possible.

  How could you do this, Izzy?

  But I didn’t hit her. Instead I clasped my hands together in my lap, fingers laced tight. I knew what was coming, I knew what she was going to tell me. Did that make it any easier? Was it a consolation? It didn’t feel like it. It felt as if my life had been in a free fall for the past week and I was finally about to hit the ground. Terrified of the impact, but at the same time ready for it to be over.

  “Kate, I don’t know how to say this. I’ve agonized over whether to tell you about—”

  I cut her off. She didn’t deserve this moment, didn’t deserve the satisfaction of being the one to break it to me.

  “I know what you’re going to say, Izzy.”

  A ripple of surprise crossed her face.

  “Really?”

  “Took me a while to work it out, but I got there eventually.”

  “Oh. I see.” There was confusion in her tone. “I was under the impression you didn’t know.”

  “Did Sean tell you that?”

  She nodded, slowly.

  “Yes.”

  “He wanted to keep it a secret, did he? I saw you arguing before dinner.”

  “He, erm … he thought it was better to keep it under wraps.”

  “Of course he did.”

  She hesitated, as if choosing her words carefully. “How long have you known?”

  “I’ve known the basics since last week. And the rest for a couple of days. Do you remember when Sean sent you a message on Tuesday, asking to meet? It wasn’t him that sent that, it was me.”

  “Tuesday?”

  “I unlocked his phone and found your conversation on Messenger. Your secret little trail of messages about what’s been going on.” I thought about our conversation at the Gorges D’Héric on Monday morning, feeling the anger at her betrayal surge again. “In fact, why didn’t you just tell me on Monday? Didn’t I at least deserve a bit of honesty? Why wait until today?”

  She frowned. “Well, for one thing, because I didn’t realize on Monday that—”

  The door flew open and Rowan burst into the room, her eyes wide with alarm.

  “You two! Oh my God, you have to come! Now!”

  Then she was gone, clattering away on her heels toward the back of the villa.

  Izzy and I jumped up and followed her out onto the balcony. For the first time since we arrived, the afternoon sun had disappeared behind huge dark clouds that were blanketing the sky. The wind had picked up and it whipped the hair around our faces, the air almost fizzing with the pressure of an impending thunderstorm.

  “Guys!” Rowan said breathlessly. “Do you see that?”

  We turned to look where she was pointing. Down into the vineyard, where the rows of vines met the tree line on the edge of the woods.

  Smoke.

  62

  Odette

  Odette crouched in a nest of leaves, her arms tucked tightly around her knees.

  She had to be quiet. Very quiet, because the boys were letting her play their game for the first time. Well, she had told the boys she was going to play and she thought they were going to laugh and tell her to go away, but they didn’t. They said OK, told her she could play, and didn’t even mind when she told them she was going to be the hider instead of the seeker. Except it wasn’t hide-and-seek—hide-and-seek was for babies—it was a better game called sardines. One person hid and the others had to count to fifty without looking. Then they all had to come and find her, on their ow
n, and the first one to find her hid in her hiding place, too. They hid together, squeezed in tight like baby mice. And then the next and the next, until only one person was still looking and then that person was the loser. But if she could stay hidden until they all gave up, she would be the winner.

  The boys had told her to go into the woods to hide and then they would try to find her.

  And she had such a good hiding place that she didn’t think they would find her even if they looked for an hour. Even if they looked until it got to bedtime. She was in a little dip, a hollowed-out bit of the ground in the woods where there was a big tree trunk that had fallen over. Because she was small—and quite bendy—she had been able to squeeze up inside a bit of the trunk where it was hollow in the middle and make a little nest for herself among the crunchy leaves and pine needles, like a hamster or something. It was hard to see out because there was a bush in the way, but she could just about make out the little path and the clearing where her mum said she wasn’t allowed to go.

  She was good at hiding. She could hide all day. She would show them that she was big enough to play their games, that she could join in just like them and be a big girl. That she could even win their games if she wanted to.

  The tree trunk had a funny smell, a musty, fusty smell like the wood Daddy stacked in piles by the fire at home. It was dark and there were a few little bugs, too, creepy-crawlies busy going up and down the inside of the bark, but she didn’t mind them, not really, because if they got close she would just do what her daddy did when there was a spider or a fly or any sort of little beastie. She would take her shoe off and just whack it with the heel. Splat. No more bug. Mummy tried to save them with a glass and a postcard but Daddy never did. He just whacked them.

  Odette sat, her chin resting on her knees, and wondered what a sardine was. Daniel said a sardine was a fish but that couldn’t be right: fish lived in the sea. Maybe it was like a kind of mouse? Or a hamster? Sardine sounded like a funny name. She wished that Lucy was playing the game with them; Lucy was so pretty, the prettiest girl she’d ever seen. She looked like a princess, or maybe even more beautiful than a princess. Sometimes she’d wished on the vacation that Lucy was her big sister so they could play together every day and do each other’s hair and all those things that sisters did. But Lucy wasn’t there when they started the game, so she couldn’t play.