Chapter Twenty-Six
Billy’s fingers dragged hairs from the back of my neck as they were wrenched away. His broken fingernails scratched stinging claw marks along the length of my chin. Sea salt blew into the wounds. Joni tried to wrestle him into a hug, but he wriggled away. He leapt into my arms again, a soft body that fit mine like a jigsaw puzzle. My missing piece. I put my hand to the back of his head and slid my thumb to the place behind his ear. He gripped me even tighter and shuddered.
“When are you coming back, Mummy?” Charlie asked, twisting his trousers into knots. “How many sleeps?”
“Quite a few sleeps, Charlie,” I told him. “Can you look after the others for me? Stay together. Joni will be with you. You’re safe now, okay? That’s better, isn’t it, now that you’re safe? That’s better.” I stopped and took a calming breath. Charlie clung to my hip, wide-eyed.
“We will keep them safe,” said Dr. Larsen.
“Until I get back.”
Not a single muscle shifted on the man’s face. “Of course.”
Maggie sat on the bench seat, arms wrapped around herself like a straitjacket.
“Maggie?”
She ignored me, staring hard at the rocks that were emerging from the water and growing up around the boat.
“Maggie, I have to go now.” I tried to move Billy so I could hug her, but he clamped on. I shifted him onto one leg to crouch down. “Maggie?”
“Why are you going?”
“To bring Lola home. She’s all alone. And it’s dangerous.”
“But you promised.”
I had. I had promised never to leave her again. My mother’s voice in my head: Never make promises you can’t keep. It reminded me of something. I worked my fingers into my jeans pocket and drew out a velvet pouch.
“I want you to take this, Maggie. Look after it for me.” I opened the string and drew out my mother’s huge brooch.
“It’s beautiful,” she said, turning the jade in her hands. She struggled with the pin, and I helped her fix it in place, holding the blanket closed across her chest. She looked like a tiny Celt, a warrior child raised under Boudicca.
“Mummy?” she said. “What if you die?”
Billy’s arms tightened around my throat.
“Then one day, Maggie, you will give that brooch to your own daughter. Even though you love it, and it’s hard to let it go, you will give it to her. And you will understand—because you will be a mummy by then—you will understand that what you want doesn’t matter. You don’t even have a choice. You will tell her that someone gave you a precious thing, but with it came the responsibility to protect it—”
“You’re trying to say that Lola is the precious thing, aren’t you? And the other children.”
“Yes, Maggie. That’s right.”
“But they’re not your children. We’re your children.”
“I know, I know. It’s hard to explain, but—” The jumble that I was trying to define coiled up inside me. I tugged at a few frayed edges in my mind—I can’t let them die: couldn’t live with myself; after all that Joni has done for me; I owe Woody; I’d never leave you if I thought you were in danger; you’re safe but they’re not—only the knot just got tighter. “Maggie, I’m—I’m just trying to do my best.”
Once again, I saw myself reflected in her eyes: her train jumping the tracks, a pause while she gathered herself up and carried on.
“We’ll be stuck on these rocks if you don’t go soon,” she said.
I kissed her scraggly hair. “I love you, Maggie.”
Now Charlie. I turned to him. “Do you understand? I don’t want to leave you. I love you. But—”
“I get it.”
“Really?”
“It’s like Peter when he slept by the gate that time. He said he wasn’t scared, but”—he raised his arms and let them fall against his sides—“he was scared.”
“But he did it anyway.”
“Can I come with you?” he asked.
“No.”
“I could help—”
“You’d be brilliant, but no. The only way I can go back in there, Charlie, is knowing that you are safe. Do you see?”
“Yes.”
I hugged him for a long time, until Larsen put his huge hand on my shoulder and drew Charlie over to a seat.
Like all toddlers, Billy sensed my need to leave and gripped me tighter than ever. The boat rocked as he flailed in my arms.
“Billy,” I said. At least I didn’t need words for him. I crushed him to me, as though I could press his soft body into my own, as though our separation weren’t yet complete, and we could go back to one flesh. His forehead pressed hot against mine, and I thought fervently about how much I loved him, hoping that the strength of feeling would burn through our skin and deep into his mind, leaving him branded with it. Whatever happens, you will remember this, I told him silently, you will remember that there was this much love. His tears were hot salt on my raw skin. His kissy lips one more time. Then Larsen pulled him away. I slid over the side of the boat into ankle-deep water.
“It is time to go,” he said. He called out to the driver, and the engine raged.
I took a step away.
“Don’t let them see you,” he said.
The slipway hid me from the helicopters, but I crouched down anyway, one hand against its slimed wall.
“When will you be back?” I pushed my tears away into the sea.
“It is not my remit to come back.”
“You like having a remit, do you? Lots of lovely paperwork?”
The doctor smiled into Billy’s golden hair.
“If you get bored again,” I said, “feel free to come and rescue me.”
The driver pushed off. The dinghy rotated slowly, so that Joni drifted past me. She reached out and made sounds of gratitude and promise, but her words were lost in the roar of the engine. The boat edged into deeper water, and then the outboard motor dropped, and it surged forward. Larsen gathered Billy into a bear hug, and the motor roared again, the dinghy rearing up into the waves.
I watched them and they watched me; I would never turn away; I would always look back. By the time the small figures of my children were out of sight, my feet stood on sand, the tide cutting me off, stranded and alone.
The sea breeze carried the voices of the Cleaners from the beach. They sounded closer than they were, but I kept myself low as I scrambled over a rocky breakwater to reach the cover of the houses that faced the sea. I clambered into a back garden, looking for somewhere to hide in case the helicopter took off again.
The engines started and built up to the familiar spanking din, whining into action as I pulled the handle of a shed that refused to budge. No other cover. For a desperate second I eyed a rabbit hutch, before simply pushing the back door, which swung open. I stepped into a huge living space that ended with a vast picture of sea and sky framed in the bay window. Way out, amid the deep grays, a small light wavered in the darkness. They must have reached the ship by now.
With a blast of light, a shape rose into view, and the room was plunged into brightness. I hit the floor. The helicopters turned, and lights spiraled across the walls and away. I raised my head and watched them slide out of the frame, though their heartbeat thudded for a long time in the quiet night, heading inland. I stayed facedown on the living room rug. The dark rushed back in. My children were safe. What more could a mother hope for?
By the time I pulled myself back up off the floor, the moon had risen, shining a long path across the water, as though taunting me. It had forced the tide to turn, and now it dared me to follow. Instead, I went back to the kitchen and started packing up food from the cupboards. For the first time since I’d entered the house, I noticed a buzz in the hallway, so I slipped out the back door and down the side alleyway onto the coast road. Staying close to the cover of houses, I broke into a jog and, as I got into my stride, a run. When the road bent away inland, I dropped down onto the beach and the hard, wet sand slapped under my boots. My lungs felt huge, swollen from salt air and crying. But I felt I could run forever. I raced toward the blackened cliff that I would have to climb to reach the abbey. The rhythm of my boots on the sand like a drum. But then there was something else, another rhythm, clashing with mine. Instinctively, I clicked off my torch and threw myself down, crabbing over to hide behind the ribbed remains of a breaker. But no light in the sky. No beat of helicopter blades. The sound—slowing, arrhythmic now—came from the sea. I squinted into the dark. A tiny light bounced across the waves. Then a voice calling my name as a bulky figure jumped from a dinghy onto the beach.
“You’re supposed to be looking after my son,” I said.
“I am. A boy needs his mother.”
For a moment, I thought Larsen was going to grab me, force me on board. I wouldn’t have had the will to resist. But instead he said, “Take this,” and pushed a canvas bag into my hands. I fumbled open the buckle, and he shone his torch inside: medication, a transistor radio, and, wrapped inside another canvas bag, a gun with ammunition.
He nodded once and turned back to the dinghy. “The boat has sailed, we need to catch up.”
“Thank you,” I said.
He reached the dinghy in a few strides, pushing it away from the sand as he rolled inside.
“I’ll see you then,” he called out. “Same time, same place?”
“It’s a date.”
The engine roared, and his small light bounced away into the gray.
Later, I reached the bridge over the river and looked for the light out at sea. It was gone. The ship must have sailed. This was a good thing. When I had been pregnant with Billy, after the bleeding made me think I’d lost him, I used to close my eyes and convince myself that the white sunspot I could see was the light of my baby. I closed my eyes now and saw the sunspot. But when I opened my eyes, the light out to sea was still gone. Gone to safety, I told myself. Gone to safety.
It was easy to follow the uphill curve of the cobbled streets through the old town to the base of the hill. The abbey peered down again, the smoke, cleared. The hillside reeked, and the stone steps were black with charred debris. Along the top of the cliff, buildings smoldered, but the grass fire seemed to have burnt itself out. I paced myself and reached the top of the steps with burning thighs but enough energy to run, if needed. The moonlight played with the night’s proportions, so I felt I could reach out and touch the top of the ruined facade. Push it down like a cardboard cutout. But the sea breeze howled through the empty window sockets, reminding me that it was real.
I climbed back up to the base of the stone cross. It was still warm from the day. I pressed my scratched face against it and closed my eyes. I smiled at the white sunspot. But then a scraping footstep from the other side of the cross filled my body with an electric surge of adrenaline. A thin figure scuttled across the gravel toward the hillside, a cloak streaming out behind. I slipped down the steps and landed heavily on my backside on the grass with a huff.
The figure reached the top of the steps and turned toward me into the moonlight. Lola’s narrow face shone white beneath what I now saw was not a cloak but a raincoat.
“It’s me,” I called out.
“Aunt Marlene?”
“The same.” I got up and pressed my hand into the hip that always seemed to take the brunt of every mishap. The fall, the run, the withdrawal of adrenaline—now my right arm and shoulder throbbed back into action, too.
“What are you doing here?” Lola asked. “I watched you all leave.”
She stayed at a distance, behind the iron railings of the steps. It was just as well. Anger pooled in my hands, which twitched with an urge to wring the truth into her: You made me leave my children; I could die without seeing them again.
Lola gave a hiccup and started to cry. “I thought you were the Cleaners. I thought I was going to die.” She sat on the top of the 199 steps and wept into her hands.
I walked over and hugged her from behind, my arms around her delicate neck.
“What about Mom?” she asked, barely audible.
“Well, put it this way. If we see her again, she’ll be too happy to hold a grudge, and if we don’t, then it’s not really your problem, is it?”
“Is that supposed to make me feel better?”
“Quite the opposite, actually. But it is better than throttling you, which is the other option.”
Lola detached herself from my embrace.
“I didn’t think they would just sail away and leave us,” she said.
“The tide went out. And there are other survivors on the ship who need treatment. And your mother—”
“Are they coming back for us?”
“Maybe.” I let the bit about Joni go. We could deal with that later. “So what’s your brilliant plan, Lady Lola? What happens now?”
“Rescue Jack.”
“That’s it?”
Apparently, it was.
It was cold at the top of the 199 steps. The wind picked up. Wisps of cloud scuttled across the moon, sending huge shadows over the waves like dark glimpses of sea monsters. Lola shivered and zipped up her coat. We needed shelter for the night. Tomorrow, a vehicle. And supplies. A new plan.
I hauled Lola up by the elbow, and we started down the lonely steps to the town, accompanied by the hiss of waves dragging stones across the sand, making wishes as they went.
“Do you think we’ll get back, Aunt Marlene? Will we make it?”
“Oh, yes, Lola,” I said, through a mouthful of salty air. “We’ll make it back. Mummy always comes back.”