THERE’S THE SOUND of a car pulling up by the flats. I go to open the door.
“Grace.”
He’s wearing an ancient leather jacket. He must have been rushing, he’s breathing rather hard.
“I hope it was okay, me ringing like that, but I felt completely desperate,” I tell him. “I really didn’t know what else to do.”
His eyes are on my face, and he has his crooked smile.
“I’m not sure that’s entirely flattering,” he tells me.
I find I am smiling in spite of myself.
I make him coffee. We sit at my dining table; he seems too tall for my chairs. It’s strange to see him sitting here, surrounded by my things. It’s all so feminine, my flat—the calico curtains, the scent of lilies.
He sips his coffee.
“So tell me what’s been happening.”
“Sylvie’s in bed,” I tell him. “She went berserk in Kwik Save, and I hit her. I’m so ashamed of myself.”
“Don’t be,” he says. “There’s nothing to be ashamed of. I think you’re incredibly patient.”
“I’ve tried so hard, and nothing works,” I tell him.
“Yes, I know that,” he says.
Out of nowhere, I feel a little rush of happiness—that he’s here to share this.
“I’d love to know what you made of her,” I tell him. “I’ve never asked you properly.”
He smiles. “I’m a skeptic, remember?”
“You refuse to come to conclusions.”
He nods. “But putting it all together—the way she is, the things she says—I’d love to find out more. The question is how best to go about it.”
“When she couldn’t or wouldn’t answer your questions?” I say.
He nods. “With an older child, you might use hypnosis, try to regress them,” he says.
“To take them back into the memory?”
“Yes. Though I’m not very keen on that, to be honest. And of course it’s never conclusive. It doesn’t really prove anything, whatever they say in the trance.”
“It isn’t science?”
“Exactly.”
He sits there quietly for a moment. His face is so close I can see the bright flecks in his eyes.
“You know what I want to do,” he says.
My pulse skitters off. “Yes.”
“There’s only one way to investigate a case like Sylvie’s,” he says.
I nod slightly.
He puts out his hand toward me in a brief, truncated gesture. My skin prickles, expecting his touch.
“Grace. Would you and Sylvie come to Ireland with me?”
I don’t say anything. My heart pounds.
“It’s not a difficult journey,” he says. “We could fly from Heathrow to Shannon and hire a car. Coldharbour’s quite a small village, but there are bed-and-breakfast places . . .”
“You’ve looked it up?” I’m unnerved.
“Of course.”
“But—how could I possibly do that? I mean, just for starters, I couldn’t afford the fare.”
He looks immediately hopeful when I say that.
“No problem. I could pay for you both. I have a research grant for investigating cases. I might then ask your permission to write it up in a journal. You’d get to see what I’d written, of course.”
“But what about Simon, your boss? Wouldn’t he be angry with you? If he thinks that what you do isn’t really science at all?”
“Probably. But Simon can stuff it,” says Adam.
I’m staring down into my coffee. Doubts worm into my mind. I can hear Karen’s voice in my head, all her warnings and admonitions.
“But—what if Sylvie got more upset—you know, more caught up in these things? I couldn’t bear that. I’d feel so guilty.”
“Yes, there’s a risk,” he tells me. “So think about it carefully. I’m not denying that it’s something I’d love to pursue. But it’s up to you—and what you feel is right for Sylvie.”
We sit there quietly for a moment. Outside, the wind is rummaging in the alleyway, banging the lids of the Dumpsters. The sound is too loud, as though it’s here in the room.
I sip my coffee, feel the kick as it slides into my veins.
“The trouble is,” I tell him, “I don’t really know where I stand. I mean, sometimes I believe it—believe there’s something in all this. But I keep coming back to that thing she says—I had a cave and a dragon . . . That’s fairy-tale stuff. Just something she saw in a book.”
“It could be.”
“Maybe it’s just some game she’s playing, some world she’s making up.” I remember Karen’s words. “A kind of wish fulfillment.”
“Absolutely,” he tells me. “We could get there and find there’s nothing. Nothing significant in this place, nothing with any meaning for her. That the whole thing’s just a shadow play. It’s your call, Grace. Whether you feel it’s worth exploring. Only you can decide.”
I think of going to Ireland with him. A little bud of excitement opens out inside me. We couldn’t—could we?
“Maybe I’ll think about it,” I say. “I mean, I’m not promising anything . . .”
I expect him to respond to this—animated, surprised, perhaps, pushing his hand through his hair.
He puts his cup down. He’s serious suddenly, frowning, his clever dark eyes on my face.
“Grace, I want you to know this.” He’s so solemn, it’s unnerving. “If we did take Sylvie to Coldharbour, we’d be looking for a death—for the story of a death.”
There’s a chill like a slight cool breath on my skin. Somehow I hadn’t put this together.
“You mean—we’d be trying to find the person that my daughter used to be . . .” The room seems to shift around me. Something in me recoils from this.
He nods.
“There’s more,” he says. “According to the studies I’ve read, the death these children say they’ve suffered is very often a violent one.”
I feel the cold go through me.
“You mean—some terrible accident? Murder even?”
He nods slowly. “Something sudden and shocking.”
“Why? Why would that be the kind of death that’s remembered? Why not just a peaceful death?” I think of the man whose funeral we went to in the autumn—with the black plumed horses and all the marguerites. “A good death?”
“It’s like the death is incomplete, the person can’t let go of it. So—a violent, sudden death, with all the wreckage that leaves.”
Jake’s death is there in the room with us when he says that. I think how it’s something he knows so well, too well—that wreckage. I wonder again whether that’s what draws him to Sylvie’s case. Trying to find a way of living with what happened. Trying to prove that there’s something else, that it doesn’t just end there, with the death, the wreckage.
“Yes, I understand,” I say.
“I want you to think about that for a while,” he tells me.
His look disconcerts me, the intensity of it, stirring something up in me. A charge moves through me, a little jolt of sex. I take my eyes from his face.
“If you do decide to come,” he says, “I want you to come with open eyes. If Sylvie is remembering something, then the story we uncover won’t—can’t—be a happy one.”
“No. I understand that.”
He’s treating me so delicately. I wonder how he sees me—perhaps as rather fragile, labeled HANDLE WITH CARE.
We sit there for a moment, and neither of us says anything. Wind rattles at my window. There’s a sound of shattering from the streets, the shocking sound of breaking glass. I reach out for my coffee and see the tremor in my hand. When I pick up the cup, the liquid shivers all across its surface.
“Think about it,” he says.
“Yes.”
“And talk about it to Sylvie,” he says. “Find out whether she’d like to go. Because there’s no point in any of this if Sylvie isn’t sure. She has to want to go there. Will you do that for me?”
When Adam has left, I go to Sylvie’s bedroom. There’s a faint wash of color back in her face, and she’s out of bed and playing quietly with her Barbies.
“Sylvie. That person who just came round—it was Adam, who we went to see. Do you remember Adam?”
“Yes,” she says.
I crouch on the floor beside her. I can feel the thud of my heart; it seems to shake my body. I realize that I don’t know how to frame the question, that perhaps I should have planned this.
“Adam and me, we were talking about the place you like—you know, the place in your picture.”
Sylvie is suddenly still. Her eyes are fixed on my face, her cool blue gaze like a clear winter sky.
“We were wondering if we should go and see it,” I say. “You and me and Adam. Go to the place in your picture.”
“Coldharbour,” she says. Pronouncing it precisely, every sound exact, as though it’s some precious, fragile object she’s placing carefully down.
“Yes. To Coldharbour.”
“When, Grace? When are we going?”
“Well, we haven’t really decided when yet—it was just an idea. Adam wanted to know what you thought. If it was something you might like to do.”
“Can we see my family? And my house and my fishing boats?”
“We can see whatever there is to see. But I need to be sure what you want, sweetheart. Would you like to go there? Go to Coldharbour?”
“Yes,” she tells me.
“Okay, then. Well, I’ll need to talk to Adam. I’ll tell him what you said to me.”
“When are we going?” she says again.
“I don’t know, sweetheart,” I tell her. “I’ll have to talk to Adam about it.”
I make a grilled cheese sandwich for her lunch. When I go back to her bedroom to tell her the sandwich is cooked, she has her Shaun the Sheep rucksack out on her bed. It’s bulging. I can see Big Ted and her favorite books, and she’s taken some clothes from her wardrobe, some T-shirts and her suede laced boots and her daisy dungarees.
“You’ve packed,” I say.
“Yes, Grace. I’m ready.” Slightly impatient with me, as though she thinks I’m being rather dilatory. “Aren’t you ready, Grace?”