THE NEXT DAY, Sylvie seems happier. She comes with me to breakfast and eats a lot of toast.
“Can I go and look at the boats?” she asks when she’s finished. “I like to look at the boats.”
I tell her yes. We walk to the seafront with Adam.
It’s a blue and glimmery day, the tide far out, the beach a perfect white crescent, so pure and clean it’s like it’s just been made. Way down by the sea, the sand has a sheen where it’s been smoothed out by the water, with no mark of a human footprint, just the exact webbed print of a bird. I’d love to walk there.
“Sylvie, why don’t we go down on the beach? It looks so lovely,” I say. “We wouldn’t have to go anywhere near the sea.”
“No.” Her closed face. “I don’t want to.”
There’s someone new on the seafront today: a woman has set up her stall in front of a shop that sells Irish crafts and bodhrans with your name on them. She’s hoping maybe for tourists or for day-trippers from Galway, though it seems a little optimistic so early in the year. The woman is young, she looks about nineteen, and I wonder if she’s an art student; she has earrings made of feathers, and tattoos. She sells Celtic crosses on leather thongs, and woven belts and bracelets, and there’s a sign with photographs, to show she will braid your hair. We say hello as we pass, and Sylvie stops by the photographs.
“I want a hair braid,” she tells me.
“Okay. If you’d like one.”
We pay our five euros. The woman smiles at Sylvie.
“Shall we choose your colors?” she says.
She has her threads laid out on a tray. She looks at Sylvie with an artist’s appraising eye.
“You’re a real little Nordic blonde. You’re so lucky to have that coloring.” She turns to me. “Isn’t she lucky?”
“Yes, I guess so,” I say.
“Nothing too obvious, I think. We don’t want to overwhelm her.”
She pulls out sherbet colors, strawberry, lemon, pistachio.
“D’you like them, darling?” she says to Sylvie.
Sylvie nods.
She sits on the stool in front of the woman. The woman starts to weave. She has deft, clever hands with bitten nails. The cuffs fall back from her wrists as she works; you can see the tattoos on her forearms, the intricate serpents and arabesques, and the serpents seem to slither around as her muscles tense and ease.
Adam and I sit on the seawall and watch. I think about Flag Cottage.
“D’you think we’ll ever make sense of it all?” I ask him.
I hear how tired my voice sounds.
Maybe Adam hears it too. He takes my hand between his hands. Desire moves through me at the touch of his skin. I hear my breathing quicken.
“Grace, don’t despair,” he tells me. “We just need to keep on asking—give Sylvie a chance to tell us.”
We sit for a while in silence. I look around at the white, blowy beach. The salt breeze fingers my face. Way out, there’s a lobster boat, with a smoke of seagulls behind it. The silence spills over between us and scares me.
He moves his hand to cradle my head, pulls me toward him, just brushes my mouth with his mouth. It’s the lightest kiss, but I feel it right through me. I feel undone by his touch.
Sylvie comes running back to us, and we edge away from each other. When I blink, there’s a dazzle against my darkened eyelids, as though all the light from the water has got into my eyes.
Sylvie spins so her braid flies out.
“It’s pretty, isn’t it, Grace?”
Adam photographs her on his cell phone. The image is bright and blurry with her movement. He shows her the picture, and she’s pink and flushed with pleasure.
I’m thinking about what Adam said. We just need to keep on asking. I decide I will seize this moment—when she’s so relaxed and pleased.
I crouch down, put my hands on her shoulders, holding her there in front of me.
“Sweetheart, there’s something I need to ask you,” I say.
She’s smiling, looking into my face.
“Yes, Grace.”
My mouth is thick, like blotting paper. I wish now I hadn’t started on this. I’m scared I will make her unhappy.
“It’s about Flag Cottage. About the people who disappeared . . .”
“Yes,” she says.
“And what you told us about before . . .”
My throat seizes up. I can’t quite say it out loud.
“When I died, Grace?”
“Yes. Then.”
Her face is quiet and serious.
“Can you tell me what happened?” I ask her.
“I told you,” she says. “The water was red.”
“Is there anything else you remember?”
“The water was cold and red. It hurt me, Grace. It hurt me here,” she says.
She touches her chest with one finger.
I shiver when she says that.
“What hurt you, sweetheart? Was it a person who hurt you? Can you tell me?”
Her expression is blank, as though she doesn’t understand the question.
“It hurt, and I saw the bubbles,” she says. “Lots of bubbles went up from my mouth.”
I move my hands to her face. I feel how chilly her skin is.
“Sylvie. Can you tell us what happened before? Before the water?”
She doesn’t say anything. Maybe she doesn’t know, can’t answer.
“Sweetheart. Before the water. Who was there?”
Her face is shuttered. I feel her slipping away from me.
I try again.
“The water where this happened, sweetheart. Where was it? Can you remember?”
She doesn’t say anything.
“Is it a place that we’ve seen?” I ask.
But she slides from my hands, goes running along the seafront. She stops by the window of Barry’s and studies her reflection in the pane.