I WAKE TO hear Adam’s voice through the wall. He’s talking on his phone. His voice is intense, hard-edged, though I can’t quite hear what he’s saying. I wonder what can have happened to upset him.
I leave Sylvie in our bedroom, playing with her LEGO. He’s at our table already. He has a troubled look.
“Are you okay?” I ask him.
He smiles his rueful smile. “You heard, then,” he says.
“Not really. Not what you were saying. But you didn’t sound very pleased.”
He says nothing for a moment, just sips slowly at his coffee. It’s pleasant in the dining room. Sunlight falls across us, and there’s a vase of narcissi that have a thin, peppery scent.
“You were right about Tessa,” he says then.
I’m puzzled.
“I don’t remember what I said,” I tell him.
“You wondered what she thought about me coming here with you. Whether she’d be okay with it.”
“Oh.”
“It appears she isn’t,” he says. “She isn’t okay.” He’s looking down at his hands, not looking at me. Again, that slight crooked smile. “Could be I’ve been talking about you a little too much.”
I know my face is flaring red.
He looks up then, looks right into my eyes. My stomach tightens, flips over.
Like Sylvie, I’m not hungry; I just eat a bit of toast, but I keep refilling my coffee cup. I would like this meal to last for hours, to sit here close beside him in the sunlight and the flower scent.
We talk about what Deirdre said, go through it all again.
“It seems to make sense of so much that’s happened,” says Adam. He’s animated, his eyes gleam. “Like that thing that Sylvie said about the children in her drawing.”
“Two peas in a pod.”
“Yes, exactly,” he says.
“I wish Deirdre hadn’t made me promise to keep the girls apart.”
“She didn’t really give you a choice. And I guess it’s utterly comprehensible from her point of view—after all that Gemma’s been through.” He shakes his head a little. “But God, it’s just so tantalizing,” he says.
I think that he might have handled her better, not agreed so readily.
“Perhaps I gave in too easily. I’m really sorry,” I say.
“Don’t be,” he tells me.
He puts his hand on my wrist—lightly, just for a second or two. Warmth floods me.
I’m talking to Sylvie already as I open our bedroom door. “Time to get going, sweetheart. You need to put on your shoes . . .”
My words fall into silence.
“Sylvie?”
I knock on the door to the bathroom. No answer. I open the door. The tap has been left running, but the room is empty. I curse myself for my self-indulgence, for spending all that time with Adam, not coming straight back here.
I go out into the corridor.
“Adam!”
I’m calling for him before I get to his room.
He comes to the door. He’s pulling on a sweater.
“It’s Sylvie. She’s gone.”
“What?” His eyes widen.
“Adam, has someone taken her? D’you think she could have been snatched?”
“She’s almost certainly still in the building,” he tells me.
But there’s a shred of anxiety in his voice.
We hunt through the lounge, the bar, the garden. Sylvie isn’t anywhere. I’m calling for her; my voice sounds thin and shrill. I’m full of a jittery energy. I need to run, but I don’t know where to run to. Panic floods me.
Adam puts his hand on my arm. “We should go back up to your bedroom—see if anything’s gone.”
He runs upstairs ahead of me. On the landing, he glances through the window that faces over the sea.
“Grace. Look.”
Far off on the beach, between the road and the water, there’s a little running figure, tiny against that wide white stretch of sand. I know at once that it’s Sylvie. There’s something about her purposefulness, the urgency of her movement.
“Thank God.”
I feel a rush of relief—that she’s there, that she’s alive still. Then a different panic grabs at me—that she’s crossed the road on her own and she’s running straight to the sea. I can’t imagine why she’s out there on the beach, in the place where she didn’t dare step before. I’m so afraid for her.
I race downstairs and straight out through the foyer. Adam is behind me, but I’m moving faster than him.
I run out into the street. The salt wind slams into me. I’m already stepping into the road when Adam grabs at my arm, wrenching me out of the path of a truck that I simply didn’t see. I feel the rush of hot, scorched air from its engines as it passes. The driver swears at me. My breath is coming in shuddery gasps.
Adam keeps hold of my arm, steers me across the road once it’s clear. Then I slip from his grasp and run down the steps to the beach, lurching at the bottom, clutching the handrail to save myself.
She’s a long long way in front of us. She seems to be running straight toward the sea. Fear has its claws in me. I think how quickly the tide comes in; I think what Brigid told us about the treacherous currents. A child can drown so quickly.
It’s hard to run on the beach. My feet sink in, the wet sand sucks at my shoes.
She veers off left past a line of rocks that stretches toward the sea. I start to gain on her, and now I can see ahead of her. And then I understand—I see who Sylvie’s running to. The girl is way out ahead of Sylvie. She has her back toward us, and I can see her narrow shoulders and the long, loose fall of her hair. She’s wearing a short denim skirt and her legs are bare and white as milk, and she’s taken off her sandals and is holding them in her hand. There’s something about the way she’s walking, rather slow and languid, as though she likes the sensuousness of damp sand on her skin. The scarf at her neck is caught by the breeze, the ends of it curling and spiraling, and you can see all the colors in it that wash into one another as though they are melting and wet.
Sylvie is shouting something. I can only just hear what she’s saying, as the wind plays around with her words.
“Lennie! It’s me! Lennie!”
The girl walks on—perhaps she didn’t hear. She comes to the second set of steps. Her scarf swirls out behind her; it has the rainbow shimmer of spilt oil. She pauses for a moment, drops her shoes. They fall on their sides, and she kicks at them to straighten them.
“Lennie! Wait for me! It’s me! I’m coming!”
The girl turns. I can see her face and I recognize beyond doubt the girl in Deirdre’s photograph. She stares for a moment at Sylvie. I realize I’ve stopped running. I’m waiting, everything’s waiting. The wind dies down and the beach feels huge and hollow, so empty under the vast, shiny arc of the sky. I can hear the sounds of the seafront—the swish of passing cars, a dog that barks at a seagull. The sounds are clear yet seem unguessably far.
The girl’s dark hair has blown over her mouth and she pushes it back with her hand. In the clarity of the light off the sea I can read her closed expression, all the blank incomprehension in her face. Then she shrugs a little, turns, goes up the steps to the road.
Sylvie stops, quite suddenly. From where I am, she looks like she’s been shot—she seems to crumple, her body folding in on itself. She’s kneeling, clutching herself with her hands, her arms wrapped tight around her. The wind brings the sound of her sobbing to me. It catches at my heart.
The girl with the long dark hair pays no attention. She climbs to the top of the steps, walking more briskly now that she’s got her shoes on. She turns toward Kinvara House, walks off along the road.
At last I reach Sylvie. I kneel beside her and wrap my arms around her. I can feel her juddering heartbeat passing into my body. I press my mouth into her hair. Anger sears through me. I’m angry with everyone, everything—with everyone in my world but Sylvie. Angry with Adam for bringing us here and opening Sylvie up to all this anguish. Angry with myself for agreeing to come, and with Deirdre for her caution and the promise she made me make. Angry most of all with this cool, remote girl who just walked on, who wouldn’t give anything.
At last Sylvie quiets down. I’m aware of the world around us again, and of Adam’s hand on my arm. The knees of my jeans are wet and stiff with sand.
“Shall we go back now?” I ask her.
Sylvie doesn’t say anything.
I help her to her feet. I have her hand in my hand. Her skin is very cold. She’s crying quietly now. We start to walk back up the beach. The tide has turned and is coming in, and our footprints fill with water that holds the blue of the sky.
Adam glances across at me.
“Are you okay?” he says quietly.
“No. Not really,” I tell him.
At the foot of the steps by St. Vincent’s, we sit and take off our shoes and tip out some of the sand. One of Sylvie’s sneakers has come undone and she reties the laces, doing it slowly, methodically. Her face is streaked with tears. She climbs a few steps above us and sits there, drawing with her finger in the thin crust of sand on the step. The sea is blue and innocent, and far, far out, on the rim of the visible world, you can see that darker immaculate line, the water meeting the sky.
We stay there for a moment. I’m not quite able to move. The adrenaline has seeped away, and I’m left with a crushing tiredness.
Adam turns toward me. “That’s the girl you saw the photo of at Deirdre’s? That’s Gemma?”
“Yes.”
“And Sylvie has really never seen a picture of her?”
“No,” I tell him.
He shakes his head very slowly. His eyes are startled and wide.
Sylvie hears us.
“She’s my Lennie, Grace.”
“Yes, sweetheart.”
I have a sudden keen sense of the tenuousness of everything, as though this life, this world is flimsy, thin—like soap film or a fine stretched cloth of patterned silky fabric, a fragile, provisional, rainbow-colored thing.
Sylvie climbs down the steps to sit beside me. Her eyelashes are clotted from her crying.
“Why wouldn’t she talk to me?” she says. “Why wouldn’t she stay with me? She just went off and she wouldn’t wait for me, Grace.”
I don’t know what to say to her.