“Not now, Will.”
He leans his head against the door frame. “I was just going to say how sweet you and Bella looked together in the garden just then, that’s all.”
“Oh,” she says, momentarily thrown. Normally she’d seize upon this, evidence of how everything’s working out just fine. “Well, I won’t be long.”
The wind pushes her through the meadow, as if it wants her to get to the river faster. It’s hard to see in the rain: the stones are battered gray shapes, the trees at the meadow’s edge sodden slabs of orange.
The river slurps at the bank, breaching in places, blades of grass sticking up surreally under a couple of inches of water. She runs alongside it, peering through the blackened bulrushes. They’re not here, she thinks, her stomach flipping. They’re bloody well not here. She starts calling their names, skidding on the cattle-hoofed mud. There’s no one around, just the eerie desolation of a river in the rain, a red kite circling above. She stands for a moment, hand covering her mouth, not knowing what to do.
Shadows appear just beneath the surface of the water, like they did in the pool that first day. A corner of an old red shopping bag looks, for a moment, like Romy’s welly boot, and a choke of fear rushes up her throat. She calls their names again, louder now. Nothing. She’ll phone Will. She must phone Will. But her phone is not in her back pocket. Her phone is on the kitchen table, of course, where she left it. She stops, panting, hands on her knees, tries to think rationally. She must return. Maybe they’re back at the house now. Yes, that’s where they have to be.
Turning back to the meadow, Jessie freezes.
Ahead, her outline smudged by an undulating curtain of rain and wind, is a little girl, tiny, huddled on one of the stones, wearing glasses.
Romy hasn’t seen Jessie yet, not until she calls her name, runs up and grabs her tightly as if pulling her back from the edge of a cliff. “Oh, sweetheart.”
“Flump gone,” sobs Romy, tightening her arms around Jessie’s neck. “Bell Bell gone.”
“Gone? Where? Why are you wearing those horrible glasses? Oh, you poor little thing. Let’s put this on before you get any wetter.”
She whips the glasses off Romy, stuffing them into her pocket, and tries in vain to push Romy’s wet arms into her anorak. Out of the corner of her eye, movement. And there is Bella, out of breath, as if she’s run back from somewhere far away, hair falling in black blades across her face.
“Bella! Where were you?”
Bella holds up Flump, the knitted elephant’s sodden ears flopping pathetically. “I went to find this. Don’t look at me like that. She dropped it. I told her to stay there while I went looking. I’ve only been five minutes or so.”
“Five minutes!”
“Flump was hard to find in the grass,” Bella retorts defensively. She shoots Romy a cold look. “I knew she’d keep whining if I didn’t come back with it.”
“Your dad told you to hold Romy’s hand!”
“By the river. He said hold her hand by the river.”
“The river is just there. It’s there! A toddle away. Romy could have gone looking for you and fallen in.” All the times Jessie’s swallowed her anger, her fear, her doubts, seem to rise up at once, and she keeps shouting, even though she should stop, she knows she should stop, and Bella is paling, her blazing eyes darting about like something trapped. Then she is stumbling away over the soggy tussocks of grass.
“Wait!” Jessie runs after her, Romy sobbing on her hip. She pulls the glasses out of her pocket. “And why did you make her wear these? Tell me.”
A guilty-looking flush rises on Bella’s cheeks as she stutters, “She . . . she wanted to wear them, didn’t you, Romy?”
“Don’t like.” Romy pushes the glasses away and buries her head into Jessie’s shoulder. Jessie cradles her protectively.
“She does. I was just being nice. Is that so hard to imagine?” Bella grabs the glasses back.
Jessie hugs Romy closer. Something doesn’t fit. For all Romy’s sense of adventure, she wouldn’t have wanted to be left alone in the rain like that. And she’d have protested about it. A small suspicious voice in Jessie’s head starts to wonder if Bella, consciously or not, deliberately put Romy in danger. “I don’t like the sound of this.”
“No, you don’t like me.”
“That’s simply not true. I . . . I . . .” Jessie is suddenly shocked by it all, the force of her own reaction, how a Saturday afternoon could have begun so sweetly and slid into this. She presses her hand to her forehead. “Sorry. I’m sorry for shouting. We need to get you some help, Bella. I . . . I will get you what you need, I promise.”
Bella fists the tears off her face. “I need Mum back, don’t you get it? And I need you gone. No more shrinks. No more talking. No more Romy this and Romy fucking that. Just me and Dad again.”
Romy starts to whimper.
“Let’s . . . let’s just stop, Bella. Please. Not here. Let’s go back to the house. We’ll talk it through.”
“There’s nothing else to say. I’ve said the truth. It’s out there now. Do what you like with it.” Bella turns, walks off, bent forward in the rain, wild, elemental, completely out of Jessie’s control.
“Bella . . .” Jessie calls weakly, blinking back tears. But her voice is sucked away by the wind. She knows she should run after her, persuade her to come back to the house, warm up by the fire, but she can’t erase the image of Romy in the spectacles, sitting on the stone like a sacrificial offering. So she lets Bella vanish into the violent rain.
Almost two hours now. Where is she? Jessie listens with mounting alarm to the sound of branches breaking, great limbs crashing to the ground outside, static things airborne, benign things gone rogue, a world spun upside down. She prays for Bella’s quick return.
The clock ticks faster on the kitchen wall, stacking up the missing minutes, minutes when anything could be happening. Jessie imagines Bella crushed beneath a lightning-felled tree, her trainers poking out, the neon-yellow soles.
Out of the kitchen window, the cone of Will’s flashlight nudges through the shrubs and shadows. Jessie desperately wishes she could run back into the afternoon, refuse to let Bella take Romy anywhere, listen to her gut.
Will throws open the back door. His hair is flat on his head. His eyes bloodshot. Like a man emerging from a rough sea. “She’s most likely to be at a school friend’s house, don’t you reckon?” he says breathlessly.
“I don’t know,” she replies.
He swipes his car keys from a pottery bowl on the kitchen worktop. “There’s not a particular house she hangs out at after school?”