The Best Horror of the Year Volume Eleven

by Ellen Datlow

  The morning passed in a lazy dream, as that kind of morning should.

  I remember Cat was upset about something on her phone, even throwing it down at one point. Andrew played in the sand but was soon inconsolable because he’d got sand in his eyes. Bea was fine, I think now, but majority ruled and we forced everyone back inside for lunch and a nap. I was out for at least two hours, and I wish I’d dreamed a warning, a figure emerging from the mist to show me I needed to latch onto my little girl and not let her out of my sight. But it’s not a mist. It’s a fog, like all my dreams before now.

  Marcy was down at the beach again when I came outside blinking in the awful spill of sunlight. The heat and humidity clung to my air-conditioned skin. This was the moment my headache likely sprouted its roots. I went down to my wife and asked her where the kids were, and she paused in her reading to point in the direction of the dune. They were three little pieces of shadow crouched over something in the distance. If I close my eyes I can see myself standing there, peering down from above as if I know what I would look like from a seagull’s perspective, hands on my hips, gazing off to the right while I decided whether to go join my three little goons or catch a moment of stillness with Marcy. If I close my eyes I can wonder if this was the point in time my alarm bell should have been ringing. But I shouldn’t wonder this—we all saw Bea later. And then after that. And after that. Until we didn’t.

  I lay down next to Marcy. Grains of sand seemed to crawl onto me from nowhere, as sand does, and I remember thinking that I’d be vacuuming the van’s carpet for weeks after we got home. Now I can’t because some of that sand is Bea’s.

  I’ve already forgotten what book Marcy was reading. She read, we talked about our next date night, I told her about the seafood buffet at Clam Sam’s, she read some more, and I lay back with the sun coming red through my closed eyelids. Vacations are for napping in the sun, and I drifted off as though I hadn’t just come from a nap. Marcy woke me sometime later, screaming Bea’s name. I jolted up to find my wife on her knees, shaking our daughter, their foreheads nearly touching. “Honey! Honey, what is it?” she said.

  I moved closer, asked the other two what was going on. Nothing, they both answered, Andrew staring at the ground and Cat shaking her head, confused, scared more of her mother’s reaction than by anything else, I thought at the time.

  Bea had started crying, not her usual quiet sobs but a thin, babyish wail we hadn’t heard in years. Marcy held her tight against her shoulder, soothing her, glaring at the other two. “What happened over there?”

  The three of them have always been more inclined to crack under Marcy’s pressure. They know I’m the pushover, the tired parent, the one who works all the time and misses dinners. Cat said they’d climbed the dune then half-jumped, half-rolled down to the other side and then back again. Everything was shadow there, cool and secret. Andrew had dug something out of the dead grass and sand: a soda bottle, thick green glass like the ones at Mom’s favorite antique shop back home. But the label had read Golden Sun, not Coke or Pepsi.

  By this time Marcy had pulled away from Bea, interested in the story. “Golden Sun?”

  “It’s from my song,” Bea said, swiping at her nose with the back of her hand.

  “You better tell me you three didn’t drink out of it,” I cut in.

  Andrew made a sour face. “No way, it was full of yucky water. We threw it away.”

  “Then what happened to upset Bea?” Marcy asked.

  “She wanted the bottle and yelled at us to give it to her,” Cat said. “Then she tried to drink some of it, and she got mad when Andy broke it on a rock.”

  “I did not!” And Bea cried that thin, regressive wail again.

  Marcy looked up at me then, and we both rolled our eyes without rolling our eyes. She pulled Bea back to her. “Honey, it’s okay, it’s just an old bottle that had who knows what in it.”

  We all calmed down and it became a strange but not exactly incongruous segment of a day in our lives. Bea’s the middle child, and the little ways she finds to stand out only make us fall harder for her. It wasn’t until earlier today I thought to ask Marcy why she acted the way she did, shaking Bea like that. Bea was only crying, right?

  Marcy had trouble answering, as if the reason hadn’t been clear even then. “Her eyes were glass,” she told me. “Glazed over. It was like all that crying wasn’t touching her eyes at all. I guess I forgot about that.”

  Bea felt better the morning we left. I knew it when I saw she had her galoshes on. The bright blue ones. They scraped against the concrete outside the motel room, in little aimless circles—she was dragging her feet like she always does. If not for the noise of it I probably wouldn’t have noticed—because of course Bea would be wearing galoshes at the beach in July. What other kid would even sneak them into her suitcase? That’s the last clear picture of her in my mind. I told Cat to get her sister and brother into the van while their mother finished up. It was ten of nine, time to get on the road. My back already ached in anticipation of the drive.

  The kids—or maybe just Cat and Andrew—were quiet with the iPad they share, except for an inevitable argument or two. Only a few miles of Florida remained when I stopped for gas. I looked through the back window at the pump, saw the blanket with the shape of sleeping Bea under it. I didn’t check, probably paid just as much attention to what was reflected in the window, the haze of sky and power lines hanging over a rash of strip malls.

  I paid with the debit card, right there at the pump. The kids might have gotten out and stretched their legs—Marcy says Cat and Andrew did, but we both agree in this new perplexed way we have that Bea was sleeping in the back. For a good while after that, I was the only one of us awake, the interstate a ribbon of the kind of tacky blandness only Americans could design, billboards for things no one wanted to think about or stop for. Marcy’s book had slipped off her lap onto the floorboard, and she slept with her head leaning against her window.

  At a few points I found myself humming something while the family napped. I think that was the beginning of uneasiness—even when Marcy shook Bea and stared into her eyes like she did, there was no tightness in my chest. When I realized what I was humming, a hidden meaning came out of the half-melody but remained just as obscured to me. The idea of there being something wrong with Bea’s words, with the soda bottle the kids had found the day before. But it was an easy thing to shrug off. Bea’s our little parrot. She’ll get a line of a song or a piece of nonsense she heard from her little brother stuck in her head and loop it until we all go mad. It was just Bea. Marcy used to say that she was skipping without a jump rope.

  That last afternoon in Cocoa Beach I got one of my headaches—not quite a migraine but it kept wanting to be, edging into my peripheral vision, digging in for a long stay—and little patience for her singsong chant. Behind the wheel the next day, in the nothingness of southern Georgia, the headache had neither receded nor bloomed. That’s why the line bothered me so much, of course, but then . . . here I am again, bringing it up now. It’s lodged in my brain, too.

  The headache began with her chant, in fact, the day before. I snapped at Bea, yes, I did, and she ran half-crying around the corner of the motel, toward the pool. The late smear of sun seemed to push out into the dimness between buildings and swallow her up, but it was a trick of pain and light. That can’t be important, though, because I remember Marcy corralling the kids and getting them dressed, and we went out to dinner not long after that. The kids had never seen so much shrimp. My headache had dimmed to a soft fluorescence of pain, and I even had a few beers. We were a tired and happy family of five with sunburns.

  There is something else: Cat said something about “the old man” at dinner the last night. Andrew giggled and Bea told her big sister to shut up. I asked who this old man was, the fear every parent has sparking briefly in me, and Cat said it was just some guy on the beach who gave the three of them slices of bread for the seagulls one day on the beach. Before the i
ncident behind the dune.

  Marcy says Bea stretched out in the rear seat of the van when all three kids got in, her bear Chester in her arms. She doesn’t know if she pulled the blanket over herself. She doesn’t know much of anything more than I do. Everything, whether viewed separately or together, seems so normal, except it isn’t at all. None of it is. Hours on the computer have told me there’s no such thing as a drink called Golden Sun.

  Since we got back home, I’ve grilled Cat and Andrew on when Bea was sleeping, every detail of the stops we made, that old man, the dune, every piece of this nonsense jigsaw puzzle Marcy and I can dump out of the box. And I don’t know if it’s the paranoia in me—the hot, despairing bafflement of this—or just that I am so tired, but sometimes I think there’s something the kids are not telling us.

  And on my desk is something I found in the “way back,” under the fleece blanket and under the duffel bag I somehow mistook for my middle child. A bottle cap, black and serrated around the edges, orange letters spelling GOLDEN SUN inside of a yellow starburst. It looks like it has never been pressed onto the neck of a bottle, like it passed from a factory that doesn’t exist straight into my daughter’s hand. I pick it up and clench it in a fist until it hurts. I put it down until I pick it back up. The palm of my hand is pocked with faint circles, each shaped like a sun.

  I want my baby back. I want to hear her galoshes squeaking in the hallway as she drags her feet through the house where she lives and sings her songs and sleeps safely in her blue-quilted bed. You could say these recollections, theories, details—whatever we’re calling them—are distant straws to grasp at, but my headache has returned. In retracing my steps I’ve gone in circles, five hundred and three miles of maybes, and Bea isn’t in a single one of them.

  Some mornings I go out to the driveway and meet the first strong light, stand and stare at the back window of the van. I squint and rub the sleep out of my eyes. I don’t let my eyes go through the glass and the scrim of dust into the way back. I feel closest to her—closest to the Bea of this moment—in the window’s reflection. I almost see her in the tree line across our little street, in the wedge of coloring sky. It is a small peace, and the sun rises, coming for me.

  MARCY

  When I dream now, I dream of how Bea felt on that last day. The heaviness of her body as I carried her to bed and tucked the stiff motel sheets around her, and dropped a kiss on her forehead. I wake up with my arms clutching at nothing. Somehow, this is worse than putting her in the ground.

  Again and again I circle back to the that day with the dune—the sun reflecting off of the sand in long, gleaming stretches so that my eyes ached from squinting at whatever paperback I’d thrown into my bag. These are the details you’re supposed to remember when you’re retracing your steps. These are the things you do when you try to remember where it was you lost your child. But there are only bits and pieces. Flashes of memory still bleached by sun and sand and salt, and the sound of my children’s voices as they streaked over the sand like wild beasts.

  Golden sun gonna come for me, golden sun gonna come for you. Bea’s little song had gotten into all of our heads. I caught Cat humming it as she stared at her cell phone, a smile playing at the edges of her lips. Even Nathan mouthed it along with Bea. Although, now I’m not sure he even knew what it was he was doing.

  At first, I thought it was a commercial. Some tiny section of a jingle she’d latched on to. It was fitting. Golden sun. It was why we’d come here in spite of the guarantee of sunburns and sand hiding in every crevice. Probably some local ad that ran during the cartoons she watched in the morning while I packed the cooler with sandwiches and bottled water and granola bars and orange slices. All things we would eat without really wanting.

  But I listened to my daughter, how she whispered those words as if they were something too delicate, too lovely to sing loudly, as if they were something she could lose, and there was the raw, bright edge of a memory suddenly burning and then gone again. I had the thought that I wanted to leave this place, to get back into the van without gathering our things and go home, but Nathan would have thought I was crazy. He’d spent so long planning this trip. Hunkered over his ancient laptop, he’d spent hours researching.

  I told myself it was the heat. I drank one of the bottled waters and waded into the ocean to cool off and watched the shimmering forms of my children as they flitted back and forth from the tiny camp we’d set up. Our towels, the cooler, the umbrella that provided almost no shade. How far away it all looked. How unlike anything familiar.

  It’s easy to see the moments you should have paid attention to after they’ve already passed.

  I don’t remember the last morning at the beach. I should. Those would be the lovely things to cling to when I wake gasping in the dark, the sound of Bea’s voice still lingering in the cups of my ears. There were tears. Andrew upset over something. Sometimes, I think it was Bea’s song. He didn’t like it and asked her to stop, and she’d said something back to him. Something sharp and cutting, which was not like her at all, and then he’d started to cry, but when I try to remember, I can’t be sure if that happened at all, and there is a deeper part of me that starts to ache.

  I remember that we went back to the motel to sleep. Nathan drifted off straight away, but I could hear Bea through the door that joined our two rooms. “Golden sun gonna come for me, golden sun gonna come for you.” It did not sound like a song anymore. It sounded like something else.

  For a long time, I stared at the ceiling and pretended I couldn’t hear my daughter whispering in the next room.

  Even when Bea fell silent, I could still hear her voice unraveling those words. Over and over and over until I thought I would remember how I knew them, but my memory was dull and hazy, and I lay on the bed next to my husband but did not sleep.

  When the children woke, they pulled me back outside. Andrew mumbled something about finding crabs, and even Cat seemed antsy. I do not remember Bea in that moment. If she was silent or if she, too, clamored to return to the beach.

  There is only a blank stain when I try to picture her face, how she looked in that moment like a television turned to static.

  Memory is something like betrayal. There, sitting on the beach, the children faded blurs in the distance, Bea’s song running through my head like something foul, I remembered why it sounded familiar.

  Golden sun gonna come for me, golden sun gonna come for you.

  There had been a girl in my seventh grade class. A girl’s whose name had been buried under the crush of years, but she’d had long ropes of auburn hair she kept pinned back, and these are the things your memory will reveal to you if you know how to stand still and watch.

  The girl had sung Bea’s song. Sitting in class, she sang it over and over. I was sure of it.

  And then, one day, the girl wasn’t there any more. There and gone, and no one talked about it. Teachers’ eyes would pass over her seat, pausing as if to consider there had once been a body there, but then they would move on, and eventually, I forgot her, too.

  Behind my eyes, a dark star of a headache began to form. Without thinking, I mouthed the words to the song and pressed my fingertips to my forehead as if the pressure could hold back whatever had taken root there.

  There had been something else, too. Some other, more terrible thing that had happened to the girl but had not been discussed.

  Gonna come for you.

  I told myself it was an old jingle, told myself Bea had seen it on YouTube or on some throwback television show and gotten it stuck in her head. These are the lies parents tell themselves.

  Suddenly dizzy, I drank a bottle of water in slow, small sips and watched my children playing on the dune.

  When Nathan came out, I did not tell him about the girl who had vanished. The girl who knew Bea’s song. It was stupid. A mother getting all worked up over nothing. It was an old habit of mine. Wanting to keep the children too close. “You’ll smother them,” Nathan would say, and so I bi
t my tongue just until the edge of pain as he settled next to me and prattled on about things that didn’t really matter. A date night that probably wouldn’t happen. Some seafood buffet that would more than likely make us all sick as dogs.

  I said the things I was supposed to say, my eyes still trained on the kids, watching as they shimmered from three to two and then back to three. I told myself that one of them had just stepped out of view. That was all. Once, I could have sworn I saw four distinct blurs in the distance, but again, there was the sun and the ever-creeping sand, and the thick, sour taste of fear on my tongue, and Nathan had already started to drift off again.

  Gonna come for me.

  I glanced down at my book, sighed, and closed it. When I looked back up, the children were gone. There were no shadows beside the dune, and I leaned forward, my eyes flicking over the horizon as panic grew hot in my belly.

  And then, they were there. All three of them in front of me, their faces flushed and freckled, their hair wind-swept and wavy from the salt.

  It was Bea that I saw though. Only Bea. She stared back at me, her eyes too dark, the pupils too large, and she looked at some point just beyond my shoulder as if she’d found a small tear in the veil that separated the worlds and was gazing at what lay beyond.

  “Bea?” I said, but she did not respond. Her mouth opened, but there was no sound, and despite the heat, my skin went cold. What looked back at me was not my daughter. It was not a face I knew. The girl standing before me wore my daughter’s skin, but she was not my daughter.