The Lost Girls of Devon

by Barbara O'Neal

  “But what would I do with them?”

  “Make art? Enjoy the process?”

  Another shrug. “It’s like they’re not real unless other people see them.”

  “Mmm.” I thought about my paintings, especially when I’d begun to imagine I might be a fine artist, and how desperately I’d wanted to have other people look at them and enjoy them. It was part of the drive of making art. “What if you made up a new name and started a new account?”

  For a moment, she was still. Considering. Then she shook her head. “Maybe.” She twisted her mouth. “Or not. Maybe I want an analog life.”

  I nodded, wondering if I should take this moment to ask again what had happened. At that exact instant she pulled her sleeves down over her hands and huddled closer into the hoodie, like a turtle withdrawing. Maybe she was remembering.

  I touched her arm gently, then let go. “Millions of people survived without digital for a long, long time,” I said lightly. “They managed to make art anyway.”

  She didn’t answer, and I looked back out to the view of the sea. Maybe this would be the rebellion of the new generation—they’d go analog to reject the dehumanization of digital.

  I took a breath, smelling salt and damp earth and the fishy scent of the sea, and my body eased. Against the tossing gunmetal gray of the waves, clouds scudded north, bubbles and skeins, and the wind blew over my face, my ears, tossed my hair. For the first time in months I didn’t think. Just existed.

  And beside me, Isabel grew still too. We simply sat for a long time letting nature heal whatever she could reach in each of us.

  At last, Isabel said, “I’m getting cold.”

  “Me too.” We stood, brushing off our butts. “I have to go to the pub for a meeting about Diana after supper. Do you want to go with me?”

  “Is this one of those things where you want me to go but you won’t force me?”

  “No. I just thought you might want to be there.”

  “I didn’t really know her. And I have some ideas I want to play with about the forest.”

  “Yeah?” A curl escaped her hoodie and blew against her cheek. I restrained myself from tucking it back in. “What kind of ideas?”

  She lifted a shoulder, staring off toward the sea. That expression again. Here but not here. “Not ready for sharing.”

  “Okay. Let me know when you are.”

  “I will.”

  For a few more breaths, I allowed myself to look at her profile. Maybe coming here was the best idea so far.

  “Stop, Mom,” she said, not looking at me.

  I laughed softly. “I can’t help it. You’re wearing my favorite face.”

  She rolled her eyes, but a slight smile flashed over her mouth. “You are so corny it’s embarrassing.”

  I leaned back, pleased by the normality of her reactions. “It’s my job.”

  It would always be my job.

  Chapter Eight

  Isabel

  Dr. Kerry says I should be getting some exercise. Something about endorphins or serotonin or one of those brain chemicals that get out of balance. I talked to her through the computer, and it was kind of harder and kind of easier. She asked a bunch of simple questions, like how was the plane and what’s it like in England, and it wasn’t terrible.

  But it’s weird that our faces are so big. She has eyes like laser beams, and I don’t want her using x-ray vision on my brain.

  She’s been saying all along that I should get exercise, and I didn’t want to at home because of . . . well, I didn’t want to see anybody. But here nobody knows me, so I promised her today I’d take a walk.

  I just went wherever, walking along a trail by Gigi’s house that goes all the way around this part of England, for, like, five hundred miles, all along the cliffs. You see people with backpacks on it all the time, and I saw a couple today, older than my mom, with big battered packs. Each one nodded at me, and I nodded back, wondering what it would feel like to walk five hundred miles.

  The trail leads down into the valley, and I walked along the river watching some birds fishing and swimming. A sign, like a cartoon sign made of wood, pointed toward the village in one direction, the beach behind me, the South West Coast Path, and then the Drengas Hill Fort. I was thinking it would be a fort like in New Mexico, a big wooden or adobe thing, but it wasn’t like that at all.

  It was just trees and flowers. Amazing, gigantic, old trees and a whole carpet of tiny blue flowers. They looked like they were floating over the grass, and it was so beautiful and quiet that it made my heart hurt. I wandered in, trying to stay off the flowers, and it felt like it was enchanted, like a fairy-tale place where you could cross through a portal if you knew where to look. The trees seemed alive, like human alive, as if they were talking to each other behind my back, making expressions.

  We don’t have trees like that in New Mexico.

  I wandered over to one that was ancient, as wide as four people, covered in soft moss. I pressed my hands to it like it was the standing stones in Outlander, and I might fall through time to find my true love. It felt like moss and bark, cool, but also like something lived inside of it, something running like a river. I looked up through the branches, and there was a whole roof of leaves with this beautiful light on them, making everything in the meadow look a soft yellow-green.

  It was crazy. I’d never seen a place like that before. It looked like a forest in a Disney movie, the arms of the trees wearing green felt and their leaves like long hair, like they could just go for a walk. I sat down by the foot of the Mother Tree and leaned against it and felt safe for the first time in ages. I closed my eyes and imagined there were fairies peeking out around the roots, talking to each other about this person who understood them.

  As I sat there, I had a whole idea for a new book. It fell right out of the trees, a story about a girl in a forest and a magical door to a new place, and a journey to complete a quest. It was practically whole, like it had just been waiting for me to be still. I sat there and let it fill me up, every corner of my brain and body.

  That was what I was thinking about as I walked home and as I sat with my mom looking at the ocean. This new idea and the people in it and how to start it.

  In my room, with Mósí sitting beside me, I started a new file on Wattpad. Private, for the moment, because people don’t like it if you leave them hanging for too long.

  But I started, because ideas are the most fun part, and sometimes if I don’t get them out, they’ll follow me around like little puppies.

  The thought makes me laugh. I’ll have to ask Gigi if that’s how it is for her, stories following her around. Maybe I’ll even ask my dad. He writes songs. It must be kind of the same.

  He’s all awkward with me right now. His girlfriend is pregnant, maybe that’s why, which is what Dr. Kerry asked me to think about, but I think he doesn’t know what to say to me after everything. Even though he doesn’t know anything, really. Nobody does. And I’m not going to tell them. It’s my business.

  Chapter Nine

  Zoe

  I was nervous walking down to the pub, my stomach reminding me every five seconds that this was about Diana. That she was missing. That I might hear something awful.

  Breathe. Taking a long deep breath grounded me, brought me back into the moment.

  The moment. This one.

  It was pretty spectacular, as moments go. The clouds had cleared, leaving behind a golden glaze as thick as honey. A painter could spend a lifetime just on those hills and never fully capture them, but I considered possibilities as I walked—which paints and methods would I choose? Which brushes? How could I capture it?

  When I realized what I was thinking, I was taken aback. This was the second time in a single day that I’d wanted to paint something. It had been years. More than a decade. Was it just the landscape?

  My feet carried me to the pub, a half-timbered building that leaned precariously toward the street. It had been this way since I could remember and h
adn’t tumbled over yet, but it could make you dizzy to look at it. The mullioned windows on the second floor had been reinforced to keep them from falling out of their frames, but otherwise it remained sound. I pushed the door open.

  The scent of beer soaked into the floor for centuries swamped me. Men standing at the bar swung their faces around to watch me make my way through the warren of rooms, dark and tight beneath low ceilings.

  I passed a booth populated with men in golf shirts and khakis, their haircuts fresh, their faces already tan from the days out on their yachts. One of them caught my eye, and I realized it was the well-tended man my grandmother had pointed out to me. The commodore. I figured this must be where the members of the yacht club unwound.

  The men at the bar who watched me walk through the room were the usual suspects, all locals who’d been bending an elbow at the Rose and Crown since they’d earned the right to drink. I’m sure I’d know many of them if I heard their names, though my gran hadn’t been much of a pub dweller. A few shadier types lurked around one table, and I imagined them in the scarves and earrings of smugglers of old.

  At the back of the pub, I found a much more varied crowd—more than a couple dozen people of a wide variety of ages and both sexes. I saw Diana’s mother, still as skinny and dry as a broomstick, deep in conversation with a man about her age. I knew I should talk to her, but the idea met with sharp resistance. She’d make it a drama somehow, something about herself.

  I slid through a group of twenty-something women decorated with tattoos and streaks of blue or green hair and gave them a nod. One of them was almost certainly Diana’s right-hand woman, Cora. Diana had mentioned her a few times, but I had never met her.

  I didn’t really see anyone else I knew, but why would I? I’d been gone for more than twenty years, and I only popped in every six months for a couple of weeks. I looked for an empty seat that wouldn’t feel too intimidating.

  And then I did see a familiar face. A woman with a cloud of black hair, dressed in a white tunic with white-on-white embroidery around the hem and sleeves. My hippie mother, who still dressed like it was 1975 or as if she lived in Glastonbury. I paused for only a second, my feet stopping so abruptly I might have stepped into puddles of superglue.

  She still wore bracelets, even more than she’d had when I was small. They rattled on her wrists when she talked and when she brushed her hair away from her face. I couldn’t hear her voice, but I heard it in my mind, rich and husky, the way it had sounded coming through the phone lines from India for five years.

  Until I refused to take her calls.

  She would never dare approach me, but to be safe, I ducked around the back of the crowd and headed for a corner.

  Where I found Cooper.

  Of course. The place was full of perils.

  He’d shed the Carhartt jacket with all its pockets and now sat in a wool sweater the color of the moor at high summer, and jeans and heavy boots. A man who walked the farthest wilds of his land and knew the names of every wildflower that grew, and every bird that called out a greeting, and every tree twisted by the harsh winds. A memory flashed through my brain—Cooper in a heavy winter coat, his magnificent hair blowing in a gale, holding my hand as we walked across the rugged ground.

  A border collie with alert ears sat on the floor beside him, his white paws crossed neatly one over the other. Cooper looked up, gave a lift of his chin in greeting.

  “Do you mind if I sit with you?” I asked, already pulling out the chair beside him. I saw him nearly every time I came to England, always by accident, and because the place was small and everyone knew everyone else. A decade or so of stiffness had given way to a slightly less rigid connection, but the relationship couldn’t really have been called friendship. Mainly we shared a long connection with Diana, and she loved both of us, so we tried for her sake.

  He gestured toward the chair.

  I sat down, hiding behind the backs of the others. “My mother is here.”

  “I saw her.”

  “Diana was friendly with her.”

  He tilted his head to look at me, raising one brow. “You’re the only one at war with your mother, as far as I know.”

  Stung, I said, “It’s not war. I just have good boundaries.”

  He didn’t reply because of course he wouldn’t. He wouldn’t take a side or have an opinion. I took a breath and pointed to the dog. We had always had dogs in common. It was a safe topic. “Who’s this fellow?”

  “Matt.”

  The dog’s tail wagged ever so slightly. “Am I allowed to touch him?” The dogs weren’t allowed to socialize when they were working, and while I didn’t see any sheep to herd, it was better to be safe. Cooper could be prickly.

  “It’s all right. He’s retired.” He gave a command, a single syllable, and Matt leapt to his feet and came over to greet me.

  “Hey, you,” I said, rubbing his ears. His black and white fur was long to protect him against the harsh conditions of the land, and he had bright, alert eyes. “You’re a special one, aren’t you?”

  He agreed, settling down against my leg and throwing Cooper a look that said, See how this is done?

  Cooper gave him a scrub on the chest. “You’re a good man, Matt, you are.”

  The weight of the dog against my leg eased some tangled thing along my spine. I thought of Simba, gone six months, and in the spiraling way of grief, I suddenly missed him desperately. “I lost my dog six months ago,” I said.

  “Ah, I’m sorry.” Of all people, he would understand how a dog could take up so much space in your life. “Do you want to tell me about her?”

  “Him.” I stroked Matt’s fur, feeling too much emotion rise in my throat. If I started crying now for Simba, I might not stop. I chanced a glance at Cooper, hoping the tears wouldn’t show in my eyes. “It’s still too hard.”

  He nodded.

  Around us, people talked and murmured and greeted each other, but here in this corner it was quiet, which left space for memories to crowd their way in. When we were children, we’d spent all of our time with each other. We’d always been together, and I suppose I expected we always would be. When my mother didn’t come back from India, I took even greater refuge in his company. My grandmother drove me to the farm, and we’d amble out into the moor or into the forest and follow butterflies and birds, and in the winter the cry of redwings. He cataloged birds and grasses while I drew postcards of butterflies and storms to send to my mom. Back in those days we didn’t know that she wasn’t coming back, just that she wasn’t coming back yet.

  All summer we wandered outdoors, taking paper bags filled with apples and cookies Sage’s mother made. Our families didn’t worry about us. We’d grown up there, knew every inch of our world and what to do in the event of a thunderstorm or wild winds or even a broken ankle. The sun turned us brown and walking made us strong, and we always had each other and a dog.

  And I thought it would always be that way. How do you imagine not having one of your arms?

  I swallowed. “How are things, Cooper?”

  “You asked me that already.”

  I glared at him. “You don’t have to be mean.”

  He held my gaze, and I saw that he was as conflicted as I was, both of us feeling that old connection, and the old pain. His hair caught the light, the ringlets haloed, making him look like some wild creature who’d stumbled into the pub from some other realm. Tam Lin, perhaps, already promised to the fairy queen.

  At last, he relented. “I’m well enough.”

  “Still on the farm?”

  He gave a slow nod. “Yes. It’s a good life. Simple.” I tried not to read anything into the answer. That farm life had looked very narrow to me once upon a time, and it had contributed to our breach.

  After a moment he asked, “How are you, Zoe?”

  “I’m okay,” I said. “Divorced.”

  “I heard.” He lifted his bottle of water. Even when we were teenagers, he didn’t drink alcohol, a rebellion
against the addiction that had run rampant through our parental group. My dad used to joke that they just said yes in the seventies, with dire consequences for a lot of them, including himself. He’d been lost to me for a couple of years. “How is your daughter?”

  I paused, wondering whether to tell some portion of the truth or a social lie. I landed somewhere in the middle. “I brought her with me. She found the hill fort today and was completely enchanted.”

  A smile softened his face. “I reckon it’s magical just now with the bluebells.”

  “That was the exact word she used—magical.” My mother moved through the room, the pristine white of her tunic and leggings shining in the dark pub. I studiously did not look at her, thumbing my phone automatically to look at the screen. Nothing. Just the photo of Isabel I kept there, from a day a few years ago when we’d made brownies together. “She wants to shoot photos of it, but recently she canceled all of her social media accounts and doesn’t know what she’d do with the pictures.”

  He nodded, but whether in agreement or just to be polite, I didn’t know. I straightened, rubbed my hands on my thighs. “Sorry. I’ll stop chattering.”

  “It’s not chatter. And I wouldn’t mind if it was.”

  “You always hated small talk.”

  “Only inane small talk,” he said in his deep voice. “You have never chattered inanely.”

  A little more pressure in my body eased. “Don’t know about that, but thanks.”

  “Maybe you could find her an old-school scrapbook. You might check Jacob Stone’s stationery store over in Beercombe. He has things there that have been out of stock in the world since 1950.”

  “Still?”

  “Still.”

  Stone’s Stationery, one village over, had been the family business for over a hundred years, and it was a warren of strange and useful things. I’d haunted the place whenever I could to unearth odd papers and art supplies. “He must be a million years old.”

  “His daughter mainly runs it now, but I don’t think she’s done a thing to it.”

  “I’ll have to check it out.”