The Lost Girls of Devon

by Barbara O'Neal

  “I wouldn’t know,” I said in my frosty voice. I was so tired of my mother being everywhere, in every conversation since we’d gotten here.

  Isabel ignored me. “They both live in the country. They both teach classes on these earth-based things. They both have land and animals and gardens. Like, it seems crazy.”

  I stared out the window, thinking of the days before my mom took off, when we all lived on the same land where Cooper still lived. My mother had specialized in breads and teas, and she milked the goats while she sang a little song. The tune haunted me sometimes, and in odd moments I found myself humming it.

  It always irked me.

  The children had tumbled in a little pack all day, roving up and down the hills, scaling hedgerows, sleeping in the woods. On Saturdays we’d drive to the Axestowe market to sell vegetables and crafts and farm goods, and the children played in the woods. Often I stayed with my grandmother, along with Diana and Cooper, who had been “Sage” then.

  “Do you prefer to be called Sage?” I asked.

  “It doesn’t matter, Zoe. You can call me whatever you like.”

  Isabel persisted. “It just seems kind of sad, doesn’t it, that both of them live alone, a whole world apart, doing the exact same things?”

  I gave her a look over my shoulder. “That’s enough.”

  “Fine,” she said. “But it is interesting.”

  “Maybe to you. For those of us who lived through everything, it doesn’t feel interesting. It feels painful. She broke his heart, Isabel. Don’t dredge up old pain.” I turned around to look at her fully. “Don’t get any ideas.”

  Her big eyes blinked. “What kind of ideas?”

  “I mean it.”

  She flipped her hair. “I won’t.”

  “Do we want some music?” Cooper asked.

  “I know how much you love small talk.” I smiled at him. “Go ahead.”

  He glanced in the rearview mirror. “Any requests, Isabel?”

  “You won’t have the music I like. Play whatever you want.”

  He nodded. “Pick something,” he said, pointing at a case of cassette tapes.

  “I can’t believe you still have this,” I said. “How do you even make cassette tapes now?”

  “Same way as before.”

  “They have new technology, you know,” I said, “where you just plug your phone into the speakers, and whatever music you want comes out.” I flipped through, pulling out one and another. Some of them were really old, from the days when we’d first been together. “Mix tapes. Wow.”

  We listened as scenery rolled by, the Cranberries and Toni Braxton and Foo Fighters. When my raw heart reminded me that Diana might be dead, I forced myself to just look out the window at the old trees and brooks and bridges, all ancient and beautiful, fields and sheep and the odd estate tucked back in a copse of trees. Next to me, Cooper drove with one hand on the wheel, the other resting on the gear stick. Light broke from the west through the windscreen, dancing over the dashboard and his hands and my legs.

  It took most of an hour to get there, to the spot I knew he’d choose, parking nearby a bridge that crossed a wide stream. As if the gods had arranged the scene just for Isabel, a Dartmoor pony bent over the river. “Oh, my God. Wait. Let me get my camera ready.”

  Her excitement had been missing for so long that I wanted to cheer. My instincts to bring her here had been spot on. Maybe I wasn’t failing as a mother after all. “We’re not going anywhere,” I said. “Take your time.”

  “He’s a beauty,” Cooper said.

  The pony was small, traditionally colored with a shaggy brown coat and long black mane. As Isabel stepped carefully out of the truck, the pony lifted his head, but when there appeared to be no threat, he bent his head to the water once more. The water caught the sky and his head and the muscles in his haunches.

  Eventually, he meandered on, and we got out. The air was cool, layered with moisture. I was glad of my wool socks and jeans as we wandered toward the moor, spreading up and over the horizon. Buttery light hung in a soft ball just above the hills, casting a gold glaze over everything.

  I paused for a moment, urgently seized again with a hunger to paint. The names of colors rolled through my mind, and I found myself visualizing which brush to use, how to make it less of an ordinary landscape and more of something breathing, a being waiting to awaken.

  And like me, Isabel was seized by the mystery and beauty. I smiled, watching her shoot everything. She got down on her knees and found a new angle for the trees twisting over the stream. I watched her, stunned by a depth of emotion that could still wipe me out. I loved that face more than any other in the world. Watching her dive into joy like this, after so many weeks of depression, lifted my spirits in a way nothing else could.

  “She’s so beautiful, isn’t she?” I said.

  Cooper nodded. “She looks a lot like your mom. And her dad, to be fair.”

  “She does.”

  He pointed at a bird lifting from a tree, making a sound I didn’t know. “Willow warbler.”

  “I found my sketchbooks,” I said. “So many birds I’d forgotten. You knew them all.”

  “Still do.”

  “I was going to ask about them when we were in the woods looking for . . . well, you know.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “It seemed disrespectful.”

  He cocked his head, then returned his attention to the landscape, lifting his hands and imitating another bird whistle. From the trees came an answer. I laughed softly in delight.

  “Do it again!”

  He grinned at me, the full, unselfconscious one that showed teeth and made his eyes crinkle at the corners. I made myself stand there like it was nothing, pretending that I hadn’t missed that particular smile for twenty years and had never even known it.

  “What bird is that?”

  “A wood pigeon.” Matt the dog suddenly went on alert, and Cooper gave him a hand signal that made him sit. But he stayed alert, ears up, back straight.

  Isabel joined us. “What does he see?” she asked in a soft voice.

  Cooper scanned the trees. “Not sure.”

  “Coyotes?” she asked. “Are there coyotes here?”

  He shook his head sadly. “Nothing like that, not wolves or mountain lions. Not for centuries. Might be an otter.”

  “Otters live here?”

  “They do. They nearly went extinct in the eighties, but it’s a good population now.” He gestured for us to move along the trail, and we followed. “We don’t want to go too far when it’s going to get dark, since you’re unfamiliar, but I’d like to check a couple of nests while I’m here.”

  “Egg stealers again?” I asked.

  He nodded grimly. “It was better for a while, but the past couple of years, they’ve been raiding all sorts of nests.”

  “Why do they steal eggs?” Isabel asked. She stopped and held up her camera, shooting a quick series of a twisted tree standing on the rise against the bright sky.

  “It’s a foodie thing,” he said. “People want rare eggs to cook up for their friends, and those yacht-club trips are full of foodies trying to impress each other.”

  “That’s disgusting.”

  “It is. Just greed,” Cooper said. “It doesn’t matter what you destroy, if you’re the richest one, have the rarest egg to serve.”

  “What kind of eggs?”

  “The rarer the better.” He crossed a stile, then turned back to help us over, one at a time.

  Isabel had never crossed one, and before she did so, she had to kneel and shoot a photo of it. “That would be a great Insta,” she said, almost to herself, and then remembered her vow. “Or not.”

  Oh, my sweet girl! I thought. What the hell did they do to you? Why won’t you let me in to help you fix it?

  Seeing her at peace for once made me realize more viscerally just how hard this past month had been.

  But not tonight. Tonight, she seemed happy.

&n
bsp; We kept walking, and in a copse of trees Cooper stopped, looked all around, then strode into the shadows and presumably checked a nest. He emerged a couple of minutes later, offering a thumbs-up.

  Isabel snapped his photo. It made my chest hurt. I knew exactly why she’d done it—the way the light caught half his form, his hair and one shoulder, and the trees behind making shapes against the sky, made him look like something ethereal, a creature of the forest, not quite human.

  “He kinda looks like Legolas,” she said. “From The Lord of the Rings.”

  “Or Tam Lin,” I said. “The Pamela Dean version.”

  “I don’t think I’ve read that one.”

  “It might be at the library.” We started walking at his gesture, the trail between tufts of growth growing quite thin as we left the main area and strode into the moor itself. Wind, unstoppable, blew across the tops of the trees and set a whirling dervish in motion, a dust devil rising like a genie from a bottle.

  We walked in silence for quite some time while the sun fell lower and lower, the color of the light growing more and more saturated with gold, gilding grasses and fences and tree branches and each of us.

  “Oh, look! Look!” Isabel cried, grabbing my arm. “Look!”

  On a rise only a few yards away were three ponies, staring us down. Their long black manes and tails blew in the strong breeze, fluttering over their faces. The one in the front had an arrogant expression, and the other two stuck close behind her. They made soft whuffling noises but seemed unafraid.

  Moving with quiet ease, Isabel changed lenses and knelt in the hillocks of grass, shooting quickly, the camera whirring as she captured the images.

  “As long as you don’t run at them, you can get closer,” Sage said.

  “Okay.” The word was whispered, and she moved like a cat, one step at a time, shooting and shooting. They watched her but didn’t move.

  “She’s quite something,” Cooper commented.

  “I completely agree. This was such a good idea.” A sudden gust of wind blew up my back and caught my hair. Before it could tangle a million ways, I captured it and wound it into a rope that I tied into a knot at the back of my neck, an automatic habit.

  I could feel Cooper looking at me. “What?” I said.

  “Your hair is beautiful. Sometimes people cut it by our age.”

  “I see you didn’t get that memo either.”

  “I tried,” he said, shoving fingers through the curls. “Alice liked it short. It just didn’t feel like my hair.”

  “I like it long.”

  He met my gaze. “I know.”

  Beneath the vast sky, adorned with fluffy clouds as painted by Constable, I felt our old selves standing with us. Seven-year-olds and ten-year-olds, then fourteen and fifteen and eighteen. Those ghosts of us wound around us, unable to see the future, and I felt them all, playing and doing experiments and then experimenting ourselves, mouth to mouth and body to body. The knowledge of them filled me. Their ghostly hair brushed my lips and my neck.

  I wondered if he felt them, too, but he’d always been more sensible than I in most ways. If he did feel them, he wouldn’t acknowledge it.

  But he didn’t exactly put distance between us either. He just looked at my face, and I felt the drag of his gaze across my brow, my earlobes, my mouth. I took a breath and forced myself to look away.

  And attempted to change the energy by changing the subject. “Did Henry give a statement?”

  “Yeah.” He tucked his hands in his jacket pockets. “Don’t know what he said.”

  “I thought he might have been responsible,” I said, “but that felt pretty real to me. His whole face lost color when we said she was missing.”

  Cooper nodded, his gaze in the distance. “That worried me.”

  “Worried you? Why?”

  He dipped his head sideways. Wind caught his hair and flung it over his face, but he just let it be. “It seemed a bit too much. For the information he had.”

  I waited.

  “If your dog got out of the garden,” he said slowly, “and someone told you about it, you wouldn’t immediately fear he was dead, would you?”

  “But a woman isn’t a dog.” I frowned. “I do see your point—if she’s missing, maybe the reason he’s worried is because he knows something?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I hadn’t thought of it that way.”

  “Maybe he’s not entirely blameless. Perhaps he knows things she only discovered by accident.”

  “Or”—my stomach roiled with a recognition of possibilities—“she’s not blameless herself. Maybe she was meddling in something or wanted to save the world somehow.” It had gotten her in trouble often enough before. Save the whales, save the oceans, never buy plastic.

  He sighed. “Maybe all of the above.”

  I moved my hand over that burning in my belly. Above us, the sky began to shift more dramatically, the sun dropping below the line of the earth, the atmosphere going softly purple while the clouds began their show—soft pink now, some coral along the scalloped edge of a cottony group to the east, a dazzling streak of orange along the bottom of the other.

  It coaxed me to forget daily mortal sorrows and invited me to dive into the brilliance, dance in the eternal colors, and rub them all over me.

  A noise cut through the hush of sunset. Something flitted through the air, two and three, then four and five. “Bats!” I cried. “Isabel! Look!”

  They wheeled out of their den, primitive shapes, such an old species, and I tipped backward to watch them.

  “Wow!” Isabel’s face shone, and she raised her camera to shoot the heavens, the clouds, the bats, and then the two of us, standing on the hillside.

  My heart sailed with the bats, buoyed by the extravagant beauty of my beloved moor, and Isabel’s happiness and even standing beside Cooper. Sage. I glanced at him. The name suited him now; he had weathered the storms of youth and young adulthood and loss, and he now stood armed with wisdom to grapple with whatever else life had to offer.

  Matt came trotting down from the hilltop as if to let us know it was all safe ahead. I scratched his smiling face. “I miss having a dog,” I said.

  “You said you lost one recently.”

  “Yes. Simba. Six months ago.” Even saying his name made my eyes water. “I haven’t been able to get another one yet. He was a puppy when Isabel was born, and he was totally my dog in a way no other dog ever has been.”

  “What breed?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Some kind of mutt—retriever and chow and husky. He had a lot of fur and great ears that were half-floppy, half-standing, so when he walked, the top half flopped along.” I could see him, orange fur and black face and weirdly curly tail that fell in a spray along his lower back at all times, and I suddenly missed him so desperately that it felt like a hole right through my chest. “He was very small when I took him home.”

  “You were his mum, then.”

  “Yeah.” I took a breath.

  “You mean Simba?” Isabel said, coming up to us.

  “Yes.”

  “I miss him too. The house is too quiet. I brought my cat with me, though. He hates to be left alone, so we trained him to be able to fly.”

  Cooper gave her a soft smile. “That’s thoughtful.”

  We walked to the top of the hill, which was farther than I thought it would be, and I started getting nervous. “Will you be able to lead us back to the car? It’s going to get dark.”

  “I doubt it. I’ll get lost and we’ll have to sleep out here with the piskies and the ghosts.”

  Isabel laughed.

  “I want to go up to the top so you can see the view, and then we’ll turn back.” He glanced at Isabel over his shoulder. “If you’ll come in the morning, we’d have more time.”

  “Hmm. I’ll think about it.”

  We walked in silence for a time. I let myself drift in the magic of the changing sky, watching the landscape turn softer and softer as we climbed. At the
top, we halted, each of us facing a different direction. Isabel faced the sunset, far to the west. I faced north, where the moor stretched in vast emptiness for miles and miles. Cooper faced east, toward the sea and civilization. The sky filled with light and life—birds diving for insects, and bats wheeling, lavender and red and aubergine joining the show of clouds. It all seeped into me, into my pores, and I felt soft and quiet within, an emotion that had become almost alien.

  When had I lost the knowledge that nature could heal? As I stood there, the wild filled me up, eased my spine, made me forget all the wounds and sorrows of daily life. I could think of Lillian with a sense of calm, and Diana without wanting to shatter. Somehow the vastness of life here made it all seem more manageable.

  From the corner of my eye, I caught a movement and turned my head in time to see a hare outlined against the light, long ears unmistakable, his paws in front of him, and then another dashed out and they both disappeared. “Oh!” I cried. “I just saw a hare!”

  Isabel whirled. “Where?”

  I pointed. “He’s gone now.”

  “Tonight’s moon is called the Hare Moon,” Cooper said.

  “Is it a full moon?”

  He nodded, and as if it were as natural as breathing, he rested a hand on my shoulder. I wanted to lean against him and did not, just let that warmth and steadiness ground me.

  Isabel only stood in the light, staring out over the moor. She took something from beneath her hoodie and kissed it, then let it drop back below.

  I didn’t ask her to explain.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Poppy

  As the moon rose that evening, I wandered outside to the garden, along the path between fields. I’d left the grass long for the hares, joining a push by the conservation society to provide more habitat for the Devon native, and I loved the way it shone against the silvering of the moon rising on the eastern horizon.

  I was uneasy. The night was calm, but just beyond the bright moonlight, a spirit of something dark lurked. I couldn’t shake the sense that things had come undone.

  My mother’s unexpected confession had unsettled me: just one more thing to add to the swirling apprehension I’d been feeling for more than two weeks since Diana’s disappearance. She had been gone so long now that I knew she would not be coming back. A part of me reached through the night, seeking her body, wondering if I could sense it if I just let myself be open to it.