The Lost Girls of Devon

by Barbara O'Neal

  But that would have been too rash, too much.

  I tangled my hands in his glorious curls, still as soft as they’d ever been. “I’m so glad you let your hair grow out.”

  “I guess we’re still hippie children at heart.”

  “No. We’re just ourselves.”

  He crept up closer, sliding his body over mine. “I can’t believe you’re here in my bed, Zoe Fairchild. But, Jesus, I’m glad.”

  “Me too,” I whispered, pushing back all the things that threatened to rise between us and ruin everything. I reached between us. “Let’s do it again.”

  At one point, the lightning was so brutal that it knocked the lights off, and I texted Isabel:

  At the farm still. Road is running like a river. Lightning insane. How is it there?

  Same. Super violent storm. Gigi says don’t try to come home.

  Are you guys okay alone?

  We aren’t alone. Poppy is still here.

  Wrapped in a sheet, with my limbs shivering in sexual exhaustion, I had no right to feel mad about anything, but I hated to imagine my mother and Isabel and my grandmother all there bonding without me. Except, I didn’t want to bond with my mother under any circumstances, so there was that.

  A sad plucking thing moved through me, leaving me on the outside.

  Who put you there? a voice asked in a reasonable tone.

  I swallowed it.

  Call me if you need me.

  Sage came back to the bedroom, wearing sweats and a sweater, the same soft heather-colored one he’d had on the night at the pub. “I’ve got a fire going in the stove downstairs. With the power out, it’ll get cold very quickly.” He turned around to rustle through the small wardrobe tucked under the eaves and brought me a flannel shirt. From a drawer, he pulled out socks. “My sweats are too big for you, but these will help.”

  “Hand knitted,” I said as I pulled them on my cold feet. They were thick and long, up to my knees.

  “Alice knitted a lot when she was ill. It gave her something to do.”

  I squeezed his arm. “They’re very nice socks.”

  Downstairs, settled by the warm stove, with candles lit all around the room and a tray of food to graze on, we talked. He told me about the years he’d spent setting up the farm properly again, and going back and forth to study business and marketing in Exeter. “I always knew you’d stick to your plan,” I said, plucking a piece of cheese from the plate.

  “And I’m surprised that you didn’t.” My feet were in his lap, and his legs were tossed over a big soft ottoman. His hand circled my ankle. “You were so determined to be an artist.”

  “Yeah, turns out nobody thought much of that plan except me.” I shrugged. “I’m still doing art, just not quite the way I thought I would.”

  He sipped his tea. “I was one of those opposing you,” he said, and he kneaded the bottom of my foot.

  “I remember,” I said.

  “I was so afraid I would lose you,” he said, his thumb moving on my knee. His smile was sad. “Turned out I did anyway.”

  “It was all a long time ago.” I shook my head. “We all take different turns than we think we will when we’re making plans. And anyway, I wouldn’t have Isabel if it weren’t for that.”

  “Still. I’m sorry for my part in keeping you from what you wanted.”

  “I was an idiot, Sage,” I said, reaching for his hand. “That guy didn’t mean anything at all. I was so crushed by flunking out, and then you weren’t there to talk to and—”

  “Zoe.” He curled his fingers around mine. “You flunked out?”

  I sighed. “Yep. That teacher, remember? The one who hated me?”

  “I thought you were imagining things.”

  “No.” I shook my head, remembering his gray face, his spluttering fury. “I don’t know why he hated me so much, but it was from the very first day, and he made fun of my work, and belittled my questions, and made me feel like a giant fake, and I was already feeling that way, that maybe I was in the wrong place, and—”

  He said, “Go on.”

  “We had a big project, a painting in the style of our favorite artist, and I spent over a hundred hours on a painting in the style of Maxfield Parrish. So many layers,” I said. “It was the moor at dusk, with all that soft light, you know?”

  He nodded.

  I remembered the endless hours, the thin glazes that were Parrish’s hallmark, each one bringing the light higher and brighter. I’d been so desperately proud of it. “He hated it. Put it up on the easel and tore it to shreds. It was so mean that some of the other kids were embarrassed.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “So this guy stood up for me, and when I left, we went to the pub together, and I just cried my eyes out. I couldn’t get hold of you, and my grandmother was in the hospital, which I didn’t know—that was the second bout of breast cancer, remember? The first one was when I had to go home to New Mexico when I was twelve.”

  He didn’t meet my eyes. “But we’d been together for almost four years, Zoe. How could you have just—”

  “I don’t know!” I whispered. “I was lost and sad and so insecure, and I was so very, very humiliated. It didn’t seem like I would ever have the life I wanted, and—” I lifted my shoulders. “There was Jacob.” I sighed. “And I made the biggest mistake of my life.”

  His mouth looked sad. “Damn. And then you had to confess.”

  “I loved you. I didn’t want to lie.”

  He nodded. “I know. And I was such a prig about it. I just couldn’t get over it. I felt like I’d been gutted.”

  “We were so young.”

  “Yes.” Our fingers laced and unlaced. The candle flames flickered. One cast his eyelashes into shadows across the bridge of his nose. “I still try to live simply. It seems more important than ever.”

  “It does.”

  “How do you live, in Santa Fe?” He let go of my hand to sip tea. “You were married to a wealthy man. Do you live in a big house?”

  I measured him for a moment, suddenly seeing that judgmental side anew. “What if I did? What if I had a big house and a closet full of clothes and drove a new car?”

  He just waited. A trick I’d never mastered.

  “Okay, I don’t. I live in a two-bedroom adobe in Old Town in Santa Fe, which is not a cheap place to live, but it’s not a lavish house. At all. It’s over three hundred years old, and it needs a lot of tender loving care. I don’t have closets big enough to hold a lot of clothes, and honestly, I don’t like to shop, anyway.”

  A smile edged over his mouth. “I knew it.”

  “I’m not the hippie you are, though. I recycle, but I do buy new clothes, and my car is a hybrid—oh, wait. You drive a Range Rover. How many petrol stations to the mile do you get in that, Mr. Cooper?”

  “Three or four, depending.”

  I laughed. The taut moment passed. “Do you have any games around here?”

  “Cards.”

  “Fine with me.”

  Abruptly, he leaned forward and kissed me hard. “I’m glad you’re here tonight.”

  A swift pluck of sadness moved through me. It wouldn’t last, this sweetness. I gripped his face between my hands. “Me too.”

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Poppy

  After dinner, I sat with my granddaughter in the warm kitchen, a fire flickering on the hearth. Gran had gone to bed, her color so much better that I was relieved.

  “I have something I need to tell someone,” Isa said, out of the blue.

  I looked at her, stirring my tea. “All right.”

  “My mom wants me to tell somebody, but I just can’t tell her . . . it would make her so sad. But I do need to tell someone.”

  Alert, I leaned in, made my body soft, tuned in to the agitation in her jiggling knee and the way she twisted her hair around a finger. “Of course. Whatever you need. I’m listening.”

  Behind me, the storm began to crash and rumble and pound, a fitting backdr
op, as it turned out.

  “Okay. I’m just going to barf it out.”

  I nodded.

  “Last year, I started high school, and there were a lot more kids, and it’s a really mixed school, too, like Anglo, Indian, and Mexican, or I guess Latinx and Native American, but nobody in my class ever says that. They say Indian.”

  “I remember that mix.”

  She looked out the window, her dark eyes reflecting the turmoil of the sea. “So me and these two girls, Katrina and Madison, have been best friends since fourth grade. We live in the same neighborhood and went to all the schools together, and we are—were—like best, best, best friends.

  “When we started high school, things changed.” Her leg started to jiggle harder. “Like, last year, in ninth grade, it was kind of okay. They both had boyfriends, when nobody even wanted to be with me at all, because I grew, like, seven inches when I was fourteen, and the guys called me ‘beanpole’ and ‘pancake chest’ and all kinds of mean things like that.”

  “And then?”

  “Over the summer last year, I got these.” She pulled her shirt back to show her generous breasts. “And everybody noticed, let me tell you.”

  I smiled, patted my own chest. “I had that experience too.”

  “Did you? My mom tries to be sympathetic about how much people stare, but she’s not exactly . . .” She made a gesture of enormity with her hands. “It happened so fast, too, like one day I was pancake girl, and two weeks later, every guy in the universe was staring at my boobs.”

  I nodded. I remembered the bewilderment of wondering what the hell was happening with the world all of a sudden, how often people accidentally bumped into me, touched me. It shamed me when I was fifteen, because I’d been taught to believe my body belonged to other people and it was all my fault the way people acted with me. I had the power, suddenly, to drive men mad with lust.

  It was my fault. I hoped that had not been Isabel’s experience.

  “So anyway, when I went back to school last fall, all of a sudden, things were different. Like really popular guys wanted to talk to me, and even girls were nicer to me, and it was completely weird—that it was just my chest, and everybody acted different, but they did. And Katrina and Madison started saying I was stuck-up and conceited and all this stuff that was just not fair, because I was exactly the same. It was them who’d started acting so different.”

  She chewed on the inside of her cheek for a minute, the jiggling of her right thigh going double time. I took her hand, wrapped it in mine, settled myself into a place of calm. “Okay, so this part I’m not proud of, but I have to tell the whole story. So don’t be mad or judge, okay?”

  “I promise,” I said. That was easy.

  “I started hanging out with some other kids. They were nicer to me. But they also were kind of partiers. Not bad, not like super stoners or anything, but they vaped out behind the school, and sometimes at parties, there was weed and some beer. Like that.”

  “Okay.” A girl needs someone to listen, I thought.

  A sharp voice asked, Who listened to Zoe?

  Not now.

  “Katrina and Madison were still my best friends, and we still talked every day, but Katrina’s boyfriend, Robert, started hanging out with the other crowd I was with, and I could tell that he was sort of into me. I kept him at arm’s length, but he was, like, always there, right? I wasn’t sure what I should do. Like, tell Katrina? Tell Madison? Not tell anybody? Ignore it?”

  “That’s hard.”

  “Yeah, so, this one day, it was just me and him out in the smoking place, and he offered me some weed, and I smoked it and it was fine, but then he kissed me. Like totally leaned in and gave me some tongue.

  “I was high and I kissed him back, but only for a minute, because I swear to God, he got so grabby, so fast. I hadn’t even really had a boyfriend then, right? So I shoved him and told him to fuck off, and that was that.”

  “He sounds like an asshole.”

  “Definitely.” She nodded. “The whole year goes by, right? Like everything settles down, and I think it’s all fine. I had an actual boyfriend—a different guy—who seemed like he actually liked me for me, and we hung out. Not a lot, really, because my mom is kind of strict and she didn’t really like him, so I had curfews and stuff that got in the way.

  “But one night, Katrina and Madison and I were going to have a sleepover. I thought it was just going to be us, but Madison’s mom went out, and then all these people came over—older kids, too, like seniors, and even a couple of college guys—and there was a lot of alcohol, like lemon vodka and stuff like that, and I was careful, but I got pretty drunk. My boyfriend was there, and he kept telling me it was okay, that he’d take care of me.”

  Her voice broke. She curled over her body and tucked her hands between her thighs, all the way up to her midforearm. My heart surged out to her, wanting to pat the jagged edges of her pain into softer angles. Knowing I could not. “It’s all right, sweetheart. I’m right here.”

  “I don’t remember what happened, like, at all. It’s just blank, like somebody erased my brain, so I kinda think somebody gave me a roofie or something.” She took a breath.

  “Take your time.” I touched her knee, but she flinched, and I got the message. She couldn’t be touched right now. A wave of warning pushed through me.

  “The next morning, everybody was gone, even Katrina and Madison. I had, like, the worst headache of all time. And I was completely naked. But I couldn’t remember anything.” She bent over, making a soft noise, and rocked a little. I left her in her bubble of protective space and didn’t even make any sympathetic noises. “They wrote all over me. All over me. With Sharpies.”

  She choked, put her head down. Very, very gently, I brushed my hand over her hair, her shoulder. For a long moment, she just sobbed, heartbroken. The keening sound rocketed through my body and roused a thousand furious reactions—I wanted to murder those kids, and wrap her up in a cocoon, and scream like a banshee for all the terrible things that happened to innocent girls.

  But she’d chosen me for a reason, because I was trained in listening and I had sat with hundreds of girls and women while they told their stories. It was what I did. “Oh, baby, I am so sorry that happened to you.”

  She let me stroke her hair while she cried. After a minute, she wiped her face on her arm and sniffed hard. “I got dressed and walked home. I lost my phone, too, so I was feeling, like, so bad, and so hung over, and I couldn’t text anybody to find out what happened, and I just had this sense of . . . disaster . . . in my gut.”

  Oh, my girl, I thought, and I let her keep talking.

  “My phone was on the porch when I got home, and when I opened it, I saw all the social media notifications, and I threw up. I knew it would be bad.” Her voice sank to a whisper. “They posed me. All . . . open . . . and naked, with different boys, all of them . . . touching me in all kinds of different ways. And then they wrote all that stuff on me. Mean things.” She closed her eyes and pressed the heels of her palms into her eyes, as if that could make it all go away.

  My entire body was shaking with rage. “Those fucking bastards,” I said, low and fierce.

  “Right?” She used her sleeve to wipe her face. “It was all over social media, everywhere. I didn’t know what to do. Like, I kind of felt like it was my fault, and if I told my mom, it would make her so sad, and she’s always kind of sad anyway.” She started to cry again.

  A wave of shame slammed me. Shame and guilt and sorrow, so many dark emotions that I didn’t even know how to name them all.

  Zoe was always sad. A lump of something I couldn’t quite identify stuck in my throat.

  But it was Isabel who needed me right now. “You know this is not your fault, right?” I asked. “They assaulted you. It was a crime.”

  “Yeah,” she said without conviction.

  “Sweetheart, why didn’t you tell your mother? She loves you so much.”

  Her eyelids fell, and her h
ands twisted together. “She might have killed somebody. Like, she’s so protective, and it would be like it had happened to her, too, right? Because”—her voice broke—“she takes such good care of me. Me and her against the world, that’s what we say, and she would have just been so devastated that she hadn’t protected me.”

  “Oh, honey. You don’t have to protect her. She wants to be there for you.”

  She squeezed her eyes tight and bent over from the waist, making a keening noise. “It was just so humiliating,” she said with a moan. “I couldn’t go to school anymore, and I erased all of my social media accounts, and I asked my mom to homeschool me until next year, and maybe even then I’m going to go to another school.”

  I kept my voice calm, even as I felt my hands shaking.

  “And she doesn’t know what happened?”

  “No. I didn’t tell her. I promised her that I wasn’t raped—”

  “But how do you know, if you can’t remember?”

  “I’m a virgin. I could tell they didn’t do anything like that.”

  I thought the top of my head might shoot off.

  “I wish I could strip the skin off of each and every one of them.” I took her into my arms. She wept against my neck, her hands in fists at my sides.

  Then she let go and sobbed, which is the whole purpose of a generously proportioned shoulder. I rocked her and held her and made soft, soft sounds and wanted to string every single one of her torturers up by their feet. Or make them sit in the village square in stocks while I pelted them with rotten fruit. Or dog shit.

  They deserved to pay for their crime, and I would talk to Isabel about that another time. Somehow Zoe had to hear this story. But I had promised. I would keep that promise. Only Isabel could decide what to do.

  In the meantime, my healer’s mind went to work to think of things to salve this wound.

  I fought back my own tears, closing my eyes tight. My poor love.

  A vision of Zoe waving goodbye to me that last day rose in my mind. So small, so trusting.

  Oh, my girl. My sorrow and shame rose like a wave, smashing all my illusions of finding myself and living a bigger life and all the other lies I’d told myself. I’d left my daughter. Scarred her for life, and never taken one minute of responsibility for it. If Zoe had experienced something like Isabel had, who would she have turned to? In fact, she very well could have, and I wouldn’t even have known. While I’d been out in the world, comforting lost girls, my own daughter had lived her life as a motherless child.