The Lost Girls of Devon

by Barbara O'Neal

  “Why didn’t you take me?” I asked before I could stop myself. “I missed you so much!”

  Poppy just shook her head. “I know.” She pulled the postcards out of the bag a handful at a time, lining them up in little piles in front of me. Each one a prayer, sent to the goddess who could grant my happiness. Mommy, I love you. Mommy come home.

  I chose one at random. The front showed a green hairstreak butterfly, drawn in exquisite detail. The skill surprised me, and I turned the card over to check the postmarked date. June 1991. I’d been eleven years old. I remembered drawing it, using colored pencil to create the lines of the butterflies, painstakingly rendered.

  I picked up another, this one a watercolor of the ocean. Small figures sat on a bench in the foreground, and I flashed on the day I’d drawn it. “You have no idea,” I said quietly, “how much I missed you.”

  “I was a breathlessly selfish woman, Zoe. I betrayed you, my only child, in a cruel and terrible way. I don’t deserve your forgiveness, but I hope you can one day find a way to give it.”

  My walls were heaps of rubble, leaving me as exposed and vulnerable as a pupa, halfway between caterpillar and butterfly. I made a soft noise. “The only way I survived was by hating you.”

  “I know,” she said without rancor. “Still.” She shoved a giant pile of my postcards toward me. “You need to make art your life.”

  There must have been hundreds of them. “I didn’t realize I’d sent so many,” I said, leafing through them.

  “Once a week for six years.”

  It pierced me. That subterranean river of sorrow swamped me again, and I almost choked holding back the tears. I bit the inside of my lip, willing myself not to show how much this hurt. She didn’t deserve it.

  And even as I sat there, I felt ridiculous over how much it hurt still. I was a grown woman. I hadn’t had her in my life since I was seven. Why would it even matter after so much time? I’d been lucky to have my gran and my dad, Sage and Diana, then Isabel.

  How could something so old hurt so intensely?

  “I missed so much,” she said in a whisper. Her lower lip trembled.

  “You should have come to get me,” I said. “That was all you had to do.”

  She nodded. Her enormous, beautiful blue eyes were shimmery with tears, and I realized with some not-heartless part of me that she was struggling with this, too, that she was working hard to be self-controlled, and I was grateful for it.

  “Thanks for these.”

  “I love you, Zoe. I hope we can find a way to have some kind of relationship. Maybe not mother and daughter, but maybe distant cousins?”

  It surprised a laugh from me, and then I sobered. “I don’t know. I just don’t know if I can put it all aside.”

  “Fair enough.” She stood.

  “You don’t have to avoid the house,” I said, “and you and Isabel are free to have whatever relationship you want. My relationship with my grandmother is very important to me, and I don’t want to keep that from her.”

  “Thank you,” she said, and her voice cracked a little. “I’ll leave you alone now.”

  “Okay.” As she started to leave, I said, “Why do you always wear white?”

  She touched the trousers she wore, with a soft rayon top. “It’s the color of widows in India.”

  “When did he die?”

  “July sixteenth, 1992.” She folded her hands in that way that she had, as if she had all the time in the world. “You were sixteen.”

  We had not spoken in four years by then. I had Sage and my dreams and didn’t think I needed my mother. It had become so patently, ridiculously obvious that she was never going to come home. “You really loved him.”

  “I did,” she said in a matter-of-fact way. “That doesn’t excuse what I did to you.”

  “No,” I said. “It doesn’t.”

  She left then, and I let her go and looked through all the postcards. So much hunger, so much love. As a mother myself now, I could see where I’d been damaged, how desperately she’d let down this little girl.

  Would I forgive her? I really didn’t see how.

  A postcard slipped out of a stack, and I picked it up. My seven-year-old self and my teenage self and my adult, broken and mended and mostly whole self came together and touched the face I’d drawn. It was Sage, fishing, his hair exaggerated ringlets, the sky full of puffy clouds.

  I needed to tell him about this. He would be glad.

  But first, I sorted through all the postcards, remembering, remembering, remembering. I let the grief of that child, that girl, that abandoned teenager rise and overflow. In the quiet room, alone with bits of myself, I could grieve.

  It took a long time, but when I finally stood, cold and headachy, I had let a heavy burden go. Maybe I would never love her, but I didn’t have to hate her.

  After gathering the postcards back into the bag, I went to find Sage.

  Epilogue

  Zoe

  Nineteen months later, Boxing Day

  A swirling storm had blown in overnight, roiling the sea into a wild, noisy thing that crashed against the rocks and sent spray against the long windows of the hearth room. Inside, an enormous fire crackled in the massive hearth, and I placed the last of the silver on individual place mats sewn by the girls rescued from the raid. The fabrics were as unique as the girls themselves, bright peaches and pinks in some, chintzes and flowers in others, big bold geometrics in still others. We’d hosted the girls—who’d been staying at the halfway house—early last week, at this very table, and they’d presented us with the gift of the place mats. It choked me up, but then everything choked me up these days.

  Isabel bounced into the room with Molly, the pair of them inseparable after the rescue. Even after the incident, Molly’s mother had not been able to step up enough to take care of her daughter, and over the course of a few months, Molly had begun living with us. Goaded by Isabel, Molly had raised her grades to the point that she would be taking her GCSEs. “We are starving!” Isabel said. “We hiked five miles this morning!”

  “In this weather?”

  “If you’re going to walk five hundred miles around the West Country,” she declared, sitting down and raiding a plate of fluffy white rolls, “you’d better be able to take the weather.”

  She had announced that she was going to conquer the South West Coast Path. “I suppose so. But don’t eat all the rolls. Go get a snack from the kitchen.”

  They danced away, all fresh-smelling good health. Our case against the people who’d assaulted Isabel had still not been resolved, although investigators were tracking the erased photos via cell phone companies and sophisticated tracking software. The case was moving forward, and in the meantime, she’d become very active online in groups devoted to people recovering from bullying and other social media issues. I was quite proud of her. She still spoke to Dr. Kerry once a week, and she participated in a group chat with assault survivors her age.

  One by one, everyone assembled around the table. Gran was having a semidecent day; though they were few and far between, we tried to make sure she felt as normal as possible. Poppy had been key in figuring out ways to do that, actually, which had gone a long way toward giving us a chance to work out at least a polite relationship. Isabel was crazy about her, just as I’d loved my grandmother, and I had to admit it was a healthy, strong relationship for my daughter.

  And my mother. She flat out adored Isabel.

  I gazed around the table. Gran and Isabel and Molly. Poppy and Mia and her partner, Beatrice; Sage and my father, Ben, who was visiting for the holiday. I had no idea where the possible reunion between him and Poppy might go, but whatever. Isabel was thrilled with her machinations. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that Ben never gave in to anything he didn’t want.

  When everyone was seated, I stood from my place as matriarch at the table and lifted a glass. Mine was filled with water, but there were plenty of spirits around the table. “Welcome, everybody! This is a ne
w tradition here at Woodhurst Hall—our Boxing Day celebration.”

  “Hear! Hear!” cried Poppy.

  “We’re going to celebrate all the best events of the year, and I think we have a lot of them today. Who would like to start?”

  Sage stood up. “I will! I married my sweetheart this year, and I could not be happier.”

  Even knowing he was going to do it, I felt a rush of pleasure. “Hear! Hear!” I cried. “Best year of my life thus far.”

  Isabel stood. “A publisher approached me to publish my book about the bluebell woods after reading it on Wattpad, and I took the deal!”

  Molly whooped. “Best story ever!”

  Others marked their stories, including a mention for my grandmother’s mystery novels as some of the best feminist works of the century and my father’s recognition as a weaver.

  When they were all finished, I said, “I have two things to celebrate.” Sage stood and picked up a canvas that had been carefully placed against the wall. He carried it over and turned it around, and again I felt a wild sense of accomplishment over the piece. I’d used the postcards my mother had returned to me to create a portrait of her.

  The piece had taken more than a year, both because I’d been uncovering my voice and because it had forced me to deal with my feelings about my mother and about being abandoned. The collage showed her standing on the shores of a lake, wearing white. It was pieced in colors I’d cut from butterfly wings and ocean waves and grass and moor. In the shadows and making the lines of her hair and the wavy lines of the lake were words—dear mum, mummy, mother, I love you. Come home. Come back. I love you. I miss you, I miss you, I miss you.

  It had won first prize at an exhibition. “This piece has earned me an honorable mention at the Hurley Awards,” I said, “and will be entered in a major competition next spring.”

  The table was entirely silent. It was unnerving, and I glanced at Sage, who smiled. He’d been saying the piece was more than I thought it was. My father stood and began to applaud. Isabel leapt to her feet and joined in, and then the entire table was applauding.

  I only looked at my mother, who sat in her place with her hands in her lap. Tears streamed down her face.

  I realized that her approval was the only thing I wanted. That I’d created it for her.

  She stood and left her place, coming up to examine the collage closely. Her fingertips floated above the words, the longing expressed so nakedly across her shoulders, my love across her mouth. “I am so proud of you, Zoe. It’s remarkable.”

  Something broke loose, and I found emotion welling up in me, something that felt very like love. “Thank you,” I said, and I looked into her eyes, letting her see me, letting myself see her.

  “I have another surprise,” I whispered, and I took her hand and placed it over my belly. “You have another grandchild on the way.”

  She burst into tears. My mother, my enemy, the grandmother of my children. I hugged her. For the first time in thirty-two years. She clung to me, smaller than I could believe, softer, warmer.

  It felt strange and painful and healing.

  It felt like forgiveness.

  Acknowledgments

  So many people contributed to this book that I barely know where to begin.

  First up are my West Country relatives: Ander and Jeanie Barlow in the north, who flung open their doors warmly and offered their stories of life in Somerset. I often remember the view over the hills and fields to Glastonbury Tor in the distance. I owe so much of Poppy’s character to that visit! Thanks to their daughter, Brinna, a brilliant and questing woman I admire deeply, for help with language. In the south are Frances and Charles Holme, who showed us another angle of life in the West Country in their little village and in the forest. Thanks for the village cricket match and the ginger apple cake, and always the sense of love and family.

  I also had the good luck to find excellent and knowledgeable guides to the West Country: first John Flanagan, from Divine Light Tours, who opened doors to discovery on a tour of the spiritual side of Glastonbury. His thoughtful authenticity and historical knowledge proved invaluable. I am more grateful than I can say. In the south, photographer and local native Mark Lakeman from Unique Devon Tours drove us through narrow lanes and along tall cliffs and through a dozen villages so that I could build one of my own. I will never forget the day on Dartmoor with Ken the shepherd, which—books and research aside—provided one of my favorite days of travel, ever. Thanks, too, for the bluebell wood, an enchanting place indeed.

  Thanks to the inimitable Ellen Kushner for the watercolor of a hare, who kept me company through the toughest stretches, a cheerful companion.

  I am insanely, deeply grateful to my entire team at Lake Union—Alicia Clancy, Danielle Marshall, Gabe Dumpit, and the entire marketing team. I can’t say enough about how much I love writing for this imprint.

  Enormous, vast buckets of thanks to developmental editor Tiffany Yates Martin, who pushed me hard to do my best work, and to Meg Ruley, who is, let’s face it, the greatest agent of all time.

  Finally, thanks to my partner, Neal Barlow, who is steady, funny, and kind, and is a great travel companion, even when we get lost in the forest. I know I can always trust him to lead me home.

  About the Author

  Photo © 2009 Blue Fox Photography

  Barbara O’Neal is the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and Amazon Charts bestselling author of more than a dozen novels, including When We Believed in Mermaids, The Art of Inheriting Secrets, and How to Bake a Perfect Life. She lives in the beautiful city of Colorado Springs with her beloved—a British endurance athlete who vows he’ll never lose his accent.

  To learn more about O’Neal and her works, visit her online at www.barbaraoneal.com.