Yes, My Darling Daughter

by Margaret Leroy

  Adam puts his hand on my arm. “We should go back up to your bedroom—see if anything’s gone.”

  He runs upstairs ahead of me. On the landing, he glances through the window that faces over the sea.

  “Grace. Look.”

  Far off on the beach, between the road and the water, there’s a little running figure, tiny against that wide white stretch of sand. I know at once that it’s Sylvie. There’s something about her purposefulness, the urgency of her movement.

  “Thank God.”

  I feel a rush of relief—that she’s there, that she’s alive still. Then a different panic grabs at me—that she’s crossed the road on her own and she’s running straight to the sea. I can’t imagine why she’s out there on the beach, in the place where she didn’t dare step before. I’m so afraid for her.

  I race downstairs and straight out through the foyer. Adam is behind me, but I’m moving faster than him.

  I run out into the street. The salt wind slams into me. I’m already stepping into the road when Adam grabs at my arm, wrenching me out of the path of a truck that I simply didn’t see. I feel the rush of hot, scorched air from its engines as it passes. The driver swears at me. My breath is coming in shuddery gasps.

  Adam keeps hold of my arm, steers me across the road once it’s clear. Then I slip from his grasp and run down the steps to the beach, lurching at the bottom, clutching the handrail to save myself.

  She’s a long long way in front of us. She seems to be running straight toward the sea. Fear has its claws in me. I think how quickly the tide comes in; I think what Brigid told us about the treacherous currents. A child can drown so quickly.

  It’s hard to run on the beach. My feet sink in, the wet sand sucks at my shoes.

  She veers off left past a line of rocks that stretches toward the sea. I start to gain on her, and now I can see ahead of her. And then I understand—I see who Sylvie’s running to. The girl is way out ahead of Sylvie. She has her back toward us, and I can see her narrow shoulders and the long, loose fall of her hair. She’s wearing a short denim skirt and her legs are bare and white as milk, and she’s taken off her sandals and is holding them in her hand. There’s something about the way she’s walking, rather slow and languid, as though she likes the sensuousness of damp sand on her skin. The scarf at her neck is caught by the breeze, the ends of it curling and spiraling, and you can see all the colors in it that wash into one another as though they are melting and wet.

  Sylvie is shouting something. I can only just hear what she’s saying, as the wind plays around with her words.

  “Lennie! It’s me! Lennie!”

  The girl walks on—perhaps she didn’t hear. She comes to the second set of steps. Her scarf swirls out behind her; it has the rainbow shimmer of spilt oil. She pauses for a moment, drops her shoes. They fall on their sides, and she kicks at them to straighten them.

  “Lennie! Wait for me! It’s me! I’m coming!”

  The girl turns. I can see her face and I recognize beyond doubt the girl in Deirdre’s photograph. She stares for a moment at Sylvie. I realize I’ve stopped running. I’m waiting, everything’s waiting. The wind dies down and the beach feels huge and hollow, so empty under the vast, shiny arc of the sky. I can hear the sounds of the seafront—the swish of passing cars, a dog that barks at a seagull. The sounds are clear yet seem unguessably far.

  The girl’s dark hair has blown over her mouth and she pushes it back with her hand. In the clarity of the light off the sea I can read her closed expression, all the blank incomprehension in her face. Then she shrugs a little, turns, goes up the steps to the road.

  Sylvie stops, quite suddenly. From where I am, she looks like she’s been shot—she seems to crumple, her body folding in on itself. She’s kneeling, clutching herself with her hands, her arms wrapped tight around her. The wind brings the sound of her sobbing to me. It catches at my heart.

  The girl with the long dark hair pays no attention. She climbs to the top of the steps, walking more briskly now that she’s got her shoes on. She turns toward Kinvara House, walks off along the road.

  At last I reach Sylvie. I kneel beside her and wrap my arms around her. I can feel her juddering heartbeat passing into my body. I press my mouth into her hair. Anger sears through me. I’m angry with everyone, everything—with everyone in my world but Sylvie. Angry with Adam for bringing us here and opening Sylvie up to all this anguish. Angry with myself for agreeing to come, and with Deirdre for her caution and the promise she made me make. Angry most of all with this cool, remote girl who just walked on, who wouldn’t give anything.

  At last Sylvie quiets down. I’m aware of the world around us again, and of Adam’s hand on my arm. The knees of my jeans are wet and stiff with sand.

  “Shall we go back now?” I ask her.

  Sylvie doesn’t say anything.

  I help her to her feet. I have her hand in my hand. Her skin is very cold. She’s crying quietly now. We start to walk back up the beach. The tide has turned and is coming in, and our footprints fill with water that holds the blue of the sky.

  Adam glances across at me.

  “Are you okay?” he says quietly.

  “No. Not really,” I tell him.

  At the foot of the steps by St. Vincent’s, we sit and take off our shoes and tip out some of the sand. One of Sylvie’s sneakers has come undone and she reties the laces, doing it slowly, methodically. Her face is streaked with tears. She climbs a few steps above us and sits there, drawing with her finger in the thin crust of sand on the step. The sea is blue and innocent, and far, far out, on the rim of the visible world, you can see that darker immaculate line, the water meeting the sky.

  We stay there for a moment. I’m not quite able to move. The adrenaline has seeped away, and I’m left with a crushing tiredness.

  Adam turns toward me. “That’s the girl you saw the photo of at Deirdre’s? That’s Gemma?”

  “Yes.”

  “And Sylvie has really never seen a picture of her?”

  “No,” I tell him.

  He shakes his head very slowly. His eyes are startled and wide.

  Sylvie hears us.

  “She’s my Lennie, Grace.”

  “Yes, sweetheart.”

  I have a sudden keen sense of the tenuousness of everything, as though this life, this world is flimsy, thin—like soap film or a fine stretched cloth of patterned silky fabric, a fragile, provisional, rainbow-colored thing.

  Sylvie climbs down the steps to sit beside me. Her eyelashes are clotted from her crying.

  “Why wouldn’t she talk to me?” she says. “Why wouldn’t she stay with me? She just went off and she wouldn’t wait for me, Grace.”

  I don’t know what to say to her.

  49

  BRIGID KNOCKS AT our bedroom door.

  “Deirdre Walker to see you!” she says brightly.

  I feel a quick surge of gratitude. This is a gift, a stroke of good fortune. Now I can persuade her to let Sylvie and Gemma meet.

  I call for Adam, and Sylvie comes downstairs with us. I’m determined not to let her out of my sight. Deirdre is waiting in the lounge. I settle Sylvie in front of cartoons on the television, then go to say hello to Deirdre and introduce her to Adam.

  But Deirdre doesn’t smile or greet me. Her face is white and frayed.

  “I wanted to tell you how angry I am. After what you promised.” Her voice is harsh with accusation. “You spoke to her, didn’t you, Grace? You went and spoke to Gemma. After everything I told you.”

  She has the air of a woman who isn’t used to confrontation, who has steeled herself to do this.

  “But we didn’t speak to Gemma. You have to believe me,” I tell her.

  “I know you did,” she says.

  We stand there for a moment. Her brittle anger seems all wrong in this homely, decorous place, with its faded peony cushions and the juddery tick of the clock.

  “This is what happened,” I tell her. “We did see Gemma, we saw
her on the sand. Sylvie had run after her, she must have seen her from the window. I was chasing after Sylvie, for a while I couldn’t catch up, but Sylvie didn’t reach Gemma. Sylvie called out, but Gemma didn’t answer. I certainly didn’t approach her. I promised you I wouldn’t, and I didn’t.”

  She’s studying my face.

  “That’s really true, what you just said?”

  “Yes. I promise,” I say.

  She sits quite suddenly then, collapsing on one of the chairs, as though without her anger she has nothing to sustain her.

  “I’m sorry I blamed you,” she says.

  She sits there, crumpled, defeated. She rubs her hand over her face.

  Adam sits beside her.

  “We could have some coffee,” he tells her.

  “Yes. Thank you.”

  Brigid brings a tray of coffee. Deirdre takes a cup, clasps it so tight in her fingers you can see the pale bones through the skin.

  “There’s something I didn’t tell you when you came to see me, Grace. Gemma’s been quite unhappy—just for the last week or two. She told me she’s been having dreams about her mother and sister.” She puts down her cup without taking a sip. “Then last night she had a nightmare. She was so upset when she woke, she was crying at breakfast this morning. That’s why I was sure you’d spoken to her.”

  “Have you told her about us?” says Adam.

  “I haven’t said a thing,” she says. “But maybe she’s heard about you. People could have been talking—the kids at her college, perhaps.”

  “If it’s our fault she’s unhappy, I’m really sorry,” I say.

  She inclines her head, accepting this.

  “There’s this thought she keeps going back to,” she says then. “This memory she has. Well, I don’t know if it’s a memory. Something that’s just resurfacing.”

  There’s a quick moth flutter of feeling in the corner of my mind, a thrill of apprehension.

  “It’s about the afternoon before they disappeared,” she tells us. “Gemma remembers her mother going to answer the phone. She thinks she said, Okay, I’ll be there for seven. She says her mother sounded happy. Like she was meeting someone she knew, not going off to die . . . She can remember her mother in the hallway, looking in the mirror, putting her lipstick on. Pressing her lips together to spread the lipstick evenly. She says her mother was humming to herself.”

  I glance at Adam. He has a vigilant, intent look.

  “Has she ever told anyone this? The gardai—Brian Ennis?” he says.

  “Not at the time,” says Deirdre. “She was only nine when it happened. She was in a state of shock—she was almost mute for a while. She’d only talk to me or her dad. So no, she didn’t mention it then. She was so confused, I think it was all a blur to her.”

  “But since then?” says Adam.

  “No, I don’t think so,” says Deirdre. “It’s only in the last couple of weeks that it’s really begun to obsess her. She certainly hasn’t been to see the gardai. The thing is, half the time she doesn’t believe it herself. She says, ‘Deirdre, what do you think? D’you think I’m making it up? Can you invent memories?’”

  “Is that what you think?” asks Adam. “That she’s inventing it?”

  “I’m really not sure.” She gives a slight self-deprecating shrug, as though she’s not used to being asked for her opinion. “But I do know this—that Gemma would give anything for proof it wasn’t suicide. That’s the thing she can’t bear, even now—that her mother chose to abandon her and took her sister with her.”

  She’s silent for a moment. The clock ticks, and we wait for her.

  “I read this thing about suicide once,” she says then. “Something in a magazine. That losing someone to suicide is more than a bereavement . . . It’s the most terrible way for someone to die—for those who are left behind.”

  “Yes,” I say.

  “I try to tell her—your mother didn’t leave you, she left life. But she still feels so abandoned. She so desperately wants there to be some other explanation.”

  “Yes,” I say. “Of course she would.”

  “I’d better go, then.” She pulls her cardigan close around her, as though it could protect her. “I shouldn’t have blamed you,” she says.

  We say goodbye at the door.

  I turn to Adam. “She seemed to be saying she thought that Gemma was making it up. That memory of her mother.”

  “Yes,” he says.

  “So what do you think?”

  “She could be right. You can see why Gemma might do that, how it might fulfill a need for her. Believe me, I can understand that. Wanting to find a different story, a different explanation—something that doesn’t hurt quite as much.”

  I know that Jake is in his mind: there’s such a raw look on his face. I would like to put my arms around him.

  “So, yes,” he goes on, “it makes total psychological sense . . . But that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen,” he says.

  We sit for a while in silence.

  “You know Brigid’s hit-man theory?” I say then. “That Gordon found out about Alice and Marcus and paid a hit man to kill her? What Gemma said could fit with that.”

  “Yes, it could,” he says.

  “Perhaps we should tell the gardai?”

  “We could. But it wouldn’t have much value as evidence after all this time. Not when she didn’t talk about it when it happened—”

  The sudden ring of his phone makes me flinch. I have a tense, brittle feeling.

  “Brian,” he mouths at me.

  I’m expecting him to tell Brian about the things that Deirdre said, but he just listens. I can’t work out what Brian is saying.

  “Absolutely,” says Adam then. “Well, that’s brilliant news.” He ends the call and turns to me. His eyes are shiny with triumph.” They’re going to search the quarry,” he says.

  I have a sense of shock. That this is happening. That we have made it happen.

  “Brian went to look at it. He found that path I found. I’m impressed he took Sylvie so seriously,” says Adam.

  There’s a sudden click of stilettoes—Brigid coming to fetch our tray. She fixes us with her glinting, curious gaze.

  “Good news, I imagine?”

  “Yes, excellent, thank you,” says Adam.

  I wonder how much of our conversation she heard.

  She reaches out to take the tray and catches the milk jug with the side of her hand. It wobbles and spills.

  “So stupid of me.”

  Her lips are tight, she’s cross with herself, though the milk is all caught in the tray.

  “It really doesn’t matter,” I tell her.

  “It matters to me, Grace. I hate being clumsy,” she says.

  That night, I can’t sleep. I hear the familiar sounds from Adam’s bedroom—the surge of the shower, and then his voice on the phone, talking to Tessa presumably. The phone call ends, there’s the click of the switch on his bedside lamp, then silence. I wish he was moving about still. I feel safer hearing him there.

  In the end, I pull my coat on over the T-shirt I sleep in and take a bottle of Jameson’s from the minibar—it’s just a miniature bottle, I don’t bother to find a glass—and I go out onto the balcony.

  I sit there, the village stilled around me, above me the sky with its pale seed of stars, spread out before me the glimmering black of the sea. The only human illumination comes from the lamps on the jetty, which rim the little lapping waves with lines of orange light. There’s a faint cold track of moonlight over the water. I see that the moon has waned since the night we broke down in the bog, when it was so bright and round, rising over the mountain—its waning a reminder that our time here has almost gone. I count it off on my fingers. In two days we’ll be flying home. I’m ambushed by a sudden longing for London, for its streets and buses and smells of smoke; for the London night, which is always lit and busy, not dense and hidden and full of secrets like the Irish dark.

  A shiver of wind from
the sea stirs the fringe on the parasol. I wonder what they will find in the quarry, and feel again that surge of emotion, the mix of excitement and dread. I notice my teeth are chattering, that the cold has got into my clothes. I wrap my coat tight around me. Out of nowhere, I think of something Lavinia once said to me—the thing the old priest had told her. It’s not the dead we should be afraid of, but the living . . . Her voice is in my head, nicotine-stained, nostalgic, as though she were here beside me.

  It’s the living we should fear.

  50

  WE DRIVE NORTH along the coast road. There’s a light morning mist and a whisper of wind off the sea.

  We come to an intersection I recognize, where a right turn onto a minor road will take you past Gaviston Pits, rejoining the road to Barrowmore farther up the hill.

  I glance at Adam. “Shall we? You know, just drive past, find out if anything’s happening . . .”

  “They may not even have started yet,” says Adam.

  But he takes the road to the right. The sky is bright and pale as tin, the sun shining whitely through the mist, the distant mountains blue as ash. The road twists out of sight of the sea.

  As we near the track to the quarry, we see a flash of rotating lights.

  “Something’s started,” I tell him. “Something must be happening.”

  Adam slows. We round the corner under the oak tree that reaches out over the road. Four garda cars are parked by the entrance to the quarry, their insistent lights raking across us, and behind them there’s an ambulance and a big white van marked TECHNICAL BUREAU, which I guess must have the forensic gear inside. The sight is imposing—all this equipment, all these official vehicles. I think how we have made this happen. Suddenly I wish we hadn’t: it feels too big a thing.

  We have to stop quite a distance beyond the quarry entrance because of all the vehicles.

  “There’s an ambulance,” I say.

  “Yes,” says Adam.

  “What does that mean, that there’s an ambulance?”

  “I don’t know. It may not mean anything. Maybe they always bring one just so it’s there if it’s needed. I mean, if they do find something . . .”