pushed into the room. He patted the smooth bedclothes as if he might be able to detect the warmth of her body, rattled the catch of the window and ran through the line of clothes in the closet. Then he turned back to Ivy and his face reflected the fear within him as it ran and leaped into the recesses of his imagination. ‘She must have been out all night.’
But when he had come in from Haselboro, from lying in a maze of indecision with Leonie in his arms, he had found his own bedclothes twisted and pushed aside. For reasons he couldn’t begin to fathom someone had tried to sleep in his bed. He had seen the evidence, but had let it lie in the back of his mind because his thoughts were busy with Leonie. The girls’ bedroom doors were closed, the house lights were off and he had assumed they were both safe in their beds. He had taken his own concerns to sleep with him and had not missed May until she failed to appear for breakfast. He was standing at the window watching the crinkled skin of the sea when a shiver of disquiet made him turn back to look at the stairs. The leaf and flower carvings decorating the banister glinted with static menace.
He ran up the stairs two at a time. In May’s room the bed was empty and the covers undisturbed.
He dragged Ivy out of her own bed, and now they stood with the backwash of disbelief and sudden anxiety slapping between them.
‘She won’t be far away,’ Ivy muttered. ‘She’s probably only gone, only …’ and her voice trailed away as she tried to come up with an explanation for her absence. May didn’t have friends, not up here. She mooched around the house or the beach, or drifted irritatingly in the wake of everyone else. John’s fear stirred an answering apprehension in Ivy. ‘I don’t know where she can be,’ she whispered. ‘I saw her, like, before I went out to meet Lucas last night. I left her here, watching TV or something. Lucas and me and the others went out to the island for a bit, just an hour or something. We lit a fire and hung out, but it was sort of cold over there, you know, and there wasn’t much happening. So we just came back and I went off with Lucas for a bit, not back to his place because it’s kind of heavy there right now.’
They were boxed in by truths that it had been easier not to confront and now by unthinkable new possibilities. Ivy took a breath and launched herself at them. ‘It’s heavy because Leonie has left Tom, okay, and there’s family stuff going on. But you know about all that, don’t you? Maybe May going off has got something to do with it.’
‘Why?’
‘She was upset last night. We were talking about the old days, you know? Like, before Mom died.’
John walked the confined width of the room and back again. He pressed his hands together to try to ease the tension that twisted his sinews. He could hear breaking glass, the tapping of rain in the night and the predatory sea, and his mind raced ahead of him, breaking out of reason. ‘What did you say?’
‘Something about Jack O’Donnell.’
‘What about him?’
‘She knew.’ Ivy shrugged, but her dismissiveness was splitting, shredding into fragments. Her eyes reddened with sudden tears.
‘I didn’t know that. How could she? She was only small.’
There was a tragedy for both of them in this. For May, Alison had remained perfect and intact. And her preservation of her mother’s inviolability had been a way for them to preserve it in part for themselves.
‘Well, she did. And I… I laughed at her a bit for being upset by the memory. It’s so long ago and Mom’s dead, isn’t she?’
John didn’t answer. It seemed that he was looking into his own memories for the spectres that hid there.
‘Wait a minute. She asked me if it was just once and I said no, of course not. She must have seen something, I guess. And not understood what was happening.’ Ivy rubbed her face with the back of her hand, an uncharacteristic, savage gesture. The ligaments joining history and today were thick and ugly, and too strong to be severed. May’s awkward anger and her irritating needs and hurts made more sense when they were connected up to Ali and John. It was the same tangle that caught her, too, Ivy supposed, only she dealt with it in a different way. With Lucas and the others she proved to herself that it was no big deal, sex, or love if that was what it was supposed to be. ‘We had a quarrel. She punched me in the face and I took the bread-knife to her. Just in self-defence, I … never touched her. It was over as quickly as it started, I swear.’ Her voice dropped suddenly. ‘God. What can have happened? How can we find out where she’s gone?’
‘We’ll find her,’ John said grimly. ‘What about her things? Has she taken anything with her?’
They hunted through the room, trying not to think that they might only be the first to search it for clues to where May could have gone.
It didn’t take long. Her clothes were all there, down to a knotted pair of shorts left damp and sandy on the floor. Her comb lay on the top of the dresser with a couple of dark, wiry hairs caught in the teeth. Her Walkman was on a shelf, pushed almost off the edge so that the wires and earphones trailed on the floor. There was an Anne Rice novel beside the bed, her place marked with a postcard view of Pittsharbor, and two other old books neither of them had seen before. In the bathroom her toothbrush, toiletries and cosmetics were undisturbed.
‘She hasn’t taken a thing. Nothing,’ Ivy cried.
‘All right. First we ask everyone else on the beach if they’ve seen her. We call a couple of people in New York, her friends, in case she was planning to run back there. Maybe they’ll know other places she might have gone. Can you think of anywhere?’
Ivy shook her head. Looking back at it across the gulf of the morning May’s life seemed dull and predictable, only now with the skew of loneliness. She hadn’t wanted to consider the possibility of her sister’s unhappiness before. The effort of keeping back tears made Ivy glare.
‘After that, if we don’t find her, it’s the police.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Have you told me everything, Ivy?’
It was a shock when their eyes met because it happened so rarely. He thought, I haven’t seen either of them properly for so long. I’ve seen a collision of reproach and guilt and disability, not my children at all. And now, if it’s too late, how will that be?
‘Yes, I have.’
Her glare dissolved for a second and he put his arms around her shoulders. ‘We’ll find her, wherever she’s gone,’ he promised emptily.
Ivy scrubbed her face again and twisted away to look out of the window.
John telephoned the other houses. The news of May’s disappearance caught everyone and slowed the stream of time so it seemed they were moving backwards, sliding in reverse into a day that had already gone.
‘I don’t believe it,’ Karyn Beam said after she told the others. She lifted Sidonie and held her so tightly that the child squirmed and yelled to be put down. No one had seen May since the afternoon before.
Tom had come back from his run and was sitting with Marian on the porch. Shelly had whispered to Richard that she couldn’t understand why Tom still had to go running when his wife had just left him, but Richard had only said that he supposed Tom couldn’t think what else to do with himself. Marian looked tired and confused. There were no silver or tortoiseshell combs or jaunty scarf in
