I sometimes think about that request and wonder exactly what I meant by it.
What Sarah thought I meant by it.
It’s easy to start pondering the possibilities of how life could have turned out differently. What if I’d kept my beach hut key safely tucked in my pocket? What if I’d asked Nick to wait for me? What if I’d never left at all?
They are questions without answers. Beginnings without ends. I don’t waste time in that place, not any more. I once thought it was answers I was looking for – but now that I’ve found them, I realize they’re not enough.
I want something far more.
DAY ONE, 8.15 P.M.
Nick and I eat dinner in silence. Each mouthful of chilli feels like an effort, but I force myself to chew, washing down the food with sips of wine. When we’re finished, I clear our plates, grateful for the activity. Jacob’s meal is still left on the side, the jacket potato already slumping, the chilli congealing with a dark red film of oil. I stretch clingfilm over the plate and, even though the gas fridge in the beach hut is tiny and already crammed with food, I spend a minute or two crouched down rearranging everything so that I can make room for Jacob’s meal. I need everything to be normal.
Yet nothing is normal. Jacob has never disappeared like this. There’ve been arguments in the past where he’s taken himself off for a whole day. Once he didn’t come home at all – but he’d at least messaged Nick to say he was staying at a friend’s. I let myself hope he’s done something similar this time.
I turn to find Nick looking at the clock, his expression serious.
‘What are you thinking?’
‘We should probably let the police know.’
The knot in my stomach pulls tight. Police. Nick – who is always the calm to my storms – is taking this very seriously. He’s right, though: the police do need to be informed. I don’t know why I’m hesitating. I think it’s because it suddenly switches Jacob’s disappearance from being a protest by an angry teenager to being potentially worse. Far worse.
‘It’s quarter past eight,’ Nick says. ‘Let’s give it until nine o’clock.’
Waiting forty-five minutes will make no difference, but we make these small rules and deadlines to give ourselves control in a situation where we have none. ‘Okay,’ I tell Nick. ‘Nine o’clock.’
Nick tells me he’s going to get some fresh air. I’m about to say I’ll join him, when I catch the tightness of his expression and realize this isn’t an invitation. He wants to be alone.
As the door closes behind him, I have a sudden sensation of being trapped here, sealed within the four walls of the hut. Night seems to push right up to the windows. On the sandbank there are no streetlamps or car headlights to diffuse the thick blackness and, on a moonless night like this, the dark is so heavy that it feels like I can’t breathe.
Out on the water I catch the flicker of a light, the faint shadow of a boat sliding past. I find myself wondering if it’s Isaac’s boat – whether he’s out there, looking back at me. I shake my head, pull the blinds down, then set about lighting extra candles, placing them on shelves, the kitchen counter and the windowsills. I can’t bear to sit down, be static, so I decide to check through Jacob’s belongings. I know he took his rucksack with him to Luke’s – I remember him slinging it over his shoulder before he stormed out – and I wonder whether he’d packed anything that would indicate he was planning to stay away.
I kneel down and pull out Jacob’s drawer. A musty, boyish smell immediately hits me. His iPad is still here, and beside it are a heap of crumpled clothes: unwashed T-shirts mixed in with clean ones, balled-up socks, a pair of jeans with the belt wagging from the loops. Tangled among them is a damp beach towel that sprinkles sand across my lap as I shake it. Out of habit I begin folding things. I set the neatened pile of clothes aside, then pull out an old shoebox that is stuffed with odds and ends: a fin for his paddleboard, a piece of downhaul rope for his windsurfer, a pair of ancient goggles that washed up on the shore a couple of summers ago, a pack of cards that have softened with salt, a collection of bottle tops.
Behind the shoebox are a pair of binoculars housed in a tired black leather case that used to belong to Marley. I remember the times I’d see Marley sitting at the end of the rocks, the binoculars pressed to the bridge of his nose, watching the shorebirds, rapt. He’d run up the beach and I’d hear him on the deck excitedly recounting to Isla what he’d seen. ‘A herring gull caught a spider crab in its beak! I saw it, Mummy! Plucked right out of the sea. The crab was almost as heavy as the gull – but he got it. I saw him!’
Isla had gifted the binoculars to Jacob, wanting him to have the thing that Marley treasured the most. I was apprehensive that Jacob wouldn’t use them or treasure them in the way she’d hoped – but I was wrong. Jacob loved looking through the lenses, watching the horizon for yachts or passing ships, or seeing a weather front blowing in.
I open the case now and find a slim book tucked inside. Shorebirds of the Northern Hemisphere. On the inside cover, I see Marley’s handwriting: Marley Berry, age 8½. He would be turning seventeen soon. I picture that flyaway blond hair, the dreamy look in his eyes, the way he’d politely touch my hand and say, ‘Auntie Sarah, please may I have a drink?’ He was a beautiful little boy. My godson. Jacob’s best friend. Even as a toddler – when Jacob was bombing around, yanking everything he could reach from cupboards and drawers – I remember how Marley would sit quietly, sucking his fingers, watching with a thoughtful, observant expression. He was a quiet boy – My little thinker, Isla used to say – but he was wonderfully happy, too. He could spend hours turning the pages of his storybooks, or playing make-believe with the set of plastic dinosaurs I gave him for his third birthday.
I glance back down at the binoculars in my hands. A lump forms in my throat as I remember Isla using them to search the sea for Marley for days and days after he disappeared. She sat inside her beach hut with the doors closed, her gaze tracked to the rolling water.
I slip the book of shorebirds inside the leather case and return the binoculars to the drawer. Next I pull out Jacob’s wash bag. I unzip it and find a toothbrush with worn bristles and a bar of soap stuffed in a plastic bag. Although he hasn’t taken it with him, it doesn’t mean Jacob didn’t plan to stay out overnight, as the small detail of not having a toothbrush or soap with him wouldn’t have mattered. There are other things too – a can of deodorant, a razor, a bottle of shampoo. At the bottom there is an open pack of condoms.
I try not to be surprised. I tell myself he is seventeen. He has a girlfriend. It’s perfectly fine. I’d be naïve to think they weren’t sleeping together.
But, still.
He’s my baby.
I zip up the wash bag and pretend I haven’t seen.
I’m good at pretending.
In fact, Jacob was the one who pointed that out.
I’ve almost finished going
