Chapter 39
Joni pressed her nails into the flesh of her bare calves, braced ready for the next flash of lightning.
The others were passing the bracelet among them, discussing Karin. Joni couldn’t hold on to the conversation, her thoughts skittering with fear.
She glanced back over her shoulder, saw the narrow gap of the cave entrance. A streak of lightning bolted outside in a brilliant series of flashes. Her heart flared in her chest; the roar of blood filled her ears.
Beside her, Liz asked, “You okay?”
She tried to make a noise, reassure Liz that she was fine, but no sound emerged.
Just beyond the cave, a second burst of lightning cracked the night open. Then a bellowing roar of thunder raged from the sky.
Joni gasped.
Liz was turning, talking, promising the storm would be over soon, but her voice sounded distant, as if Joni were at the far end of a tunnel.
Panic rose in her throat as she felt herself slipping away from the others, being swallowed by a memory of that first storm.
She had been six years old. She’d joined her father on a photo shoot.
The house they’d rented had been noisy with models, stylists, makeup artists, and her father’s voice, booming above them all.
She’d kept out of the way, like she’d been told to.
One of the assistants brought pizza up to her room, and despite the voices and the music, at some point she’d fallen asleep.
She woke hours later to a growling rumble outside.
Beneath her covers she froze, terrified.
She fumbled for the lamp, but the power was out, and there was only more darkness.
At her window, the forest lit up in a flash, eerie and wild.
She screamed, stumbling onto the pitch-black landing, calling her father’s name.
But he wasn’t there.
No one was there.
She was a child. She didn’t understand that there’d been a power cut. That her father and his friends were drinking in the pub next door, a generator keeping the lights on. She didn’t know that she hadn’t been abandoned.
Hours later, when her father returned with the others, he found her asleep on the doormat, her pajamas soaked with urine. Someone put her back in bed—him? An assistant?—without changing her.
In the morning her father was hungover, grouchy, preoccupied with the shoot. He didn’t ask if she was okay. Didn’t apologize for leaving her. She knew her fear, her emotions, her presence, were an inconvenience to him. She shrank inward, trying to make herself invisible.
A few weeks later, her father had a shoot in France, and he left her at her grandmother’s house in Oakscombe, like he had done before. Only this time, he didn’t return.
She really was invisible.
The next flash of lightning struck, and she felt the terror rise up, tightening at her throat. She screwed her eyes shut, dug her fingertips into her skin, clamped down her teeth. Her breathing was ragged, high and shallow in her chest.
Sliding above the wind and rain, she heard a voice. Not words. Not her friends talking to her—but music.
Beside her, Maggie had started to sing.
Eyes still closed, Joni listened. “Under the Bridge” by the Red Hot Chili Peppers. A song they used to sing as teenagers, walking to lessons with their arms linked. She tried tuning in to the music to stop the terror from dragging her far away.
A second voice joined the song. Loud and jaunty, hopelessly out of tune, but with a strong power. Helena.
Another crack of thunder. One . . . T—
Lightning danced outside, forks of it shooting to the ground, like a fireworks display. The storm was overhead. She tensed, waiting to feel it strike the cave . . .
Maggie and Helena, perched on lobster pots, continued to sing—and then Liz was joining in, too. Their three voices surrounding her, rising in volume, echoing in the dark chamber of the cave, singing louder than the rain and the waves and the wind.
Joni lifted her head. She opened her mouth. Began to sing.
Her voice came out shaky, thin, but as she used it, she began to feel the rhythm of the song move through her, strengthening.
Crouched low on the lobster pots, water dripping from the cave, the mountains steely beyond them, the four of them sang.