Chapter Eight
My nerves actually can’t take this. I want to scream, to howl out into the night like some sort of feral animal. And perhaps I should — but I hold it together, by a thread. I can’t collapse, but I can call for help.
Bolting up the stairs, I open her bedroom door without knocking, hoping to see her boots and clothing discarded on the floor, but my lower lip trembles at the sight of her bed.
Still made. Two bunny teddy bears propped up against a selection of throw pillows.
She isn’t here. She’s still out with Raven, whose surname I don’t even know.
I open WhatsApp and start typing a frantic message to the mums group chat for Skyla’s class, but I delete what I write twice before closing the app completely without sending a thing.
Skyla will be furious at me for causing a scene — but then, I’m furious at her for not telling me where she went.
For turning her location off. What if she has been taken?
I swallow hard. I’m sitting here seething at my child when someone might have abducted her.
Nothing I do seems to be right; everything I feel is wrong.
Parenthood is something you blindly navigate every single day — and just this once I wish there was someone who could tell me what to do in a situation like this.
I return to the keypad, where the number for the emergency services is still entered on the screen, and press call, squeezing my eyes shut while I wait to be connected.
A woman with a monotone, drawn-out voice drawls down the phone like she’s ready for her shift to end. I tell her my daughter is missing and just saying the words out loud is my worst nightmare come to life.
I rattle off all of the information I remember.
‘Skyla Louise Rushmore. Fifteen. She was wearing—’ I stop, crane my neck to the coat and shoe rack just to be sure. ‘Chuck Taylor All Star boots. A black River Island jacket. Jeans. She’s got blonde, curly hair and, oh my God, please just help, she’s fifteen. She’s my everything.’
‘Was she with anyone tonight that you’re aware of?’
‘Yes!’ I sputter. ‘This new girl from her school. Ro— Raven.’
The hallway light flicks on and I’m blinded, shielding my eyes with one hand while the other clutches the phone.
‘What’re you doing?’ James grumbles.
‘Skyla hasn’t come home,’ I say. ‘Her location’s off on Life360.’
The woman on the other end of the line starts asking more questions, but I can’t concentrate. James is speaking too, and together their words congeal. I don’t even realise I’m pacing until James grabs me by the shoulders.
We stare at each other for a moment, but then the sound of the French doors opening has us whirling round.
‘Mum?’ Skyla’s voice is soft, scared. ‘What’s wrong? Has someone died?’
I drop the phone. James scrambles to the ground to retrieve it while I rush up to my daughter and wrap my arms around her.
‘You’re okay,’ I breathe, blinking back tears.
My hands are gripping her shoulders tightly, as if to make sure she’s real. The relief is quickly replaced with confusion and anger as James tells the woman on the phone everything is okay.
‘Where were you?’ I demand, shaking her a little too hard, making her dark eyes grow wide. ‘Why was your location turned off?’
‘In the garden. I’m sorry.’ Her cheeks turn red and her eyes dart between James and me. ‘We were just staying up late, talking. My phone died!’
I look over her shoulder to our firepit sofa out on the patio. A small, dark figure is hunched over the flames. How had I not even noticed that the firepit was on?
I thaw, pulling Skyla to me again. ‘I was worried,’ I admit, breathing her in, and stiffen. Clinging to her clothing is a smell I try to ignore, but I can’t. Cigarettes. Has she been smoking?
It’s too late for a battle, so I drift outside to Raven. Her make-up is smudged, as though she’s been crying. Has she? If so, why?
‘Raven, can your mum come get you?’
Raven snaps her head in my direction.
‘No,’ she says.
She doesn’t elaborate and I’m too tired to try and pry more information from her. ‘I’ll make up the spare room for you,’ I say simply. ‘Come on, it’s late.’
I turn off the firepit and the girls follow me back inside.
For the next hour, I lie in bed listening to the sounds of the girls brushing their teeth, washing their faces and closing their bedroom doors.
Noises that should quell my nerves but don’t.
There’s an awful feeling in the pit of my stomach, and I roll over to James to talk to him, but he’s already fallen back to sleep.
* * *
‘Fuck. We’re going to get done by child services, aren’t we?’ I hiss down the phone.
The girls still haven’t appeared from their rooms. The aftermath of a late night and not more, I hope. I don’t know what I’ll do if Skyla starts drinking and smoking. It’s so out of character for her I can’t actually imagine it.
‘No! She can’t just be taken away from you, Bella. Your parental rights are the same as if she were biologically yours,’ Harper says as I slide back under the bedsheets with my mug.
I inhale the roasted coffee, still steaming from the fancy coffee machine James bought me as a peace offering after he’d purchased the house. I’m still not sure I prefer this to the simple Nescafé from a tin. I take a sip, grimacing as I swallow. This stuff is too strong for me, too bitter.
‘But what if they think we can’t look after her?
Because of Robin disappearing and now Skyla .
. .’ My sentence drops off. I can’t say it.
The words won’t form. I’m in such a deep state of panic I start clawing at my chest, as if I could plunge through my sternum and still my racing heart in my fist.
‘That won’t happen. Okay? It won’t.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘I just do. You’re fine. It’s not like it’s a frequent occurrence, is it? She’s not at risk with you guys. You panicked; your reaction was totally understandable.’
I wish I could believe her, and it’s silly I don’t, given her profession. She’s in the frontline of the adoption world as a family support worker, so she knows what she’s talking about.
‘Where’s James anyway?’ she asks, a symphony of screams in the background. ‘Pack it in you two!’
‘Downstairs making pancakes for when the girls wake up,’ I say, wincing at the sound of my nephews bickering.
‘Sorry, Bella, I have to go. Jake’s hogging the iPad and Luke’s bashing him on the head with the remote.
’ She hangs up, leaving me to drop my phone into my lap.
I clutch at the bed sheets, trying to picture Harper’s life.
It took her a while, years, but she did finally get pregnant.
Then got pregnant again while breastfeeding just three months after Jake was born.
Her infertility struggles evaporated, just like that.
There’s a lot of resentment there — feelings I can’t help but have.
It doesn’t feel fair or right that she got to have children of her own.
She’s one of the few people from my infertility support group who did actually have a happy ending — most of us haven’t been that lucky — and now Harper is hell-bent on sharing her tips and tricks.
How to Get Pregnant Fast! Her latest YouTube video already has over a million downloads.
I don’t watch them. I can’t. Watching them would be like biting into a Yule log only to realise it’s dog shit.
The support group is meant for infertile mothers, women who have become my crutch in the months and years that have followed Robin’s disappearance, even when we’re twenty miles away down the M5.
I have to remind myself that it was Harper who helped me to find a place in Bitton, a village sitting roughly between Bristol and the Cotswolds, so we can keep the group going despite the move .
. . and Harper who picks up the pieces when I have to take some time away, to focus on my own diminishing mental health.
I sip the rest of my coffee in silence, until the sound of a door opening and closing makes me throw my feet out of the bed.
Sliding into my suede slippers, I wrap a dressing gown around myself and head to the bathroom where I splash some cold water to my face. Spooning out some cream that smells of vanilla and is supposed to smooth and regenerate my skin, I dab it to my cheeks and glance at my reflection.
As always these days, I can’t look for long before reaching for the stick of concealer. I blend it into the dark crevices beneath my eyes, instantly looking slightly more refreshed and ready to show face.
Laughter is trailing up the staircase and onto the landing as I open the bedroom door.
I smile. It’s a wonderful sound, one I’ve never taken for granted but especially not today.
Had something happened to Skyla last night, today would be entirely different.
It doesn’t even bear thinking about. But everything is fine, and she’s downstairs making her father laugh.
All of my nerves vaporise because our little bubble we’ve formed over the years hasn’t popped.
It’s still there, fragile, so easy to change, but floating along. For now.
When I get to the kitchen, I freeze, the grin on my face collapsing, sagging my features.
James is in the kitchen, but it’s not Skyla he’s with — it’s Raven.
They’re standing in front of the cooker, flipping pancakes.
James is tossing his head back and laughing at something she’s saying.
It makes my shoulders tense, because when was the last time James and I laughed like that together?
Fourteen years, at least. Longer, probably.
Before Robin disappeared, we’d drowned in becoming parents overnight to two tiny newborns who depended on us for everything.
We became passing ships in the night, bargaining with each other.
‘Please can you do the first feed? I have work tomorrow,’ he’d whine, and win, because I didn’t have work the next day.
Though what he didn’t understand was that while I was on my own sort of maternity leave, I too was exhausted.
I was working just as hard as him, in fact, probably harder.
Because my job didn’t start at eight and end at five.
My job was twenty-four hours, around the clock.
And yet still he made me feel guilty for craving sleep too.
The exhaustion ate at us, turned us against each other in the middle of the night while we had yowling babies between us.
We became bitter, sometimes even violent, which really wasn’t us, our words coming out like poison as we spat at each other.
We just couldn’t seem to get a handle on juggling twins.
Yet to the outside world, to Facebook and to our friends and family, we seemed golden.
Glowing. No one saw the cracks. No one offered to watch the twins so we could reconnect because they didn’t see us losing the connection.
Our date nights disappeared. Watching a movie on the sofa together became a nap session.
Cooking dinner became a whispered fight about the meat in the pan sizzling too loudly.
And the sex? What sex? Just the idea of trying to be intimate with each other at that time in our lives is enough to make me laugh.
I don’t even know how long it’s been since we were last intimate.
For a while after the twins I assumed it was normal for sex to become less of a priority, but once they did start sleeping through and we started carving time out for each other again, it seemed like James had suddenly shifted his tastes.
It jarred me. Instead of pulling me into him in the kitchen and fucking me on the countertop, he’d whisper, ‘Want to watch something naughty?’ before switching over from Netflix to some dodgy porn site.
I started to feel like he needed to watch other women just to be with me — and so I withdrew.
I wouldn’t have recognised Raven as the fifteen-year-old girl from last night had it not been for the red mop of grease hanging from her scalp.
Dripping. She is in the tiniest little outfit imaginable, something silky.
I’m sure I’ve seen the same set of lingerie in Ann Summers recently.
I may have even bought it. Wait, I squint, looking closely.
Is it mine? But no. No. It can’t be. She’d have had to come into our room and sneak past our bed while we were sleeping to get to the walk-in wardrobe — and that’s just ridiculous.
I try to remind myself that I’m not the only woman in the world who owns these particular undergarments. But Raven is not a woman, my mind gnaws at my insides. What is she doing with something like this on? And why is she wearing it in front of my husband?
I clear my throat and they both turn, Raven’s budding breasts perky and proud, a far cry from my own. I wrap the dressing gown tighter around myself, watching as her brightness fades the moment she sees me, her mouth becoming slack, eyes draining of life.