The Lost Girl (3 page)

It’s so quiet I can hear Mina Ma’s bed squeaking in the room above, the gurgling of water in the pipes, an owl, something creaking softly. I open my eyes again and glance at the window. Beyond is the back garden, and the creaking is the sound of the swing,
my
swing, swaying back and forth.

My guardians made me the swing as a gift on my seventh birthday. I woke in the morning and it was there, like magic. I’ve spent hours in it, kicking myself high into the air or simply lying back to stare into the sky.

In the dark I think about the fight. I think of Mina Ma telling me she wants a girl to die because she believes that will save me. I think about the swing. It was a kindness my guardians didn’t have to show, a gesture of their affection in spite of what I am. It was a gift, rare and precious, and gifts don’t come often to echoes in this world that despises us.

3
Name

“T
here you are,” says Sean.

I turn around and look at him, standing at the top of the path. The sun is a hard orange ball behind him, and he looks like he’s only a shadow.

I’ve known him about a year. Before that his father, Jonathan, was my guardian instead. Then they found cancer in Jonathan’s brain and he had to stop working. Somehow Erik and Jonathan got the Weavers to agree to take his fifteen-year-old schoolboy of a son on as his replacement. When Jonathan died nine months ago, I thought Sean wouldn’t have to come anymore, and my grief doubled. I didn’t want to lose them both. But he came. He turned up the weekend after his father’s funeral, and I tiptoed around him, terrified of saying something wrong, until he snapped at me and told me not to treat him like he had smallpox. And on every other weekend since then, like clockwork, he’s here.

It takes him a few seconds to come down the path to the bottom and meet me by the edge of the lake. I wasn’t expecting him.

“I thought you weren’t going to come this weekend,” I say. “Isn’t your girlfriend’s birthday tomorrow?”

His girlfriend’s name is Lucy and she’s in his year at school. They’re both sixteen, a year older than I am. After much badgering, he showed me a photograph last time he was here, and she
looks
older than I am. Gorgeous. Confident. Mature. They’ve been going out three weeks now. She likes dogs and volunteers at a local thrift store, and after once hearing her on the phone with Sean, I discovered she has a way of making every sentence turn up at the end like a question. I try and talk like that just to wind Sean up, but he never reacts.

“She’s doing something with her friends,” Sean says vaguely.

He has the perfect poker face. It drives me crazy because I can’t mask a single thing
I
think or feel. But I’ve learned to read his eyes and the little ups and downs in his voice.

“Erik told you about the tattoo.”

Sean nods.

I glance up at him. “Thank you. For coming.”

One corner of his mouth crooks upward. “You’re welcome.”

We stand there for a minute, facing the water. Sean’s hands are in the pockets of his jeans; his short, untidy dark hair flickers in the wind. He is tall and lean, with his shirt rolled up past his elbows and green eyes the exact color of the marbles I had to play with when I was little. I look down at the skin on his forearms, lightly tanned from PE and after-school soccer with his friends. He has a scar below his left elbow. I wonder how he got it. I wonder why he cares more about an echo and her tattoo than his human girlfriend’s birthday.

“I hate those words sometimes,” I mutter under my breath.

He doesn’t ask me which words I mean. I think he knows. Sean always knows. He can see what move I’m planning to make in chess and counters before I can do it. He always knows who the killer is in a detective story. I think he could make a career out of detecting, but he wants to write plays for theater. Maybe he could be a Shakespeare instead of a Sherlock. He could be anything. Anything he wants to be.

“We’d better go back inside,” I say, trying to shake off visions of Sean growing up and Lucy kissing him when he gets home, their kids running up to hug him—

He watches me turn away, eyes narrow. “What’s the matter?”

“Nothing,” I say with painstaking cheer.

He doesn’t push it. He follows me back up to the cottage, and possibly to distract me, he kicks off one of our lessons: grilling me about social groups and stereotypes and etiquette. What is a goth? What is “emo” short for, and what kind of music would I classify as emo? I need to give him examples. What words might an average teenager’s parents disapprove of hearing from their child? And would these parents frown upon similar words in Amarra’s India
and
Sean’s England alike, given that they both come from English-speaking families, go to English-speaking schools, and live in towns or cities that are largely if not entirely English-speaking and are subjected to similar TV shows, movies, news, sports, and music?

I get all the answers right.

“Well done, you!” he says, in an exaggeratedly hearty tone of voice. “You can have a cookie for being so good!”

I throw a dishcloth at him.

Sean goes to help Mina Ma with dinner. I’d help too, but I have to finish reading
Wuthering Heights
and email Erik an essay on whether Nelly Dean is a reliable narrator. I love
Wuthering Heights
, one of the few things I share with Amarra, so this assignment has been far more fun for both of us than the one on
Romeo and Juliet
.
While Sean and Mina Ma mash potatoes and fry sausages, I sit at the kitchen table with the book and my notepad.

“Nelly”—I read my words out loud, scribbling my introduction—“obviously hates Cathy and Heathcliff, so her judgment is far from objective. Quite frankly, she’s also a bitch.”

Mina Ma and Sean burst out laughing. Mina Ma hastily stops herself and shouts at me for my language.

I’m halfway through the essay when Mina Ma goes out of the kitchen to take the washing off the line and Sean sits down at the table across from me.

“I have a question,” I say.

“What a surprise,” he says. “You, with a question? Unprecedented.”

I grin. “Never mind. It was only about the book, anyway.”

“Well, I have a question, too,” he says. “I happen to have two tickets to the zoo for tomorrow. Want one?”

“What would I do with it?” I ask him. “You might as well give it to somebody who can use it, Sean.” I clench my teeth. “Wouldn’t Lucy like to go as a birthday present?”

Sean sighs. “I’m going to let that slide, because you’ve never been asked this type of question before. Obviously I haven’t done a good enough job of teaching you how to recognize the situation. For future reference, it might help you to know that when a friend tells you they’ve got tickets and asks if you want one, they usually also mean that they would like you to
go
to the event in question.”

I don’t even notice the sarcasm. I look up at him, taken aback, the book and essay forgotten. “You mean, you’re asking if I’d like to go to the zoo? Like,
actually
go?”

“Well done,” he approves.

How could he have possibly known how much I have wanted to go to the zoo?

I fly out of the chair. “Sean, do you mean it?”

“Of course I mean it,” he says, exasperated. “Why would I ask you if I didn’t mean it, you daft harpy?”

I falter. “Is this about the tattoo again?” I can see my life unfolding in front of me, filled with pitying gestures like scones and zoos. I can’t bear to imagine that I will always be someone Sean feels sorry for.

He pulls out a pair of tickets. “Here,” he says. “These are the old tickets I got before I changed them. Look at the date on them.”

“These are tickets for next month.”

“And at the bottom, see, there’s my receipt for the day I bought them.”

“You bought them two weeks ago.”

“Right,” says Sean. “Meaning I bought them long before I knew about the tattoo. I’ve changed the date so we can go tomorrow instead, which I will admit
is
about that bloody tattoo. I thought you could use some cheering up. But I was always going to ask you.”

“Why?” I ask, bewildered.

“Everyone should get to go to the zoo,” he says. “So do you want to?”

“Yes,” I burst out, my chest tightening with excitement, “thank you, yes, of course I want to go!”

“You’re not allowed,” Sean reminds me, “so it’ll be tricky. It’s more than an hour away on the train.”

I tip my chin, refusing to let such a consideration destroy this moment, this flare of hope that I may never have again.

“No one needs to know,” I say.

“Not the others,” he concedes, “but Mina knows. I asked her when I first came in today. It took some persuading, but she’s agreed. I think she wants you to get out for a bit. But only as long as I, and I quote, ‘don’t let you out of my sight for an instant.’”

“I don’t need looking after,” I say indignantly.

“You may be able to handle yourself in a scuffle, but you don’t know the first thing about the country beyond this town. If you got lost, you’d probably wander straight into a hunter. Wouldn’t
that
be the prettiest pickle?”

I point a dirty look his way, but I’m too euphoric and grateful to stay annoyed. A lock of hair falls over my forehead, feathery and wayward, and I blow it impatiently out of the way.

“Do we have to take the train through Lancaster to get to the zoo?” I ask eagerly.

“Yeah.”

“So can we stop off and go to your house on our way back?”

Sean gives me a strange look. “You want to go to my
house
?
Of all the places—”

“I’m curious.”

He rolls his eyes. “Well, if that’s what you want, why not?”

I am so excited for the rest of the evening that Mina Ma says she has half a mind not to send me if I can’t act my age. When Sean says he could get a ticket for her too, she declines, announcing that she’s quite happy not to go “racketing about the countryside.” Yet this doesn’t stop her from muttering about “unaccompanied girls, with
boys
” and “
zoos
, of all things” and “if
they
find out.”

It’s the last bit that worries me, a knot of fear battling the excitement. What if the Weavers
do
find out? For me to actually leave town, go somewhere even with a guardian, is punishable. I am not allowed to leave Windermere. I am not supposed to spend time in busy places. Someone might see the Mark on my neck and recognize me for what I am.

“What will they do if they catch us?”

“I don’t know,” says Sean.

His voice gives nothing away, but I am looking at his eyes, which are honest and very green, and they’re troubled. I believe him. He doesn’t know what they’ll do to us. But he knows that because I belong to them, they have every right to dispose of me if I defy them.

Sean might not belong to anybody, but that doesn’t mean he’s in the clear. Guardians are not allowed to help us. To interfere with the laws. The Weavers can punish them, too.

“They won’t find out,” I say.

“Course they won’t,” says Sean. “So finish your broccoli, it’s good for you.”

I have trouble sleeping all night. Tonight my dreams are mine, which is not always the case. Sometimes I dream of things from Amarra’s life, bits of memories and emotions that slip through the cracks from her consciousness to mine. Like the time the dog bit her. It preyed on her mind for weeks, the memory of that terror. Or the time she had an enormous crush on a pop star and I dreamed of his face for days. Erik says it’s normal: when they made me, they had to put bits of her into me. This means that sometimes traces of memories and feelings cross over from her to me.

I dream of strange things—not of zoos, like I’d expected to, but of an abandoned carnival in a deserted dark city. Men and women in green, swinging back and forth on trapezes. Elephants rearing up on their hind legs. Brightly painted clowns. Each time I wake, my heart races with a mixture of fear and excitement. In my dreams, the clowns and the Weavers look eerily alike.

On the train the next day, I am too excited to sit still. I bob up and down in my seat, jostling Sean, who gives me a look that mingles amusement with exasperation. I can’t contain myself. I haven’t left Windermere since I arrived as a baby. As the familiar town disappears, the English countryside meanders in. It’s like a snapshot lifted off a postcard, with endless fields and sheep-dotted hills.

“It’s so beautiful,” I say softly.

Sean points things out, like the low stone fences that he says are a northern thing, you don’t see many of them in the south.

“Have you been to the south much?”

“Now and then,” he says. “London, mostly. Cornwall, too. My parents used to take me there on holiday when I was younger. Except for one year when we went to Egypt. Echoes are illegal there, too, so Dad had to lie about his work whenever anyone asked. I met some kids in Cairo who weren’t even sure echoes actually exist.”

“So you and your mum don’t go on holidays anymore?” I ask.

He shakes his head.

“Is she all right?” I ask tentatively.

He shrugs. “She misses him.”

“You do too, don’t you?”

“Yeah. Do you?”

“I try not to,” I confess. “But I keep thinking about that rhyme Mina Ma used to sing for me. You know, about the five little ducks? And how they went out one day, over the hill and far away. And the mama duck quacked, but only four came back.” I try to smile, but there’s a lump in my throat. “It’s silly, but I keep thinking Jonathan’s the one that didn’t come back. And in the song it goes on until none of them come back.”

“You know how it ended, don’t you?”

“I always made Mina Ma stop because it upset me so much.”

“Silly,” he says. “In the end, the mother duck followed them, over the hill and far away. And she quacked and quacked, and all five little ducks came back.”

“Really?”

He laughs. “Yes, really.”

I laugh too.

When we pass through Lancaster, I pay special attention to it. I can’t quite imagine how Sean lives his everyday life in this place, with its storybook castle and cobbled streets and old bridges. I’ve never known Sean in any setting except our cottage by the lake.

It’s almost noon when we finally pull into Blackpool. Sean seems to know his way around, so I follow him out and down the street to the nearest bus stop. I can smell the seaside, all salt and fish and vinegar.

“What do you want to do with your life?” Sean asks me unexpectedly. We’re on the bus. I can see the ocean as we rattle down the road. It’s a bluish gray, sparkling in the pale sunlight.

I have the answer ready, slotted in place in my memory. “I’m going to study archaeology,” I say. “My other’s father, Neil, is a historian, and she really loves that kind of thing. We could be the next Indiana Jones.”

“No,” says Sean. “What do
you
want to do?”