Chapter 8

8

October 30, 10 p.m.

eight hours until low tide

Dad leans back in his chair, Nancy gasps, and Lily swears as the door bursts open. The candles on the table flicker, casting an eerie pattern over all the faces sitting around it, and only Rose keeps her wits on a tight leash as a man appears in the doorway. He is backlit from the light in the hall, and it takes a few seconds for me to recognize the shape of who is casting a new shadow over the evening.

Conor steps into the kitchen. The man I have secretly loved since he was a boy has been a stranger for too long. I’ve spent a lot of my life in love’s waiting room, not being noticed by those I want to see me. Other people seem to find it all so easy—Lily has never had any problems attracting attention from the opposite sex—but I’ve always been a little awkward in that way. I never know what to say or do when I like someone, so I tend to say and do nothing at all. Still, nobody here would have approved of me having a relationship with Conor. Not then, not now, not ever. I’m about to say something, I think we all are, but Nana beats us to it.

“Conor, welcome. I didn’t know whether you’d come.”

“You invited him?” asks my mother.

“Conor might not be a Darker, but he is part of this family,” says Nana.

“That depends on your point of view,” says Dad, staring down at the table.

Conor ignores the comment. “I tried to call, to let you know that I was running late—I got stuck at work—but there seems to be a problem with your phone.”

“There is. It kept ringing, so she had it cut off,” Lily says, taking another large gulp of champagne, as though it were lemonade.

“Well, I wanted to be here,” he says.

Nana’s face is lit up like a Christmas tree. She always adored Conor, just like all the women in this family have at one point or another. The man I see now in the doorway—looking a little lost—reminds me of the boy he was when we first met. There are some memories we can never outrun.

---

It was a hot summer’s day when we all first saw nine-year-old Conor Kennedy with his bucket and spade. He was sitting alone, on what we had come to think of as our beach, just opposite Seaglass. It was as though he were trespassing. Blacksand Bay is a public part of the coastline, but nobody ever visits this particular stretch of black sand. It is too difficult to get to without scrambling down the cliff, and there are plenty of signs about the dangers of swimming in the sea. I don’t believe in love at first sight, but something at first sight happened to the women in my family that day. All of us.

I was four, Lily was eight, and Rose was nine. We lived in a world of our own during those childhood summers at Seaglass, while my father was busy touring the real one. Nancy would drop us off in July and reappear in August, leaving us alone with Nana for the weeks in between. On the rare occasions we dared to ask where our mother went when she left us, the answer was always the same: somewhere else. My sisters missed her more than I did. But then I’ve always loved Seaglass; it’s the only place that has ever really felt like home.

Strangers were a strange sight in Blacksand Bay. We all stopped and stared that day, including Nana, at this perfect-looking boy sitting on our beach. So out of place he seemed to fit right in. Lily was the first one to speak, as usual. It wasn’t exactly Shakespeare, but it was the question we all wanted to ask.

“Who are you?”

The boy glanced in our direction, looking unimpressed. “What’s it to you?”

Lily’s hands formed fists and found their way to her hips. “We live here.”

Conor looked the same age as Rose but acted a lot older. He stood up, dusted the sand from his hands, and copied Lily’s stance. “Yeah? Well, I live here too.”

He took a yo-yo from his pocket and started playing with it, without taking his eyes off us.

Things get a little hazy after that. Sometimes our memories reframe themselves.

Nana bridged the gap between herself and the boy, leaving us behind. She’d seen the bruises on his neck, the shadows beneath his eyes—the details only age teaches you to translate. She asked him where he lived, and he explained that he and his father had just moved into a cottage along the coast.

“What about your mother?” she asked.

Nine-year-old Conor stared at her, and the yo-yo went down and up several more times while he decided how to answer. “I don’t have a mother anymore.”

“Our parents are away all the time too,” said Lily, misunderstanding.

Nana invited Conor to come across the causeway and have lemonade with us; she wanted to call his father to tell him that the boy was safe. Things didn’t used to be how they are now; children didn’t know they might need to worry about an adult offering them a cold drink on a hot day. Conor said yes. Sometimes I wish he’d said no. I remember him walking across the causeway with us for the first time, still yo-yoing as though his little life depended on it. He was officially the most fascinating creature four-year-old me had ever seen.

Our new neighbor lived a mile away, but that isn’t far at all when you are a child and in search of company. Conor didn’t have any other children to play with, and sisters are rarely satisfied to be with one another when someone more interesting comes along. He became a permanent fixture in our lives, and I think I might have fallen in love with him that day. I liked the taste of his name in my mouth and on my tongue, so much so I would whisper it to myself on the days he didn’t come to visit. It felt like snacking between meals. That chance meeting with Conor and his yo-yo changed the shape of my family forever.

We spend our youth building sandcastles of ambition, then watch as life blows sands of doubt over our carefully crafted turrets of wishes and dreams, until we can no longer see them at all. We learn to settle instead for flattened lives, residing inside prisons of compromise. A little relieved that the windows of the world we settled for are too small to see out of, so we don’t have to stare at the castle-shaped fantasies of who we might have been.

There are two kinds of attractive people in the world: those who know that’s what they are and those who don’t. Conor Kennedy knows it. His good looks gifted him an unshakable confidence in life, the kind very few mere mortals experience, and fear of failure is a stranger he has yet to meet. He wears his stubble like a mask, always dresses in scruffy jeans teamed with smart shirts, and his blond hair is long enough to hide his blue eyes when it falls over his face. He doesn’t look like a journalist, but that’s what he is. Thirtysomething going on fifty, and addicted to his job.

Tonight, Conor’s white cotton shirt is clinging to his chest, and a small puddle of water has already formed around his feet where he stands in the kitchen doorway. He looks like he might have swum from the mainland, but that’s not possible—we all learned a long time ago that the riptides between here and there can be deadly.

My dad—seemingly sober all of a sudden—asks the question we all want to know the answer to.

“How the devil did you get here?”

“By boat,” Conor says.

“By boat?”

“Yes, they’re a fantastic invention that you can use to sail across the sea,” Nana says. “I get my post and groceries delivered by boat once a week now too. So I don’t have to cycle into town, or worry about the tide—”

“I expect they don’t deliver after ten p.m. in a storm, though, do they?” interrupts Dad, narrowing his eyes at Conor, like a comedy villain with a sense-of-humor bypass. “What kind of boat?”

“A boat with oars, Mr. Darker.”

“You came here in a rowboat, in a storm, in the dark?”

“Yes. I’m sorry to arrive so late. I got held up at work; there was a murder.” This would sound strange coming from most people, but Conor is a crime correspondent for the BBC. His press pass is still dangling from the lanyard around his neck. “I managed to borrow a small boat from an old friend—Harry from the fish shop. The storm isn’t as bad as it sounds, and it isn’t as though I haven’t rowed a boat across Blacksand Bay before. I feel as though I might be interrupting, and I don’t want to be a party pooper, but I wonder if I might head upstairs and change into some dry clothes?”

“Of course,” says Nana. “It isn’t my birthday until tomorrow. I’m just glad you’re here in time for that. Before you disappear … I found something belonging to you.” She shuffles over to the sideboard, opens a cupboard door, and takes out an old Polaroid camera. It looks like a vintage item from a museum, but I remember when it was brand-new. “Would you mind just taking a quick snap of the family? Who knows when we’ll all be together again?”

Conor takes the camera from her, we all—reluctantly—lean in, and he takes a photo before passing the white square to Nana. She attaches it to her retro fridge with a strawberry-shaped magnet before the picture has even developed.

“Thank you, Conor. I suppose Daisy’s room would be best for you to sleep in. It’s the only one with a spare bed. Unless … that would be too—”

“I don’t mind,” I say, a little too quickly. The thought of sleeping in the same room with Conor starts a little fantasy inside my head, one that I’ve had several times before. Lily pulls a face, but I ignore her.

“That’s fine with me. We’re all grown-ups. It’s just somewhere to sleep,” Conor says, and my fantasy deflates. You can’t make someone fall in love with you. I don’t know much, but I do know that. The rest of my family exchange glances that I choose to ignore.

“Do you remember where it is?” Nana asks.

“I’m sure Conor remembers everything about Daisy,” says Rose.

It’s one of the few times she has spoken tonight, and her words feel like a slap.

I excuse myself and leave the kitchen; Conor does the same and follows. I don’t mind sharing a room if he doesn’t; he used to be like a brother to me. I don’t say a word as we walk through the hallway and past the cupboard under the stairs. I was locked in there once as a child, and I give it a wide birth.

The staircase itself is a rather grand affair, and unique in that the entire wall next to it is covered with a hand-painted family tree. Time-warped branches stretch across cracked plaster from the floor to the ceiling. Nana did it—of course—illustrating our lives as though they were the same as her books, another story to be told. We’re all on there, dangling on fragile-looking twigs. She has painted us in the same style that she illustrates her children’s books, using a pot of black ink and various-sized dipping pens and brushes. Sometimes, if she is in “the mood,” she will draw the outline of her characters with a reed from the garden. Then, when the ink is dry, she colors them in with palettes of watercolor paints. She likes to portray people, places, and things the way she sees them, which rarely matches the view of those being drawn. Her characters are all as flawed as the world they live in, but children love them, maybe because of the honesty that shines through what they get to see and read. Other children’s authors seem to sugarcoat their books in an attempt to make the world less scary. But Nana always tells it like it is, and her readers love her for it.

Miniature faces of the Darker family past and present, painted inside the tree’s giant black leaves, permanently look down on the mistakes we’ve all made. It makes me feel an overwhelming sadness: the idea of this one day being a place I can no longer visit whenever I want to. We all have roots in this family and in this house. It isn’t something I think any of us can just walk away from.

Conor and I head up the creaking steps to the first floor, and only when we reach my old childhood bedroom, and the door is firmly closed behind us, do I whisper.

“Why did you have to come here?”

There is an ivory-colored metal daybed against the back wall of my old bedroom. Nana bought it secondhand, for all the times when she slept in here, too scared to leave me alone in case my heart stopped in the night. Sometimes I would wake up and see her staring at me in the darkness, whispering words I couldn’t quite hear. Conor puts his bag on the daybed as though marking his territory, then starts to change out of his wet clothes, with his back to me. I sit down on the very edge of my bed and turn away. Maybe sharing a room wasn’t such a great idea after all. It takes a lot of courage for me to ask the question.

“Could we maybe just talk about what happened?”

But Conor doesn’t answer. It’s been like this between us for a long time. No matter how sorry I am, he can’t seem to move on, just like my sisters. I know he’d probably rather never see me again, but I’m glad that he chose to come anyway this weekend, for Nana. What happened certainly wasn’t her fault.

The rest of the evening is a blur at best. I’m exhausted, but I never seem to be able to sleep these days, and the atmosphere in the house feels even more polluted than before. We heard the others decide to turn in and call it a night too almost as soon as we left the kitchen. Nana’s room is the largest bedroom at the back of the house, and she whispers good night as she passes my door. Lily and Trixie take the room that Lily and Rose used to share as children. My mother is the last person to come up. I only know it’s her because I hear her talking to someone in a hushed voice at the top of the stairs.

“We’ll get out of here as soon as it’s light. I knew the old witch wouldn’t leave us a penny.”

I listen at the door as she scuttles along the hall to the guest bedroom she used to share with my father. Rose stays downstairs, choosing to sleep on a sofa in the library. Dad also said he would rather stay downstairs, sealing himself in the music room that was his sanctuary when he was a child and when he had children of his own. He always needs to disappear inside his music when the real world gets too loud. But Seaglass is no longer noisy; it has returned to its own variety of silence.

I can hear the sea outside my window, and Conor’s slow and steady breathing. I can tell he’s still awake. I keep completely quiet when I hear him get up and tiptoe across the room, and I listen as he opens his laptop on the desk in the corner. There’s no internet here, but it seems that Conor still can’t resist doing a little work this weekend. He’s become a workaholic since getting the crime correspondent job at the BBC. Perhaps because sometimes, when you work that hard for something, you live in constant fear of losing it.

He creeps out of the room—presumably to use the bathroom down the hall—and while he is gone, I get up, cross the threadbare carpet to his side of the bedroom, and stare at the laptop screen. What I see is nothing to do with work; it looks more like a poem. Which is odd, because Conor has never been one to dabble with fiction or anything creative; he is a man who only likes to deal in facts. Or at least, he was.

I hear footsteps in the hallway, creaking floorboards telling tales on anyone out of bed, and know I have to hurry. In a childish attempt to get Conor’s attention and make things less awkward between us, I type a Halloween-inspired message with my index finger. I can’t type properly and am dreadful with modern technology, but I smile to myself as the letters appear on the screen.

Boo!

Then I return to my side of the room, watch and wait. Conor stares at the word when he returns, then spins around, frowning in my direction. I wish he’d say something, anything, but as usual, he doesn’t. Conor stopped speaking to me around the same time as Rose, and nothing I say or do seems to change things. Sometimes the way he stares so hard at me seems to physically hurt. I’m like a word he can’t read, or a puzzle he can’t solve, just like the Rubik’s Cube he couldn’t work out as a kid, no matter which way he tries to twist me. Conor lies back down on the daybed and faces the wall. I turn my back on the disappointment I feel, wondering why he still can’t see me for who I am now, or talk about what happened then. Nobody can run away from their own shadows, but he’s always been determined to try.

It’s cold in this part of the house, and I shiver on the other side of the room as I lie on the bed that was always mine. I blink into the darkness, listening to the sound of Conor’s breathing as he pretends to sleep again. There are a galaxy of stars on the ceiling. They are the glow-in-the-dark sticker variety and almost as old as me. I expect they will continue to shine long after I am gone, just like the stars in the sky, and sometimes it feels as though nobody in this family would really notice if I just disappeared. Sometimes I think they wish I’d never been born. I close my eyes and a single tear escapes them, rolling down my cheek and dampening the pillow.

Sometime later, I hear a noise downstairs. I have never been a good sleeper; I’m not even sure whether I was asleep just now. That nightmare people sometimes have where they feel like they are falling? I have it all the time. When I check the clock in my room, I see that it is almost exactly midnight. A few seconds later, the eighty clocks downstairs begin to chime their agreement. As soon as the final clock strikes twelve, I hear a terrible scream.