The Girl Who Never Came Back (8 page)

Twenty years ago

When she woke up, Charlotte was wet and cold and still in darkness, but she was alive and - to her surprise - she realized she was no longer underwater.

Sitting up, she found that there was still a small amount of water around her waist, but it seemed as if most of the ice cold liquid had somehow drained away. She sat in silence for a moment, taking slow, steady breaths as she tried to work out what the hell was happening to her. The pain in her ankle had reduced to a dull throb, but she figured that any reduction in pain was probably because the freezing water had numbed most of her body. She reached around and found several rocks nearby, and finally she decided that she had to try to find a way out.

"Mummy!" she shouted, hauling herself up onto one leg, while carefully trying to keep her other, damaged leg from touching anything. "Ruth! Help!"

She waited, but the only reply was a faint echo of her own voice, which served only to remind her that she was completely alone.

"Ettolrahc," she whispered. "Please, I need you."

After a moment, she realized that she was starting to shiver. Reaching up, she felt ice crystals in her hair and realized that her teeth were chattering. She'd already fallen twice now, each time tumbling down into the darkness, and she was sure she must be a long way underground by now. She opened her mouth to shout for help, but finally it occurred to her that no-one could hear her, even if they were looking. Figuring that she should probably conserve energy, she decided to focus on finding her own way out of the cave. After all, it was clear that for whatever reason, no-one was coming to save her. Not her mother. Not Ettolrahc. No-one.

Today

"Who puts a smoke alarm in the kitchen?" Charlotte asked as she used a spoon to take an egg out of the boiling water and slip it into an eggcup. She wasn't usually the kind of person who embraced smalltalk, but right now she was desperate to fill the silence with words, any words, even if they were utterly pointless. "I mean, really, that's just asking for trouble. Don't you ever burn dinner? Don't you constantly set the damn thing off every time you get stuff out from the microwave?"

Turning, she saw that Ruth was sitting at the kitchen table with her head in her hands, patently uninterested in anything that her sister was saying.

"So I had
one
cigarette," Charlotte continued, standing by the kitchen counter while she waited for her toast to pop up. "It's not a crime. I know you don't
like
them in the house, and I'm sorry, but I didn't mean to wake everyone up. It's not like I burned the house down or anything. I'm careful, and I always do it by a window, so there's no smell." She waited for her sister to say something, anything, but instead the silent gulf between them seemed to be widening with every second. "They're pretty good for stress," she added. "If you want to try one, just let me know."

Ruth turned and scowled at her.

"I'm sorry," Charlotte added. "I just -"

"Do you think," Ruth said suddenly, her voice firm with anger as she picked her words carefully, "for one fucking moment, that I give a crap about your fucking cigarettes?" Her eyes red and puffy from crying all night, she looked as if she was just about ready to kill someone. "Seriously?" she continued. "Do you think I give a damn what you do? Do you think it's a matter of concern to me at this precise moment in time?" She paused, as if she was trying to think of some fresh way to voice her disapproval. "You can smoke yourself to death right in front of me for all I care. If you smoking and killing yourself with fucking lung cancer would bring my daughter back right now, I would
gladly
take that deal in a heartbeat."

The toast popped up.

"It's true," Ruth continued. "I would. I
really
would."

"You know what I mean," Charlotte said, turning away from her sister and trying not to get too freaked out by the unprecedented venom in her words. She and Ruth had always had a somewhat adversarial, sparring repartee, but this was something new. For the first time, Charlotte felt that she was actually loathed and despised, and her hands were trembling as she grabbed a knife from the drawer. It was as if, suddenly, all her weapons had been blunted. "I'm just sorry for waking you up," she said quietly as she buttered her burned toast. "That's all."

"I wasn't asleep," Ruth said wearily. "What kind of mother could sleep at a time like this?"

"Sorry."

"I spent the whole night trying to call out to her," Ruth continued. "Not literally. I mean, with my mind. I kept hoping that somehow I could sense where she was, that maybe..." She paused. "I know it sounds stupid, but I felt it was worth a try. I thought that maybe we could hear each other, across the distance. All I needed was silence, so I could concentrate. We've always been so close, and I just hoped that maybe there might be some way for us to communicate." She sighed. "It was a stupid."

"Sorry."

"Stop apologizing," she shot back. "It makes me feel physically sick."

Keeping her mouth shut, Charlotte looked down at her meager breakfast and realized she wasn't remotely hungry. She knew she should eat something, but she was convinced that even a mouthful of food would make her vomit. She couldn't help feeling that, no matter how bad things were, they were poised to get inexorably worse at any moment. A knock on the door, a phone call, an e-mail... there were so many ways that bad news could arrive, she almost felt as if they were under siege.

"How's Tony this morning?" she asked eventually.

"How do you think?"

"I guess he didn't sleep either, huh?"

"Is this all you've got to offer?" Ruth asked. "Asinine questions? You can't
help
, you can't
do
anything constructive, so you just stand around uttering these fucking ridiculous platitudes? Jesus Christ, Charlotte, did anyone ever tell you that you're fucking hopeless in a crisis? I mean, really, Jesus, you're completely useless."

"So you're swearing again, huh?" Charlotte replied with a faint smile.

"My daughter's not here, is she?" Ruth shouted, losing control for a moment before regathering her composure. "If you've got nothing useful to say," she continued eventually, "then it might be better to keep quiet. There's no point filling the silence with inane chatter. I need to think."

"I helped Mum last night," Charlotte said defensively. "She was wandering out the door at two in the morning wearing nothing but her nightgown, and I steered her back inside."

"Great," Ruth muttered. "I'll arrange for you to receive a medal, shall I? After all, I took the old bitch in, I gave her a home, I feed her and wash her clothes and keep her stocked with sherry, I listen to her inane drivel all day every day, but you're the daughter of the fucking year because you dragged her saggy ass back into the fucking house one night. You're clearly as good a daughter as you are a sister. You must be so fucking proud of yourself."

Charlotte stared at her sister for a moment, unsure as to what to say. All the jokes and sarcasm of the past few days seemed wildly inappropriate. She couldn't shake the feeling that all the bile and anger spilling out of Ruth had been bubbling away for years, and had been waiting for a time like this so that it could be heard. She knew that her sister was hurting, but she also knew that even if Sophie ran through the door at that exact moment, things would never be the same again. Lines had been crossed, things had been said, and she figured she just wanted to wait until Sophie (hopefully) came home, and then leave. For good.

Still sitting at the kitchen table, Ruth sighed as she put her head in her hands.

"Sophie's going to be okay," Charlotte offered eventually, even though she knew her words sounded hollow. "I can just feel it, Ruth. She's going to come back through the door soon, and you're all going to be together again, and it's going to turn out that this has all been some kind of huge misunderstanding, and she'll be right back here with you -"

"In a
year
, like you?" Ruth replied, clearly in no mood for a rapprochement. "Is that what's going to happen? Is my daughter going to vanish and spend a year in whatever mystical shitty far-off land that you went to, and then she'll come back and have no memory of what happened to her, but it'll all be okay because she'll be fine, is that what's going to happen?" She paused. "Is my daughter going to end up like
you
?"

"There are worse things," Charlotte replied with a faint, tentative smile.

"Not many," Ruth said firmly. "She'd probably be better off dead. I mean, look at you, Charlotte. You're... empty."

Charlotte looked down at her breakfast again. She knew that anything she said right now would just be taken the wrong way, but at the same time, she wanted to help her sister.

"You never really came back, you know," Ruth continued after a moment. "You walked through the door all those years ago, but you were different. It was like a ghost of you came back, but the rest of you stayed away. I knew it from the moment I first saw you again. Everyone else was fussing around and saying how wonderful it was that you'd come home after a year, and I couldn't work out why they didn't see the difference. Something was missing from you, and it still is, and that's why you're fucking cracked down the middle. You just never really came back."

Charlotte took a deep breath. Everything her sister was saying was true, but it still hurt to hear the words.

"Do you want to know something else?" Ruth continued. "I think you know
exactly
what happened to you while you were missing. I think all this bullshit about not remembering is a cover story. You just don't want to tell anyone. That's why you've never agreed to go and get therapy, because you know your bullshit wouldn't work the same way. A psychiatrist would see through your lies and force you to tell the truth, and that's the last thing you want, so you put up this facade of toughness as an excuse."

They stood in silence for a moment.

"I think I should go up and get changed," Charlotte said eventually, feeling as if she needed to get the hell away from her sister for a few minutes before she ended up telling her to go fuck herself. "I'm going to go down to the river and see if I can help, so -"

"You can help by telling us all what really happened to you," Ruth said firmly. "Anything else is just noise."

Without replying, Charlotte turned and hurried out of the kitchen, leaving her breakfast uneaten. By the time she got up to the guest room, there were tears in her eyes, and soon she was sitting on the bed with her back to the wall and her knees drawn up to her chin, trying desperately to hold herself together. She kept hearing her sister's words cutting through her mind, and she knew full well that, in Ruth's eyes at least, it was her fault that Sophie was missing. Still, no matter how hard she tried, she couldn't remember what had happened to her all those years ago. She knew that even if she
did
go and get help, and even if that help
did
unlock her memories, there was no way that it'd help in the search for Sophie; all that would happen would be that Ruth would move on and find some other reason to attack her.

With tears flowing down her cheeks, she started to sob uncontrollably. The worst part was that, almost her entire life, she'd felt that there was a locked, impassable door in her mind, hiding all the secrets away; for the first time, however, she was started to feel as if a small, childish hand was pawing at that door, slowly teasing it open and threatening to reveal the truth. Charlotte had never understood why other people felt that the truth was so important. To her, a good lie could paper over a thousand ugly truths, and she didn't see a damn thing wrong with that arrangement.

Twenty years ago

With two undamaged ankles, climbing up the rock-face would have been difficult; with one good ankle and one that was broken, the job was almost impossible.

Still, she couldn't give up.

"Look," she whispered, with tears in her eyes, "I'm trying. I'm not scared." The pain in her belly was getting worse, however, as if Ettolrahc was still dead. "Come back."

Each new grip had to be judged carefully. She had been climbing for a few minutes now, but she knew that one wrong move would undo all her work and send her tumbling back down into the depths. Her arms were aching and she was feeling light-headed, but she was certain that she'd die if she stopped to rest. Since there was no light, she couldn't see her broken ankle, but she figured she'd probably lost a lot of blood.

The worst part, though, was that she was alone. Her other half, her adventurous and brave half, was nowhere to be found. It was as if only her meek half had fallen, and her adventurous half had stayed up at the mouth of the cave, laughing at her misfortune. Suddenly it occurred to Charlotte that maybe her entire body had split in two, and the reason no-one had come to look for her was that she had a doppelganger who had gone back to the house. Perhaps, she wondered, she had been left down in the cave to die by a stronger version of herself who just wanted to get rid of her. Then again, maybe there as a simpler explanation: maybe her family were glad that she'd vanished, and they were hoping she'd stay away. She took a deep breath as she tried to tell herself that she was imagining things, but deep down, she felt there had to be some kind of explanation. Why had no-one arrived at the cave to look for her?

"Please let me get out of here," she whispered, hoping that God might take pity on her. Hauling herself up onto another rock, she paused for a moment to get her breath back. "Please," she continued eventually, "help me get home. I don't want to be down here. I'm cold. I'll be good, I swear. I'll never, ever do anything bad ever again, and I won't think anything bad, and I'll spend my whole life doing good things for other people if you just let me get out of here."

All around her, there was nothing but silence and darkness. She waited for some kind of sign that someone, anyone, might be listening to her prayers, but finally tears began to roll down her cheeks as she realized that no-one was coming to help her. She turned, figuring she should continue her climb, but in her panic she let her foot slip and she began to tumble back down. At the last moment, she was able to grab a section of rock and hold on tight, with her legs and body dangling down into the darkness. Reaching up, she tried to haul herself back to the top of a nearby rock. She knew that if she fell right now, she'd probably be killed.