The Lighthouse Witches(38)

“Why not?”

“Well, you could have slipped and hit your head. And then what would we do?”

“But I didn’t slip.”

“If I went missing,” Saffy says, “would you miss me?”

“No, because you’d already be missing.”

“You know what I mean.”

“You said ‘miss’ twice. That’s like a double negative.”

“All right, smarty pants. Would you look for me if I went missing?”

Clover thinks about it. “Yes.”

“Why?”

Clover shuffles closer to her oldest sister. “Because you’re so warm.”


III

It’s time. Saffy slides out of the bed, careful not to disturb Clover, who is fast asleep. She treads lightly on her feet, rolling through her heels to her toes as she takes the stairs, aware of how a creaky floorboard could bring her mother darting out of her room and discover her headed out into the night.

She holds her breath the whole time. As she slips her coat across her shoulders. As she turns the doorknob, centimeter by centimeter, the spindle turning the old latch in the latch plate, springing the door free.

And she’s out. Her breaths are quicker now, but still she forces herself to keep her movements slow, just as Brodie taught her: pull the door behind her, quiet as a cat, let the latch slip back. Her steps away from the bothy to the meeting point are as slow as she took the stairs, until she knows that the angle of her mother’s bedroom no longer permits sight of her.

Outside, she feels a sudden elation at the wind on her face and the unloosed surf and the stars with their untrammeled light. She heads to the meeting point and sits down, letting her legs swing loose over the rocks. Gold houselights glitter on the other side of the bay. She knows which of them is Brodie’s house. In her bedroom she has turned all the shells and pieces of driftwood he’s gifted her toward his house, as though it’s a kind of mecca. She’s sure her heart even moves around her chest cavity these days like a rose seeking the sun.

But where is he? She turns her head from side to side, taking in the velvet expanse of the ocean on her left and the rocks and beach on her right. Ahead, surf furls into the bay. Something there catches her eye, and she wonders if it’s the basking shark, Basil, with his weird two fins. Something bobbing in the water. Seals, probably. Except it’s the wrong color. It’s pale.

She squints at the object. It’s about thirty feet away, moving on the waves. A cloud shifts from the moon and for a moment the light finds the object. It’s a face. A human face, its mouth open in a howl, someone in the water and oh God she opens her mouth to scream but suddenly there are arms around her and a warm mouth on her cheek and she turns to find Brodie there, and when she turns back to the person in the water they’re gone.

“Miss me?” he says, careful to keep his voice low.

She finds she can’t speak, she’s breathless and dizzy with confusion. She points wildly in the direction of the head she saw just a moment before, she saw it, someone was in the water, she saw their face and their hair, it was a man, but Brodie isn’t paying attention and within a moment he’s pulling her across the rocks to the beach.


IV

They sit holding hands in a cave that’s situated farther along the bay. Like an optical illusion, it’s hard to see on account of the striations of rock. The first time Brodie showed her the cave she thought he’d vanished.

“Perfect smoking spot,” he says, lighting a cigarette. She lights hers, and they watch the tide push forward and drag back just a few feet away. She loves how safe she feels with him. Just minutes ago she was terrified, wrung out with fear. And now he is here, and she is shielded from all the monsters in the world, emboldened by his desire for her.

He’s a couple of years older than her and has the body of a footballer, she thinks. The body of a man. He’s over six foot tall, has dark black hairs on his belly, and has to shave his face every day. She loves his voice, his hands, the planes of his face, the back of his neck. His smell.

They sit on a ledge in the rock, smoking and kissing. She tells him about the human head she saw bobbing in the waves and he laughs so hard that she laughs, too, and suddenly the whole thing is hilarious. The fear leaves her, and they talk about music (Marilyn Manson, Massive Attack, and Rage Against the Machine are mutual favorites), films (both liked Reservoir Dogs and Reality Bites), and their families.

“My mum’s last boyfriend was a pig,” she says. “But she’s left him now and is flirting with this new guy. Finn.”

“He’s a good guy, Finn.”

She frowns. “Really? My mum always goes for assholes, so I figured he was part of the club.”

“He’s got this rewilding project going on, it’s pretty major.”

“Rewilding? Is that something to do with those evil fairies that people apparently tied to the sycamore trees and cut their hearts out?”

She says it in a dry tone, and he grins. “He’s restoring the old forests that used to grow on these islands.”

“What do you mean, ‘restore old forests’? A forest can hardly disappear, can it?”

“Anyway, we were talking about something else.”

“Assholes?”

“Ah, yes. Parents. Mine argue all the time. Think they’ll split soon.”