Suddenly she sat up.
She stayed absolutely still for a moment, staring straight ahead. The rain on the roof above her sounded like hail, it was so loud. Madison looked at her bedside table. The clock said 1:12. So why was she awake? Sometimes she had to go to the bathroom. She didn’t now, though, and usually when she woke in the night it was a vague and fuzzy kind of awake. Now she felt like she’d never been asleep. Ever. There was a question going around in her head, urgently.
What was she doing here?
Next to the clock was a small, round shape. She picked it up. A sand dollar, small. She remembered finding it that afternoon, but that felt like it was something that had happened a while ago, like last time they’d come here, or the summer before. She brought it up to her nose and sniffed. It still smelled like the sea.
She could remember being on the beach as the storm headed south towards her. Sitting there knowing she’d have to go in the cottage soon. Then … she just couldn’t quite … It was like sometimes when you were in the car on a long drive and suddenly you realized a chunk of time had passed. One minute you were twenty minutes from home and then suddenly you were pulling into the driveway. It wasn’t like you’d been asleep, more like you hadn’t been paying attention, day-dreaming, and the world had gone on regardless. The world, including your own body. You must have been awake, because you’d done stuff, but it had happened without you thinking or noticing. Like putting a car on cruise, as Daddy did on the freeway. Then, boom – you reached an interchange and there you were, noticing things again, taking back control.
Though … now she could remember being in the cottage afterwards. When she’d come in from the beach Mom had been sitting in her chair without a book and without the TV on. Doing that looking-at-her-hands thing. She said hi when Madison came in, but nothing else – which was weird, because Maddy was late. At least a half hour. In fact … now she even remembered looking at the clock in the kitchen and realizing it was seven o’clock – which was a whole hour later than she was supposed to come back.
She’d taken a shower to get the sand off, and when she came out Mom said she didn’t feel like going out to eat tonight and what did Madison think about calling for pizza? Madison thought this was a world class idea, because Mario’s in Cannon Beach did what her Dad called ‘real serious pies’ and you could only get them here because they weren’t a chain. It was strange that Mom was suggesting it because her usual position was Mario’s put too much cheese on and not all the toppings were certified organic or GM-free, but, whatever: ‘Yes, please’ was the answer whichever way you cut it.
But then Mom couldn’t find the menu and she was going to call directory assistance but it grew later and later, and after a while Madison got the idea that pizza wasn’t going to happen after all. She found a packet of soup in the cupboard and made that instead. Her mother didn’t want any. Madison didn’t either, but made herself eat about half, and then spent a while reading one of her history books. She liked history, enjoyed knowing about how things had been in years gone by.
Then she’d gone to bed. Got into her jim-jams and climbed in. Then she must have fallen asleep.
And now she had woken up.
Madison opened her hand and looked at the sand dollar again. She could remember bending down to pick it up. She could remember sitting with it. So how come she couldn’t remember what had happened right after that? Sand dollars were big news. Surely she would have come running in right away to show her mom, maybe thinking it might cheer her up? Why couldn’t she remember doing that?
Madison lay back, pulling the covers up under her chin. Her memory was good. She performed well in tests at school, and triumphantly took on all comers at Remember, Remember and Snap – Uncle Brian said she could win a Remember, Remember World Series, if there was one. But now it was like the world was a big television, showing two shows at once – or as if the signal had got confused and the screen was showing one thing but the sound was from another movie altogether. And even though she’d mainly sorted out the question of what she was doing here, it didn’t seem to answer anything. She was here because it was the beach house, and she was here with her mom, and it was night so she was in bed.
But was that what she’d actually meant?
She was breathing a little quickly now, as if expecting bad news or hearing a sound that meant that somewhere, something bad was coming towards her. Something felt wrong and crooked and out of kilter.
And … hadn’t there been a man?
Hadn’t he given her something which she had put in the drawer of the bedside table? A card, like one of Dad’s business cards but very plain and white?
No. Absolutely not.
There had been no man. She was sure of that. So there could be no card. She did not need to check.
But she did, and found that there was in fact such a card in the drawer. It had a name printed on it, and a phone number added in ballpoint. There was a design drawn on the other side. The symbol looked as if someone had drawn a number ‘9’, then rotated the card a little and drawn another 9, and kept doing that until they came back around to where they’d started.
Barely aware that she was doing it, Madison reached to the phone on the bedside table and dialled the number. It rang and rang, sounding as if it was trying to connect to the other side of the moon. Nobody answered, and she put the phone down.
She forced herself to lie back in bed. To try to listen beyond the rain, to focus on the sound of the waves, behind this temporary storm: to find the reassuring sound of crashing water, drawing its line at the end of the world. She kept her eyes closed, and listened, waiting for the tide to pull her back into the dark. Tomorrow she would wake and everything would feel normal. She was just tired, and half asleep. Everything was okay. Everything was just like always.
And there had been no man.
When Alison O’Donnell woke at 2:37 it was the sound of rain that she first noticed, but she knew this had not been what had woken her. She pulled the covers back and swung her legs out of bed. Grabbed her robe from the end and pulled it on. She was foggy with bad sleep and mechanical dreams but a mother’s feet operate outside her own control. Doesn’t matter how tired you are, how worn, how much your body and brain wants to climb into bed again and stay there for a week, a month, maybe even the rest of your life. There are sounds that speak to the back brain and countermand your own desires.
The discomfort of your young is one of them.
She padded out of her room and into the hallway. Through the window she glimpsed trees pulled back and forth in high winds, white lines of water speeding across the glass. There was a sudden gust and rain hit the window like a handful of stones.
Then she heard the noise again.
She shuffled down to the door at the end of the hall. It was slightly ajar. She gently opened it a little farther and looked inside.
Madison was in bed, but the covers had been thrown down to her waist. Alison’s daughter was moving, slowly, her head turning from side to side. Her eyes were closed but she was making a low, moaning sound.
Alison walked into the room. She knew this sound well. Her daughter started having nightmares a little before the age of three, and for a few years they were pretty bad. It got to the point where Maddy had been afraid to go to bed, convinced that whatever she saw there – she could never remember, when she woke up – would come for her again, that the feeling of constriction and suffocation would descend upon her again. A year or so ago they had just petered out, become a thing of the past. But now, here was that noise again.
Alison