“I don’t know . . . about eight o’clock.”
“And then what happened?”
“I couldn’t sleep,” I said, pressing the balls of my palms into my eyes. “Since . . . I’ve hardly slept a night since Saffy went missing. And Clover. But I was so tired, I kept drifting off and then waking up.” I squeezed my eyes shut, the horror of it bringing me to silence. Waking was like being plunged into lava. Being torn from the bliss of sleep into the knowledge that not one but two of my daughters were missing.
“I heard a noise at the door. It woke me up. It was still dark. I thought maybe it was Saffy or Clover. I shouted their names and ran to the door. Before I opened it, Luna had appeared behind me.”
“？‘Is it Clover?’ she’d asked. The noise had woken her up, too.
“And then what happened?”
“I opened the door. There was a girl standing on the porch. I saw it was Luna, only she was wet and covered in dirt. Like she’d had a fall. She was shivering with cold and begging me for help.”
“And did you?”
“My first instinct was to help her, but then I turned and saw Luna standing in her bedroom. She stepped out and saw the other girl.”
A cold finger of ice had run down my spine. There were two of them. Two Lunas. One crying and begging for help, the other pulling at me, begging me to explain who the other girl was and why she looked like her. In a handful of seconds, both girls were crying, their voices identical in pitch, on either side of me, both of them calling “Mummy” in stereo.
“Both of them were asking ‘Who is she?’ over and over, pointing at the other one. After all that had happened, I felt like I was going out of my mind.”
II
I felt like I was falling down a never-ending hole of confusion. The other Luna had begged me to tell her what was happening, and she pointed at Luna and asked who she was and why she was here, and then the two of them were crying and shrieking, their voices echoing and braiding, until I shouted, “Enough!”
“Mummy,” the other girl said in a pitiful voice. “I’m bleeding.”
I knelt by her and glanced at the spot that she was pulling at. Her dress was filthy and smelled briny, and there was a red mark on the fabric, just at the waist. She gathered the dress up and made a noise of pain. On the back of her knee was an angry red mark. A burn, of some sort, with several raw scratches in the middle. One of them looked like a number.
“What happened?” I asked her.
“It hurts,” she moaned, too distracted by the pain to answer. I took her into the bathroom and held a clean cloth under the tap to clean the wound. I felt nauseous, my head full of noise. The girl had pulled her dress up to allow me to tend to her injury, and the sight and smell of her little body, naked save for her underwear, only served to plunge me into deeper confusion. Every millimeter of her was an echo of Luna. The color and shape of her eyes, the spread of freckles across her cheeks, the puckered mole that sat just below her collarbone on the left side, the fold of skin that sat over her belly button.
I felt like I was losing my mind. Behind me were two sets of cries, pleading, begging. I slumped back against the bathroom wall and drew my knees up to my chest, shaking all over. The voices changed—now the girls were working out how to help me.
“You go get her some water,” one of them said. “I’ll get her a cloth.”
“Here you go, Mummy.”
I opened my eyes to see a glass of water held in front of me, and behind it, two versions of my daughter. Standing side by side like twins, reflections of each other, Tweedledee and Tweedledum. I must have laughed, because they shared a look and said, almost in chorus, “Are you all right, Mummy?”
My strength had left me. I couldn’t speak. I felt pinned to the floor, the weight of all that had happened collapsing on me like mountains. Saffy’s disappearance. Clover’s.