The story of her past is not like other people’s, she thinks. Most people’s pasts can be viewed like cleaved water left in the wake of a boat. Hers? It’s a tangled weave of spiderwebs and nightmares, never to make sense.
II
From the window, Luna locates the flat square of the hospital roof amidst the cityscape. She thinks of what the doctor said before they left. About the injury on Clover’s hip. He wanted to know if it had happened before she went missing, or during.
“What injury?” she’d asked. He’d turned to Clover. She was asleep, curled around the teddy bears donated by the nurses. Very gently, he’d lifted up Clover’s hospital gown and peeled aside a white dressing on her hip to reveal a small red blotch. Perhaps a rash. Measles? No. Luna was sure they’d all been vaccinated. She’d lowered herself to look at it. The mark was singular, a handful of red-raw scratches within a raised circle of skin, angry and inflamed. Like a burn.
“Is it an insect bite?”
“We think it’s a wound inflicted by a human.”
She’d straightened, searching his face. “Who?”
“Well, I was hoping you might be able to shed a bit of light on it,” the doctor had said. “Can you make out the numbers?”
“Numbers?”
She’d bent quickly once more to see the mark, closer this time, but Clover had moaned and squirmed to change position.
“I can’t make it out,” she’d said. “What numbers?”
“It’s very small, as you can see, but on closer inspection we found four digits. The numbers two zero two one.”
Luna had leaned forward and stared hard. There they were: four numbers etched lightly into the skin in a vertical row.
2
0
2
1
Someone had carved numbers into Clover’s skin.
“The police are looking into it,” she tells Ethan. “Apparently it could be anything. A gang sign. A code.”
They both fall silent. How can this have happened? And why? Ethan rises from his chair and wraps his arms around her, holding her tight.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “But . . .”
“She is Clover,” she snaps, pulling away. “I don’t care what you think.”
“OK.” For a while neither of them speaks. “So . . . you think she’s still a child because of what she’s been through?”
She covers her face with her hands. “It’s my fault. It’s my fault she went missing.”
“You can’t say that.”
She snaps her head up, fixing him with a glare. “It. Was. My. Fault.”
“You were ten, Luna.”
“You weren’t there, Ethan. You don’t know . . .”
“How were you to blame, exactly?”
She falters. “I just know I was. I can’t remember the details.”
But suddenly it’s there, the memory of Sapphire coming into her room and talking to her. She knows instantly this was it, this was how it happened. Where has this been, this slice of her past? Where has it been lingering?
“I think it started with Saffy,” she says, closing her eyes. “She went missing. But on purpose.”
He tilts his head. “What do you mean, ‘on purpose’？”
“I think that Saffy and my mother had a falling-out.”