Free Finnegan's Field by Angela Slatter Page A

freckles, pert little nose, and the rosebud pout Anne so loved, she looked the way their nine-year-old girl should; as if she’d not aged a day.
    But Madrigal wasn’t right, after she came home, though Anne couldn’t quite put her finger on why.
    â€œJust her size? That’s all?” she asked, digging but not too hard, afraid he might begin to question her sanity. Afraid of the avalanche such small pebbles might start. If her husband was honest, he knew it too, that their youngest wasn’t as she’d been, but Brian wasn’t honest, at least not in his heart.
    It was why he’d stayed married to her long after he’d stopped loving her; Anne knew it and he didn’t. She thought it probably meant he was kind. It was all equal to her: with him there, the bills got paid, with enough left over to put some savings by; he’d kept Jason fed and cared for when she couldn’t bear to get out of bed; and there was a warm body beside her at night when she needed it. After the loss of Madrigal, so much had changed in their lives that these small things were what she clung to when she felt most adrift, on the days when her imagination went hyper and she saw all manner of terrible acts being repeatedly visited on her daughter. Acts that made her long for the child to be dead, killed outright, and not kept alive to suffer the deeds Anne conceived.
    Time had passed; Jason left home for university. She and Brian shuffled the cards of their lives, papered over the great gaping hole. Just when she thought that some scar tissue might grow, that they might move on, Madrigal came back.
    â€œCan’t you just be happy, Annie?” Brian’s eyes were sad. “Can’t you just accept we were given a tremendous gift, and we should be grateful?”
    Anne nodded slowly, let him think he was right. “Of course, love. I just meant … I don’t know what I meant. I’m getting used to seeing her; that’s all. I can’t stop watching because I think she’ll be taken away again.”
    â€œNo, Annie. She’s here to stay. God gave her back to us.”
    She smiled, though his religious belief riled, and when she peered through the kitchen window once more, every single thing she spotted was something that was off . Something about the way the girl moved; if Anne squinted, she seemed to see a ghostly outline around her daughter. A shadow-shape that was slightly larger than Madrigal and a split second slower, as if just out of synch so that when she swung about, ran, jumped, and skipped, there was the blur like a butterfly’s wing in her wake, but only for the slenderest of moments. The hair seemed too dark, sucking in light but not sending it back, and it didn’t matter how often Anne washed the girl’s locks, they still came up oily. And the little girl’s smile seemed simultaneously too quick and too slow, as if it also carried its own spectre, leaving a short-lived smear as it slid into place.
    But Anne knew she couldn’t tell anyone that. Madrigal looked like the child they’d lost, the child whose face had appeared on the flyers they’d pasted to poles and sticky-taped in shop windows, the face that had graced the front pages of a dozen newspapers ever so briefly, and flashed even more briefly across television screens while the tragedy was fresh. And the child was fine, seemed fine, but for the few times Anne had found her by the front door in the middle of the night, sleepwalking. She didn’t wake when shepherded back to bed, and didn’t remember the episode in the morning, just laughed and made a joke about how lucky she was that her mother kept such a good watch over her. That hurt, a tiny bit. Anne felt it stab at the raw ball of guilt which had surfaced when Madrigal first disappeared, the reminder that she’d not kept her daughter safe. But she could discern no intent in the comment, no sharp edge to the grin, nor