Stanley, Webster and Yolisha looking out at her from behind a plastic window in her wallet, remote and unfamiliar. She still had Bunny’s smell with her, in her clothes and in her skin, his warm cereal perfume. She still had his sturdy weight in her lap, his sleeping cheek in the hollow above her collarbone. She counted the money she had left from her last week’s wages, seventeen dollars and some change. She put the change in the pocket of her skirt and folded the bills and tucked them back in her wallet behind her children. Overhead a plane dropped down into the re-opened airport, then another and another and another, their lights bright in the sky.

In the morning she’d start looking for a new family.

Miracle at Hawk’s Bay

Miracle at Hawk’s Bay

MATTHEW HIGH. WE knew it would be him. Even before Hannah turned him over, we just knew it.

It was Annie who saw him from the road. ‘Look,’ she said, and when she pointed at the dark shape out there in the shallow water, there was only one thought in all our heads – please God, let it not be him. Let it be any of the others but not him, not Matthew High.

At the beginning of the marshes we took off our boots and our stockings and hitched up our skirts and ran along the high grassy mounds above the channels, hopping over the gaps where you could hear the creep of the tide trickling in and filling them up. He was out on the sand, and even though we all knew it would be Matthew, when we were quite close Annie said, ‘Who is it?’ because the truth was we couldn’t tell for sure. Even then, from the look and shape of him, all blobby and blown-up, it might have been someone else. He was lying on his front in just a shirt which was up over his head in a sodden lump of cloth. We went towards him through the shallow water and stood around him like a kind of crescent moon with our backs to the sea, and I remember feeling the water lapping at my heels, thinking that if we all stood aside now and went back the way we’d come the water would rise and cover him again and take him back and Bella High would never have to know. I looked at Annie and Hannah to see if they were thinking the same thing but I couldn’t tell. Their eyes were down, looking at the dark and swollen body of Matthew High.