The Good Sister

by Gillian McAllister

  “It’s not very easy to piece together half a conversation, is it?” Harriet, Becky’s lawyer, says as she rises to her feet. Her eyes are narrowed, looking carefully at Jasbinder. “I am surprised you can recollect it at all.” Here she is: the defense lawyer, on the full defensive. She is small and slight compared to the hulking Ellen, but her voice rings out loud and true in the courtroom. “How clearly do you remember it?”

  “Very.”

  “How do you recall so clearly what was said, when you only heard half of it?”

  “I could hear it very clearly. And then the next day I learned that the baby had died, which made me reflect on it.”

  “Thank you,” Harriet says, holding up a hand. “But what I am wondering is . . . did this conversation sound out of the ordinary at the time? And not in retrospect?”

  Jasbinder hesitates. “No. Not really,” she says eventually. “No.”

  “Were you worried that night, at all, for Layla’s welfare? Given what you’d overheard?”

  “No. Not at all.”

  “So it was a pretty normal, non-alarming conversation?”

  “Yes.”

  “Thank you. Nothing further,” Harriet says.

  Becky’s eyes are narrowed, in the dock. After this, if she’s . . . if she’s free. Will she move back in? Nod hello to these neighbors? Surely not. How could she? What is the way forward, from all of this?

  * * *

  —

  The prosecution calls Devorah Friedmann to the stand.”

  I watch as a wiry, tiny woman with dark hair wound into a bun strides quickly over to the witness stand.

  “Ms. Friedmann,” Ellen says.

  “Yes.”

  “What do you remember about the twenty-sixth of October?”

  20

  Devorah Friedmann

  7:45 p.m., Thursday, October 26

  Devorah opened Candy Crush on her phone. She was on level 980.

  Her grandson, Ezra, was at her feet, playing with an old lottery ticket.

  The bell above the door rang, and Devorah raised her head. Ezra looked up, too. He looked just like her husband, David.

  A tall woman walked in. Devorah ignored her, but got up off her old stool and turned Candy Crush off. The tinny background music cut out, leaving the shop in silence.

  “Sorry,” the woman in front of her said after a few minutes. “Just these.”

  Devorah glanced down at them. Two bottles of Calpol Infant Sugar Free.

  “Six pounds, please,” she said. She was glad the baby years were behind her. Lordy. She could drop Ezra back at her daughter’s, go home and actually relax.

  “Thanks,” Devorah said as the woman handed over the exact money. At least she didn’t have to bother with change.

  “Baby won’t sleep,” the woman said with a rueful smile.

  She picked up both bottles in one hand and left.

  21

  Martha

  Two bottles?” Ellen says, repeating what she has just been told. Her upper-class rasp rings out in the courtroom. I close my eyes against it.

  “Yes, two,” Devorah says.

  “And she said the baby couldn’t sleep.”

  “Wouldn’t, I think,” Devorah says, looking thoughtful.

  “And tell me—was the defendant alone?”

  “Yes.”

  “Members of the jury, please note. The defendant was in sole charge of baby Layla at this moment.”

  The jury nod, saying nothing. She left Layla alone. It thrums through me.

  “What time was it?”

  “Seven forty-five.”

  “Nothing further,” Ellen says. She pats the front of her robes and sits down heavily on the chair.

  “Devorah, if I may,” Harriet says.

  “Yes.”

  Devorah looks nervous, small and slight in the witness stand. Her slender arms are drawn across her.

  “Were the bottles of Calpol on any sort of offer?”

  “Two for six pounds.”

  “Nothing further.”

  * * *

  —

  I can’t believe she left my baby alone.

  My throat feels tight with it.

  I start to count the faces in the room to distract myself. There are only women in this case. Me. My sister. My daughter. Two female barristers. The almost all-female jury. The witnesses. All women, so far. Mothers, daughters, friends. This tiny world seems to revolve around us. It discards the men. They are not expected to look after their children, and they are not blamed when they don’t.

  The barristers want to discuss something and the jury dutifully file out. The public gallery is permitted to stay, but we don’t. The legal arguments are lost on me. Scott suggests a coffee, and I follow him.

  We all come out of different doors—Becky, her lawyers, and the public gallery—but we all end up in the same place, like water being drained from a colander and into a sink. I stop, momentarily, not knowing where to go. Becky is just a few feet to the right of me. I can tell in the same way I can tell her mood from her stance—tense, today—and where she’s about to go—to the toilets. Our bodies have been so close to each other for so many years that they know each other, like two tennis players whose limbs can predict their opponent’s actions. She serves; I return it effortlessly.

  Except I don’t see the backhand coming: Mum crosses over to her and follows her in. “How is it?” I hear her say before the dark wood door swings shut behind them.

  She left Layla alone.

  What if she has done it? What am I doing here? Panic rises through me. I’m here ostensibly supporting her, and she might have done the worst thing in the world to me.

  I try to calm myself down, snap out of it, but these days I know it’ll pass. In a few hours I will be back to feeling irrationally supportive of her. It is the way of it.

  I sit on a bench, ignoring Dad and Ethan and Scott hovering nearby.

  Ethan goes outside for a cigarette, and I watch him through the tinted glass windows. It’s warmer today, the sky a heavy white above us, like being trapped inside a dome. He has started smoking rollups, again, after five years off them, held between his index finger and thumb, and the gesture doesn’t suit him. It’s like seeing someone from work in their pajamas, or a celebrity on the Tube. Becky always said Ethan hated everything about smoking except how it looked, but I don’t think that. There is pleasure in the way he closes his eyes when he inhales. Good for him, I think: Life is too short anyway.

  Scott comes up behind me and catches my hand. His glasses mirror the fluorescent courtroom lights above us.

  “Think they will let us go?” he says.

  “Early finish.” I try to smile.

  He sits down next to me and I run my fingers down his arm. I read somewhere that every single skin cell renews itself after seven years, and so the arm I am touching is not the same one I was touching seven years ago. It feels just the same, to me.

  “Do you think it will be better, when we know?” I say.

  “Maybe,” he says, but a faint frown crosses his features.

  “I think so,” I say.

  The frown deepens. “Marth.”

  “Hm?”

  “I think you need to prepare yourself, for the verdict . . .” He has often tried to protect me in this way. Straight talking. I have always liked it. I never wanted to be babied. He seems to read my mind, as he has always been able to do, because he pulls me close to him, just like he does in bed, at night. Our sides are touching each other, right down the length of our bodies.

  “Why?” I say softly.

  “Because I think it’s going to be guilty.” He rests his head against mine gently. “I’m sorry.”

  “No,” I say faintly. “She died of . . . she died of lack of oxygen. It doesn’t mean someb
ody did it. It doesn’t even mean it’s suspicious. It could have been an accident. The police thought it was, for ages, remember? And the doctors.”

  “Marth . . .”

  “She could have rolled over or leaned against a blanket and wasn’t able to . . . to pick up her head. Or it could have been a co-sleeping accident. We haven’t had the medical evidence yet. We don’t know for sure it was . . . it was definitely suspicious.”

  “But Becky would admit that, wouldn’t she? If she said she’d co-slept with Layla, or she’d found Layla tangled up or something, then she wouldn’t have been tried.”

  “I don’t know,” I say. I close my eyes and pray for it to have been an accident. I’ve lost my daughter. I don’t want to lose my sister, too. “They might say it’s—”

  “What?” His tone is soft. He is not being harsh. Or, at least, he does not mean to be.

  “They might say that they don’t know,” I say desperately.

  “Science is science. That’s what they’ll say. Somebody did it.”

  The words thrum through me.

  Somebody did it. Just as I had thought earlier on. What if somebody had been there that night? And not Becky?

  Something fires up in my mind. Becky left Layla alone. What if something had happened while Becky was at Londis at 7:45 P.M.? The times check out. Layla died between eight and nine thirty. It could have been somebody else.

  “Somebody killed her,” Scott says softly, unaware of my mind racing. “We know that. Even if the verdict is not guilty, we still know that. Babies don’t die from asphyxiation for no reason, Marth.”

  I can’t handle that. Not guilty, but no explanation, either. No. I will trust in the system. Somehow, somehow, we are going to find out what happened.

  “I was away. From her. I was away,” I say, the saliva clogging my throat like a viscous syrup.

  “So was I.” His voice is anguished, too. “It was me who should have been there. Not you.”

  “We both should have been there,” I say tightly.

  “But you only went because you knew it was only one night—that I’d be back for the second night. And I wasn’t. I just didn’t come back to her.”

  “It’s different for you,” I say, wondering if I truly believe that. If I am simply caught up with the narrative surrounding the case. I draw a deep breath. No. I’m not. “I was her mother,” I say to him. And that is what I believe. My role in our family was senior to his. However unfair that is. However sexist.

  “That’s bullshit,” he says. “It was both of us. It was me.” And now I see his anger for what it is. He wants to feel like he is fighting back. Ethan is smoking. Mum is with Becky, in private, mothering her. And Scott is getting angry.

  And here we are: the culpable parents. The parents who were not there. We’re not in the dock, but we should be.

  * * *

  —

  Marc hasn’t been allowed in the public gallery because he will be a defense witness, later in the week, and he has Xander, so I am surprised to see him walk into the foyer. The day outside, through the windows, has a faintly autumnal feel, as though the light outside has been heavily filtered through a gray curtain.

  Becky emerges from her meeting room, flanked, as ever, by her legal team: She is expecting Marc. She crosses the foyer to him, reaches for his arm, her fingertips just touching it. It’s impossible to read the expression on her face. He nods at her, smiling shyly, and follows her across the foyer to the room.

  The things that must go on behind those doors. I watch them, still walking closely together like a couple, arms almost brushing, and I cannot help but remember the reason for their separation. What she did to Marc. It is not evidence; it is not admissible, but it is the truth. I put it out of my mind. I can’t think about that now. Besides, I am sure the court will come to it. They ransack your personal life, your history, your mistakes, when you are accused of a crime. They will come to it.

  “He did these courses on the internet,” she told me, two Christmases ago, twenty-five days after they had broken up. “FutureLearn, they were called, and they were the end of us.”

  I’d been contemplating getting pregnant for some time.

  Sort of. In my own way, taking literal years to reach a decision: the Martha way of life. Some decisions were merely made for me, in the end.

  Marc had moved out on the first of December. Becky had joked she was having a bottle of wine for every day of Advent, but her voice sounded strangled as she said it.

  “Why?” I said. We were in Mum and Dad’s living room. Christmas-stocking bunting was strung across the fireplace and Elf was playing in the background. My socked feet were flung over the arm of the sofa, mulled wine in my hand. Would I give up the wine for nine months, and the peace forever? I wasn’t sure. I rested my hand on my stomach and tried to imagine it full and pregnant, little realizing that the beginnings of my baby were already curled up inside me.

  Becky shrugged. “I think by the time you’ve done twenty FutureLearn courses, your marriage might be over.”

  She was sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of the television with her back to it. She often sat in that spot, like a cat; she said the pipes crossed and there was a warm patch. She was always so cold. She was picking at the skin around her fingernails.

  “Forensic profiling. Beginners’ Mandarin. Hedge funds. You know?”

  “Right. That’s . . . not like him,” I had said. Marc had always seemed to me to like simple things. He would always eat the same packet of cheese and onion crisps during halftime in the football game. Every single Saturday, game day, he would check in on Facebook, writing: Fingers crossed!

  “No. He got kind of obsessed,” Becky said.

  “I see.”

  “By the time— I don’t know. By the time I emerged from the early years of motherhood, it was too late.” She shrugged.

  It seemed a strange gesture, twenty-five days after her marriage had ended, but she was like this. Prickly sometimes.

  “It’s hard. Having a baby, I guess. Wasn’t Marc . . . Wasn’t he good, though?”

  Becky’s gaze locked on to mine. “They can only do so much,” she said. “It’s the women who suffer. It’s always the women.”

  “Is it?” I said.

  “Of course it is. We try to reach equality, but we never fucking will. Breastfeeding. Labor. It’s all us.”

  “You were a kid yourself, anyway,” I said, trying to talk her down. “Besides all of that.”

  “Yep. We limped on for seven years. Almost eight. But think about that. It wasn’t that we were too young or whatever. We didn’t stop having sex—we were always so good at sex.” She gave a little laugh, a sort of puff of air out of the side of her mouth, a half smile. “It was just the good old-fashioned daily slog of parenting that did it. Isn’t that fucked up?” She stopped picking at her fingernails and raised her head to look at me.

  “Not really,” I said. “You’re pretty textbook.”

  “Cheers to that,” Becky said. Even there, on the floor at Mum’s, a single mother in a Christmas jumper, she looked cool. She looked directly at me. “So I slept with someone else,” she said. “That was the real nail in the coffin. After the FutureLearn, obviously.”

  Becky. A dishonest cheat. I never thought she would be unfaithful. Could she surprise me in other ways, too? How dark did her personality go?

  “I . . . oh,” I said. “God . . . when?”

  “Five weeks ago. I told him—Marc. I couldn’t live with myself.”

  “Where was it?” I said.

  “Where?” she said, looking at me with a sudden look of distaste. “At his.”

  I blinked, imagining affairs to be seedy things, taking place in alleyways and across office desks.

  “So you went to his.”

  She waved her hand again, then went back to c
hewing her nails. “It wasn’t what it sounds like,” she said. “Not like that.”

  “How was it, then?”

  “If you must know, we were shit at getting pregnant and even shitter at being married,” she snapped.

  She didn’t say any more than that. I wish she had. But she had all these barriers up all the time. Humor was one. Barbed comments were another. Underneath that—occasionally glimpsed—was soft, yielding Becky. But she was hard to find.

  I sigh now as I think back to their marriage. How she and Marc used to be. Their obvious sex life. “I’m going to bed, and you’re coming with me,” Becky had said, tugging on Marc’s hand, only two summers back. Their desire to spend all their time together, Becky following him to his carpet-fitting appointments, sitting on kitchen counters and in the next room, just talking to him. So different from me and Scott.

  The most Scott has ever done is bring me fruit and vegetables from his patch of land. A bunch of fresh broccoli. A punnet of strawberries, grown by him. He means well. It’s just . . . practical. That’s all. Love, for Scott, is cooking a meal, changing a light bulb, buying me a book I’ve expressed an interest in. He makes my life run seamlessly, and I loved that once. So capable and calm. He made me ham sandwiches every morning after his paternity leave, cutting them into bite-size pieces so I could eat them one-handed. He didn’t leave a flamboyant, loving note, as Marc might. But there was love there. There was love for me. I try to remind myself of it now.

  He is at his grandfather’s land so much, lately. Too much. Three hours one night recently, until long after dark. He’s bringing home no produce. I don’t know what he’s doing.

  I snap back to reality, and return to the memory of Becky in our parents’ living room. My mind was reeling from the shock of her confession. “Who was it, anyway?” I asked.

  She would answer me on this. Becky dealt in facts just fine. It was feelings she didn’t like.