The Good Sister

by Gillian McAllister

  Scott splutters, a real, genuine, surprised laugh. “Do you?”

  “Yeah. I hate this whole flat.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s like . . .” I look around the room. At the white dressing table dotted with my makeup and brushes. At the huge gray vase in the corner, serving no purpose: It’s too massive to ever contain flowers. “It’s all fake. Isn’t it?”

  “Is it?”

  “What’s the word for when you’re doing things because other people are?”

  “Keeping up with the Joneses?”

  “No, more than that. I don’t know . . . I just feel like my whole life . . . I don’t know.”

  “What do you mean?” His expression is becoming more alarmed, and he sets his uneaten pizza down on the plate.

  I give a half smile. “Pretension. I got a job because I had a good degree. We got a flat overlooking the sea because—well, because why not? Everyone likes that, right?”

  “I don’t love this flat. I thought you did.”

  “It feels like a show home,” I say.

  I always loved show homes. I loved the matching cushions and ornaments and fake photographs. I loved the little artificial lemons in the bowls. But you can’t live like that.

  “I want mess and stupid bedspreads. Seventies bedspreads.”

  “What else did you do just because everyone else did?” he says.

  “Got a mortgage.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Had a baby,” I whisper.

  His head drops at that. “I see.”

  “I thought it would be . . . It was just the next thing, wasn’t it? Spend twenty thousand pounds on a wedding. Kit out a nice flat. Have a baby. I never knew it would be so . . .”

  “So what?”

  “So complicated. So hard. I didn’t know any of it. I wasn’t ready. Stop Gap was too important to me. It was the only thing besides you that was real. I wasn’t ready to give that up. And neither were you, with your job.”

  “No.” He eats the final part of the pizza. A few crumbs cascade down onto the duvet. “We weren’t.”

  He is looking at me, saying nothing. We both know it’s illogical.

  “I loved her so much,” he says, his voice thick with tears. He opens his arms and I scoot up the bed toward him.

  “It was enough. That you loved her,” I say softly. “It’s just . . . complicated. If we’d been trying for years, or something, and we’d loved every moment of having Layla, do you think it would have been different?”

  Scott doesn’t answer. How can he? Of course it’s true—if we had been there, Layla wouldn’t have died, so say some of the experts—but the reasoning is flawed. She didn’t die because we didn’t love her enough. She died because somebody stopped her breathing. Because Becky stopped her breathing.

  Scott heaves a huge sigh. I bob up and down on his chest like a tiny boat out at sea.

  “It’s pointless. Talking like this. It has happened,” I say.

  “Yeah. But I miss her,” he whispers.

  Neither of us speaks for a while.

  “It was my fault,” he says.

  “What?” I say.

  “It was my fault, not yours. I shouldn’t have left her. If I hadn’t got carried away, socializing, wanting another night of freedom, it wouldn’t have happened.”

  “No. It was both of us.”

  “You’ve been blamed for it. For everything.”

  “I know,” I say softly.

  “But it was me. I’m the one who changed my plans. You were always going to be away two nights.”

  I look up at him. His face is wobbling, trembling with the effort not to cry.

  “Why did you?” I say. I have never asked. Instead, I have avoided him, shifted away from him in bed, my body rigid with anger. He left her.

  He sighs, his chest moving up and down. “I don’t know,” he says. “I don’t know. It was hard for me, too.” He holds a hand up. “It was harder for you, I know. A million times harder. I suppose that’s what made it hard for me. I didn’t know what to do about it. And the guilt. Of seeing you struggle. Of seeing Layla struggle. And I had to earn the money, but I was also being selfish, Marth. I could’ve taken more leave. I could’ve gone part-time. We could have shared it. I see it now. It’s so clear. But I didn’t then. I wish,” he says, his voice rising, “I wish I’d taken her off you. Thrown that bloody expressing machine out of the window. Formula-fed her, so I could help. But it’s a bloody hornets’ nest. I nearly said it to you so many times, but I didn’t know how . . . I thought you’d think you’d failed her. All I wanted was to make it easier for you, for her, for everyone. But instead, I avoided it, because it made me uncomfortable. Because I was a selfish bastard who wanted another night away. And now, she’s gone and . . . I never thought she’d be gone,” he says, tears coursing down his cheeks. “I never thought this would happen. Because of me,” he says. “Because of that one stupid, stupid text.”

  I hold him closer to me. I can feel his heart beating underneath my ear. Strong and steady.

  “Thank you for saying that.” I don’t argue with him, and I don’t try to convince him otherwise. He’s learned his lesson. We all have.

  “That day in the en suite, when I said . . .” I begin, tentatively.

  “Yes,” he says.

  I don’t want to get the memory out and examine it, but I have to.

  “I didn’t wish we had never had her.”

  “You were just so broken,” he says. “It was so hard. I wish I had helped you.”

  “It was just the shock of it,” I say. “New motherhood.”

  He pulls me closer to him. “I know,” he whispers in my ear. “I know.”

  We lie there for five minutes, then ten, crying, my head on his chest. Something about it feels cathartic. We’ve cried so many times over the past nine months, but this time, we’re together. We’re in it together.

  “Becky said something to me, you know, after she was arrested. She said it wouldn’t have happened if I had been there,” Scott says after a while.

  I blink, listening to his breathing, thinking. “I’m sorry,” I say eventually.

  “I think she was just furious. I didn’t know. I didn’t know how hard it had been for her, when I texted about staying another night. And she sent this really nice reply saying not to worry.”

  “She didn’t say. She didn’t say to anybody how hard she had been finding it.”

  “Yeah. Anyway,” he says, heaving a sigh.

  We lie in silence for a while.

  “Any more regrets?” he says lightly. “While we’re confessing?”

  I almost say it, then. That I married him because I thought I was supposed to. A developer in training. A nice bloke. Uptight, sometimes, but kind to me. A man with whom I didn’t have a huge amount in common, except a commitment. But to what? To the cause, I guess. To normality. To nice flats and mortgages and babies and pressed napkins on the tables at our wedding. To Italy in the summer and skiing in the winter. To the establishment. To life. To living life the way one should.

  I think of his toes in the mud at the river, that day in Cambridge. I see his fingertips, now, stained orange with cheap tomato sauce, and notice how I feel, deep down in my stomach, right underneath my heart, about him. How I can remove my tights in front of him, eat a cheap pizza and get it everywhere. I think of the things he has just said to me: his guilt, his regrets. How differently he would do it all again, if he could. How he wanted to do things differently, but just didn’t know how. There is love for me, there, buried deep underneath his layers.

  Still waters run deep.

  I think of the way he has held my hand through every day of the trial. His calm coaching of me the morning I was due to give evidence. His warm presence every lunchtime. His sympathetic smiles. The way he shields m
e from the reporters. The way he tells me it was his fault, not mine. The father and the mother. Not just the mother.

  We may never be like Marc and Becky, but they’re not together. And maybe, just maybe, they’re not perfect. I had always so admired their relationship, their hundreds of in-jokes, but it must have been flawed, cracked, too. Because it failed. When it came to it—a child, jobs, life—their marriage cracked. Its foundation wasn’t strong enough.

  Maybe there is hope for us. Perhaps we can sell out, here. Quit our jobs. Go part-time. Go and get muddy at the weekends.

  “Regrets?” I say softly. “No. Nothing further.”

  * * *

  —

  Later, after, my husband goes to the wardrobe. He’s naked, and I look at his form in the dim light of the bedroom.

  “Can we get a rambling old house?” he says.

  “Yes,” I say. “No ambient lighting. No fucking Glade plug-ins.”

  “Zero,” he says. “I want to tell you something.” He looks at me, his expression serious. “About where I’ve been going in the evenings.”

  He sits down at the end of the bed. He looks braced, as though I might not like what he’s about to say.

  My mind starts racing. Affairs, divorce, loneliness. “Okay,” I say.

  Oh, please don’t leave me, I am thinking. Not after we have reconciled. I can see it so clearly now. We don’t have to be like Marc and Becky. Not silly. Perhaps there is another way.

  Here is a man in front of me to whom I can say, “I sort of regret having a baby,” and he hasn’t judged me. There are so many kinds of relationships, and Marc and Becky’s is just one of them. Ours could be another. Not jokes, but other stuff: vulnerability, maybe. Intimacy.

  “Can I show you something? At the land?”

  “Now?” I say.

  He spreads his hands wide in front of me. “Why not? Didn’t you notice the fruits have stopped? Since?”

  I look at him, intrigued, then smile what feels like my first smile since it happened. “You’ve been there loads . . . I have wondered.”

  “This is why.”

  We get dressed and get in his car and drive there. It’s less than five minutes, and I can’t believe I haven’t been in almost a year. The night is cool and calm around us, and Scott turns the heaters up so high the hot air makes my face feel tight and shiny.

  His patch of land is down a hill, left at a gate.

  I notice as soon as we descend the hill that it’s not how it was.

  “Where are the plants?” I say.

  He shrugs shyly.

  We walk farther down and open the gate.

  And now I can see them properly. And I can hear the sea, rather than just see it, like an illusion. And I can taste the salt on the breeze.

  There they are. Maybe forty of them. Tiny trees. Calf-height, just like Layla would have been by now.

  “You got rid of all the plants.”

  “I don’t care about the fucking plants,” he says softly. “What use is growing fruit that only I eat?”

  We stare out at the trees together. They won’t yield fruit. They won’t save money. Their ferns waft slightly in the breeze. They’re pointless. They’re pointless, and I love them.

  “They’ll grow as she would have,” Scott says.

  I look more closely at them. Every trunk has an L carved into it. They’re all for her. And for me.

  “I love them,” I say to him. And I do.

  monday

  56

  Martha

  The reporter isn’t there today. I look around for her, on the steps, but she has disappeared.

  Scott and I spent the weekend not talking about the trial. We slept too much, ate too much, but we were together.

  By tomorrow, it will be over. Or, at least, the evidence will be, and it will be for the jury to decide. But today, it’s the defense’s expert. This is it: the woman who can give us an alternative truth, if there is one.

  She is called Jada, and she is younger than I thought an expert might be, maybe only in her early thirties.

  She confirms her name and her job title, which is a jumble of words to me by this point. Her eyes keep flitting to me. Perhaps she thinks I wish for Becky to be found guilty. And do I? No. I don’t. Quite the opposite. Despite myself. Because of myself, and because of her, and who she is. My little sister.

  “Ms. Browne,” Harriet says. “It’s important that we get this right.”

  Jada pushes oversize glasses up her nose. “Yes. For the sake of the deceased child.”

  Layla was just beginning to recognize people, right before she died, but it was only me who could spot it: the tracking of her eyes, the interested eyebrow raises. She had fantastically expressive eyebrows, her back arching as she tried to hold her head up, to turn and look at everybody.

  “Sometimes, accidents happen, and we’ll never know what occurred,” Jada adds.

  “So can you talk us through the evidence, piece by piece?” Harriet says.

  Jada nods. “Nine hundred babies died last year from accidental suffocation and strangulation in bed.”

  “Yes.”

  “A very small percentage of suffocations are homicidal.”

  “I see,” Harriet says. “So if we were to consider the hypothesis that Layla was accidentally smothered, how could that have happened?”

  “If, at any point, you perform an autopsy on a baby, the baby’s body will show a snapshot of what its body has been through in those past few weeks or months, at the moment you cut into it. Whenever doctors perform a test looking for one thing, they often find other, benign, things that then require investigation. Ever had a scan of your appendix and then they found a liver cyst, and so on? Well, that can happen with babies. The honest answer is that if you take a snapshot of a baby at any one time, you won’t always know what was wrong, and what had a material effect. The scans are just snapshots. They are not as diagnostic as you might think.”

  “So the scans are merely showing the body as it was at the time of death. But perhaps not everything observed in the scans caused the death? In babies, in particular?”

  “Yes, exactly,” Jada says. “If you were admitted to hospital right now, pronounced dead on arrival, and we performed an autopsy, what might we find? An old bruise to your hip from that table? A blood clot on the brain that might’ve ruptured one day soon, or years from now, or never? A blocked artery? The beginnings of cancer, somewhere? The thing with babies is that their bodies are so . . . well, so new that it is just impossible sometimes to tell what caused what. We are still learning, every week, every month, about them, and what’s there right after they leave the womb. What we cannot—what we mustn’t—do is assume that every sign found on the scans indicates force or a struggle. We must also accept that, ultimately, we weren’t there. And so we may never know.”

  “And sometimes,” Harriet says, with a look at the jury, “the tendency can be toward knowing, and so we convict where it would be wrong to do so. Do you have an alternative hypothesis, based on your examination of Layla’s case?”

  “Let’s take the evidence step by step. The bruise behind the ear could easily be a Mongolian blue spot: a congenital birthmark. Now that Layla has died, we cannot test whether it had always been there or if it was a new bruise. But we shouldn’t assume.”

  “Yes,” Harriet said. My eyes pool with tears. How can I not know whether a mark had always been on my own daughter? I have been through my hundreds of photographs of her, over and over, hoping to find one with the answer. But I never do.

  “The bleeding in the lungs and the blood spots around the mouth, nose and on the retinas could all be caused by accidental smothering.”

  “Yes. And how might Layla have been accidentally smothered?”

  “She might have rolled over. Eight weeks is early, but not unheard of. The defen
dant could have remembered incorrectly, and could have placed her facedown, misremembered. Perhaps.”

  “And the hemorrhages?”

  “Could have been caused by accidental smothering but could also have been there from birth.”

  “How?”

  “During a prolonged and difficult labor—or one where the baby’s head does not easily fit through the birth canal, or the baby is large—the blood vessels in the eyes can rupture.”

  “So those symptoms may have been there since birth?”

  “Yes.”

  “And would they look like the retinal hemorrhages we have seen on Layla’s scans?”

  “Yes.”

  Harriet pauses. She looks down at her papers, then up at Jada, then at the jury.

  “Please, can the members of the jury turn to page eighteen of their folders,” Harriet says. “The pathologist’s photographs of Layla’s retinas, taken with a magnifying camera through the pupil.”

  Jada reaches for a folder, too, and holds up a photograph. It looks like a sun, or a ball of lava. “Full retinal hemorrhages would have blood across this entire orange area,” she says. The eyes have thin, red cobwebs over them, interspersed in the center with fat, sprawling drops. “Layla’s are only in the center, here,” she says, pointing to one of the blobs.

  “What would you conclude might cause retinal hemorrhages like this?”

  “Many things. Birth trauma. Accidental smothering. Crying violently. CPR, for example. CPR performed by the frightened defendant. Shaking, to wake the baby up.”

  “Thank you. Lots of explanations. None as far-fetched as abuse.”

  “No.”

  “And, finally: Do you agree with the pathologist’s time of death as between eight and nine thirty—nine forty at the absolute latest?”

  “Yes. I agree there could be no way Layla would have been alive after nine forty.”

  “Thank you, Ms. Browne,” Harriet says. “That will be all from me.”

  That’s it? That’s it?

  I sit very still, hoping for more.

  Where is the counterevidence? The moment of truth? Ellen looks completely cool as she stands up. She stands silently for a moment or two, one arm across her body, left hand cupping her right elbow, right hand up to her face. Her head is tilted thoughtfully.