Cassie froze. She was in the laundry folding clothes and didn’t want to draw attention to herself.
“Because it was the right thing to do,” Richard replied, “just as a funeral is now the right thing to do. We need to say good-bye.”
“I will say good-bye,” Helen said, “when I see his body.”
“Darling, you know that might never happen. All the police’s evidence points toward his drowning.” Richard was trying to be patient but an edge had entered his voice. It was clearly a wearing conversation for them both. “Look, will you just stop that for a moment? This is important. The dishes can wait.”
There was a crash as bowls hit the kitchen counter. “I just don’t understand why you are so keen to move on, Richard. I would have thought that you, of all people, would want to get all the answers. You’re usually such a stickler for the details.” Cassie heard the fury in her mother’s voice. “Shouldn’t we try to find out what really happened to our son before we just give up hope and move on with our lives?” Helen paused. “You know, I wish I could forget him sometimes. I’d like to blank this whole nightmare out too. But it’s just too soon for me.”
“I haven’t forgotten him!” Richard blasted. “How could you even suggest such a hateful thing?” He was quiet for a moment. Cassie had to strain to catch his next words. “I am consumed by Alfie. I am living this nightmare each and every day, just like you are. I ask myself every moment of every day what I could have done…if I might have done things differently…how I might have protected him, been a better father to him…” His voice wavered. “How I could have saved him.”
“And you think I don’t?” Helen had cried out, her voice suddenly hysterical with pain and rage.
“I don’t know, Helen. Do you? I still don’t really understand why the kids took him to the beach. We had rules—strict rules about that.”
“Oh get off your bloody high horse, Richard. The kids, as you call them, aren’t kids anymore. They’re teenagers…almost adults. I had to go onto campus. What was I supposed to do, take Alfie with me?”
Richard ignored the question. “Dora told me you asked them to look after Alfie. She said you gave them permission to go to the beach. She said you gave her money for ice cream.”
There was a pause. When Helen next spoke her voice was low and cold. “Richard, have you been talking to Dora about this behind my back? Are you blaming me for what happened that day?”
He didn’t respond, instead choosing to change tack. “I’d just like to know what was so important at the university that it couldn’t wait until term started.”
“For God’s sake, Richard, you’ve got a nerve. Have I ever asked you what’s so important that you have to spend days up in London, working all hours?”
“That’s different.”
“Is it? Why?”
“Because I wasn’t supposed to be looking after the kids during the school holidays,” Richard blasted back at her.
Helen started to say something but Richard shouted over her. “If you’d told me you had work commitments maybe I could have shifted things around at the office, or worked from home that day. But you never mentioned that you had to be on campus. So how could I have known?”
“It was a last-minute meeting,” Helen screamed. “The dean needed us to come in and discuss timetables and—” She stopped herself suddenly. “Seriously, Richard, what are we achieving here? Are you honestly looking for someone to blame? What about the girls? What about Cassie, spending the day doing God knows what with her new friends? Or Dora, playing on the beach, frolicking around with boys up in the parking lot when she should have been with Alfie?”
Cassie held her breath.
“Don’t be ridiculous, Helen. Dora isn’t to blame for this.” Richard’s voice quieted again. Cassie couldn’t hear what he said next. She put her ear right up to the door but it was no use. It was Helen’s voice she heard next.
“Please, please just stop,” she said, sobbing. “None of this is helping. None of this is going to bring Alfie back.”
“I know,” Richard replied coldly. “And that’s exactly why I think we should hold the funeral.”
And round they went, a merry-go-round of grief and anger, insults and tears.
Cassie tiptoed out of the laundry room, her clothes bundled under her arm. She didn’t want to hear any more.
In the end Richard got his way. The funeral had been held a few weeks later on a damp October afternoon. Cassie dressed carefully in an old black skirt and dark polo neck and escorted her sobbing sister to the front of the chapel. The church was packed; its pews were full of familiar faces. She saw Sam standing at the back of the church with her parents as she walked by. For a split second their eyes locked. Sam seemed to be gazing at her urgently, but Cassie couldn’t bring herself to stop so she just gave her a little nod and continued to the front of the church, trying to ignore the sensation of the girl’s eyes boring into the back of her neck for the rest of the service.
She remembered mouthing along silently to the hymns, and the sickening, dentist-drill feeling in the pit of her stomach. Someone, she didn’t know who, had thought to put some of Alfie’s favorite toys up near the coffin. It was heartbreaking to see his little wooden trains lined up at the front, and his blue-and-yellow tricycle, a stark reminder of all the frenzied trips he had taken on it, scuffing the skirting boards and driving Helen to distraction with the noise. Never again would she see that anarchic grin as he skidded around the house. Never again would she discover him in her bedroom, guilt written all over his face with his hands caked in makeup and loops of her necklaces draped around his little body. Never again would he joyfully catch snowflakes on his tongue and declare them “yummy,” or pester her relentlessly to play spaceships and dinosaurs, or to read him his favorite stories. Never again would he lean his little head against her leg and ask her where the moon had gone in the morning.
She remembered her father standing up at the lectern and with shaking hands and trembling voice talking about his “beautiful boy” until his voice faltered and the pastor stepped in to pat him awkwardly on the shoulder and offer a comforting word. She remembered her mother’s hysterical sobs as the heartbreakingly tiny coffin, holding nothing but air, was lifted from its stand at the front of the church and carried out into the gray afternoon light. And she remembered standing outside in the graveyard, holding herself so completely still, her lips so tightly shut, her body so rigid with tension, terrified that if she were to let go for just a moment, even for just a second, she might open her mouth and scream at the very top of her lungs: It’s all my fault. I killed him.
After the funeral, when it had finally sunk in that Alfie wasn’t coming home, the four of them had found themselves faced with the sorry task of picking up their lives. It struck Cassie now, looking back, that this had actually been the hardest time of all. No matter how painful and turbulent those first few days immediately after his disappearance had been, there had been something about the knife-edge anxiety and tension that had kept them all going, a strange adrenaline that gave them the strength to dress each morning, head downstairs, and face the brutal days head-on. But after the funeral, “normal” life came knocking.
They reacted to it in different ways.
Her father disappeared, retreating to his darkened bedroom to lie among the shadows with his face turned to the wall. When he eventually stirred he was like a shadow himself—ghostly pale, creeping around the house with all evidence of his easy smile and jolly disposition gone.
Their mother, on the other hand, was noisy with her grief. By day she set about the business of running the house, tight-lipped and stiff with tension, but come evening the pressure of maintaining her composure proved simply too much and she’d take herself off in private to disintegrate into a pool of maternal grief. Cassie would hear her wailing and sobbing behind the bathroom door, or in Alfie’s room, weeping into his pillow night after night.
Really, she had wanted to avoid them a
ll. She didn’t want to look at her father’s grief-stricken face, or hear her mother’s raw midnight keening. But most of all, she didn’t want to have to look into Dora’s eyes and see the bewilderment, grief, and unanswered questions running endlessly through her sister’s mind. Dora’s face was like a mirror, and all it did was shine a spotlight back at Cassie. So she avoided her, as far as she could, taking refuge in her schoolwork, or busying herself with friends and parties, or, when she was at home, closeting herself away in her own room, a DO NOT DISTURB sign pasted firmly on the door.
The irony was that she had never been so popular at school. Everyone seemed to want to get close to the girl who had actually experienced something. She heard them whispering around her, nudging each other and staring with barely disguised awe as she passed in the corridors, even on her first day back. Suddenly she was invited to hang out with the most popular girls and to attend the wildest parties. When sleep failed to come, or the nightmares threatened to keep her up all night, or she was simply too afraid to lay her head on her pillow, she would surreptitiously phone her new friends and sneak out of the house. Desperate to escape its confines and the cloying atmosphere of grief, she’d creep up the driveway and spin off into the night in a willing friend’s car.
With the new friends came new experiences. Alcohol, pills, house parties, clubs, sex. She did it all, anything to dull the pain. She loved the warm tingle that filled her belly when she threw back the shots she was handed, the beautiful golden-honey glow the world took on when she swallowed the little white pills pressed discreetly into her palm. Suddenly everything was okay again; everyone was smiling; everyone was happy. There was dancing, and clapping and laughing and she twirled under strobe lights with a manic intensity, wanting the moment never to end.
When the clubs closed she dragged them all down to the beach. “Let’s watch the sunrise,” she cried. “It will be fun.” And swept up in the hilarity of it all, they’d careen through the lethal laneways and park down by the seawall, Cassie leading the way across the pebbles to the water’s edge.
“Who’s coming in then?” she dared, stripping off at the water’s edge.
“You’re kidding, right?”
“No chance! The water’s freezing.”
“Pussies,” she taunted, shrugging off her bra and slipping her skirt down over her legs. Naked and giggling, she’d thrown herself into the ice-cold waves, submerging herself until she could barely breathe.
“She’s crazy,” she heard them whisper.
“You heard about her brother, right?”
“She’s got serious problems, that girl.”
And slowly, one by one, her newfound friends would slip away into the darkness, leaving her alone on the pebbles to shiver and smoke and curse the fact she wasn’t brave enough to stay under the waves for long enough.
She took to hanging out alone at the fish-and-chip shop, sitting in the window watching the condensation run down the side of her Diet Coke can and her chips cool in the winter air. It was where she met the man with the thin gold wedding band and the peeling bumper sticker on his Ford Escort that said SCREAM IF YOU WANT TO GO FASTER. He drove them to out-of-the-way rest stops and did things to her body that made her sit in the bath for hours afterward, weeping hot salty tears into the cooling water, wondering why she still couldn’t feel anything.
The only time she felt real was when she was cutting herself. It was the only time she truly felt anything. The sting of metal on her skin, the rush of warm blood dripping down her arms, pooling in her hands or falling scarlet into the white porcelain of the bath—it made her feel alive. It made her feel present and in control. And most important, it made her feel like she was being punished for what she had done.
It was these nights that she wanted the world to end. If she could have stopped it on its axis and prevented it from turning one more millimeter toward another day, she would have. But the morning always came. And it was always bad. Oh, was it bad. When the gray light of dawn broke through the night and the hangover came knocking with a loud crash of cymbals at her temples, then it hurt. She’d crawl shivering and shaking under her bedclothes, her body cut and bruised, and squeeze her eyes shut against the reality of her life. She would will some kind of end to it all, and shudder in disbelief that her parents could be so oblivious, not just to her secret night antics but, more important, to the unbearable truth behind her pain.
Cassie could see a triangle of gray light forming where her bedroom curtains didn’t quite meet. It would be daylight soon. She thought back to her argument with Dora the night before and felt bad. She didn’t want to talk about Alfie, but she also knew she didn’t have to be quite such a bitch about it. After all, she was the one who was leaving; Dora would have to endure another two years at home with Mum and Dad and the memories of that terrible day. There was no escape for her sister, not yet.
She tried to close her eyes again, one last time. She felt tired now. She had spent half the night reliving the tragedy in her mind’s eye. As her body relaxed once again into the mattress, and her mind began to submit to sweet oblivion, she was pulled back to the surface of consciousness by a strange sound, like a soft, sad sigh. She thought she was dreaming, but then she heard it again.
Cassie squeezed her eyes shut. No, no, no, she implored silently. Not again. It can’t be.
There was a shuffling sound, and another sigh.
Go away, she willed. You’re not real. I know you’re not.
But it was there again, a soft sigh carried on the air. It was coming from the corner of the bedroom.
Her heart pounded in her rib cage and her blood seemed to pump in her ears. She really didn’t want to open her eyes, but in the end, morbid curiosity won. Tentatively she opened one eye and glanced quickly at the shadows in the far corner of her bedroom. Her eyes widened in fear when she saw the small figure crouched there.
He was cast in shadow, but two unmistakable, piercing blue eyes stared up at her mournfully out of the darkness. She could just make out the familiar silhouette of his sticking-up hair and the grimy old blanket he had dragged around everywhere, clutched in his little hand. It was terrifying to see him so vivid, so lifelike, there before her. And yet it was the expression in his eyes that scared her the most: for they were filled with such terrible sadness and reproach.
“Cassie,” he whispered. “Cassie, play with me.”
It was her baby brother. It was Alfie.
Cassie stifled a choking cry and scrunched herself beneath the bedclothes, sobbing wildly.
“Go away,” she willed. “Just go away. I didn’t mean it. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
There was another sigh, a breath so close now that she swore she could feel it on her skin.
“Cassie…Cassie…Casssieeee.”
“Leave me alone. Please, just leave me alone.”
She stayed there, trembling under her duvet until the morning sunshine had breached her bedroom curtains and she could hear her parents moving around below.
In the end it was a mad rush. Helen drove like a maniac to get her to the station on time and they arrived with just minutes to spare. The train to Waterloo pulled in just as she was paying for her ticket. Cassie submitted herself to a last hug from her mother, scooped up her rucksack, and then climbed up the steps of the last carriage. She gave a small wave as they began to pull away from the platform and then watched as her mother grew smaller and smaller, until she was nothing more than a tiny, indistinguishable gray dot on the horizon. As she disappeared from view, Cassie let a small sigh of relief escape from between her lips.
At last, she thought, and plunged her hand into her coat pocket to grasp the cold butterfly brooch secreted deep within.
Chapter 14
Dora
Ten Years Earlier
Three days passed without word from Cassie. Dora watched as her parents went about their lives with a strange, quiet bravado. Outwardly they appeared calm about their eldest child’s first foray into the big wi
de world, but Dora wasn’t fooled. She could see the tremors of worry stirring below the surface. It was obvious from the swing of her father’s head whenever the telephone rang, and from the soft sighs her mother emitted every time Cassie’s name was mentioned, that they were desperate for news of life up in Edinburgh.
“She’ll call tonight,” Richard mused over dinner on the third night, the furrows in his brow deepening. “She’s having too much fun to worry about us—off meeting people and finding her way around, sorting out her timetables. Quite right too.”
“Yes,” agreed Helen, “it must be hard to find a phone. Everyone will be queuing up to call home, don’t you think? I wish she’d taken that mobile we offered her.”
“Well, she’s very independent. You know, I admire that in her. Don’t worry, love, I’m sure she’ll call, just as soon as her hangover has eased off a bit.” Richard was trying to lighten the mood but it wasn’t working.
Dora sat in silence. Personally she thought Cassie terribly selfish not to ring. Surely she would know better than most how much her parents would worry? Just because she got to escape Clifftops and start again somewhere new, it didn’t mean the rest of them were so lucky. It was bad enough to be on her own at home; to then have to listen to her parents make excuses for her sister was enough to drive Dora more than a little crazy.
She was still silently railing at Cassie as she made her way into school on the bus the next morning. Rain poured down, fat drops splattering onto the window and streaming diagonal rivers across the glass. The bus was already steaming up—the driver reaching every few minutes to wipe the windshield with a grimy cloth—and worse, everything smelled of wet sneakers and the revolting sulfuric stench emanating from Billy Cohen’s lunchbox as he plowed through his egg sandwiches. She leaned her head against the window, gazing out unseeing at the passing landscape as she channeled her anger toward an imagined image of her sister flitting around Scotland.
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