Seven Lies

by Elizabeth Kay

  I felt suddenly breathless. “Yes, I’m her sister. What’s happened? Is she . . . ? What’s happened?”

  “She collapsed. She’s doing well, considering the circumstances, but we do have some concerns. Perhaps you might be able to visit? She’s just arrived. I’m afraid we aren’t yet in a position to discharge her. But she’s being quite insistent that she won’t stay here.”

  “I’m on my way. I’ll be half an hour. Tell her I’m coming?”

  “Thank you, Mrs. Black. That’s much appreciated.”

  The line went dead.

  “I have to go,” I said to Peter.

  I was meant to be the last out, to turn off the lights, but I didn’t have time to wait while he shut down his computer and went to the bathroom and washed his mug in the sink.

  I gestured toward the ceiling. “Will you get them?” I asked. “When you leave?”

  “Sure,” he said. “I hope everything’s okay.”

  I nodded and pulled my coat from the back of my chair.

  “Thanks,” I replied.

  * * *

  The hospital was quiet. The white walls and the tiled floors and that recognizable smell of disinfectant had a library-style effect and we all shuffled along the corridors in silence, just the smack of our shoes and the rustle of our coat sleeves against our bodies.

  I asked at the front desk, almost whispering, and was directed to an assessment ward on the third floor. I followed the signs and distracted myself from the reality of my being there by focusing instead on the framed photographs of children with cancer smiling and elderly women waving and mothers clutching their newborns.

  I had visited Emma in many different hospitals, but for five years she had been teetering in a space that could almost be defined as “well.” I entered the ward and the nurse at the desk was on the phone, canceling a hospital transfer for the following morning because the patient had unexpectedly been rushed to surgery and wouldn’t be leaving anytime soon.

  I hovered, waiting for her to hang up and yet eager for her conversation to continue and to postpone what would inevitably come next.

  “Your turn, love,” she said eventually. “Who’re you here for?”

  “My sister,” I said. “Emma Baxter.”

  “Bay two,” she replied. “Just through those doors.”

  “Thank you,” I said, but she had already turned back to her computer and to the stack of pages piled beside it.

  There were six beds in bay two and five patients. There was a steady stream of noises: gentle snores and intermittent beeps and the quiet murmur of a television. There were two elderly women sleeping with their duvets pulled up to their chins and their bedding tucked beneath their frail bodies. There was a younger woman, perhaps in her thirties or forties, with her leg raised above the bed in a hoist and the pay-as-you-go screen positioned directly in front of her. One of the beds was empty, without sheets or spare chairs or gurneys. Another was hidden, soft wheezes seeping from behind a thin blue curtain, and diagonally opposite, nearest the window, was my little sister.

  She didn’t notice me straightaway. She was on her phone, the backlight casting a blue-white glow across her face. It highlighted her bone structure: her too-big eyes that sat in hollow pools, her sunken cheeks, the tendons that jutted from her neck. Her fingers, clasping her phone, looked too long, her knuckles bulbous, the bones of her wrists pressing up against the skin.

  I exhaled slowly and my stomach groaned as the knot that had tightened there tried to untangle itself.

  Emma looked up. She smiled. “You came,” she said. She placed her phone on the table.

  “Of course I did,” I replied, pulling up a wooden dining chair to sit beside her bed. “What happened?”

  “I fainted,” she said, and I must have rolled my eyes or raised my brows because she frowned and then became defensive. “Really,” she insisted. “It was nothing more than that. They’re all just overreacting. And that nurse. Brown, I think—is she the one who called you?—she won’t stop fussing.”

  “She’s probably just good at her job.”

  “If she was, she’d have sent me home by now.”

  “Did someone call an ambulance?”

  “Yes.”

  “So it must have been more than a faint. Or you’d have been fine by the time the paramedics arrived.”

  “Oh, Jane. Stop it. Please don’t do this.”

  “They’re clearly worried about you,” I said. “Or you wouldn’t still be here.”

  “They don’t need to be,” Emma replied.

  I sighed and placed my hand over hers, willing her to confide in me, to share the truth and to be as confident and open as Peter had been just a few weeks before.

  “What are they worried about?” I asked.

  “My heart,” she replied. She looked away from me, embarrassed, and I wanted to take her in my arms and promise her that everything would be okay and to tell her that she didn’t need to hide from me because I understood that we didn’t all become the people we wanted to be.

  “It’s okay,” I whispered instead. “We’ll find a way to fix this.”

  When she looked back at me, her eyes were wet with tears.

  “I don’t think so,” she said. “I’m never going to be”—and she screwed up her face, almost disgusted—“healthy.”

  “But—”

  “No,” she continued. “That will never be me. I haven’t been that person in over a decade.” She shuffled down beneath her covers and turned her head toward the window. “This is going to kill me,” she said. “You know it and I know it. That’s the only way this will ever end.”

  “Now, Emma,” I said. “Come on, now. That’s just not true. There are ways to survive it. You know better than anyone. Look at you; it’s what you’ve been doing all along.” And even though I knew that it could be true, that it was for some, I knew that it would never be true for Emma. She was right: I knew and I had known for years.

  Emma had always been invincible, and yet at some point it became very clear that she was broken, too, and that even the best of her would never be enough. She started to exist in a peripheral space inhabited only by the sick and inaccessible to everyone else. She lived with a countdown, ticking in the depths of her mind, measuring the fight left in her. And we all knew her fight was running thin.

  “You can do this,” I insisted. “You’re strong.”

  “I am,” she replied. “But I’m also sick. They aren’t mutually exclusive. I’m not giving up and I’m no less brave for knowing that the end is a real place.”

  “I know,” I said. “I know all of that. I just—”

  “I’m getting worse,” she said. “You can see it, can’t you? I see it in your face when you look at me. I’m not in control of it anymore; it has me completely.”

  “We can find a new normal,” I said, and I look back now and I know that I was sort of begging.

  “You don’t understand,” she said. “And it’s not your fault; I wouldn’t wish that you could. But it owns me. It’s all that I am.”

  “That’s just not true,” I said. “You are so much more than simply this.”

  And then tears flooded the corners of her eyes and I imagined then that she must have been terribly sad, but perhaps she was simply incredibly frustrated, exhausted by the myriad of people unable to understand her and a disease that she couldn’t understand herself.

  “No,” she replied. “You wish that I was, but I’m not. Maybe once upon a time. Maybe. But not anymore. Remember what you were like when you first met Jonathan?”

  “Emma—”

  “No. Stop. Let me finish. Do you remember? Because I do. You were totally overwhelmed by him. He was in everything you said and did and probably your every thought too. That’s what this is. It’s like being in love. It is utterly consuming. It’s unstoppable. I
t’s all that I am.”

  “No,” I said. “What you’re describing is horrible, miserable. Love is wonderful, Em. You’ll see. One day, you’ll see.”

  She laughed and I wanted to cry. “I don’t think so,” she said. “I think I’m past the big things now. Just one more at the end of the road for me.”

  I wanted to shake her. I wanted to shake her from her stupidity and I wanted to reach deep inside her and pull that demon out. I knew I couldn’t save her, but I also knew that I must have been able to at some point. I knew that there must have been a way to stop this before her bones became brittle and her muscles started to waste away and her heart began to stop. I must have failed her somewhere along the line for this to be her ending.

  We heard footsteps approaching and fell silent. A nurse appeared at the end of the bed.

  “Mrs. Black?” she said. “My name’s Lillian. We spoke earlier. Now, Emma. The paperwork’s complete, so you can go home whenever you’re ready.”

  “But—” I began.

  “I’ve discharged myself,” said Emma. “There’s nothing they can do for me here.”

  I tried to persuade her to stay in the hospital. She refused. I tried to persuade her to spend a few weeks in a rehabilitation facility. She refused. I tried to persuade her to live with me for a little, while she recuperated, while she recovered. She refused.

  I took her home in a taxi and put her to bed.

  I feared that it might be the last time I ever saw her, but I was exhausted and overreacting and, most important, wrong.

  * * *

  I wish the day had ended there but, still, it didn’t.

  My phone was beside me on my pillow, there in case she needed me in the night. I was almost asleep, my mind fogging with thoughts that weren’t quite conscious, when it vibrated. My hand jumped immediately, drawn to it like the pull of a magnet.

  It wasn’t ringing—the vibrations ceased quickly—but there was a red circle suspended over the mail icon. I opened my inbox and there was her name: Valerie Sands.

  You stayed in their flat for a whole week.

  She hadn’t written anything else, just that one sentence, and I sat up, pushing my pillow against the headboard, to work through her meaning.

  She was right, of course. She was almost always right.

  Charles had asked me to water their plants while they went on holiday, and I had done just that. Except I had also stayed over, without invitation, living in their home for nearly a week.

  How much of that did she already know?

  And what was she going to do with it?

  Here was the thing that was slowly seeping through, that was starting to make sense. My fear manifested only when my friendship felt threatened. I was less perturbed by the possibility of police and prison because there was no body, no motive, no reason to doubt the reports already written. But I was becoming increasingly aware that the small threads protruding from my lies, if pulled, would devastate my friendship with Marnie. The problem, it seemed, was that those were the threads that most appealed to Valerie. She was determined to see us unraveled.

  The Sixth Lie

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Charles had been dead for more than six months and I was sleeping badly for the first time in several years. I had slept as a child—not easily, but comfortably, often after reading late into the night, a flashlight clasped beneath my covers—but I had struggled throughout my teenage years. I had spent long nights rotating my pillow and adjusting my position and refilling my water glass, which would quickly absorb the thickness of a warm bedroom and gather a filmic, stale taste. I know that I slept best with Jonathan beside me.

  It was often difficult to believe that one simple action had been so effective, that he had died so easily, that death was so attainable. I found myself returning to it regularly, retelling that story, developing my role, but it never frightened me. In fact, I found it strangely comforting. It was reassuring to know that I had some agency in the course of my own life.

  And I felt, again, like that might be necessary, that I needed to do something in order to maintain control. I couldn’t have articulated this for you then, but I had a sense that I was losing my balance. There had been a temporary stability—just those few months—but things were beginning to feel uneven again.

  * * *

  It was mid-April the day that Marnie went into labor, a Friday, and I was exhausted. I had been interrupted by my neighbors going out the previous evening at half past eleven—their incessant giggling, the clinking wine bottles, the thunderous hum of voices trying to be quiet—and then returning to the flat just after three in the morning. I had hopped between dreams: of Emma, of Marnie, of Charles.

  I hadn’t dreamed about Emma’s corpse since my years at university, almost a decade earlier, and yet that vision had returned and it felt more frightening, more graphic, than it ever had before. It would creep into an entirely unrelated narrative. I’d be in the middle of a work dream—hundreds of calls simultaneously and not enough staff to answer the phones, wait times reaching several hours, being summoned to that windowed office on the eighth floor—or one of those traditional anxiety dreams, in which I was standing naked in front of a crowd or my teeth were falling out. And then suddenly, in the stationery cupboard or at the dentist’s office, I would discover her lifeless body, simply nudged into a corner, stiff limbs fixed and eyes clouded. And I would wake gasping for air and sweating and trembling in cold, damp sheets.

  It wasn’t unusual for Charles to appear unexpectedly in my dreams, too. He would be there, sitting at another desk in my office, or on the hygienist’s stool, either in his suit and tie or in those striped pajamas and that university sweater. He rarely participated or addressed me directly; he was just there, present in the corner of a nightmare, watching as things unfolded. I wondered if I was haunted by my actions, if his presence in my dreams suggested the early symptoms of some deep-rooted guilt or shame. But the truth is that I never felt disturbed by his company. He was simply there, as in my real life he was simply not.

  Marnie called me in the middle of a nightmare. I was stuck in the mirror of my wardrobe watching Emma’s dead body rot between my blankets. I could hear a lawnmower rumbling somewhere outside, shaking against the earth, and it continued to reverberate, its engine growling, until I finally forced my eyes open.

  My phone was vibrating on the bedside table beside me. It shivered off the lip and clattered to the ground, still attached to its charger. I slid my hand across the floor and finally found it still ringing.

  “Hello?” I said. My voice caught in my throat and emerged in a croak. I coughed to clear the phlegm that had set there overnight.

  “Jane?”

  It was a woman’s voice, but I didn’t recognize it. There was something breathless about it, something desperate.

  My heart began to beat a little faster.

  I knew immediately that it wasn’t Emma—I knew her too well; it wasn’t her voice and she’d have filled this silence immediately—but it could have been a friend of hers, or another nurse, or someone from my mother’s facility.

  “Speaking,” I said in response, and in an unnecessarily formal manner.

  There was a sharp intake of breath. “Just . . . one moment.” Then a loud sigh. “Okay—thank goodness—it’s done. I—”

  “Who is this?” I interrupted.

  “Oh, it’s me,” said the voice. “Sorry—not helpful at all. It’s Marnie. Jane, it’s me.”

  Which didn’t make sense. It was barely light outside.

  “Marnie?” I asked. “What . . . ? Why are you calling? It’s the middle of the night.”

  “It’s not the middle of the night,” she said. “It’s nearly six. I thought you’d be up.”

  “What’s happened?” I asked. “Is something wrong?”

  “Now,” she began, “there’s no need
to panic. I just . . . I think that maybe stuff is starting to happen. You know, with the baby. And I wondered if you might be able to come over. I wanted to catch you before you left for work, you see. There’s still time, I’m sure. But I’m getting these quite overwhelming twinges. I’ve been up since around three. They come and go, you know, as they’re supposed to, but I just couldn’t get back to sleep. And I’ve been waiting to call you and—as I said—I thought you might be up by now.”

  We had lived together for years, so embedded in the details of each other’s days that there were no secrets, no missteps, no unknowns. I could easily have woken one morning and lived her day instead: drinking her tea, going to her gym and using her shower gel, speaking in her voice, using her words—simply being her. And she could have done the same for me. She knew my routines and habits. And she knew, too, that not once in my entire life had I left for work before six in the morning.

  “When do you need me?”

  There was a long silence.

  “Shall I come over now?” I asked. “I can bring a few bits with me; I can shower at yours instead.”

  “Yes,” replied Marnie. “Please. If that’s okay.”

  She told me that she loved me, really loved me, which was very unusual and, truthfully, entirely out of character. We didn’t have—have never had—that sort of friendship. We don’t profess love in a heartfelt way or make promises of forever. Perhaps that has been our undoing. But, regardless, it revealed to me that she really was very frightened, that she really did need me.

  I liked it, that feeling of being needed. And being needed by Marnie specifically. I felt that I was sliding backward along the thread of a spiderweb, toward the place we used to be, when it was just us, and we were friends, and there was nothing to complicate that simple fact.