Sister

by Rosamund Lupton

  “May I ask you another question?” She nodded. “Were you paid to take part in the trial?”

  “Yes. Three hundred pounds. I need to collect Barnaby from nursery school now.”

  There were so many questions I still hadn’t asked and I felt panicked that I wouldn’t have another opportunity. She went into the sitting room and coaxed the toddler away from the television.

  “May I see you again?” I asked.

  “I’m babysitting next Tuesday. They’ll be out from eight. You can come then if you like.”

  “Thank you, I—”

  She motioned at me to be quiet, the toddler in her arms, protecting him from a possibly unsuitable conversation.

  “When I first met Hattie, I thought she wasn’t anything like Tess or Kasia,” I say. “She was a different age, different nationality, had a different occupation. But her clothes were cheap, like Tess’s and Kasia’s, and I realized that one thing they had in common, as well as being on the cystic fibrosis trial at St. Anne’s, was that they were all poor.”

  “You found that significant?” asks Mr. Wright.

  “I thought they were more likely to be seen as financially persuadable or open to bribery. I also realized that with Hattie’s husband in the Philippines all three were effectively single.”

  “What about Kasia’s boyfriend, Mitch Flanagan?”

  “At the time Kasia was put on the trial, he had already left her. When he did come back, they were together for only a few weeks. I thought that whoever was behind this was deliberately choosing women on their own because there would be no one who would look too hard, care too much. He was exploiting what he thought was an isolated vulnerability.”

  Mr. Wright is about to say something kind, but I don’t want to go off on a guilt/reassurance tangent so I briskly keep going.

  “I’d seen footage on TV and at Chrom-Med of babies who had been in the trial, and there were fathers as well as mothers very much in the picture. I wondered if it was only at St. Anne’s Hospital that the women were single. If it was only at St. Anne’s that something terrible was happening.”

  Hattie had carefully settled the blond toddler into the stroller with drink and teddy. She set the security alarm and picked up her keys. I had been looking for signs of a young baby, but there had been nothing—no sound of crying, no baby monitor, no basket of nappies. She herself had said nothing. Now she was leaving the house and it was clear that there could be no baby upstairs somewhere. I was on the doorstep, halfway out, before I could muster the nerve or the callousness to ask the question, “Your baby…?”

  Her voice was quiet so that the toddler couldn’t hear.

  “He died.”

  Mr. Wright has had to go to a lunch meeting, so I’ve come outside. The park is rain washed after yesterday, the grass shiny green and the crocuses jewel colored. I’d rather talk to you out here, where colors can be bright even without sunshine. Hattie told you that her baby had died, after an emergency caesarean. But did she also tell you that she had to have a hysterectomy, her womb taken out? I’m not sure what the people out here think of my weeping, probably that I’m a little mad. But when she told me, I didn’t even pause for a thought about her baby, let alone weep, totally focused instead on the implications.

  I get back to the CPS offices and continue with my statement to Mr. Wright, giving bald facts stripped of their emotional resonance.

  “Hattie told me her baby died of a heart condition. Xavier had died of some type of kidney failure. I was sure that the deaths of the two babies were linked and that they must be related to the trial at St. Anne’s.”

  “Did you have any idea what the link might be?”

  “No. I didn’t understand what was going on. Previously, I’d had a neat theory that well babies were being put in a fake trial, that it was a huge fraud for profit. But now two of the babies had died, so it didn’t make any sense.”

  Mr. Wright’s secretary interrupts with antihistamine tablets for Mr. Wright. She asks me if I’d like one too, misinterpreting the reason for my red-rimmed eyes. I realize that I’ve misjudged her, not so much for her attempted thoughtfulness toward me but for her initiative at trying to reprieve her daffodils. She leaves the room and we continue.

  “I phoned Professor Rosen, who was still on his lecture tour in the States. I left a message on his mobile asking him what the hell was going on.”

  I wondered if his pride in being invited to all those Ivy League universities was to distract from his real purpose. Was he running away, worried that something would be unearthed?

  “You didn’t talk to the police again?” asks Mr. Wright. The log he has of my calls with the police clearly shows a gap at this point.

  “No. DI Haines already thought me irrational and ridiculous, which had been pretty much my own fault. I needed to get some ‘heavier counterbalancing facts’ before I went back to the police.”

  Poor Christina, I don’t suppose that when she ended her condolence letter with the statutory “if there’s anything I can do, please don’t hesitate to ask” that I would take her up on it, twice. I phoned her on her mobile and told her about Hattie’s baby. She was at work and sounded briskly efficient.

  “Was there a postmortem?” she asked.

  “No. Hattie told me that she didn’t want one.”

  I heard the sound of a pager in the background and Christina talking to someone. Sounding harassed, she said she’d have to call me back that evening, when she wasn’t on duty.

  In the meantime, I decided to go and see Mum. It was the twelfth of March and I knew it would be hard for her.

  20

  I’d always sent flowers to Mum on Leo’s birthday and phoned her, thoughtfulness at a distance. And I’d always made sure there would be an end to the phone call—a meeting I had to get to, a conference call that had to be taken—creating a barrier against any potential emotional outpouring. But there had never been any outpouring, just a little awkwardness as emotions were bitten back and passed off as the judder of a transatlantic phone call.

  I’d already bought Leo a card, but at Liverpool Street Station I bought a bunch of cornflowers for you, wild and vividly blue. As the florist wrapped them, I remembered Kasia telling me that I should lay flowers at the toilets building for you, which she’d done weeks before. She was uncharacteristically insistent and thought that Mum would find it “healing” too. But I knew Mum found this modern expression of grief—all those floral shrines by pedestrian crossings and up lampposts and on roadsides—unsettling and bizarre. Flowers should be laid where you were buried, not where you died. Besides, I would do my damnedest to make sure Mum never saw the toilets building. Me too, for that matter. I never wanted to go near that building again. So I’d told Kasia that I’d rather plant something beautiful in your garden, look after it, watch it as it grew and flourished. And, like Mum, lay flowers on your grave.

  I walked the half mile from Little Hadston station to the church, and saw Mum in the graveyard. I told you about my lunch with her just a few days ago, jumping ahead in the chronology of the story so I could reassure you and be fair to her. So you already know how she changed after you died, how she became again the mum of babyhood in the rustling dressing gown, smelling of face cream and reassurance in the dark. Warm and loving, she’s also become worryingly vulnerable. It was at your funeral that she changed. It wasn’t a gradual process but horrifyingly fast, her silent scream as you were lowered into the wet mud shattering all of her character artifices, leaving the core of her exposed. And in that shattering moment, her fiction around your death disintegrated. She knew, as I did, that you would never have killed yourself. And that violent knowledge leached the strength from her spine and stripped the color from her hair.

  But every time I saw her, so old and gray now, it was newly shocking.

  “Mum?”

  She turned and I saw tears on her face. She hugged me tightly and pressed her face against my shoulder. I felt her tears through my shirt. She pulle
d away, trying to laugh. “Shouldn’t use you as a hanky, should I?”

  “That’s fine, anytime.”

  She stroked my hair. “All that hair. It needs a cut.”

  “I know.”

  I put my arm around her.

  Dad had gone back to France, with no promises of phone calls or visits, honest enough now not to make promises he couldn’t keep. I know that I am loved by him but that he won’t be present in my everyday life. So, practically, Mum and I have only each other now. It makes the other one more precious and also not enough. We have to try to fill not only our own boots but other people’s too—yours, Leo’s, Dad’s. We have to expand at the moment we feel the most shrunk.

  I put my cornflowers on your grave, which I hadn’t seen since the day of your burial. And as I looked at the earth heaped above you and Xavier, I thought that this is what it all meant—the visits to the police, the hospital, the Internet searches, the questioning and querying and suspicions and accusations—this is what it came down to: you covered with suffocating mud away from light, air, life, love.

  I turned to Leo’s grave, and put down my card, an Action Man one, that I think an eight-year-old would like. I’ve never added years to him. Mum had already put on a wrapped-up present, which she’d told me was a remote-control helicopter.

  “How did you know he had cystic fibrosis?” I asked.

  She told me once that she knew he had it before he showed any signs of illness, but neither she nor Dad knew they were carriers, so how did she know to get him tested? My mind had become accustomed to asking questions, even at Leo’s graveside, even on what should have been his birthday.

  “He was still a baby and he was crying,” said Mum. “I kissed his face and his tears tasted salty. I told the GP, just a by-the-by comment, not thinking anything of it. Salty tears are a symptom of cystic fibrosis.”

  Remember how even when we were children, she hardly ever kissed us when we cried? But I remember a time when she did, before she tasted the salt in Leo’s tears.

  We were silent for a few moments and my eyes went from Leo’s established grave back to your raw one, and I saw how the contrast visualized my state of mourning for each of you.

  “I’ve decided on a headstone,” Mum said. “I want an angel, one of those big stone ones with the enveloping wings.”

  “I think she’d like an angel.”

  “She’d find it ludicrously funny.”

  We both half smile, imagining your reaction to a stone angel.

  “But I think Xavier would like it,” Mum said. “I mean for a baby an angel’s lovely, isn’t it? Not too sentimental.”

  “Not at all.”

  She’d got sentimental, though, bringing a teddy each week, and replacing it when it got wet and dirty. She was a little apologetic about it, but not very. The old Mum would have been horrified by the poor taste.

  I remembered again our conversation when I told you that you must tell Mum you were pregnant, including the ending that I had forgotten, deliberately, I think.

  “Do you still have knickers with days of the week embroidered on them?” you asked.

  “You’re changing the subject. And I was given those when I was nine.”

  “Did you really wear them on the right day?”

  “She’s going to be so hurt, if you don’t tell her.”

  Your voice became uncharacteristically serious. “She’ll say things she’ll regret. And she’ll never be able to unsay them.”

  You were being kind. You were putting love before truth. But I hadn’t seen that before, thinking you were just making up an excuse—“Avoiding the issue.”

  “I’ll tell her when he’s born, Bee. When she’ll love him.”

  You always knew she would.

  Mum started to plant a Madame Carriere rose in a ceramic pot next to your grave. “It’s just temporary, till the angel arrives. It looks too bare without anything.” I filled a watering can so we could water it in and remembered you as a small child trundling after Mum with your mini gardening tools, your fingers clutched around seeds you’d collected from other plants—aquilegias, I think, but I never really took much notice.

  “She used to love gardening, didn’t she?” I asked.

  “From the time she was tiny,” said Mum. “It wasn’t till I was in my thirties that I started liking it.”

  “So what started you off?”

  I was just making conversation, a safe conversation, that I hoped Mum would find soothing. She’s always liked talking about plants.

  “When I planted something, it became more and more beautiful, which at thirty-six was the opposite of what was happening to me,” Mum said, testing the soil around the rose with her bare fingers. I saw that her nails were filled with earth. “I shouldn’t have minded losing my looks,” she continued. “But I did then, before Leo died. I think I missed being treated with kindness, with leeway, because I was a pretty girl. The man who came to do our rewiring, a taxi driver once, were unnecessarily unpleasant; men who would normally have done a little extra job for free were aggressive, as if they could tell I had once been pretty, beautiful even, and they didn’t want to know that prettiness fades and ages. It was as if they blamed me for it.”

  I was a little taken aback by her, but only a little. Shooting from the hip as a style of conversation was getting almost familiar now. Mum wiped her face with her grimy fingers, leaving a streak of dirt across her cheek. “And then there was Tess growing up, so pretty, and unaware of how generous people were to her because of it.”

  “She never played on it though.”

  “She didn’t need to. The world held its door open for her and she walked through smiling, thinking it would always be that way.”

  “Were you jealous?”

  Mum hesitated a moment, then shook her head. “It wasn’t jealousy, but looking at her made me see what I had become.” She breaks off. “I’m a little drunk. I allow myself to get a little plastered, actually, on Leo’s birthday. The anniversary of his death too. And now there’ll be Tess’s and Xavier’s anniversaries, won’t there? I’ll become a drunkard if I don’t watch out.”

  I held her hand tightly in mine.

  “Tess always came down to be with me on his birthday,” she said.

  When we said good-bye at the station, I suggested an outing together on the following Sunday, to the nursery at Petersham Meadows, which you used to love but couldn’t afford. We agreed we’d choose a new plant that you’d like for your garden.

  I got the train back to London. You’d never told me that you visited Mum on Leo’s birthday. Presumably, to spare me the guilt. I wondered how many other times you visited her until the bump started to show. I already knew from the phone bill that I’d been cruelly neglectful of you, and I realized it applied to Mum too. It was you who was the caring daughter, not me, as I’d always self-righteously assumed.

  I ran away, didn’t I? My job in New York wasn’t a “career opportunity”; it was an opportunity to leave Mum and responsibility behind as I pursued an uncluttered life on another continent. No different from Dad. But you didn’t leave. You may have needed me to remind you when birthdays were coming up, but you didn’t run away.

  I wondered why Dr. Wong hadn’t shown me my flaws. Surely a good therapist should produce a Dorian Gray–style portrait from under the couch so the patient can see the person they really are. But that’s unfair to her. I didn’t ask the right questions about myself; I didn’t question myself at all.

  My ringing phone jolted me out of the self-analysis. It was Christina. She made small talk for a while, which I suspected was because she was putting off the reason for her phone call, and then came to the point.

  “I don’t think Xavier’s death and this other baby’s death can be linked, Hemms.”

  “But they must be. Both Tess and Hattie were in the same trial at the same hospital—”

  “Yes, but medically there isn’t a connection. You can’t get something that causes a heart conditi
on serious enough to kill one baby, and kidney problems—most likely total renal failure—which kill another baby.”

  I interrupted, feeling panicky. “In genetics, one gene can code for completely different things, can’t it? So maybe—”

  Again she interrupted, or maybe it was the bad connection in the train. “I checked with my professor, just in case I was missing something. I didn’t tell him what this was about, just gave him a hypothetical scenario. And he said there’s no way two such disparate and fatal conditions could have the same cause.”

  I knew that she was dumbing down the scientific language so that I would understand it. And I knew in its more complex version, it would be exactly the same. The trial at St. Anne’s couldn’t be responsible for both babies’ deaths.

  “But it’s strange, isn’t it, that two babies have died at St. Anne’s?” I asked.

  “There’s a perinatal mortality rate in every hospital and St. Anne’s delivers five thousand babies a year, so it’s sad but, unfortunately, a blip that wouldn’t be seen as remarkable.”

  I tried to question her further, find some flaw, but she was silent. I felt jolted by the train, my physical discomfort mirroring my emotional state, and the discomfort also made me worry about Kasia. I’d been planning a trip for her, but that might be irresponsible, so I checked with Christina. Clearly glad to be able to help, she gave me an unnecessarily detailed reply.

  I finish telling Mr. Wright about my phone call with Christina. “I thought that someone must have lied to the women about what their babies really died from. Neither baby had had a postmortem.”

  “You never thought you might be wrong?”

  “No.”

  He looks at me with admiration, I think, but I should be truthful.

  “I didn’t have the energy to think I might be wrong,” I continue. “I just couldn’t face going back to the beginning and starting again.”

  “So what did you do?” he asks, and I feel tired as he asks the question, tired and daunted as I did then.

  “I went back to see Hattie. I didn’t think she’d have anything to say that would help, but I had to try something.”