Little Sister

by Isabel Ashdown

  She picks up the bottle James left on the counter and pours wine into his used glass. At least this time, there’s no doubt it’s all Chloe’s fault. The name spikes into Emily’s thoughts. Always bloody Chloe.

  After the first glass, she picks up the phone and calls Becca, knowing it will block the line when Jess tries to call her from the hospital, but suddenly not giving a damn.

  “Becca?” she says as soon as her friend picks up. “It’s me, Emily. Is it a good time? I just really need to talk to someone—”

  Becca tries to reply, but Emily talks over her, ignoring the clatter of the busy restaurant in the background.

  “I don’t know who else to turn to—I’m at my wits’ end, and there’s still no news of Daisy”—she refills her glass—“and James and Jess have just been called out to the hospital, where Chloe’s having her stomach pumped.”

  “God, Emily!” Becca gasps, the change in background noise suggesting she’s stepped into the back room. “That’s awful. What happened? Is she going to be all right?”

  Becca sounds so genuinely concerned that it occurs to Emily that this thought hasn’t even entered her mind. Will Chloe be all right? She supposes so, but she’s been so busy feeling rage at the girl’s latest disaster that she hasn’t even thought about the reality of the situation.

  “Of course she will!” Emily replies with a snort. “She’s just trying to get attention. Probably got pissed out of her mind on cheap vodka. She’s trying to show us she’s the boss—sleeping with her boyfriend, staying out all night, getting drunk—she’s just playing up. She hates it that all the attention is on Daisy. It’s shocking, to be honest, Becca. I hate to say it, but she’s a spoilt little cow.”

  There’s silence at the other end of the phone, and Emily knows she’s crossed the line. Becca has known Chloe since she was tiny, ever since they first met at playgroup when Chloe and Todd were just tots. Becca’s always said how fond she is of Chloe, what a sweet girl she is.

  Eventually Becca speaks, her tone now laced with stilted formality. “I’m going to have to go, Emily,” she says. “The restaurant’s full tonight, and we’re short-staffed. Give my best to James, will you? Tell him we’ll stop by to see Chloe when she’s feeling up to it.” And she rings off, leaving Emily staring at the wineglass on the worktop, the message behind Becca’s words confirming what she already knows about herself: she’s the worst person in the world.

  Her thoughts return to that image of Jess’s hand on James’s back. There was always something about Jess that made people feel good. She was quiet, and so you had the sense that she was listening, really listening to what you were saying and feeling. When you meet someone like that, it makes you feel good. It makes you feel interesting and important and understood. Emily knows this as well as anyone—Jess was her counselor, her confidante, her best friend since the earliest age, and she was the one person Emily would always turn to for support, the one person who would never judge her, never betray her trust. When they were little—in fact, through most of their childhood together—Emily had trusted her implicitly, in many ways thinking of Jess as an extension of herself, the better, quieter, kinder version of herself. Strangely, these were the qualities that could provoke jealousy in her too, when she allowed herself to wish she were more like Jess, more likable like Jess.

  Before they separated, Emily had never known Jess to have a boyfriend, and as their subsequent sixteen adult years were spent apart, she’s never seen her sister in any kind of partnership at all. That’s strange, isn’t it? she thinks. To have only known your sister as a child—and then later, as an adult, solitary, with no apparent baggage to drag along. In their teens, Emily had lots of boyfriends, most of them only lasting a couple of weeks or so, and the awkwardly shy Jess tried to steer clear of these boys if Emily brought them home or they bumped into each other around town or school. Jess would be polite, say a friendly hello, raising her doe eyes to linger on them momentarily before spiriting herself away, too uneasy to stick around and say more. And Emily, so vivacious and certain of her own Snow White charm, would watch jealously as her latest crush darted furtive glances at her retreating sister, eyes hungrily following the pretty little mouse as she scuttled from view. And she was mousy, wasn’t she? That was what Emily would tell herself in those moments of envy, gazing after Jess with her browny-gold hair and grungy attire. She might be pretty, but she wasn’t sophisticated like Emily; she wasn’t fun like Emily. Who would choose Jess over Emily?

  “You’re a tease,” she had once told Jess, after a particularly stupid boyfriend of three weeks had dumped her, then had the cheek to ask if she’d find out whether her sister wanted to go out with him. She had been incensed by the nerve of him, and she’d marched home from the swimming pool where it had happened, running over the times and places they’d encountered Jess, working herself up to the conclusion that her sister’s shyness was in fact a form of passive flirtation designed to steal the limelight from her older, more popular sister. Jess had been helping Dad in the garden at the time, wearing cut-off jeans and a Simpsons T-shirt, with a ridiculous thumb-width smear of soil across her forehead.

  “What?” she had replied.

  “You’re a tease,” Emily had repeated. “You try to make out you’re not interested in boys, and all the while you’re sneaking them flirty looks.”

  Even as she said it, Emily knew it wasn’t true. Jess looked around, clearly mortified by the thought that Mum or Dad might have overheard. “But I don’t,” was all she could muster.

  “Well, maybe you think you don’t, Jess. But trust me, you do. Take it from someone older and wiser: you ought to be careful, because you’re giving out all the wrong signals.”

  Emily had sauntered away, already feeling better about the breakup with stupid Rick, only pausing briefly at the back door to look over at Jess. She was standing beside the border with a trowel in her hand, looking every bit as young as her fourteen years, an expression of panic fixed on her grubby face.

  * * *

  Emily is woken by the sound of the front door banging shut, her first emotion that of irritation. Jess and James enter the living room where Emily has been dozing, closely followed by a dough-skinned Chloe, whose expression sits somewhere between shamefaced and sullen.

  “You said you’d phone me.” Emily directs her accusation at Jess.

  Jess glances at James. “I did try, but the line was busy. And your mobile’s been switched off for days.”

  James puts his arm around Chloe, but when he looks at Emily, his face is annoyed. “Aren’t you going to ask Chloe how she is?”

  “Sorry, yes,” Emily replies, rising from the sofa, shaking her head. “Sorry. I’ve been worried, that’s why I’m a bit cranky. How are you, Chloe?” She approaches her stepdaughter and embraces her, but Chloe is not yielding; she takes the hug like a tree resisting a strong wind.

  “Fine,” Chloe mutters. “My throat hurts.”

  Jess extends a hand toward Chloe, and Emily feels cross when Chloe readily takes it, following her “aunt” out into the kitchen to fetch a cold drink.

  The living room feels like a strange place, still decked out for Christmas, the huge tree now wilting and bare in the corner, the tree that James and Jess put up with the girls all those weeks ago while Emily lay in bed with a headache. She remembers lying beneath the covers in her darkened room upstairs, the pain in her temple throbbing like a heartbeat, feeling grateful at the sound of their distant laughter as they unpacked the decorations and sang along to Boney M’s 20 Greatest Christmas Songs. They must have made a night of it, because in the morning Emily found two empty wine bottles on the side, the Christmas cheese and biscuits half devoured, and she’d had to stop her jealous alter ego from rearing up, enticing her to imagine all sorts of goings-on between her sister and her husband after the girls had gone to bed.

  But even then Jess had been helping out more than she needed to, stepping in to lighten Emily’s load, finding ways to make life easier
for them all. She’s a good sister. Since New Year, James and Jess have been trying to persuade Emily that it’s time to take the Christmas decorations down, but she won’t have it, not until Daisy is back home, not until this is all over. It’s creepy, she acknowledges to herself now, the way she’s saving it like some kind of shrine to her missing child, and the decay of the thing grows more disturbing to her with every passing day. But to take it down now would surely be to accept defeat, to accept that she might never come home. How Daisy adored the tree, with its angel on top! James would lift her high above his head to kiss the angel on the face, and then she’d rest in his arms as she pointed out every one of her favorite decorations for James to name. “Big Santa. Shiny Robin. Sparkly Reindeer. Little Dog. Stripy Stocking.” She’d even started to form some of the words herself. “Diney Oh’in.” That was her version of “Shiny Robin.” The health visitor thought she was going to be an early talker, because she was ahead of her peers with all sorts of vocal cues, though she was a bit behind with the crawling and walking. Emily looks around the room, at the desiccated tree and its dropped needles, at the wizened mistletoe that hangs above the hearth, and wonders if Daisy has learned any new words in the past fortnight. She hopes that woman—Avril—is talking to her enough. Daisy likes it when you talk to her a lot.

  “What did the doctors say?” Emily asks James, for want of anything else to say. When did she get to feel so awkward in the company of her own husband? Ha! Even that’s a laugh: husband.

  He gazes through the door in the direction that Chloe and Jess have gone. “Classic alcohol poisoning—nothing else. No drugs, as far as they could tell. Chloe hasn’t said much about it, except that she just wanted to ‘blot it all out.’ She just wanted to forget everything for a while.”

  Emily nods, incapable of coming up with anything worth saying. James makes a move to leave the room, clearly feeling as uncomfortable as she does, when he stops in the doorway, an afterthought.

  “One of the nurses on duty . . . she said something that worried me a bit.” He turns to look at Emily full on. “She said that when Chloe was first brought in this evening, she was crying hysterically, rambling on about her sister, Daisy. The nurse wanted to know who Daisy was—I think she thought there might be another teenager out there in the same state—and of course I had to explain who we were.”

  Emily stares at James, wishing he would get to the point.

  “I asked the nurse if she could remember Chloe’s exact words, and she told me she’d just said the same thing over and over again: It’s all my fault. It’s my fault Daisy has gone. It’s all my fault.”

  10

  Avril

  I’m so grateful for the open fire and the store of firewood the housekeeper has stacked up at the back of the cottage. Cold entered my bones during our morning walk on the beach, and again I had that sense of myself separating out, becoming two: one version of me in the seeing, breathing moment, the other watching from afar, detached, as a hard-hearted voyeur. It frightens me. I fear that poor judgment will blight me again, as it has so often in the past, and I find myself checking and rechecking the roll of money I keep tucked in the bottom of my overnight bag, worried that it will run out too soon. But it only adds to my anxiety; the large amount of cash tells me I must have planned this with clear thought, to avoid having to use cash machines or do anything that will draw attention to me at all. As that woman in the red jacket passed me on the beach today, I had the fiercest pang of reality—that’s the only way I can describe it—reality, and comprehension of what this actually is, what I’m really doing. But then I tell myself that those feelings are the wrong feelings, that the right ones are the ones that drove me to be here, to take matters into my own hands. Was that really me, slipping ghostlike through the midnight garden and in through their back door? Like a dream, it seems now, the way in which I spirited myself through the house and up to the nursery, instinctively knowing just where to find her, unguarded and waiting. It must have been me, I think now, remembering my clapped-out old car parked on the scrubby ground at the back, unused since that night when we’d returned here together. When I’d forgotten to switch off the headlights and drained the battery dead. As I sit here in the glow of the firelight, my beautiful girl asleep in my arms, I know that James would be happy to see us together, even after so long and painful a separation. I know because he said so. His words couldn’t have been clearer. Of course you should see Chloe, he said. A child needs to know who her mother is. A child needs to know where she came from. You’ll always be Chloe’s mother, Avril. When did he say those words? I have an image of him sitting at my bedside, cradling our newborn; another where he’s blocking my entry to the nursery, and I’m crying, hands covering my own face; another as he soothes my head on his lap, and his tears hit my cheek and mingle with my own. I see him sitting on a straight-backed sofa in the whitewashed hush of St. Justin’s, without Chloe, his face furrowed and serious, his body stiffening when I reach for his hand. Beyond him I can see the great oak tree through the common room window, its leaves rippling in the damp breeze. Was it then that he said it? I don’t know, it’s all a jumble. I can visualize the words in my mind’s eye, and I try to summon up the sound of his voice in my memory, but it’s been too long, so long that the sound of him just won’t play in my ears.

  Outside, the winter wind is up to its tricks again, always at its strongest up here at the top of the island, its howling breath drawing the flames of the fire high and fierce so that the reflected light shimmers over the walls of the warm, dark room. I gaze down upon Chloe’s gentle face, so like his, and I have the strongest desire to see him again, to see James and let him judge for himself how good I am with her, how good a mother I turned out to be. He always said I would be, I recall as I close my eyes and let my memories drift. When I first got pregnant, he said that together we’d be the best parents a child could ever have. Now I can hear his voice, strong and gentle, and I feel so very lonely again. And all at once I’m alone on the empty beach below, my gaze on the horizon, and I’m wondering, how would it feel to simply walk out into the ocean, just me and my beloved child, to release ourselves forever, to see where the tide would take us?

  11

  Jess

  Last night I put together some flyers to hand out to the businesses around town. They’re simple, made up of Daisy and Avril’s photographs and a simple strapline and contact number:

  HAVE YOU SEEN THIS WOMAN AND CHILD?

  PLEASE HELP US TO #FINDDAISY

  CALL THIS NUMBER IF YOU SUSPECT ANYTHING,

  HOWEVER SMALL

  I’ve no idea if it will make any difference at all, but I’m willing to try anything, rather than just sit around doing nothing and feeling useless. This morning Emily appears strangely detached from it all, in good spirits even. An outsider might think she’s without feeling; I’m pretty certain she’s taken too many of those tablets and she’s artificially buoyant, which worries me just as much as when she’s in her dark place. I’m glad when she agrees to let me take her out to lunch, as I’d feared last night’s upset with Chloe, not to mention the abandoned romantic meal, might have set her back. DC Cherry texted James early this morning to warn us that there’s a photograph of Emily in this morning’s news—looking more than worse for wear—and that we’d be wise to steer clear of journalists today, if at all possible. James and I agree not to tell Emily, so I’m nervous about trying to make it past the baying mob outside without Emily being asked for a comment or shown a copy. When the time comes, with the help of our neighbors, Emily and I cut across the backyards, popping out on the low road and managing to dodge the press vultures altogether. Thank God, she’s none the wiser, and in surprisingly good humor. We arrive at Becca’s Café just before the lunchtime rush begins, and she gives us the best table in the house, overlooking the bay.

  “Can we get a bottle of wine?” Emily asks when Becca has returned to the bar, and although I don’t think she should really be drinking again, I sup
pose it won’t do her any harm to let her hair down with me here to keep an eye on her. I want her to think of this as a nice day out, a treat, something that takes her away from the house and the absence that Daisy has left behind.

  “Good idea!” I say. “Why don’t you take a look at the menu, and I’ll go and see what wines Becca has got?”

  Becca gives me a strained grimace as I approach the bar. She reminds me of a 1940s farmer, ruddy-faced and solid. Reassuring.

  “She phoned me last night,” she says. “She was raving, and I didn’t really know what to say. I was probably a bit off with her. I didn’t like the way she was talking about Chloe, you know? Did she mention it to you, Jess?”

  “No, she didn’t. It must have been while I was at the hospital with James. What did she say?”

  Becca leans out across the bar to pass a pile of menus to a new arrival. Several more customers have come in since we arrived, and the volume in the place is now loud enough that our conversation can’t be heard by Emily at the front of the café. “She called Chloe a spoilt little cow. Can you believe it? The girl’s having her stomach pumped, and her stepmother’s acting cold as ice. As I say, I was speechless.”