“Did you get him back?” I ask.
She nods, her gaunt expression absent of feeling. “For a while. For just a month or two, until he found someone new.”
This, this final piece of information, is it, I think to myself. The final injury.
24
Emily
She knows. This is the chilling realization that Emily can’t shake from her mind as they pull up in the car park at Yarmouth ferry terminal. It is the first clear thought she has had all day, the first thing she has been certain of in a very long time, and it courses through her thoughts as she runs along the dark and windswept pathway toward her daughter’s safe return. Jess knows what happened in that bedroom at Sammie’s house all those years ago. And worse still, Emily thinks, she knows that I’ve always known.
On the horizon, the tiniest hint of light appears, and a ferryman calls out, “There she is!” and Emily thinks she might stop breathing until the boat draws nearer, when she can really believe that Daisy is on her way. DCI Jacobs and her team start to move about the quayside, pointing and calling out instructions. Emily barely hears a word of it. She knows, her mind taunts her again. This is the thought that runs through Emily’s panicked mind over and over, as the cold wind bites at her. She fixes her gaze on the lights of the incoming ferry, fighting against this fresh terror that threatens to engulf her. She knows.
* * *
Along the corridor, Lizard stood outside the closed door to Sammie’s bedroom, and in the moment it took for his startled eyes to meet Emily’s, she knew it was bad news.
“Who’s in there?” she asked, her hands already wrestling him away from his post, her voice surging at him, high and frightened. She was vaguely aware of Sammie behind her, urging her to calm down, appealing to Lizard that they needed to check on Jess. But Emily was hysterical. She knew she had to get inside that room, and she lashed out at Lizard, scoring a deep red mark along his cheekbone, causing him to yelp and step aside, his hands raised in self-defense.
“Who is in there?” she screamed again, wanting to know—not wanting to know—and as the door fell open and she stumbled against the end of the bed, she had all the answers she needed.
Sammie’s neat pink bedspread was rucked up, and that in itself was uncharacteristic, unsettling. In the second it took for Simon to register her presence, all Emily could see of Jess was the pale skin of her motionless limbs, pinioned beneath Simon’s moving hips, and her face—oh, God, her face. She was pale, her head lolled back against the pillow, one eye open but unseeing, and so, so lifeless, that in that second Emily truly believed that her sister was dead. She gasped, at once turning to check if she was the only witness to this, but she was not. It was Sammie, tiny little Sammie who rushed at Simon, grabbing him by the back of his shirt to haul him off her, dragging him to the floor with a drunken thud. In a second, Emily had kicked the door shut, tugging up the bedspread to cover her sister, everything happening with such speed that she thought she might collapse under the heart-pumping strain of it. And then she stood, stock still, and took in the scene. Simon was crumpled on the floor where he fell, not too wasted to cover his own modesty as he fumbled with his button fly. Sammie appeared suddenly terrified, standing in the center of her own bedroom, wordlessly asking, What now, Emi, what now? And there was Jess, like a corpse on the bed, half-naked beneath those garish pink sheets, unmoving, unspeaking. Unknowing.
“What were you doing?” Emily murmured, and even now she can’t be sure if she meant this for Jess or for Simon. All the power she possessed seemed to slip from her as she gazed down on her sister’s helpless form. Now she turned toward Simon, addressed him directly. “What. Were. You. Doing?”
“Shit, Ems,” he said, rotating his earring between finger and thumb and pushing himself to standing. He hooked his fingers into his belt loops and tugged up his jeans. “Shit, Ems, I’m sorry. Ah, fuck. Sorry, OK?”
Sorry? Didn’t he know what he’d done? Had he no idea at all? “She’s my sister,” she said quietly. But it wasn’t enough. Not for this. She knew that much from the look of abject horror on Sammie’s face. She knew that much from the rotten pool of bile that had started to swill in her gut. “She’s my sister.”
“Oh, man, look—I’m sorry,” he repeated, and so thrown was she by the innocent expression on her boyfriend’s face that she started to question whether she’d got this all wrong. Hope flickered, for the briefest of moments, hope that perhaps she had got it all wrong. But she hadn’t, had she? She knew what she had seen in this candy-pink bedroom, a room she once associated with childhood and innocence, a room now so sullied she feared she might never step foot in it again. She knew what this was.
“God, I’m out of my head, Ems. Babe? I didn’t mean for this to happen. You believe me, don’t you? I didn’t mean it.” Simon moved toward her, reaching out a hand, a hand that moments earlier had been on her sister. She lurched backward, crashing against Sammie’s chest of drawers, shaking her head as hair clips and cotton buds scattered across the carpet.
“No!” she shouted. “No, no, no!”
And he left the room. Simple as that. He shrugged, kicking Jess’s discarded denim skirt to one side, and he left the room.
Sammie was leaning over the bed, stroking Jess’s forehead, pulling at her eyelids and trying to bring her around. She indicated for Emily to go around the other side and help to hoist her up to a sitting position. Jess’s body was like a dead weight, but she was breathing and starting to show signs of consciousness. “We need to tell someone about this,” Sammie said, but Emily shook her head and focused on the task of pushing pillows behind Jess’s slumped torso. “This is wrong,” Sammie whispered fiercely. “We can’t just do nothing! You can’t let him get away with it! Emi? She’s your sister!”
Like a gift, reason flooded Emily’s mind, and she was suddenly calm. She took control, as she always did, and she made it go away. “Sammie, please, you’ve got to trust me on this one. Jess would never get over it if she thought you’d seen her like this—you know how embarrassed she gets about her fainting and all that—”
“But this isn’t like that! She hasn’t just fainted—look at her! She’s taken something. Or they’ve given her something, more like.”
Emily reached across Jess to take Sammie’s tiny wrist in her hand. “Let me handle it, Sammie, OK? Whatever happened, Jess won’t want anyone to hear about it. She’d be so ashamed, I don’t know what she’d do—or what would happen to her. You know how the doctors are always telling us how she has to avoid stress, because of her heart. Please, Sammie. Swear you’ll never breathe a word? Please? You said it yourself, she’s my sister. And I think I know what’s best for her, don’t you?”
* * *
The ferry has docked, and the first of the passenger cars exits the lower deck of the ferry. DCI Jacobs turns and makes a wide, sweeping motion with her arms. Emily looks around at the anxious faces of James and Chloe, at the assembled officers and harbor crew, poised for action, their breath white and smoky in the night air, and wonders if perhaps this has all been a dream. James has his arms around Chloe, warming her shoulders beneath his jacket, his face in her hair, and Jess—well, there she is now, at their side, where Emily should be. She’s taken my place, she thinks. I really am vanishing. The irony of it does not escape her: to have been replaced by her vanished sister is perhaps the worst punishment of all. James has barely looked in her direction, oblivious to everything but the disembarkation point of the ferry, and she daren’t approach him, so afraid is she of what her little sister may have said. Does he know about her? Does he know what she did?
Max arrives, running along the quayside to join the others, James and Chloe and Jess; he places his hands on Chloe’s shoulders, and she turns to look back at him, and she looks happy. Jess smiles at him, welcoming him. It’s as though Emily doesn’t exist, and even now jealousy tugs at her, needling her to get her sister away from them. Away from her family. She yearns for another of her little tablets, just
one, to take the edge off all this.
“There she is!” Chloe cries out, and her arm shoots up, a finger pointing in the direction of the passenger deck at the back of the ship. “There! There’s Daisy!”
And Emily doesn’t know which way to turn because now she’s crying, and everyone’s crying—there’s no one to hug her—and she can see her, really, really see her. She’s real, and she’s safe, and even though they’re separated by police tape and distance and waiting, waiting, waiting, they’ve seen for themselves that Daisy is really here. In this extraordinary moment of reconciliation, surely her sister could reach inside herself and find forgiveness? Surely, after everything they’ve been through together? Surely, after the passing of so much time? Emily moves closer and tries to draw Jess’s attention; she reaches out, touches her arm lightly, hopeful that she’ll respond in this moment of celebration and relief. But Jess flinches at her touch and leans in close to whisper, “I know it was you, Emily. It had to be. It was you who contacted Avril, wasn’t it?”
Emily can see herself now, bent over James’s desk, reading and rereading the letter she’d found in her husband’s paperwork, tears falling from her eyes as the full extent of his deceit dawned upon her. Dear James, I can’t bear the way we parted. Please, can we meet? I just want to talk to you. All my love, A x. She’d acted rashly, immediately flipping open her husband’s laptop to type “his” reply—a simple yes to the woman, an invitation to come to his home while his family were away, to talk. She had printed the letter, adding a handwritten “x,” and rushed to the post box to send it before she could change her mind. Had she ever thought anything would come of it? She hadn’t even had a name to put on the envelope, for God’s sake. Of course, she hadn’t thought anything would come of it.
The minutes that follow Jess’s words are a blur, Emily’s state a nightmarish blend of horror and hope, of anticipation and alarm. She steps away from her sister, her heart hammering against her cold ribs, and fixes her attention on the upper deck of the ferry, where several figures stand. To one side, a police officer holds Daisy in his arms, and farther along the railings is the woman who can only be Avril, flanked by two more uniformed officers. The floodlights are full on, and as the distant group starts to move toward the staircase to make their descent, another person comes into view, a small-framed woman in a neatly cut coat, a little handbag hooked in the crook of her elbow. She slips her arm through Avril’s.
“Who’s that with them?” Emily asks, the frightened sound of her own voice startling her as she squints against the glare of the floodlights.
It is James who answers, and his tear-streaked face reveals the strangest expression of pain and joy. “It’s my mother,” he says.
Epilogue
Jess
September
I love this new stretch of the island, so far away from the tourist trail and tricky to reach unless you’re familiar with the hidden coastal paths. The tide is way out, the sun low in the sky, casting long shadows of the smallest shells and lugworm trails, dappling the glistening sand like a soft oil color. I live for these moments alone, these hours of calm contemplation and movement, when I can make sense of all that has happened and be thankful for all that I have.
In the hours that followed Daisy’s return, so much altered for all of us that, looking back now, it takes on a dreamlike quality, like a film or a story belonging to someone else altogether. That night, when Avril was apprehended, she brought with her the strangest revelation, in the form of James’s mother. It emerged that, after James had left his old life behind, his mother had remained steadfastly loyal to her daughter-in-law, visiting her at the psychiatric hospital until she was finally approved as recovered and released into the community. I liked James’s mother, Alicia—or Lily, as she prefers—from the moment I met her. I love her quietly efficient little ways, and I love the wisdom with which she leads her life. James sobbed when she reached out to embrace him at the quayside, she so tiny and steadfast, he, in contrast, vast and needful.
Lily told us she had been searching for Avril since her release a year ago, and about how shocked she was on arriving home late at night from a long holiday abroad to find a message on her answering machine. In the message, Avril was almost incoherent, but Lily was able to make out that she wanted to meet her the next afternoon before she traveled to the island—and thank God, Lily decided it sounded important enough to drop everything and go. When she turned up to meet Avril at the ferry terminal in Lymington, she had no idea about James and his missing daughter—or that Avril was wanted by the police—until she picked up a newspaper in the waiting room and saw their faces on the front page. When she spotted Avril approaching with Daisy, she quickly alerted the security staff, and, on their instruction, held back to allow Avril to board before her while they organized backup.
It seems that lying runs in the family; Lily had convinced the nurses at Avril’s hospital that she was someone else altogether, but her deception came from a good place, a place of compassion, after James had himself suffered a breakdown and taken Chloe with no forwarding address. Amazingly, Lily had been funding Avril’s private care at Buddleia Hill for the five years before she left, paying out a small fortune every month for the care of her beloved daughter-in-law. All these things we withhold from each other; so many secrets we tie ourselves up with in the keeping.
Avril is in a secure unit now, just across the water, where Chloe can visit her, and often Chloe will take the hovercraft with Grandma Lily, who now lives on the island, just a few miles along the coast from the new family home. For years, Lily had waited in hope that James or Chloe would find her again, invite her back into their lives, and now here they are, together, as close as a family could be. Chloe’s visits to Avril are going well, and slowly she is filling in the history that her mother has missed out on, taking bundles of photographs and scrapbooks with her each time, excitedly returning home with the excavated tales of her parents’ old lives. A few times, I’ve visited with her; they’re so alike, Chloe and Avril, it’s uncanny. Avril’s doing just fine. She feels safe where she is; she’s well cared for and monitored, and she has Chloe in her world. “That’s all I ever wanted,” she told me the last time I went along.
And Emily—well, she’s gone. When James discovered that it was Emily who had made contact with Avril, encouraged her to come, any traces of love he still had for her vanished entirely. She tried to tell him about finding the letter he’d hidden, the letter signed “A,” to tell him that she hadn’t known, couldn’t have known who she was writing to—who she was inviting into their lives. “I just wanted to see her—this other woman,” she pleaded. She tried to tell him that she’d thought he was having an affair, that she was only trying to put a stop to it, but James wouldn’t hear another word. She was the one who made this happen; she was to blame for the agony of Daisy’s disappearance; she was the one who had put them through the nightmare that no parent should ever face. And almost worse still, she had tried to implicate Chloe in order to deflect suspicion from herself. That, he said, was unforgivable.
Of course, James doesn’t know that it was me who moved the letter from his coat pocket to his desk drawer so that Emily was likely to find it, and I’m sure he would never have detected the hint of uncertainty I allowed to slip into my tone as I reassured my sister that her husband couldn’t possibly be having an affair. Such subtle shifts in tenor are barely audible to most; perhaps it’s the kind of nuance only a sister would pick up on.
After much soul-searching, Emily agreed that she’d rather take some time out than have her involvement exposed to the police, and I gave her the details of my ashram in North Wales. It’s been more than seven months now, and we haven’t heard from her at all. It must be doing her good, some valuable time to reflect and heal. We all need that, don’t we? Time to think things over.
Now as I ascend the sandy path toward my sun-bathed little cottage, I pause a moment to catch my breath, to cradle the tightening corset of my gr
owing belly. I must slow down, I remind myself; it’s only a matter of days until my due date. My thoughts are drawn back to that faraway night in December, when we were not much more than strangers, James and I, just the two of us together beneath the newly strung Christmas lights, sharing a bottle of wine as the rest of the house slept overhead. I’d never meant that to happen, but there you are. Life is full of surprises. From here, I can just make them out, gathered in the evening light of the wildflower garden: James, his head tilted in concentration as he tends the smoking barbecue with Max; Chloe, tall and willowy as a flower herself, pushing little Daisy on her new wooden swing, causing her to laugh in high breathless squeals. I inhale the smoky warmth that catches on the air and marvel at my family. If Emily were here now, I’d tell her how right she was all those years ago, how wise her words.
Life really does have a way of working itself out.
Little Sister Page 29
