I think I can hear my name being called, high and light, a girl’s voice. I must be imagining it, an auditory hallucination born of thinking about you.
Did you know that there’s a dawn chorus far out in space? It’s made by high-energy electrons getting caught in the earth’s radiation belts, then falling to earth as radio waves that sound like birds singing. Do you think that is what seventeenth-century poets heard and called the music of the spheres? Can you hear it now where you are?
I can hear my name again, on the periphery of the birdsong, barely audibly legible.
I think the darkness is turning to dark gray.
The birds are still singing, more clearly now.
I hear men’s voices, a group of them, shouting out my name. I think they must be imagined too. But if they aren’t, then I must call back to them. But the gag is still tight around my mouth, and even if it weren’t, my mouth is incapable of making a sound. To start with, I tried to spit out any saliva, fearful the sedative would have dissolved in it, but then my mouth became salt dry and in my imagination Mr. Wright’s secretary brought me endless cups of water.
“Beata!”
Her voice is clear among the men’s as she screams out my name. Kasia. Unmistakable and real. She isn’t having her baby. William isn’t with her. I want to laugh out loud with relief. Unable to laugh through the gag, I feel tears, warm on my cold cheeks.
William must have been right when he said the police think me capable of suicide and so would have taken seriously Kasia reporting me missing. Maybe, as he also predicted, they guessed that this would be the place I’d choose. Or was it just the two words
I can just make out a stain on the concrete. It really is getting lighter. It must be dawn.
“Beata!” Her voice is much closer now.
The pager sounds again. I don’t need to call back, because I realize it’s become a homing beacon and they’ll follow the sound to me. So Kasia has been paging me all through the night, not because she needed me with her while she had her baby, but because she’s been worried about me. It is the final fragment of the mirror. Because all this time it’s really been her looking after me, hasn’t it? She came to the flat that night because she needed shelter, but she stayed because I was grieving and lonely and needy. It was her arms, with red welts on them, that comforted me that night—the first night I’d slept properly since you’d died. And when she made me dance when I didn’t want to and smile when I didn’t want to, she was forcing me to feel, for a little while, something other than grief and rage.
And the same is true of you. The smell of lemons alone should have been enough to remind me that you look after me too. I held your hand at Leo’s funeral, but you held mine tightly back. And it’s you who’s got me through the night, Tess, thinking about you and talking to you—you who helped me to breathe.
I can hear a siren, wailing in the distance and getting closer. You’re right, it is the sound of a society taking care of its citizens.
As I wait to be rescued, I know that I am bereaved but not diminished by your death. Because you are my sister in every fiber of my being. And that fiber is visible—two strands of DNA twisted in a double helix in every cell of my body—proving, visibly, that we are sisters. But there are other strands that link us, that wouldn’t be seen by even the strongest of electron microscopes. I think of how we are connected by Leo dying and Dad leaving and lost homework five minutes after we should have left for school; by holidays to Skye and Christmas rituals (ten past five you’re allowed to open one present at the top of your stocking, ten to five you’re allowed to feel but before that only looking and before midnight not even peeking). We are conjoined by hundreds of thousands of memories that silt down into you and stop being memories and become a part of what you are. And inside me is the girl with caramel hair flying along on a bicycle, burying her rabbit, painting canvases with explosions of color and loving her friends and phoning me at awkward times and teasing me and fulfilling completely the sacrament of the present moment and showing me the joy in life, and because you are my sister, all those things are part of me too and I would do anything for it to be two months ago and for it to be me out there shouting your name, Tess.
It must have been so much colder for you. Did the snow muffle the sound of the trees? Was it freezing and silent? Did my coat help keep you warm? I hope that as you died you felt me loving you.
There are footsteps outside and the door is opening.
It’s taken hours of dark terror and countless thousands of words, but in the end it reduces down to so little.
I’m sorry.
I love you.
I always will.
Bee
Acknowledgments
I’m not sure if anyone reads the acknowledgments, but I hope so because without the following people, this novel would never have been written or published.
First, I want to thank my UK editor, the wonderful Emma Beswetherick, for her creativity, insight, and for not only having the courage of her convictions but inspiring other people to share them. I would also like to thank Sarah Knight and Christine Kopprasch at Crown for all their support and for getting this story across the Atlantic!
I would like to thank my agent, Felicity Blunt, at Curtis Brown, as well as Kate Cooper, Nick Marston, and Tally Garner, also at Curtis Brown.
I want to thank, hugely, Livia Firth, Michele Matthews, Kelly Martin, Sandra Leonard, Trixie Rawlinson, Alison Clements, and Amanda Jobbins, who helped in so many practical ways.
Thank you, Cosmo and Joe, for understanding when I needed to write and for being proud.
Last, but most of all, my thanks go to my younger sister, Tora Orde-Powlett—the inspiration for the book and a
